Halo: Cryptum

by Greg Bear

Page 4

 

  Chakas explained. “He wants you to blinker yourself. It helps. ”

  I covered my eyes.

  “Keep walking,” Chakas said. “If you stop, we might lose you. ”

  I couldn’t help lifting my hands to peek. “Don’t look. Walk blind,” Riser insisted.

  “We’re walking in circles,” I warned.

  “Such circles!” Riser enthused.

  The sun was affecting them. I felt like I was in charge of a pair of heat-stroked humans.

  “Left!” Chakas shouted. “Left, now!”

  I hesitated, lifted my hands, and saw my two guides—several paces ahead of me —abruptly vanish, as if swal owed by empty air. They had abandoned me in the middle of the flat, surrounded by white sand and distant jungle. Off to my right rose a lumpy blur that might or might not be the central peak.

  I braced myself for the worst. Without armor, without water, I’d die out here in days.

  Chakas reappeared on my left. He took my arm—I shook him loose instantly— and he stood back like a flattened cutout, his edges loose and seeming to flap.

  Blinking did not clear this apparition. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Turn left, or go home.

  If you can find your way out of here. ”

  Then he vanished again.

  I slowly turned left, took a step … and felt my entire body shiver. I now stood on a low black walkway curving to the right and then back to the left, surrounded on both sides by gritty white sand. So it had been a baffler and not a dazzler. A Forerunner had hidden this place long ago, using outdated technology—as if expecting that the old tech would be penetrated by clever, persistent humans.

  Ahead, clearly visible now, not white apes but twelve midsize Forerunner fighting suits, arranged in a wide oval about a hundred meters across the long axis. I had spent long hours studying old weapons and ships, to better distinguish them from more interesting finds. Swal owing back disappointment, I recognized them as war sphinxes—flown into battle by Warrior-Servants in ages past but now found only in museums. Antiques, to be sure, and possibly stil active and powerful—but of no interest to me whatsoever. “Is that al you have to show me?” I asked, indignant.

  Chakas and Riser kept out of reach, posing in postures of reverence, as if engaged in prayer. Odd. Humans praying to antique weapons?

  I turned my eyes back to the frozen circle. Each war sphinx was ten meters high and twenty long—larger than contemporary Forerunner suits that served the same function. An elongated tail contained lift and power, and from that, at the front, rose a thick, rounded torso. Atop the torso, smoothly integrated with the overal curvilinear design, perched an abstract head with a stubborn, haughty face—a command cabin.

  I took a step forward, deciding whether to cross the remaining stretch of flat between the walkway and the white “giants” arranged around the center of the waste.

  Chakas lifted his crossed arms and sighed. “Riser, how long have these monsters been here?”

  “Long time,” Riser said. “Before grandfather flew away to polish the moon. ”

  “He means, more than a thousand years,” Chakas interpreted. “You read old Forerunner writing?” he asked me.

  “Some,” I said.

  “This place doesn’t like humans,” Riser said. He pul ed back his lips and shook his head vigorously. “But grandfather caught bees in a basket. …”

  “You’re tel ing him the secret?” Chakas asked in dismay.

  “Yes,” Riser said. “He’s not smart, but he’s good. ”

  “How can you tel ?”

  Riser showed his teeth and shook his head vigorously. “Grandfather put bees in a big basket. When they buzz loud, stop and wave the basket this way, then that.

  When they stop buzzing, go that way. ”

  “You mean, there are markers—infrared markers?” I asked.

  “What you say,” Riser agreed with a pout. “Bees know. If you live, you drop rocks so others can fol ow … as far as you make it. ”

  Now that I knew what to look for, I saw—through the dazzle—that there were indeed broken, veering lines of smal pebbles marking the otherwise smooth white sand.

  Riser guided us along this jagged path, pausing now and then to chitter to himself, until we stood just a few meters from the nearest sphinx. I paused in its shadow, then leaned over and reached out to touch the high, white surface, pitted with centuries of battle debris and stardust. No response. Inert.

  Towering over me, the scowling features were stil impressive. “They’re dead,” I said.

  Riser’s voice took on a tone of some reverence. “They sing,” he said.

  “Grandfather heard. ”

  I drew my hand back.

