Hive

Hayes felt that just seeing it, just letting his eyes roam that obscene geometrical matrix, made him somehow less than human. It evaporated the sweet and fine milk of the human condition drop by drop. It was evil and unholy and sacrilegious. Words engendered by a weak, superstitious mind, but Hayes was proud of that mind. Because it made him human. He was warm and emotional, not a machine like the things that had reared this awful place.

“Just like Gates said, it seems to go for miles,” Cutchen pointed out.

There was no way to know just how far into the belly of the mountains the city reached. For as Gates said, it went on as far as the eye could see and as far as their lights could reach, though in the distance you could see that parts of it were covered by cave-ins and swallowed in frozen rivers of glacial ice.

A paleozoic megalopolis.

The sort of place that might have inspired the wild tales of mythical places like Thule and Hyperborea, Lemuria and the Mountains of the Moon. Mystical Commoriom and veiled Atlantis. This was the prototype of countless prehuman blasphemies such as the Nameless City and eldritch Kadath in the Cold Wastes beyond Leng. You could see plainly how it had been scarred and scraped by the movement of the glaciers, carried up and pressed down, ground between massive ice flows like corn meal.

“You don’t honestly expect us to go into that bone pile, do you?” Cutchen said in a dry, cracking voice. “I mean . . . c’mon, Jimmy, it doesn’t look safe. And, Jesus Christ, I’m not afraid to admit that it scares the shit out of me just looking at it.”

It scared Hayes, too.

Scared him in fundamental ways he was not even aware of. It offended him as it offended all men, whether savage or rational, and he had an overwhelming compulsion to come back here with all the dynamite he could fit in the SnoCat and bring that fucking mountain down right on top of it.

“It’s safe enough,” he said. “Gates and the others were crawling through it, so can we.”

“Bullshit. I don’t care what those fucking labcoat Johnnies were doing, I’m not going in there. That’s it. That’s all there goddamn well is to it.” He stood there, breathing hard, looking like he wanted to scream or cry. “C’mon, Jimmy, don’t do this to me . . . lookit that fucking thing, will ya? I’m having bad dreams just seeing it. But going in there . . . it’s like a tomb, like a big rotting casket with the lid thrown open . . . I . . . I’m sorry, Jimmy . . . I’m just not up to it.”

Hayes went over to him, clapped him on the shoulder. “Just wait out here for us. We shouldn’t be long. Keep an eye on that generator.”

“Hell, I can’t even change the oil in my goddamn car,” Cutchen said.

He stood there, hands on his hips, watching them scramble up shattered stone columns and through an oval opening, one of hundreds if not thousands set into the weathered face of that city.

“You two would really leave me alone out here, wouldn’t you?” they heard him call. “Boy, isn’t that just great? Assholes. Your both assholes.”

They were barely inside and Cutchen came stumbling in after them, calling them every name he could think of and some that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Maybe the city did look like a casket, but at least inside it, he wouldn’t be alone with the bleak, antehuman memory of the place.

41

Inside, the city was no less amazing.

No less insane.

There were endless hexagonal mazes of corridors that seemed to lead into nothing but other corridors that branched to either side, above and below like jungle gym tangles of hollow pipes that had been welded at right angles to one another. Some were quadrilateral and others were triangularly obtuse. Circular passages began and ended with solid walls or sphere-shaped apartments. Rooms simply opened into other rooms like dozens of narrow cubes strung together or stacked atop one another. They were either massive and vault-like or cramped like the cells of monks or honeybees. Arched doorways were set halfway up fifteen foot walls. Sometimes they led into cylindrical channels that went on for hundreds of feet before narrowing to tiny, cubelike alcoves or sometimes they opened into gargantuan amphitheaters with madly curving walls that were set, sloping floor to fifty-foot ceiling, with ovoid cells. Some rooms had no ceilings, just immense shafts that led into a grainy fathomless blackness above and others had no floors, just narrow walkways spanning the great depths below. There was nothing that might have been called stairways, but now and again ribbed helixes rose to the floors above or far below.

The building plan was chaotic at the very least.

The floors were not necessarily distinct nor differentiated from one another. There was no first floor, second floor, third floor etc. The stories converged into one another, rooms and chambers dropping from above or rising up from below, tangled in lattices like diamond crystals.