Cryptum

by Greg Bear

  My youthful beauty was passing. I was growing uglier.

  I did not care.

  * * *

  So, when did you realize that you had grown up?

  I thought I saw Chakas stand beside my bunk, watching with a frown. How remarkable that I used to be like him. So much alike. I wondered whether the geas imposed upon him and Riser by the Librarian felt anything like this mutation.

  I wanted to compare my experiences with his, but the room was empty.

  I drank some water.

  For a few minutes, I thought I experienced yet another voice in my head, not me, not my past me or any future me. It seemed to contain a great deal of knowledge, none of it of any use. It was knowledge that belonged to others from very far away, other existences where life and death were meaningless, light and darkness twisted together, where the twin fists of time uncurled their fingers and joined in a clasp, so that nothing changed or ever would.

  Of course that made no sense. Later, even thinking about it repulsed me.

  The Didact checked in on me and tested my limbs, thumped my chest, hummed over my prone body. I assumed he would declare the mutation a failure. I did not feel like any sort of Forerunner, young or old.

  “Be glad,” he said. “You are not becoming a warrior. Not entirely. But you’ll do.”

  “What am I becoming?” I asked. If I was to live, I needed to know where I might fit in, what rate would accept my hideously distorted body.

  “In a little while you will be hungry,” he said. “The ship will prepare special food. When you’re ready, join me in the control center. We need to plan how we will approach the San’Shyuum.”

  “When will I access the Domain? When will I receive your knowledge?”

  “The potential is already there, Builder. But take it slowly for now.”

  * * *

  I walked on my own to the control center. Chakas and Riser were not present. I wondered if the Didact had locked them away during all the time I was out of action.

  He stood by a direct view of the stars. The control center’s wide curved floor had sprouted a number of instruments I did not immediately recognize. One of them, it turned out, was there to give me my special food.

  The Didact pointed without looking at me. I sat and ate.

  I ate a lot. And then the second round of pain began, but I was not allowed to hide away and lie down. Our work was beginning.

  SEVENTEEN

  I PUT MY armor on after I stopped being hungry and feeling terrible. It required some adjustments before matching my new, larger body. The little blue female in the back of my thoughts was still there but seemed reluctant to deal with me. I had to dig deep to even find her. I felt as if my armor were judging me.

  The Didact observed, blinking with slow dignity. He rearranged himself on the floor and turned back to the steadiness of the stars.

  “The armor’s broken,” I said.

  “You’re different. The ancilla knows that, but she won’t cater to you. You’re no longer a Manipular. You have to listen better.” The Didact seemed remarkably patient. Perhaps he remembered his own brevet mutation, all those thousands of years ago.

  “The Domain—I don’t feel anything.”

  “I would say that is also your fault—but perhaps not this time. I, too, have difficulty accessing the Domain at present. It is a mystery—for now. Perhaps in time we will explore together and see if it can be solved.”

  Disappointed, I stood up, performed a quick diagnostic on my armor, watched everything chart up clear and fine—then focused, trying to will my thoughts to be more mature. Still, I couldn’t get the ancilla to cooperate. She came and went in different places in my head but would not do anything I asked—perhaps because my internal speech was garbled.

  “Where did the humans go?” I asked the Didact when I was sure this process was getting nowhere.

  “I locked them in a room with plenty of food they seem to like.”

  “Why?”

  “They asked too many questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “How many humans I’ve killed. That sort of thing.”

  “Did you answer?”

  “No.”

  “The Librarian filled them full of knowledge they can’t handle. They’re like me.”

  “Yes, they’re like you, but they seem to actually be listening. They just don’t like what they’re hearing.”

  EIGHTEEN

  MY FIRST SUCCESSFUL though stumbling efforts to access the Didact’s experiences produced scattered impressions of darkness, brilliance, rolling suns, grief and sickness and glory—complete chaos. My ancilla was still balky; I had to find my own way of accepting and interacting with the knowledge.

  What I managed was a crude arrangement, missing fully nine-tenths of the subtlety and subtext and power, but at least the memories began to open to me.

  Soon, I was jittering and plunging my way through a great space battle, events moving far too quickly for me to make much sense of it. I had no idea where or when this was—I could not correlate these events with any historical record. Complicating the recovery was many hundreds of points of view, threading through and around the central events, chopping and intercutting—and a remarkably different perception of objective reality. As a Promethean, the Didact simply saw things differently.

  Clearly, a thousand years ago, when entering battle, the Didact had plugged into the full sensory experience of thousands of his warriors … something I could barely imagine and certainly not control.

  My ancilla fell far behind, glowing between all the half-processed, crudely assembled information like a distant blue star, frantically seeking details which connected all this to real history.

  What startled me as I explored the threads—and tried to collapse them into a usable narrative—was how pitiful objective reality was, all by itself. The combined threads—even the chaos of uncombined threads—were far richer, far more evocative and informative.

  In my education as a Manipular, it had seemed to me that my teachers and even my ancillas had been intent on having me memorize the bare facts and not add my own interpretations. They did not trust me to enrich the whole; I was young and naïve. I was foolish. Even now, it was obvious the Didact’s memories resisted my adding any coloring from my own experience. I had not been there.

