Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  As for Lucia herself, she is now living with Daniel and his family, in their bright, airy home in the hills outside Rome. Daniel's parents turned out to be decent, humane folk. And usefully enough, like many expats they don't entirely trust the competence of the Italian authorities, and were happy to get Lucia medical treatment privately and discreetly.

  Lucia has had her third baby — a boy, in fact, lusty and healthy. It turned out to be a simple procedure to snip out her spermatheca, as Peter had called it, the little sac on her womb that would have continued to bleed Giuliano's seed into her for the rest of her life. Daniel's family now talk of putting her through school.

  I don't know whether there will ever be love between Daniel and Lucia. Even now that the pressure of relentless childbirth is off her, nobody seems to know how her body will adjust in the future. And she is damaged. She has never heard what became of her first child, who must have been in one of those immense crèches on that fateful day. I think that is a wound that will never heal. But at least in Daniel, and his family, she has found good friends.

  Sometimes, though, I wonder about Lucia's true destiny.

  In all the reports about the Crypt, what was most notable for me was what was missing. The little carved matres, for instance, which Regina had brought from Roman Britain — the symbolic core of her family, and then of the Order. They were never mentioned, never found.

  Peter told me that among some species of social insects the colonies breed by sending out a queen and a few workers, to start a colony all over again. I think I will try to keep watch on Lucia and her young family.

  As for my sister, I haven't seen Rosa since I lost sight of her in the crush, deep in the Crypt. I don't think she could have gone back to the Order, though. In the end she knew too much — more than she was supposed to know — and yet she needed to know it. It must be necessary from time to time for the Order to throw up somebody like Rosa with an overview, somebody capable of perceiving greater scales, more complex threats. Peter's understanding was itself a threat to the Order — and she had to develop an equivalent understanding to beat him. But a drone isn't supposed to know she's in a hive. Ignorance is strength. In the end she saved the Order by sacrificing herself, as a good drone should, and knew what she was doing every step of the way.

  Thus I found my sister, and lost her again.

  • • •

  There are other loose ends I can't resist tugging on.

  I've been reading about eusocial organisms. I've learned that one characteristic of hives, just as much as the sterility of the workers and the rest, is suicide — the willingness of a drone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and so for the long-term interests of its genetic heritage. You see it when a termite mound is broken open, or a predator tries to get into a mole rat colony. It's seen as proof by the biologists that the key organism is the global community, the hive, not the individual, for the individual acts completely selflessly. It was certainly true of the Order. When the Crypt was attacked, such as during the Sack of Rome, some of the members gave their lives to save the rest.

  But here's the rub. In the end Peter committed suicide, to protect — what? He had no family. The future of humankind? But again, he had no children — and no direct connection to that future.

  What he did have a connection to was the Slan(t)ers.

  The Slan(t)ers have no leader; their network has no central point. Their behavior is dictated by the behavior of those "around" them in cyberspace, and governed by simple rules of online-protocol feedback. Among the Slan(t)ers — I've found — there are virtually none with children. They are too busy with Slan(t)er projects for that.

  The Slan(t)ers don't have any physical connection, as did the Order. They don't even live in the same place. And their interest in the group isn't in any way genetic, as with the Order. There is no pretense that the Slan(t)ers are a family in the normal sense. But nevertheless, I believe the Slan(t)ers are another hive — a new, even purer form of human hive made possible by electronic interconnections — a hive of the mind, in which only ideas, not genes, are preserved.

  Peter believed that everything he did was in the service of the future of humankind. But I believe that he wasn't really acting for any rational goals. The Slan(t)ers, the hive as a whole, had recognized the existence of another hive — and, like a foraging ant coming on another colony, Peter attacked.

  At the crux, Peter wondered if I was a hive creature myself. Perhaps I was; perhaps I am. I am sure he was. And if the Order truly was a hive — and if it wasn't unique, if the Slan(t)ers are, too, a new sort altogether — then how many others are out there?

  Anyhow, just because Peter was really following hive dictates doesn't mean he was wrong about the human future.

  • • •

  On his computer I found a few emails he'd been composing to send me, never finished.

  "I think about the future. I believe that our greatest triumph, our greatest glory, lies ahead of us. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that just as the great events of the past shape us now, so that mighty future — the peak age of humankind, the clash of cymbals — has echoes in the present, too? The physicists now say you have to think of the universe, and all its long, singular history, as just one page in a great book of possibilities, stacked up in higher dimensions. When those pages are slammed together, when the great book is closed, a Big Bang is generated, the page wiped clean, a new history written. And if time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the farthest future, would you at last touch the past? Are we influenced and shaped, not just by the past, but echoes of the future?..."

