Cryptum

by Greg Bear

  She did not want to show her pain.

  “We’re in what remains of a debris cloud,” I said. “I saw stars earlier—very far away.”

  We were weightless, the air was growing foul, all of us were injured—the guard most severely. There was likely no food to sustain us. Even though the armor could recycle our wastes, lacking additional raw materials and running out of its own charge of energy, it would not fill our needs for long.

  “Mendicant Bias,” I said. I could not tell whether Bornstellar or the Didact was bringing up this topic. Something had broken down all my internal barriers. I was now privy to most of the Didact’s wisdom, his imprint—but its usefulness at this point seemed doubtful. Still, I—we—wanted some questions answered. “The Didact oversaw the Contender’s planning and inception, and was present at its key quickening. But he was removed from any contact with Mendicant Bias a thousand years ago. What’s happened since?”

  “Mendicant Bias was charged by the Master Builder with conducting the first tests of a Halo installation,” the councilor said.

  “Charum Hakkor,” I said.

  “Yes. Shortly thereafter, the Halo entered slipspace on a scheduled mission—and vanished. Mendicant Bias went with the installation. That was forty-three years ago.”

  Forty-three years on the first Halo … in the presence of the captive? Did they communicate?

  Can that ever make sense?

  “It might have been strained by contradictory instructions from the Didact, from the Master Builder.…”

  “Not likely,” I said. “Mendicant Bias was fully capable of working with contradictory commands. I’ve never known a more capable ancilla, more powerful, more subtle … more loyal.”

  “What do you know about the captive of Charum Hakkor?” the Councilor asked. “This subject was to be part of the Didact’s testimony against the Master Builder.… But I suppose none of that matters now. Still, I’m curious.”

  “I suspect the captive made its way, or was transported, to the first installation.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Still unknown. The Contender would likely have been brought any unusual specimens for examination.”

  “Would Mendicant Bias have been able to communicate with the captive? It is said by some that you actually spoke with it, using a human device.…”

  I saw that as if it had happened yesterday. And I noted that the councilor was addressing me as if I were the Didact. “It was not a real conversation, and not in the least satisfactory,” I said.

  Looking down into the deactivated human timelock, and beyond that secondary cage, tuning the Precursor tool, so small and simple—merely a smooth oval with three notches in its side.… “The humans found a way to activate at least one Precursor artifact,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “A device that could selectively and temporarily open access through the captive’s cage.”

  Seeing the great, ugly head, its compound eyes assuming a new glitter as its consciousness rose from the quantum somnolence of fifty thousand years.…

  It spoke in a Forerunner dialect, one I could barely understand—archaic Digon. I remembered clearly what it said, but it took time for the context to become clear. Context is everything, across all those centuries. It spoke to me of the greatest of Forerunner betrayals, the greatest of our many sins.

  I told the Librarian and no one else … and her researches changed drastically. As did my design of Forerunner defenses against the Flood.

  “And now the Contender has returned and assumed control of as many installations as it could command … only to direct their power against the capital itself. It seeks the destruction of us all. Why?” A look of horror crossed his face. “Is the captive part of the Flood? Does the Flood now control Mendicant Bias?”

  “Unknown,” I said. “But I think not. It was something other … older. And we have no way of knowing whether the Halo strike did its intended damage.”

  “The response of our warships was magnificent,” the guard said, her voice weaker still.

  “It was magnificent,” I agreed. “But if Mendicant Bias has been suborned, and the Domain has been permanently blocked…”

  “The war may be lost,” the First Councilor said.

  “Never,” the guard said. “Never! You are the heir of the Didact, unless he be found, and if that happens, then you are his second-in-command. Either way, you are my commander. We will never give up. It is so, aya.”

  I reached back instinctively. My armor withdrew from my hand, and my fingers brushed past her facial protection to touch her forehead, which was hot. She was in bad shape.

  “Your courage becomes mine. I am privileged,” I said.

