Halo: Primordium Read Online Free Page A

about the time before we came here.”
    “Who’s Gamelpar?”
    She bit her lip, as if she had spoken too soon. “An old man. The others don’t like him, because he won’t give them permission to mate with me. They threw him out and now he lives away from the huts, out in the trees.”
    “What if they try—you know—without his permission?” I asked, irritated by the prospect, but genuinely curious. Sometimes females won’t talk about being taken against their wil.
    “I hurt them. They stop,” she said, flashing long, horny fingernails.
    I believed her. “Has he told you where the People lived before they came here?”
    “He says the sun was yelow. Then, when he was a baby, the People were taken inside. They lived inside wals and under ceilings.
    He says those People were brought here before I was born.”
    “Were they carried inside a star boat?”
    “I don’t know about that. The Forerunners never explain. They rarely speak to us.”
    Turning around, I studied again the other side of the curve. Far up that side of the curve, the grassland and forest ran up against a border of blocky lines, beyond which stretched austere grayness, which faded into that universal bluish obscurity but emerged again far, far up and away, along that perfect bridge looping up, up, and around, growing thinner and now very dark, just a finger-width wide—I held up my finger at arm’s length, while the female watched with half-curious annoyance. Again, I nearly fel over, dizzy and feeling a little sick.
    “We’re near the edge,” I said.
    “The edge of what?”
    “A Halo. It’s like a giant hoop. Ever play hoop sticks?” I showed how with my hands.
    She hadn’t.
    “Wel, the hoop spins and keeps everyone pressed to the inside.” She did not seem impressed. I myself was not sure if that indeed was what stuck the dirt, and us, safely on the surface. “We’re on the inside, near that wal.” I pointed. “The wal keeps al the air and dirt from slopping into space.”
    None of this was important to her. She wanted to live somewhere else but had never known anything but here. “You think you’re smart,” she said, only a touch judgmental.
    I shook my head. “If I was smart, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be back on Erde-Tyrene, keeping my sisters out of trouble, working with Riser. . . .”
    “Your brother?”
    “Not exactly,” I said. “Short felow. Human, but not like me or you.”
    “You aren’t one of us, either,” she informed me with a sniff. “The People have beautiful black skins and flat, broad noses. You do not.”
    Irritated, I was about to tel her that some Forerunners had black skins but decided that hardly mattered and shrugged it off.

FOUR

    ON OUR SECOND outing, we stopped by a pile of rocks and the girl found a ready supply both of water from a spring and scorpions, which she revealed by lifting a rock. I remembered scorpions on Erde-Tyrene, but these were bigger, as wide as my hand, and black
    —substantial, and angry at being disturbed. She taught me how to prepare and eat them. First you caught them by their segmented stinging tails. She was good at that, but it took me a while to catch on. Then you puled off the tail and ate the rest, or if you were bold, popped the claws and body into your mouth, then plucked the tail and tossed it aside, stil twitching. Those scorpions tasted bitter and sweet at the same time—and then greasy-grassy. They didn’t realy taste like anything else I knew. The texture—wel, you get used to anything when you’re hungry. We ate a fair number of them and sat back and looked up at the blue-purple sky.
    “You can see it’s a big ring,” I said, leaning against a boulder. “A ring just floating in space.”
    “Obviously,” she said. “I’m not a fool. That,” she said primly, folowing my finger, “is toward the center of the ring, and the other side. The stars are there, and there.” She pointed to either side of the arching bridge. “Sky is cupped in the