“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.