Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  He held up his hand. "You are determined that the light of civilization will not go out. Very well. But until that day of blessed recovery comes, until the Emperor rides in to tell us what to do, we must fend for ourselves. Do you see that? Well, of course you do, for I can see what you have built here. You must come with me — you and your family, and the others who depend on you. I can protect you in the dangerous times to come... You can't do it all yourself, Boudicca," he said more gently.

  "And if we refuse?"

  He shrugged. "I can't let you stay here, for what you have built will give succor to the Saxons."

  "What will you do — burn us out, as the Saxons have our neighbors?"

  "I hope not," he said. But he was still and silent as a statue, and she could see his determination.

  Once again she faced an upheaval in her life — the abandonment of all she had built, the security she had made. But it could not be helped.

  "Do you make iron?" she asked suddenly.

  "Yes," he said. "Not well. But we have begun." He seemed amused. "Are you assessing me?"

  "I would not throw my lot in with a fool," she snapped. "I have lived too long, and seen too many fools die. If we come with you, it will not be as captives, or slaves, or even servants. We will live with you as equals. And we will live inside your fort — we will not grub in the fields beyond, exposed to the blades of the Saxons."

  The moment stretched, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. And she was aware, too, of the crusted mud that clung to her legs and stiffened her hair. But she held her nerve, and returned his startled gaze.

  At last he laughed out loud. "I would not dare challenge you, my Boudicca. Very well. As equals."

  She nodded, her heart pounding. "Tell me one more thing, riothamus. What is your name?"

  "My name is Artorius." It was a Roman name, but his t was soft, and he spoke in the Welsh style: ar-thur-ius. He smiled at her, and turned away to issue crisp commands to his soldiers.

  Chapter 16

  When I got back to my hotel room after my visit with Lou, I used the room's clunky pay-for-use plug-in keyboard to check my email. There were two significant notes.

  The first was a long missive from Peter McLachlan.

  "Most of the universe is dark," Peter wrote. "Dark matter. An invisible, mysterious substance that makes up some ninety percent of all the mass of the universe. You can tell it's there from gravitational effects — the whole Galaxy is embedded in a big pond of it, and turns like a lily leaf in a pail of scummy water. But otherwise it passes through our planet like a vast ghost. How marvelous, how scary, that so much of the universe — most of it, in fact — is quite invisible to us. Who knows what lurks out there in the glassy dark?... I'm inspired, George. Something about my contact with you, this little mystery in your life, has sparked me off. That and Kuiper. I've been in touch with the Slan(t)ers again..." He was an unusual email correspondent. There was no BTW or abt or lol, no smiley faces for Peter. His mails were clearly thought through, composed, even spellchecked, like old-fashioned letters: they were genuine correspondence. "...Of course we do have a handful of human-built space probes that have reached almost as far as the Kuiper Belt. They aren't capable of studying the Anomaly, sadly. But they are running into strangeness..."

  My finger hovered over the DELETE button. Part of me responded to all this stuff. But the adult part of me was beginning to regret letting this strange obsessive into my life.

  I read on.

  He told me about the Pioneers: two deep-space probes launched in the seventies by NASA. They had been the first probes to fly past Jupiter and Saturn. And after that, they had just kept on going. By now, more than three decades after their launch, they had passed far beyond the orbit of Pluto — and there was nothing to stop them, it seemed, until they swam among the stars a few hundred thousand years from now.

  But something was slowing them down. More anomalous information he and his pals the Slan(t)ers had dug up.

  "The two Pioneers are decelerating. Not by much, a mere ten-billionth of an Earth gravity, but it's real. Right now the first Pioneer is off-course by the distance between the Earth and the moon. And nobody knows what's causing it." But perhaps it was dark matter. "Maybe for something as isolated and fragile as a Pioneer, dark matter effects start to dominate. It's interesting to speculate what will happen if we ever try to drive a starship out there—"

  Or it might be a fuel leak, I thought. Or just paint, sublimating in the vacuum. Oddly, I felt reluctant to discourage him.

