With a twist of judgment, she added, “And some as food.” She paused to enjoy our surprise. Forerunners have not consumed animals for many millions of years. “More interesting still, their animals show descent from the original population. Including those they eat. Even the plants have Forerunner genetics—if they are in fact plants. They likely arrived without a genetic library—hence no way to create a complex ecosystem. They used what they had.” She looked up, eyes round. “I wonder if they’d enjoy eating us?”

Keeper could not contain his disgust. “What could they have done to deserve such degradation?”

“Nothing like it in our history,” Dawn said.

Chant did her best to put together a useful social picture of our long-lost relatives.

Audacity decided that landing directly on the planet still posed too much risk. We could not yet be sure whether what we were seeing was real, or whether the Forerunners below—even should they be the sole masters of this strange world, and not peculiar pets—might be hiding their true level of technology. Keeper in particular favored this view. He preferred an explanation of camouflage and hidden danger over what he deemed Forerunner disgrace.

Audacity brought forth two excursion craft, seekers with the lightest of armaments. A quick lottery of needs and circumstance determined that three of us would descend and two would remain in orbit.

I insisted on joining the excursion.

* * *

Our seekers penetrated a low deck of thin clouds, then followed the sinuous contours of the greatest range of craggy mountains, between which lay immense freshwater lakes. Because the planet’s axis was perpendicular to its orbit, and had been for many hundreds of millions of years, the land had never been subject to heavy winters or severe glaciations. The weather was steady and dull—low overcast much of the time, infrequent but violent thunderstorms, heavy precipitation that nonetheless brought only light snow to the highest mountains.

The planet had only one small ocean that covered the southern polar regions, its dense, salty waters filled with bitter minerals. All the other water on the planet was fresh and contained in the deep, clear lakes.

Our seekers flew over a low mountain ridge, then dropped and hovered a few thousand meters above a brown, gently sloping plain. The breaking of thin lava dikes had long ago broached one of the deep lakes, loosing immense floods that had shaped chaotic terrain across the northern third of the plain. The plantlike growth here was scrubby, set low to resist channeled winds between the wrinkled mountain ridges—winds that blew sand and carved tumuli, caprocks, and other grotesque formations.

At the southern end of the rugged mountains, the mouth of a narrow valley revealed a great cleft in the range, faced with pale vertical faces of granitic rock.

Clearance was not impressed by the local geology. “A place of exile, not opportunity,” he said. “I would not have chosen it.”

“Spoken like a Miner,” Chant said. “Lifeworkers would see other opportunities, other forces at work.”

In my experience, a lean and barren world could force rapid cultural growth that would in turn promote a quick renewal of technology. We do enjoy our creature comforts. But that was not the case here. Who or what had compelled them to seek this strange penance, to become a focus of all evolution, with the unavoidable result of cannibalism?

The seekers landed us within a kilometer of a town. Low, flat dwellings lay like sedimentary layers on the slope of a low ridge.

We climbed down to survey the plain and the flat town. Clearance, on my instruction, stayed close to his vehicle.

A low wall lay within forty meters of our landing. Within the wall, ten squat, tawny-furred animals, each massing about five hundred kilograms, grazed on the few dusky green shoots that poked up through cracked and crumbled soil. The wall was likely a channel to keep small floods from intruding into the town. The grazing animals easily stepped over it to find fresh shoots.

Clouds blew free from the mountains. Sunshine played over the rolling, crackled ground.

“Look at their faces,” Chant said. I already had—and did not like the resemblance. I approached the closest animal. It stood its ground and patiently watched through closely spaced gray eyes.

“Looks like Clearance,” Chant said.

Clearance framed his face with his gloves and looked domestic.

“Stop that,” I said.

“Apologies.”

“More like Keeper,” I suggested. Chant covered her mouth.

I stooped a few meters from the beast—rather, the adapted Forerunner—to more closely examine its feet. The digits and phalanges were indeed based on a stem Forerunner body plan. These creatures were as related to us as their herdsmen in the buildings beyond. But intelligence was not apparent.

