This encounter changed the Didact. He told me what he saw, ten thousand years ago, but not what the creature said to him. That he withheld from me—or any other. I think he wished to protect us. He could not, of course. Not long after securing the Didact in his Cryptum, I made a journey to Path Kethona and discovered the Primordial’s secret on my own.
More on that in its proper place.
* * *
As the human-Forerunner war twisted and stumbled to its conclusion, Builders supplied even more weapons and ships than were needed. They acquired greater and greater wealth and power. With this power came a drift away from the old ways and attitudes. Under the Builders’ growing influence, the Old Council also underwent a transformation—becoming more and more vindictive and wealth-driven.
Facing apparent evidence of our enemy’s rapacious cruelty, the Old Council decided that humanity as a species was guilty of crimes against the Mantle. I agreed—at first. Later, when we realized humans had made great efforts to fight the Flood, and that many of their so-called atrocities had been carried out with that in mind, I changed that opinion. But Lifeworkers were ignored. Politically weakened, we could not push our case.
Some Warrior-Servants objected as well. Peculiar notions of honor and duty ruled their lives. Humans had been worthy opponents. Subduing them was honorable—extinction, not. Yet they, too, were ignored.
The Builders single-mindedly made plans for a final human solution. Forerunners were sliding down a steep path to committing just the sort of alleged atrocity for which humans were to be punished. The paradox was dizzying. Yet despite the cruel contradiction, not even Juridicals objected.
But another, far greater concern quickly came to the fore: the Flood. Our earliest encounters with that shape-changing and all-consuming plague had been shocking. The Flood ripped through hundreds of Forerunner battle fleets and dissolved their crews into crawling, agonized muck, or grouped them into amazing collectives we called Graveminds. Warrior-Servants methodically destroyed the infected fleets, leaving only scattered remains to analyze—damaged monitors and broken bits of armor. A few of the recovered monitors were beyond repair or even interrogation. They had been subjected to a hitherto unknown philosophical corruption—much like the perversion later observed in Mendicant Bias. They quickly spread their corruption to other AIs.
It was obviously not healthy for an ancilla to match wits with a Gravemind. The same might have been true of organic beings. But with them, the Flood leaped over any subtle perversion or persuasion.
It simply absorbed, converted, used.
* * *
The earliest antecedents of the Flood had appeared among humans centuries before they engaged with Forerunners—long before we ourselves faced the plague. The infection was first delivered into their midst by small ships, very old, of unknown origin, carrying a peculiar and apparently lifeless powder. The powder-bearing ships had originated outside the galaxy—perhaps from Path Kethona [TT: the Greater Magellanic Cloud].
The powder first produced desirable mutations on the Pheru, a type of pet humans particularly favored. I have long wondered through what devious process the pet’s masters discovered this. But ingenuity is often indistinguishable from foolish play, and foolish play is one of those traits I find most endearing about humanity.
The Pheru came from Faun Hakkor, in the same system as Charum Hakkor, one of the key centers of human culture, as well as an amazing collection of massive Precursor artifacts.
Centuries before the beginning of our war, the mutated Pheru entered a new phase and produced spores that infected their masters with the first stage of the Flood. The infection spread rapidly, evolving quickly in its new hosts and weakening humans so severely that early Forerunner victories came with surprising ease.
Humans were, in effect, fighting on two fronts.
But within decades, that situation changed. Humans surged back. Their strength redoubled. Our fleets came upon strong, healthy human populations residing in Flood-infested sectors of the galaxy, apparently unmolested. Humans had obviously found a way to immunize against the Flood, or had developed a natural resistance—or possibly even found a cure.
Yet despite this rebound, Forerunners had taken sufficient advantage of the earlier, troubled period to organize our forces and distribute them to key positions, great in both strength and strategy.
My husband’s fleets and warriors made tremendous gains.
The Flood no longer seemed to infect humans, but along the galactic margins, in many other systems, it held its awful sway over thousands of worlds. Wherever the Didact’s forces came upon pockets of infection, they burned them out—cauterized them by sheer firepower. The Flood seemed to be quelled—for a time. The Didact and I knew these piecemeal efforts should not have been enough. Lifeworkers calculated that given its virulence and adaptability, the Flood should have overcome our entire galaxy within a few hundred years.
