At last Pirius understood what this was; he had been trained to recognize such things.

The Archive was not a human society at all. It was a Coalescence. It was a hive.

In the beginning it really had been just an Archive, a project to store the records of the Coalition’s great works: nothing more sinister than that.

But its tunnels had quickly spread into the welcoming bulk of Olympus. Very soon, there was nobody left with a firm grasp of the Archive’s overall geography. And, with sections of the Archive soon hundreds of kilometers from each other — several days’ transit through these cramped corridors — it was impossible for anybody to exert proper central control.

It was soon obvious, too, that that didn’t matter. People were here to serve the Archive — to record information, to classify, analyze, store, preserve it; that was all. You might not know what everybody was doing across the unmapped expanse of the library, but you always knew what the next guy was doing, and that was usually enough. Somehow things got done, even if nobody was sure how.

Then times of trouble came to Sol system.

For long periods, the Archive was left isolated. The corridors of Olympus were always crowded. No matter how fast new tunnels were dug, no matter how the great nano-food banks were extended, the population seemed to grow faster. And people were stuck in here, of course; if any of the librarians and clerks stepped out on Mars’s surface unprotected, they would be dead in seconds.

There was a period of complicated politics, as factions of librarians fought each other over the basic resources that kept them alive. Strange bureaucratic kingdoms emerged at the heart of Olympus, like the ancient water empires of Earth’s Middle East, grabbing a monopoly on vital substances in order to wield power. But none of these “air empires” proved very enduring.

At last another social solution was found. Nobody planned it: it simply emerged. But once it was established, it proved remarkably stable. In the end, it was all a question of blood ties.

Despite the Coalition’s best efforts to establish birthing tanks, age-group cadres, and the rest of the homogenizing social apparatus it deployed elsewhere across the Galaxy, in the dark heart of Olympus, out of sight, families had always prospered. But now some of these clerkish matriarchs shifted their loyalties. The matriarchs began to produce more children of their own. They exerted pressure on their daughters not to have kids themselves but to stay at home, and help their mothers produce more brothers and sisters. It made sense, on a social level. These close ties kept the families united, and prevented ruinous squabbles over limited resources.

And then the genes cut in. Organisms were after all only vehicles that genes used to ride to the next generation. If you remained childless yourself, the only way you could pass on your genes was indirectly, through the fraction you shared with your siblings. So, in these cramped, stifling conditions, as the daughters of librarians gave up their own chances to have babies in order to support more sisters from the loins of their fecund mothers, the genes were satisfied.

It worked. The resource wars stopped. A handful of families grew spectacularly fast, spreading and merging, until at last the Archive was dominated by a single broad gene pool. Just five thousand years after the Olympus ground had first been broken, almost everybody in the Archive looked remarkably similar.

The population swelled, united and organized by the peculiar new genetic politics. And there was plenty of time for adaptation.

The peculiar society that had developed in the Archive was an ancient and stable form. Nobody was in control. People didn’t follow orders, but responded to what others did around them. This was local interaction, as the social analysts called it, reinforced by positive feedback, people reacting to their neighbors and evoking reactions in turn. And that was enough for things to get done. Food and other resources flowed back and forth through the warren of tunnels, the vital systems like air circulation were maintained, and even the nominal purpose of the Archive, the storage of data, was fulfilled — all without central direction. It was as if the Archive was a single composite organism with billions of faces.

And that organism was bound together by genetic ties, the ties of family.

“Beyond Sol system, other Coalescences have been discovered,” Luru Parz said. “Relics of the earlier Expansions. But all warrens are essentially the same. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing. Anywhere the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, and it pays to stay home with your mother rather than strike out on your own — out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I sometimes wonder where the first Coalescence emerged: perhaps even before spaceflight, on Earth itself.

“Of course the hives are terribly non-Doctrinal. Are these women human, as you are? No. They have evolved to serve a purpose for the Coalescence. And there are many specialists. You’ve seen them yourself: the long-legged mechanic types, the runners, the archivists with their deep, roomy brains. Specialists, you see, adapted to serve particular purposes, the better to serve the community as a whole — but all diverging from the human norm. Officially, everywhere they are found, the Coalition cleans out Coalescences—”

“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!”