“Correct.” He sounded proud, as if I were some son who had performed wel. “And not just any center. This is the Cartographer, the core of the wheel’s structural knowledge. The Halo’s automated control systems were sabotaged by rebelious Forerunners before they were infected and died. The Cartographer is al that remains— but it wil suffice.

“Three monitors wil be stationed here, relaying the Cartographer’s measurements to al the others. But for our signals, they wil be nearly blind . . . making our work more difficult. But . .

.”

His image wavered. When it returned, Forthencho seemed perturbed, even distressed, if that was possible for him, doubly isolated from the living.

“One of our questions is about to be answered,” he said. “Brace yourself, young human. We wil not be handling the controls ourselves. Gods help us al.”

The war sphinx wove through and around beautiful, graceful structures that seemed untouched by recent battles. My mind had already filed to overflowing with visual impressions, and now I simply wanted to sleep and absorb it al, give myself time to slot al that I had seen and my reactions to those sights into useful categories.

I could no longer feel my hands at al!

My eyelids drooped, my thoughts blurred into fever. But stil—no respite. With a lurch, the sphinx flew fast as a hornet up against a wal, stopped instantly—and connected. The hatch opened. The monitor supporting Forthencho disengaged from its cubby and the couch opened wide, expeling me with a long pale curl, like a tongue pushing out an unwanted gobbet of food.

For a moment, I seemed to see my body from another location —above and to one side. The body opened its eyes.

Then we rejoined, my body and I. But the peculiar feeling did not diminish. Something was changing—something had changed since the idyl in the false woods.

I stood on a flat space surrounded by a tangle of other platforms, some flat, others curved inward or out, arranged in many directions —a dozen ups and downs. Each platform faced a display on which glowed complicated visuals of the wolf-faced planet, the far stretch of the wheel, close-ups of damaged regions—even other control stations.

“This is the Cartographer,” Forthencho said.

“Why are we alone?”

“Are we? Enjoy it while you can,” he said.

The wal behind us shivered as other vehicles attached and spewed out nine more humans and as many monitors. Forthencho’s monitor nudged me abruptly toward a steeply curved wal. I thought I might have to crawl, but I was able to walk along the curve, upright, toward another level at right angles to where we had begun.

In normal circumstances, the abrupt shift might have made my stomach rebel, but I felt nothing.

Other humans, for the most part elderly, were chivvied onto opposite platforms. Only two were as young as me.

No Riser. Not at this station.

Then, from the opposite side, came those whom Forthencho had been informed were to handle the actual controls. Another cold spike went through my head.

The plague-stricken corpses we had seen on our journey had been in the last stages of the Shaping Sickness, supported and maintained by the strange variety of armor—products or patients, of that mysterious entity the Lord of Admirals had caled the Composer—which must have existed even in his day.

But even in their worst contortions, those remains had displayed none of the perverse and infernal creativity lavished on these livid, ghastly combinations: a single Forerunner head covered with suppurating scales, shared by two partial bodies, with four legs— A great lump of quivering, boneless flesh surrounded by a fringe of drooping appendages, ten shrunken arms or legs, undulating out and back to transport the mass to its position— And around these wretches another type of constraint or support: flexible harnesses, fine meshes of wiring and tubing, radiating from a blue metal disk. A serpent oozed along with sinuous motions, then raised a torso, from the chest of which a jammed-in head peered out, eyes alert, showing what remained of the face—a face contorted with pain. The eyes sought me out. They were Forerunner eyes—slanted, gray, deeply inteligent. They reminded me of Bornstelar or the Didact.

And suddenly I felt pity—pity mixed with abject horror. “I can’t do this,” I whispered. “Let them al die. Let me die. Let this end right here!”

“If it does end here,” Forthencho told me, “then humanity ends here. Al that you know, al those whom you know and al that they have ever known—finished! Get up and stand for your species.

This is our last chance.”

His disembodied courage hardly fazed me at first. I was exhausted, my emotions skirling way beyond fear, into an acid nothingness of pure panic.

