Several long-tailed birds started to flutter around the fur. Neither Vinnevra nor the ape moved. Eventualy, the birds—none more than a morsel—grew used to them and flew lower, grabbed hold of the cane with their claws, plucked at the fur. . . .
Mara shot up her big hands and caught five at once. Five smal birds. We broke their necks and ate them raw, including their innards. Mara we gave two, but she split half of one with Vinnevra.
Vinnevra said the ape was sharing it with the memory of Gamelpar.
The meadow soon gave way to bare soil, lightly tiled, as if waiting for a fresh crop. We were stil some distance from the desert of ashy blight, but I doubted any farmer would be planting here soon.
“Is this what you see?” I asked Vinnevra.
She nodded.
“I thought it was al grassland.”
She shook her head. “There’s more trees and grass out there.”
She pointed inland and west. “Like you saw.”
But I had missed this tiny patch of dirt, no doubt just a brown line against the wider yelow and green. “Anything nearby?”
“Just dirt . . . for a ways.”
“Why didn’t you tel me that?”
“I wil, from now on—if you want,” she said.
“I want. Tel me . . . whatever, whenever.”
She looked unhappy. “What if I’m wrong again?”
“Just tel me.”
We spent a day trudging across the dirt, until we came in sight of a blue-gray line along the inland horizon. Hours later, we saw that the line was a great, long rail—a strange sort of fence rail that floated over the dirt without visible support.
“Where does this go?” I asked Vinnevra.
She pointed along the rail. That was obvious enough.
“What’s at the other end?”
“Something I don’t understand. I don’t see it very clearly.”
“Food?”
“Maybe. I see . . . and smel . . . food, if we go that way.”
“Grass and trees?”
“Not that way. Over there, maybe.” She pointed away from the rail.
“Game?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
The old spirit decided now was the time to make a contribution again.
It might be a transport system.
I saw big, noisy objects running along, or above, or beside—or on both sides of—double and single rails, both on the ground and elevated, like this one.
Usually they go to places where there are resources. Or they carry passengers, and passengers need to eat.
So much for my being in charge. We were al starving again.
We changed direction and turned our group toward the spin, walking beside the soaring fence rail.
Riser and I fel back a dozen paces from the girl and the ape.
“A nudge from the old spirit?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said glumly. “You?”
“Soon it wil be long dark, she says.”
“Right. I’ve seen that, too.”
“Long dark, travel hard. We folow the girl again?”
“Yes,” I said. “For now.”
“It was worth a try, finding game,” he said. “No blame.”
He fel quiet for another while, then said, “Old spirit suggests lots of space below, caverns. Why don’t we find a way down? Maybe things have not gone wrong down there.”
I thought of the great jagged hole punched into the wheel, many kilometers back along our journey. Inside, below, there had been layer upon layer of broken levels, floors, interior spaces. And what about the chasm that had opened up near the wal? It was too late to go back and find out. Something might have even fixed the hole, and by now, the bottom of the chasm had probably filed in.
What had happened to al those people? To the war sphinxes that were herding them along like cattle? Were those machines controled by Forerunners, or by the Captive, the Primordial itself?
Was the Primordial actualy in charge of this wheel, after al?
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, going down there,” I said.
“You smel bad,” Riser observed.
“I want to piss my pants,” I said.
“Me, too,” Riser said. “Let’s not and say we did.”
It was an old cha manune joke, not a very good one.
We kept quiet for another few hours, until we came within sight of a long, large machine sitting on top of the floating rail.
Chapter Twenty-Four
THE MACHINE RESEMBLED a giant moth pupa clinging to a stick, with two narrow vanes on each side—no windows, no doors, and no way to climb up.
“It’s a big wagon,” Riser said.
Or a baloon, I thought, somehow tethered to the rail— but it did not bob in the breeze.
We walked around and beneath. If this was a wagon, we might somehow climb up, climb in, make it work, make it move . . . fast!
But it was much too high to touch.
Vinnevra and Mara had plopped down and were watching us as we walked in circles, making our inspection.
