“Forerunners,” he mutters, shaking his great head. He stretches out his arms to imitate the image of his younger self, then moves into the image, until he is swarmed by translucent children, all of whom grew up and chose their father’s rate, all of whom died in the war with the humans. The sight is striking—a glowering old Warrior-Servant surrounded by happy youths. These memories must bring far more pain than relief or peace.

And then I understand.

These memories are not meant to soothe. They are meant to prepare. At a wave of his hand, the children vanish. The house seems to draw in a breath of cold wind. He slowly turns and examines me as if I am new and unfamiliar.

“I reject the assertion that you are all the same,” he says. “The unit the Master Builder sent with us into the Burn helped to save me, of that I’m convinced. It performed with extraordinary courage. It was special. He was special.”

My curiosity is intense. The Ur-Didact has yet to tell what happened on the hulk sent into the Burn. No other survivors have been found.

“It—he—came between me and the Gravemind, just as I was being delivered up. Then monitors moved in. Grapplers held and froze Catalog. Before I could see more, I was removed.”

The Ur-Didact shudders, then points his arm along a line that thrusts down through the planet. “She’s here. She’s in the system,” he says, as if sensing the Librarian’s presence across time and space. Instead of joy, however, he exhibits a peculiar bleakness, then contorted anger. He squares his body with mine. “Send Bornstellar to me when his ship arrives. Alone.” He stalks off to a side chamber, and when I try to follow, he waves me off. I am alone on the plaza, under the night’s knotted weave of interstellar mist.

Only a few of the house monitors still function. Many hide in the shadows, eyes glowing like small animals. I am little more than a servant myself now, not of the Didact but of a system of reckoning and justice that may no longer exist.

The shadows grow deeper and longer as the stars wheel westward and a great black torso of uncondensed nebula rises to zenith. One of the functioning monitors approaches. “We should all greet our mistress,” it says.

“Of course.” I am now indeed at the level of these cowering servants. I wonder about the courage of the Ur-Didact’s Catalog. We are all the same. We are not all the same.

But one or many, same or different, I must seek truth. And so I go with the monitor away from the plaza to the landing platform, which minutes later fills with light and echoes with thunder as a Lifeworker ship pushes through the heated air and comes to a pause just centimeters from the buffering arms of its hard light cradle.

THE GATHERING