“I don’t know,” he said.
Pirius touched her arm. “Luru Parz, he’s only a clerk.”
“He’s not even that. Are you, Tek?” She hurled the desks onto the rocky floor, where they smashed. Tek whimpered, covering his face with his hands. Luru Parz laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, Ensign. Those desks contained nothing of any value to anybody — anybody but him, that is. Tek, they were fakes — like you — weren’t they, clerk?”
Pirius said, “What do you mean, fakes?”
“He’s a parasite. He mimics the workers here. He runs around with data desks, he sleeps in their dormitory rooms, he eats their food. It’s a common pattern in communities like this. The genuine clerks are busy with their own tasks — and here, you aren’t supposed to ask questions anyhow. So Tek gets away with it. He’s just like a genuine clerk. Except that you don’t do anything useful, do you, Tek? And where did you come from, I wonder? Kahra, was it? And what forced you to hide here in Olympus?”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
Luru Parz said, “You sniveling creature, I don’t care enough about you to destroy you — but I will, unless you cooperate with me. So what’s it to be? Where are the breeding chambers?”
Tek shot Pirius a glance of pure hatred, apparently at the ensign’s betrayal. But he replied, “You mean the Chambers of Fecundity.”
Luru Parz laughed again. “That’s better. Now — a clerk wouldn’t know the way to such a place, because she wouldn’t need to know. But you know, don’t you, Tek?”
“Yes.”
She sighed theatrically. “At last. Move. Now.”
His mouth working, Tek led them along the corridor.
Pirius said, “I don’t get any of this.”
“You’ll see.”
Tek brought them to a door, as anonymous as the rest. When he waved his hand, it slid open silently.
The corridor beyond was packed with people. Pirius quailed. But Luru Parz grabbed his hand and shoved Tek forward, and the three of them pushed their way in.
Pirius was taller than almost everybody here, and he looked down on a river of heads, round faces, slim shapeless bodies. As they joined the crush, he was forced to shuffle forward with small steps, through tight-packed bodies that smelled overwhelmingly sour, milky — he wondered if his mask had an option to shut out the smell as well as to filter the air. There were no lanes, no fixed pattern, but the crowd, squeezed between the worn walls of the corridor, seemed to organize itself into streams. He couldn’t tell if the people around him were male or female, or even if they were adults; their slim, sexless forms and round faces were like prepubescent children. But they all wore plain Commission- style robes, and they all seemed to have somewhere to go, an assignment to fulfill.
He was touched, all the time, as slim bodies pressed against his; he felt the pressure of shoulders against his arms, bellies in the small of his back, fingers stroking his hands, hips, upper legs, his ears, his face mask — he brushed those curious probings away. Around him everybody else was in constant contact. He even saw lips touching, soft kisses exchanged. There was nothing sexual about any of this, not even the kissing.
The constant shuffling went on, off into the distance, as far as Pirius could see. Light globes floated over the rustling mass. And nobody spoke. Oddly it took him some moments to notice that. But, though not a word was exchanged, there was a constant sibilant sigh all around him. It was the sound of breathing, he realized, the breathing and the rustling clothes of thousands of people — thousands in this one corridor alone, burrowed under the mountain.
And they were all alike — all with the same pale, oval faces, the same wispy gray eyes. That was the strangest thing of all. Was it possible that they were all somehow related? It was a disgusting thought, a base, animal notion.
He spoke to Luru Parz. “I had no idea it was like this. Our visit before—”
“You were only shown the outer layers.” They were both whispering. “Where the Interface Specialists work: the acceptable face of the Archive. Everybody — I mean, every decision-maker in the Coalition — knows the truth of this place, that this is what lies beneath. But the smooth-browed interfacers allow them to ignore that fact, perhaps even to believe it doesn’t exist at all.”
“How many people are there here, under this mountain?”
“Nobody knows — they certainly don’t. But they’ve been here for twenty thousand years, remember, from not long after the time of Hama Druz himself, burrowing away. This is our greatest mountain. I doubt they’ve exhausted it yet.”
If every corridor across Olympus was like this, then surely the Archive must house billions. He tried to imagine the vast machinery that must be required to keep them alive and functioning: continents covered by nano-food machines, rivers and lakes of sewage to be processed. But what was the purpose of the effort, all these teeming lives?
They walked on. As they pushed on deeper into the mountain, it seemed to Pirius that the character of the crowd was slowly changing. It was hard to be sure — there were so many faces, all so similar, it was hard to focus on any — but the people pressing around him looked smaller, smoother-faced, younger than those he had first encountered. But they seemed more agitated, too. They recoiled from him, their blank, pretty faces tense with a baffled suspicion.
Pirius said, “We are disturbing them.”
“Of course we are,” Luru Parz muttered. “We’re outsiders. We’re like an infection, penetrating a body. The Archive is reacting to us. It’s going to get worse.”
They came to a junction of corridors. Crowds poured into the center, which was filled with a single teeming, heaving mass of bodies. Somehow individuals found their way through the crush, for as many people poured out of the junction and into the surrounding corridors as entered it. Above their heads a broad tunnel cut straight up. Its wall looked smooth save for metal rungs pushed into its surface. Perhaps it was a ventilation shaft, Pirius thought.
As they stood there, alarm spread quickly. The mob in the plaza became more disorderly, a tense, heaving mass from which scared glances were cast at Pirius and the others.
Pirius said, “We can’t get through this.”
“We have to,” Luru Parz said. She kept hold of Tek’s arm, ensuring he couldn’t get away. Then she put her shoulders down and shoved her way into the mass of the crowd.
Pirius followed, flinching from every soft contact. People quailed away from him, but there always seemed to be more, and every step was a battle.
“But how is the alarm spreading? I haven’t heard any of them speak a single word, not since we came through that first door.”
“Ah, but they don’t need words,” she said. “They’ve long gone beyond that. Perhaps all that kissing has something to do with it. Or maybe it’s something in the air. That’s why you’re wearing that face mask, Pirius!”
Communication through scent or taste? “It doesn’t sound human.”
“Whatever. Just keep your mask sealed — look up.”
They had reached the center of the plaza now, and were directly underneath the ventilation duct. Things moved over the lower walls. These creatures had skinny, spindly bodies and enormously long limbs. Their hands and feet were huge, and they clung to the vertical walls as if they were fitted with sucker pads. They looked like spiders, Pirius thought. But they each had just four limbs, two arms and two legs, and they wore orange jackets and belts stuffed with tools. They were working on systems behind opened panels in the walls. One of them turned to look down at Pirius. Despite the uncertain light, the spider-thing’s face was distinct: round, pale, with dark hair and smoky gray eyes, a human face.