Chapter 1-3

Over the next few weeks, I facilitated several conference calls which included Talita Valzeshia, Queen Yalat, and sometimes Chieftain Lirinus (who agreed to release Talita from her house arrest). Most resulted in very little forward movement. Queen Yalat proved to be less pliable than we had hoped. "Wealth is a pale substitute for position and purpose," the hologram representing the Yanme'e primly declared.

"This is gibberish," the hologram representing Talita replied. "Talk sense."

"It may be difficult to explain to you. Think of it like this. If I, Queen Yalat, lost all the money and property I ever had, what would I be?"

"What would you be?" Talita responded. "You would still be a giant bug who talks like a stuck-up aristocrat from the terrestrial ages!"

"Correct. I would still be a queen. All my worker and soldier drones would still recognize me as a queen. My basic position in Yanme'e society would be unaltered. But what would happen to you if you lost all the money and property you had? Your importance to vertebrate society on Narsompasi would vanish at once. Your social rank, which you never even bothered to formalize, would be gone. Qelet B'Norai, as I understand, is what the Batarians call 'cartel-kin.' This is at least a semi-formalization of social rank, of position and purpose- but if he and his B'Norai family were to lose all their money and property, they would no longer be considered as 'cartel-kin' at all, and so that semi-formalization is no proper assurance!"

"Bug, what is your point?"

"My point is that the security you or Qelet B'Norai draw from wealth is a security which no Yanme'e needs. To you, position and purpose is something not entirely inborn, even in our Covenant which so wisely does its best to impress caste upon you. The artifice of currency, the artifice of Chieftain Lirinus' military rank, even the artifice of a Prophet holding lofty political office on High Charity- all this artifice is necessary for you to achieve what every Yanme'e achieves effortlessly, at the very moment of our hatching. It is such a proud thing to be a bug."

"Then why don't you relinquish your Deed of Settlement? It is only more clumsy vertebrate artifice!"

"Do not be facetious. I am a part of our Covenant, and I observe the forms and compromises which make our Covenant work. I am only trying to illustrate the difference in our perspectives."

"What forms? What compromises? Your wars are why our Covenant is not working, not on Narsompasi!"

"The wars are a form and a compromise."

"I regret ever calling you a Rachni! Rachni had the decency to shut up!"

That call somehow got worse from there. Queen Yalat did name a price at which she would surrender some colonization rights, but it was a figure about triple the value of all private and public property on Narsompasi. With progress on three of my four mandates stalling out, I decided it was high time to handle the fourth. Ruz and I set off to see the Sangheili xenoarcheologist Wul'Tazamuna. We no longer drove a rented hovercar. It had become clear to us that we were going to be spending enough time on Narsompasi that it was worth it to spring for our own private shuttle, one capable of circumnavigating Narsompasi without need for refueling. We flew across the central continent of Narsompasi, the shuttle flying too high for any swamp-dweller to possibly take potshots at us.

Given that I served in a theocracy dedicated to the worship of antecedent civilization, some commentary regarding what exactly it was that the Covenant believed about galactic prehistory seems overdue. I will try to cover the essential factual assertions and moral themes as briefly as possible, with a little less flowery language than is customary for the story.

According to Covenant scripture, a billion years ago the galaxy was ruled by diabolical giant psychic squids, called the Leviathans. The Leviathans could subdue any alien people, but they were afraid of synthetic intelligences. So, they built the most dangerous synthetic intelligence they could (I never understood that part), which they called a Reaper, and then the Reaper naturally built other Reapers and killed most of the Leviathans. The Reapers could "harvest" organic peoples somehow, with each individual Reaper representing a different destroyed organic culture. They set up the whole galaxy as a sort of factory farm and "harvested" organic cultures for millions and millions of years.

All of this ended about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, when the Forerunners passed through the Crucible which lay upon the Path of Destruction, beat the Reapers, and created the greatest civilization ever, the one which lasted fifty thousand years and which the Covenant preached was literally perfect. But what the Forerunners didn't know was that a few of the Leviathans, the giant psychic squids, were still around and in hiding. The Leviathans had watched the Forerunners fix the problems that were all caused by the Leviathans, and their only feeling was bitterness and envy. They wanted to rule the galaxy again and screw it all up again, and the Leviathans swam in the Flood, which I'm not sure how to parse but I suppose just means they attacked the Forerunners with their mind control. The Forerunners won again, and one hundred thousand years ago they built the seven Halos and went on the Great Journey to become divine beings of pure goodness and wisdom.

