by Greg Bear
“The human is telling the truth,” I said. “This is a planet reserved for their occupation. I came here seeking artifacts. These humans showed me to your resting place. They have a gea—”
“A Cryptum is not to be violated,” he interrupted, looking off at the sky. “One of you found a way to open my vessel. Who? And how?”
His sadness was like a pall over the beach and the jungle. For me, in the presence of such a senior Forerunner, it seemed as if the very air filled with his weary gloom.
“The humans sang songs,” I answered. “The Cryptum opened.”
“Only one Forerunner would ever be so devious,” the Didact said, his voice softening. “Or so clever. You were about to say, the humans have a geas. Someone infused them with codes in their infancy, or earlier—genetically.”
“I think that might be so.”
“How much time has passed?”
“Perhaps a thousand years,” I said. “A very long sleep.”
“Not sleep,” the Didact said. “I entered the Cryptum on another world. Someone brought me here. Why?”
“We are tools of the Librarian,” Chakas said. “We serve her.”
The Didact examined the human with distaste. “With my sphinxes, someone helped revive me.”
“I did,” I confirmed.
“I had hoped to rise in triumph and recognition of my judgment—but instead, I find myself facing young fools and the offspring of ancient enemies. This is worse than disgrace. Only one other reason … one other provocation would make the Librarian revive me under these humiliating circumstances.”
He raised one arm, then executed a brief wave in the air with his fingers. The pieces of armor floated out of the chamber, and the Didact assumed a position of robing, arms extended. The armor sections surrounded his limbs, his torso, and finally, the top of his head, in shimmering pale bands that floated centimeters above his skin. I was surprised by the humbleness of the armor’s design. My father’s armor was far more ornate, yet he was not the stuff of legend. Such were the sumptuary rules of Forerunners—even a great Promethean must dress below the style of any Builder.
“There must be a reason my wife is not here to greet me,” the Didact said when he was fully clothed. He stretched his arms to the stars. Beams shot from his fingers, and he sketched out several constellations, as if commanding the stars to move. I felt strangely surprised when they did not.
The beams dimmed and went out, and he curled his fingers into fists. “You know nothing.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said.
“You are a mere Manipular, and a reckless one at that.” He pointed to Riser. “Little human, I know your kind. You are of ancient form. I asked you be preserved, because you are peaceful yet full of cleverness. Worthy pets to amuse and by low example to instruct our young. But you…” He swung his finger around to Chakas. “You are too much like the humans who nearly wrecked my fleets and murdered my warriors. My wife has taken liberties. She provokes me.” He stretched out his arms. The armor flashed. “You provoke me.”
Chakas’s face clouded but, wisely, he said nothing.
The Didact seemed to rethink any violent action. His arms dropped and the armor returned to a state of protection.
“Manipular, where did you see first light?” he asked.
I explained that my venerable Builder family had long inhabited systems in and around the Orion nebular complex, near the Forerunner core.
“Why are you naked?”
“Merses surround this island,” I said. “They won’t tolerate complex machines. My ancilla—”
“My wife raised merses in our garden shallows,” the Didact said. “Never liked them much myself. Show me.”
SEVEN
IN A FOUL mood, Chakas lagged behind the Didact, Riser, and me as we hiked along the outer shore, following one of the new trails blazed by the sphinxes—which were, indeed, acting as excavators, apparently to the surprise of the Didact as well. In truth, he seemed more often dismayed than in control of his surroundings—more often confused than enlightened by what we found.
He had no explanation for the reshaping of the central peak.
“I am lost here,” he said as we looked over the outer lake of Djamonkin Crater. He studied the wallowing merse. He found a low boulder and sat again in that contemplative posture that also seemed to reveal exhaustion. “No one can tell me why I am not still in timeless peace.”
“In exile,” I said.
