Halo: Primordium (22 page)

her great hand.

Both looked back several times before they vanished into the ragged jungle.

I climbed the steps and squatted beside Gamelpar, whose name means Old Father. I recaled as much as I could of the paintings in the narrow, winding caves a day’s journey outside Marontik, and of what they meant.

“She is al I have,” he said, interrupting the flow of ritual. “She is wilful but loyal. If I leave her to you, wil you watch over her, and guide her away from this place? Take her to where she can be safe?”

Trapped! I trembled at the contradictions within and without. A vow made to a dying man had to be kept—there was no way out.

And I could not let this one die in shame and disappointment.

“You wil not leave her behind and go off on your own, wil you?”

“No,” I said, hating myself, not knowing whether that was a lie or not.

“Her true name . . . known only to her mate, her life partner . . .

or to her sworn guardian . . .”

And he whispered it in my ear.

I resumed the ritual storyteling, only vaguely aware of the blue-eyed machine stil hovering over the long grass.

Just as I finished, I saw that the old man’s eyes were mostly closed and had falen back the tiniest bit, unmoving, within his skul.

I stayed by him, listening to the last tick of his breath, watching the last twitch of his limbs. . . .

It did not take long before I knew he had crossed safely over the western waters. He had suffered much already, and the Elephant and Abada are kind. Stil, I wept and felt the sadness of the old spirit inside me.

We never shared. . . . Whom have we lost yet again?

Then I saw that the machine with the blue eye was slowly dropping into the grass, and the eye was dimming, turning black.

There was nothing left for Genemender to do, and no power left to do it, anyway.

I angrily gathered up a few scraps of clothing from the old huts.

Some at least of the food had been real—a final feast produced within the pavilion of cylinders—and I packed up what I could.

None of the monitors moved. Their eyes stayed dark.

I walked into the jungle a few hundred meters and joined Vinnevra and the ape at the start of a nearly overgrown trail, little more than a winding gap between the towering trees. I could not meet her look, and when she asked me if he had died wel, in tune with
daowa-maadthu
, I simply nodded.

I felt barren inside. No Riser, no old man, and even the voice within was quiet. I had no notion where we might go from here, and neither did Vinnevra. But we started down the trail, anyway, to the far side of the plateau. After her question about Gamelpar’s passing, she did not speak for hours. It was her way of mourning.

The station where Gamelpar had died was several kilometers behind us and the jungle was thinning when she asked me to tel her the old stories, just as I had told them to her grandfather.

And she in turn would speak the stories Gamelpar had told her, including the story about the First Human’s soul-finger.

It was then that Riser chose to rejoin us.

WE WERE WALKING
along the trail, picking our way over the creepers—or in the ape’s case, plowing and swinging through them

—and watching through the broken canopy of branches and leaves the perhaps not so endless progress of shadow and light on the sky bridge. The skies had cleared for a time since midmorning and the air was moist, but the trail—dead leaves overlying stones and bits of wood—was drying and firm enough underfoot.

Al ilusion. How could I know anything was actualy solid?

Perhaps this was an amusement being enjoyed somewhere by jaded Forerunners. If I did not amuse, then at any moment my story, my life, might be crumpled up and thrown away. . . .

Our tales spun on while we walked. I told Vinnevra the ancient story of Shalimanda, the heaven-snake, who one night swalowed the original shining, jewel-encrusted stream of worlds, and the next night exploded, showering the sky with al the darker, earthy orbs on which humans would grow. As long as I heard us speaking, our voices soft and holow in the jungle, I seemed more tightly bound to what was real, to al that I could smel and see and feel.

The girl—the young woman, for she was no longer a girl—was a comfort to me. More knives in my head as I tried to resist.

But I continued to listen and to speak in turn. I knew her real name. Perhaps that is not something you feel much about, one way or another, but for anyone tuned to
daowa-maadthu
, the old man’s confidence was terribly important. I could not just leave her behind, not now, any more than I could abandon a sister . . . or a wife.

The ape listened to us and occasionaly threw in her own commentary, low rumbles and occasional sighs. If she used words, I could not understand them—perhaps they were hidden in her grunts.

Something made a smal crunching sound off to our left and silenced us. Vinnevra cocked her head to listen, then threw it back and sniffed. “It’s your friend,” she whispered. “The little one.” Riser came out of the jungle, climbing over two embracing tree roots, then stopped several paces in front of me, stood straight, and folded his arms. He looked me up and down, as if to satisfy himself I was not another ghost.

His smal, wry face was as hard and serious as a stone.

I was stil numb at the loss of the old man and the loss of my freedom. I wanted to reach out and touch my friend but didn’t dare.