“Does it carry Forerunners, or their stuff?”Vinnevra asked.
“You don’t see it?”
“No. Just the rail. What do you see, at the end?” Vinnevra, after a long silence, finaly shrugged. “It goes where we need to go,” she said, and then gave me an apprehensive look.
Arguing with her would have been pointless, even cruel.
You are all crazy here , Lord of Admirals observed wryly.
Forerunners have ruined what’s left of us, raised us up, made us their tools . . . their fools.
“Then go,” I said.
She walked away, looking back, then got a fey look and broke into a lope, as if fleeing from us. Mara loped along beside her, sometimes upright, sometimes on her long arms, swinging body and legs after—less efficient in the open, it seemed to me, than in the trees.
She didn’t seem to need my protection, or want it anymore.
Good.
But I could not bring myself to folow right away. I sat in the dirt, head in hands, sick at heart. Riser sat with me for a few minutes, then got up, walked a few steps, and stared back at me, head cocked.
“Don’t you feel it, too?” he asked.
I did—but I had been trying to ignore it. Vinnevra wasn’t the only one being guided, puled in like a goat on a rope. I saw food,
shelter, protection. And now I smeled the food as wel—great tables loaded with food, enough for hundreds of us.
Crazy inside, worn down inside and out.
Footstep after footstep, folowing the floating rail, hour after hour— and finaly a change, something new on this endless, furrowed field of sterile dirt.
We came to a thick white pole with a wide circle at the top. The rail passed through the circle, at no point touching. I measured with my bleary eyes and decided the circle was big enough to let the transport pass through, but stil, I half-heartedly wondered how the rail just hung there.
Lord of Admirals then condescended to inform me that this was not especialy marvelous. With a kind of easy, instinctive pride, he told me that we—old humans, that is, separating me, his host, from the humans he had known—had once covered many worlds with networks of transportation much like this—rails, poles, and circles.
Far less marvelous than star boats. Which, by the by, we called ships. Star ships.
It occurred to me that Lord of Admirals was feeling something like contempt for al us poor slaves and pets of the Forerunners, so ignorant—but I let it pass. He was dead, I was alive, stil moving of my own wil.
Mostly.
“Did we ever make anything like a Halo?” I asked, hoping to sting him a little. But the Lord of Admirals did not answer. He could withdraw when it suited him into the quiet murmurs that filed my head—hiding behind my own half-formed thoughts like a leopard behind a cane brake. I could not force him out if he did not want to come.
“I take that as a no,” I muttered.
Riser’s forehead glistened with sweat. It did seem the air was warmer here even than in the jungle—warmer and drier. My thirst was fierce. Pretty soon, we’d curl up like earthworms on a flat, sunny rock—al brown and leathery.
“Worse here than when young tough ha manune caught me and tied me to a thorn bush,” he said. “That was before Marontik was much of a town.”
“You didn’t tel me about that,” I said. “I’d have beat them up and thrown rocks.”
“They died before you were born,” Riser said.
“You kiled them?”
“They got old and wrinkled,” he said with a shrug. “I outlived them.”
I didn’t ask if that gave him any satisfaction. Cha manune were not much concerned with vengeance and punishment. Maybe that was one of the secrets to their longevity.
“You stil don’t live as long as Forerunners,” I said, more out of weariness than reproof.
“No, I won’t,” Riser said. “But you wil.”
“How?” I shot back, irritated. I didn’t want to be anything like a Forerunner right now. Riser stubbornly refused to answer, so I let it go.
Another couple of hours’ walking and the wheel’s shadow swept down. We stopped, lay back on the dirt, and Riser and I alowed Lord of Admirals and Yprin to quietly speak, while Mara and Vinnevra snored and the stars roled along in the sky, behind and around the other side of the wheel. Wheels within wheels.
The wolf-orb grew each night. Thirteen thumb-widths, almost.
Somehow Riser and I nodded off, perhaps interrupting the old spirits’ conversation. Just as light returned, we jerked awake, sensing a change in the air—and a soft sound like wind.