He glowered. “Yes, exile. Forced to retreat for speaking truth, tactical and strategic wisdom, useless against the bold assertions of the Master Builder…”
He stopped himself. “But those matters are not for the ears of a Manipular. Tell me—are the weapons finished? Have they been used?”
I told him I knew nothing of weapons.
“That means little. As a Manipular, you have no need to understand your greater circumstances. Worse, however, you apparently focus on personal gain and treasure. Precursor artifacts. No doubt you seek the Organon.”
His words stabbed deep, not just because they were true. “I am honest to my goals. I seek diversion,” I said. “Excuses for adventure are means to an end.” I quoted, “You are what you dare.”
“Aya,” the Didact murmured, shaking his great head. “So I told her, once, and she’s chided me with it ever since.” He looked out over the lake and the clear cloudless morning sunrise. A breeze sallied from the west into the crater’s wide bowl and dappled the blue waters, eliciting circlets of foam from agitated merse.
“Ugly, mean brutes,” the Didact observed, his rancor cooled. “What ritual allowed you to come here without being attacked?”
I explained about humans and their wooden boats, powered by steam, but even then requiring soft watery songs to cross safely.
“Humans making tools … again.… I have been well and cleverly hidden. No other Forerunner would seek me here.”
“Long time,” Riser confirmed. He seemed comfortable around the Didact—as if from instinct. I saw it clearly. A servant species favored for ages …
No wonder Chakas was in a foul mood. His own instincts were likely either blank—long erased—or filled with much darker memories.
“Your Cryptum killed any human who approached,” I said. “At least, any stupid human.”
“A selection process,” the Didact said.
“But there was a safe way in, partly. Someone made a puzzle that would stick in the human imagination. So humans came time and again and sacrificed themselves, and the survivors erected walls and laid pebbles to show the way. Someone wanted you to be found—when the time was right.”
This seemed to sink the Didact into deeper gloom. “Then it is almost over,” he said. “All we have tried to do as inheritors of the Mantle—all that will be violated, and the galaxy will be murdered … because they do not understand.” He let out a grating sigh. “Worse, it may already be loose. Join your human friends and sing sad songs, Manipular. There is judgment, and just doom is upon us all.”
“It is what you all deserve, no more,” Chakas said, throwing down a shred of palm.
The Promethean paid him no attention.
EIGHT
THAT NIGHT, IN the dark, the profile of the central peak altered abruptly. Thousands of sparking fires and bluish glows burned around the jutting prominence like the flitting of lightning insects, until the dawn snuffed them with the sun’s first yellow rays.
Riser accompanied me to the inner shore, sharing parts of a coconut and the sour green fruit he favored. He also offered a piece of raw meat from some animal he had snared in the darkness, but I of course refused. The Mantle forbade the eating of the flesh of unfortunates.
Chakas was nowhere to be found.
What the sun revealed of the former peak was a circle of slender pillars, rising a thousand meters out of a remnant base of mountain and surrounded by sloping chutes of scoria. I had never seen the like before, and vaguely wondered if here, finally, was a Precursor
machine fully active, ready to unleash mischief.
I was very confused. My curiosity about all manner of things historical had been sparked by the example of the Didact. If he was indeed the Didact … for how could a great warrior and defender of Forerunner civilization, how could a true Promethean, feel such a depth of defeat and gloom? What passions—what adventures—had this Warrior-Servant known in his long life, and what could have possibly forced such strength and accomplishment to cower in meditative exile?
I put little store in his condemnation of other Forerunners. Truly, the concept of an end to Forerunner history had never occurred to me. I found it ludicrous. And yet …
The idea of Warrior-Servants laying low entire species—now that I had actually met humans—seemed to violate all the precepts of the Mantle. Did not the Mantle give us dominion to allow us to uplift and educate our lessers? Even humans, so degraded, deserved that much respect.… After all, I had learned much about Chakas from observing him, and my opinions of his degraded status were changing. The Didact’s guilt alone might account for his deep sense of darkness and failure.
