by Greg Bear
“There is often a sickness before the purge.”
“That sounds gross and bloody-minded.” He returned the cup to his lips and swallowed the last measure. “I am reminded of why I sought our love in the first place.”
“You sought it?”
“I did.”
“That isn’t how I remember it, Warrior. An unlikely love, at any rate—so your fellows said.”
“But we knew. As you have instructed me often, we play out our parts in Living Time and accept all that life brings, and all that it takes away. So we support the Mantle: Daaowa maadthu.”
His use of that human phrase, so ancient and fraught with meaning, caught me by surprise.
He added, “The humans … Had they been willing to acknowledge their crimes, they would have made a great civilization, worthy to join our own. But they did not. I hope that what remains of them, in your care, does not disappoint you. My anger would then be impossible to control.”
The Didact’s aide returned with the Haruspis’s associate close behind. The associate peered around the hall with a critical squint. Display of wealth and power was exquisitely distasteful to those who served the Domain.
“Didact, you must recline and complete the vitrifaction, before we move you to your Cryptum,” the aide said. She stood in a submissive posture that could be interpreted as the first stage of mourning—something the Didact had forbidden. But he could not bring himself to correct her.
Monitors brought forward a hovering bed, shaping to support his shrunken frame. He rose with some difficulty. I could hardly bear to look at him. But I knew this was nothing close to death—though it would bring a separation of centuries, while he lay in a meditative trance and while that awful political purge worked its way through the Forerunner body.
While the Master Builder ultimately overreached, as we knew he would, and the return of the Flood would compel the Didact’s revival.
I walked beside my husband as he was carried to the Cryptum. The glow of the far supernova had dimmed, as all had known it would. The farther one is from astronomical events, the less surprise.
The Haruspis’s associate spoke the words, in middle Digon, which would help the Didact focus on his long meditation: enchanting, musical words we all hoped might open access, if the Domain was so disposed, if the Didact was so disposed, to higher experience and greater awareness.
The words penetrated my husband’s discomfort. He tried to reach for me. I saw his effort and stroked his face, his naked arm. Already his flesh, rapidly cooling, felt like rock. His eyes tracked with increasing difficulty the shadowy figures around him. Soon he would see and hear and feel nothing of this world. He would be connected to us by the barest metaphysical thread.
One step away from death itself.
One step from knowing all.
We delivered the Didact to the elliptical hatch, opening wide like the mouth of an eyeless fish; only we who were flesh. Neither monitors nor ancillas were allowed to participate.
The Didact stared straight up as he vanished from our sight.
CATALOG
The Librarian pauses.
We have traveled inward to the central hold. There is much activity here. Ancillas are delivering a new selection of humans. The Lifeshaper watches closely as they are aligned shoulder to shoulder in restraining fields. Male and female, young and old, they are briefly roused and released.
“They believe they have been transported to a better place,” she says, in the same tone of voice she used to describe the Domain: reverential, but with a shadow of deeper guilt.
I can barely discern the luminous edges of the environment projected to keep them calm. “An afterlife?” I ask.
“They believe so. I came to all of them at birth. They believe when they see me next, I will lift them from trouble and pain. In a way, that is true.”
A light appears over her head. The humans in the hold turn as one and behold the Librarian. Their faces transform. The hold is filled with echoes of wonder as they crowd forward, trying to communicate their joy, their hope.
The light above the Librarian dims. The fields return, separate the humans, and again numb them, at this high moment of joy, to their plight.
“Life is resilient—particularly human life,” the Lifeshaper says. I can barely hear her, she speaks so softly. “They will be taken to the Ark.”
I cannot stifle a sense of awe and even affront. Such power—such hubris! And yet, without the Lifeshaper’s intervention, all humans would have died long before.
She does what she can.
“They feel no pain, no distress. Composers are no longer used by any of our teams. Their memories and genetic patterns will be carried in the flesh of all their descendants, when Erde-Tyrene is repopulated. In that way, they will touch eternity. But their existence here is ending.”
The humans rise like bubbles in a pond and swing around an immense, glowing blue flower, undergoing deep examination. Their faces go slack. The bodies are then consumed by brilliant purple flares, and the remains compacted to be returned to the oceans of Erde-Tyrene—not as ashes, burned and degraded, but rich nutrients that will feed minute organisms in the sea during the great sweep of Halo radiation.
When the hundreds of thousands of humans collected in the last few hours are processed, she lifts us from the hold and wraps us both in cooling darkness.
“I pity future scholars. They will notice nothing here to explain what happened—neither an increase in the fossil record nor any other evidence of a great die-off. Now … the time has come to describe what I found in Path Kethona. May I tell that story?”
No permission is necessary. I am Catalog.
I listen.
THE LIBRARIAN
Things did not improve after my husband vanished.
The Master Builder regarded my partnership as a liability. To maintain our status, such as it was, and to uphold our few remaining privileges, we needed to remain essential to both the Council and Builders.
I proposed to the Council that we seek out the truth about the Flood: its origins, its vulnerabilities, its motivations—if any.
