< Once it’s no longer in contact with you, it’ll explode. > “I said a little.”
Prone didn’t answer, but he fiddled with the straps and Jul felt more comfortable as the pressure eased. It was loose enough to slide over his head. He wasn’t going to risk testing Prone’s warning, but he resolved to work out some way of exploiting that. In the meantime, he contented himself with scratching to relieve the itch.
But removing the harness was no escape on its own unless he found a way out of the sphere.
“Can you read al Forerunner symbols?” he asked.
< Yes. > “Surely they told you the places they might go if there was a crisis, if only to help you to help them.”
< There were locations they didn’t reveal for our own safety.> “Ah, because of the Flood.” That would steer Magnusson wel away from Jul’s plan. “Is the Flood more widespread than this galaxy?”
Prone didn’t respond. Unlike humans, they didn’t seem able to lie at al , just answer or not answer. And what was this Didact? Perhaps he was another form of the Flood, or some enemy of the Forerunners. The only place Jul would be able to ask Prone that question was in the underground chamber. He needed to thicken his smokescreen a little more.
“This world alarms me,” he said. “I get lost walking through doors that I can’t even see.”
< These are for safety in case the Flood contagion breached this shield world. There are many such barriers within barriers that we can use to contain contamination. > “Tel me if the Flood is stil out there somewhere.”
< I can’t. I don’t know. > “But the Forerunners must have known.”
Jul gazed at his belt, inscribed with the writing of beings that had died or vanished so long ago, and felt satisfied that Magnusson would be wel on the way to believing that his focus was on a spiritual mystery. He got up and walked slowly toward the spire, trying to remember what he’d done last time to trigger whatever kind of portal had taken him under the structure.
< Remember, > Prone said, drifting after him. That was quite devious for a Huragok. He real y didn’t want the humans to know about something.
< Remember not to stray too far. > Jul ambled up to the spire and wandered around, touching the carved stone until he felt the cobwebs brush his face again. He found himself back in the chamber, this time with Prone.
“Tel me why I must avoid the Didact,” he said. There had to be some portal connected with this. That was the name that had made Prone most anxious. Jul needed to know what the risks were when he worked out how to activate a portal and take the plunge into the unknown. “Is he the Flood? Is he another form of the Flood?”
< He was of the warrior caste. A Forerunner. He despised humans.> “So do my people. I don’t understand.”
< If he still lives, then he may return from exile. He only knows war. He tried to fight the Flood. He tried to destroy the humans. > This Didact sounded like a perfectly sensible person who knew a threat when he saw one. “How long has he been gone?”
< A hundred thousand years. > That was very disappointing. It was now dawning on Jul that this wasn’t making sense. That point in time seemed to be a watershed for Forerunner events. This wasn’t history; this was a myth. It surprised him that the Huragok would take a legend so seriously, but the names began to fit the pattern. The Didact and the Librarian sounded like the oldest sagas carved on the wal s of the earliest keeps on Sanghelios. There might have been a foundation of truth in them, but there was also much embel ishment to fil unexplained gaps or make up for unreliable memories, and one thing was always certain: they were far in the past. How much of what Prone told him was myth that had evolved into reality because of Onyx’s long isolation?
“I think the Didact wil be long dead by now,” Jul said kindly. He looked at al the potential portal signs on the wal s again, wondering what his chances were of emerging into an environment that wouldn’t kil him. “Even gods die.”
< We are not dead. > Jul pointed to the symbols that repeated most frequently. He took care not to look as if he planned to touch them in case Prone wrestled him to the ground again.
“Is there a portal to Earth? Show me.”
Prone hesitated, as if he was weighing up whether Jul would be rash or stupid enough to try using it.
< That one. It doesn’t work now. Not at all. > Ah, so he had some way of tel ing which ones were live. Of course: how else would he know the portals were faulty in the first place? Why didn’t I think of that before? Jul didn’t ask if one led to Sanghelios. He’d get around to that eventual y, but subtly.
“Did the Didact use a portal? And the Librarian?”
< No. He is hidden. > “You don’t know where he went.”
< We know the name but not the location. In case others used us to reach him. > The line between reality and myth seemed to be blurring again. It obviously troubled Prone, making his luminescence increase. Jul wondered whether to change the subject and get him talking about the nature of the faults the portals had. But that odd answer intrigued him.
“Very wel , what’s the name of the place he went? Not Sanghelios, and not Earth, obviously.”
< Requiem. > Jul had never heard of it. It sounded like another myth-word, as vague and meaningless as the Great Journey. “Which is the symbol for it?”
< That one. > It was one of the more distinctive ones that Jul had etched into his belt as a way of finding his path back to the chamber. “So he was sent to Requiem, but you don’t know where it is.”
< That’s what I said. We have to go back now. > Prone drifted back and forth until Jul stepped away from the wal and fol owed him. That was probably enough for today. Rushing it would simply make Prone reluctant to talk, and being out of contact for too long might make Magnusson suspicious and encourage her to come down here.
There were so many artifacts in this world that even the sizable number of humans now working here had hardly placed a fraction of them on a map, Magnusson had told him, as if this lack of knowledge was something laudable.
Getting back to the surface simply meant retracing his steps and steeling himself to walk into an inscribed wal that suddenly wasn’t there. Out in the sunlight again, he fingered his belt, intrigued by the symbol for the Didact. So the Didact didn’t like humans. A hundred thousand years ago. Jul realized the Forerunners had visited many planets and seemed to have something in common with humans that they didn’t have with Sangheili, but until today he’d thought of it as a positive connection, something to be envied, an unjustified fondness for the least worthy child in the clan. Now he saw an entirely new history of the galaxy: the humans had done something to provoke the Didact’s anger, and a god didn’t wage war on insects, not even a mortal god. The powerful dealt with threats.
Jul started to wonder what threat the human worms could have posed to such a massive, sophisticated empire, and reached one conclusion.
Humans bred. Humans spread and colonized, like the Flood, albeit in a more subtle and insidious way. They didn’t absorb what they touched into their biomass. They simply gave it no room to live.
< A vehicle’s coming, > Prone said. < Listen. > Jul could hear it, the familiar sound of a Warthog, a noisy, ugly machine that came in varied forms. The vehicle—a smal troop transport— bounced across the ground, and it took him a few moments to work out that it wasn’t passing but coming right at him. He’d done something foolish.