Halo: Primordium

by Greg Bear

Page 8

 

  Just a few hundred meters from the gate and the boundaries of the city, as the wheel’s shade again slipped over us and a fine rain drizzled down, we took refuge in a tumble-down home that stil had part of a roof.

  That night, Gamelpar tossed and turned, no doubt because of the aches and pains of age—but he also cried aloud, caling names, so many names, until he jerked upright. Vinnevra tried to soothe him.

  Then she motioned for me to join them, and we al lay beside each other.

  To these two, the ruins of this old city spoke of lost glory and family and happiness.

  To me, and to the old spirit within, the city spoke of Forerunners deigning to alow us a crude, limited sort of freedom—but only for a time.

  Had it realy been any different back on Erde-Tyrene?

  Chapter Eight

  AT FIRST LIGHT, we passed through the gate and saw the near- edge wal much more clearly. Vinnevra spun around again, eyes closed, and flung out her arm to establish our direction.

  Where she pointed, I could see a brown smudge along the wal’s gray horizon—dust rising high in the air.

  Gamelpar leaned heavily on his stick, his right leg stil trembling.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure. ”

  The great double-square tiles of Halo had continued to move along the inside of the wheel. Now the sun shone on their upper surfaces and revealed geometricaly patterned Forerunner metal, as with the bare segments we could see spaced at intervals along the sky bridge.

  Whatever landscape—if any—that had been layered on the tiles had been sacrificed, atmosphere spiled out into space along with land, animals, and, yes, perhaps even people— al to repair damage suffered during the war between the Forerunners.

  It is her way, to allow us to suffer.

  “No,” I said under my breath. “I feel her in me, it is not her way. ” My experiences on the Halo had not yet rubbed out al my hopes for the Lifeshaper.

  Then streaks crossed the sky, —silvery, darting, like heaven- made swalows chasing swift insects. I grabbed Vinnevra’s arm.

  She trembled at the sight.

  “Sky boats,” Gamelpar said. “From the Palace of Pain. They’re coming for the rest of the People in the vilage. ”

  At this, we moved on as fast as we could and stil have the old man keep up with us. Soon, the city was hidden by roling hils. We stopped when Gamelpar tired and lagged. Concealing ourselves among another patch of low trees, we tried to keep stil and quiet.

  We had traveled perhaps a dozen kilometers outland. Fog crept over us, but the moisture did not quench our thirst. None of us slept.

  But the boats did not come for us. We never saw the streaks in the sky descend, and I do not know what happened to the People in the vilage.

  The fog lifted with the passage out of shadow. No rain folowed and the land was soon as dry again as old bones. In silence, Gamelpar suffered pain in his joints from the night’s damp and cold.

  I wondered what the old spirit he carried thought about this aging, primitive vessel. He or she—or it, who could know?—might have wished for a younger, stouter container. But in the old man’s stolid, wrinkled face I read a different kind of courage, one new to me.

  Vinnevra and I offered to help carry him, but he waved us off and used his stick to push to his feet. He then swung the stick around, limbering up for the morning journey, and headed off before we began, leaning on the stick and swinging his sore leg out in an arc with each step. Again we folowed a few paces behind, alowing him some dignity. Truthfuly, I was in no hurry to discover what might be raising so much dust near the edge wal.

  The next day and night we found very little in the way of food— just a few dry, greasy berries that made my stomach grumble. For water we had only the morning dew from the rocks and leaves and grass. The land we crossed was like a squeezed sponge. No springs, no rivers . . .

  On the third morning of our journey, we licked up as much dew from the rocks and grass as we could. The hils had become more prominent and rugged, some rising several hundred meters and studded with rocks. The dust towered high beyond. We pushed between the hils, skirting cracked boulders and spiky, cone-shaped trees. Their bristles left smal, itching welts. Wisps of fog mixed with dust swirled over our heads. A few smal birds flew back and forth, but the sky seemed as empty of sustenance for them as the land was for us.

  The air twisted and whistled through the hils and the trees.

  The next morning, the fog carried as much dust as moisture. An hour after first light, as we trudged along, half-blind, the dirty curtains of mist blew aside in ragged ribbons—and Vinnevra, intent on folowing her geas, nearly walked over a crumbling rim of rock and dirt.

