The image flickered, grew larger, than shrank. A clear outline was impossible to fix. We might be looking down at our ship, seconds later—or at another vessel only vaguely like ours, from billions of years before.

Clearance apologized for presumption, then floated close to me on the translucent bridge. “Lifeshaper, I have an idea … Not a very good idea, I’m afraid … but interesting.”

Keeper joined us.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“If these masses are indeed time-phased mirrors, then they could have been used as blunt-force counterbalance for a series of massive portals. Not the techniques we use now, yet, there is something familiar about them.”

“Of course!” Keeper said. “Brilliant. Reconciling and anchoring all at once.”

“They may have been used by Forerunners … our ancestors,” Clearance said.

Dawn and Chant tapped his shoulders. In the face of this approval from higher rates, Clearance shook his head in a not very convincing display of humility. “It’s just an idea. I don’t know where it came from.”

“Wouldn’t that mean moving an exceptionally large number of vessels?” I asked.

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Clearance said.

Keeper murmured, “They could hold all the causal burdens of our far-traveling ancestors. Great middens of contradiction…”

I felt like I was being led into shadows. Or led by shadows. The huge black sphere did not respond to probe or signal—merely echoed what we sent down, shifted it ahead and then backward a few seconds, but giving no clue to the sphere’s composition or internal structure, if any. Very likely, I thought, the other spheres in this system would behave the same.

“These stars are haunted,” Chant-to-Green said softly. The others looked at her with some distaste.

I suggested that Audacity make the bridge opaque. The object below was too distracting. Dispiriting.

“For the moment, we’ll move off and focus our study on the planets,” I said. “If the spheres are Forerunner, then this system may hold other surprises.”

“Something Audacity can’t see?”

“Possibly.”

Our armor slowed us again as we traveled downstar several hundred million kilometers. I had instructed Audacity’s ancilla to monitor changes and wake me—but not the others—if something significant occurred.

It did.

After reviving me, Audacity revealed that, less than seven hundred million kilometers from the star, sensor readings were abruptly and erratically changing. From our upstar orbit, significant details had been veiled. We were able to see more clearly the nature of the inner worlds.

Some Builders believed, as an article of faith, that Forerunners had once possessed superior technologies long since lost. If ancient Forerunners had created those spheres, then placed a veil over this system, a veil that had persisted for ten million years, then that tradition seemed entirely justified.

All very intriguing. But the larger questions remained unanswered: What happened here, so long ago—and why? And how did it end?