Twenty days passed—twenty cycles of the diurnal plasmas. I healed. From my nurse, Calyx—a first-form, tal er than me and graceful, yet also quite strong—I learned that my companions in the Falco were also healing. But before we reunited, another reunion had been arranged.

It was time for me to meet with the Librarian. “She has been expecting you,” Calyx said.

I fol owed him out of the forest.

A transport within the fifth petal carried me toward the main body of the Ark, and a graceful teardrop structure just below the tower that supplied the star of plasmas.

Here, before the meeting, another Lifeworker, an older third-form equipped with a style of armor even more ancient than the Didact’s, conducted her own exacting inspection. She sniffed critical y, then asked me three questions.

I answered them al . Correctly.

She regarded me with an odd expression of concern.

“I am merely his poor double,” I insisted. “I have not integrated—”

“Oh, but you have,” she said. “Whatever you do, please do not disappoint her.

She feels badly about what has happened, but—”

“Why does she feel badly?”

“For interrupting the way of your own growth, and imposing something other.”

“I made that choice,” I said.

“No, Bornstel ar agreed, in part. You are the choice he agreed to, but he did not know the consequences.”

“He—I wil return when my mission is finished.”

“Aya,” the Lifeworker said. “This is a day of joy and sadness for al . We revere our Lifeshapers beyond al Forerunners, and the Librarian beyond al Lifeshapers.

She is our light and our guide. And she has longed for this moment for a thousand years—but not this way. If only…”

But she did not complete that thought.

Now she took my hand and led me through a great arched doorway, into the base of the teardrop. A lift carried us to a wide room covered with a curved canopy that al owed in selected portions of the broad spectrum of the shaft of light. The light here was blue-green. The space was fil ed with specimens from a world I knew nothing of, captured in special cages, immobile, unaware for the time being.

And walking between those cages, inspecting her charges, using her long, graceful fingers to prune and arrange and persuade, confirming their integrity and health, I saw the Librarian.

My wife.

Here, she did not wear armor. She was among her other children, and had never known harm from any of them.

She paused and moved on her long legs to a pathway through the cages. Along that pathway, she approached me slowly, eyes quizzical, face wreathed in a complex expression of joy, pain, and something I could only see as youth.

Eternal y young. Yet this Forerunner was older than me, that is, older than the Didact—over eleven thousand years of age.

“So similar,” she whispered as we stepped toward each other, her voice like a sweet sigh of wind. “So much alike.”

I reached out to her. “I bring greetings from the Didact,” I said, feeling the awkwardness, knowing I bore the same memories … yet wishing to be honest and to honor the reality of our situation.

“Bring me your own greetings,” she responded, leaning her head to one then, then grasping my outstretched hands. “You are him.”

“I am merely—”

“You are him, now,” she insisted, with a sad intensity I did not expect. My emotions leaped out to her, then my arms rose and I clasped her, not understanding, not caring: fulfil ed.

I was with my wife. I was home. Aya!

The other Lifeworkers tending the specimen cages turned away to give us privacy.

“How can I be him and other?” I asked as we embraced. I looked up at her beautiful face, pale blue and pink, feeling the warmth of the naked skin of her lithe arms and the touch of her infinitely subtle fingers.

“The Didact is here,” my wife said. “The Didact is gone.”

And then I knew, and my love was pushed aside by a moment of intense vertigo, as if I were again fal ing through black, starless space.

She clasped my face between her cool hands and looked down into it. “You refused to give Faber what he needed to activate al the Contender-class ancil as.

You refused to give him the location of al your Shield Worlds. It is said that the Master Builder executed you on the San’Shyuum quarantine planet. You are now al I have.

“You are al we have.”

FORTY-TWO

THE LOVE OF old Forerunners is sweet beyond measure. It mattered not our rates or forms. I had a lovely time with my wife, before once again we went our separate ways.

She showed me the work of centuries, the preservation of al life-forms she could locate and gather, preparing to save what she could from the awful, final solution of the Master Builder’s instal ations. I saw fauna and flora and things around and between, strange and beautiful, fearsome and meek, simple and complex, huge and smal , but only a smal sample of a tril ion different species, most now dormant, stored as best they could be on the Ark and what was left of the Halos. Whole creatures alive or suspended, genetic maps, preserved and reduced populations visible only in reconstructive simulation.… The other Halos—if any survived—would have to be dealt with later. There were now not enough, away from the Ark, to complete the Master Builder’s plan. And if those others somehow managed to return to the Ark, no one here would repair, rebuild, replenish them.… I would make sure of that. In time, I would prepare once again the defense I had championed a thousand years ago: my far-spread Shield Worlds, if the Master Builder had not destroyed them.

Time was very short. But we stil had no communications with the capital system.

The entire range of slipspace was in turmoil, and might not settle for years.

Other chores awaited me, as wel . Chores—and personal obligations. I confirmed what I had suspected ever since my revival on Erde-Tyrene. The Librarian had fil ed the humans there with versions of their history that would reawaken in time.

Intel igent species, she told me, are very little indeed without their deep memories.

As I contained the essence of the Didact, the Master Builder must have suspected the value of the two humans, and so I hoped that he had not kil ed them, but hidden them away, where only he might find them again … if he stil lived.

Somewhere in the humans’ awakened memory lay our last hope of defeating the Flood, which was even now ravaging world after world, system after system—more hideous by far than it had been a thousand years before.

More sophisticated, more devious. More vital. And soon to acquire a new Master, if we did not act quickly—if we did not locate the lost instal ation and the former captive.

Ten thousand years ago, on Charum Hakkor, before I resealed its cage, this is what the captive had said to me, speaking in ancient Digon, which it had to have learned from our far-distant ancestors: We meet again, young one. I am the last of those who gave you breath and shape and form, millions of years ago.

I am the last of those your kind rose up against and ruthlessly destroyed.

I am the last Precursor.

And our answer is at hand.