  "I'm coming to think dark matter is the key to everything..."

  I pressed a key to store the file.

  The second notable mail was from my ex-wife.

  Linda had heard about my dad's death from our mutual friends, and wanted to see me. We had always gotten together regularly. I suppose we both accepted that after a decade of marriage, now buried in the irrevocable past, we had too much in common to ever cut the ties completely. Over an exchange of mails, we agreed to meet on neutral territory.

  I flew back to London the next day. I left Florida without regrets.

  • • •

  It was my idea to meet Linda at the Museum of London. I was starting to become intrigued by what I'd heard of the Roman British girl Regina, who according to our dubious family legend was supposed to have traveled from the collapsed province of Britain, across Europe, all the way to the fading glory of Rome itself. Somehow she, or at least her legend, seemed to be central to what had happened to my family. And if any of it was true, perhaps she once traveled through London itself — Londinium, as the Romans had called it. But like most of London's peripatetic population, even though I'd spent much of my working life in the City, I'd paid no attention whatsoever to its history. I'd never so much as been inside the Tower, though it had only been a quarter hour's walk away from the offices where I once worked. Anyhow, now was a chance to put some of that right.

  A check on the Internet showed me that the Roman city had been confined by a wall that contained much of the modern City of London — the financial center — excluding the West End, and points farther east than the Tower. The Museum of London was itself set on a corner of the old wall, or rather, on the line it had once traced out. It might give me a few clues about Regina.

  And two thousand years of history might distract Linda and me sufficiently to keep us from bickering for a couple of hours.

  The museum turned out to be just outside the Barbican, that concrete wilderness that seems to have been designed for cars, not humans. The museum itself is set on a traffic island cut off by a moat of roaring traffic. I seemed to walk a mile before I found a staircase that took me up to an elevated walkway that crossed the traffic stream and led into the museum complex itself. I was early — I'm always early rather than late, while Linda is the opposite — and I spent the spare time poking around the museum's show-and-tell displays and scale models, showing Londinium's rise and fall.

  After Caesar's first foray, the Emperor Claudius, equipped with war elephants, had begun the true conquest of Britain. By sixty years after the death of Christ, Londinium had grown into a city big enough to be worth being burned down by Boudicca. But in the fifth century, after Britain became detached from the Empire, Londinium collapsed. The Roman area would not be reoccupied for four hundred years, the time of Alfred the Great. I picked through the little models and maps, trying to figure out what date Regina must have come through here, if she ever did. I didn't know enough to be able to tell.

  I dug around in the gift shop. I felt like the only adult in there; the museum's only other visitors were some Scandinavian tourists, all long legs, backpacks, and blond hair, and a batch of young-teenager schoolkids who seemed to swarm everywhere, their behavior scarcely modified by the yells and yips of their teachers. Eventually I found a slim guidebook to the "Wall Walk," a tour around the line of the Roman wall. I queued up to pay behind a line of the schoolkids, each of them buying a sweet or a sparkly pencil sharpene
r or an AMO LONDINIUM mouse pad. An old fart in a duffel coat, I gritted my teeth and stayed patient, reminding myself that all this junk was helping keep the museums free to enter.

  Linda found me in the coffee shop. She had come from work; she was an office manager in a solicitor's office, based on the edge of Soho. She was a little shorter than me, with her hair cut sensibly short, a bit flyaway where it was going to gray. She wore a slightly rumpled blue-black suit. Her face was small, symmetrical, with neat features set off by a petite nose. She had always been beautiful in a gentle, easy-on-the-eye way. But I thought I saw more lines and shadows, and she looked a little stressed, her eyes hollow. She always programmed herself right up to the last minute, as no doubt she had today; she'd have had to make room for me in her schedule.

  I bought her a coffee and explained my scheme to do the Wall Walk.

  "In shoes like these?"

