* * *

The first evening after our return, my sister joined me on the lakefront veranda of the main domicile and sat next to me as the tiara of three smal , bril iant suns sank below the horizon, casting al in a shimmering twilight. There fol owed an unusual y bril iant display of aurora. I could almost make out the additional refraction caused by the fields that protected us from the nastiest radiations of those smal , bril iant dwarf stars.

“Did you ever find your treasure?” she asked gently, touching my arm. If that was meant to divert my gloom or otherwise cheer me, it did not.

“There is no treasure,” I said.

“No Organon?”

“Nothing remotely like that.”

“Everyone around here is acting very mysterious of late,” she said. “Father in particular. It’s like he’s carrying the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders.”

“He’s an important Builder,” I said.

“He’s been important since I can remember. Is he more important now than he used to be?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How?”

“I’d like to know more about that myself.”

“Now you’re being mysterious.”

“I saw things … terrible things. I’m not sure how much I can explain without causing trouble.”

“Trouble! You love trouble.”

“Not this kind.”

Time to change the subject, she saw. She looked me over with that combination of half-concealed appraisal and kind judgment she had inherited from our mother.

“Mother wonders if you plan to redeem your mutation and reshape yourself,” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Why? Am I especial y ugly?”

“Before we females are betrothed, a little slumming between rates is almost mandatory. You have a brutish aspect that would suit a few of my friends perfectly.

Do you plan on becoming a Warrior?”

Now she was teasing. I ignored the gibe, but felt a twinge at the real possibility.

“My life is no longer my own,” I said. “Perhaps it never was.”

A sharp retort almost came to her lips—I could tel by her expression she was on the verge of saying I was ful of self-pity. She would not have been wrong. But she subdued the impulse, and I took the unspoken advice to heart.

After a long moment, as darkness fel , the nebulae grew brighter in our accustomed eyes, and the veranda was subtly lit and warmed from beneath, she asked, “What real y happened out there?”

It was now that Mother appeared, walking with her perpetual and almost ageless grace across the veranda. She motioned for another chair and, when it formed, sat beside us with a long, grateful sigh. “It’s good to have my finest children al with me again, al here at home,” she said.

“Bornstel ar was about to tel me what happened on Edom,” my sister said.

“Edom! Would that were al to the story. We have punished your swap-family for al owing the influence of a Lifeworker to lead you astray.”

“Astray…” My sister luxuriated in that word. One last late aurora waved its slow banner, suffusing her smooth face with a flowery pink glow that plunged a barb of regret through me. I would never again share her innocence, her sense of adventure.

“And I certainly hope to pass along a few of the Council’s fines,” Mother added.

“We may yet lose this world because of your ‘adventures,’ Bornstel ar. I hope they were worth it.”

“Mother!” My sister seemed surprised and distressed. I was not. I had expected this moment for most of my return journey.

“Is any sort of ‘tel ing’ al owed?” Mother asked. “You left Edom. You were advanced to maturity by a disgraced Warrior-Servant.”

“By the Didact,” I said.

“The dissident Promethean—banished from the Council?”

“Victor over humans and San’Shyuum, protector of the ecumene for twelve thousand years.” My other memory recal ed this with no pride, only a sense of regret that more could not have been done.

“Is it al true?” Mother asked, her voice soft and a little frightened. The tale of my travels and adventures had been told to her in no depth, apparently, and with major deletions.

“It’s true.”

“How could you al ow yourself to be so misguided?”

“Edom isn’t far from Erde-Tyrene. I went there to seek treasure. I was led to believe there might be Precursor artifacts. But I found nothing of that sort. Instead, I was guided by a pair of humans to the Didact’s Cryptum.”

My sister’s esteem grew. “A Warrior Cryptum? You opened it?”

“And helped to revive him. He did not cal down punishment. He recruited me.”

My mother tied together the obvious knots of the story. “Al this was the Librarian’s scheme, perhaps?”

