Fractures

by Various

  After the species’ initial shock dulled, the Forerunners would create an area for themselves, set apart from the main inhabited areas, and they did so now for the last time. Here, the San’Shyuum could locate them if need be, and here they could easily supervise without directly mingling. The Forerunners had discovered that, every time, some few individuals would find them particularly intriguing and create ways to be nearby or even actively involved with them. While this was not discouraged, boundaries were enforced with the gentleness of a concerned parent. Even so, the Forerunners were aware that their words might be overheard. But what, really, did it matter, as long as they treated their charges with care? It would be millennia before any of them would again find their own paths to the stars. Words spoken here would be forgotten in a handful of decades, if they resonated even for that long.

  Only twenty or so Forerunners would be stationed here, keeping watch over the San’Shyuum. While the Librarian had destroyed all active keyships, she had kept a hidden cache aboard the Ark. These few vessels now ferried the last handful of other specimens to their homeworlds, and would return to the Ark when that task was done. Then . . .

  Then the Forerunners would leave the Ark and begin their own journey.

  The acclimation continued over the next two years. Bornstellar found himself adrift during this time. For so long, reliving his experiences with the Librarian, it had been a pattern, a comforting routine. At some point, the pain had lessened, changed, as the relationship with her had changed, from one of flesh to one of memory. Even as he accepted the loss on one level, Bornstellar now realized the holograms had blurred the line between life and death so that the cessation of them was agonizing.

  One evening, he returned to his own quarters, drawn by an uneasy, anxious emotion he could not name. He called up the recorded moments, sorting through them. He tried to do as he had done before: lose himself in the memories to forget she was gone. But it did not work; not this time. His anxiety increased with each attempt, and comprehension hit him with the psychological force of a physical blow.

  The last recording he had visited had been, in truth, the very last. He understood that in his head, but now his heart belatedly grasped the full import of the loss. He never exchanged another touch, embrace, word, glance with his wife. Centuries had passed. He was caught in a terrible place—unable to move forward, unable to even momentarily assuage the pain by reliving the memories. Why? Maybe it was because he had already experienced them not once, when they were happening, but twice now. A third time seemed only to make the ache inside him worse. If only there was some recording of something he had not seen before, but there was not.

  Or was there? A thought drifted into his mind, something he had all but forgotten. After she had . . . after the Halo Array had been fired, he had received a jumble of other messages. One had purportedly been from the Librarian, but he had dismissed it as false, as she would never identify herself thusly to him.

  But what if, all these centuries later, it was indeed a final message for him?

  It took his ancilla barely any time at all to locate the message, but it felt like an eternity. Bornstellar had not felt so nervous or hopeful since he was a Manipular. Words from her lips he had never heard—it was too much to contemplate.

  But there it was.

  Her essence manifested in front of him, so detailed he could almost feel her smooth skin, smell her scent.

  His wife. First-Light-Weaves-Living-Song.

  The Librarian.

  Her eyes were bright with commingled grief, fear, and purpose. “My husband,” she said, “time is short. But there is something you must know.”

  Seven minutes later, he was all but shouting for Chant.

  It was easier, watching it for the second time. He focused not on the image of the Librarian but on her words and Chant’s reaction. Chant, who had loved the Librarian almost as much as he had, who had worked unceasingly to keep whatever promises his wife had extracted from her.

  “This is for Chant-to-Green as well,” the image was saying. “I know what you, my husband, must do, and you know I agree. Halo must be activated. But nothing is without consequence, and I understand now there will be one we have not foreseen.” The Librarian took a deep breath. “The legendary Organon—the great Precursor artifact that you once sought with such sharp desire . . . my love, it has been with us all along. The Organon holds the Domain—and firing the Halo Array will destroy it.”

  Chant uttered a soft cry, reaching out to Bornstellar even as her gaze remained riveted to the image of the Librarian. He squeezed her hand tightly, as glad of the press of living flesh as she.

