We have traveled inward to the central hold. There is much activity here. Ancillas are delivering a new selection of humans. The Lifeshaper watches closely as they are aligned shoulder to shoulder in restraining fields. Male and female, young and old, they are briefly roused and released.
“They believe they have been transported to a better place,” she says, in the same tone of voice she used to describe the Domain: reverential, but with a shadow of deeper guilt.
I can barely discern the luminous edges of the environment projected to keep them calm. “An afterlife?” I ask.
“They believe so. I came to all of them at birth. They believe when they see me next, I will lift them from trouble and pain. In a way, that is true.”
A light appears over her head. The humans in the hold turn as one and behold the Librarian. Their faces transform. The hold is filled with echoes of wonder as they crowd forward, trying to communicate their joy, their hope.
The light above the Librarian dims. The fields return, separate the humans, and again numb them, at this high moment of joy, to their plight.
“Life is resilient—particularly human life,” the Lifeshaper says. I can barely hear her, she speaks so softly. “They will be taken to the Ark.”
I cannot stifle a sense of awe and even affront. Such power—such hubris! And yet, without the Lifeshaper’s intervention, all humans would have died long before.
She does what she can.
“They feel no pain, no distress. Composers are no longer used by any of our teams. Their memories and genetic patterns will be carried in the flesh of all their descendants, when Erde-Tyrene is repopulated. In that way, they will touch eternity. But their existence here is ending.”
The humans rise like bubbles in a pond and swing around an immense, glowing blue flower, undergoing deep examination. Their faces go slack. The bodies are then consumed by brilliant purple flares, and the remains compacted to be returned to the oceans of Erde-Tyrene—not as ashes, burned and degraded, but rich nutrients that will feed minute organisms in the sea during the great sweep of Halo radiation.
When the hundreds of thousands of humans collected in the last few hours are processed, she lifts us from the hold and wraps us both in cooling darkness.
“I pity future scholars. They will notice nothing here to explain what happened—neither an increase in the fossil record nor any other evidence of a great die-off. Now … the time has come to describe what I found in Path Kethona. May I tell that story?”
No permission is necessary. I am Catalog.
I listen.
THE LIBRARIAN
Things did not improve after my husband vanished.
The Master Builder regarded my partnership as a liability. To maintain our status, such as it was, and to uphold our few remaining privileges, we needed to remain essential to both the Council and Builders.
I proposed to the Council that we seek out the truth about the Flood: its origins, its vulnerabilities, its motivations—if any.
For thousands of years, based on where the Flood struck in our galaxy, many had theorized it originated in one of the smaller local galaxies, Path Kethona, and in particular a huge, filamentary nebula ripe with birthing suns called the Spider [TT: Tarantula Nebula].
According to legend, Path Kethona was first visited by Forerunners during our greatest period of exploration, over ten million years ago. Yet there was substantial doubt that voyage had ever happened. Records had long ago vanished. Not even Haruspis, entrusted with studying the Domain, could access those memories.
In any case, the Domain, in time, converts history into truth beyond the understanding of most Forerunners. To establish the kind of truth we could understand, we would need to recreate that first great voyage.
We would need to go there.
I am not comfortable with the spaces between suns, much less between galaxies. My love and expertise lies in the immensity within—the unbounded inner roil of a cell, the tight-packed jostling of hundreds of thousands of molecules cooperating and competing at once, all unaware that their activities, massed together, open doorways to even greater immensities: you, me, all living things.
The greatest galaxies are nothing without our inner immensity, which opens our eyes to their light, our senses to their warmth, and our minds to their challenge.
Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me. Space has its own textures and mysteries. Forerunners draw power from the perpetual rise and fall of ghostly particles that have no true existence—until they are harvested. We draw power as well from the interstices of space itself, where space and time form the tiniest little knots of uncertainty and dimension.
But emptiness without sensation, the unobserved vastness between suns, brings me nightmares. I am happiest on a teeming planet, surrounded by aggressions and consumptions and births and all the colliding webs of observation and fixation. Reality for me begins with the small.…
But inevitably it must end with the very large.
Soon after the Didact was safely hidden, I went before the Council with a plan for an intergalactic fast transport, a vessel so extraordinary it would enrich Builders across the Forerunner galaxy.
I had learned well how to play this particular game of Council politics. For Builders, contracts meant everything, and my challenge combined elements they found irresistible: re-creating the greatness of our past, harnessing new technologies, and accessing the immense resources of the ecumene to stuff Builder coffers.
As well, the mission’s goal was direct and compelling. This would be a Lifeworker-sponsored expedition. Neither the Builders nor the Old Council could deny that Lifeworkers were most devoted to preserving and understanding life. However strange, the Flood was a living thing, or mass of things, and so it was well within our purview to study it and try to understand.
And so my expedition—whether it was the second, or the first—was designed to once and for all confirm the extragalactic origin of the Flood. That sealed the deal with both the Old Council and the Builders.
Builders have always been superb shipwrights. The construction took ten years. Permission from the Old Council to make the journey took another ten.
I understood their delay.
Travel across even a few light-years through a portal or jump requires mending breaches in causality. Forerunner ships crossing between systems create a buildup of space-time resistance, a polluting effect that gradually limits both transport and communication—and may also interfere with access to the Domain. When the buildup is eliminated—as reconciliations are made and aftereffects fade into the quantum background—more journeys become possible.
But moving even a single small ship over one hundred and sixty thousand light-years in just a few jumps, without long pauses, creates a monumental backup. The journey to Path Kethona could slow or even halt transportation throughout the ecumene for over a year. Nevertheless, the intrigue of making history and solving one of the greatest mysteries was irresistible. Builders worked hard to forge consensus, as I knew they would.
That a Lifeworker was in command—worse still, a Lifeworker associated with the Didact—was an irritation, but not insurmountable. Who else was more qualified to study the origins of the Flood? Or understand the nature of Precursor beginnings? For of course the Precursors themselves were believed to have traveled to our galaxy from Path Kethona, billions of years ago.
We christened our ship Audacity. Less than one hundred meters in length and thirty across the beam—modest, lightly armed. A crew of seven, including me: one Miner, three adventurous Builders, and two Lifeworkers were selected from well over a million volunteers.
No Juridicals joined our crew. At that point, there was no reason to suspect we were about to uncover the greatest crime in Forerunner history.