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 on 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.