  “He said these are trophies from war. Important to old, big guy. Somebody put them here to guard, watch, wait. ”

  “Which war, I wonder?” Chakas asked, and looked at me as if I might know.

  I did know. Or strongly suspected. The sphinxes were about the right age to be from the human-Forerunner wars, ten thousand years or so. But I stil did not feel comfortable discussing this with my guides.

  Riser left the walkway and walked careful y around the fighting unit. I went next, observing the smooth points of the suit’s forked tail, the gaping tunnels on each fork leading, no doubt, to thrusters. There were no visible guidance points. On the opposite side, I noticed the outlines of retracted manipulators and folded shields.

  “Locked down for thousands of years,” I said. “I doubt they’re worth anything. ”

  “Not to me,” Riser said, looking up at the younger, tal er human with pouched lips.

  “To him, maybe,” Chakas said softly, waving at the center of the oval—an empty stretch of distorted sand. “Or her. ”

  “Him or her?” I asked.

  “Who chose you? Who guided you?” Chakas asked.

  “Do you mean the Librarian?” I asked.

  “She comes to us when we’re born,” Chakas said, his face dark with indignation and something more. “She watches over us as we grow, knows good and bad. She joys at our triumphs and sorrows at our passing. We al feel her presence. ”

  “We al do,” Riser affirmed. “We’ve been waiting for just the right time, and just the right fool. ”

  No doubt under her protection, these humans had grown arrogant and presuming.

  But there was nothing I could do. I needed them. “She’s out there?” I asked, pointing at the central peak.

  “We never see her,” Chakas said. “We don’t know where she is. But she sent you, I’m sure of that. ”

  My ancil a. They were more right than they could possibly know. “She must be a great power indeed, to arrange al this,” I said. But my voice lacked conviction.

  “Luck is her way,” Chakas said.

  Once again, old Forerunners were conspiring to guide my life.

  Riser bent and waved his hand over what appeared to be an empty span of sand.

  This motion pushed aside a low mist, revealing for a moment a single large, flat lump of black lava. “Good for wal s. ”

  We stepped over the rock onto the central oval bordered by the sphinxes.

  Suddenly, I felt a chil —an awareness that I was on a space sacred not to humans, but to some other power. Something great and old was nearby—a Forerunner, of that I was sure—but of what rate? Given the sphinxes, a Warrior-Servant seemed most likely.

  But how old?

  From the human wars. Ten thousand years ago.

  “Don’t like it here,” Riser said. “Not brave like grandfather. You go on. I stay. ”

  “Fol ow the pebbles and the rocks,” Chakas said quietly. “Where the rocks stop, no human has ever stepped—and lived. What needs to be done, I can’t do—nor can Riser. ” The young human was sweating, his eyes unfocused.

  The Forerunner universe has a rich history of impossibilities that became truth. I considered myself a pragmatist, a realist,
and found most such stories unsatisfying, frustrating, but never frightening. Now I was not only irritated, I was frightened—far more frightened than I had been on the boat.

  When Forerunners die—usual y by accident or, on rare occasions, during war— elaborate ceremonies are enacted before their remains are disposed of in fusion fires associated with the activities of their rates—a melting torch or planet cutter.

  First, the Forerunner’s last memories are abstracted from his armor, which preserves a few hours of the occupant’s mental patterns. This reduced essence— a spectral snatch of personality, and not a whole being—is placed in a time-locked Durance. The body is then torched in a solemn ceremony attended only by close relations. A bit of plasma from the immolation is preserved by the appointed Master of the Mantle, who secures it along with the essence in the Durance.

  The Durance is then given to the closest members of the dead Forerunner’s family, who are charged with making sure that it is never abused. A Durance has a half-life of more than a mil ion years. Families and rates are very protective of such places. In the treasure-hunting manuals I had read over the years, seekers are frequently warned to observe the signs and avoid such locations. Stumbling upon such a family Durance would definitely be considered sacrilege.

  “This is a disgraceful world,” I murmured. “No Forerunner would want to be buried here. ”

  Chakas set his jaw and glared at me.

