The great door began to swing open. The thin air brought only the faintest of sighs to Pirius’s ears. A semitransparent tube snaked out of the hatchway and nuzzled against the hull of the flitter.
“Don’t forget your face masks,” Luru Parz said. She snapped her fingers and disappeared into a cloud of scattering pixels.
The woman smiled at them, though the gaze of her pale gray eyes slid away from their faces. “My name is Maruc. I am an Interface Specialist.”
Pirius and Nilis had climbed down a metal-runged ladder into a kind of antechamber, roughly cut from the rock. They faced this Maruc, their mouths and noses hidden by snug semisentient masks. It had been made clear that though the air in the Archive was breathable, such masks were to be worn at all times; nobody had explained why to Pirius, but he wasn’t in the habit of asking such questions.
Nilis introduced the two of them in his typically boisterous and avuncular way. “I can’t begin to tell you how privileged I feel to be here — here, the greatest repository of knowledge in Sol system, why, I dare say, in the human Galaxy!” He clapped Pirius fon the back. “Doesn’t it make you fall in love with the Coalition all over again?”
“Yes, sir,” Pirius said neutrally.
Maruc led them out of the anteroom and down some shallow steps into a chamber dug deeper yet into the rock. This vast library, dug into the cooling corpse of Olympus Mons, was evidently a place of low ceilings; Pirius had to duck.
Maruc struck him as odd. She had her head shaven, she wore a standard Commissary-style floor- length black robe, and she was short; both Nilis and Pirius towered over her. The robe he had expected. This Archive had once been an independent organization, but it had long ago been swallowed up by one of Earth’s great Academies, which had in turn been brought under the wing of the all-powerful Commission for Historical Truth. Nilis had set out this long bureaucratic saga for him, not seeming to realize that Pirius was even less interested in the organizational history of the Coalition’s agencies than he was in the dusty landscape of Mars.
But Pirius was surprised at Maruc’s height, given the general tallness he had noticed in the Martian population. And at first glance he would have said she looked young, only a few years older than himself, perhaps early twenties. But her face was pinched, marked with deep lines on her brow, and her gray eyes, though clear, were sunk in pits of dark-looking flesh. She was a strange mixture of youth and age.
He was staring. When she caught his gaze she hunched in on herself a little.
Pirius looked away, embarrassed. More secrets, he thought wearily.
They passed through a final door, and walked into a corridor, a long one; its low arched profile, lit up by floating light globes, receded in both directions until a slow curve took its farther stretches out of sight.
Maruc led them along the passageway. It was punctuated by doors on either side, all identical, none of them labeled. The corridor was evidently very old; the floor was worn, and the walls rubbed smooth. The only people he could see were running, back and forth along the corridor, off in the dusty distance. Pirius automatically began to count the doors; without that instinctive discipline he would soon have been lost.
One of the doors opened as they passed. A man came out, carrying a stack of data desks. Thin-faced, he was like Maruc in his slight build, but he looked young, with none of Maruc’s odd premature aging. He let them walk ahead, and then trailed them a few paces behind, his gaze cast down on the worn floor. This seemed peculiar to Pirius. But Maruc didn’t say anything, and Nilis was of course oblivious to everything but the contents of his own head.
One of those corridor runners passed the little party. They all had to squeeze back against the wall to let her pass. She wore black, but her robe was cut short to expose bare legs. She ran intently, eyes staring ahead, arms pumping, her long, spidery legs working; her upper chest was high, though her breasts were small, and she seemed to be breathing evenly. She ran on past them without breaking stride, and disappeared down the corridor, following its bend out of sight.
“Remarkable,” Nilis said, watching her go. “She looks as if she could run all day.”
“Perhaps she could,” Maruc said mildly. “That is her specialism.”
“Really? Well, well.” Nilis was playing the visiting dignitary, trying to put Maruc at ease, though without much success, Pirius thought.
They walked on. And behind them the strange young man with the data desks still trailed, unremarked.
Maruc opened a door and led them into a room. “A typical study area,” she said.
Brightly lit by light globes, the room contained desks and cubicles where people and bots, crammed in close together, worked side by side. Most of the scholars worked through flickering Virtual images, but some labored over data desks. The people were small, neat, their heads shaven like Maruc’s. Men and women alike were slim, and it was hard to distinguish between the sexes.
Some of those bare heads looked oddly large to Pirius, their skulls swollen and fragile. It was probably a trick of the light.
The visitors seemed to disturb these scholars. Some of them looked up, nervously, before cowering into their work, as if trying to hide. Others touched each other, clasping hands, rubbing foreheads, or even kissing softly. Not a word was spoken. Pirius could feel the tension in the room until he and the others receded again.
They walked on.
Maruc spoke of how the Archive had been digging its way into Mons Olympus for millennia. In many ways it was an ideal site for a library. Mars was a still, stable world, geologically speaking, and even this, its greatest mountain, had been dead for a billion years. The bulk of Olympus was basaltic rock, and under a surface layer smashed and broken by ancient impacts — in Maruc’s peculiar phrase, impact gardened — the rock was porous and friable, quite easy to tunnel into. It grew warmer the deeper you dug, Maruc said, but that wasn’t a problem; some of the deepest chambers even used Mars’s remnant inner heat as an energy supply. The tremendous shield of rock above was of course a protection from any deliberate aggression, as well as from natural disasters up to a small asteroid strike.
Pirius built up a picture of a great warren burrowed through the vast mound of Olympus, people everywhere, running along corridors and laboring in chambers. After twenty thousand years the Archive must run far, he thought, tens of kilometers, even hundreds: under Sol system’s greatest mountain, there was always more room.
Maruc stopped at a doorway and opened it to reach another corridor, identical to the first. They walked down this until after a time they turned through another door into yet another passageway, and then they turned again. Pirius kept trying to build up a map in his head, based on the turns they made, the numbers of doors they passed. But all the corridors were identical, and looked the same in either direction, and he began to be unsure which way he was facing.
Besides, the air was thick, increasingly clammy and warm, and despite his face mask he thought he could smell an odd scent — a milkiness, oddly animal. Disconcerted, disoriented, he began to worry that he was getting lost.
But no matter where they went, the little man with the data desks followed them.
They came to another room, full of more scared-looking archivists. Maruc said that some of these had been assigned to assist Nilis.
Only about half the people living here under the mountain were devoted to the data itself. The rest had administrative functions, like Maruc herself, or they were concerned with support work that kept the facility going: there were specialist groups for digging fresh corridors ever deeper into Olympus, others to maintain the flow of air or water, and others to tend the big nano-food banks, warmed by Olympus’s residual heat.