“Your tongue isn’t bleeding now. Can you tel me what it’s like where you come from? Up in the sky? Try to speak slowly.”
I moved lips, tongue, jaw. Al were sore, but I could talk easily enough. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Are you al human?”
She hummed through her nose and leaned forward to wipe my eyes. “We’re the Tudejsa, if that’s what you’re asking.” Later I would put this word in context and understand that it meant the People from Here, or just the People.
“And this isn’t Erde-Tyrene.”
“I doubt it. Where we are is a place between other places.
Where we came from, we wil never see again. Where we are going, we do not want to be. So we live here and wait. Sometimes Forerunners take us away.”
“Forerunners . . . ?”
“The gray ones. The blue ones. The black ones. Or their machines.”
“I know some of them,” I said.
She looked dubious. “They don’t like us. We’re happy they haven’t come for many days. Even before the sky became bright and filed with fire—”
“Where do they come from—these People?” I waved my arm at the silhouettes stil coming and going through the door, some smacking their lips in judgment and making disapproving sounds.
“Some of us come from the old city. That’s where I was born.
Others have gathered from across the plain, from river and jungle, from the long grass. Some walked here five sleeps ago, after they saw you fal from the sky in your jar. One felow tries to make people pay to see you.”
I heard a scuffle outside, a yelp, and then three burly gawkers shuffled in, keeping wel back from us.
“The cackling bastard who fancies you?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Another fool. He wants more food. They just knock him down and kick him aside.”
She didn’t seem to like many of the People.
“Valey, jungle, river . . . city, prairie. Sounds like home,” I said.
“It isn’t. ” She swept her gaze around the gawkers with pinched disappointment. “We are not friends, and no one is wiling to be family. When we are taken away, it brings too much pain.”
I raised myself on my arm. “Am I strong enough to go outside?”
She pressed me back down. Then she pushed the gawkers out, looked back, and stepped through the hanging grass door. When she returned, she carried a roughly carved wooden bowl. With her fingers she spooned some of the contents into my mouth: bland mush, ground-up grass seed. It didn’t taste very good—what I could taste of it—but what I swalowed stayed in my stomach.
Soon I felt stronger.
Then she said, “Time to go outside, before someone decides to kil you.” She helped me to my feet and pushed aside the door- hanging. A slanting burst of bluish white glare dazzled me. When I saw the color of that light, a feeling of dread, of not wanting to be where I was, came on me fierce. It was not a good light.
But she persisted and puled me out under the purple-blue sky.
Shielding my eyes, I finaly located the horizon—rising up like a distant wal. Turning slowly, swiveling my neck despite the pain, I tracked that far wal until it began to curve upward, ever so gently. I swung around. The horizon curved upward to both sides. Not good, not right. Horizons do not curve up.
I folowed the gradualy rising sweep higher and higher. The land kept climbing like the slope of a mountain—climbing but narrowing, until I could see both sides of a great, wide band filed with grassland, rocky fields . . . mountains. Some distance away, a foreshortened and irregular dark blue smear crossed almost the entire width of the band, flanked and interrupted by the nearest of those mountains—possibly a large body of water. And everywhere out there on the band—clouds in puffs and swirls and spreading white shreds, like streamers of fleece in a cleansing river.
Weather.
Higher and higher . . .
I leaned my head back as far as I could without faling over— until the rising band crossed into shadow and slimmed to a skinny, perfect ribbon that cut the sky in half and just hung there—a dark blue, overarching sky bridge. At an angle about two-thirds of the way up one side of the bridge, perched just above the edge, was the source of the intense, purple-blue light: a smal, briliant sun.
Turning around again, cupping my hand over the blue sun, I studied the opposite horizon. The wal on that side was too far away to see. But I guessed that both sides of the great ribbon were flanked by wals. Definitely not a planet.
My hopes fel to zero. My situation had not improved in any way.
I was not home. I was very far from any home. I had been deposited on one of the great, ring-shaped weapons that had so entranced and divided my Forerunner captors.
I was marooned on a Halo.