“It seems so.”

“Then under the compel ing influence of an ancient leader, you joined the Didact’s cause.” She was trying to put a kind mask on the whole—in her view—sordid episode. “He no doubt required your help to accomplish his peculiar ends. And because of your youth, you could not have understood how that might complicate your father’s work and cause great harm to our family.”

“My body isn’t the only thing that’s changed,” I said. “I learned much that is hidden from Manipulars and even most Forerunners. I learned about something cal ed the Flood.”

My sister looked between us, uncomprehending.

Mother’s expression shifted in an instant from patient sadness to stiff formality.

“Where did you hear of that?” she asked.

“Partly from the Didact, and some from the Domain itself.”

“Then you have experienced the Domain,” my sister said. “And from the perspective of an ancient warrior! What’s that like?”

“Confused,” I admitted. “I haven’t integrated my perceptions. The knowledge is primitive at best, and I can’t go back without further guidance … I think. At any rate, I haven’t accessed the Domain since my armor was taken away on the San’Shyuum quarantine world.”

“Quarantine!” my sister exclaimed. “I’ve heard about the San’Shyuum. Was it marvelous and sensuous?”

“Enough has been said of that.” Mother looked around the veranda and seemed to be surveying the entire estate through her ancil as, as if anticipating Council spies, more fines, and even more severe correction. “I’ve heard of the Flood. It was a mysterious stel ar disease that caused radiation anomalies. It severely damaged a number of Forerunner colony worlds in the outer reaches of the galaxy, several centuries ago.” This seemed to cost her considerable effort. I saw clearly the burden that had been placed upon her in the last few months. I could bear responsibility for only so much of that burden. “We must await the judgment of your father,” she final y said, drawing back her survey, no doubt to the relief of ancil as around the planet.

“Father’s changed, too—he looks as if he’s been groomed and tutored for great advancement,” I said. “Did the Master Builder mentor him for his last mutation?”

“Enough!” Mother cried, and stood. Dozens of little servant units scattered. With a shiver, she suggested we retire to contemplate the Mantle before spending the hours of darkness in private study. She then walked out quickly, scattering the units again, and left my sister and me under the faint wisps of nebular glow and stars both diffuse and sharp, as if caught behind a sweeping, broken veil of tattered fog.

“What is happening to this family?” my sister asked. “It can’t al be your fault. Even before you left—”

“Mother’s right,” I said.

“What is the Flood?” she asked abruptly, her instincts sharp. “Mother seems to know something … I certainly don’t.”

I shook my head. “Frightful stories concocted for political gain, and perhaps that’s al .” Was I now misleading my own sister? With a shrug, I added, “I defer to Father’s judgment.”

“Oh you do, now?” she said.

We parted at the gate to the veranda, and I returned to my room high in a tower looking out over the nearest disk-sea, its rim surrounded by cascading waters, beneath the ever-changing gal ery of our sky: newborn stars, dying suns, the great turmoil in which Forerunners had seen first light.

I had done nothing for my family. Perversely, I now felt more connection with the Didact than I did with them—and even more perversely, perhaps that was how I would redeem myself to family and Forerunners alike.

How many betrayals could it take to go ful circle?

It was now even more imperative that I learn who I actual y was, and what I was about to become. No one could tel me. No one could teach me.

TWENTY-NINE

THAT NIGHT—AND many after—were tumbled and confused. I sat surrounded by gently flickering displays that delivered little of the information that I requested and needed. The Domain was stil a closed puzzle box. Sometimes I felt its touch, but never long enough to immerse myself or study its nature and contents.

Instead, I watched the sky, tracking the reentry trails of hundreds of Builder transports coming and going. So many ships of late. So much activity. I had always known my father was important, but suspicion had blossomed into certainty that he was in fact crucial to the Master Builder’s plan. So much hatred directed at the Warrior-Servants.

