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?”

“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.