  The Librarian’s voice was thick with pain as she continued. “The Didact dreams now not with wisdom whispering in his ears but silence, utter and absolute. He is already mad, and it was my hope—and yours—that the Domain might restore him. But imprisoned with only his own tormented thoughts for millennia to come . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head gently. She didn’t need to say anything further. They already knew.

  “It is for those who come that I fear. The humans—the Reclaimers—will need the Domain one day. I cannot—I will not—die without hope that there is some way to repair it. If there is, I believe that information will be found at Maethrillian. We understand the keeping of secrets, we Forerunners, and next to the knowledge of the Flood, this would have been the greatest secret of all.”

  Her eyes gazed steadily at Catalog, who had dutifully recorded and transmitted the message, but as he and Chant stood mutely clasping hands, Bornstellar knew that his wife was envisioning gazing at both of them. “I charged the two of you with reseeding the sentient species I have tended most of my life. I must exact another promise. You must return to our capital, if anything remains of it. Find a way to reactivate the Domain.”

  Her dark gaze—intense, warm, filled with love not just for those who beheld her but also for those she had given everything for—almost overwhelmed Bornstellar. “Find it. Promise me! Or I fear that all we have done to try to fix that which we have ruined will crumble to dust.”

  And she was gone.

  Chant and Bornstellar found the group keeping watch on the San’Shyuum outside their structure, enjoying the pleasant artificial evening. Trial, Splendid Dust, Keeper-of-Stone-Songs, Walking-in-Light-of-Falling-Stars, Sorrow-for-Lost-Voices, Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn, and a handful of other Forerunners of all rates were tossing artificial vegetables and flavoring herbs into small, cheerfully bubbling pots.

  “We have not interacted with the Domain in over a century,” Stone Songs said when Bornstellar had finished. “And it was erratic and largely unresponsive even before then. We have gone this long without it, and if we are to be departing the galaxy itself soon, then what is the point?”

  Chant stood beside Bornstellar and tensed at the words. “This is not about the Domain and what it can do for us,” she said, glaring at Stone Songs. She rarely grew angry on her own behalf, but she was fierce when it came to defending her charges. As her predecessor had been.

  Trial watched her Lifeshaper intently, concerned. She knew how close the Librarian and Chant had been.

  “Yes, we are departing this galaxy, and it will be a long journey indeed. And no, the Domain will not help us. It may not even help the Didact. The point”—Chant emphasized the word—“is that repairing the Domain will help the humans, who will one day bear the Mantle as we once did, to carry out their responsibilities. They will need this knowledge, and after all we have done, we owe it to them.”

  Stone Songs waved his spoon dismissively. “It is a lovely thought, but unless there’s something you’ve not shared with us, Bornstellar, your Librarian failed to tell us how we are to go about repairing the Domain, or what could help us, or where to look for it!”

  She was not mine, Bornstellar thought. Not in this. In this, she belonged to—and acted for—us all.

  Stone Song’s words hung heavy in the air and weighed down Bornstellar’s thoughts.
The Builder was right. Find a way to reactivate the Domain, she had made them promise, even from the other side of the great gulf of death. But what were they looking for? And how would they know what to do if they found it?

  “We will be traveling to Maethrillian regardless,” Bornstellar said, struggling against his anger. “We need the slipstream crystals and the ships that can use them if we are to have any hope of truly leaving the galaxy behind. We can search for a way to repair the Domain while we are there.”

  “The scope is enormous,” Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn said. A Warrior-Servant, she had saved both Bornstellar and Splendid Dust when the battle on the capital had begun. Once Bornstellar had been drawn to her, but that had been when he was still new to his rate. And before he had met the Librarian. He and Glory were nonetheless bonded in battle, and friends.

  “We have you to help us,” he reminded her, “and we have someone else who knows . . .” Bornstellar’s voice trailed off. They did not, apparently, have someone else who knew the capital world well, for Splendid Dust’s seat was empty.

  Splendid Dust had not gone far. Bornstellar spotted his fine, slender form leaning up against a vru’sa tree. He was dappled with shadow and sunlight filtered through leaves. He looked up, unsurprised, as Bornstellar approached, and regarded him with dull eyes.

