The wals became clear and seats rose up that fit al of us—even a kind of low couch for Mara, who preferred to lie on her side.

“Would you like refreshments?” the blue lady asked. “The trip wil not be very long, but we see you are hungry and thirsty.”

None of us hesitated. Water and more of that pleasant-tasting paste, in bowls, floated out on several smaler disks, and we ate and drank. . . . My lips seemed to fil out, my eyes felt almost normal again, not covered with grit. My stomach complained, then settled in to its work. I could feel the humming, drumming of the transport through my butt and my feet.

The blue lady took away the refreshments before we made ourselves sick. We waited, ful, no longer thirsty, but stil expecting bad things.

“We have three passenger compartments today,” the ancila announced. I saw only one, the one we were in, and it looked just a little smaler than the wagon’s outside. Where were the other two?

“Our journey wil begin shortly.”

Don’t trust any of it, Lord of Admirals advised me. I didn’t need to be warned. We had been requested. That meant somebody knew we were here, and wanted us. And that, coming from any Forerunner, was likely not a good thing.

Vinnevra sat looking out at the passing, darkened land. I leaned forward—I was sitting behind her—and touched her shoulder. She turned her head and stared at me, half-asleep.

“I don’t blame you for anything,” I said. “I hope you’l let me off the hook, too.”

She just looked ahead again, nodded once, and shortly after that, she fel asleep.

I too saw very little of the journey. And it was a long journey.

When I came awake, the transport had passed into day and was crossing a rugged, rocky landscape, al gray. Clouds flew by. I wondered if we ourselves were flying now but couldn’t see the rail, so there was no way of knowing.

Then something big and dark flashed past just a few meters from the wagon. At our speed, even that brief passage meant the wal or building or whatever it was must have been very large.

The lights inside the transport flickered.

The blue lady stood at the front of our cabin, eyes fixed, body changing in slow waves between the shape of a Forerunner—a Lifeworker—and a human. Her mouth moved, but she did not say anything I could hear.

The transport gave the merest shiver, then stopped with hardly any sensation. The disk-door fel away from the side, but this time fast, landing with a resounding clang somewhere below.

That didn’t sound right.

Suddenly, I could feel, then see, shuffling, moving forms al around us—coming and going in slow waves. I seemed to stand in three different interiors at once, with different lighting, different colors—different occupants.

Riser let out a thin shriek and leaped to clutch my arm. Mara pushed her head and shoulders up against the ceiling, arms held high, trying to avoid the things moving around us in the awful guttering half-light.

Vinnevra clutched the ape’s side, eyes wild.

Everything suddenly got physical. Dust rose around us in clouds.

We were surrounded, jostled. Pink and gray lumps bumped into us as they shambled forward, trying to reach the exit. They might have been Forerunners once—al kinds, even big ones as large as the Didact—but they were hardly Forerunners now. One turned to look down at me, eyes milky, face distorted by growths. Tendrils swayed below its arms, and when it turned toward the exit, I saw it had another head growing from its shoulder.

Al were partialy encased in what seemed at first glance to be Forerunner armor—but this was different. It seemed to flow of its own wil around their deformed and rearranged bodies, as if struggling to hold them together—and keep them apart. These maleable cases were studded with little moving machines, rising up and dropping back from the armor’s surface like fish rising and then sinking in water—al working as hard as can be to constrain, organize, preserve.

Poor bastards. They’ve got it bad—the Shaping Sickness.

“I know that,” I said, under my breath.

But it’s been held back, retarded. Only prolongs their misery —but perhaps they remain useful, maintain their services to the Master Builder.

I wasn’t sure of that, not at al. Perhaps something that controled the plague was caling them in. Perhaps they had become slaves of the Primordial—of the subverted machine master of the wheel.

“They were with us al along!” Vinnevra whispered harshly.

“Why didn’t we see them?”

Bright lights moved just outside the door—monitors with single green eyes. Floating before them—under their control, but physicaly separate—metal arms and clamps guided oval cages.

One by one, the clamps circled the transformed and encased occupants, tightened, lifted them, and inserted them into the cages, which then floated away. With what few wits I had left, I counted twenty, twenty-five, thirty of the plague-stricken things.

The interior stabilized.

The blue lady announced, in her human form, “You have arrived at your destination. You are now at Lifeworker Central. Please exit quickly and alow us to service this compartment.”

Except for us, the transport again seemed empty.

Chapter Twenty-Five

ANOTHER MONITOR—ALSO green-eyed—met us as we dropped down from the open door—no steps, no conveniences. The disk wobbled and clanked beneath our weight. Mara descended as gently as she could but the disk slammed down, then wobbled as she got off.

The transport was streaked with dust and a thick green fluid.

Once we were off, the hole in the side filed in—grew a new door, I suppose—then the transport swung around and about on the rail, this time hanging down from the bridge, below the platform.

I think we just witnessed the work of the Composer, the Lord of Admirals said.

“You keep mentioning that,” I murmured. “What is it?”

Something the Forerunners were using long ago to try to preserve those stricken with the Shaping Sickness. We thought they had abandoned it.

“You told me it had something to do with converting Forerunners into machines—monitors.”

That was its other function. A very powerful device—if it was a device. Some thought the Composer was a product of its own services—a Forerunner, possibly a Lifeworker, suspended in the final stages of the Shaping Sickness.

I realy did not want to hear any more. I focused on our surroundings—real and solid enough. We were inside a cavernous, murky interior. No other transports were visible. The transport that had carried us—and those awful, hidden passengers—now, with little warning, hummed, drummed, then rushed off into a pale spot of daylight some distance away, on another errand—back where it came from.

Riser gathered us together like a shepherd, even the ape, who reacted to his prodding hands without protest. The green-eyed monitor moved forward and rotated to take us al in. “Would you please folow? There is sustenance and shelter.”

