“The Master Builder’s fate is here. And so is ours,” Examiner says. “Someone must go to the other Ark and prepare for the unthinkable.”

My task is now clear.

“The Graveminds know they still face a tremendous threat,” Bitterness says. “They know of the existence of the greater Ark. But they may not yet know the whereabouts of the lesser Ark. You must go there and take command. The Flood cannot be allowed to claim victory. They must be stopped, if not for our kind, then for others who may come later.”

The commanders look out beyond the image of Halo and Ark, toward the great dim spread of stars that is our galaxy.

The star roads are coming.

We can all feel them.

String 30

STRING 30

THE LIBRARIAN AND THE UR-DIDACT

MY HUSBAND … HAS become a child again.

But not any sort of child I’d be proud of. Not any sort of child I would trust.

He has stripped off his armor and wanders about our quarters, looking at the things his duplicate has gathered, artifacts and objects of study, remembrances of the time when he was away, in exile or lost, and I briefly had another husband—very much like him.

But no longer. There is no question of him making any attempt to reconcile, of that I am certain. I hardly recognize what he has become.

Still, he has requested this meeting, with the implication that it will be our last.

I sit on a suspensor that takes color and shape beneath me, and he sits beside me, his great head dropping between his thick knees. “Can you know what it was like to be in the Cryptum, leaving our situation to you, while all this spun out of control?” he asks.

I take up his great hand and unfold it, running my own smaller finger along each muscular digit. The hand reflexively closes. Our bodies still carry instructions built in from times long before memory.

“No,” I breathe. “I hope it was peaceful.”

“Quiet, as much as there can be sense or sensation. The Domain can only tell the living what they already know,” he says. “Or what they’ve stored in its expanses. I wandered through all the corridors … so they appeared, anyway. Centuries of wandering through hallways and caverns and even deeper, darker places, lined and fitfully aglow with ancestral records and memories, upwellings of past visits, rarely by me, sometimes by our ancestors … on occasion, our descendants.”

“Descendants?” I ask.

“The Domain keeps its secrets only with difficulty. It wants, it needs, to spread knowledge. It wants to tell us when we’re being foolish, but it can only replay the emotions and memories of those who came before. Still, rarely, it violates its own rules.”

“What about our descendants?” I persist.