I looked from the inner shore at the revealed pillars and wondered what they were meant for, what would rise through or up and around them. Was it something for the use of the Didact? An architectural beacon announcing his return? Or the final instrument of his punishment?
I understood nothing about Forerunner politics. I had always disdained this concern of mature forms. Now I felt weak in my ignorance. What shattered my youthful naïveté most powerfully was the realization that the world of my people—a world of ageless social order and regimentation, of internal peace against external challenge—might not be eternal, that rising through the forms from Manipular to Builder, or whatever other destiny I fled so blithely—
All that might soon not be a choice.
This morning, I felt true mortality for the first time. And not just my own. I now understood the deep old symbol for Time—the sweeping opposed hands with lightning between, extended fingers triangulating the pinch of most efficient fates from which there is no return.
Chakas interrupted my thoughts with a touch on my shoulder. I turned and saw him standing behind me, looking out at the pillars with a look of bitter dread.
“They’re coming from the east,” he said.
“Across the lake, over the merse?”
“No. The sky is filling with ships. The Librarian no longer protects us.”
“Does the Didact know?”
“Why should I care?” Chakas said. “He’s a monster.”
“He’s a great hero,” I said.
“You are a fool,” Chakas said, and ran back through the trees.
NINE
THE SHIPS MOVED slowly in a great, waving gray and black line from east to west, like a ribbon of steel and adamantium slicing the sky. So many!—I had never seen so many ships in one place, even on ceremonial days on my family’s homeworld. What I could not understand was the reason so many were necessary, if in fact they were here to capture and incarcerate just one old Warrior-Servant.
Even a Promethean, it seemed to me, did not merit such a show of force.
But everyone around me seemed to think I was a fool, even a simpleton. I kept to the inner beach, lying on the sand, watching the ships arrange themselves in tight whorls spiraling in toward Djamonkin Crater. At the center of the whorl, a great Builder ship—the largest I had ever seen—and a great Miner vessel, easily outmatching anything owned by my swap-family, held steady in a dyadic cloud of buffer energies. The air itself began to feel stiff and harsh with the pressure of so many ships hanging in slow suspension.
A shadow of a nearer, darker sort crossed my face, and I angled my head to see a war sphinx just a few meters away, rising on its curved legs.
“The Didact requests your presence,” it announced.
“Why?” I asked. “The entire galaxy is coming to a bitter end. I’m just a piece of waste matter not worth flushing.”
The sphinx took a step closer, unfolding upper arms tipped with tangles of flexible grapples. Hard light flashed blue along all its joints.
“So it’s not a request, eh?” I said, and pushed to my feet. “Do I walk? Or are you offering me a ride?”
“Suck it up, Manipular,” the sphinx intoned. “Your presence will be useful.”
I felt for the first time that there might be more than just a mechanical intelligence under its pitted skin. “He wants me to witness him being arrested,” I said. “Is that it?”
The grapples flashed like the agile fingers of a pan guth master. “These ships are not here to arrest the Didact,” the sphinx informed me. “They are here to demand his help. He will of course refuse.”
I had no response to this. Instead, I followed the sphinx quietly through the trees to the inner shore. Since the sphinx seemed to have found a new purpose—telling me what was what—I ventured another question.
“What’s with the mountain? Why tear it down?”
“It is the Librarian’s doing.”
“Oh.” That told me nothing, of course—but it was intriguing. Something big was happening, that much was obvious. Without my armor, I wasn’t fit to meet my superiors—or even other Manipulars, for that matter—but the fact that the Didact still knew I existed and required my presence was also intriguing.
I looked around the inner shore. Then a glint caught my eye, and I looked up toward the base of the mountain, the cloud-piercing pillars—and saw the other war sphinxes flying across the inner lake, climbing rapidly to several hundred meters.
I looked around. The inner beach was deserted. “Where is everybody?” I asked.
The sphinx’s control cabin hatch pulled aside with a fluid sigh. “You will join the Didact. Get in.”
