Audacity outlined a proposed point of entry.

“Send out monitors,” I instructed.

“Should we withdraw while they work?” Dawn asked.

“No need,” Keeper said. “Any effective trap would set up a perimeter throughout the system.”

I agreed that such caution was impractical under the circumstances. We were committed to our plan. A group of ten monitors left Audacity and slowly approached the ancient craft. At any sign of revival, the monitors would back off and attempt to return—or, if danger presented itself, act as decoys while we made our retreat.

Two of the monitors extended manipulators. The first manipulator lightly brushed the craft’s worn surface.

“No response,” Audacity announced.

Within the flotilla, and throughout the ancient fleet, no ship, large or small, showed the slightest reaction.

For machines, ten million years is a very long time. But ten million years is just a brief trek for a living planet. And so even as our monitors opened the vessel, I turned my thoughts toward the small orange star and its single living planet.

That was where we would find answers.

STRING 9

UR-DIDACT

TEN CENTURIES I spent in meditative solitude, while the Lifeshaper completed her duties for the Council—and for the Master Builder—and arranged her own biological traps and releases. Very clever, my wife. I miss her deeply. She was ever my balance and my goad—ever my conscience. But despite her cleverest efforts, providing me with a fast ship, loyal ancillas, and a mixed bag of comrades, she could not prevent my ultimate capture.

Strange that recounting all this brings back my time in the Cryptum, so close to the Domain … Memories that until now I had thought lost. Or discarded. I have never been prone to either solitude or meditation. Up until now, I could barely remember the state I had lain in for so long. Yet watching as our near-derelict hulk was drawn deeper and deeper into the writhing nest of star roads, with Catalog close by but silent, there was little to do but remember, to stew in my own juices, as Forthencho, my greatest human adversary, had so aptly described his own capture and imprisonment. Before a Composer brutally sucked away his patterns and memories.

“It is invigorating,” Catalog said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Awaiting the inevitable. I am an individual truly now.”

“What were you, before you became Catalog?” I asked.

“Not a proper question,” it replied.

“I’ve heard that each Catalog has a certain history,” I continued, feeling less than proper as my fear mounted.

Catalog regarded me with its many sensors. Was it affronted? “That is no secret,” it said after a pause. “Juridicals are chosen from those who have done wrong. Awareness of the nature of guilt is our strength.”

“And what was your crime?” I asked.

“Not to be revealed. Expunged. I serve.”

“We’re not likely to survive,” I said. “You know my crimes, don’t you?”

“I am aware of your prior acts. Catalog does not judge. I observe.”

“So tell me. We’ll be equals.”

“You mock me.”

“Not at all.”

The sensors on its carapace shifted, and a low humming sound came from within.

“Before I assumed the carapace, I was a Miner,” it said. “I improperly set forward a planet’s destruction, to reduce it to space-borne rubble. Before a crew containing my crèche-mate could evacuate.”

“Crèche-mate … What did you have against him, or her?”

“Him. He was destined to bond with the heir to a powerful family, highest in our rate. I had been passed over. It was not just, so I felt.”

“You blew him up?”

“Utterly. And twelve of his crew.”

This put my stalwart companion in an entirely new light. “The Juridicals chose you anyway?”

“They did.”

“You must have a very special quality.”

“Yes.” Again the hum. “Depth of depravity.”

“I once tried to destroy an entire species,” I said.

“Perhaps you are destined to become like me,” Catalog said.

“Perhaps. I don’t judge. You don’t judge. We’re here to observe. And to do our best to survive.”

“Correct.”

“Glad to have that resolved.” I held out my hand and gripped one shoulder. Catalog raised one of its hands and we clasped palms, then each of us drew a Y with a finger, me, over my nose, Catalog, over the front portion of its forward sensor. A Warrior’s awareness of shame.

“Now, you’re an honorary Warrior-Servant,” I said.

“If you insist, Didact.”

We waited.

“You’re still connected with the Juridicals, aren’t you?”

“No,” it said. “All our channels have closed. The Domain is also blocked.”

“They’re moving Halos again?” I asked with a shudder.

“A possible explanation,” Catalog said. “Or that.”

We were approaching the middle of the tangle, nudged along by a coiling ribbon of star road, shoved toward an assemblage unlike any Precursor structure I had ever seen.

The star roads had combined to sketch out a great, parallel double-arc, like two arrow-shooting bows pulled from an ancient armory. And at the center of each double bow glowed a brilliant ring surrounding a pit of blackness deeper than space.

“It’s not a ship,” I said.

“Is it like the Ark?” Catalog asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe they hope to collect us, as the Librarian collects her beasts?” Catalog withdrew most of its sensors. “Before all connections closed, Haruspis supplied me with a number of records. I have conducted a search and can now recognize the structure.”

“How?”

“Testimony from the Lifeshaper and others across the ecumene,” Catalog said.

“She was deposed?”

“Yes.”

“And you received her testimony?”

“Before the network closed, yes.”

The double bow overwhelmed our visual field.

After a long, agonizing moment—Catalog no doubt luxuriating in its knowledge but utterly silent and still—I asked, “Willing to share?”

STRING 10

LIBRARIAN

I LOVE PLANETS—those agglomerations of rocks and volatiles found around most stars throughout the galaxy, and even between the stars.

Most living things are born on gas-infused, stony orbs. Still, the exceptions are fascinating. I have long studied those ice-bound moons where blind scuttlers arise in secret oceans to stack rocks and burrow deep. Stifled beneath kilometers of mineral-cold ice, they rarely if ever get to see the stars, living out a dreaming existence in perpetual, sulfur-rich darkness.

