Halo: Primordium (32 page)

The Halo was preparing for its coming chalenge.

I felt nothing—took no breath, experienced no sensation. Only cold thought left me any hope of stil being alive. Stil, I came to enjoy this isolation. No feeling, no pain—only education and watchful eyes.

Then I also heard voices. A kind of selective blindness lifted and I realized I was standing—leaning slightly to one side, but standing.

The red and gray world blocking out the stars, so near to the wheel, remained—as did the stars and the wheel itself. But beneath my feet, I became aware of a dark platform, and then, of shadows—

many shadows moving in.

A smaler shadow came close, stretched out a blurry hand—and al came into focus. I looked out upon dozens of people—humans al, some like me, many others different.

Riser gripped my fingers. I knelt and took him in my arms. He whined at my touch. “Hurts,” he said, and turned around to show a punched-out mark in his back—healed over, but furless, pink and angry looking. “Stung deep.”

I felt my own back and cringed at the shalow hole my fingers found. I puled them back, expecting to see blood—but they were dry.

Male and female, we were al naked. Most looked as old as Gamelpar had been before he died. Only a few were as young as me. Few words passed. We stood out under the stars, caught in the light of the red and gray planet, rapidly closing the distance between itself and the wheel.

“Who brought us here?” I asked Riser. He circled his fingers and looped them in front of his eyes.

“Green-eye,” he said.

The closest male, a tal, elderly, brown-skinned felow with a short jaw and thick neck, tried to say a few words, but I could not understand him. No old spirit rose up to interpret and Riser himself

—master of so many human languages—didn’t understand, either.

A female gently pushed the elder aside and spoke simply and in broken phrases, like a child, but at least I could understand her.

“You the last,” she said. “Al . . . others . . . little ago, little time. But you last.”

Then she turned and revealed that in the smal of her wrinkled, suntanned back, a chunk had also been removed . . . and healed over.

The younger members came forward. The elders parted and let them through, and Riser approached them, sniffing and judging in that way he had, which I never mistrusted.

Then he darted off and vanished for a moment among the crowd of elders.

These younger men and women—there were no children—

gathered and compared their healed wounds. Some seemed embarrassed by their nakedness, others, not. Some were glassy-eyed, terrified into muteness, but others, as if at a signal, began chattering away. I was surrounded by five or six very communicative men and four or five women. Somehow I had been singled out, perhaps because I was the last to arrive, or the last to wake up.

Their faces fascinated me, but nowhere among them could I find Vinnevra. A few resembled Gamelpar, purple dark of skin and reddish brown of hair, with broad, flat faces and warm, inteligent eyes.

But Vinnevra was not here.

Age. Diversity. Very few young. That gave me my first shalow clue. Then Riser returned, dragging with him three other cha
manush
—a male and two females. On Erde-Tyrene, I had found females of Riser’s people to be quiet and reclusive, until they had made firm acquaintance—and then, al too familiar, quick to poke and make rude inquiries, nothing off limits, everything either wonderful or funny. I had never been quite sure how to deal with Riser’s women, or his female relatives—on those few occasions when I interacted with them—for Riser seldom invited me to his home, and seemed to prefer going out on jobs with me and his other young ha
manush
minions.

But now he had two females in tow, of that ageless puzzlement of cha
manush
years. Cha
manush
grizzled in their adolescence but seldom turned al gray or white, as my people did.

“Everyone is missing bits,” Riser told me. His companions stood a few paces back, nostrils flexing, watching the rest of the crowd.

They held hands, and one gestured for Riser to join them. He backed away from me, but nodded meaningfuly, eager to convey something important. We could barely hear each other in the rising babble, so he signed out:
All from Erde-Tyrene. Younger fell
from sky with us. Old ones brought here long ago
.

Others gathered around, too tightly for my comfort, but I did not discourage them or express any distress—for the story was coming out, the familiar story, that within them they had al once had old spirits, old warriors, each distinctive and opinionated.

To a one, young and old, those inner voices were now silent.

I tried not to conspicuously stare at the missing pieces of their backs when they turned, raised their arms, gestured. But I could not help myself. Al of us on that wide-open, elevated platform—under that looming planet and starry sky, looking out over the stretch of Halo that had been the home of so many for so long—every single one of us had been wounded, sampled—“stung deep.” We al limped, old and young—and we al cringed when we moved.

But the important question, immediate and crucial, was, why were we
here
? What did the machine master of the wheel intend for us? For I had little doubt that Riser was correct, that the green-eyed ancila was behind al this. Did that mean it was now alied with the Didact, or with the Librarian, the Lifeshaper herself?

Had the wheel been reclaimed by the Lady?

Something else was missing in my thoughts, something that made al these theories pointless. I seemed to have misplaced a memory about a child. There was a child. . . . The child was in control . . .

held sway over the green-eyed machine. We had been introduced!

But I could not remember its name, and I certainly could not remember its shape.

TWENTY-NINE

THE GROUP PARTED
to open a passage. They craned their necks to see what was coming, rising over the edge of the platform. I caught a flash of briliant green. A monitor—larger than any I had seen so far, at least two meters wide—came into view and moved between the parted humans.

“Welcome to our instalation’s new command center,” it said in a beautiful, musical voice neither male nor female, nor much like a Forerunner’s.

