Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  She was studying him. “Do I horrify you, Ensign? I am a living embodiment of everything you have been brought up to despise. Every breath I take is illegal.”

  “It isn’t that.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “No, it isn’t, is it? I suppose you’ve been in Sol system long enough to be able to perceive shades of gray. Then what?”

  “You’re the strangest human being I have ever met.”

  She nodded. “If indeed I am still human. After all, as Hama Druz himself understood, human beings aren’t meant to last twenty thousand years.”

  It was the first time he had heard the actual number; it shocked him. “It is unimaginable.”

  “Of course it is. It is a monstrous time, a time that should frame the rise and fall of a species, not a single life. But the alternative to living is always worse.”

  She had been born during the last days of the Qax Occupation. While no older than Pirius she had been forced to make a compromise: to accept the gift of immortality in return for becoming a collaborator. “I thought it was the right thing to do, to help preserve mankind. It would have been easier to refuse.”

  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 flitter’s 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.

  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.

  They came at last to another door. Tek, battered by the crush of the crowd, cowered nervously.

  “Twenty thousand years is a long time,” Luru Parz said to Pirius. “The human species has only been around a few multiples of that. It is time enough.”

  Pirius asked, “Time enough for what?”

  For answer, Luru opened the door.

  The chamber was huge. The light from the few floating globes was low, and Pirius’s view was impressionistic, of a domed roof, a vast floor inset with pools of some milky fluid through which languid creatures swam. Like everywhere else in the complex, the room was crowded. There must have been several thousand people visible in that one glance. Pirius marveled to think that all of this was concealed under the immense basaltic pile of Mons Olympus.

  He took a step into the room. The air was thick with steam, which his semisentient mask battled to keep from condensing on his faceplate.

  Luru Parz placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t crack your visor in here, of all places,” she said. “Don’t.”

  The people here were as small, rounded, uniform as they were everywhere else. As he walked forward they scuttled out of his way, but the sea of people closed behind him, and they hurried back and forth on their tasks. They all seemed to be women—or rather girls; they seemed even younger here than in the rest of the complex. They carried bits of food, jugs of water, clothes, what looked like medical equipment. It was like a vast, low-technology hospital, he thought.

  He paused by one of the pools. It was no more than waist deep, and filled with a milky, thick fluid that rippled with low-gravity languor. Women floated in this stuff, barely moving. They were naked, and droplets of the milky stuff clung to their smooth skin.

  And they were pregnant, mountainously so.

  But they were all ages, from very young girls whose thin limbs and small frames looked barely able to support the weig
ht of their bellies, to much older women whose faces bore more wrinkles than Luru Parz’s. Attendants, female, moved between the women, wading in the waist-deep milk. They stroked the faces and limbs of the pregnant ones, and caressed their bellies.

  “The breeders,” Luru Parz said grimly. “It’s always like this at the heart of the warrens. Breeding chambers are the most sacred places in the complex, the most precious to the drones. See how alarmed they are. But they won’t harm us.”

  Pirius was struggling to make sense of this. “And this is where the Archive is controlled from?”

  “No,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Do you still not see, Ensign? Nobody controls the Archive. These mothers are its most important single element, I suppose. But even they, perpetually pregnant, don’t control anything, not even their own lives… .”

  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.