Then, Riser began to silently weep. He wiped his eyes with one long-fingered hand and turned to Vinnevra.

“You knew first,” he said, and then, to me, “The woman is smarter than you. No surprise.”

“Why did you folow us and not show yourself?” Vinnevra asked him, as if chiding an old friend. Riser had that way with some people.

“The ape is smarter than both of you put together,” he said. “She smeled me and she knew I was folowing, didn’t you?” The ape pushed away creepers and branches, showering dead leaves over the trail. Standing tal in a shaft of afternoon sun, her white-fringed jowl and cheek fur forming a nimbus around her nearly black face, she withdrew her lips, showing strong, square teeth, and shook out her arms, softly guttling. She was glad to see the little one.

My tension broke. I could not help but laugh. Even now, Riser could befuddle me. He looked me over criticaly, walking around me and poking my ribs, my back, determined I was sound, then snorted at the ape. She snorted back. “Cha
manush
once knew Sha
kyanunsho
—her people. So she says. She even speaks a language I understand, a little, so it must be so. She says her lending name is Mara.”

“You were there al along, but you didn’t trust me,” I said.

“Forerunners make ghosts,” Riser said, eyelids flicking white. I got down on my knees before the Florian, held out my arms, and he fel into them like a child—though he was easily ten times my age.

We hugged for a moment, then became aware that Vinnevra was watching with a needful expression. So Riser wriggled loose, stepped over to her, grabbed her around the hips, and hugged her as wel.

“Sister or wife?” he asked me, looking back.

“Neither!” Vinnevra said.

“You like this boy,” Riser said. “No?”

“No!” Vinnevra said, but glanced at me.

The shadow-ape squatted, pushing aside several saplings, and watched us contentedly while combing fingers through the fur on her arms.

Insects had found us again, and so we moved on. “How long have you been here?” I asked Riser. “Tel me how you got here.

You fel from the sky?”

“Long story. Tel soon.”

“I want to hear it now.”

“So do I,” Vinnevra said.

“First, make a wide look around,” he said.

Riser ran ahead of us, up a gentle slope to a smal clearing above the tree line, set with three giant rock pilars. We made a circuit around the rocks and joined him to survey the landscape below.

We had come to the lower edge of the plateau and now faced wildly hummocked terrain, many mounds and low hils, while off to our right, mountains rose steep and forbidding, folded around their skirts by more jungle, above that a barren belt, and finaly, patches of snow.

I sighed. “I have no idea where we need to go,” I said.

“My
geas
says nothing,” Vinnevra confessed.

“I fel into a bad, bad place,” Riser said. “We won’t go there.

Everyone dead. Ugly.”

“War?”

He pushed out his lips. “Maybe. I walked from far over that way.” He pointed away from the mountains, at a sharp angle inland.

In that direction, many hundreds of kilometers away, the hummocky terrain blued out in thick atmosphere and clouds. Beyond the clouds, naked foundation stretched al the way across the band, marked

with

geometric

details—the

usual

Forerunner

imponderables. Foundation material stretched up that side of the wheel for perhaps four or five thousand kilometers, then ended in a turbulent roil of perpetual cloud.

Within that mass of cloud, lightning flashed every few seconds—

briliant but silent.

“You mean, your ship—the ship that carried you here—crashed out there?”

He tapped his shoulder once, yes. And that also indicated he wanted to use the mix of cha
manush
signs and chirps and grunts he had taught me back on Erde-Tyrene, a patois we had never shared with Bornstelar or used in front of any Forerunner. He settled on his haunches and picked at a patch of moss, then puled out a tuft and sniffed it philosophicaly. “I tel it, and when I finish,” he said,

“you tel them.”

As if Mara would understand! But perhaps she understood more than I suspected.

And so Riser began. When he spoke this way, his halting speech and mannerisms seemed to drop away and he became positively elegant—but only with difficulty can I convey the flowery style, with so many inflections and declensions. Florians used nouns, adjective-like phrases, and verb tenses that recognize thirteen different genders and four directions of time. So I simplify.

Pity. When inspired, or when bragging, Riser was quite the poet.

RISER’S STORY

IF I WERE
happy I would sing this for al time, but there is much sadness, not of our doing, and so this can only be a tale told by slaves.

“The first part you know. We were there. Then Forerunners put me away like sugar-fruit in a pot. You, too, I think.

“Later, I woke up on a dying star boat, faling through noise and heat. The boat became bent and broken with parts and things glowing, not fire, like the spirit of the boat trying to come together again or just find home and die. The boat fel apart when it became too tired to keep trying. And we spiled out onto a graveyard-desert, below those clouds, way over there.