For thousands of years, based on where the Flood struck in our galaxy, many had theorized it originated in one of the smaller local galaxies, Path Kethona, and in particular a huge, filamentary nebula ripe with birthing suns called the Spider [TT: Tarantula Nebula].
According to legend, Path Kethona was first visited by Forerunners during our greatest period of exploration, over ten million years ago. Yet there was substantial doubt that voyage had ever happened. Records had long ago vanished. Not even Haruspis, entrusted with studying the Domain, could access those memories.
In any case, the Domain, in time, converts history into truth beyond the understanding of most Forerunners. To establish the kind of truth we could understand, we would need to recreate that first great voyage.
We would need to go there.
I am not comfortable with the spaces between suns, much less between galaxies. My love and expertise lies in the immensity within—the unbounded inner roil of a cell, the tight-packed jostling of hundreds of thousands of molecules cooperating and competing at once, all unaware that their activities, massed together, open doorways to even greater immensities: you, me, all living things.
The greatest galaxies are nothing without our inner immensity, which opens our eyes to their light, our senses to their warmth, and our minds to their challenge.
Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me. Space has its own textures and mysteries. Forerunners draw power from the perpetual rise and fall of ghostly particles that have no true existence—until they are harvested. We draw power as well from the interstices of space itself, where space and time form the tiniest little knots of uncertainty and dimension.
But emptiness without sensation, the unobserved vastness between suns, brings me nightmares. I am happiest on a teeming planet, surrounded by aggressions and consumptions an
d births and all the colliding webs of observation and fixation. Reality for me begins with the small.…
But inevitably it must end with the very large.
Soon after the Didact was safely hidden, I went before the Council with a plan for an intergalactic fast transport, a vessel so extraordinary it would enrich Builders across the Forerunner galaxy.
I had learned well how to play this particular game of Council politics. For Builders, contracts meant everything, and my challenge combined elements they found irresistible: re-creating the greatness of our past, harnessing new technologies, and accessing the immense resources of the ecumene to stuff Builder coffers.
As well, the mission’s goal was direct and compelling. This would be a Lifeworker-sponsored expedition. Neither the Builders nor the Old Council could deny that Lifeworkers were most devoted to preserving and understanding life. However strange, the Flood was a living thing, or mass of things, and so it was well within our purview to study it and try to understand.
And so my expedition—whether it was the second, or the first—was designed to once and for all confirm the extragalactic origin of the Flood. That sealed the deal with both the Old Council and the Builders.
Builders have always been superb shipwrights. The construction took ten years. Permission from the Old Council to make the journey took another ten.
I understood their delay.
Travel across even a few light-years through a portal or jump requires mending breaches in causality. Forerunner ships crossing between systems create a buildup of space-time resistance, a polluting effect that gradually limits both transport and communication—and may also interfere with access to the Domain. When the buildup is eliminated—as reconciliations are made and aftereffects fade into the quantum background—more journeys become possible.
But moving even a single small ship over one hundred and sixty thousand light-years in just a few jumps, without long pauses, creates a monumental backup. The journey to Path Kethona could slow or even halt transportation throughout the ecumene for over a year. Nevertheless, the intrigue of making history and solving one of the greatest mysteries was irresistible. Builders worked hard to forge consensus, as I knew they would.
That a Lifeworker was in command—worse still, a Lifeworker associated with the Didact—was an irritation, but not insurmountable. Who else was more qualified to study the origins of the Flood? Or understand the nature of Precursor beginnings? For of course the Precursors themselves were believed to have traveled to our galaxy from Path Kethona, billions of years ago.
We christened our ship Audacity. Less than one hundred meters in length and thirty across the beam—modest, lightly armed. A crew of seven, including me: one Miner, three adventurous Builders, and two Lifeworkers were selected from well over a million volunteers.
No Juridicals joined our crew. At that point, there was no reason to suspect we were about to uncover the greatest crime in Forerunner history.
* * *
Our ship emerged from its second jump, the middle distance—eighty-seven million light-years from the Orion complex, sixty million light-years from the irregular margins of our galaxy. I stood on the transparent bridge, surrounded by the dim specks of far galaxies, and for a horrid moment, imagined my spirit set free to wander home at a walking pace, utterly alone, barely recognizing the impossibly distant and freezing haze of our home galaxy.
The Didact would have reveled in such vastness. Perhaps in his Cryptum, he was even more isolated, more directly in tune with the singing whine of the indescribable that flows around our lives.
Emptiness.
Vastation.
Nothingness.
Humans believe in nothingness, in zeros. It is one of their distinguishing traits. They keep inventing nothing. Forerunners know otherwise. Even where there is very little matter, each cubic centimeter of space is crossed by a crucial density of radiation, fundamentally linked with far places and ancient times.
Audacity paused before its next jump, giving those external feelers, those entangled ray-traces, a chance to adjust to our intrusion. To reconcile. We had all heard stories of bold journeys ending badly. Space-time, we’ve been reliably informed, forms something like a bruise or clot around ships that consistently outrace their own reality. We were certainly in that category. We dared not even attempt to communicate our success—that might have tipped the scales.