  I grabbed her arm forcibly—she hissed and tried to pul away— but then she saw, and gasped, and ran back. Gamelpar leaned on his stick and took deep breaths, letting each breath out in a low, curling sort of song whose words I did not understand.

  This did not seem to be a valey, a canyon, or a river run. It was simply the deepest, ugliest ditch I had ever seen.

  The old man ended his song and swept out his arm, fingers clutching, as if trying to grab at any answer to the mystery.

  “The land here puls back like drying mud,” he said. “This is new.

  I don’t like it. ” He walked back to squat in the shade of a high boulder.

  Vinnevra and I carefuly approached the ditch’s crumbling rim.

  The last few meters, we got down on our hands and knees and crawled. An alarming cascade of dirt and pebbles fel away beneath my outstretched hands. I tried to guess how deep and how far across the ditch was. I could no longer see the edge wal, nor could I see the ditch’s bottom.

  The dirty fog crept along like a filthy, useless river.

  “You want us to go down there?” I asked Vinnevra. “That’s where your geas leads you?”

  She regarded me glumly.

  “Wel, with al that dust, something’s definitely on the move,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Animals, maybe. Like wildebeest. ”

  “What are . . . ” She tried to say the word but gave it up. “What are they?”

  I described them and said that on Erde-Tyrene I had seen such herds raising great clouds of dust and trying to forge broad rivers, where many drowned or fel prey to crocodiles. As a boy I had sat on the riverbank and watched the jaguars and sabertooths wait patiently on the far shore for the animals who survived, grabbing a few more, while the drowned ones swept away to become food for other crocodiles and fish. And yet, by sheer numbers, the wildebeests overwhelmed even these predators, and most reached their destinations.

  By now, daylight had warmed the fog and I could dimly make out the bottom of the ditch. Gamelpar was right: the land had indeed puled away from the great blue-gray wal, leaving a slope of broken rubble, and beyond that, about a kilometer of revealed foundation.

  It was easy to see how deep the land was here, on the inside of the Halo: eight or nine hundred meters. Not much thicker, relatively, than a layer of paint on the wal of a house.

  I thought of one of my mother’s bond-friends, with whom she would meet and chew leather and stitch cloth. The bond-friend kept a gray parrot that spoke as wel as I did (I was just a child). To amuse the parrot, the bond-friend had arranged, within the bird’s large wicker cage, a smal forest of old tree branches stuck into a shalow dirt floor. The Librarian or some other Forerunner had painted the inside of this hoop with dirt and trees and animals to make us feel at home. Al ilusion, like the parrot’s forest.

  I drove this idea from my thoughts and focused on what I had seen and what I could know. There were things on the move down there, probably tens of thousands of them—but they were humans, not animals, walking over the bare foundation and around the slopes of rubble, folowing the great ditch westward.

  For minutes, Vinnevra and I watched the crowds, stunned silent by their num
bers and steady, united motion. Were al of them heading where Vinnevra had pointed? Had the beacon in the old city—if that was what it was—sent out a signal, a message so old that it had become outdated and pointless? Or had they become lost, slid into the ditch, and now folowed it wherever it took them?

  Soon I spotted other objects in motion—objects I definitely did not want to see. Only by their shadows, rippling like banners across the haze, did I first spot them: ten war sphinxes. From this distance, their paleness almost blended into the dust. They hovered, moving slowly back and forth above the masses, whether urging them along or just keeping watch I could not tel.

  I pointed them out to Vinnevra. She groaned deep in her throat.

  Gamelpar had crawled to a spot just behind us, stil wel back from the chasm. “Be quiet!” He cocked his head. “Listen!”

  I heard little but the steady rush of wind from behind, cooler air seeking lowness. Finaly, the wind subsided enough for me to pick up a distant, deeper note. Vinnevra heard it, too, and her face brightened.

  “That’s the sound of where I’m supposed to go if there’s trouble!” she said.

  “They’re moving toward that sound?” I asked.

  The old man crawled forward some more, turned slowly, head stil cocked, and faced me. “What do our old ghosts say about that?” he asked.

  “The memories are quiet,” I said.