  “You know,” Bornstellar said.

  “Yes,” Splendid Dust replied, his voice flat. “I know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Splendid reached up to pull the vibrant green of one of the leaves through his fingers, the meeting of Bornstellar’s gaze perhaps too much to endure. Bornstellar was as impatient as if his life was as brief as a human’s, but he forced himself to wait.

  When talk had begun about returning to Maethrillian, Splendid Dust had begged to stay behind. They did not need him to acquire the crystals, he had argued, and it was clear to Bornstellar that the thought of returning to the ruined capital of the once-great ecumene tormented its First Councilor. He had agreed.

  He could not comply this time though. Not now.

  “We council members were privy to a great deal of information, Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting. Many secrets. When Maethrillian fell, our society suffered a loss of knowledge second only to the loss of the Domain itself. I am the last who remembers any of it, and I knew more than almost anyone else.”

  “Why didn’t you speak before?” Fury, clean and sharp and righteous, swelled Bornstellar’s heart and turned his words into daggers. He regretted it at once when he saw Splendid Dust’s body twitch, as if those daggers had been physical.

  “To what end?” Now he did look at Bornstellar, and his eyes were homes for ghosts. “You were there. You saw what madness we fled. We were all trying to escape Maethrillian, not return to it—until now. We don’t know if there’s even anything left to return to.”

  “No,” Bornstellar said, gentling his own voice. “We do not know what awaits us. But if you know of anything that can help us restore the Domain, you must speak.”

  Something of his old pride seemed to stir in Splendid Dust. “I will remind you that as First Councilor, I made binding oaths.”

  “True,” agreed Bornstellar. “But your overwhelming duty is to your people. I respect promises, Splendid-Dust-of-Ancient-Suns. But those who would hold you in violation are long dead. If they exist at all, it is as spirits, and if they are spirits, tales all say they wish to rest in peace. You will speak, or you will fail every Forerunner who has ever lived, and every creature my wife died to save. That seems a far greater wrong.”

  Splendid Dust looked again at the leaf, as if it held all the secrets of the universe in its green-gold veins. “You are right, of course. I must speak,” he agreed, a wealth of regret in the words. “And,” he added, “I must go with you. You will need what I know.”

  Splendid Dust was not insane, as the Didact had become. But he was broken. Bornstellar understood.

  All of them were a little broken now.

  Bornstellar and Splendid Dust rejoined the others. The San’Shyuum had an intoxicant that burned the belly and softened the edges, and Splendid Dust required two mugs full of it before he could bring himself to speak.

  What he knew was astounding; and that he knew it to begin with, terrifying.

  The former First Councilor spoke of treasures that a younger Bornstellar would have gladly spent a lifetime seeking. Not just a few rare and unimaginably glorious items, but hundreds. Thousands. Gathered from the farthest reaches of Forerunner space and brought to Maethrillian for safekeeping in a place called the Mysterium.

  “Some were simply beautiful,” he said. “Art for art’s sake. Others were . . . trophies. Still others were unique scientific curiosities. All secreted in the Mysterium, in the heart of the capital, all untouched, preserved simply for the having of them, of collecting, of adding to the glory of all it meant to be a Forerunner. Some were aware of what the artifacts did. Most of us were not. All we knew was that they were ours.”

  “But you knew,” Trial said. It was a statement, not an accusation, but Splendid Dust dwindled even further.

  “I knew more than most,” he said. “My great pride and joy, and my great burden. But I had not been First Councilor for very long when the battle took place. I did not have time to learn everything. Most of my knowledge was to have come from the Domain, and it was unreachable, toward the end. But I knew about this. Oh yes.” He turned to Bornstellar and said, “Do you remember what I wore?”

  “What?”

  “What I wore. The robes of First Councilor. The collar, the decorations.”

  Bornstellar stared blankly. Splendid Dust smiled, so sadly. “The trappings, IsoDidact. The regalia. I still have it. Those stylized designs had a purpose, and among them is a specific key, of sorts.”

