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.”