The grazer turned its head, incurious, and bent its neck to pluck more shoots.

A few hundred meters to the north, closer to the town’s outlying buildings and surrounded by another low wall, lay a plot of gray-green bushes. If we approached that plot, almost certainly we would be noticed and challenged.

I looked back to Clearance. “It’s much more likely they’ll see our kinship without armor.”

Clearance, standing beside the first seeker, was not enthusiastic. In our helmets, we heard him say, “I doubt they’d recognize us even if we were naked. They’ve fallen so very far.”

“Even so,” I said, then instructed my ancilla. My armor unfolded, pulled away, and arranged itself neatly on the compacted dry mud. My ancilla and I had long ago reached an agreement about solicitous warnings. None were given. It knew my mind.

“I shall go in without armor as well,” Chant said.

“No. Just me.

“Lifeshaper!”

Both of my shipmates looked distressed.

“Just me,” I insisted. “Clearance will stay here to back us up.” I preferred for the Miner to remain by the seekers, in case Chant and I were suffering from that willful blindness that sometimes afflicts Lifeworkers too fascinated by nature to recognize a threat.

She and I walked across the dried mud. I wore only underlinings, feet bare but for thong-socks. The ground was hard and cold, the air brisk but not dangerously so.

At my signal, Chant fell back about twenty paces—she had wanted to precede me but I forbade it. Our training was explicit in how to approach indigenes, but never had we approached Forerunners in such circumstances. At any rate they were indigenous only by courtesy. The courtesy of ten million years’ habitation was real enough, however.

Beyond a waist-high mud and stone wall, no doubt built to keep out the grazers, a tilled field supported many rows of gray-green stalks topped by spiky leaves, below which hung wrinkled-looking fruit or pods. The wind rustled leaves and fruit. They sounded dry and unappetizing, but whatever their genetics, they looked the part of fixed plants, not Forerunners doing penance rooted in dirt.

Neither of us intruded on the patch. Rather, we kept outside the wall and thus were directed toward the nearest complex of buildings, irregular pentagonal structures made of mud brick, with stones pieced out along their foundations. The mud had been scored with crude strings of unfamiliar symbols. Oblong doorways were spaced one or two to each building, each covered by a rough woven hanging.

In the nearest doorway, a wrinkled, thick hand drew back a hanging, and for just a moment, a shadowy figure stood there, striking an odd pose, naked, as if hoping for inspection and approval. A female, I was fairly sure, but not in her prime, with shrunken belly-teats and very different patterns of facial hair. Most distinct, a line of gray fur reached around from her cheeks to join beneath a flat, pushed-back nose. At least that was classically Forerunner.

The female darted back and the curtain dropped.

In another doorway, back among the main cluster of dwellings, another curtain drew aside and a second figure stepped into filtered sunshine: a male with a square, broad face, thick-furred about chin and forehead. Columnar legs supported a squat and bulky torso. He wore heavy gray clothing. His face was rugged, observant, but lacked any readable expression.

Behind him, silhouetted by the flickering glow of a fire or lantern, stood a younger female dressed in lighter clothing. Sexual dimorphism was evident but not extreme. They were far closer to each other in appearance than I was to the Didact—but of course ours was an artificial dimorphism, rate-determined, and it seemed they had given up all that here, if ever they had possessed it.

I was fascinated! Never had I seen Forerunners so different from our root stock: less than a meter and a half in height, broad across shoulders and midriff, thick of leg and short of arm, with long, curling fingers—five fingers only on each hand.

I subdued a familiar giddiness of discovery. My ancilla would have controlled that response with a subtle tickle in my brain stem. Now, I swallowed hard and drew myself back to full alertness, forcing a deliberate pinch of anxiety.

The wind ruffled my underlinings, as I had expected, making my own shape clear. To them I would appear strangely tall and slender, eyes large, skin pale. I doubted they would recognize our kinship by sight alone.

I held out my hands.

One thing we do know is that early Forerunners had a keen sense of smell and used it to determine kinship and other social relations.