  “A key to what?” Chant said. She stammered ever so slightly.

  “The Deadbolt, they called it,” Splendid Dust said, “though perhaps ‘they’ had no idea, really.”

  “Deadbolt,” echoed Falling Stars. He was of the Engineer rate, and so understood its purpose. “A deadbold needs a key—it is not the key. It is put in place to keep something locked safely away.”

  “In, or out?” mused Stone Songs.

  “Key or deadbolt to what?” demanded Sorrow-for-Lost-Voices, a Warrior-Servant.

  “Precursor technology. It was transported whole, from the distant world where they found it, to Maethrillian during the capital’s construction. The entire planet was built around it. Sources from that era wrote that they found something that . . . helped them understand the Domain, and when rumors began to spread, as was inevitable, the legend of the Organon sprang up.”

  A Precursor artifact that controlled the Domain. Hidden in the capital city.

  Bornstellar almost laughed. He hadn’t needed to go to uncomfortable backwater places to seek a mythical artifact.

  He’d been standing atop the greatest of them all.

  “Prepare the Audacity,” he said. “We will leave right away.”

  Bornstellar, Glory, and Splendid Dust had been present when Mendicant Bias had taken over; when the rogue AI had frozen ancillas and fired the Halo weapons at the capital. They and the rest of Audacity’s current crew were aware that a few councilors had hidden, clustered deep inside one of the rings that had made up the sectioned sphere, and had been rescued before the worst of the battle had occurred. Afterward, there had been no point in returning. Anyone not saved by then was dead.

  But knowing this was not the same as beholding it.

  Everyone was silent in respect, horror, and shock. Bornstellar had once envisioned the world as resembling a sliced spherical fruit. Now, it looked as if the slices of that fruit had been devoured or ripped to pieces. Only three remained even somewhat intact, still stubbornly impaled and connected by their axis. But they were dimmed and dark and damaged. No longer perfect circles. No longer teeming with life and activity.

  It was Falling Stars, the Engineer, who broke the sickening silence. “
Do you think we’ll even be able to find anything?”

  “We have to try.” Bornstellar was the calmest of them all. Dim memories not his own stood alongside recollections of things he had lived through, but he felt the shock nonetheless. This had been the capital, the heart of the ecumene, and now it was little more than chunks of debris.

  “Splendid Dust?” he prompted gently, patiently. “Where should we begin?”

  Splendid Dust had paled as he stared at the ruination. He wore his formal collar, and now Bornstellar realized that there were indeed a variety of shapes that adorned it; keys to all manner of things, in the guise of decoration. How clever the councilors must have thought themselves; how smug they had been.

  Splendid Dust shook his head and spoke, one six-fingered hand closing about a small hexagon that hung from his collar.

  “The, ah, the top fragment. The Crown. What remains of it, at least.” The Crown had been cracked in two, but it seemed that those pieces were intact.

  “For the slipstream crystals, or for the Organon?” They had fallen into using the familiar, legendary term for the artifact they sought, as there was really no other established term for it. Not even Splendid Dust had one to offer them.

  “The crystals,” he said. “The Mysterium is located on the equatorial ring.” Broken, smaller, presumably used largely for storage, pilfering the Crown would feel less like entering a ravaged domicile.

  Audacity was a silvery fish swimming through a sea of rubble and sorrow. They navigated around moon-size chunks of the former world, and smaller, more horrible evidence of destruction: the ordinariness of personal vessels; the grandeur of a wall, its brightly painted mural a startling burst of color; the corpses of Forerunners, caught forever in their armor, all rates, all ages, all viciously equal in death.

  Chant-to-Green had never been to Maethrillian, and she would gladly have stayed away. As one focused on life and renewal, so much death affected her greatly, and she wondered why Splendid Dust had requested two Lifeworkers in addition to the more logical choices of Builders, Warrior-Servants, Miners, and Engineers. Perhaps he felt like sharing his pain.