Chapter Two
HOW I WISH I could recover the true shape of that young human I was! Naïve, crude, unlettered, not very clever. I fear that over the last hundred thousand years, much of that has rubbed away. My
voice and base of knowledge has changed—I have no body to guide me—and so I might seem, in this story, as I tel it now, more sophisticated, weighted down by far too much knowledge.
I was not sophisticated—not in the least. My impression of myself in those days is of anger, confusion, unchecked curiosity— but no purpose, no focused ambition.
Riser had given me focus and courage, and now, he was gone.
When I was born, the supreme Lifeshaper came to Erde-Tyrene to touch me with her wil. Erde-Tyrene was her world, her protectorate and preserve, and humans were special to her. I remember she was beautiful beyond measure, unlike my mother, who was lovely, but fairly ordinary as women go.
My family farmed for a while outside of the main human city of Marontik. After my father died in a knife fight with a water baron’s thugs, and our crops failed, we moved into the city, where my sisters and I took up menial tasks for modest pay. For a time, my sisters also served as Prayer Maidens in the temple of the Lifeshaper. They lived away from Mother and me, in a makeshift temple near the Moon Gate, in the western section of the Old City.
. . .
But I see your eyes glazing over. A Reclaimer who lacks patience! Watching you yawn makes me wish I stil had jaws and lungs and could yawn with you. You know nothing of Marontik, so I wil not bore you further with those details.
Why are you so interested in the Didact? Is he proving to be a difficulty to humans once again? Astonishing. I wil not tel you about the Didact, not yet. I wil tel this in my own way. This is the way my mind works, now. If I stil have a mind.
I am moving on.
After the Librarian (I was only an infant when I saw her) the next Forerunner I encountered was a young Manipular named Bornstelar Makes Eternal Lasting. I set out to trick him. It was the worst mistake of my young life.
Back before I met Riser, I was a rude, rough boy, always getting into trouble and stealing. I liked fighting and didn’t mind receiving into trouble and stealing. I liked fighting and didn’t mind receiving smal wounds and bruises. Others feared me. Then I started having dreams that a Forerunner would come to visit me. I made my dream-self attack and bite him and then rob him of the things he carried—treasure that I could sel in the market. I dreamed I would use this treasure to bring my sisters back from the temple to live with us.
In the real world, I robbed other humans instead.
But then one of the chamanune came to our house and inquired after me. Despite their size, chamanush were respected and we rarely attacked them. I had never robbed one because I heard stories that they banded together to punish those who hurt them.
They slipped in, whispering in the night, like marauding monkeys, and took vengeance. They were smal but smart and fierce and mostly came and went as they pleased. This one was friendly enough. He said his name was Riser and he had seen someone like me in a dream: a rough, young hamanush who needed his guidance.
In my mother’s crude hovel, he took me aside and said he would give me good work if I didn’t cause trouble.
Riser became my boss, despite his size. He knew many interesting places in and around Marontik where a young felow such as myself—barely twenty years old—could be usefuly employed. He took a cut of my wages, and his clan fed my family, and we in turn protected his clan from the more stupid thugs who believed that size mattered. Those were exciting times in Marontik.
By which I mean, stupid cruelties were common.
Yes, chamanush are human, though tinier than my people, the hamanush. Indeed, as your display now tels you, some since have caled them Florians or even Hobbits, and others may have known them as menehune. They loved islands and water and hunting and exceled at building mazes and wals.
I see you have pictures of their bones. Those bones look as if they might indeed fit inside a chamanush. How old are they?
*INTERRUPTION*
MONITOR HAS PENETRATED AI FIREWALL
AI RECALIBRATION
Do not be alarmed. I have accessed your data stores and taken command of your display. I mean no harm . . . now. And it has been ever so long since I tasted fresh information. Curious. I see these pictures are from a place caled Flores Island, which is on Erde-Tyrene, now caled Earth.
In reward for their service, I can now see that the Lifeshaper in later milennia placed Riser’s people on a number of Earth’s islands.
On Flores, she provided them with smal elephants and hippos and other tiny beasts to hunt. . . . They do love fresh meat.