For that and other reasons, objectively—within our frame—the journey would take far longer than one might think, considering our jumps could in theory have been instantaneous. We were at the mercy of healing space-time.
We would not know how long we had been gone, from our old frame’s reference, until we returned.
Months. A year.
Longer.
The last half of the journey I spent in slumber, wrapped in a slowly rotating cocoon of loose sheets. Occasionally I would rise from this dreamless sleep and try to remember my husband’s face. Then the faces of our children. I would fail on both counts.
An ancilla could have refreshed that memory. Armor could have supplied me with all our time spent together. I availed myself of neither.
My crew wisely set their slumbers to last until near the end of the journey.
* * *
A chiming sound.
Time to come to full alertness.
I ignored the alarm for as long as Audacity allowed. Then, small monitors entered my cabin and snipped away the silken layers of my cocoon.
We had not yet arrived. One more jump would be made.
My fellow travelers were making themselves useful in an antechamber to the bridge. I stepped between darting sounds and flowing images, a bird swarm of diagnostics and discoveries, revealing the ship’s relief at surviving so far, over so few long jumps.
The crew also celebrated, threw aside their armor, embraced, slapped flesh awake, confounding the little monitors trying to assess their health.
The seven slowly became aware of me and grew quiet as I moved forward.
Keeper-of-Tools, an arrogant young Builder, came up to assure me all was well. Clearance-of-Old-Forests, a Miner of one of our most ancient clades, passed out cups of celebratory nectar dosed with restoratives. He doubled the dose for my two Lifeworkers, Chant-to-Green and Birth-to-Light. Somehow, they looked less fit than either the Builders or the Miner. No surprise. I felt it, too. Out here, the aura of Living Time—the sea within which Lifeworkers swim like fish—was very thin indeed.
“Apologies, Lifeshaper,” Clearance said. “You’ve had a hard journey.”
I accepted my own double dose of restorative. “Do I look sickly?” I asked.
“You do,” Clearance said with that blunt lack of decorum common among Miners.
“No apologies,” I said. “You must feel lost as well, out here.”
“I do,” Clearance admitted. “No planets, no stone or magma—nothing! Watched by a trillion tiny eyes in the dark.” He shuddered.
We sipped until all seemed well enough, though exhausted.
“We are farther from other Forerunners than anyone in verified history,” Keeper said. “All honor to those who crafted Audacity!”
We toasted these Builders with the last of our nectar, and the crew resumed armor. Birth-to-Light was already evaluating the fresher light from Path Kethona. A second-form Lifeworker, she was capable and experienced; we had worked together many times before.
“Looks barren,” she said.
A practiced eye can detect the effects of advanced civilizations on a starfield, as technologies harness and affect the raw radiation emitted by so many stars. And fresher light carries more information, more detectable entanglements. The light from these stars was less than a thousand years old.
“Perhaps,” said Chant-to-Green, our youngest. “But it’ll take time to know for sure.” I had taken a special liking to Chant; earnest and focused, with an intensity that hid her naivety, she reminded me of my own daughter, lost at Charum Hakkor. That one had of course be
en a Warrior-Servant. Still, Chant-to-Green was like the daughter I might have had, had I not married outside my rate.…
I made my own measurements. The stars indeed appeared untouched, color shifts entirely natural. I could not be as sensitive as the instruments wielded by Audacity, but my instincts told me that this small satellite galaxy was as close to lifeless as any region of stars I had ever experienced.
“It feels young,” said Dawn-over-Fields, our second Builder, the quietest of our group and the oldest, other than myself.
“Youth can last billions of years for a galaxy,” I reminded them. “Civilizations burn like grass fires on a dry prairie. Suns explode and kill. Nebulas spread new elements and seed new suns … and it all begins again. Our own galaxy has gone through many such cycles. We are just the latest.”
I had been about to say “the last.”
* * *
The last leg of our journey, a few thousand light-years, was accomplished without incident. But the most strenuous phase of Audacity’s reconciliation forced us back into armor and sleep for many hours.
That completed, Keeper and Dawn confirmed the ship’s fitness.
A detailed sensor sweep of the satellite galaxy’s billions of stars again revealed no communications of any variety known to Forerunners. Path Kethona appeared free of technological civilizations, and based on a close-in analysis of the few planetary systems, free of most forms of life as well.
The focus of our probing expedition was to be a star deep within Path Kethona, on the outskirts of the Spider nebula. This star had over a million years ago attracted the attention of a female of the now-subsumed rate called Theoreticals. She had been called Boundless. Soon after her death, her rate had been forcibly merged with the Builders.
Boundless had persisted in her studies throughout her long life, in defiance of Warrior orders. The reason why Warriors wanted this particular star left unstudied was never explained. Perhaps they didn’t themselves know. She was finally prosecuted for her defiance—I assume by Juridicals.