Halo: Primordium (24 page)

We sat, Riser and I, in the shade of the great boulders on that promontory, experiencing a new relationship to one another—a relationship Gamelpar and I were never able to complete. Vinnevra looked between us with that same furrowed frown she used when Gamelpar and I had spoken about these things.

“And who are
you
?” Riser’s old spirit asked.

“Forthencho—Lord of Admirals, supreme commander of the last fleets of Charum Hakkor.”

“The one who lost the war to the Didact.”

“Yes. Yprin Yprikushma—you saw what the Shaping Sickness has done here,” the Lord of Admirals said. “And that has brought you forward, out of guilt! Out of pride!”

“I am dead. You are dead.” Riser’s voice was almost

unrecognizable.

We had become puppets, and I feared these spirits would never let us go.

The dialog between the old spirits went on for some time. I was not precisely present for al of it, so what I remember is shifting, dreamlike, but the facts—the larger facts—loom clearly enough, and if I wish—if I open many old doors—I can resuppose, reimagine the histories and emotions now being alowed to clash once again.

“And now, many more are dead,”my old spirit resumed,

“because you recovered and preserved the Primordial. From a place lost to the memory of al, including Forerunners, you brought it to Charum Hakkor. . . .”

“I have no disgrace. I had reasons to speak to the Primordial, and it is not known to this day whether the Primordial was responsible for the Shaping Sickness. Confined the way it was,
where
it was, and found long after the sickness began—how could it be?”

“By reaching out, ordering the movement of ships from beyond our galaxy, ships that brought the plague to Faun Hakkor—”

“How could it communicate? It was hidden naked and half-dead on a lost cinder of a world. And then—we froze it in a timelock!

You are confused, Forthencho. Besides, the Primordial gave us information, and with it, we saved bilions of human lives.”

“That is far from the whole truth. Humans themselves discovered what needed to be done to preserve ourselves and our descendants against the Shaping Sickness.”

“That has ever been in dispute between us,” Riser’s old spirit countered. “It may always be argued this way, or that. But
it is why
we are here.
This knowledge, however acquired, is what forced the Forerunners to preserve remnants of those they defeated, rather than wipe us from the slate of history, as they had so many others before.”

The Lord of Admirals responded with bitterness, “That may be so, but it only puls thin curtains on your disgrace.”

“Look around you! The Primordial is
here.
The Shaping Sickness is
here
! Forerunners are dying—but we live on! And that is what the Primordial promised!”

“It said no such thing to me.”

And so it went for much of that night, back and forth, round and round. I tried to catch the important details, but they were too strange, too frightening—those visual impressions, like my nightmare of the Captive, what the old spirits caled the Primordial—but stamped with a mark of authenticity. . . .

The threads of different ages tangled until I did not know who I was, who was feeling fear, who was feeling any emotion. . . .

My most lasting impression of that long night: Riser lying down on the ground and giving smal cries of distress, but the voice within kept pushing out through his lips, expressing that ancient agony of knowing al those you love have either died or are about to die, in many strange ways— memories and knowledge overwhelming and incomprehensible even to these dead spirits, to the fundamental children that lie at the center of us al.

It is too much even now!

The Lord of Admirals is not testifying before the true Reclaimer.

I am Chakas. I am al that remains of Chakas, and stil I am haunted!

I give up being Chakas. I withdraw! Please stop your recording, Reclaimer.

I am unstable.

Exquisitely painful.

I am breaking apart.

We are all dead, and even our bones are dust!

*AI TRANSLATOR BREAK*

Science Team Analysis:
Monitor has shut itself down. Whether this is due to prior damage is not known. AI Translator reports that before the shutdown, twin streams of language appeared in the data stream, conflicting with or overriding each other. Monitor memory may be defective, or more than one stream of memory may be incompletely integrated. Repairs are still impossible.

The monitor must recover on its own.

Resumption of response streams may be problematic.

Thirty-two hours elapse.

ONI COMMANDER:
“I have to say, I’m having difficulty with all this information. ‘Arks?’ There’s more than one?”

SCIENCE TEAM LEADER:
“The Halo as described is also larger than any we’ve encountered. That could imply a larger Ark, right?”

ONI COMMANDER:
“Hmmh. There’s still a high probability that this machine is a decoy, and all of the information it’s giving us is a ruse. However ancient, the Forerunners might have anticipated an eventual human resurgence, and possible rematch, and prepared for it. To the extent that this testimony could demoralize our troops, we may be playing right into their hands.”
SCIENCE TEAM LEADER:
“That would imply a truly astonishing level of prescience, given that Forerunners vanished from our galaxy a thousand centuries ago, and left us on Earth as little more than a bunch of wandering savages.”