All intelligent life was indebted to Forerunner civilization, without which everyone would still be plagued by the Leviathan tyrants and their Reaper genocidaires. The highest aspiration of any intelligent being should be to follow the Forerunners on their Great Journey. The key to achieving this aspiration was to serve the Covenant, a partnership of all races, if not an equal partnership. The day would come when the Covenant would find the Halos, and on that day the faithful would leave the drab violence and injustice of known reality behind and ascend to the supernal realms.

It was all fine by me, a lot of it was probably closer to literal truth than most religions, there were relics after all, but I admit I generally didn't find it very relevant to my day-to-day business. Until somebody actually found a Halo, the imperative to use the Halos to follow the Forerunners on the Great Journey seemed moot. Unfortunately, a great deal of the Anuranite Lustration's time and therefore my time was consumed by the Relay Dissension. It is sadly necessary to provide yet more exposition.

Interstellar travel in the Relay Ecumene depended on the use of mass effect relays, which were built by some antecedent culture along with the Citadel itself and which allowed for rapid transit over maybe two-thirds of the galaxy. In the Attican Blank, the other third or so of the galaxy, which stretched from the northeastern part where the Covenant came from to the southeastern part where the Quarians were hiding somewhere, there weren't any relays and space travel was massively slower. I should say clearly that no part of the galaxy was truly well explored, the relay network was never fully charted, and that much of this geography is simplified or speculative.

The Relay Dissension dated back to when the Covenant discovered the Haivattan Relay, which became known as the Haivattan Gate because it was the only practical point of access between traditional Covenant space and the Relay Ecumene, it being inconceivable for the Covenant to traverse the whole of the Attican Blank and attack the Relay Ecumene from the alternate end. The Haivattan Gate was one of the two known "endpoints" of the northern part of the relay network, the other being the Dholen Relay, which was where Quarians and latterly Geth came from. Nobody sane would ever go the Dholen Relay. The Geth would disintegrate anyone foolish enough to do so.

The Kig-Yar surveyors who discovered the Haivattan Gate did what every people in the Relay Ecumene (barring the Drell and Vorcha) had done before them: invent a means of using the relay system. This of course brought the Relay Ecumene and the Covenant Empire into contact, which shortly led to the Covenant pouring through the Haivattan Gate, conquering the Terminus Systems, and warring with the Citadel Council's member states. None of this would have been possible if the Covenant had been unwilling to use the mass effect relay network, which is what made the Relay Dissension so ridiculous.

Simply put, the Relay Dissension centered on which antecedent civilization created the Citadel and the mass effect relays. If they were created by the Forerunners, then for the Covenant their use was of course permissible and indeed praiseworthy. If they were created by the Prothean Empire fifty thousand years after the Forerunners disappeared (as the Citadel Council still maintained) then their use was simply permissible. But some genius San'Shyuum had the brilliant hypothesis that the Citadel and the relays might instead have been created by the Reapers, the synthetic monsters of Covenant demonology. In this case the relays should never be used and indeed they should probably be destroyed.

Why it mattered was beyond me. If the Reapers really did build the mass effect relays, so what? The Forerunners had destroyed the Reapers. If the Forerunners had wanted to destroy the mass effect relays, they could have done that too. The mass effect relays were just unthinking tools which happened to do something extremely useful, it shouldn't have made any difference who built them.

That should be enough background for the reader to understand my conversation with Wul'Tazamuna. If the reader feels that any of that was tiresome, he should understand that I had to deal with that same feeling every day of my life. I was sick of hearing about the Relay Dissension. I still hate just typing the words. I prayed that Wul'Tazamuna would be one those rare xenoarcheologists who did not try to intermix their conclusions with political commentary.

"Some fools question the expense of expeditions like this," Wul'Tazamuna told me. "What they don't see is that this kind of work is absolutely necessary if our Covenant is ever to resolve the Relay Dissension."

