Halo: Primordium Read Free

moved lips, tongue, jaw. Al were sore, but I could talk easily enough. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Are you al human?” She hummed through her nose and leaned forward to wipe my eyes. “We’re the Tudejsa, if that’s what you’re asking.” Later I would put this word in context and understand that it meant the People from Here, or just the People.
    “And this isn’t Erde-Tyrene.”
    “I doubt it. Where we are is a place between other places.

    Where we came from, we wil never see again. Where we are going, we do not want to be. So we live here and wait. Sometimes Forerunners take us away.”
    “Forerunners . . . ?”
    “The gray ones. The blue ones. The black ones. Or their machines.”
    “I know some of them,” I said.
    She looked dubious. “They don’t like us. We’re happy they haven’t come for many days. Even before the sky became bright and filed with fire—”
    “Where do they come from—these People?” I waved my arm at the silhouettes stil coming and going through the door, some smacking their lips in judgment and making disapproving sounds.
    “Some of us come from the old city. That’s where I was born.
    Others have gathered from across the plain, from river and jungle, from the long grass. Some walked here five sleeps ago, after they saw you fal from the sky in your jar. One felow tries to make people pay to see you.”
    I heard a scuffle outside, a yelp, and then three burly gawkers shuffled in, keeping wel back from us.
    “The cackling bastard who fancies you?” I asked her.
    She shook her head. “Another fool. He wants more food. They just knock him down and kick him aside.”
    She didn’t seem to like many of the People.
    “Valey, jungle, river . . . city, prairie. Sounds like home,” I said.
    “It isn’t. ” She swept her gaze around the gawkers with pinched disappointment. “We are not friends, and no one is wiling to be family. When we are taken away, it brings too much pain.” I raised myself on my arm. “Am I strong enough to go outside?” She pressed me back down. Then she pushed the gawkers out, looked back, and stepped through the hanging grass door. When she returned, she carried a roughly carved wooden bowl. With her fingers she spooned some of the contents into my mouth: bland mush, ground-up grass seed. It didn’t taste very good—what I could taste of it—but what I swalowed stayed in my stomach.
    Soon I felt stronger.
    Then she said, “Time to go outside, before someone decides to kil you.” She helped me to my feet and pushed aside the door-hanging. A slanting burst of bluish white glare dazzled me. When I saw the color of that light, a feeling of dread, of not wanting to be where I was, came on me fierce. It was not a good light.
    But she persisted and puled me out under the purple-blue sky.
    Shielding my eyes, I finaly located the horizon—rising up like a distant wal. Turning slowly, swiveling my neck despite the pain, I tracked that far wal until it began to curve upward, ever so gently. I swung around. The horizon curved upward to both sides. Not good, not right. Horizons do not curve up.
    I folowed the gradualy rising sweep higher and higher. The land kept climbing like the slope of a mountain—climbing but narrowing, until I could see both sides of a great, wide band filed with grassland, rocky fields . . . mountains. Some distance away, a foreshortened and irregular dark blue smear crossed almost the entire width of the band, flanked and interrupted by the nearest of those mountains—possibly a large body of water. And everywhere out there on the band—clouds in puffs and swirls and spreading white shreds, like streamers of fleece in a cleansing river.
    Weather.
    Higher and higher . . .
    I leaned my head back as far as I could without faling over—
    until the rising band crossed into shadow and slimmed to a skinny, perfect ribbon that cut the sky in half and just hung there—a dark blue, overarching sky bridge. At an angle about