Yet before our eyes, even as humans were being defeated, the Flood was evaporating like frost on sun-warmed ground. It seemed to deliberately retreat, as if it had established a pact with humanity and was sensitive to their change of fortune. Forerunner fleets soon squeezed humanity into a few redoubts. Charum Hakkor held out to the very last.
It seemed for a time that our two greatest enemies were being defeated. But Forerunners could not afford complacency. We knew what the Flood was capable of. There was an overpowering conviction, and not just in the Old Council or among the Builders, that it would return with renewed virulence. And we had no immunity.
We desperately needed to learn how humans had survived the Flood. Captured humans could not be forced to divulge these secrets. Analysis of dead humans revealed little. But the Old Council became convinced a vaccine or cure existed.
And yet they had ordered the destruction of the human race. It was obvious this contradiction had to be resolved.
Already some Builders were laying their own plans for a solution if there was ever a resurgence of the Flood. The culmination of those plans would come thousands of years later, and would be called Halo. Even so, it seemed appropriate—and politically expedient—for a Lifeworker to be put in charge of Flood research.
At that time, my star was rising in line with the Didact’s victories. He was a triumphant hero. I was his constant companion, and I had studied Flood-ravaged worlds in detail. I was given the title of Lifeshaper and put in charge of a renewed effort. Understanding the Flood became my responsibility. The Didact approved. It would strengthen his hand in the Council to be allied with me in this matter. And he was always proud of my accomplishments.
His confidence was boundless.
I was ordered to the Capital planet to meet with the Council. Although I had originally supported aggressively dealing with the humans, now I made the Lifeworker case that erasing this species was not only a potential crime against the Mantle, but might impede Flood research. I told the councilors—truthfully enough—that the greatest resource might not be human genetics or even human memory, but the inherent qualities found only in intact populations. Culture, language, population-wide exchanges … the subtle discourse of an entire species could ultimately reveal a cure, if any existed. We had to preserve as much of humanity as we could—as much as still remained, most of them suffering through the last stages of resistance on and around Charum Hakkor.
The Old Council saw my logic, but the war had already cost Forerunners much blood and treasure. The councilors insisted that we must balance our quest for a solution to the Flood with other concerns. We had to safeguard against human resurgence.
The Didact as well had mixed feelings, though he rarely expressed them to me—not then. He supported the rule of the Mantle, but as a Promethean he had sworn to preserve Forerunners at all cost. He knew what fierce enemies humans could be, should they escape our forces and rise again to power. Yet even to the Didact, it was obvious preservation of one sort or another was necessary.
The Builders finally came around and agreed with me—in part. They combined forces with Lifeworkers to push hard for a program of relentless research. The Flood, after all, might return and endanger the systems we had captured—reducing Builder profit following the war.
In the end, the Old Council and I struck an awful bargain. Humans would be reduced to a powerless remnant of their former selves. And Lifeworkers were commanded to use any means necessary to discover the secret of human resistance. There was a strong component of punishment in our instructions—that much was obvious. Our grief burned. It burns still.
The human-Forerunner war ground on to its inevitable conclusion. While the fate of the humans was being finalized, Charum Hakkor held out to a bitter end, sacrificing tens of thousands of ships and millions of lives on both sides.
Then—Forthencho, that awful name, that awful, magnificent presence! Forthencho, Lord of Admirals, the Didact’s greatest opponent—surrendered his fleets, disbanded his forces, and awaited whatever we might bring.
* * *
And so it was that at Charum Hakkor, the Didact and I moved among the captured commanders and warriors and their families, surrounded by those who had fought against us for decades, often bravely, more often still with unique treachery. We could not avoid bitterness—we are only Forerunners, after all. But the cost the humans had paid, and would continue to pay, was horrendous.
