Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Linda asked, "Civilization really did fall here, didn't it?"

  "It really did."

  "I wonder if she came here. That great-grandmother of yours. Regina."

  "...And I wonder if she knew that it would all disappear, as if a small nuclear bomb had been dropped on the city."

  The third voice made us both jump. I turned to see a bulky, somewhat shambling figure dressed in a coat that looked even heavier than my duffel. Linda flinched away from him, and I felt the tentative mood between us evaporate.

  "Peter. What are you doing here?"

  Peter McLachlan came around the bench and sat down, with me between him and Linda. "You mentioned doing the walk." So I had, in an email. "I thought you'd end up here. I waited."

  "How long?"

  He checked his watch. "Only about three hours."

  "Three hours?"

  I could see Linda's expression. "Listen, George, it's been good, but I think—"

  "No. Wait, I'm sorry." I introduced them quickly. "Peter, why did you want to see me?"

  "To thank you. And tell you I'm going to be away for a while. I'm off to the States."

  "Visiting the Slan(t)ers?" Linda caught my eye again; I pursed my lips. Don't ask.

  "I feel the need to catch up. Be refreshed."

  "Refreshed with what?"

  He shrugged. "The energy. The belief. That's why I want to thank you. Somehow you have shaken me out of my rut. Your bit of mystery with your sister. Layers upon layers... That and Kuiper, of course." He leaned past me and thrust his face toward Linda. "Of course you know about the Kuiper Anomaly. Have you seen the latest developments?" He produced his handheld and started thumbing at its tiny controls, and Web pages flashed over its jewel-like screen.

  Linda plucked my sleeve. "This guy is seriously weird," she whispered.

  "He's an old school friend. He helped my dad. And—"

  "Oh, come on. Your dad's buried. He's followed you to London. And all this spooky stuff — what does it have to do with you and your sister?"

  "I don't know."

  "Look, George, I changed my mind. It's as if the people around you are parts of your personality. Your family was the clingy, oppressive, Catholic part, and you need to get away from all that, not indulge it. And this guy, he's like your—"

  "My anus."

  That brought a stifled laugh. "George — go back to work. Or paint your house. Get away from memories, George. And get away from this guy, or you'll end up on a park bench muttering about conspiracies, too..."

  "Here." Peter thrust his handheld before my face; data and diagrams chattered across it. "The Kuiper Belt is a relic of the formation of the solar system. We see similar belts around other stars, like Vega. The outer planets, like Uranus and Neptune, formed from collisions of Kuiper Belt objects. But according to the best theories there should have been many more objects out there — a hundred times the mass we can see now, enough to make another Neptune. And we know that such a swarm should coalesce quickly into a planet."

  "I don't understand. Peter, I think—"

  "Something disturbed the Kuiper Belt. Something whipped up those ice balls, about the time of the formation of Pluto — so preventing the formation of another Neptune. Since then the Kuiper objects have been broken up by collisions, or have drifted out of the belt."

  "When was this disturbance?"

  "It must have been around the time the planets were forming. Maybe four and a half billion years ago." He peered at me, eyes bright. "You see? Layers of interference. The Anomaly, the Galaxy core explosions, now this tinkering with the very formation of the solar system. This is what we're going to investigate."

  "We?"

  "The Slan(t)ers, in the States. You read my emails."

  "Yes..." I turned. Linda had gone. I stood up, trying to see her, but as the rush hour approached the crowds pouring into the Tube station were already dense.

  Peter was still in midflow, sitting on the bench, talking compulsively, bringing up page after page of data. He was hunched forward, his posture intense.

  Standing there, I could either go after Linda, or stay with Peter. I felt that somehow I was making a choice that might shape the whole of the rest of my life.

  I sat down. "Show me again," I said.

  TWO

  Chapter 17

  For Lucia it had begun eleven months before the death of George Poole's father. And it began, not with death, but with stirrings of life.

  It came at night, only a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She was woken by a spasm of pain in her belly, and then an ache in her thighs. When she reached down and touched her legs she felt wetness.

  At first she felt only hideous embarrassment. She imagined she had wet her bed, as if she were a silly child. She got out of bed and padded down the length of the dormitory, past the bunk beds stacked three high, the hundred girls sleeping in this great room alone, to the bathroom.

  And there, in the bathroom's harsh fluorescent light, she discovered the truth: that the fluid between her legs, and on her fingers and her nightclothes, wasn't urine at all, but blood — strange blood, bright, thin. She knew what this meant, of course. Her body was changing. But the shame didn't go away, it only intensified, and was supplemented now by a deep and abiding fear.

  Why me? she thought. Why me?

  She cleaned herself up and went back to bed, past the stirring ranks of the girls, many of them turning and muttering, perhaps disturbed by her scent.

  Lucia was able to conceal that first bleeding from the other girls, from Idina and Angela and Rosaria and Rosetta, her crowding, chattering sisters with their pale gray eyes, all so alike. You weren't supposed to keep secrets, of course. Everybody knew that. There were supposed to be no secrets in the Crypt. But now Lucia had a secret.