  The guard’s eyes closed.

  We drifted. Our armor failed.

  We slept. All of us. I dreamed of only one thing—or perhaps it was hypoxia.

  I dreamed of the captive’s glittering eyes.

  FORTY

  SOMETHING SCRAPED AT the outside of our craft like tree branches in a slow wind—delicate, tentative. The first to return to consciousness, I dragged myself up to the port and looked out at a vast swirl of stars, so many and so far away I could not distinguish most of them.

  A galaxy. I hoped our galaxy and not another.

  The Falco slowly rotated and a complicated silhouette moved across the spiral cloud. It took several long moments before I could make out slender shapes attached to that silhouette, like a wide rosette. Slowly it dawned on me that I was looking upon another array of installations: six rings, each rising from one of the petals of an enormous flower.

  Then, to my astonishment, six straight shafts of light flowed outward from the darkness at the center of the flower and through the Halos, illuminating the insides of the rings as well as the main body of the flower.

  The Falco kept turning. The edge of the port obscured one view and the other side revealed another. My other memory—now become my memory—could not recall anything about this association, this shape against the galaxy and the dim void beyond.

  But in the back of my thoughts, a dim female grayness reappeared. “We have returned,” my ancilla said. “We have arrived at the Ark.”

  Incredulous that the armor still had any power, I turned my eyes away from the port and looked at the outlines of my fellow passengers. Neither moved. I thought they must be dead.

  “How far?” I asked. But the glimmer of the ancilla had again faded, and I was alone, utterly alone.

  I had forgotten about the scraping.

  When I looked back to the port, I was astonished to see another face staring back at me—a face framed in a headpiece and wrapped in the protective field of fully active armor. And beyond that face, three other figures, long and graceful.

  Lifeworkers.

  Groggily I tried to make sense of these perceptions. Lifeworkers were maneuvering outside the dead shell of our craft. I made a weak gesture through the port. My ancilla flickered in and out. Then I felt a hint of something other than stale fetor against my face. Power was being externally fed to the craft, and from there to our armor—even the broken armor. Yet they were not breaking our seal or opening the Falco to rescue us. Instead, they were guiding the craft intact to a larger ship I now saw floating a few hundred meters away.

  A voice spoke to me now—female, soft—through the cracked remains of my headpiece. “How many? I count three.”

  “Three,” I confirmed, my mouth dry, my tongue swollen and cracked.

  “Are you from the damaged installation that attempted to return to the Ark?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Is there infection?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “How far have you traveled?”

  “From the capital. Shouldn’t … talk for while.”

  The face withdrew, and we were absorbed in a protective field. We had been cautiously inspected, cleared … drawn within the ship … then deposited on a platform. Up and down returned. Tal
l figures walked past, but I could not hear what they were saying.

  Then the Lifeworker who had first appeared in our port motioned for me to draw the others toward the center of our craft. I tried to do that, pulling in the councilor’s limbs, even moving and arranging the guard when she failed to respond.

  They then broke open the depleted, dead bulk of the Falco’s outer shell, split it wide, and Lifeworkers surrounded us with their instruments and monitors, bringing comfort and relief. They removed the remains of our armor, then took up Glory of a Far Dawn and surrounded her in a golden softness. Her eyes opened, and she seemed astonished—then, embarrassed. She struggled—but was patiently subdued and carried away from the platform, into a healing chamber.

  The First Councilor tried to stand to survey the broken shell of our rescue craft. His strength failed him. More Lifeworkers carried him away, as well.

  Somehow, I had retained the most strength—or so I thought. But my turn to give in came quickly enough.

  No sleep, no dreams, just a warm, nutritive blankness, neither dark nor bright. For the first time in a thousand years, I felt at home.

  The Librarian is near.

  FORTY-ONE

  WE HAD JOURNEYED to a point far outside our galaxy.

