“Just me,” I insisted. “Clearance will stay here to back us up.” I preferred for the Miner to remain by the seekers, in case Chant and I were suffering from that willful blindness that sometimes afflicts Lifeworkers too fascinated by nature to recognize a threat.

She and I walked across the dried mud. I wore only underlinings, feet bare but for thong-socks. The ground was hard and cold, the air brisk but not dangerously so.

At my signal, Chant fell back about twenty paces—she had wanted to precede me but I forbade it. Our training was explicit in how to approach indigenes, but never had we approached Forerunners in such circumstances. At any rate they were indigenous only by courtesy. The courtesy of ten million years’ habitation was real enough, however.

Beyond a waist-high mud and stone wall, no doubt built to keep out the grazers, a tilled field supported many rows of gray-green stalks topped by spiky leaves, below which hung wrinkled-looking fruit or pods. The wind rustled leaves and fruit. They sounded dry and unappetizing, but whatever their genetics, they looked the part of fixed plants, not Forerunners doing penance rooted in dirt.

Neither of us intruded on the patch. Rather, we kept outside the wall and thus were directed toward the nearest complex of buildings, irregular pentagonal structures made of mud brick, with stones pieced out along their foundations. The mud had been scored with crude strings of unfamiliar symbols. Oblong doorways were spaced one or two to each building, each covered by a rough woven hanging.

In the nearest doorway, a wrinkled, thick hand drew back a hanging, and for just a moment, a shadowy figure stood there, striking an odd pose, naked, as if hoping for inspection and approval. A female, I was fairly sure, but not in her prime, with shrunken belly-teats and very different patterns of facial hair. Most distinct, a line of gray fur reached around from her cheeks to join beneath a flat, pushed-back nose. At least that was classically Forerunner.

The female darted back and the curtain dropped.

In another doorway, back among the main cluster of dwellings, another curtain drew aside and a second figure stepped into filtered sunshine: a male with a square, broad face, thick-furred about chin and forehead. Columnar legs supported a squat and bulky torso. He wore heavy gray clothing. His face was rugged, observant, but lacked any readable expression.

Behind him, silhouetted by the flickering glow of a fire or lantern, stood a younger female dressed in lighter clothing. Sexual dimorphism was evident but not extreme. They were far closer to each other in appearance than I was to the Didact—but of course ours was an artificial dimorphism, rate-determined, and it seemed they had given up all that here, if ever they had possessed it.