  Now I understood that no matter how sophisticated one became, the total richness was something no individual could ever capture or truly know. It must not be constrained. It is ever raw, ever rich.…

  I tried to emerge from this pool of ecstatic excess. The so-called solid reality of the ship, of my armor, of the space and stars around us, was suddenly ominous, frightening. I had difficulty distinguishing these different states. I was drunk.

  I fell back from the memories and tried to reengage with my core self.

  And suddenly, as if everything had come into focus, I rode the whipsnap of over a dozen threads—warrior threads. They had a place, a name, a historical marker. I could not scramble free.

  I plunged deep into the first battle of Charum Hakkor, one of the final engagements between Forerunners and humans. I saw thousands of war sphinxes spiraling in clouds around the planet like flocks of deadly sparrows, twisting and entangling human ships—

  Sending them tumbling into the atmosphere to disintegrate, or slamming them against the unbending pillar of a Precursor ruin stretching high over the planet, or being slammed in return—the memory thread suddenly burning bright at the end, winking out, shriveling away.

  Passion and the flow of a warrior’s life … and, too often, death. The deaths jerked and whipped around me; the end of a warrior’s life in a spreading, sparkling plume of molten metal, carbonized flesh, plasma and pure gamma rays, that flailing, crying, terrified abruptness felt as sharp as a plunging dagger.

  I could not stop it.

  I saw the implacable Precursor ruins of Charum Hakkor studded with human constructs, like ivy growing on great trees: vast
cities and energy towers and defense platforms operating at geosync and equigravitation, little less sophisticated than Forerunner ships and platforms and stations.

  Humans had been a great power, a worthy adversary—technologically. What about spiritually? How did they connect to the Mantle?

  Were they truly our brethren?

  I could not know. The Didact had been remarkably open to those ideas at the time. You must know your enemy, and never underestimate or belittle them.

  No human threads in the Domain—no way of knowing their reactions—the Domain is not complete—

  Was that my thought, or the critical observation of the Didact himself, realizing the greatness of his enemy?

  I managed to lurch free and came to myself in my cabin, under the single wall lamp, gasping, crying out, my fingers scrabbling at the bunk and at the bulkhead, as if to dig myself free.

  Truth was not for fools.

  NINETEEN

  THE HATCH TO the humans’ quarters opened as I approached. I stepped inside and saw Chakas and Riser in the middle of the floor, sitting cross-legged, facing each other. Their armor lay beside them. Each had tucked a single foot into the leggings.

  Chakas did not move, but Riser opened one eye and glanced at me.

  “Blue lady is exploring us,” he said.

  “You’re not wearing your armor,” I said.

  He moved his foot. The armor moved with it. “This is enough.”

  Chakas stretched up his arms with a cross expression. “What have we done to deserve this?” he asked.

  “I had nothing to do with your geas.”

  “Blue Lady says we have many lives inside,” Riser said.

  “We’re seeing some of what happened on Charum Hakkor,” Chakas said. “Before the battles, before the war. I’m trying to see the caged prisoner. It’s there somewhere, but why should I care?”

  “I wish I understood,” I told them. “I don’t. Not yet. There’s a greater story, something that brings glory to your people … but I don’t see it. I think it is yours to see, not mine.”

  Chakas got to his feet, breaking the connection with the armor and the ancilla. “There’s food. Forerunner food. You might as well have some.”

  Riser climbed onto a low bunk and brought forward a pair of trays covered with floating ampoules of grayish material. It looked little different from the “special” food provided after my brevet mutation. Clearly, Warrior-Servants were not tied to creature comforts. I tried to eat a little. “We’re approaching a quarantined system,” I said. “What have you learned—what do you remember about the San’Shyuum?”

  “They are shadows,” Riser said. “They come, they go.”

  “I don’t think I like them,” Chakas said. “Too charming. Slippery.”

  “Well, we’re going to visit them, and I think the Didact is going to want you to meet and talk with them. We all seem to be part of a game he’s playing with the Librarian.”

  “A tricky game?” Riser asked.

  “A very serious game. I think she wasn’t able to warn him about what’s been happening since he entered the Warrior Keep. So we’re his special tools. Few would suspect us.”

  “How does that work?” Chakas asked.

  “We visit the places of history, we see, it stimulates us—we remember. Mostly, you see and you remember. Now that I have the Didact’s memories, I think I’m supposed to link up with the Domain, but the Domain’s not cooperating.”

  “Domain…” Riser held up his hand. “We don’t know what that is.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either. You talk with your ancestors … in the memory the Librarian gave you, locked inside you, waiting to be activated. Is that a fair statement?”

  Riser waggled his hand, meaning, I presumed, yes. His face relaxed and he cocked his head. Chakas looked at him curiously.

  “The Domain is where we keep our deep ancestral records,” I said. “They’re stored there forever, available to any Forerunner, anywhere, no matter how far away.”

  “Not ghosts.”

  “No, but sometimes strange. The records don’t always stay the same. Sometimes they change. It is not known why.”

  I flashed through some of the Didact’s own experiences with the Domain, confused and unsatisfactory.