And with the fear came short relief. At least I could stil feel something!

Forthencho’s monitor withdrew and flung out a swift dart that struck my thigh. My panic faded instantly, as did half of my mind— the half that judged, decided, felt an urge to preservation.

I actualy smiled.

“This wil last for a brief time,” the monitor said. “At the end of euphoria wil return cooler thought patterns. Take care. You are being measured.”

“By who?” I croaked, wiping drool from my lips.

Forthencho seemed far off now, like an insect lost in the muddle of floors and monsters and glowing curtains.

“Who’s measuring me? Why?”

No answer.

The serpentine creature that had stared at me joined us on the platform. It curled its fleshy tail, wrapped in netting, wires, and scraps of sticky fabric, and rose up again, then reached out to empty air—while the skewed platform thrust up a slender pilar to meet its gray, grasping fingers.

With a sidewise glance through agonized eyes, the transformed Forerunner assumed a firm stance— Studied me.

And took control.

The Lord of Admiral’s monitor rose behind me. Something flowed outward from the monitor, around both my head and the monster’s torso, and my direct view of the platforms was replaced by a far-spanning perspective on the wheel and the planet.

Turning my head, I seemed to see things in great detail, with a fine sense of depth. My “eyes” might have been hundreds of kilometers apart. I could perceive the closing distance between the Halo and the wolf-faced planet; I could also see a portion of the wheel beginning to torque in the gravitational pul of that icy, rocky sphere.

I understood a few of the symbols that now appeared in and around these objects. But the Forerunner beside me—I could sense its cold, sour presence both mentaly and physicaly—understood perfectly wel, and it guided my hands across the knobs with whispered suggestions.

The touch of its hands—repelent, pitiable, desperate. Why both of us were necessary, I could not guess. Yet al across the wheel, the adjustments made by this extraordinary team began to have an effect.

The Halo, thirty thousand kilometers in diameter, was precessing to a new angle in its orbit, facing off against the approaching planet, just under ten thousand kilometers. Our combined speed was bringing us to a rapid close, but long before the planet struck, its mass would severely torque the wheel, possibly even break it apart,

and so other systems were being brought into play. The monitor, the disintegrating Forerunner—along with an educational residue from the Lord of Admirals—alowed me to folow and even understand some of what was happening.

The Forerunner beside me, with his (or her—I could not tel)

hand now lying beneath mine on the controls, felt a pain I could hardly imagine. The distorted hand was exerting less and less pressure. I thought it likely that the controls could not, after al, be operated with purely human guidance—but I had no idea how long these pitiful creatures could avoid becoming puddles of slime, whatever the Composer had or had not done to keep them alive.

The Shaping Sickness—the Flood—had rearranged al their internal order, preparing these bodies for a new kind of existence in which the individual identity would be, for the most part, erased.

But enough identity stil remained for it to wish to carry out its final duty, before it either disintegrated completely—or fulfiled that other destiny imposed by the Shaping Sickness—and even young, naïve Chakas had a vague inkling of what that might be.

For now, however, the wires and mesh kept it from that fate.

This was becoming more than one kind of race.

Forthencho, seeing what we had found in the lake town, trapped in a Forerunner cage—, had caled it Gravemind. Tagged to that word in the Lord of Admiral’s experience was a half-buried awareness that the Primordial itself had not been, precisely speaking, one creature, but three, four, five, six—a dozen! Forthencho had never learned the actual number.

Having undergone that disintegration and dying of past individuals and rebirth into something vastly more powerful, al these creatures had joined milions of years before into its own early Gravemind, far more than the sum of its parts.

I see by your copious perspiration that you have witnessed such transformations. But like frightened children, you have not entirely understood their implications.

I have, and I do.

Chapter Thirty-Three

YOU HAVE ASKED me about the Didact. I have not provided much in the way of useful information, because during the time in which I knew him, I was only minimaly educated and could not properly interpret what I saw and experienced.

That changed as I accessed the memories and knowledge of the Lord of Admirals. Yet even his experience of the Didact had been for the most part confined to remote observation.

