“I don’t know.”

“Maybe they hope to collect us, as the Librarian collects her beasts?” Catalog withdrew most of its sensors. “Before all connections closed, Haruspis supplied me with a number of records. I have conducted a search and can now recognize the structure.”

“How?”

“Testimony from the Lifeshaper and others across the ecumene,” Catalog said.

“She was deposed?”

“Yes.”

“And you received her testimony?”

“Before the network closed, yes.”

The double bow overwhelmed our visual field.

After a long, agonizing moment—Catalog no doubt luxuriating in its knowledge but utterly silent and still—I asked, “Willing to share?”

String 10

STRING 10

LIBRARIAN

I LOVE PLANETS—those agglomerations of rocks and volatiles found around most stars throughout the galaxy, and even between the stars.

Most living things are born on gas-infused, stony orbs. Still, the exceptions are fascinating. I have long studied those ice-bound moons where blind scuttlers arise in secret oceans to stack rocks and burrow deep. Stifled beneath kilometers of mineral-cold ice, they rarely if ever get to see the stars, living out a dreaming existence in perpetual, sulfur-rich darkness.

Three times I have liberated icy moons—opened crevices in the deep frozen shields and freed the inbred scuttlers. They climbed up and out, were astonished by the depth and emptiness of the unbounded void of space—and then fell back, terrified and discouraged, to seek refuge again beneath the ice. They wiped their minds and their histories of what I had shown them. Now, they do not remember anything about Forerunners.

I do not know if their ice will protect them against the Halos. Likely not. However, a great many were small … less than the size of my hand. That might save them.

How much like those scuttlers all young species are! The empty greatness of space is a thick wall erected between lovers, harsh and cruel.

When Forerunners were young and bound to our natal planet, we must have wondered who and what we were, how we would measure up if we met our peers—or our superiors—out there in the void. But the challenge of simply crossing the void was so tremendous that for millennia after we acquired speech, fire, art, machines, we still clung to our rock and shunned the endless vacuum.

Inexperience—naivety—hope and fear.

Young wisdom.

* * *

Hulk after ancient hulk we carved open without resistance, without reaction. All records within the equivalent of our ancillas—primitive memory stores, huge and bulky—had decayed to random patterns of binary garble.

Binary! After our great memory catastrophes, digital storage had been given way to substrates of quantum foam. Yet on these ships, the last dim hope of log and history crumbled at a touch.

Ten million years is a long time for machines.