Three times I have liberated icy moons—opened crevices in the deep frozen shields and freed the inbred scuttlers. They climbed up and out, were astonished by the depth and emptiness of the unbounded void of space—and then fell back, terrified and discouraged, to seek refuge again beneath the ice. They wiped their minds and their histories of what I had shown them. Now, they do not remember anything about Forerunners.

I do not know if their ice will protect them against the Halos. Likely not. However, a great many were small … less than the size of my hand. That might save them.

How much like those scuttlers all young species are! The empty greatness of space is a thick wall erected between lovers, harsh and cruel.

When Forerunners were young and bound to our natal planet, we must have wondered who and what we were, how we would measure up if we met our peers—or our superiors—out there in the void. But the challenge of simply crossing the void was so tremendous that for millennia after we acquired speech, fire, art, machines, we still clung to our rock and shunned the endless vacuum.

Inexperience—naivety—hope and fear.

Young wisdom.

* * *

Hulk after ancient hulk we carved open without resistance, without reaction. All records within the equivalent of our ancillas—primitive memory stores, huge and bulky—had decayed to random patterns of binary garble.

Binary! After our great memory catastrophes, digital storage had been given way to substrates of quantum foam. Yet on these ships, the last dim hope of log and history crumbled at a touch.

Ten million years is a long time for machines.

We finished knowing little more than when we began—a vague recognition of shared heritage, a realization that these ships, gathered about the star roads like so many flocks of dead birds suspended in a silent gray cathedral, reminded us of archaic designs in Builder ritual. No more. And no less.

“They were Forerunner, that’s all we may ever know,” Clearance said.

“We could transport the best Builder technicians out here,” Keeper suggested. “We could set loose our finest researchers to go ship by ship … Then we would learn!”

But Keeper’s enthusiasm was not convincing. Back in our home galaxy, where nearly all of Forerunner history had played out, preparations to fight the advance of the Flood would certainly take precedence.

The one thing we could all surmise about the great fleet we were leaving behind, mute and pitifully old, was that no species had ever mounted such an effort except to save itself. No species had ever gone to such great lengths for any purpose other than all-out war.

And what about the Precursors, whose cathedral roads stretched around so many planets and interlaced the stars?

Where had they gone?

* * *

Audacity took us to the inner stars of the great Spider in yet another jump, toward the tiny orange sun.

Fresh light from the unique living world greeted us as we arrived in the target system—light less than two seconds old. “Wonderful, fresh light,” Chant noted. “Makes me feel more connected to reality.”

What had been statistical from a great distance now resolved to certainty. Here, there were no star roads, no orbiting constructs, no ships. Audacity brought us sharp images even through the planet’s wavering atmosphere.

We studied individuals—most seen from above—as well as gatherings in small towns or villages. Tens of thousands, perhaps more. But certainly not millions.

A lonely and simple planet.

Our emotions reached down.

“Their technological status is minimal—fire, ceramics, some metal-working,” Dawn said. “Because they are so few, even compared to their resources, they must exercise population control. Beyond that, they seem to have returned to a state of natural evolution.”

Chant continued with less startling details. “Subsurface and volcanic vent biota is nonexistent. There’s nothing in the way of an underground biosphere. No signs of ancient reservoirs of fuel—carbonaceous or petroleum-based.”

“If they arrived with the fleet,” Keeper said, “they’ve been here ten million years.”

A prospect so astonishing it could scarcely be believed. Either their ancestors had been forced to colonize a desperately impoverished planet, or they had long ago shed most of their knowledge.

We absorbed this with the proper silent respect.

“Lack of resources could hold back progress,” Keeper said. I noticed a certain doubtful disdain in his tone.

“Even so, they must have stripped themselves of everything,” Dawn said in wonder.

“Or they were abandoned, left here with nothing,” Clearance said. “Judging from the mineral evidence, life didn’t exist before it came here with the Forerunners. There is a fair percentage of radioactive ore, however, and the oceans—such as they are—are rich with deuterium.”

“They could have escaped if they had wanted to,” I concluded. “Weapons?” I asked Audacity.

“Nothing that can harm us,” the ship responded. “They live and work by fire alone. And not a great deal of that.”

“But why?” Chant asked.

Audacity entered low orbit.

“We’re intercepting sounds,” Dawn said, and with a lift of her fingers, played for us words being spoken in a small village just a few hundred kilometers below. We understood nothing.

“It’s not ancient Digon?” Keeper asked.

“That reached its peak less than three hundred thousand years go,” Dawn said. “We have no idea what form of Digon, if any, even existed when the fleet left our galaxy. Ship will gather sounds from as many points a possible, but already, the language seems far simpler than our own.”

“Simpler language is often more advanced, syntactically,” Keeper said, and brightened at a thought. “Their technology and structures might be hidden—they might be in defensive mode, hiding them! There could be threats in Path Kethona we do not recognize.”

“More likely, they chose to suppress technology at the deepest level,” Dawn said. Keeper fell back in dismay. He could not bring himself to believe Forerunners would ever abandon advanced engineering.

“No doubt they still dig,” Clearance said with a smug air. “They’ve become Miners. All of them. How else would they find stone and clay?”

I have difficulty knowing when Miners are trying to be funny.

None of us had ever seen Forerunners so abject and primitive. They averaged about two thirds the height and mass of a healthy Manipular. Their structures were rarely taller than one or two stories, or wider than five or ten meters.

“How can we learn anything from them?” Keeper asked. “How can they maintain any sort of culture?”

“They likely rely on oral histories,” Chant said. “We’ve seen it in other species.”

“Maybe they’re some sort of Flood residue—an inept crossbreeding,” Keeper said.

“The genetic heritage is clear,” Chant insisted. “At the cellular level, they aren’t very different from us. I think the first group to arrive made the best of a tough situation. They could not overburden meager resources. But there are other animals down there, some serving as beasts of burden.”