I nodded grimly. I already suspected this was going to be one of those xenoarcheologist jobs that ended in violence.

Like Queen Yalat's hive, Narsompasi's Prothean Catacombs were found in a relatively dry and elevated corner of the central continent, surrounded by the inevitable wetlands with their Lystheni matrilines, although the two locations were not nearby one another. Unlike Queen Yalat, Wul'Tazamuna had no interest in bothering the Lystheni, and that was one reason they left him alone. The other reason was that the thirty-four Sangheili xenoarcheologists were all heavily armed, as were their Unggoy servants. There was no question of whether the xenoarcheologists knew how to use their weaponry. All Sangheili males serve in an army or fleet during their youth. Wul'Tazamuna himself carried an energy sword with elaborate engravings, which I understood to mark him as some sort of nobility, as if I hadn't had enough of that talking to Queen Yalat.

"But why have you taken such an interest in my work?" Wul'Tazamuna asked me. "It wouldn't have to do with the Prophet of Sagacity's narrow prejudices, would it?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Of course you do. You are blessed by the Prophet of Sagacity, who despite all evidence to the contrary insists that the mass effect relay system was built by our Covenant's Forerunners. My expedition, like most of its kind, is blessed by the Prophet of Diligence, who takes a more fact-based approach to the matter."

"It is one thing for a distinguished Sangheili such as yourself to opine on these matters. I am far too lowly myself to even understand such questions, much less seek their answers."

"False modesty. Another reason to mistrust your grasping institution."

"You object to the Anuranite Lustration?"

"I do."

"Why?"

Wul'Tazamuna looked at me directly in my lower eyes. "Because it is composed of Batarians, who are criminal opportunists ignorant of all religion." He gestured to Ruz. "And I suppose some Kig-Yar aides, who are simply criminal opportunists."

"I object to this characterization entirely."

"It is the truth, and I have stated it politely. In addition, I do not like to think of you and that Chieftain Lirinus together, because the only idea I can think of worse than a Jiralhanae policeman is the idea of a Jiralhanae policeman acting on information he got from a Batarian spy."

At this point I wanted to kill Wul'Tazamuna, but it was still probably unnecessary. And these thirty-four Sangheili looked a pretty fearsome bunch, so it wouldn't be easy, and it certainly wouldn't be easy to make it look like an accident, which is what I would need to do if I didn't want the Prophet of Diligence catching on to what the Anuranite Lustration had been doing for several years by this time.

"I am visiting you for the sake of courtesy," I told Wul'Tazamuna. "Narsompasi is a dangerous planet. The native Lystheni swamp-dwellers abhor our Covenant, and the reason that these Catacombs went unexplored for one thousand years is that the Lystheni did not like the idea. We cannot expect that they will respect your Deed of Excavation. It is the duty of an Anuranite agent to ensure that the blessed tread in safety."

"And so, you are offering me your protection?"

It did sound silly when he put it like that. He did have two hundred pounds and an energy sword on me.

"I am offering you my courtesy," I said. "If it is not wanted, I shall go."

I knew that this was every Sangheili's weak point. It is strange. They are the rudest creatures in the galaxy, but they don't have any idea of it. They think of themselves as perfectly well-mannered. Playing on that tension is the only way to get anywhere with them.

Wul'Tazamuna gave a patronizing sigh. "It is all well. Come, sit, you have flown a long way. Have a small meal."

I was hoping for Sangheili barbeque, which is pretty good, but instead Wul'Tazamuna offered a nondescript porridge. Ruz, being a carnivore, wouldn't even have been able to digest it. He sat to the side, probably dreaming of the fish we'd had when we met Talita.

"I am fasting," Wul'Tazamuna said by way of explanation. "It is a custom for parents with sons at war."

Which was all well and good, but I felt for his thirty-three Sangheili retainers who were also restricted to porridge on behalf of their lord's son. Not to mention the Unggoy servants. I didn't like to think what they might be reduced to. The Huragok the expedition had brought, not bothered at all by consideration of foodstuffs, were the only people at the excavation site who looked happy to be there. They bobbed about, tentacles poking and prodding, taking measurements.

