Halo: Primordium (27 page)

And the wolf-orb kept getting bigger. It was now ten thumbs wide, a great pink-gray mass, its roundness clearly visible even during the day.

Vinnevra was very thin. Riser checked out our health with his nose and gave me a worried look; she was not doing wel. None of us was doing wel. The jungle was not providing much food, and we were walking steadily. Mara—it was hard to tel whether Mara was losing weight, her fur was so thick. But around her elbows and hips it was faling out in patches.

She would take those patches and set them up in trees, then wait below, for a while, before giving up.

The trees got smal, then thinned out to grassy glades. The glades

in turn gave way to a lush, tal grass meadow.

We had been traveling for over twenty-two days—again, I had lost count. Then, just after dawn, I saw Vinnevra standing beside Mara, who had planted a patch of her dark reddish fur on the tip of a tal grass cane, then crouched down below.

Several long-tailed birds started to flutter around the fur. Neither Vinnevra nor the ape moved. Eventualy, the birds—none more than a morsel—grew used to them and flew lower, grabbed hold of the cane with their claws, plucked at the fur. . . .

Mara shot up her big hands and caught five at once. Five smal birds. We broke their necks and ate them raw, including their innards. Mara we gave two, but she split half of one with Vinnevra.

Vinnevra said the ape was sharing it with the memory of Gamelpar.

The meadow soon gave way to bare soil, lightly tiled, as if waiting for a fresh crop. We were stil some distance from the desert of ashy blight, but I doubted any farmer would be planting here soon.

“Is this what you see?” I asked Vinnevra.

She nodded.

“I thought it was al grassland.”

She shook her head. “There’s more trees and grass out there.” She pointed inland and west. “Like you saw.”

But I had missed this tiny patch of dirt, no doubt just a brown line against the wider yelow and green. “Anything nearby?”

“Just dirt . . . for a ways.”

“Why didn’t you tel me that?”

“I wil, from now on—if you want,” she said.

“I want. Tel me . . . whatever, whenever.”

She looked unhappy. “What if I’m wrong again?”

“Just tel me.”

We spent a day trudging across the dirt, until we came in sight of a blue-gray line along the inland horizon. Hours later, we saw that the line was a great, long rail—a strange sort of fence rail that floated over the dirt without visible support.

“Where does this go?” I asked Vinnevra.

She pointed along the rail. That was obvious enough.

“What’s at the other end?”

“Something I don’t understand. I don’t see it very clearly.”

“Food?”

“Maybe. I see . . . and smel . . . food, if we go that way.”

“Grass and trees?”

“Not that way. Over there, maybe.” She pointed away from the rail.

“Game?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

The old spirit decided now was the time to make a contribution again.

It might be a transport system.

I saw big, noisy objects running along, or above, or beside—or on both sides of—double and single rails, both on the ground and elevated, like this one.

Usually they go to places where there are resources. Or they
carry passengers, and passengers need to eat.

So much for my being in charge. We were al starving again.

We changed direction and turned our group toward the spin, walking beside the soaring fence rail.

Riser and I fel back a dozen paces from the girl and the ape.

“A nudge from the old spirit?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said glumly. “You?”

“Soon it wil be long dark, she says.”

“Right. I’ve seen that, too.”

“Long dark, travel hard. We folow the girl again?”

“Yes,” I said. “For now.”

“It was worth a try, finding game,” he said. “No blame.” He fel quiet for another while, then said, “Old spirit suggests lots of space below, caverns. Why don’t we find a way down? Maybe things have not gone wrong down there.”

I thought of the great jagged hole punched into the wheel, many kilometers back along our journey. Inside, below, there had been layer upon layer of broken levels, floors, interior spaces. And what about the chasm that had opened up near the wal? It was too late to go back and find out. Something might have even fixed the hole, and by now, the bottom of the chasm had probably filed in.

What had happened to al those people? To the war sphinxes that were herding them along like cattle? Were those machines controled by Forerunners, or by the Captive, the Primordial itself?

Was the Primordial actualy in charge of this wheel, after al?

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, going down there,” I said.

“You smel bad,” Riser observed.

“I want to piss my pants,” I said.

“Me, too,” Riser said. “Let’s not and say we did.” It was an old cha
manune
joke, not a very good one.

