Halo: Primordium by Greg Bear Page B

difficulty thinking of the sky as something other than a great spreading flatness, on which little glowing insects moved, and occasionaly someone opened up a door to let in light from outside.
    . . .
    Old teachings die hard.

TWELVE

    THE WALL OF the forest was the most formidable living barrier we had encountered—to the point of being impassable. The great brown and green trunks—some as wide as the three of us stretched head to toe—rose up in implacable, sulen splendor, like pilars spaced along the wal of a fortress. Great gray thorns grew in from the trunks and met like meshed teeth in a tightly clamped jaw.
    Above the thorns, ten or twelve meters up, thin, wiry branches interlaced to form a tight canopy.
    Vinnevra actualy smiled at this. I thought she was taking comfort in the possibility that it didn’t matter which way we walked, we were bound to meet up with something or other unpleasant and discouraging. But that was unfair. I was compensating for my growing attachment by casting aspersions.
    How mature to see that.
    “Oh, shut up ,” I grumbled.
    We could climb to the canopy, but it leaned out a considerable distance—several meters—and I doubted we could al clamber up and over.

    I studied and stroked the thorns’ tough, thinly grooved surfaces, almost hard as stone—then pushed my finger in as far as I could between two of them. There was a bare minimum of flexure, of give
    —no more than a fingernail’s thickness. Perhaps the trees would present less of a barrier if we could bend and break the thorns with sturdy poles—wherever would we find those! Gamelpar’s stick was too flimsy.
    But nothing we could do now would make much difference, and so we prepared through the slanting light of dusk to sleep out in the open yet again, with no idea where the next morning would take us.

    From my uneven bed on the spiky dry grass, my eyes kept lifting above the tree-wal to the stars and the sky bridge. I drifted in and out of sleep, only half-caring that the dreams that moved behind a thin, translucent wal in my mind were not my own, nor mere fantasies, but ancient memories, with al the uneven detail of memories, made worse by being witnessed by an outsider.
    Some, however, were remarkably vivid—lovemaking in a garden under a sky crisscrossed with Precursor architecture; the impassioned face of a female whose features differed from the women of this time, and especialy from Vinnevra—so much variability in our kind!
    But if these passing glimpses were at al indicative, humans had stayed remarkably true to their stock during our suppression and reevolution. We were al recognizably of the same kind, the same breed, and we did not grow up or get transformed into different physical castes like the Forerunners.
    The dream-emotions conveyed by the Lord of Admirals felt sharp and raw, like the waft from a freshly slaughtered animal . . .
    strange juxtapositions of pain and pleasure, hidden fear and anticipation, a glowing spark of battle-rage kept from flaring—held in reserve.
    For these dreams spoke of leave-taking and farewel, of the last night before a grand battle that would spread across a hundred thousand light-years to determine the fate of a thousand suns and twenty thousand worlds.
    All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.

    A snapping, clacking sound abruptly puled me up out of this bizarre eavesdropping.
    I started from my rustling pad of plucked grass and looked at the thorn-packed, forbidding wal of the forest. The thorns were withdrawing, puling back into the trunks . . . opening wide, dark passages below the thick black canopy.
    I crawled over to awaken Vinnevra, and she shook the old man’s shoulder. He slept lightly if at al, came awake more alert than either of us, but he did not rise up. Instead, his eyes moved back and forth under the silver-ivory reflected light of the sky bridge.
    “Dawn’s a few hours off,” he