Cryptum

by Greg Bear

  I was regretting more and more leaving my armor on the boat. I desperately needed to ask my ancilla how these humans would know to expect me. “What will you do if I go home now and give up this quest?”

  Behind us, Riser snorted. Chakas smiled. This smile displayed not humor, nor a prelude to aggression, but contempt, I think. “If we are so weak and our world is so disgraceful, what are you afraid of?”

  “Dead things,” Riser said. “Forerunner dead. Our dead are friendly.”

  “Well, my ancestors can stay in the ground and I’d be happy enough,” Chakas admitted.

  Their words stung. With an abrupt hitch of confidence, and perhaps even a slight swagger, I began walking toward the center of the circle, parting the mist with swings of my foot, looking for the pebbles laid by earlier generations of hamanune. I must have seemed to be dancing my way toward the center, watched with sullen disapproval by the oval of inward-facing war sphinxes. Ancient weapons, ancient war. The sphinxes bore the scars of ancient battles, wars that no one cared about anymore.

  I looked over my shoulder. Chakas leaned casually against the prow of a sphinx. The machine’s stern visage glowered over him like a disapproving priest.

  It takes a great deal to provoke my people to war, but once provoked, the war is carried out ruthlessly, totally, by our Warrior-Servants. There is a kind of embarrassment in that slow rise to total fury that Forerunners do not like to acknowledge. It goes against the very Mantle that we so strive to inherit and hold, but to defy the Forerunners is after all to show contempt for the Mantle itself.

  Perhaps that was the case here. Monuments of the past. Hidden passions, hidden violence, hidden shame. The shadows of forgotten history.

  About twenty meters from the center of the circle, a sidewise kick of my sandaled foot revealed another low black wall. Beyond the wall there were no more pebbles—no more markers. I knelt to push my hand into the sand and sift it between my fingers. The sand flowed back, smooth again, unmarked. But in my palm, the sand had left a bizarre gift.

  I turned it in my fingers.

  A chip of bone.

  My footprints had made no trace. The sand did not cling to my shoes or my feet, and not one grain stuck to my palms, my skin, anywhere. A sand pit built to withstand storms and intrusions, built for the ages, never to be erased, never to be completely forgotten.

  Designed to kill any intruder who did not follow precise rituals. Anyone not wanted here.

  Above me, something blotted out the sky. I had been studying the sand so intently that I neither felt the ground effect nor heard the subtle rushing sound of a ship, until its shadow passed over and I jerked my gaze upward.

  As I had feared, one of my swap-father’s mining ships had found me. Reluctant to face the shame of losing me, my surrogate family had sent search parties throughout the system, looking for their ward.

  I stood straight, waiting for the ship to descend, waiting to be lifted into the hold and swifted away before I even had an inkling why I was here. I spun about and looked out at the circle of war machines. Chakas and Riser were nowhere to be seen. They might have dropped below the mist, or run back through the dazzler, heading for the trees.

  The mining ship was an ugly thing, sullen, entirely practical. Its belly was studded with unconcealed grapplers, lifters, cutters, churners. If the master of this craft so desired, its engines could easily convert all of Djamonkin Crater into a steaming tornado of whirling rock and ore, sifting, lifting and storing whatever components it wished to carry back.

  I hated what it stood for.

  I hated it all.

  The vessel continued its slow, steady glide over the crater. The sand did not dimple beneath the pressure of its lifters, the rocks did not shiver; I heard nothing but a subtle rush, like wind through the trees. I dropped my shoulders and knelt in submission; no choice. I might escape again, but I doubted it.

  After a while, the opposite blurred edge of the ship’s shadow crossed my body and sunlight spread again to the other side of the sandy waste. The mining craft rose slowly, with lumbering grace, then sped up and flew over the peak. Moving on.