  “Biding their time,” Gamelpar said. “It wil be a real struggle, you know, if the old spirits want to take charge. ”

  I had not thought of this possibility. “Has that happened to you?”

  “Not yet. Fight them if you wil. ” He took the weight off his sore leg, then lifted his stick and pointed in the direction of the noise.

  “There’s no bridge and nothing in the way of a path down—so, not much choice, eh?”

  Vinnevra agreed. We walked on, keeping wel back from the edge of the ditch, until the night shadow swept down upon us and the stars came out. I thought about the chance that Riser was down there in that crowd.

  “Are they al going to a good place, or a bad place?” I asked Vinnevra. She turned away.

  “It’s al I have,” she said.

  As we rested against an embankment, I could feel the old spirit’s deep curiosity at work again, and together, we studied those stars.

  The Lord of Admirals, finding new life within me, was so dismayed by the changes since his (I assumed) violent demise that more often than not he kept to the background, a kind of brooding shadow. I did not know whether I preferred his silence or his frustrated attempts to rise up and discover what he could do. He could not control me; he was little more powerful than a babe in a sling, not yet a wilful force. My reaction to his growing strength was mixed. I worried about what might happen, yet took pride in flashes of remembered battles between humans and Forerunners, especialy the victories. I shared his pain and shock at the power the Forerunners now wielded, the fates they had meted out to humans since the end of the old wars, our weakness—our divisions—our diversity.

  Once, we were one great race, united in power and concerted in our goals. . . .

  But I saw quickly enough that this was not precisely true, and soon realized that what the Lord of Admirals believed and what he knew were at times quite separate matters. Even alive, it seemed, the original mind that had lived these ancient histories had shared the contradictions I was al too familiar with in myself and in my felows, back on Erde-Tyrene and here on the great wheel.

  Vinnevra cut and prepared a new walking stick for Gamelpar.

  “Recognize any of those stars?” he asked me. His face was like a dark wrinkled fruit in the sky bridge’s cool, reflected glow.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Stop talking about that, ” Vinnevra demanded. She chopped away the last few twigs and presented him with the stick, greener and less crooked than the previous one. “We need to find food and water. ”

  The dew that gathered here was muddy and bitter. We could drink from pockets of rainwater in the depressions in the boulders that lay along the edge of the chasm, but even those were drying up or thick with scum. It had been days since rain had falen.

  At first light, the noise from the chasm rose like a faraway torrent —the People were on the move again after a night’s rest. We listened, then got up and walked on through the gray light, each of us casting two shadows, one growing from the light cast by the brightest arc of the band, the other dimming and shortening as shadow swept the other side.

  “Does everyone have a geas?” Vinnevra asked. “Everyone down there, too?”

  Gamelpar shook his head. “The Lady seeds her gardens, but she may also pluck weeds. ”

  “What if we are the weeds?” Vinnevra asked.

  The old man chuckled. He sounded young. If I did not look at him, I could almost imagine he was young, but the impression was fleeting. The Librarian—the Lifeshaper—the Lady, as these two caled her—did not seem to care if those who bore her imprint grew old or suffered and died. That obvious fact seemed important, but I was too tired and thirsty to think it through.

  Cool air crept down the embankment and spiled into the chasm.

  “Tel us more about Erda,” Gamelpar said to me, his voice growing hoarse.

  “Is that where al the People come from, long ago?” Vinnevra asked. “Not even you remember that far back, Gamelpar. ”

  “Too thirsty to talk,” I croaked.

  Without warning, my ears popped and the dust in the chasm belied upward, lapped over the edge, and bilowed toward us.

  Along with the dust came the strange, high sound of thousands of people screaming.

  Gamelpar groaned and clutched his ears. Vinnevra leaned forward, hands on her knees, as if she were about to be sick. The sky above darkened, stars twinkled—breath came harder.

  Discouraged, gasping, my head throbbing and chest burning, I lay beside Vinnevra and the old man. Vinnevra had closed her eyes tight and was trembling al over like a fawn. Gamelpar lay on his back, the new green stick held across his chest. Grit floated everywhere, wet and clinging—clogging our noses and getting in our eyes. We could barely see.