I studied the far trees. “Where there are bugs, there might be birds,” I said. “Do you ever see birds?”
“They fly over.”
“That means there might be other animals. The Lifeshaper—”
“The Lady,” Vinnevra said, looking at me sideways.
“Right. The Lady probably keeps al sorts of animals here”
“Including us. We’re animals to them.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. “We could hunt and live out there. Make the Forerunners look hard for us, if they want us. At least we wouldn’t be sitting here, waiting to be snatched in our sleep.”
Vinnevra now studied me much the same way I studied the distant trees. I was an odd thing, not one of the People, not completely alien. “Look,” I said, “if you need to ask permission, if you need to ask your father or mother . . .”
“My father and mother were taken to the Palace of Pain when I was a girl,” she said.
“Wel, who can you ask? Your Gamelpar?”
“He’s just Gamelpar.” She squatted and drew a circle in the dirt with her finger. Then she took a short stick out of the folds of her pants and tossed it between two hands. Grabbing the stick and holding it up, she drew another circle, this one intersecting the first.
Then she threw the stick up. It landed in the middle, where the two circles crossed. “Good,” she said. “The stick agrees. I wil take you to Gamelpar. We both saw the jar fal from the sky and land near the vilage. He told me to go see what it was. I did, and there you were. He likes me to bring news.”
This outburst of information startled me. Vinnevra had been holding back, waiting until she had made some or other judgment about me. Gamelpar—the name of the old man no longer wanted in the vilage. The name sounded something like “old father.” How old was he?
Another ghost?
The shadow racing along the great hoop was fast approaching. In a few hours it would be dark. I stood for a moment, not sure what was happening, not at al sure I wanted to learn who or what Gamelpar was.
“Before we do that, can you take me to where the jar fel?” I asked. “Just in case there might be something I can find useful.”
“Just you? You think it’s about you?”
“And Riser,” I said, resenting her sad tone.
She approached and touched my face, feeling my skin and underlying facial muscles with her rough fingers. I was startled, but let her do whatever she thought she had to do. Finaly, she drew back with a shudder, let out her breath, and closed her eyes.
“We’l go there first,” she said. “And then I wil take you to see
Gamelpar.”
The site of my “jar” was about an hour’s walk. She led me out of the reed-hut camp and across a shalow stream, through a spinney of low, heat-shriveled trees, where the air smeled bittersweetly of old fires and drying leaves. Up a low hil, and down again, we finaly came to a flat meadow that had once been covered with grass— familiar, I thought, very like home. But the grass had been burnt up in a fire and was now gray and black stubble. The char and dust burst up around our feet and blackened our legs.
Finaly, I saw a grouping of large, grayish white, rounded objects I took to be boulders—and then I realized they were not boulders, but falen star boats, larger than war sphinxes but much smaler than the Didact’s ship.
Vinnevra showed no fear as we approached these vessels. There were three of them, each split wide open, surrounded by deeper char and scattered debris. She stopped at the periphery of the rough oval they formed. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. The huls were not complete, and yet they had not just broken apart or burned up—parts had simply gone away. These boats, I remembered, were not just made of solid stuff. They were spun out of temporary stuff as wel, what the Forerunners caled hard light.
The Forerunners that had flown inside the first boat—six or seven of them, if I counted the pieces correctly—lay sprawled in the wreckage, most stil wrapped in their armor. On four, the armor was cluttered with strange attachments, like fist-sized metal fleas.
The fleas had gathered along the joints and seams.
Fearful myself now—visualizing the fleas leaping loose and landing on me—I backed off, hunkered down, and studied them carefuly from a distance. The fleas didn’t move. They were broken.
The bodies stil smeled bad. They had swolen out of their armor, what parts had not been cooked away by the impact.
The emotions I felt were confused, exultant, and sad at once— and then alarmed. I walked around the first hulk and wondered if Bornstelar was among these dead.
After a few minutes, Vinnevra caled to ask when I was going to be done here. “In a while,” I said.
Now I moved a few dozen paces to the second star boat. It was of a different design, more organic, like a seed pod, with short spikes covering its surface. The Forerunners left inside—three of them—wore no armor and had been reduced to blackened skeletons. They seemed different—different styles of boats, different types of Forerunners. Had they fought each other?
If this Halo was a gigantic fortress—as it certainly had the potential to be—then perhaps it had its own defenses, and I was looking at a sad remnant of a much larger battle—what the People here caled the “fire in the sky.” I could not know that for sure, of course. I could not know anything for sure.
Dead Forerunners, it seemed, decayed much as dead humans do, yet I knew that the armor, if active, would have done al in its power to protect them while alive, and even to preserve them after death. Therefore, the armor had failed before the crash. It seemed reasonable to assume that the strange flea-machines had something to do with this. My old memories had no experience of Halos and knew nothing of current Forerunner politics. But I could feel an interior tickle of speculation, and wondered if there was any way I could coax it out—bring it forward.
“Tel me what these are,” I said, and shivered despite my attempt at bravado. Waking ghosts was never a good idea.
Armor cracking units.
The old memories—the dominant old spirit within me—suddenly revealed its own mixed emotions about the carnage.
“Human-made—human weapons?” I whispered.
Not human. Forerunner. Fratricide. Civil war.
I had been present on the periphery of a few Forerunner disputes and power plays. Ten thousand years ago, the Forerunners had been united in their conquest of my ancestors. Now, it seemed clear that they were even more deeply divided.
“The fleas got into the star boats and cracked the crew’s armor before the boats crashed,” I speculated. “Is that what happened?”
You are young. I am old. I am dead, the old memory said, like a low hum inside my thoughts.
“Yes, you are,” I agreed. “But I need you now to tel me—”
I am Lord of Admirals!
The sudden strength of the inner voice staggered me. I had never felt such a powerful presence in my head before, even when being possessed during the scarification ceremony celebrating my manhood—not even when being suffused in smoking leaves and led through the caves.
“I feel you,” I said, my voice shaky.
I fought the Didact and surrendered Charum Hakkor, but not its secrets.
I knew nothing of this.
We survived the Shaping Sickness. Forerunners hoped to learn the secret of how we survived the Shaping Sickness, but we would not give it to them, even under torture!
And with that, the old memory did an awful thing—it spasmed in rage. The effect almost knocked me over, and I knelt down in the dirt, by the second vessel, clutching my head. For sanity’s sake, I pushed back the old spirit—and heard Vinnevra caling from outside the elipse of falen star boats.
“Why are you talking to yourself? Are you mad?”