Completing that survey, that analysis, encouraged her to believe she completely understood human psychology and culture. Yprin had advanced to Political and Morale Commander of al human forces.
I disagreed with that advancement, her rise to power. I had severe doubts that Erda was our planet of origin. Other worlds in other systems seemed more likely. I had been to many of them and had viewed their ancient ruins.
And I had seen evidence that Forerunners had also visited these worlds, were also interested in human origins—not just the Librarian and her Lifeworkers, but the Didact himself.
We defended Charum Hakkor against the Forerunner assaults— which came in an unending sequence, one after another—for three years.
My own ships swept back and forth hundreds of times across the star system, pushing back pinpoint orbital incursions before they could establish corridors of least energy dominance.
In al such battles, within the vast reaches of a stelar system, hyperspacial technologies give only a slight advantage; tactics in such close quarters depend on stable positions established near planetary objectives, where triangulations of fire can focus on mass- delivery portals and turn them into logjams of debris and destruction.
Occupation of vast reaches of space means nothing. It is control of population centers and essential resources that determines victory or defeat.
But our ships were depleted month by month, our battle positions worn down year by year, as Forerunner ships ranging in scale from fortress-class behemoths to squadrons of swift and powerful dreadnoughts opened brief entry points and attacked from briliantly surprising angles, with sweeping, erratic arcs that reminded me of the scribblings of madmen—briliant madmen.
The hand of the Didact himself drew those reckless and daring entries and orbits.
Forerunner dominance of the advanced technology of reconciliation—repairing the causal and chronological paradoxes of faster-than-light travel, so crucial to journeys across interstelar distances—slowed and even blocked our own slipspace channels and interfered with the arrival of reinforcements.
The crushing blow, long anticipated, even inevitable, was agonizingly slow to arrive. The final Forerunner assault was staged from seven portals opened at one-hour intervals to disgorge the massive fleet of the Didact himself, along with his finest commanders, many of them veterans of the battles that had been fought from our colony worlds along the outer rim to Erde-Tyrene itself.
Yprikushma and a special forces team of seven thousand warriors and seventy vessels were assigned to protect the timelock that contained the Primordial.
It was ironic that among the last surviving humans gathered in the Citadel Charum, the greatest Precursor ruin left on Charum Hakkor, she and I were brought together. We shared this space among the ancient Precursor structures with the last survivors of the Admiralty—listening to the hideous noise of Forerunner fleets sweeping over and breaking down our last resistance.
Forerunners captured the timelock and the Primordial. Yprin was withdrawn against her fervent objections—this much I heard. I also heard that she had hoped to be captured by the Forerunners themselves, so that she could warn them about a fate you would not wish on your worst enemy.
To warn them about what the Primordial had told her.
At the last, separated by only a few hundred meters, we tracked the concentrated assault that colapsed our last orbit fields, eliminated our planetary defenses, and brought down the Citadel.
The sounds of death and dying, my warriors being vaporized while I yet lived . . .
Confined. Awaiting the inevitable.
The inevitable arrived.
I died.
The Composer and the Lifeworkers did their work. . . .
And now I was here, in this boy’s body.
Am here!
Still here!
AI TRANSLATOR: PRIMARY LANGUAGE STREAM RESUMES: RESPONSE STREAM #14401 [DATE REDACTED] 1701 hours (nonrepeating)
Chapter Twenty-Two
THERE. THAT WAS restful, wasn’t it? I do so enjoy being subverted from within. If I can carry more than one memory stream, then I may not be so badly damaged after al. Crazy, but not damaged!
But I apologize if our ancestor, or our predecessor (it is so difficult to determine descent and lineage for any human species), has caused you difficulties. For Lord of Admirals and Yprin were very strong individuals in their time, and when Riser and I finaly managed to resume our own lives and thoughts, we were wrung out. . . .
Riser was a curled-up, matted bal of sweat and stink. I was not much better. Mara and Vinnevra were sleeping at some distance from us, in their typical attitude: both lying on their sides, Vinnevra curled up within the protective arms and drawn-up legs of the shadow-ape, looking peaceful enough.
