“Shall we carry you there?” I asked.
“Yes.” She waved her hand ahead. “I hope I can see it and know where to stop—from high up. Don’t go too fast, or too high.” She patted my forearm and stared at the seeker. “Do they frighten you, those things?”
* * *
The old female sat stiffly in the seeker’s enfolding interior, eyes wide. She quickly grasped the concept of the displays, twisted her head this way and that, following the colors and symbols as they wrapped around us. She gripped my arm as the craft lifted—not where she had bitten me. That had already healed. The pressure seemed to call up more of the information within my blood and flesh.
I felt myself coming into a denser appreciation of the way these people saw themselves—and then, like a shallow coloring laid over all that, how they felt about us.
They felt an extraordinary guilt. Or rather, somebody—not these people precisely—had once felt guilt, and now it suffused through them all, but generations before they had numbed it, stored it away in safe cubbyholes, rarely acknowledged.
Until now.
She surveyed the landscape as we rose, then pointed east and said, “That way.”
Clearance moved the seeker as instructed, at an altitude of a thousand meters. The old female never once let go of my arm. Her sense of direction was precise. Perhaps she had climbed the mountains and looked down over a similar view—but I thought it more likely she already knew.
Keeper and Chant remained with the other seeker. Despite my convictions, I still thought it best to keep options in reserve. The power of the old female’s bite might be more significant and powerful than I yet understood. Those little agents … what else could they manage, as protectors, or as persuaders?
The old female guided us along a steady curve.
“We’re following old field lines, I think,” Clearance said. “But there’s no longer a magnetic field. Hasn’t been for millions of years.”
I translated for Glow, but she paid us no mind—merely directed us with her knobby finger. We passed over deep dry gorges and wide valleys. Long lakes crossed the valleys like the marks of animal claws. Chaotic terrain. Thousands of kilometers of it.
And now we came to the peculiar feature we had noticed even from low orbit. A broad patch of grayish yellow had spread over a gorge four kilometers deep. A wide, steaming fissure opened along a two-kilometer stretch. The yellowish coloration was caused by minute bacteria and other organisms feeding on sulfur compounds. The entire valley was filled with a thin haze—not smoke but dust. Dust from spores—funguslike organisms—nothing like the Flood, of course, but bearing Forerunner genes.
Most remarkable.
“That is where we need to go,” Glow told me.
Clearance brought the seeker around, interpreting the direction of Glow’s finger, tracking its quick, precise changes, until she lifted it straight up, stared at him with her piercing gray-blue eyes, and said, “There.”
We landed.
“It’s here,” Glow said. “You walk out there … naked. Walk with me. Not him. Keep him away. He is not wise.”
I conveyed this to Clearance, who tipped his head. “Not wise at all,” he murmured. “But if there’s the slightest hint of danger, I’ll grab you up so fast…”
His expression brooked no disagreement.
Glow and I walked out on solid, rocky ground. Our feet pushed up a fine cloud of spores. “We cannot contain all the memories of our ancestors,” the old female said. “We do not want them. We wish to be ourselves, with our own memories. And so they are kept here. When we need the past, which is rarely, we come here. We walk this way, and we walk back. When we return, we have what they need.”
“A biological Domain,” I said.
“I do not know that word,” the old female said, walking ahead. “I have only been here once, when I was young and we had a dispute regarding a matter of law and tradition. The ones who were in power then were shown to be wrong by what we brought back, the memories and traditions we carried. They stepped down and were replaced. No one defies this place or what it holds.”
Stripped of all technology, left to their own ingenuity, the ancient Forerunners had created a completely organic and living way to store their histories. “Do you know how far back this memory goes?” I asked, bewildered by the possibilities.
“To the beginning. Days ago, we see a light in the sky like a moving star, and it is you. I have a memory…”
She turned and held up her hands, then slowly lowered them, along with her head, and got down on her knees, not before me, but the far cliffs that rose thousands of meters into the dusty skies.
“The first of us scratched and drew and marked those cliffs with whatever they had available—rocks, sticks.”
The yellowish dust coated my garments and my skin. Some of it irritated my nose and lungs. I wondered what I would dream tonight, or remember in weeks to come.
The old female pushed painfully to her feet and walked toward the cliffs, then looked over her shoulder and urged me on.
The high rock walls were hung with orange, fibrous growths, like lichen or moss, moving slowly over the smoothly and naturally planed surfaces. Along their course, the mosses clung with rasping roots. Where patches had died and fallen away, they revealed etched symbols—many kilometers of them, arrayed in spirals and whorled radiances. While I now recognized the script, and the methods of reading the symbols seemed familiar, the symbols themselves were still hidden from me and could not be deciphered by my ancilla.
“These mosses are sisters to us. They travel back and forth from one end of this valley to the other,” the old female said. “When wind and dust and rain wipe away what they carve, they slide back and replace it, always with the same memories.”
Ten million years ago, the Forerunners abandoned on this barren world had chosen to store history and memory not only in blood and flesh, but in these rustling, spreading, rock-climbing growths.
“What do they mean?” I asked.
“They tell our stories. And a greater, older story.” She moved closer, examining my face. “It’s coming a little slow in you. But soon.”
And it did arrive, but several days after.
I stayed in the valley, squatting on the fine, packed, stone-scattered soil, watching the fiery passage of the sun as it rose and set, tending now and then to functions my armor would once have taken care of—and by this process, I think, coming to better understand the old female.
As we waited, I felt a growing warmth in my body and brain as what the old female knew—what had been passed from generation to generation for ten million years—flowered within me.
One night, just as dawn cast faint beams over the easternmost wall of rock, I stood, stretched out my sore muscles, and began to walk to the beginning of the valley, several kilometers away. Here, I found the seekers, along with Chant and Keeper, who awaited me with looks of concern.
Chant approached and checked my health. “Are you well and fit, Lifeshaper?” she asked.
“So far,” I said. “The old female’s knowledge is growing. If it turns into something like a personal imprint—if I start looking and acting as she does…”
“We will be watchful,” Keeper said. “What should we do if that happens?”
“Put me back in my armor and reset me. Purge the old female’s knowledge.”
“That may not be easy, Lifeshaper.”
“I know. Let’s hope for the best.”
The old female had followed me, and squatted again at the head of the valley, watching us with her haunted smile.