  She was wearing plain-looking flat-soled black leather shoes, the kind I used to call "matron's shoes," when I dared. "They'll do."

  "Not mine. Yours." I was wearing a pair of my old Hush Puppy slip-ons. "When the hell are you going to get yourself some trainers?"

  "The day they go out of fashion."

  She grunted. "You always were perverse. But still — two hours of London roads on a muggy day like this. Why?... Oh. This is family stuff again, isn't it?"

  She had always been suspicious of my family, ever since it had become clear that my mother had never really approved of her. "Too dull for your personality," Mum would say to me. I think Linda had been quietly pleased that I was always remote from them at the best of times, and had drifted even farther from my dad after Mother's death. We had had enough fights over family issues even so, however. But then we had fights about everything.

  "Yes," I said. "Family stuff. Come on, Linda. Let's be tourists for once."

  "I suppose we can always go to the pub when it doesn't work out," she said.

  "There's always that."

  She stood, briskly gathered up her belongings, checked her cell phone, and led the way out.

  • • •

  The London wall was a great semicircle arcing north from the river at Blackfriars, east along Moorgate and then back south to the river at the Tower. Not much of the wall itself has survived, but even after all this time the Romans' layout is still preserved in the pattern of London's streets.

  The walk didn't follow the whole line of the wall, just the section that cut east of the museum at the Barbican, passing north of the City and then down to the river by the Tower. There were supposed to be little numbered ceramic plaques you could follow, with the first few in the area of the museum itself, which had been built on the site of one of the Romans' forts. Number one plaque was at the Tower and number twenty-one near the museum, so we were going to have to follow the line counting down, which bothered my sense of neatness, and earned me the day's first bit of mockery from Linda.

  The first few plaques were hard to find in the Barbican's three-dimensional concrete maze of roads and highwalks — "Like an inside-out prison," as Linda put it. The first plaque was glued to the wall of a modern bank building; it showed the site of a late Roman city gate, now long demolished. By the time we got there Linda was already sweating. "Is this going to be the story of the afternoon? Crappy little plaques showing where things used to be?"

  "What did you expect, Gladiator?..."

  The next few plaques led us around the perimeter of the old Roman fort. Stretches of the wall were visible in scraps of garden below the level of the roadway. Much of the wall had been built over in medieval times, then uncovered by the archaeologists. The ground level had risen steadily over time; we walked on a great layer of debris centuries thick, a measure of the depth of time itself.

  Plaques seventeen to fifteen caused us some arguments, because they were scattered around the ruins of a round medieval tower set in a garden in the shadow of the museum itself. We traipsed over the grass-covered ground, to the water and back, trying to figure out the peculiar little maps that supposedly showed us how to get from one plaque to the next in line.

  Plaque fourteen was in a churchyard that turned out to be a little oasis of peace, set away from the steady roar of the traffic. We sat on a bench facing a rectangular pond, bordered by concrete. The wall, with its complex layers of medieval building and rebuilding, stretched its way along the bank opposite us, passing the remains of a round fort tower. I'd brought a couple of bottles of Evian, one of which I now passed to Linda. She had been right about the shoes. My arches were already aching.

  "You know, I used to have a toy like this," I said. "A castle, I mean. It was all plastic, a base with cylindrical towers and bits of walls you snapped into place, and a drawbridge for little knights to ride in and out..."

  She leafed through the walk guidebook. "I can't believe you're actually ticking off the plaques as we find them. You're so anal."

  "Oh, lay off, Linda," I snapped back. "If you want to pack it in—"

  "No, no. I know how you'll fret if we do." Which was code for her saying she was vaguely enjoying the little expedition. "Oh, come on."

  We walked on.

  As we counted down the plaques, we passed the sites of vanished city gates and found more sunken gardens set away from the road, like islands of the past. But as we headed down Moorgate the plaques were less interesting, spaced farther apart and set on office walls. Moorgate itself was a bustling mixture of shops and offices, with, as ever, immense redevelopment projects going on. We had to squeeze our way on temporary walkways around blue-painted screens, scarily close to the unrelenting traffic, while intimidating cranes towered overhead.

