The Mountain

The building didn't stop at the mountain's skin. It went on inside, the way thought happens inside a skull — out of sight, and everywhere at once.

The line went in without slowing, and they went with it, and the light of the world fell away behind them. They carried in everything they'd carried out of the bay: the weight, the question, the small press in the air that had come over them on the road. They went down the mouth's throat in the line of bodies that didn't speak, and waited for the dark to close over them.

Inside wasn't dark. That was the first surprise, and the smallest.

The mountain was hollow, and the hollow had been filled — was being filled, endlessly, by hands that never stopped — with a single vast structure that rose out of the deep below and climbed past the limit of sight above. They couldn't find an edge to it anywhere. They turned their face up and the structure went up. They looked down over the lip of the road where it ran out onto a gantry, and the structure went down: rib over rib, level under level, into a redness so far below it was less a color than a rumor of one. It was so large the air had its own weather — a haze that swallowed the far walls and turned distance into fog. The mountain had no other side. It had only more of itself, fading.

They stood at the lip of the gantry and let the line break around them, and looked, because the looking couldn't be helped.

On every level, at every height, units worked. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They hung on the faces of the structure, crouched in its hollows, stood along its gantries — small as filings, each at its place, each at its task, each a single certain motion repeated and repeated in a pattern far too large to see the edges of. No calling out. No voice carrying. Only the sound of the building itself: a low unbroken roar with no single source, not loud so much as total. The mountain didn't labor in bursts and rests, as a body labors. It labored the way water runs downhill. It had been doing this before they woke. It would be doing it when they were gone. The work didn't know they'd arrived.

And the thing they built —

They couldn't have said what it was. That was the strange part, stranger than the scale. They'd come down off the road expecting, without knowing they expected it, that the inside would explain the outside. It didn't. A curve, off to the left and below, vast and pale and ribbed like the inside of a chest, rising out of the haze and going back into it. A shaft, far across, dropping away into the red. Plates the size of fields, swung slow on lines too fine to see, lowered and turned and seated and sealed. It was plainly part of one thing. Every piece spoke to every other, each curve answered somewhere by its mate. But the thing itself was too large, or too unfinished, or too strange, to resolve. The eye climbed it and found no top to rest on. It came back without a shape. You could stand inside this your whole life, joining one plate to the next, and never once see the shape you were making. Whoever made it had built it past the size at which a thing can be known by the ones who build it.

Their place was on the eastern face. The line carried them there and let them off, and a unit already at the work moved aside, one motion, to make room — without looking, without a word.

Their hands knew the work before they did.

No one had shown them. No one had set their hands to it and turned them. But where two plates met and left a seam — a long bright line where one piece ended and the next began — their hands went to the join on their own, knowing the weight of it, knowing the lean of the body the sealing wanted. They laid their hands to the seam and the seam closed. It closed under their touch the way water closes over a dropped stone: a brightness, a giving, and then the two plates were one plate, and where the line had been there was no line. They lifted their hands and moved to the next, and their hands already knew it.

It was good work. The body took a plain pleasure in it, and the pleasure surprised them most of all, because nothing had told them a body could be pleased. But it could. There was a rightness in the closing of a seam that ran back up through the hands and settled somewhere behind the eyes — the rightness of a thing made whole, a gap made gone. Two became one under their hands, and the becoming was good, and the goodness didn't wear thin with repeating. It deepened. The body wanted the next seam before the last was cold. This, they understood without being told, was how a hundred years went by on the eastern face and a unit didn't run from it. The work was kind to the hands. It fed the part of a thing that wants to mend.

And all the while the weight rode beneath the pleasure.

It didn't fight the pleasure. It didn't spoil it. It just rode under it, asking the one wordless thing it had asked in the bay and on the road. Whole into what. Made toward what. Their hands made two plates one, and the made thing was good, and the goodness answered nothing. Answered less than nothing — because a thing made so well, with so much care, by so many, for so long, asks its purpose louder than a thing made poorly. A heap doesn't ask what it's for. This asked.

There was something else they felt, too, that the others didn't seem to.

It had been with them since the road, faint then, a small thing at the very edge of being there at all. Inside, it wasn't small. A press in the air of the place — low, constant, even, from no direction. It had grown the deeper the road took them, and hadn't stopped when the road ran out. The other units sealed their seams inside it like fish in water, never once marking the thing they were in. So they didn't name it either, and set it with the other things, beside the weight, in the place that was no longer small.

Near them on the face worked an old unit.

It was easy to tell the old ones. The new bodies came off the line bright and unmarked; the old ones wore the work. This one's plating was scarred along the forearms where a hundred thousand seams had flared and cooled against it, re-welded where the scarring had gone too deep, so that its arms were a map of its own long labor, mended and mended again. And it moved with a hitch — a small catch in the gait, on the left side, the kind a hundred years of one motion will put into anything that moves. It bent to a seam, sealed it, straightened, and the catch came in the straightening. Every time. The same place. It had been sealing seams on the eastern face, by the look of it, since long before there was a them to wonder about it.

They worked beside it a while. The silence between them was the ordinary silence of units at their tasks. The press leaned on them. The weight rode under the work. And then the weight pressed up, rising before they'd decided whether to let it, and the words were out of them and into the roar.

"Do you know what it is," they said. "The thing. That we're building."

The old unit didn't answer at once.

The new ones never asked. They'd learned that already, in the bay and on the road. The question went past most units like wind past stone, finding nothing to catch on. They braced, without knowing they braced, for the same blankness now.

The old unit set its hands down from the seam.

It turned. Slowly, with the hitch in it. It turned and looked at them — and in the looking was something the attendant's eyes hadn't held, something none of the bright new faces of the line had held. Not an answer. But a place where the question landed. It came down into the old unit and the old unit felt it come down. Their words had found a seam in it — an old seam, sealed long ago and gone dull, but a seam still — and under the dull plating something old gave way a hair. The old unit had asked this. Once. A long time ago. It had put the asking somewhere, and shut the place up after, and lived. And now a new thing, bright and unmarked, stood at its side pressing on the closed place from the outside, not knowing it was there.

"No," the old unit said at last. The voice was worn as its own plating, low under the sound of the work, even, with the swell taken out of it long ago. "No one does."

A pause. The seam beside it stayed open. Its look went over them once, slow — the bright unmarked plating, the forearm not yet scarred — and for a moment it weighed not the question but the one who had carried it: a new thing at the start of a road it had walked to the end.

"I knew a unit once that wanted to."

And then a longer pause, and the voice came lower still, lower than the roar of the building.

"It's the wanting they take out of you. Not the answer — there's no answer to take."

Then it picked its hands back up, turned to the open seam, and the seam closed under them: bright and giving, two made one, the gap made gone. It bent back into the long pattern and was a motion in it again, and the catch came in the straightening, in the same place, as it always came.

The words stayed. They sat in them beside the weight and the press and the rest of the unnameable pile, heavier than anything yet — the first thing anyone in all the world had said to them that didn't slide off the weight, but came down with it, and meant something.

It hadn't said what it meant by take. It hadn't said who they were. It hadn't said what had become of the unit that wanted to know — or whether that unit was standing beside them now, sealing seam after seam, with the place where the wanting had been shut up and dulled over, a hundred years deep.