The rail wagon whooshed over our heads.
We al stood up and stared. The wagon was just a moving dot, already kilometers away.
“Something’s working again,” Vinnevra said. Mara whistled and grumbled, and Vinnevra agreed with her—whatever it was the ape had said.
“Walk more?” Riser asked her.
“No.” Vinnevra looked around, hands on her hips, and shook her head firmly. “This is where we need to be.”
And it was—if we listened to those inner guides.
Stil, we looked around—nothing but dirt, no water, no food, no shelter—dismayed but hardly surprised. The skin on my face and arms was brown and flaking and Riser was pinking and patchy.
Mara was stil losing fur, though out here, there were no nesting birds she could tempt.
We were a mess, but it was so good to know we had finaly arrived.
Again.
The sky bridge taunted us with its graceful silence.
It didn’t happen right away, but after my thoughts had blurred into an agony of thirst and hunger, and the sun was beyond unbearable, and madness seemed near— The ground shivered.
“Not now,” I tried to say with a thick tongue and crusted lips.
Riser didn’t speak, just lay back flat and clasped his hands over his face.
Then the ground crumbled and split in sections. We crawled every which way until the trembling stopped. When I roled over to look, a platform had broken through the dirt. Shuddering clods marched off its flatness until it was pristine white.
Along the platform’s edge smal poles rose up and benches shaped themselves at the center.
We waited. Anything might happen. The Primordial itself might pop out of the platform and reach out to grab us.
Halo night swept over and the tops of the poles shoved out little blue lamps that cast a steady glow across the platform. We watched al this, not moving, for many minutes, but then, as one— even the ape—we stood up and walked painfuly toward the platform, stepped onto it, and peered up at the lamps.
Riser crawled up on a bench and began picking his feet. I hoisted myself to sit beside him, and Mara joined us. We waited some more. Every so often, my little friend would look up and wrinkle his nose.
Vinnevra kept near the outside of the platform, ready to run if anything bad started to happen. Of course, there was no place to run.
Then we heard a faint humming sound. Across the shadowed land, a star glowed way out along the rail. I watched the star move toward us down the wheel’s shaded curve, trying to figure how far off it was—many hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers.
off it was—many hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers.
Moving fast. It grew to a bright beacon that threw a long beam ahead through the dusty air, and then—another great wagon rushed down upon us—and we fel flat on our faces!
It stopped instantly, silently, right over our heads, ten meters above the platform. Wind folowed and pushed at Mara’s nimbus of fur.
The wind spent itself in gritty dust devils, spinning off into the darkness.
The humming became a low, steady drumming.
Vinnevra had found the strength to run off. I couldn’t see her.
The rest of us stood up under the transport.
A disk cut itself out of one side and descended to the platform.
Again, I flinched—but it was just a disk, curved like the part of the wagon it had come from, blank on both sides. A series of smaler poles rose up around the outside of the disk, minus one, where, I supposed, we were expected to step up and get on.
I caled hoarsely for Vinnevra. Finaly she came out of the darkness and stood next to me.
“What do you think?” I asked. It didn’t much matter whether we did this thing or stayed here. We were being reeled in. We didn’t have much time left either way.
She took my hand. “I go where you go.”
Mara climbed aboard, pushing sideways between the poles. We al folowed. The disk lifted us through the air, tilted us at an angle— I was afraid we might slide and fal off, but we didn’t—and then inserted us through the hole in the side of the transport.
I thought I saw three doors, was about to decide which one to take, but then—there was only one door, and we were inside. The disk sealed itself tight. No cracks, no seams—very Forerunner. The air was cool. Mara had to bend over to fit under the ceiling, which glowed a pleasant silvery yelow.
A blue female appeared—the wagon’s ancila, I guessed, human- looking but about as tal as Riser. The image floated at one end of the transport, toes pointed down. She raised her arms gracefuly and said, “You have been requested. We wil take you where you need to be.”