What part did Father play in their reduction? Was he aware of the damage to our traditions, to the protection of the Mantle itself?

Visions of the prisoner of Charum Hakkor, whatever that was, now loose and beyond the reach of the Didact.

Missing for forty or fifty years.

And, always looming, the specter of that vast slender ring—underscored by the strange horror of Master Builder’s destruction of the war sphinxes and their impressions of the Didact’s children.

* * *

What I had managed to learn about the Forerunner schism was a slender thread, but stil intriguing. My other memories stil withheld those times from me, perhaps waiting for more sophistication—or the right moment.

Ten thousand years ago, just after the conclusion of the human-San’Shyuum war, the most exalted of the Warrior-Servants, the Prometheans, had been ascendant among Forerunners, as high in social standing and power as they would ever reach. Their downfal came as a great strategic decision was being made. Behind this maneuvering lay a threat from outside the galaxy—theoretical, perhaps, but terrible nonetheless. Remembering what the Didact had told me, I surmised that this threat was what humans had once fought against and defeated, or pushed back, even while warring against the Forerunners: the Flood. Of that I could stil learn little or nothing, but I was sure my mother’s tale of stel ar disease was simply a cover.

The secret of the human victory against the Flood had never been revealed.

But al had anticipated that the Flood would return.

The Master Builder seemed to have asserted that a new grand strategy (and a new weapon, as wel ?) made old-fashioned warriors and armies and fleets unnecessary.

Shortly thereafter, the Didact and al his fel ow Prometheans were removed from the Council. I presumed this was when the Didact was forced into exile and entered the Cryptum.

From that time until now, over a thousand years, Warrior-Servants had been increasingly marginalized, their rates reassessed, their forces and fleets and armies disbanded.

* * *

Night upon night I struggled with the limited feeds, and day after day I suffered under the polite condescension of my father and the sad reckoning of my mother.

I had hardly even begun to explore the depths of the Didact’s imprint, stil slowly opening and expanding within me. There was a reason for the concealment and slow unfolding. Those resources were not for my personal entertainment, nor even for my own growth and edification. They had to be buried deep against intrusive access—to be unlocked only if I returned to a position of importance, responsibility.

Only if I dared.

If I lost the protection of my father and fel into the hands of the Master Builder one more time, I might be dangerous to the Didact as wel . My other memories could be painful y yanked out and put on display for the Master Builder’s benefit, to scour for incriminating information.

Perhaps that had already happened to the humans.

I could not bear the thought that the Master Builder might even now be tossing aside the spent corpses of Chakas and Riser and laying low Erde-Tyrene, snuffing out potential resistance—shoving aside and burying anything and anyone that stood in his path.

THIRTY

MY RESTLESSNESS TURNED me into a wanderer.

A Forerunner household never sleeps. There is no equivalent of nighttime and rest, but there are moments of repose when al retire for individual contemplation and to prepare for the next round of activities. In traditional Builder households, these moments are sacrosanct. Thus during any given day-night cycle, there are hours when the house—and in our case, much of the planet—becomes quiescent.

The streets and byways reduce their flow. Even the ancil as and automated systems reduce their on-cal activities.

But I did not. I preferred to take my exercise alone, without armor, simply to al ow my developing self—whatever that might be—to communicate its direction. I was stil mutating, stil changing in ways none could predict. The Didact had done a real number on me.

And so I walked. I paced. I explored kilometers of corridors leading to hundreds of empty chambers, chambers that re-created their elaborate hard-light decor only in the presence of Forerunners. Parts of our house and estate buildings had not been visited for hundreds of years. Many contained tributes and records of past members of our clan and al ied clans, including ancestors of the Master Builder himself. I took a perverse interest in the Master Builder’s relation to my family, and learned through reactivated displays—pitiful y enthusiastic about final y being observed—of great contracts and political al iances stretching back twenty-five thousand years, long before my Father’s inception.