The breeze now blew from behind. The male sniffed through wide nostrils, wider than my own. He stepped forward with a light sway, bandy-legged to a degree that reminded me of a first-form Warrior-Servant, around the corner of the dwelling, where he stopped and gestured to the female, who now also came forward.

“All is well, we have traveled far, and we are here to speak with you,” I said in the most ancient known Digon dialect. “We come from our old home to this new home. Are you well?”

The male waved his hand and made an ululating hoot. The female shunted sideways toward the male. Neither seemed afraid. The female canted her head, studying me. Her nostrils flared. It didn’t seem much of a stretch to interpret her reaction as intrigued but puzzled.

Throughout the dwellings, more hangings parted and other figures appeared—males, females, all of middle age or older. Obviously, they allowed themselves to age in natural time. No children were visible.

On all the dwellings, the walls had been stamped with unfamiliar symbols. But along the outward-facing wall of one dwelling, prominently displayed, ten large, circular emblems had been carved, repetitions of a mark so often found in Forerunner decorations that, in our daily lives, we hardly notice its presence: a circle around a treelike branching of angular veins.

Long ago, among Lifeworkers, I had heard it referred to as the Eld. Others—mostly Builders—called it the Tree-mark. Forerunners had associated it with the Mantle for as long as can be remembered, but its origin remained a mystery.

And yet here it was—confirming … what?

Memorializing what, precisely?

Again I felt a deep unease. To come all this distance and find brothers and sisters completely isolated, and in such circumstances … yet still exhibiting the most ubiquitous mark of Forerunner culture! Why should that surprise or chill me? But it did.

Something in me did not want to find the Eld, with all its associations and connections. Not here.

A small crowd gathered in a loose clump between the low dwellings. The bulky male had ceased his hooting. No one else made a sound.

I shifted my gaze around the group, then repeated what I had said before, adding, “We are Forerunners. You are the same. Is there anyone here who speaks of times past?”

The old Digon did not come easily—no doubt the ancilla could have pronounced the words better, or gotten the grammar more correct. Words live as genes live, some parts conserved, others wildly variable. But then, we already knew it was unlikely they understood even this old tongue.

An older female broke from the group and with a shrug of her shoulders walked toward us, stopping within three paces. Chant seemed ready to intervene, but I waggled my hand behind my back.

The old female stared beyond my shoulder, then turned her eyes on me. She pulled thin lips back from strong gray teeth, favoring me with a full-blown smile. These Forerunners were still capable of that rictus, while I could barely manage to lift the corners of my lips!

But I did my best and again held out my hands.

The female grasped my outstretched fingers. Her own fingers were covered with dirt and green stains. They felt greasy, but her grip was firm. She tugged gently, urging me to come with her, and again favored me with a smile.

I followed. After ten long steps, we seemed to cross a line, and the rest rushed forward to surround us. A smaller group broke free and encircled Chant. In her armor, she towered above them all, in a posture of calmness and caution—as we had been trained. Best to appear neither too friendly nor defenseless and predictable.

The crowds merged, corralling us into their center, touching us not unkindly but with rude familiarity. Chant’s eyes flashed. Their touches grew more intimate. They wished to know everything about me. What they discovered surprised them. They pulled back a little, dismayed, but kept smiling. Our methods of reproduction had diverged substantially over millions of years.

The crowd now parted, forming a channel down which another, much older female, with stiff, steely gray fur on both crown and shoulders, pushed through, waved the first female aside, and took a position beside me, then looked at all the others, as if daring them to interfere.

She turned and grasped my wrist, lifting my arm.

The others pulled back.

She looked up into my face, smiled brilliantly, showing strong teeth—gray and none too clean. At that moment, I swear that but for the nose and fur she seemed almost human—something in her eyes, her curiously committed expression, an atavistic glimpse at what may have been our common roots long, long ago.…

And then she bit me. Fastened those gray teeth into my forearm, jerked her jaw sidewise, opening up shallow but painful wounds. I did not move, did not cry out—held my ground.

She jerked back, blood purple on her lips and teeth—my blood—and again that smile! I pulled loose, looking down on her in wonder. She seemed proud of my reaction.