  And then her second period came, during a working day. The stab of pain warned her in time for her to rush to the bathroom again. The cubicles had no doors, of course — though before her menarche it had never occurred to Lucia to notice the lack — but she was lucky to find the room empty, and was able again to conceal what had happened, even though she vomited, and this time the pain lasted for days.

  But now she had compounded her secret.

  She hated the situation. More than anything she cared what the people around her thought of her. The other girls were her whole world. She was immersed in them night and day, surrounded by their scent and touch and kisses, their conversation and their glances, their judgments and opinions; she was shaped by them, as they, she knew, were shaped in turn by her. But ever since she had started growing taller than the average, at the age of ten or so, barriers between her and her old friends had subtly grown up. That got worse at age twelve or thirteen, when her hips and breasts started to develop, and she had started to look like a young woman among children. And now this.

  She didn't want any of it. She wanted to be the same as everybody else; she didn't want to be different. She wanted to be immersed in the games, and the gossip of what Anna said to Wanda, and how Rita and Rosetta had fallen out, and Angela would have to choose between them... She didn't want to be talking about blood between her legs, pain in her belly.

  She had to tell somebody. So she told Pina.

  • • •

  It was during a coffee break at work.

  This was November, and Lucia's regular schooling was in recess. For the second year she had come to work in the big office called the scrinium. This was an ancient Latin word meaning "archive." Despite the antique name, it was a modern, bright, open-plan area with cubicles and partitions, PCs and laptops, adorned with potted plants and calendars, and with light wells admitting daylight from the world above. This bright, anonymous place might have been an office in any bank or government ministry. Even the ubiquitous symbol of the Order, two schematic face-to-face kissing fish, was rendered on the wall in bronze and chrome, like a corporate logo. Quite often you would even see a contadino or two in here — literally "countryman" or "peasant," thi
s word meant "outsider; not of the Order."

  But beyond the office was a computer center, a big climate-controlled room where high-capacity mainframes hummed and whirred in bluish light. And beyond that were libraries, great echoing corridors, softly lit and laced with fire-preventive equipment. Lucia didn't know — nobody in her circle knew — how far such corridors extended, off into the darkness, tunneled out of the soft tufa rock; it didn't even occur to her to ask the question. But it was said that if you walked far enough, the books gave way to scrolls of animal skin and papyrus, and tablets with Latin or Greek letters scratched in clay surfaces, and even a few pieces of carved stone.

  In these vaulted, interconnected rooms the Order had stored its records ever since its first founding, sixteen centuries before. Nowadays the archive was more valuable than it had ever been, for it had become a key source of income for the Order. Information was sold, much of it nowadays via the Internet, to historians, to academic institutions and governments, and to amateur genealogists trying to trace family roots.

  Lucia worked here as a lowly clerk — or, in the sometimes archaic language of the Order, as one of the scrinarii, under a supervising bibliotecharius. She spent some of her time doing computer work, transcribing and cross-correlating records from different sources. But mainly she worked on transcription. She would copy records, by hand, from computer screens and printouts onto rag paper sheets.

  The Order made its own rag paper, once manufactured by breaking up cloth in great pounding animal-driven pestles, but now directly from cotton in a room humming with high-speed electrical equipment. It was medieval technology. But the rag paper, acid-free, marked by special noncorrosive inks, would last far longer than any wood-pulp paper. The Order had little faith in digital archives; already there were difficulties accessing records from older, obsolescent generations of computers and storage media. If you were serious about challenging time, rag paper was the way to do it.

  Hence Lucia's paradoxically old-fashioned assignment. But she rather liked the work, although it was routine. The paper always felt soft and oddly warm to her touch, compared to the coarse stuff you got from wood pulp.

  Her tasks had taught her the importance of accuracy; the archive's main selling point, aside from its historical depth, was its unrivaled reliability. And Lucia's calligraphy was careful, neat — and accurate, as proven by the triple layers of checks all her work was put through. It seemed likely, said the supervisors, that the scrinium would be her career path in the future, when she finished her schooling.

  But that, of course, was thrown into uncertainty, like everything else in her life, by the unwelcome arrival of womanhood.

  Pina sat on Lucia's desk, her hands clasped together over her knees as if in prayer. They had no privacy, here as anywhere else, of course; there must have been fifty people in the office that morning, working or chatting, and the waist-high partitions hid nothing. Lucia spoke so softly that Pina had to lean closely to hear.

  Pina was ten years older than Lucia. She had a small, pretty face, Lucia thought, lacking cheekbones but with a pleasing smoothness. Her eyes were a little darker than most, a kind of graphite gray, and her hair was tied neatly back. Her mouth was small and not very expressive when she talked, which gave her an aura of seriousness compared to other girls — that, and her ten years' age difference, of course. Still, though, her features were quite similar to those of everybody else, including Lucia's, the typical oval face, the gray eyes well within the range of variation.

  And, though she was twenty-five, she was small, smaller than Lucia, with a slim figure, her breasts only the slightest swellings under the white blouse she wore.

  She had been friendly to Lucia since her first day here in the scrinium, showing her the basics of her work and such essentials as how to work the coffee machine. Now Pina looked uncomfortable, Lucia thought, but she was listening.