  I could not believe my good fortune. Perhaps the island’s deception could hide us from the deep-seeking probes of a mining ship …

  My relief was short-lived. I heard a melodic wail. Chakas and Riser had joined in hideous song. That made no sense at all. The sand, which had withstood the immense pressure of the miner, now whirled under my feet and upended me. Ripples pushed out, lifting me like a wave. I fell on my side and was swept around in a spiral toward the stone wall. I scraped up hard against the rough lava. The motion stopped, but a precisely hemispheric hollow dropped in front of me. At its center, a white cylinder topped with a black stone capital slowly rose to a height of more than fifty meters.

  Chakas and Riser stopped their wailing. The island fell silent. It had no opinion, made no comment.

  The Miner vessel had dropped out of sight behind the peak, then turned north, and was now almost over the horizon.

  My companions reappeared, standing up through the low mist. Riser ran out along the markers, arms held out in swinging balance, and stood on the inner wall, looking down on me. He squatted, toes poking over the edge.

  “Big,” he said. “Looking for you?”

  “It’s not easy concealing anything from a Miner ship,” I observed. “They scan hard and deep.”

  “Special place,” Riser said.

  Chakas was striding toward us, picking his teeth again with a palm fiber—a gesture he seemed to think revealed sophistication. “It worked,” he said, shading his eyes.

  “You sang to make it go away?” I asked.

  “No song,” Riser said. They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders.

  I turned back to examine the column sticking up from the hollow. Definitely Forerunner but far too prominent for a Durance. In color and shape, it seemed to fit the severe style of a marker one might find outside a temple of battle, commemorating regret and eternal sorrow. A military monument was certainly more in tune with the war sphinxes.

  I walked toward the hollow and stood on the rim for a moment, considering my options. The island had been visited frequently by hamanune. They had explored, built walls, laid down trails, kept defying the dazzler.

  I rolled the bone chip in my fingers.

  Then, as if giving up, the humans had departed—leaving the island to brood on its own enigma. Of late, however, visitors—mostly Florians, I guessed—had again begun to cross the merse-filled lake, as if in anticipation of a change, an awakening. Following their geas. The Librarian had obviously tuned these peoples for a particular, very difficult task.

  And now—song.

  We were all being set up. I could feel it. But to what purpose?

  The pair watched with curious expectancy from the inner wall. “Any ideas?” Chakas called.

  “Go ahead,” Riser suggested, waving his fingers. “It welcomes you.”

  “You don’t know that,” Chakas said to the Florian.

  “I know it,” Riser insisted. “Go down. Touch it.”

  I had studied just about every source on Precursor myths and treasure. But now I was working hard to remember other tales … tales I had heard in my youth of the strange practices of a high class of Warrior-Servants known as Prometheans: practices antiquated and rarely seen today—that is, in the times of my family. Practices involving sequestration and self-exile.

  In the archives of treasure-seekers, such tales were inevitably followed by warnings. If one should come across something called a Cryptum, or a Warrior Keep, one should leave it alone. Violating a Cryptum, whatever it was, came with nasty consequences, not the least of which involved angering the highly protective guild of Warrior-Servants.

  That could also explain why the Miner ship had moved on.

  For possibly the first time in my life, I decided to do a little thinking before taking any reckless action. I stepped back from the hollow, joined the humans
at the wall, and sat beside Chakas. He lifted his palm-frond hat and wiped his forehead.

  “Too hot for you?” he asked.

  “Your yelling … your song. Where did you learn that?”

  “No song,” Riser said again. He looked puzzled.

  “Tell me more about the Librarian,” I said. “She protects you. She marks you at birth. How does she mark you?”

  “She doesn’t mark us. She visits us,” Chakas said. “We’re told who we are and why we are here. Even if it’s not secret, it’s hard to remember.”

  “How many young Forerunner chumps have you brought to this place?” I asked.

  Chakas grinned. “You’re the first,” he said, and then backed off as if I might hit him.

  “The Librarian told you to bring a Forerunner here, didn’t she?”

  “She watches over all,” Riser said and smacked his lips. “Once we were great and many. Now we are few and small. Without her, we would be dead.”

  “Riser, your family has known this island for a long time,” Chakas said. “How long? A thousand years?”

  “Longer.”

  “Nine thousand years?”

  “Maybe.”

