“But not here,” Pirius said. “They left this one to develop, here, on Earth’s sister planet. On Mars.” And they gave it mankind’s treasure, he thought, the Archive of its past.
He probed at his feelings. He found no anger. He felt only numb. Perhaps he had experienced too much, seen too much. But this was even worse than finding a nest of Silver Ghosts in Sol system. To allow humans to diverge like this, here at the very heart of Sol system — it went against the basics of Hama Druz’s teachings.
Luru seemed to sense his discomfort. “Nobody meant it to be like this, Ensign. And when it did happen it was simply too useful to discard, no matter what the Druz Doctrines had to say. In the end, the powerful folk who run the Coalition are pragmatists. Like you.”
It was a relief to Pirius when a corpulent Virtual of Minister Gramm gathered in the air, shadowed by a nervous, barefoot Nilis. He and Luru Parz had been tracked down.
Nilis grasped the situation much more quickly than Pirius. He didn’t have to fake his anger and repugnance.
But Gramm was lordly, defiant. “So now you know about Olympus. Do you think I will apologize for it to the likes of you?
“Listen to me. This Archive is essential to the continuance of the great projects of the Coalition. We humans are poor at the archival of information, you know. Paper records rot in a few thousand years at most. Digitally archived data survives better, so long as it is regularly transferred from store to store. But even such data stores are subject to slow corruption, for instance, from radiation. The half- life of our data is only ten thousand years. But all our efforts are dwarfed by what is achieved in the natural world. DNA far outdoes tablets of clay or stone. Some of our genes are a billion years old — the deep ancient ones, shared across the great domains of life — and over the generations genetic information has been copied more than twenty billion times, with an error rate of less than one in a trillion.”
He sighed. “We are fighting a war on scales of space and time that defy our humanity. We need to remember better by an order of magnitude if we are to sustain ourselves as a galactic power. And so we have this place. This Archive is already ancient. Its generations of clerk-drones live for nothing but to copy bits of data, meaningless to them, from one store to another. Perhaps the hive will one day be able to emulate the copying fidelity of the genes — who knows? It’s certainly a goal that no other human social form could possibly deliver. Commissary, like it or not, hives are good libraries!”
Nilis shouted, “And for that grandiose goal you will tolerate this deviance in the heart of Sol system? Your hypocrisy is galling!” His raised voice disturbed the swimming mothers; they drifted across their pools, away from him.
“You always did think small, Nilis,” Gramm said dismissively. “In a way it’s rather elegant to turn one of our fundamental human flaws into a source of strength, don’t you think? And speaking of corruption and deviance — you,” he challenged Luru Parz. “What is it you want here, you old witch?”
“I told you I knew where the bodies were buried,” she said levelly. “Gramm, once again you’re stalling over funding Nilis’s projects. That will stop.”
Gramm growled, “You have threatened me before. Do you really think exposing this hive-mountain will bring down the Coalition?”
“No,” she said, unperturbed. “But it will show you I’m serious. There are far worse secrets in Sol system than this, Minister Gramm, as you know better than I do. And now you are going to help me find a weapon. Nilis needs something to strike at the Prime Radiant. I think I know where to find one.”
Nilis looked interested. “Where?”
“In the past, of course. But locked away, in an archive buried even deeper than this one.”
Gramm glared at her, his mouth working. But Pirius saw that Luru Parz had beaten him again.
Nilis was staring at her. “Madam, you are a nest of mysteries. But this deeper archive — where is it?”
She said, “Callisto.”
The name meant nothing to Pirius. But Nilis blanched.
The strange standoff lasted a few more minutes, until blue-helmeted Guardians in fully armored skinsuits broke into the chamber to escort them all away.
As they left, Pirius drew Luru Parz aside. “There’s something I still don’t understand. Why did Tek give me that contact chip in the first place? What did he want?”
She sighed. “He was just probing, seeking an opportunity. It’s the way a Coalescence works.”
Pirius shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Tek act on behalf of the Coalescence? He is a parasite.”
“But he’s part of the hive, too. Don’t you see that? It’s just that he doesn’t know it. None of them does.” She plucked his sleeve. “Come on, Ensign, let’s get out of here. Even through my mask, the stink of this place is making me feel ill.”
They hurried after the Guardians, making for the cool, empty surface of Mars.
Behind them, the Coalescent mothers swam in their milky pools, and naked, round-shouldered attendants scurried anxiously.
Chapter 30
Pirius Blue had almost forgotten how it was to sit in a greenship cockpit.
It was like being suspended in open space, with nothing between you and the sky. And this Galaxy- center sky was full of stars, a clustering of globes that receded to infinity. Many of them were bright blue youngsters, but others glowered red, resentfully old before their time. There was a great sense of motion about the barrage of stars, a sense of immense dynamism — and in truth these crowded stars were flying rapidly through this lethal space, though their motion was only visible on timescales of years, too slow for mayfly humans to perceive.
Huddled in a corner of Pirius’s greenship cockpit, Virtual Nilis looked faintly absurd in his skinsuit, Virtual-tailored to fit his ample girth. He said, wondering, “So many stars, giant, violent stars, far more massive than Earth’s sun, crowded so close they slide past like light globes lining a roadway… It is as bright as a tropical sky! There is an old paradox. Once it was believed that the universe is infinite and uniform, everywhere full of stars. But that cannot be so, you see, for then whichever direction you looked, your eye would meet a star, and the whole sky would shine as bright as the surface of the sun. Perhaps that paradoxical sky would look something like this.”
“It’s a beautiful sight, Commissary,” Pirius Blue said. “But remember, in this place, every star is a fortress.”
That shut him up, to Pirius’s relief. Pirius had work to do; the mission clock was counting down. He blipped the greenship’s attitude controllers, tiny inertial generators fixed to each of the three nacelles and to the main body.
Before him, the spangling of crowded Galaxy-center stars shifted. He made out seven sparks against that background, the emerald lights of the seven greenships that were going to accompany him and his crew into the unknown depths of the Cavity.
“Systems seem nominal,” he reported.
Enduring Hope called from his engineer’s position, “Sure, genius, like you can feel the ship’s degrees of freedom just by sitting there. In fact I fixed the inertial control before you started playing.”
“I knew I could rely on you, Hope.”