I knew enough about the protocol of warriors and their machines to understand that I was not being recruited into a glorious, defiant fight to the finish. And then it dawned on me—the humans might be riding in sphinxes as well.
Why were we so important?
I tried to crawl up the pitted ancient surface. The grapples extended around and aft, providing stirrups. I climbed in through the rear hatch, and it sealed behind me. The cabin inside was spacious enough for a mature Warrior-Servant, only slightly smaller than the Didact himself—giving me plenty of room but no comfort because nothing was shaped to accommodate a much smaller and almost completely naked Manipular.
There were a bare seat, a variety of antiquated displays, and control tubes designed to hook up with armor. Standing on the seat, I could see through the slanted, forward-looking direct-view ports that gave the sphinx’s features the illusion of a disdainful, downward gaze.
I felt only a little bump, and then we were away, wheeling about to join the general migration toward the dismantled mountain and the mysterious pillars. Above the island, the spiral of ships held position and did nothing—perhaps locked in some sort of dispute.
Wherever the Didact was, there was likely to be trouble. I could not imagine the power he had once wielded—that he could still, after a thousand years, provoke legions of Forerunners to seek him out and assemble their ships above the island.
We crossed the inner lake in minutes, a leisurely pace for craft designed to drop from high orbit, sweep continents, and decimate cities. The only thing these old machines lacked, I thought, was a direct connection to slipspace. But I didn’t know that for sure.
The sphinxes circled the lower reaches of the pillars, then passed between and dropped to a central, octagonal platform. There, they settled in a protective ellipse, just as I had first seen them only a few days before.
The hatch opened. I emerged and slid off the rear curve. From another sphinx, Riser poked out, clearly agitated. Not tall enough to see out the ports, I thought.
The Florian ran over and stood close, wringing his hands and trembling. “Something in there with me,” he muttered, then smirked up at me and wiped his forehead with one hand. “Not alive. Not happy. Very bad!�
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The greater, doubled war sphinx arrived last and settled in the center of the ellipse. As if at its touch, the platform vibrated under my feet, then began to rotate. All around, the pillars and the base of the mountain—and the ships in formation high above—also seemed to turn. The spiral of ships took on a hypnotic, whirlpool fascination.
We felt none of this motion, but still, Riser grunted in dismay.
The Didact descended from the doubled sphinx and walked on his trunklike legs to confront us. “You’re being kidnapped, young Manipular,” he grumbled as the pillars sped up. “The humans have to come as well. Apologies to all.”
I looked down to avoid getting dizzy, even without the sensation of spinning.…
“Why apologize now?” I asked.
The Didact’s expression did not change—he did not react in the least to my insubordination, whelp that I was, agitating against the Promethean’s thousands of years of life and experience. He simply looked outward, drew his brows down in concentration, and asked, “Where’s the other human?”
“Still hiding,” Riser said. “Sick.”
Chakas chose this moment to poke his upper body out of the hatch of his transport. He looked woozy. His descent down the sloping back of the machine lacked any dignity, and he landed on bent legs, then slumped to one side and vomited.
“Bad sky,” Riser said stoically.
The Promethean regarded this sign of human weakness with the same emotion he had shown to my insubordination. “In a few hours, all signs of my stay here will be erased. No one will be able to prove I was ever here.”
“Can’t the ships see us?”
“Not yet. But they obviously know something.”
“Why so many?” I asked.
“They’ve come to ask my help—or arrest me again. I think the former, and I think I know why—but I must not help them. I’ve stayed here too long already. It’s time to leave. And all of you will come with me.”
“Where? How?”
My answer arrived even as I spoke. The platform was still rising. The circling pillars sprouted bulkheads, beams, and stanchions—all the necessary parts. The skeleton of a slipspace voyager was growing around us, almost too rapidly to track—until the pillars were walled in, the sky and the swirling ships vanished, and we were completely enclosed.