"High Charity is buoyed by the honor of your progeny," I told Wul'Tazamuna. This was the formal thing to say. Wul'Tazamuna nodded.

"If I had known that there would be such a great war, I would have stayed with the fleets myself. I would not have become a xenoarcheologist. But no one can know the future, and it is a useless thing to regret. And the Relay Dissension must be resolved."

"What answers do you expect to find here? It's a Prothean site, only fifty thousand years old. The Citadel Council still holds out that the Protheans built the mass effect relays, but if they didn't, wouldn't they be just as clueless as us whether it was the Reapers or the Forerunners?"

"I thought you said that you were too lowly to understand these questions."

"Ultimately, that is more for you to decide than me."

"So it is. Perhaps a disputation could be healthy for me. I have been on Narsompasi for two years now. I have not had much chance to prove the merits of my stance on the Relay Dissension through argument. My retainers defer to me, and earnestly agree with me anyway. The only aliens of rank on this planet are the intellectually incurious Queen Yalat, the simply stupid Chieftain Lirinus- and you. Very well. I release you from consideration of your lower caste! Tell me what you think about the mass effect relays, or at least tell me what your institution has told you to think. I could use the practice of devastating the Prophet of Sagacity's absurd intellectual contrivances. Give your opening statement!"

This was unusual, but it was also the best way I could see to check whether Wul'Tazamuna had found anything dangerous while he was poking around the Prothean Catacombs. "Alright. Almost all other antecedent relics of real value in this galaxy were created by the Forerunners. Why should the relays be any different?"

"The Forerunners ruled all the galaxy. Why would they be so careless as to leave one-third of it uncovered by a relay system they created? And the Attican Blank is that same third of the galaxy where Forerunner relics are so much more common!"

I had heard these arguments before, and they had grown insufferable to me, but I did not let that show. "The Leviathans swam in the Flood. Perhaps during the Second Crucible the Forerunners' enemies were concentrated in what is now the Attican Blank, and so the Forerunners destroyed their own mass effect relays to buy themselves some time. Just as a practical measure, reflecting no spiritual significance. The same way that a retreating terrestrial army might destroy a bridge."

Wul'Tazamuna scoffed. "Everything the Forerunners did had spiritual significance. And they would never have retreated."

This attitude struck me as fanatical. "We agree that the Forerunners ruled the entire galaxy. Why would they leave two-thirds of it menaced by sorcerous Reaper wrongness?"

"As a test of faith for their successors. The Forerunners left behind the Reaper relay system so that our Covenant might prove it has willpower sufficient to resist Reaper allurements! Our Covenant can show itself worthy of inheriting the Mantle of Responsibility only by rejecting the cheap temptation of jumping from one end of the galaxy to the other quickly and conveniently. We must honorably soldier through interstellar odysseys lasting decades at the least, as the Forerunners and nature intended! The demolition of the mass effect relay system is a miniature Crucible that we might pass through ourselves. Do the scriptures not describe how the Forerunners themselves traveled the Path of Destruction?"

"If our Covenant destroyed the relay system, how could we possibly conquer the Relay Ecumene and unite the galaxy? Our Covenant and the Relay Ecumene would be divided from one another by so much empty void that the empires might as well exist in different universes."

"Ah-ha!" Wul'Tazamuna was triumphant. "You come to your real point. You know I am right. The Prophet of Sagacity knows that I am right. The mass effect relay system was created by the Reapers. But you won't admit it, he won't admit it, because doing the right thing would, admittedly, delay the union of all peoples for quite some time."

"I don't know that you're right. What I'm saying is, the Forerunners wanted our Covenant to rule the galaxy. They must have left us the relay system to help us do so."

"That is Indoctrination whispering! That is an unholy Reaper allurement echoing through your lips! What cannot be done without the craft of antediluvian genocide machines must not be done at all!"

"Then there is the sacred mission to find the Forerunners' Halos. You must admit that cutting our Covenant off from access to two-thirds of the galaxy would mean cutting our Covenant off from two-thirds of the places where the Halos might be found."

"What cannot be done without the craft of antediluvian genocide machines must not be done at all!"