  Since the time the Librarian had been given charge of Erde-Tyrene. Since humans had been devolved and exiled here.

  A Warrior Keep, if that was what it was, hidden on a planet of exiles. I was detecting a pattern but could not bring it into focus. Something about Forerunner politics and the human war … I had never cared much for that sort of history. Now I really missed my ancilla. She could have retrieved what information I needed almost instantly.

  The sun was westering. Soon it would fall behind the central peak and we would be in shadow. Now, however, the ring island’s heat was at its most intense, and I was getting uncomfortable, sitting on the black wall, surrounded by glaring white sand—disciplined sand, made to stay here for the ages.

  I stood, my mind made up, and walked away from the hollow and the pillar. “Take me back to the beach. Call the boat.”

  The pair looked uncomfortable. “The boat won’t return for days,” Chakas said.

  I suppose they would have been glad to strand a silly Forerunner youth out here, making off with his armor, sneaking back to Marontik. But it did not make sense for them to be stuck out here with their hapless victim.

  I squinted. The sun hurt my eyes. “You didn’t actually plan any of this, did you?” I asked.

  Riser shook his head. Chakas made a breeze on his face with his hat. “We thought you’d do something exciting.”

  “We’re still waiting,” Riser said.

  “Where we live is boring,” Chakas said. “Out there…” He swept his hand up and around the vast, hot blueness. “Maybe you and me, we get crushed by sameness. Maybe you and me, we think alike.”

  Something stiffened my neck, then made my head hurt, but it wasn’t the last flashing glare of the sun. I could feel the two humans beside me, sitting quietly on the rock wall, patient, bored—heedless of danger. Like me in so many ways.

  Too much like me.

  There are points in life when everything changes, and changes in a big way. The old sophistic texts refer to these points as synchrons. Synchrons supposedly tie great forces and personalities together. You can’t predict them and you can’t avoid them. Only rarely can you feel them. They are like knots creeping forward on your string of time. Ultimately, they tie you to the great currents of the universe—bind you a common fate.

  “This whole crater is a mystery,” Chakas said. “I’ve dreamed about it all of my life. But if I step inside this circle, or away from the maze lines, it will kill me. Whatever it is, it doesn’t like humans. The sand climbs down our throats. When we are dead, the sand climbs back out. Now, we bring you, and everything changes. This place recognizes you.”

  “Why would anything valuable or even interesting be stuck out here, on a world covered with humans?”

  “Go ask,” Riser suggested, pointing to the column. “Whatever happens, we’ll sing your story in the market.”

  Dusk was upon us, but the air stayed hot and still. I knew that I had to go out to the pillar. If I couldn’t handle a Cryptum, then almost certainly, when the time came, my courage would fail me when I faced something much older and far stranger.

  I pushed off the wall and took a step. Then, I looked back at the two humans.

  “Do you feel it?” I asked.

  Riser circled two fingers and waggled them—yes—without hesitation, but Chakas asked, “Feel what?”

  “The ties that join us.”

  “If you say so,” Chakas said.

  Liars. Cheats. Low beings suitable only for being kept as specimens. Of course the sand would choke them.

  But not me.

  THREE

  I CLIMBED OVER the lip and descended the hollow. First step. The sand did not sink but held me upright, as if each footfall made its own stair step. Second step. No mishap.

  In a few seconds, I stood beside the pillar, its wide black cap looming over me. The tropical dark that had slipped across the island was profound, but the clouds parted and stars in a diffuse, glittering belt illuminated the sand, the hollow, the pillar. I knelt. Around the base scrolled a single line of text in old, sweeping Digon characters, used almost exclusively by Warrior-Servants—and in recent history only by their most powerful class, the Prometheans. I was far from family, rate, and class, but what I read in those characters practically defined my attitude toward existence:

  You are what you dare.

  Everything fell into place. This confirmed what I had felt earlier. A Forerunner youth, a low Manipular, had been expertly recruited by the Librarian’s ancilla—on instruction of the Librarian herself. He had been deposited on the ring island within Djamonkin Crater and guided to a strange patch of white sand guarded by stolid war sphinxes. His guides had urged him to cross a deadly, barren ground of sand and stones, then, all unknown to themselves, had sung a preprogrammed song, and for the first time in a thousand of years, the site had changed—reacted, responded.