We kept quiet for another few hours, until we came within sight of a long, large machine sitting on top of the floating rail.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE MACHINE RESEMBLED
a giant moth pupa clinging to a stick, with two narrow vanes on each side—no windows, no doors, and no way to climb up.

“It’s a big wagon,” Riser said.

Or a baloon, I thought, somehow tethered to the rail— but it did not bob in the breeze.

We walked around and beneath. If this
was
a wagon, we might somehow climb up, climb in, make it work, make it move . . . fast!

But it was much too high to touch.

Vinnevra and Mara had plopped down and were watching us as we walked in circles, making our inspection.

“Does it carry Forerunners, or their stuff?”Vinnevra asked.

“You don’t see it?”

“No. Just the rail. What do you see, at the end?” Vinnevra, after a long silence, finaly shrugged. “It goes where we need to go,” she said, and then gave me an apprehensive look.

Arguing with her would have been pointless, even cruel.

You are all crazy here
, Lord of Admirals observed wryly.

Forerunners have ruined what’s left of us, raised us up, made
us their tools . . . their fools.

“Then go,” I said.

She walked away, looking back, then got a fey look and broke into a lope, as if fleeing from us. Mara loped along beside her, sometimes upright, sometimes on her long arms, swinging body and legs after—less efficient in the open, it seemed to me, than in the trees.

She didn’t seem to need my protection, or want it anymore.

Good.

But I could not bring myself to folow right away. I sat in the dirt, head in hands, sick at heart. Riser sat with me for a few minutes, then got up, walked a few steps, and stared back at me, head cocked.

“Don’t you feel it, too?” he asked.

I did—but I had been trying to ignore it. Vinnevra wasn’t the only one being guided, puled in like a goat on a rope. I saw food,

shelter, protection. And now I smeled the food as wel—great tables loaded with food, enough for hundreds of us.

Crazy inside, worn down inside and out.

Footstep after footstep, folowing the floating rail, hour after hour—

and finaly a change, something new on this endless, furrowed field of sterile dirt.

We came to a thick white pole with a wide circle at the top. The rail passed through the circle, at no point touching. I measured with my bleary eyes and decided the circle was big enough to let the transport pass through, but stil, I half-heartedly wondered how the rail just hung there.

Lord of Admirals then condescended to inform me that this was not especialy marvelous. With a kind of easy, instinctive pride, he told me that we—old humans, that is, separating me, his host, from the humans he had known—had once covered many worlds with networks of transportation much like this—rails, poles, and circles.

Far less marvelous than star boats. Which, by the by, we
called ships. Star ships.

It occurred to me that Lord of Admirals was feeling something like contempt for al us poor slaves and pets of the Forerunners, so ignorant—but I let it pass. He was dead, I was alive, stil moving of my own wil.

Mostly.

“Did we ever make anything like a Halo?” I asked, hoping to sting him a little. But the Lord of Admirals did not answer. He could withdraw when it suited him into the quiet murmurs that filed my head—hiding behind my own half-formed thoughts like a leopard behind a cane brake. I could not force him out if he did not want to come.

“I take that as a no,” I muttered.

Riser’s forehead glistened with sweat. It did seem the air was warmer here even than in the jungle—warmer and drier. My thirst was fierce. Pretty soon, we’d curl up like earthworms on a flat, sunny rock—al brown and leathery.

“Worse here than when young tough ha
manune
caught me and tied me to a thorn bush,” he said. “That was before Marontik was much of a town.”

“You didn’t tel me about that,” I said. “I’d have beat them up and thrown rocks.”

“They died before you were born,” Riser said.

“You kiled them?”

“They got old and wrinkled,” he said with a shrug. “I outlived them.”

I didn’t ask if that gave him any satisfaction. Cha
manune
were not much concerned with vengeance and punishment. Maybe that was one of the secrets to their longevity.

“You stil don’t live as long as Forerunners,” I said, more out of weariness than reproof.

“No, I won’t,” Riser said. “But
you
wil.”

“How?” I shot back, irritated. I didn’t want to be anything like a Forerunner right now. Riser stubbornly refused to answer, so I let it go.

Another couple of hours’ walking and the wheel’s shadow swept down. We stopped, lay back on the dirt, and Riser and I alowed Lord of Admirals and Yprin to quietly speak, while Mara and Vinnevra snored and the stars roled along in the sky, behind and around the other side of the wheel. Wheels within wheels.