Riser had some difficulty unknotting his muscles, and was embarrassed by the state of his grooming. “I don’t like being ridden like a horse, even by a female.” He quirked his whole face, an expression that always fascinated me. “Makes me smel older than I am.” He lifted his arm to sniff his armpit. “Pretty damned old. And you!” He looked at me and twitched his nose. “You’ve looked better.”
I was furiously hungry. Being ridden by spirits was more than just exhausting: it used up al the fuel in my furnace. I stumbled across the curved top of the mound, around the triplet of poking rocks, looking for a fruit-bearing tree, a beehive we could raid—anything.
Riser folowed, rubbing his shoulders. “Nothing to eat,” he said.
I smacked my lips at him.
“Don’t look at me, young ha manush!”
We were joking—I think.
“We might find some water down there,” he said. “But it hasn’t rained for a while—since the spirits rose up and argued.”
I squatted on the highest curve of the slope. “The ape might find something. She did before.”
“She’s out of her country,” Riser said with a clack of his teeth.
Vinnevra seemed to pop up right behind us. She had moved so quietly she startled even Riser, who jerked around and growled.
She curled her lip, and that made him lean his head back and chortle out the oook-phraaa sound that was one kind of cha manush laughter. Riser always appreciated a good joke, even if the joker didn’t know that what she had done was funny.
She sat beside us. “I know where to go,” she said, and nodded across the hummocky terrain.
“Again?” I asked.
“Again,” she said. “You think al the Forerunners are dead. I don’t think they are. I think . . . Wel, I don’t know what to think, but it’s teling me there’s food and water nearby.”
“Back at the ghost vilage?” I asked, perhaps too sharply.
Vinnevra shook her head and wrung her hands, as if squeezing her fingers dry after a wash. “It’s what I’m being told.” She looked at us without much hope we would listen to her.
“I don’t think I want to take any more chances,” I said.
“I don’t blame you,”Vinnevra said. “Neither do I. I’m going to ignore it, too, this time.” Vinnevra was no longer the sparking young female who had rescued me from the broken jar and taken me to meet her Gamelpar.
“We need to decide what we’re going to do,” she said. “Mara is wiling to listen to me—”
“You haven’t disappointed her,” I said, again too sharply and quickly.
Her wince saddened me. “True. I was about to say, Mara wil listen to me—and I’m wiling to folow both of you. Whatever you decide.”
This transformation was oddly disturbing. She was quieter, more reasonable. Her face had a soft glow, as if she had freed herself from some impossible burden.
And I was responsible for her. Riser looked between us, squinting one eye.
Vinnevra turned to him. “I listened when your old memories talked. Some of what you said I understood. Gamelpar spoke like that, and taught me a few words and ideas. You realy do have spirits inside of you.”
“So did he,” I said.
“Yes. I don’t have such a spirit, and I’m not disappointed.”
“No fun,” Riser agreed.
“Anyway, this time, you can take me with you, or not. But Mara wants to go where I go, and she wants Riser to come with us. You, Chakas—she says you’re going to be trouble.” The soft glow took on a harder, more defensive cast.
“You’re talking with the ape now, too?”
Vinnevra nodded. “Some. You have to listen deep to her chest, and to her high, little piping sounds . . . not so hard, once you get the hang of it.”
“Maybe the Lifeshaper gave us al a way around the storyteler’s curse,” Riser suggested.
“The Lifeshaper lies,” I said, but it hurt me to say it.
Riser shrugged. “No good going back where I was,” he said.
“And no good going back to the ghosts.”
I had been studying the curve both during the day and at night, trying to understand what al the features and details meant.
The barren waste where Riser had crashed was apparent enough. Behind us was the great sea, across the entire band. There had not been much food there.
“There’s a narrow way inland and then west, between the waste and the mountains,” I said, pointing it out to them. “It seems to be covered in forest, not as dense as the jungle we’ve been through— and maybe grassland.” I half-imagined it looked like the land around Marontik, but that was too much to hope for. “It might be we’l find game out there, bigger game where there’s forest and grass. . . .