ONI COMMANDER:
“Forerunners didn’t vanish completely, did they?”

SCIENCE TEAM LEADER:
“We disagree about the possibility of a ruse. Everything the monitor has related ties in with other Forerunner records we have discovered—including the Bornstellar Relation found on Onyx. There is no possibility of recent communication between those points. The data matches, and so it is almost certainly accurate.”

POLITICAL TEAM LEADER:
“The Commander’s concerns have been noted. But all information gathered thus far with relation to the Forerunners has been sequestered and will have no effect upon team morale. The interest of the overall Halo/Shield Alliance in the facts and inferences these sessions have produced is sufficient to override all our lower-level concerns.

Interrogation will continue.”

ONI COMMANDER:
“With all due respect, ma’am, we have already seen that this machine can breach our security with alarming ease.”

POLITICAL TEAM LEADER:
“Also noted, Commander.” Thirty-two hours elapse.

Monitor light resumes glowing.

AI Translator receives and converts a new response stream.

AI TRANSLATOR COMMENT:
What follows is a multilevel, noncontiguous and ambiguous narrative. Some phrases, perhaps many, may not be translated accurately.

INTERROGATION RESUMES WITH:

RESPONSE STREAM #1352 [DATE REDACTED] 1270 hours (Repeated every 64 seconds.)

What am I, really?

A long time ago, I was a living, breathing human being. Then, I
went mad. I served my enemies. They became my only friends.

Since then, I’ve traveled back and forth across this galaxy, and out
to the spaces between galaxies—a greater reach than any human
before me.

You have asked me to tell you about that time. Since you are the
true Reclaimer, I must obey. Are you recording? Good. Because my
memory is broken and covered with thorns. I doubt I’ll be able to
finish the story.

Once, I was Forthencho, Lord of Admirals.

RESPONSE STREAM #14485 [DATE REDACTED] 1124 hours (nonrepeating)

TWENTY-ONE

WITH DELIGHT I
felt the moving muscles and living body of the one I inhabited, in whom I was slowly being reborn. . . .

My memories seemed to rise from scattered pieces, like a building blown to pieces and dropped into a deep wel of thick fluid

. . . then sucking in reverse from that awful mire and reconstructing itself chunk by chunk, year by year, emotion by emotion.

How could I be here? How could I live again, through what miracle, or—more likely—what awful Forerunner technology?

The Composer! So many possibilities and capabilities tied up in that strange name. . . . A Composer of minds and souls!

But because of its talents, used by the Librarian, I was here.

I did not feel guilt. To this young human, so lambent in emotions, so confused in thought and action, I felt both gratitude and irritation, because he was strong, and I was weak. He was young, and I was

. . .

Dead.

The emergence that became
me
seemed so delicate at first, capable only of brief interruptions, wry comments, like a flea hiding in an elephant’s ear. A strange sensation indeed, nudged along by strangely familiar observations, stimuli forcing me up and out, like iron bars prying up stones in a field: Forerunner ships, the Didact himself, the arena where the Primordial had once been stored—and then released!

Ho w
could
the Forerunners have been so stupid? Was it deliberate?

So strange, the familiarity of this boy’s emotions— recognizably
human
—and yet separated from my existence, I learn, by ten thousand years of history.

I remember those last hours in Citadel Charum.

The Librarian walked slowly, reverently, among the captured, the wounded, the dying, the last survivors of Charum Hakkor. She was accompanied by other Lifeworkers as wel as many hovering machines.

One by one, as we were laid out under the shel of the Citadel—

rows upon hundreds of rows, stretching off to the limits of my blurred vision—the Librarian paused, bent over, knelt beside us, spoke to us. Strange indeed that such a simple and elegant face can appear so compelingly beautiful, so filed with empathy.

She expressed sadness at our condition, and her servants administered relief for my pain.

Perhaps it was an ilusion, like the absurd belief in this boy that the Librarian touches us al at birth. Stil, I do not deny this memory.

Beside her stood the Didact, a great, hulking presence, my sworn enemy for fifty-three years of continuous battle. Yet he had not aged. Forerunners live so very long; human lives are like candle flames flickering and guttering before their steady torches.

Even though we had stripped off our uniforms, doing our best to erase al evidence of our identities and ranks, the Didact found
me
, the Lord of Admirals, who had opposed him longer and more successfuly than any other. He bent beside me, hands clasped as if he were a supplicant before a shrine. And this is what he said to me: