Halo: Primordium by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online

crashed into the hoop, before the brightness and the shooting stars, just before you fel from the sky.” He reached for another, thicker stick, handed it to Vinnevra, and blew out through his lips. She showed the stick to me. There were many notches already. “Mark another double handful,” the old man instructed. “A day or so doesn’t matter.” Vinnevra took the stick and removed a sharp rock from her pocket. She began to carve.
    “Many mysteries,” the old man said. “Why are we here? Are we like animals in a pit that fight to amuse the Forerunners?”
    “We have something they want,” I said.
    The old man shifted the rabbit again and bright orange sparks flew up into the cool air. “Can’t let the skin go black al over,” he murmured. “Can’t let the legs burn through. Why do they move us around, why do they take us to the Palace of Pain . . . why treat us so?”
    I itched to ask about this Palace of Pain, but the time did not seem right—the look on his face as he said those words . . .
    “Humans defeated Forerunners, long ago,” I said. “Forerunners stil resent it.”
    Now the old man’s expression realy sharpened. His jaw firmed and dropped a little, making his face look younger. “You remember such times?” he asked. He fixed me with an intense, if rheumy-eyed, stare, then leaned toward me and whispered, “Are there old spirits inside your head?”
    “I think so,” I answered. “Yes.”
    Vinnevra considered both of us with alarm and moved away from the fire.
    “Does he have a name?”
    “No name . . . just a title. A rank.”
    “Ah. A highborn, then.”
    “You’re encouraging him!” Vinnevra accused from the shadows, but who was encouraging whom, she did not make clear.
    “Pfaah,” the old man said, and lifted the rabbit. “Break off a leg. I wish we had some salt.” He poked the now-bare spit over his shoulder, toward the part of the bridge spinning into shadow. The blotch where a ship had crashed was a dark gray smear, tapering in one direction, and then flaring outward with the marks of burning debris.
    “Before the strange brightness, the sun was different—true?” I asked.
    Vinnevra had moved closer again, and she answered this time.
    “Golden-red,” she said. “Warmer. Larger.”
    “Did you see the sky bridge—the hoop in the sky—disappear into the brightness, before al the rest?”
    The old man favored me with a gap-toothed grin. “So it did.”
    “Then it is a different sun,” I said.
    “Not different,” Vinnevra insisted, her brows arching. “It changed color. That’s all .” Any other explanation was too vast for her.
    Perhaps too vast for me as wel. Moving something the size of this Halo the way the Didact had moved us from Erde-Tyrene to Charum Hakkor, then out to the San’Shyuum world . . .
    But I did not back down. “Different suns,” I insisted.
    The old man pondered, his nearly toothless jaw moving up and down. I began to regret this discussion—we were distracting him from portioning out the rabbit.
    He raised himself up in his seated posture and squared his hands on his knees. “I was brought here when I was an infant,” he said. “I do not remember much about Erda, but my best wife told me it had a flat horizon, but when you are high up, the end of the world curves down to each side, not up. Makes you wonder what’s on the other side of the wheel, down there . . . doesn’t it?” He caught me staring at the rabbit. I wiped drool from the corner of my lips. He tapped his finger lightly on the ground, then lowered his head, as if in mourning. “I remember the long journey in the gray wals and no way to see the sky, with air that smeled of closeness and sweet and bitter herbs, like perfume. Herbs that kept us quiet during the voyage. And then . . . the first ones were brought here, to the hoop.” He tapped the ground again. More firmly. “I was just a babe. We had lived for many days within gray wals, but now the great ship shook us