Al of us, young and old, were pushed back by invisible forces until a circle cleared in the middle, about thirty paces across. As Riser and I were nudged back, I remembered the moments on the Didact’s ship when the entire hul seemed to vanish, giving us the sickening sensation of being suspended in space.

At least here there was the gentle mercy of a floor—a deck, as the Lord of Admirals would have caled it.

“Al bid welcome,” the beautiful voice said, “to the new masters of this instalation.”

At the center of our ring of frightened people, a number of hatches slid wide in the floor, and through these rose more monitors

—smaler but otherwise almost indistinguishable from the large one.

Each had a single glowing green eye. As they rose, the hatches closed up beneath.

There were now more than forty monitors crowded inside the circle, surrounded by humans old and young. Al stood out in sharp detail against the deep backdrop of stars and the ever-growing red and gray planet, which now covered a third of the sky.

The nearest of these new monitors puled up before Riser and myself. It projected an image I instantly recognized—though I had never seen him before, not through my external eyes.

Male. Human. I looked the image over cautiously, closely, noting that his shape was similar to mine, though broader in shoulders and thighs; arms long and powerful-looking; hands thick and backed with patches of hair. A flatter, broader head and a great, square jaw.

“A strange reacquaintance,” the image said.

Unlike us, he appeared in raiment traditional for a high-ranking commander in the old human fleets: a rounded helmet that covered al but the forehead and the ears, a short coat over armor plates, a wide belt cinched just below the ribs, and form-fitting pants that revealed a bulging shield around the genitalia, which might, it seemed to me, have been more than a little exaggerated.

Like the ancilas, he was translucent—a ghost of a ghost, a whispering within made manifest without, like Genemender back in the Lifeworkers’ preserve. Yet having carried him within me for so long, I would have recognized him anywhere.

This was Forthencho, the Lord of Admirals.

“We’re being given command,” the image said. “Believe this. It is true. The time for our victory has arrived.”

Riser touched my hand. I broke from my fascination to glance down at the little one. He clenched his jaw and made a smal shake of his head. His meaning was clear enough. He was incapable of further judgment or action. We had both been carried so far beyond any human wisdom or experience that any move we made—

anything we might say or do—was equaly likely to produce a good outcome or a bad—equaly likely to pul us deeper into Forerunner madness, or propel us out and up.

The image of the Lord of Admirals continued. “We have been carried by these descendants, our vessels, for many years. And now we are brought here, for this moment, by a machine that has long since turned against Forerunners. It wishes us to defeat them—

to cause them misery and dismay. And so we shal!

“But there is no way yet to know our total strength, or how far we may go . . . with our new command, but this we do know, finaly: after ten thousand years, we have a chance to avenge our cruel mistreatment.

“We have urgent work to do al around this infernal wheel,” the Lord of Admirals continued. “Forerunners have cocked things up magnificently before having the grace to kil each other or die of the Shaping Sickness they wished to communicate to us. The wheel itself is in jeopardy. There is little time, and so extreme measures have been authorized.”

The larger monitor rose up, a faint display of lacework energies playing across its features. It hovered over us al—the inner circle of machines and the outer of the humans.

Al around, the apparent openness of stars and planet was overlaid by vivid, glowing displays. The sky became like the inside of one of the old caves, filed with instructive images and stories masterfuly tuned to our ignorant needs. I seemed to both see and feel a sharply defined awareness of how we al needed to behave, to act in concert.

The image of the Lord of Admirals favored me with particular attention. “You have a decent mind, young human,” he said. “We have traveled wel together. I wil place you beside me at the center of this weapon’s control and command. If together we can save this Halo, then we wil use it to strike against the heart of Forerunner defenses. But the time between now and then wil be very difficult.” Symbols and curving lines surrounded the wolf-faced planet. Al of us tried hard to understand, as if our lives depended on that understanding—as very likely they did.

The lines swept like an expanding tunnel toward the far curve of the wheel—a point of intersection.

Now appeared a dizzyingly strange and complicated set of instructions for creating a portal—a broad gate like a hole in space, through which great distances could be shrunk to almost nothing.

I watched a detailed record—reality, simulation, or reenactment, I could not tel which—of the Halo shedding damaged bits, leaving behind broken ships and a spreading, radiating cloud of atmosphere, ocean, terrain—and then opening just such a portal, and beginning a passage to comparative safety, where it would repair itself—or be supplied with materials transported from another instalation, much greater in scale and much farther away—to rebuild, if necessary.

At the same time, from al around, I heard a low moaning sound, as if from a gathering of frightened livestock.

“After this wheel was transported to the Forerunner capital system, and the metarch-level ancila prepared to unleash its energies on the capital world itself, it was attacked by Forerunner fleets and defended by its own sentinels—a battle that resulted in much of the destruction we see around us. The wheel was moved again, a tremendous effort, but the Lifeworkers and many of the Builders who had survived continued to fight. They did al they could to destroy this instalation from within. They failed. One and al, they were finaly infected with the Shaping Sickness.” Much of this I had learned from Genemender. Stil, the implications plunged deep. The green-eyed inteligence knew us too wel. My hatred against Forerunners reached a pitch of intensity that almost blew me out of the presentation.