The Ur-Didact stands motionless in the middle of their estate’s main dwelling, clad in a new suit of combat armor, a dark presence in a grim, chaotic scene. Council agents ransacked the private quarters as well. The house is in a state of perilous confusion. In two of the six wings, chambers and rooms climb up and over each other and rearrange randomly beneath the glowing night sky.

He has attempted to restore some order, but the quarters where he and his wife raised their children and lived through their brightest and darkest centuries are too traumatized to recover without demolition, wiping, replacement.

Many of the Librarian’s specimen stasis bubbles have been breached by Council agents attempting to find evidence against her. Their contents set free, many of them attacked each other or fled. Mangled cadavers have been arranged in odd heaps by house monitors. Few are now alive to eat or to be eaten.

He approaches a badly injured tarantovire, fifty times his size, a gentle beast of intelligence and wisdom.

“She will return soon, old one,” he murmurs, stroking the great head behind one glazed and fading eye. “What will she find? A broken and crippled home, a broken and crippled husband.” He glances at me, still stroking the leathery hide. The beast is dead. “We have become our own enemy, Catalog.”

I am too saddened to reply, and it takes a great deal to sadden a Juridical.

Glowing clouds of interstellar gas slide below the horizon, remnants of the supernova wavefront that passed a thousand years ago.

The Ur-Didact summons memories of children from long ago. The young ones leap and scamper about, and I glimpse the Didact in those far-gone years, reaching out to lift a young female to his shoulders, or parrying a stick playfully swung by a young male, or bending to pet a furry creature held by another child … a pet not unlike a small human, I think. There is something different about this Didact from his younger, projected self. Something I cannot completely understand.

“No war, no fighting,” he murmurs. “Eternal bliss, progress and development without pause! Impossible dream.”

“The Librarian’s dream?” I ask, too boldly.

“Not at all. She understands life! How could they not? Peace and cooperation, never painful or deadly competition—that’s what they must have desired. They understood nothing about their creations, really—else why open themselves to that sort of rebellion? Madness! It could only lead to madness.”

“You speak of the Precursors.”

He ignores my question and asks his own:

“What is this other like, the foolish Manipular I was forced to imprint?”

“To my knowledge, he has conducted himself well, even impressively,” I say.

“I should not resent him. The choices they made…”

“Precursors?” I ask.