“What did we eat inside that thing?” Vinnevra asked, putting her mouth close to my ear, as if not to offend the machine.

“Don’t ask,” I said, but felt even sicker.

“Were they Forerunners?” she asked, pointing toward the darkened archway through which the other monitors were moving the cages.

“I think so.”

“Was that the Shaping Sickness?”

“Yes.”

“Wil we get it, now?”

I shuddered so violently my teeth chattered.

We had recovered enough strength that walking wasn’t an agony, but stil, the hike across the cavernous space seemed to take forever. Above us, architecture silently formed and vanished, rose up, dropped down, came and went: wals of balconies and windows, long sweeps of higher roadways and walkways, in slow waves, like the ancila inside the wagon. Wherever we were, this place was dreaming of better days.

The monitor took us through a great square opening and suddenly, as if passing through a veil, we were out in daylight again.

Before us roled a wide body of water, gray and dappled, reaching out to low, rocky cliffs many kilometers off.

Close in to the wide dock on which we now stood, several impressively big water boats lay at an angle, half in, half out of the water—partialy sunken, it seemed to me—but one could never tel with Forerunner things. Large cylinders were tumbled and bunched around their underwater ends.

A few burned and scorched monitors lay scattered around the dock, motionless, their single eyes dark, al sad and decrepit— something we were certainly used to by now.

Our green-eyed guide rose to the level of my face, then urged us toward the edge of the dock. “There wil be a high-speed ferry along shortly,” it said. “You wil wait here until it arrives. If you are hungry or thirsty, limited reserves of food and water can be supplied, but we must not stay here long.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The conflict is not over.”

Perhaps here was another truthful monitor. Best to get an update on the wheel’s situation—from the green-eye’s perspective. Not that we, as mere humans, could do anything about any of it.

“Where does the fighting continue?”

“Around the research stations.”

“The Palace of Pain,” Vinnevra said, face contorted. She raised her fists, either as defense against these words coming from the monitor, or because she wanted to reach out and strike it. I touched her shoulder. She shrugged away my hand, but let me speak. I could feel the Lord of Admirals subtly guiding my questions, expressing his own curiosity . . . supplementing me in both wisdom and experience.

“Were humans infected?” I asked.

“Not at first. Then . . . the Captive arrived.”

“While this weapon was being tested at Charum Hakkor?”

“Yes.”

“How did the Primordial—the Captive—get here?” Riser asked, no doubt guided by Yprin.

The green-eye seemed to brighten at this. “The Master Builder himself escorted it to the instalation.”

“Was the Primordial in a timelock?”

“It was not.”

“Was it free to move about, act . . . on its own?”

“It did not move, at first. It appeared dormant. Then, the Master Builder departed from this instalation, and left his researchers in charge. They reduced the role of the Lifeworkers on the instalation, and finaly sequestered them with a select group of humans in several smaler preserves.”

“But there were other humans outside the care of the Lifeworkers.”

“Yes. Many.”

“And the Master Builder’s scientists kept trying to infect them.”

“Yes.”

“Did they succeed?”

“Eventualy, but only in a few humans. They also tried to access records stored in the humans by the Librarian herself.”

This was too much like staring into my own navel. I felt a whirlpool of unhappy, contradictory emotions—and realized much of that inner turbulence came from Lord of Admirals himself.

“How did they access them? By asking them questions?”

“By removing the records and storing them elsewhere.”

Ask about the Composer!

“What is the Composer?”

“Not in memory,” the monitor said.

“You seem to know everything else. What is the Composer?”

“An archaism, perhaps. Not in memory.”

“Not stil in use—turning living things into machines, that sort of thing?”

No answer this time.

I could hear a distant whirring noise. Far across the body of water, moving along the distant rocky cliff, a white streak was making a wide turn and coming closer. This must be the ferry.

Questions bunched up. “Wil you be coming with us?”

“No,” the monitor said. “This is my station. I have care-taking duties to perform.”

“Wil there be other monitors out there, where we’re going?

Other ancilas?”

“Yes. Three minutes before the ferry arrives.”

“The war . . . did Lifeworkers rise up against the Builders?”

“Yes.”

Infuriating reticence! “Why?”

“The Captive held long converse with this instalation’s controling ancila. It in turn leveled the shields and broke safeguards at the Flood research centers and spread infection among the Builders and many of the Lifeworkers. It then moved this instalation to the capital system, where we were attacked by Forerunner fleets, and forced to move again . . . but not before the hub weapon fired upon the Forerunner capital world.” The monitor’s voice dropped in both volume and pitch, as if expressing sadness. Could these mechanical servants suffer along with their masters?

“Where are we now?” Riser asked.

“We are in orbit around a star out in the thinnest boundaries of the galaxy.”

“Any planets?”

“Some. Most are little more than icy moons. There is one large planet composed mostly of water ice and rock. It is growing closer.

Too close.”

The ferry slowed as it approached the dock—in shape a pair of sleek, long white curves, like boomerangs linking their tips to make bow and stern. A spume of water cascaded behind and soaked us with mist.

The ape shook herself and launched another spray.

“You wil go aboard now,” the monitor said as a door swung wide and made a ramp into the interior.

“Are there sick things inside?” Vinnevra asked, her voice shaky.

“No,” the monitor said. “You are expected, and time is growing short. That is al I have been told.”

We walked across the ramp. The inside of the ferry differed little from the inside of the rail-wagon, though it was wider and the ceiling was higher. Mara did not have to crouch. Vinnevra poked about, checking carefuly for other passengers. There were none that we could see.

“Maybe Forerunners pack passengers together and make some of them sleep and dream, so the journeys are shorter,” I said.

Vinnevra curled up on a bench. “Shut up—please,” she said.