  "Don't worry," she said. "Anyhow, now you've drawn me into your secret."

  "I'm sorry. If it's one it's a secret, if it's two—"

  "It's a conspiracy," Pina said, completing the crèche singalong phrase. "Well, I'll forgive you. Especially as it can't remain a secret for long."

  Lucia pulled a face. "I don't want any of this. I never wanted to be taller — I don't want this bleeding."

  "It isn't unnatural."

  "Yes, but why me? I feel—"

  "Betrayed? Betrayed by your own body?" Pina touched her arm, a gesture of support. "If it's any consolation I don't think you're the only one... I suppose my memory is that bit deeper than yours. Things have been different the last few years. People have been—" She waved her hands vaguely. "—agitated. Every summer the new cadres come up from the downbelow schools, all fresh faces and bright smiles, like fields of flowers. Always charming. There are always one or two who stand out from the crowd."

  "Like me."

  "But in the last few years there have been more." Pina shrugged. "There are some who say there is trouble with the matres. Perhaps that's somehow disturbing us all."

  Lucia had only ever heard the word matres a few times in her life. Some called those mysterious figures the mamme-nonne — the mother-grandmothers. She had only the dimmest idea about them. Ignorance is strength — another crèche slogan. You weren't even supposed to talk about subjects like the matres...

  She pulled back from Pina. Suddenly it was too much; she was crashing through too many taboo barriers. "I should get back to work," she said.

  "Why don't you talk to somebody?"

  "Who? Nobody would want to know."

  "I don't mean the girls in your dormitory." Pina thought briefly. "How about Rosa Poole?"

  Lucia knew Rosa, a woman in her forties who had a job in the remoter layers of the Order's administration. Rosa had lectured Lucia's classes a few times on aspects of information technology — database design, programming theory.

  "Rosa is approachable," said Pina earnestly. "She would know what you have to do."

  "Do?"

  Pina sighed. "Well, to begin with, you're going to need towels, aren't you? You have to be practical, dear. And after that... Well, I'm not sure — "

  "Because it never happened to you."

  Pina kept her face blank, but Lucia, her nerves taut, nevertheless thought she detected a little smugness in her friend's face. "No, it never did. Which means I'm not much use to you. Rosa might be, though. She's approachable, for a member of the cupola." The Order had no hierarchy in theory, but in practice, at any time there was a rough-and-ready chain of command among the senior women, known informally by everybody as the cupola.

  "I don't know, Pina."

  Pina said a little harshly, "You think if you keep it secret it might all go away. You think if you were to talk to someone like Rosa it will make it real." She looked closely at Lucia. "You think even talking to me about it makes it real, don't you?"

  "Something like that," Lucia said reluctantly. "This is very difficult."

  Pina said softly, "We can sort this out, Lucia. Don't be afraid. You're not alone."

  Lucia smiled, but it was forced. She longed only to put the clock back a few weeks, back to the time before the bleeding had afflicted her — or better still back two or three or four years to when she had just been another little girl, just one of the crowd, invisible.

  As it turned out her secret didn't last another twenty-four hours. She didn't approach Rosa Poole of the cupola. Pina did it for her.

  Chapter 18

  For days Artorius marched them along the old roads, far to the west. At night they slept in the open, perhaps sheltered by a hastily constructed lean-to, their only bedding the spare clothing they carried with them. Every day Regina woke to a rough breakfast of salted meat. She was always stiff and cold despite the mildness of the midsummer nights.

  Eventually, though, Regina found herself recognizing the countryside. It was a land crowded with hills, green and rounded — a human-scale landscape, very unlike the wastes of the border country around the
Wall.

  Her geography remained sketchy, little better informed than by Aetius's map drawn in the dirt. But this was, she realized slowly, home. Blown by the winds of fate, she had sailed in a great circle, and come back to where she had started. Still, she had no idea exactly where the site of the family villa was: she had left at age seven, after all, and there was nobody left alive, Carta or Aetius, who might know. Perhaps it was best not to know; she could not bear to see it a ruin.

  And there were changes. Even here the country seemed far from friendly: on every hilltop, walls loomed and the smoke of fires curled into the air. It had become a land that bristled with defenses, like a hedgehog's quills.

  Artorius's proposed new capital was a fort built on a brooding hill — what he called, in the old language, a "dunon." Artorius had already assembled a community of a few hundred people, scraped together from across the country, and the place was alive with activity. Regina did not know what the hill might have been called in the days of the Romans; it seemed to have no Latin name. But some of the locals called it by the name of a nearby stream. It was the Caml hill, or the Caml fort.

  • • •

  On their first full day at the dunon Regina's people were assigned to fetching stone from what was called a "quarry." Artorius told Regina he would spare her this toil. She had made a good impression on him with her defiance, and she could stay here with him in his capital; perhaps he could find her a different role.

  Brica encouraged her to accept. "He seems to like you, Mother, Jove knows why. You need to play on that for all it's worth."

  "Oh, I will," Regina said. And she would. From the moment of Brica's birth she had been determined to do whatever it took to ensure the survival of her family. But she refused Artorius's offer; she was not yet ready to be separated from those with whom she had spent two decades on the hillside farm.