As she had promised, Luru Parz met him at Kahra. After an overnight stay they boarded a flitter for the final hop to Olympus.
They landed at coordinates Pirius had extracted from Tek’s chip. When the flitter settled to the ground, the situation — the gentle slope, the dust-soaked sky, the washed-out red-brown colors, the hatch set in the ground — seemed exactly the same as his last visit.
Tek kept them waiting.
Luru Parz was calm. “We have to give him time. Remember he is working covertly in there. Believe me, it’s a difficult environment in which to act independently.” Pirius didn’t know what she meant.
He was restless, anxious. The flitter was little more than a bubble a couple of meters across. Its hull was so transparent it would have been invisible save for a thin layer of Martian dust. And Pirius was stuck inside it with an immortal.
They sat opposite each other, so close in the tiny flitter that their knees almost touched. Even in person Luru had that dark, still quality, as if light fell differently on her. He could smell her, a faint dusty tang, like the smoky smell of the dead leaves that littered corners of Nilis’s unruly garden.
She was studying him. “Do I horrify you, Ensign? I am a living embodiment of everything you have been brought up to despise. Every breath I take is illegal.”
“It isn’t that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No, it isn’t, is it? I suppose you’ve been in Sol system long enough to be able to perceive shades of gray. Then what?”
“You’re the strangest human being I have ever met.”
She nodded. “If indeed I am still human. After all, as Hama Druz himself understood, human beings aren’t meant to last twenty thousand years.”
It was the first time he had heard the actual number; it shocked him. “It is unimaginable.”
“Of course it is. It is a monstrous time, a time that should frame the rise and fall of a species, not a single life. But the alternative to living is always worse.”
She had been born during the last days of the Qax Occupation. While no older than Pirius she had been forced to make a compromise: to accept the gift of immortality in return for becoming a collaborator. “I thought it was the right thing to do, to help preserve mankind. It would have been easier to refuse.”
When the Qax fell, the jasofts, undying collaborators, were hunted down. Many of them fled, on starships launched from Port Sol and by other routes. But the nascent Coalition soon discovered much of the information and experience they needed to run Earth was locked up in the heads of the jasofts. “They could never admit what they were doing,” Luru said. “But they were forced to turn to us. And that mixture of secrecy and power gave us opportunities.”
But time flowed by relentlessly, mayfly generations came and went, and still Luru Parz did not die. She continued to build her power base, and to watch the slow working-out of historical forces.
“Every few generations there would be a fresh surge of orthodoxy,” she said dryly. “Some new grouping in the Commission for Historical Truth would decide we ancient monsters should be got rid of once and for all.” She found places to hide, and spent much of her life out of sight. “But I survived. It got harder for us as the Coalition strengthened, of course. But the Coalition’s very stability was good for us. If you live a long time in a stable economic and political system it’s not hard to accumulate wealth and power, over and over. It’s a change of regime you fear.”
Having been born with mankind under the heel of a conqueror, she had lived through the whole of the stunning Third Expansion, which had seen humans sweep across the Galaxy. And in this manner, twenty thousand years had worn away.
Pirius said, “I can’t imagine how it feels to be you.”
She sighed. “The scientists used to say that the human brain can accommodate only perhaps a thousand years’ experience. It isn’t as simple as that. Of course we edit our memories, all the time. We construct stories; otherwise we could not survive in a chaotic, merciless universe that cares nothing for us. If I think back to the past, yes, perhaps I can retrieve a fragment of a story I have lived. But I live on, and on, and on, and if I look back now I can’t be sure if I am visiting a memory, or a memory of a memory… Sometimes it seems that everything that went before today was nothing but a dream. But then I will touch the surface of a Conurbation wall, or I will smell a spice that was once popular in Port Sol, and my mind will be flooded with places, faces, voices — not as if it were yesterday, but as if it were today.”
Her eyes now were clear, bright, behind lenses of water. “And do you know what? I regret. I regret what is lost, people and places long vanished. Of course it is absurd. There isn’t room in the universe for them all, if they had lived. And besides I chose to leave them behind. But I regret even so. Isn’t that foolish?”
She leaned forward; that smoky scent intensified. “Let me tell you something. You think I have banished death. Not so. I live with death. Faces like yours flash before me, and then crumble and vanish. How can I care about you? You are just one of a torrent, all of you winnowed by death.”
“And so you work to stay alive.”
“What else is there? But I have come to see that though I will outlive you, it’s very unlikely I could outlive humanity: if I am to survive, I need the infrastructure of mankind. And that is why I have come out of hiding. I’m not doing it for mankind, Ensign, or for the Coalition, or for Nilis, and certainly not for Hama Druz and his dreary preaching. I’m doing it for myself.”
Pirius sat back. “I wonder how much of this is true. Perhaps this is all a fantastic story you tell to baffle the credulous.”
She smiled, unperturbed. “Well, that’s possible.”
“But your power is real enough. I’ve seen it. And, whatever you are, the goal is all that matters.”
She clapped her small hands. “There — I knew you were a pragmatist!”
The hatch in the flank of Olympus opened at last. A wormlike tube slid out and nuzzled against the flitters hull.
As they prepared to enter the Archive, Pirius thought of her stories of the lost starships, immense multiple-generation arks that had fled from Port Sol, most of them never to be heard from again. Perhaps they were still out there, arks of immortals, driving on into the dark. He felt an intense stab of curiosity. After twenty thousand years, what would have become of them? He supposed he would never know.
He focused on the moment.
As on his first visit, Luru insisted they both wear their skinsuit helmets.
Once again Pirius found himself in a maze of tunnels and chambers. It looked much the same as where he had entered before. But in this section, the hovering light globes were sparse, as if it was less used.
And here was Tek, small, compact, stooped, cringing. Once more he carried a set of data desks, clutched to his chest as if for reassurance. “I knew you would return, Ensign.” But then he made out Luru Parz, and Tek flinched back. “Who are you?”
“Never mind that. Take us to the breeding chambers, whatever you call them here.”
Pirius had no idea what she meant.
He sensed Tek understood. But the specialist said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He huddled over his data desks. He was actually shaking, Pirius saw; whatever he had hoped to achieve by bringing Pirius back here, he hadn’t expected this.
Luru Parz stepped up to him. “So you’re a clerk, are you?”
“Yes, I—”
“Then what are you doing out here, away from all the other clerks?” She snatched the data desks out of his grasp. “What do these contain?”