  You are what you dare.

  The synchron was definitely upon me. By the sensations that crept up and down my back and my neck, I sensed that a connective loop of world-lines would bind me for a long time—perhaps forever—to the two humans waiting in the dark, back at the stone circle. I wondered if they knew.

  I stretched out my hand and laid it on the pillar’s smooth surface. The cold stone seemed to shiver beneath my fingers. A voice vibrated up my arm and echoed in the bones of my jaw.

  “Who summons the Didact from his meditative journey?”

  I was stunned into immobility. My thoughts flashed with panic and wonder. The stories still echoed over thousands of years.… The Didact! Here, surrounded by the last population of humans in the galaxy … Not even a fool such as myself could believe such a thing. I had no idea what to do or say. But out of the dark behind me, the humans began singing again. And with that wailing, wavering song, the tone of the voice from the pillar changed its challenging tone.

  “A message from the Lifeshaper herself, conveyed in a strange manner … but the content is correct. Is it time to raise the Didact and return him to this plane of existence? A Forerunner must give answer.”

  There was really only one sensible answer: No. Sorry. Leave him be! We’re leaving now.…

  But you are what you dare, and the chance to meet this hero, enemy of all humans … Only the most foolish of young Forerunners would dare this, and so, once again, I had been well chosen.

  “R-r-raise him,” I said. “You mean, bring him back…?”

  “Bring him back. A Forerunner commands this. Stand aside, young messenger,” the voice instructed. “Stand well back. This is a millennial seal, held by the wisdom of Harbou, hardened by the strength of Lang—and the force of its breaching will be great.”

  FOUR

  THE SAND WITHIN the hollow whirled outward in spiral ridges, washing around my feet but not upsetting me. The p
illar seemed to melt down, flow away into the sand. The movement dug deeper, revealing a large ovoid vessel originally buried meters below the surface. I backed away, not to stumble and get caught up in the excavation.

  The two humans and I again waited on the wall, dodging the sand as it hurled itself over and formed neat conic piles on all sides.

  Eventually, the pit became a well.

  The great copper and steel vessel, over ten meters high and at least that wide, gleamed as if freshly forged.

  Riser was chattering to himself, no doubt singing little prayers to little gods. Or perhaps the hamanune had greater gods, huge gods, to compensate. Chakas did nothing but watch and jump aside when necessary.

  Bad enough that a Forerunner of another rate would disturb the Didact’s Cryptum, but if indeed this vessel carried the great Promethean warrior, he might be severely displeased to find himself in the presence of the descendants of his old enemy.

  Again the voice buzzed in the bones of my skull.

  “Minimum safe distance, fifty meters. Stand aside. Millennial seal will be breached in five, four, three, two…”

  “Look away,” I said to the two humans. As one, we all averted our eyes.

  I heard a crackling rumble and saw even through my palms a flash of transchronic blue. It revealed the bones of my hand. I felt it in my viscera. It made me feel immensely old, as if I might crumble to dust. I seemed to sense deep pulses of memory from all who had ever chosen to enter a Cryptum and were still sealed in profound meditative transcendence, united, brothers and sisters in timeless xankara.

  The night was illuminated by another flash, this one pure white, shot through with arcs of green fire. Behind us, through the jungle, palm leaves swung wildly, caught in changing winds. I looked everywhere but directly at the Cryptum vessel.

  Then it was over. The pit fell silent. Afterimages danced across the darkness and faded. Now appeared the first striations of dawn. It seemed that mere seconds had passed, and yet, the morning was upon us. Soon it was bright, and we were allowed to see clearly what we had done.

  The ovoid vessel had parted in three sections above its midline belt. The sections had opened outward like the protecting calyx that falls to unveil a flower. But the great figure so revealed was not nearly as pretty as a flower. In fact, curled up like some monstrous, wrinkled embryo, it resembled a great corpse shriveled by time—mummified.