He could repeat it all he wanted, that reasoning wasn't going to start making sense to me. A tool is a tool, the nature of its creator is not important. But I decided not to make that case to Wul'Tazamuna. "We're letting this disputation get too philosophical. You're a xenoarcheologist. What have you found? Have you, personally, found anything that would point to the true creators of the mass effect relay system?"

If he said no here, he could live. This was the vital thing. It wasn't important what he said about me, or Batarians, or even the Prophet of Sagacity.

"Personally? Well… not yet."

I relaxed. Ruz, who had been sitting silently to the side all this time, gave me a knowing grin. I returned a small smile.

Wul'Tazamuna misinterpreted the meaning of my expression. "Four-eyed criminal! Wipe that smirk away! I am not done here! You think I am some Yonhet scrapper who trips over an antecedent site, grabs whatever relic looks shiniest, and scurries away? No! Two years into my investigation here, I am still finding surprises, and eventually I will find answers! The value of my Deed of Excavation is not yet exhausted, and the Relay Dissension is not yet settled!"

"It's not a commentary on you," I assured him. "It is only a commentary on the Prothean Empire. Of course, you are a worthy xenoarcheologist, and in time you may come to know everything that the Protheans knew. But what did they know? About the mass effect relays, perhaps no more than us."

"You are without faith," Wul'Tazamuna said bitterly, but I interpreted that as his way of admitting that I might be right.

Wul'Tazamuna sat quietly, fuming. Now that I knew I wouldn't have to kill him, I started to empathize with him a little more, and even to feel some genuine curiosity about his work. I looked around the excavation site, but there did not seem to be that much to see, certainly not enough to occupy thirty-four Sangheili for two years. "What did the Protheans build here, anyway?" I asked.

"I know that it doesn't look impressive from the surface!" Wul'Tazamuna said sharply, but I think he could sense that I was now speaking out of authentic interest, and this mollified him a little.

"But what is it? Was Narsompasi a Prothean colony?"

"It was not. In two thousand years of Salarian habitation, no relics have been found outside of this solitary underground structure."

"They're Lys- sorry, that's not important. What is the structure, why would the Protheans build it here if they didn't live here?"

"It may have served several different purposes at once. You probably don't realize how large this site is," Wul'Tazamuna said. "It took us months to be sure ourselves. Here, look." He took out a map, projected a three-dimensional image of the underground structure, and explained the scale.

"How is that possible?" I asked, thoroughly startled, even a little shocked. "What about flooding? It's Narsompasi!"

"Dry as a desert, after fifty thousand years."

"But you could fit a million people down there!" I felt the beginnings of an idea. "You could fit a million Yanme'e down there…"

"Sure. I don't know why you would want to. But you see why I have been here for two years, why I cannot possibly presume to have found everything there is to find."

"Don't you see? This is a solution!"

Wul'Tazamuna frowned. "Solution to what?"

"A solution to all Narsompasi's intractable difficulties!"

"What intractable difficulties?"

"Queen Yalat's provocations of the swamp-dwellers, which incite wars in the wetlands, which divert the Jiralhanae gendarmes from policing the cities, which makes it impossible to reopen the shipyards, which immiserates the whole planet and thus all the problems are made worse again."

"I haven't concerned myself with any of that."

"But you have been on Narsompasi for two years."

"I have spent two years not concerning myself with any of that. It bores me. It is all a trivial nuisance, particularly when compared with the endlessly fascinating matter of the Relay Dissension. What exactly are you thinking of doing with my Catacombs?"

"Queen Yalat can't be bought with money, but she can be bought with this. Yanme'e like to build underground, see? But there is such little elevated land for them to dig on this flooded planet. Without reason to bargain for good land, Queen Yalat resorts to just seizing as much of the swamps from the Lystheni as she can, and with the only modern army on the planet pledged to giving her cover no one can provide her with an incentive to do otherwise. This can be that incentive! You can relinquish your Deed of Excavation to her, let her build her hive here, and make it all conditional on her agreeing to restrictions on her Deed of Settlement."

"You want me to give up my rights to the site? I fail to see why I should be any more free-handed with my Deed than the Yanme'e queen is with hers! What I am doing here is important! The chance of a solution to the Relay Dissension outweighs the value of every vertebrate and invertebrate life on this backwater, my own included!"