The debris of battle lay all around, ruins of human structures but also, visible through the haze and smoke as long slender streaks in the sky, the untouchable and perpetual star roads of the Precursors, placed there more than ten million years before. These gray, eternal whorls stretched to middle orbit, where their rotating bands drew constantly and silently from the neurophysical energy of raw space in ways we still do not understand.
Life—achingly beautiful, impossibly difficult.
What we brought for Lord of Admirals and his last warriors were the Composers. These large, ugly machines had originally been designed by Builders in a failed attempt to attain immunity against the Flood. Composers broadcast high-energy fields of entangled sympathies to gather victim mentalities—essences—and then translated them into machine data. In the original scheme, new bodies were constructed, and the subjects’ essences were imprinted over them—minus any trace of Flood patterns.
The results were not at all satisfactory. In fact, they were horrible. The Forerunner bodies so treated did not live very long. None survived outside of mechanical storage.
But here—Composers were all we had. All we were given. Builders and vengeful councilors made sure of that.
The hundreds of thousands of humans still alive on Charum Hakkor were handed over to Lifeworkers to be studied, probed, analyzed molecule by molecule, thought by thought, down to their very cells—and then subjected to the wide-ranging, rippling fields of Composers.
After the Composers had done their work, draining these last survivors, these exhausted and dying warriors, of their memories and patterns, their remains were reduced to scattered atoms. It was manifest holocaust. Once the second greatest fighting civilization and species in the galaxy, humans were stomped down, reduced, effectively eliminated as a threat.
Throughout, the hardest part was processing the human children. They had been formed into their own cadres, given their own defensive orders. Raised in times of continuous war, they seemed to understand what was about to happen better than their elders. I remember their wise eyes, unafraid, terrible.
CATALOG NOTE: The Lifeshaper’s ancilla transfers sensory data recorded at the time described. What Catalog glimpses of Composer procedures is disturbing. I have never directly witnessed such events. And yet, even this does not rise to the level of a crime against the Mantle.
Not yet.
LIBRARIAN
Despite our feverish preparations, Builders and the Old Council had kept the Flood’s existence secret from the great centers of Forerunner population, ostensibly to avoid panic during time of war.
Most of the ecumene celebrated a newfound security, unaware even of the existence of the Flood.
The second part of my deal with the Council, to preserve humans as a potentially renewable species, required a selection of intact and vital specimens. Thousands more were extracted from hiding in shattered redoubts around the conquered human territories and carried to Erde-Tyrene, which even today exhibits the fossil remains of humanity’s most ancient ancestors.
Yet while honoring my request, the Old Council insisted that the last surviving humans were to be devolved. Human epigenetics would be played backward, reversing their time-enriched evolutionary music. Individuals, the Council mandated, would be forced to consciously experience this reversal, as a reminder and balance for their arrogance and cruelty.
Each and every day, for months, my specimens felt their bodies lose memory, complexity, mass—and finally, intelligence.
The Council and the Builders then put another, even stranger twist on my hopes to preserve human cultural patterns. As the humans devolved, the Composer-gathered personalities and memories of their fellows at Charum Hakkor would be holographically stored within their changing flesh. Not active, but dormant—thus avoiding the consequences of Composer decay.
Each devolved human would in effect carry the memories of tens of thousands of their kind, preserved for future study and investigation—and passed along to their offspring.
Those same memories and personalities would also be transferred to machine storage and subjected to constant rote interrogation—creating a library of enslaved ghosts subjected to mechanized torment for thousands of years to come. Thus, the Council believed, the secret to human resistance to the Flood would eventually be found.
Our perverse nod to the Mantle exhibited cruelty far beyond simple extinction. The Builders had gained practically everything they wished for. But that did not stop another and very different war from breaking out—between my husband and the Master Builder.
Powerful forces within the Council and among Warrior-Servants still supported the Didact’s strategy for containing the Flood: hundreds of enormous Shield Worlds, placed at key locations around the galaxy to both survey for Flood incursions and conduct carefully chosen, system-wide operations. The Didact had worked with me to provide these huge constructs with a tremendous capacity to preserve imperiled species—on a localized basis.