We’l have to make weapons and hunt. If we’re going to survive without Forerunners.”
I wasn’t at al happy with this plan, to tel the truth. I had no idea whether the Lifeshaper would have taken the trouble to stock her forests and plains with animals we could eat. They might just as easily be animals that would prefer to eat us—or monsters like nothing we had ever seen before.
“What do the old spirits say?” Vinnevra asked.
“Nothing. They’re tired from arguing.”
Riser quirked his face.
“Then it’s a plan. Let’s go find out,” Vinnevra said, getting up.
Mara came around the rock pilars, grunting happily at finding us.
Riser lightly pinched my arm. “Leader,” he said, and walked off.
We descended the mound and traveled opposite the flow of the wheel’s shadow. Vinnevra walked beside me and kept pace. Riser stayed back with Mara.
“I don’t mean anything by this,” the young woman began, struggling to express herself properly and not provoke me. I wasn’t sure I liked her being subservient—it worried me. “I just wanted to tel you . . . I see things out there. I seem to have a map in my head now.”
“Is that a good place to go?”
“I don’t know. I won’t just folow anything that gets into my head —not now.”
“We’l watch,” I said. “If what you see in your head is right, if it fits the land, maybe we can use the rest.”
She looked away, then rubbed her nose. “Itches. What’s that mean?”
“Don’t know.”
“Gamelpar believed in you,” she said quickly, “and you kept them from . . . doing whatever they would have done to him. He is free now, because of you.” She rubbed her nose more vigorously until her eyes almost crossed. Then she turned to look at me, steadily, clearly—more strongly determined than ever. “I believe in you, too.”
Vinnevra offered her hand. After a couple of steps, I grasped it.
She then walked closer and looped her arm around mine.
“You can use my true name, if you want,” she said.
My heart felt very strange. I had made a decision, laid out a plan, and everyone was going along with me—even Riser.
I had responsibilities. Three of them.
I hated that.
Chapter Twenty-Three
FOR A FEW days, we passed through jungle of varying density, cresting the low mounds and hils, going around the big ones. Mara found us some fruit, not much— more of the green tubes that we peeled and ate the pulp out of, more seedy fruits with salow flesh, mostly bitter.
Vinnevra was delighted to find a log filed with giant wood- maggots. They tasted better than scorpions. Even Mara ate a few.
Riser poked and waded through a stream that crossed Vinnevra’s chosen path, but there were only insects too smal to bother with— no fish.
Stil, it was water, and we drank our fil.
The sun had changed its angle to the rim of the wheel even more.
Once, sitting in a clearing, I considered the possibility that we might soon enter a long darkness, when the hoop, the Halo, found its place in orbit where its tilt was perpendicular to the . . . I felt around for the word . . .
Radius.
I didn’t need much help from the old spirit to think through the rest. There would be a long stretch of darkness— many days—and then a dreary half-day, light faling only on one side of the band, while the Halo traveled around the sun some more. Not a cheery prospect. I finaly stopped thinking about it, but the sun stil dropped, day by day, toward the sky bridge.
And the wolf-orb kept getting bigger. It was now ten thumbs wide, a great pink-gray mass, its roundness clearly visible even during the day.
Vinnevra was very thin. Riser checked out our health with his nose and gave me a worried look; she was not doing wel. None of us was doing wel. The jungle was not providing much food, and we were walking steadily. Mara—it was hard to tel whether Mara was losing weight, her fur was so thick. But around her elbows and hips it was faling out in patches.
She would take those patches and set them up in trees, then wait below, for a while, before giving up.
The trees got smal, then thinned out to grassy glades. The glades
in turn gave way to a lush, tal grass meadow.
We had been traveling for over twenty-two days—again, I had lost count. Then, just after dawn, I saw Vinnevra standing beside Mara, who had planted a patch of her dark reddish fur on the tip of a tal grass cane, then crouched down below.