But the intimacy of combat—of matching strategy against strategy, and more intimate yet, tactics against tactics—had provided Forthencho with an inner understanding of the Didact that likely only a few Forerunners possessed. For the depth of the human-Forerunner conflict had led up to, and over, the brink of near-extinction, which revealed a kind of animosity—a raw, vigorous, yet completely rational enmity—unlikely to be found among those of the same kind. At least, unlikely among those who are sane.

We kil mice that invade our grain stores—kil them without mercy—but only the feeble-minded hate the mice.

But there is yet one more occasion on which I encountered the Didact, and that propeled my understanding of what this Warrior- Servant was capable of on a new level.

This insight is what you are after, above al. I am wel aware my functions are failing. But you must indulge me. I owe you nothing. I am no longer human; I have not been human or even a living thing for over a thousand centuries. You wil not be able to preserve my experiences and memory from more than a smal fraction of that period, and yet, what I have been and done looms over my thin moment of humanity like a mountain rising over a pebble.

And it seems likely, as I observe your concern, that you are not yet cognizant of the one great truth that I offer you—the truth that changes al the equations of our history.

That amuses me.

Al around, on al the platforms, humans had paired off with Forerunners in their final stages of transformation—soon to become useless, I thought, if not to actualy die . . . a mercy.

Then, a great tunnel grew out before me, its shining wals blocking out my view of the platforms. The wals gleamed with arrow-flights of briliant sparks, and sharp musical notes rang in my ears, discordant and frightening.

The linear sparks in the tunnel darkened to dul red, then died away like the embers of an old fire. I felt only intense cold. For a moment, I seemed to float in the tunnel surrounded by the last of the sparks.

The tunnel then turned completely gray and lifeless.

I tried desperately to perceive myself as occupying a point in space, a fixed position, and could not—there was only the tunnel and memories faling in line behind me like leaves.

An ancila appeared, briliant green.

The ancila came between this blurred-out, uncertain me and the pitiful remains of my companion. My eyes suddenly focused—for the last time. I raised one hand and looked at it, wondered at how beautiful it was, moving its fingers at my command, obeying my wil, our wil—just like the wheel. But so slowly!

Reaction time was crucial.

“You wil connect directly to the Cartographer,” the ancila said.

“This wil require interface adjustment.”

The Forerunner turned away what was left of its face, shuddering as if at some sacred violation.

“We are instructed by metarch-level command to reveal al,” the ancila said. “We have no choice but to obey. The Cartographer contains al designs and locations and circumstances of this instalation, past and present. Al changes are recorded here.

“Preparations are necessary.”

Another dart jabbed into my calf, and now the sparks raced through my body, rather than outside. I felt pain everywhere, and then a startling clarity.

Between my body and the decayed Forerunner’s bulk rose a suspended rod about as thick as my arm, and from that rod flew thousands of glistening strands like spiderwebbing; the strands stitched up one side of my body, covering me with gossamer, while more strands laid themselves down over the Forerunner’s upper torso.

It squirmed in fresh agony.

The tunnel now came alive to us. To both of us—I seemed to merge with my companion, and even, for a moment, feel its pain as wel as my own—until al was submerged in an ecstasy of total information.

My eyes and ears were laid siege. Both of us blended with the tunnel displays, far more complex and detailed than anything before.

More surprising, I understood what I was seeing—al of it!

Comprehension came to me through the Forerunner—and suddenly I knew how to act, how to coordinate with hundreds of other, similar pairs located around the wheel.

We became the Halo. I could feel the stresses, the peril—and the means we might use to escape, as a runner fleeing a predator feels the ground beneath his feet.

Exalted! Godlike energy and power, like nothing I had ever known. If this was what it meant to be a Forerunner, than I would have gladly resigned my humanity. Al my tasks, however tiny, brought me intense joy; al seemed supremely important, and perhaps they were, for a calculus of preservation was being made even now by the monitors and their hideous tools, by us: when to bring which systems into play, how long to use them, and in what sequence to cut them off.