I tried to think of the most persuasive answer to this question that I could. Wul'Tazamuna came from nobility, and I could not imagine that Talita's fortune would sway or impress him any more than Queen Yalat. I tried to think like a Sangheili. "When I asked Queen Yalat to make a sacrifice, to put our Covenant before herself, all she said was 'it is not my purview.' That is why the Yanme'e are bugs, rightly of lower caste-rank. Sangheili are different. You stand at the pinnacle of our Covenant because of the sacrifices you make for us all. That is why you will put our Covenant before yourself, when Queen Yalat would not. You are better than her. You were born better than her."

Wul'Tazamuna was quiet for a moment. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Batarian," he finally said.

"Fine," I shouted, "Then I'll stop humoring you. Your expedition is futile! It would be one thing if you were interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake, but you aren't, are you? You want to solve the oh-so-important Relay Dissension. The answer isn't here! This wasn't a library! This wasn't a university! They don't build those underground, or on uncolonized swamp planets! This was some kind of gigantic bunker! We can put it to real use, we can use it to bargain with Queen Yalat and bring peace to Narsompasi, and it is a ridiculous sin for you to put your desperation ahead of your dignity and not let yourself see that!"

"Desperation?" Wul'Tazamuna cried. "You think I am somehow desperate?"

"Well, it's obvious! Isn't it?" I pointed to his bowl of porridge. "You don't like that your son is on the galactic front lines. You're scared that the Turians are going to get him. You want him to come home. But you can't say it like that without losing face. So, you've adopted this absurd Reaper theory to rationalize why the Covenant quitting the war, blowing the relays, and permanently separating itself from the Relay Ecumene would be the honorable thing, rather than the cowardly thing. And you're here telling yourself that you can prove your Reaper theory through a Prothean site which you know won't have anything to say about it one way or the other!"

That was probably the stupidest thing I've ever said, well, I still think it was true, except for the part where I was lying about the Reapers, which I knew full well did build the mass effect relays, but it was such a stupid thing to say. I was lucky to get out of there without Wul'Tazamuna actually carving me up. He would have, if I had been some Batarian nobody. He would have cut me down right there, out of hand. But I was an agent of the Anuranite Lustration, and blessed by the Prophet of Sagacity, and I was just barely able to get out of there with my hide intact.

"Right," I told Ruz once we were back on our shuttle and safely in the air, "I think this decision is a clear one. We're getting our hands on that Deed of Excavation the hard way." Ruz nodded. He had helped me handle xenoarcheologist problem cases before. I called Talita.

"Qelet! It is so good to hear from you!"

"Talita, I need to speak with a swamp-dweller Dalatrass."

"Qelet, we agreed that I should be the face of any negotiation with the Lystheni matrilines."

"I don't want to talk to any of the bigger, more important matrilines. I'm looking for discretion. I want you to put me in touch with the most discreet Dalatrass you can think of. Preferably one who lives…" I gave a description of the broad section of the continent we were flying over.

Talita hemmed and hawed for a while as she tried to figure out what I was up to, but she gave me what I needed and even offered to call and let the Dalatrass know I was coming. The Vikasaya matriline was small, politically insignificant. They had gotten the worst of their late feud with the larger Inlidaya matriline and had since kept their heads down. As they watched Ruz and I touch down, they fingered their antique heat-sink rifles and shifted uneasily. But they escorted us right to Dalatrass Vikasaya, sure enough.

They weren't the only people nervous. This was the first time that Ruz and I met Narsompasikar swamp-dwellers in person, and I was somewhat paranoid about how it might go. These anxieties turned out to be groundless, on both ends. Negotiations went smoothly and straightforwardly. Dalatrass Vikasaya had been puzzled when Talita had called her, but as soon as the Vikasayas grasped the nature of my proposal they jumped at the opportunity. After talks were concluded I departed for Port Septentrional, leaving Ruz behind to ensure that the Vikasayas handled things properly. As I lifted away, I could see Ruz demonstrating to the fascinated Vikasayas how he used his carbine rifle. The whole arrangement was by far the easiest diplomacy I did on Narsompasi.