  We had been rescued and taken to the factory where the ring-shaped installations were made, equipped, repaired … as well, the ultimate repository of the Librarian’s collection of the galaxy’s life-forms.

  The Ark.

  I took a regenerative walk through the brightly illuminated forest surrounding Fifth Petal Station. Nearly all the light this far from our galaxy came from the diurnal glow of the elongated plasmas, casting the strangest shadows. The rings themselves were canted at different angles on each petal, rotating constantly within enormous hoops of hard light to maintain their integrity.

  On each of the installations, the Librarian’s aides and monitors supervised the laying down of the Lifeshaper seeds, containing all the records necessary to create and restore unique ecological systems on the inner surface of each ring. I could see evidence of their work even from where I stood—mottled patches of early-stage jungles and forests, the tan of desert, sheets of ice …

  Earlier, when I had voiced puzzlement at the contradiction of Halos supporting these living records, my nurse and guardian, a Lifeworker named Calyx, explained that the Librarian had equipped most of the Halos with living ecosystems, and stocked them with many species from many worlds—selecting from those multitudes that been gathered over the last few centuries, and now populated the Ark’s great half-circle.

  She had hoped to preserve many more species by using the Halos; the Master Builder, after agreeing to her plan, had decided it would be useful to test captured specimens of the Flood on the Halos before they were fired—to learn more about them.

  Sacrificing those populations, of course.

  I could not understand how the Librarian’s pact with the Master Builder had been arranged or implemented. But I admired her stamina. She had proven my superior in every regard. And now that I was here—

  Something like the Didact, though not him—

  I wondered how much I could possibly contribute.

  Looking up at the great Halo’s upper reaches, I felt dizzy and steadied myself against the toppled trunk of cycad. Nearby, something like a small tank passed by on many pumping legs, a gigantic armor-plated arthropod almost three meters long. It ignored me, for I was not the rotting vegetation it favored as a meal.

  When the plasmas dimmed, it became obvious that the sky was still filled with danger. In the battle of the capital, only one installation had survived passage through the portal without breaking up. It had returned to the Ark, and now rotated off to my right, visible through a green wall of ferns. Its interior surface had suffered great damage, and so it was being scrubbed clean, its few remaining specimens rescued and constrained. A new surface was in preparation, with a replacement set of seeds.

  What wreckage had passed through the portal still threatened this extraordinary construct. The domain of the Librarian—but also the centerpiece of all that the Master Builder had hoped to achieve—had to be constantly protected against impacts. In the dark, it was easy enough to follow the many vessels that patrolled the debris field; they were tiny glints in a varicolored haze that reminded me so much of the clouds in our Orion complex.

  But this haze was not primordial and nurturing of suns. It was the death shroud of a great, perhaps crippling defeat—the final battle, perhaps, of a Forerunner civil war—and it was filled with careening fragments of shattered rings, broken ships, demented or damaged monitors, cut loose from all their disciplines, from the metarchy—lost and worse than useless—and of course, the frozen corpses of hundreds of thousands of Forerunners.…

  I walked through the forests day after day, and in the dark as well, guided by smaller cousins of the armored arthropod, bearing blue-green lanterns above their tiny eyes and showing me the way.

  Night after night, I watched the rings’ tentative hard-light skeletons form spokes, stabilizing them before their planned release.…

  Studied the strange shape of the hard-light hubs at the center of those rings, which had once been designed to direct the deadly energies of the rings when they were fired.…

  If they were fired. That seemed very unlikely now.

  Twenty days passed—twenty cycles of the diurnal plasmas. I healed. From my nurse, Calyx—a first-form, taller than me and graceful, yet also quite strong—I learned that my companions in the Falco were also healing. But before we reunited, another reunion had been arranged.

  It was time for me to meet with the Librarian. “She has been expecting you,” Calyx said.

  I followed him out of the forest.

  A transport within the fifth petal carried me toward the main body of the Ark, and a graceful teardrop structure just below the tower that supplied the star of plasmas.

