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 weight 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…”