If what your history archives tel me is correct, I believe the last of Riser’s people died out when humans arrived by canoe at their final home, a great island chain formed by volcanoes that burned through the crust. . . .
I see the largest of those islands is known as Hawai.
I am getting distracted. Stil, I notice you are no longer yawning.
Am I revealing secrets of interest to your scientists?
But you are most interested in the Didact.
I am moving on.
Soon after Riser took charge of my life, folowing a decline in our work opportunities, he began to direct his attentions toward preparing for “a visitor.”
Riser told me he had also seen a young Forerunner in a dream.
We did not discuss the matter much. We did not have to. Both of us lay under thral. Riser had met male Forerunners before; I had not. He described them to me, but I already saw clearly enough what our visitor would look like. He would be a young one, a Manipular, not fuly mature, perhaps arrogant and foolish. He would come seeking treasure.
Riser told me that what I was seeing in my dreams was part of a geas—a set of commands and memories left in my mind and body by the Lifeshaper who touches us al at birth.
As a general rule, Forerunners were shaped much like humans, though larger. In their youth they were tal and slender, gray of skin, and covered nape, crown, shoulders, and along the backs of their hands with a fine, pale fur, pinkish purple or white in color. Odd- looking, to be sure, but not exactly ugly.
The older males, Riser assured me, were different—larger, bulkier, less human-looking, but stil, not exactly ugly. “They are a little like the vaeites and alben that come in our eldest dreams,” he explained. “But they are stil mighty. They could kil us al if they wanted to, and many would. . . .”
I took his meaning right away, as if somewhere within my deep memory, I knew it already.
The Manipular did indeed arrive on Erde-Tyrene, seeking treasure. He was indeed foolish. And we did indeed provide him with what he sought—guidance to a source of mysterious power.
But where we took him was not a secret Precursor ruin.
Folowing our geas, we led Bornstelar into the inland wastes a hundred kilometers from Marontik to a crater filed with a freshwater lake. At its center this crater held a ring-shaped island, like a giant target waiting for an arrow to fly down from the gods.
This place was legendary among the chamanune. They had explored it many times and had built trails and mazes and wals across its surface. At the center of the ring-shaped island stood a tal mountain. Very few chamanush had ever visited that mountain.
As the days passed, I came to realize that despite my urges, I could not hurt this Manipular—this young Forerunner. Despite his irritating manner and obvious feeling of superiority, there was something about him that I liked. Like me, he sought treasure and adventure, and he was wiling to do wrong things.
Meeting him, I began my long fal to where I am now— what I am now.
The Didact was in fact the secret of Djamonkin Crater. The ring- shaped island was where the Librarian had hidden her husband’s warrior Cryptum, a place of deep meditation and sanctuary— hidden from other Forerunners who were seeking him, for reasons I could not then understand.
But now the time of his resurrection had come.
A Forerunner had to be present for the Cryptum to be unsealed.
We helped Bornstelar raise the Didact by singing old songs. The Librarian had provided us with al the skils and instincts we needed, as part of our geas.
And the Didact emerged from his long sleep. He plumped out like a dried flower dipped in oil.
He rose up among us, weak at first and angry.
The Librarian had left him a great star boat hidden inside the central mountain. He kidnapped us and took us aboard that star boat, along with Bornstelar. We traveled to Charum Hakkor, which awoke another set of memories within me . . . then to Faun Hakkor, where we saw proof that a monstrous experiment had been carried out by the Master Builder.
And then the star boat flew to the San’Shyuum quarantine system. It was there that Riser and I were separated from Bornstelar and the Didact, taken prisoner by the Master Builder, locked into bubbles, unable to move, barely able to breathe, surrounded by a spinning impression of space and planet and the dark, cramped interiors of various ships.
Once, I caught a glimpse of Riser, contorted in his il-fitting Forerunner armor, eyes closed as if napping, his generous, furred lips lifted at the corners, as if he dreamed of home and family. . . .
His calm visage became for me a necessary reminder of the tradition and dignity of being human.
This is important in my memory. Such memories and feelings define who I once was. I would have them back in the flesh. I would do anything to have them back in the flesh.