  Here, before the meeting, another Lifeworker, an older third-form equipped with a style of armor even more ancient than the Didact’s, conducted her own exacting inspection. She sniffed critically, then asked me three questions.

  I answered them all. Correctly.

  She regarded me with an odd expression of concern.

  “I am merely his poor double,” I insisted. “I have not integrated—”

  “Oh, but you have,” she said. “Whatever you do, please do not disappoint her. She feels badly about what has happened, but—”

  “Why does she feel badly?”

  “For interrupting the way of your own growth, and imposing something other.”

  “I made that choice,” I said.

  “No, Bornstellar agreed, in part. You are the choice he agreed to, but he did not know the consequences.”

  “He—I will return when my mission is finished.”

  “Aya,” the Lifeworker said. “This is a day of joy and sadness for all. We revere our Lifeshapers beyond all Forerunners, and the Librarian beyond all Lifeshapers. She is our light and our guide. And she has longed for this moment for a thousand years—but not this way. If only…”

  But she did not complete that thought.

  Now she took my hand and led me through a great arched doorway, into the base of the teardrop. A lift carried us to a wide room covered with a curved canopy that allowed in selected portions of the broad spectrum of the shaft of light. The light here was blue-green. The space was filled with specimens from a world I knew nothing of, captured in special cages, immobile, unaware for the time being.

  And walking between those cages, inspecting her charges, using her long, graceful fingers to prune and arrange and persuade, confirming their integrity and health, I saw the Librarian.

  My wife.

  Here, she did not wear armor. She was among her other children, and had never known harm from any of them.

  She paused and moved on her long legs to a pathway through the cages. Along that pathway, she approached me slowly, eyes quizzical, face wreathe
d in a complex expression of joy, pain, and something I could only see as youth.

  Eternally young. Yet this Forerunner was older than me, that is, older than the Didact—over eleven thousand years of age.

  “So similar,” she whispered as we stepped toward each other, her voice like a sweet sigh of wind. “So much alike.”

  I reached out to her. “I bring greetings from the Didact,” I said, feeling the awkwardness, knowing I bore the same memories … yet wishing to be honest and to honor the reality of our situation.

  “Bring me your own greetings,” she responded, leaning her head to one then, then grasping my outstretched hands. “You are him.”

  “I am merely—”

  “You are him, now,” she insisted, with a sad intensity I did not expect. My emotions leaped out to her, then my arms rose and I clasped her, not understanding, not caring: fulfilled.

  I was with my wife. I was home. Aya!

  The other Lifeworkers tending the specimen cages turned away to give us privacy.

  “How can I be him and other?” I asked as we embraced. I looked up at her beautiful face, pale blue and pink, feeling the warmth of the naked skin of her lithe arms and the touch of her infinitely subtle fingers.

  “The Didact is here,” my wife said. “The Didact is gone.”

  And then I knew, and my love was pushed aside by a moment of intense vertigo, as if I were again falling through black, starless space.

  She clasped my face between her cool hands and looked down into it. “You refused to give Faber what he needed to activate all the Contender-class ancillas. You refused to give him the location of all your Shield Worlds. It is said that the Master Builder executed you on the San’Shyuum quarantine planet. You are now all I have.

  “You are all we have.”

  FORTY-TWO

  THE LOVE OF old Forerunners is sweet beyond measure. It mattered not our rates or forms. I had a lovely time with my wife, before once again we went our separate ways.

  She showed me the work of centuries, the preservation of all life-forms she could locate and gather, preparing to save what she could from the awful, final solution of the Master Builder’s installations. I saw fauna and flora and things around and between, strange and beautiful, fearsome and meek, simple and complex, huge and small, but only a small sample of a trillion different species, most now dormant, stored as best they could be on the Ark and what was left of the Halos. Whole creatures alive or suspended, genetic maps, preserved and reduced populations visible only in reconstructive simulation.…