  “Like real memories,” Chakas said, watching me closely.

  “I suppose. Such changes are regarded as sacred. They are never reversed or corrected. And I learned something about the Didact’s war sphinxes. They’re all that’s left of his children.”

  Riser whistled and squatted, then rocked gently, screwing up his face again.

  “The war killed many … but humans fought well,” I said. “I think we’re about to face a common enemy—not the San’Shyuum.”

  Chakas and Riser focused fully on me. “Empty cage,” Riser said, and folded his arms around his body, as if embracing and reassuring himself.

  The ship’s ancilla flashed before us. “The Didact requests your presence in the command center.”

  “All of us?”

  “Humans will stay in quarters until the situation is better understood.”

  Riser chuffed, then sat cross-legged again and closed his eyes, lifting his chin as if listening to distant music. Slowly, Chakas sat as well, and they were as I had found them.

  I took the lift to the command center.

  TWENTY

  “I’VE SENT A message to the Deep Reverence and revealed our location,” the Didact confessed as we moved downstar, approaching the interlocking vigilants of the system’s outer defenses. “We’ll be destroyed if we don’t communicate our intentions to the commander. Among Prometheans, he was known as the Confirmer.”

  On the deck of the command center, we again stood in virtual view, unsupported in wide space, surrounded by stars. One of the small outer worlds passed by: airless, rocky, lifeless. The displays conveyed updated information about the quarantine shield, along with what could be gathered about the three protected planets downstar—two apparently inhabited by San’Shyuum, the third a storage depot for stockpiled (and presumably outdated) Forerunner weapons.

  I saw the San’Shyuum in my other memory as they had been ten thousand years before: a sleek, beautiful race, strong and sensual, intelligent but not overly impressed by intellect—capable of seducing other species with their almost universal beauty. Slippery indeed. Around the San’Shyuum, it seemed, all emotions melted into uncritical passion. The sole exceptions, in their historical experience—humans and Forerunner.

  Our ship cruised on its long orbit downstar for a hundred million kilometers before a strong signal was received from the Deep Reverence.

  “Aya, a Promethean interrupts our solitude, claiming to be the Didact!” a hoarse, deep voice said, accompanied by a visual of an old and nearly shapeless mass of muscle and scarred skin. Here was a Warrior-Servant who had undergone, it seemed to my newly informed eye, more battles and mutations than the Didact, some less successful than others. “Is it truly you, my old nemesis?”

  The Didact revealed no dismay at what time had done to his fellow Promethean. “I told you I’d return. We have important business, and need your assistance. Are there traps laid here? Tell me true.”

  “Are you in trouble again?”

  In an aside to me, the Didact said, “It is the Confirmer. But something feels wrong. The quarantine shield has been in battle mode for some time, I think.”

  “What would cause that?” I asked.

  The Didact looked wary and grim. “Recent punitive action, possibly.… But the San’Shyuum were model citizens after they were brought here. Try to focus downstar on the San’Shyuum worlds.” To the Deep Reverence, he said, “How long have you been stationed here without relief?”

  My fingers worked quickly to draw up the required sensor data. I studied the two inner planets in the low-rez scan available through the quarantine shield. The surface features were mostly obscured. What I could make out deviated substantially from the ancilla records. Th
e features had been rearranged. I thought immediately of Faun Hakkor.…

  Nothing on the scale of a spaceship could be resolved, except of course for the Deep Reverence.

  “Twelve centuries,” the Confirmer said. “They have been years of blessed opportunity for growth and reflection. The Council assigned we old warriors to guard and protect our ancient enemies, now prostrate before Forerunner power. I do my duty and nothing less. You should see my collection of San’Shyuum carvings. Magnificent—I value it more because it’s worthless. No Forerunner pays heed to the artifacts of vanquished foes. I presume you wish to visit my poor vessel?”

  “That’s my first intention,” the Didact said.

  “Just a moment … let me check with my staff. Oh, wait. I have no staff.”

  “You’re alone?” The Didact gave me a look that might have asked, Are all the old warriors alone?

  “Out here, the Domain is my only consolation,” the Confirmer said. “I’ve been working my way through ancestors I never knew existed. But of late, the Domain has rebuffed me.…”

  “I’ve come here on a mission for the Librarian,” the Didact said. “We’re traveling with two humans chosen by her. We need to question the leaders of the San’Shyuum.”

  “The Librarian—the Lifeshaper herself.… She was just through here on some mission or other. Caused some difficulties. Perhaps you’ve noticed the shield and vigilants are on alert.”

  “My wife has been busy,” the Didact said.

  I continued to study the inner planets. From what little we could see, through the filter of the quarantine shield, nearly all looked darker, probably damaged.

  “Curious as to why anybody even cares about these remnants of our old wars,” the Confirmer said. “Every now and then, I intercept a message about big events going on at the capital. I ignore them. They have nothing for me—no new orders. The Domain is all I have left—and now it’s shut me out. Do you know why?”

  “I’d like to view those reports.”

  “When you get here, we can rummage around in the ship’s memory and look for them. But allowing the San’Shyuum to meet up with humans—that’s forbidden. We separated them for a reason, old friend.”