  One of the prettier sites was another little garden area close to the entrance of All Hallows Church: office workers sat around, jackets off, smoking, their cell phones glistening on the grass beside them like tame insects. But the plaque — number ten — was missing from its plinth, probably long ago vandalized and never replaced. Number nine was gone, too, and number eight seemed to have been swallowed up by redevelopment. My little book was acquiring frustratingly few ticks. The walk itself dated back to 1985, long enough for time and entropy to have started their patient work, even on the plaques.

  I asked, "So why did you want to see me?"

  Her eyes hidden by her Ray-Bans, she shrugged. "I just thought I should. Jack's death... I wanted to see if you're coping."

  "That's good of you." I meant it. "And what do you conclude?"

  "I guess you're healthy. You still have that damn duffel coat, and your sphincter is as tight as ever..." She turned to me. I could see her eyes, flickering in the shadows of her glasses. "I'm worried about this quest to find your mythical sister."

  "Who told you about that?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "I suppose you think it's anal again..."

  As we approached Aldgate, we were entering the financial district of the City, the area where I had spent so much of my working life. At this time of day, late afternoon, the pavement was crowded with people, mostly young and bright, many with cell phones clamped to their ears or masking their faces. It felt genuinely odd to be tracing the wall, this layered relic of the past, through a place that was so bound up with my own prehistory.

  She asked me, "So what will you do? Will you go to Rome?"

  Lou had suggested that, but I still wasn't sure. "I don't know. It seems like a big commitment—"

  "—to a project that might be completely wacko. But it might be the only way you're going to be able to clear this up, if you're serious about it."

  "I'm serious. I think. I don't know."

  "Same old same old. George, you're a good man. But you're so fucking indecisive. You blow with every breeze."

  "Then you were right to kick me out," I said.

  We walked in silence for a while.

  Plaque four was at the back of an office building — we had to be bold enough to walk into private grounds — where we found a sloping glass frame, like a low
greenhouse, set over a trench in the tarmac. A section of the wall was exposed, twenty feet deep under the glass, through which we peered. We couldn't see the lower section, the Roman bit, because the office workers in their dungeon below had stacked boxes and files against it.

  I was the first to say it. "Okay, I'm sorry. But I'm really not sure I need advice right now. My family may have been something of a screwup, but there's nothing I can do to change the past. And now it's gone — Gina's fled about as far as she can go — and all I'm left with is..."

  "This loose end. Which you can't resist tugging. Well, I think you should go. Let's face it, the death of a parent is as big a loss as either of us is ever likely to face. I think you should take some time to get through it. And if this sister thing is an excuse to do that, fine. Go to Rome. Spend some lira."

  "Euros."

  "Whatever."

  "I was sure you'd try to stop me."

  She sighed. "Listening is just one of the skills you never acquired, George." She touched my hand; her skin was warm and comfortable. "Go. If you need anything just call."

  "Thanks."

  "Now let's finish this stupid walk." She marched on.

  • • •

  We passed out of the City area and came down Cooper's Row, passing under the rail line into the tourist-oriented area close to the river, and the Tower. We passed through the Tower Hill underpass by the Tube station entrance, peered at the ruin of a robust-looking medieval gate, and then walked back through the subway to where a sunken garden at the northeast corner of the underpass contained the statue of an emperor — and, ironically, right at the end of the walk, the best-preserved section of wall we'd seen all day.

  We sat on a bench and sipped our water.

  "One more tick for your little book," Linda said, not too unkindly.

  "Yep." It was all of thirty feet high, and the Roman section itself maybe ten feet. The Roman brickwork was neat rows interspersed with red tiles that might have come from my father's house. The medieval structure above it was much rougher. "If I didn't know better I'd have said that the Roman stuff was Victorian, or later," I said. "It's as if the whole wall has been turned upside down."