  “It’s al nonsense,” I persisted. “No high rate would be buried here. Besides, what treasure would possibly be kept near a grave?” I continued, drawing my arrogant words to a stronger point. “And if you never met the Librarian, how…”

  “When I first met you, I knew you were the one,” Chakas said. “She comes to us at birth—”

  “You said that. ”

  “And tel s us what we must do. ”

  “How could she know what I’d look like?”

  Chakas dismissed this. “We owe our lives to the Librarian, al of us. ”

  A Lifeworker as powerful as the Librarian certainly had the means to impose a generations-long genetic command upon the objects of her study. Such a compulsion in past times would have been cal ed a geas. Some students of the Mantle even believed that the Precursors had imposed a geas upon Forerunners.

  … I was regretting more and more leaving my armor on the boat. I desperately needed to ask my ancil a how these humans would know to expect me. “What wil you do if I go home now and give up this quest?”

  Behind us, Riser snorted. Chakas smiled. This smile displayed not humor, nor a prelude to aggression, but contempt, I think. “If we are so weak and our world is so disgraceful, what are you afraid of?”

  “Dead things,” Riser said. “Forerunner dead. Our dead are friendly. ”

  “Wel , my ancestors can stay in the ground and I’d be happy enough,” Chakas admitted.

  Their words stung. With an abrupt hitch of confidence, and perhaps even a slight swagger, I began walking toward the center of the circle, parting the mist with swings of my foot, looking for the pebbles laid by earlier generations of ha manune.

  I must have seemed to be dancing my way toward the center, watched with sul en disapproval by the oval of inward-facing war sphinxes. Ancient weapons, ancient war. The sphinxes bore the scars of ancient battles, wars that no one cared about anymore.

  I looked over my shoulder. Chakas leaned casual y against the prow of a sphinx.

  The machine’s stern visage glowered over him like a disapproving priest.

  It takes a great deal to provoke my people to war, but once provoked, the war is carried out ruthlessly, total y, by our Warrior-Servants. There is a kind of embarrassment in that slow rise to total fury that Forerunners do not like to acknowledge. It goes against the very Mantle that we so strive to inherit and hold, but to defy the Forerunners is after al to show contempt for the Mantle itself.

  Perhaps that was the case here. Monuments of the past. Hidden passions, hidden violence, hidden shame. The shadows of forgotten history.

  About twenty meters from the center of the circle, a sidewise kick of my sandaled foot revealed another low black wal . Beyond the wal there were no more pebbles —no more markers. I knelt to push my hand into the sand and sift it between my fingers. The sand flowed back, smooth again, unmarked. But in my palm, the sand had left a bizarre gift.

  I turned it in my fingers.

  A chip of bone.

  My footprints had made no trace. The sand did not cling to my shoes or my feet, and not one grain stuck to my palms, my skin, anywhere. A sand pit built to withstand storms and intrusions, built for the ages, never to be erased, never to be completely forgotten.

  Designed to kil any intruder who did not fol ow precise rituals. Anyone not wanted here.

  Above me, something blotted out the sky. I had been studying the sand so intently that I neither felt the ground effect nor heard the subtle rushing sound of a ship, until its shadow passed over and I jerked my gaze upward.

  As I had feared, one of my swap-father’s mining ships had found me. Reluctant to face the shame of losing me, my surrogate family had sent search parties throughout the system, looking for their ward.

  I stood straight, waiting for the ship to descend, waiting to be lifted into the hold and swifted away before I even had an inkling why I was here. I spun about and looked out at the circle of war machines. Chakas and Riser were nowhere to be seen. They might have dropped below the mist, or run back through the dazzler, heading for the trees.

  The mining ship was an ugly thing, sul en, entirely practical. Its bel y was studded with unconcealed grapplers, lifters, cutters, churners. If the master of this craft so desired, its engines could easily convert al of Djamonkin Crater into a steaming tornado of whirling rock and ore, sifting, lifting and storing whatever components it wished to carry back.

  I hated what it stood for.

  I hated it al .

  The vessel continued its slow, steady glide over the crater. The sand did not dimple beneath the pressure of its lifters, the rocks did not shiver; I heard nothing but a subtle rush, like wind through the trees. I dropped my shoulders and knelt in submission; no choice. I might escape again, but I doubted it.