  Sometimes at night I look up at the stars, and I wonder what strange future is folding down over us even now. I wish Peter was here, so we could talk this out. I can still see him leaning closer to me conspiratorially, on our bench in that dismal little park by the Forum, the sweet smell of limoncello on his breath.

  Chapter 51

  Beyond the air lock door, there was a tunnel. It branched and bifurcated, and the light glowed pearl gray. It was like looking into a huge underground cathedral, shaped from the glistening ice.

  And in the foreground was a mob.

  There must have been a hundred people in the first rank alone, and there were more ranks behind, dimly glimpsed, more than Abil could count. They were small, squat, powerful looking. They were mostly unarmed, but some carried clubs of rusty metal. And they were naked, all of them. They looked somehow unformed, as if ill defined. The males had small, budlike genitals, and the females' breasts were small, their hips narrow. None of them seemed to have any body hair.

  All this in a single glimpse. Then the Coalescents surged forward. They didn't yell, didn't threaten; the only noise was the pad of their feet on the floor, the brush of their flesh against the ice walls. Abil stood, transfixed, watching the human tide wash toward him.

  Denh screamed, "Drop! Drop!"

  Reflexively Abil threw himself to the ground. Laser light, cherry red, threaded the air above him, straight as a geometrical exercise.

  The light sliced through the mob. Limbs were cut through and detached, intestines spilled from unzipped chest cavities, even heads came away amid unfeasibly huge founts of crimson blood. Now there was noise, screams, cries, and soft grunts.

  The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carcasses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.

  Abil had never confronted death on such a scale — a thousand or more dead in seconds — it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn't even murder but a kind of mass suicide. The Coalescents' only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in it
s way. But that wouldn't happen, Abil thought sadly.

  So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. "Forward the throwers!"

  Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.

  But the flames wouldn't hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. "Go, go, go!"

  He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.

  And he faced more people — thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.

  But they ran into flames. The front rank melted back like snowflakes.

  After that Abil let the flamers take the lead. They just cut a corridor through the swarming crowd, and the troopers strode ahead over a carpet of burning flesh and cut bone. The crowd closed behind them, clustering like antibodies around an infection, but the troopers' disciplined and well-drilled weapons fire kept them away. It was as if they were hacking their way into some huge body, seeking its beating heart. As drones died all around him Abil began to feel numbed by it all, as the waves of faces, all so alike, crisped in the brilliant glare of the flames.

  As they worked deeper, though, he began to notice a change. The assailants here were just as ferocious, but they seemed younger. That was part of the pattern he had been trained to expect. He wished he could find a way to spare the smallest, the most obviously childlike. But these young ones threw themselves on his troopers' flames as eagerly as their elders.

  And then, quite suddenly, the troopers burst through a final barrier of drones, and found themselves in the birthing chamber.

  • • •

  It was a vast, darkened room, where ancient fluorescents glowed dimly. The troopers fanned out. They were covered in blood and bits of charred flesh, he saw, leaving bloody footprints where they passed. They looked as if they had been born, delivered through that terrible passage of death. One flamethrower still flared, but with a gesture Abil ordered it shut off.

  In this chamber, people moved through the dark, as naked as those outside. Nobody came to oppose the troopers. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for the drones that anybody should harm those who spent their lives here.

  Cautiously Abil moved forward, deeper into the gloom. The air was warm and humid; his faceplate misted over.

  Women, naked, nestled in shallow pits on the floor, in knots of ten or a dozen. Some of the pits were filled with milky water, and the women floated, relaxed. Attendants, young women and children, moved back and forth, carrying what looked like food and drink. In one corner there were infants, a carpet of them who crawled and toddled. Abil moved among them, a bloody pillar.

  The women in the pits were all pregnant — tremendously pregnant, he saw, with immense bellies that must have held three, four, five infants. In one place, a woman was actually giving birth. She stood squat, supported by two helpers. A baby slid easily out from between her legs, to be caught, slapped, and cradled; but before its umbilical was cut another small head was protruding from the woman's vagina. She seemed in no pain; her expression was dreamy, abstract.

  One of the breeder women looked up as he passed. She reached up a hand to him, the fingers long and feather-thin. Her limbs were etiolated, spindly; her legs could surely not have supported the weight of her immense, fecund torso. But her face was fully human.

  On impulse, curious, he reached up and ran his thumbnail under his chin. His faceplate popped and swung upward. Dense air, moist and hot, pressed in on him.

  The smells were extraordinary. He distinguished blood, and milk, and piss and shit, earthy human smells. There was a stink of burning that might have come from his own suit, a smell of vacuum, or of the battle he had waged in the corridors beyond this place.

  And there was something else, something stronger still. Abil had never seen an animal larger than a rat. But that was how he labeled this smell: a stink like that of a huge rat's nest, pungent and overpowering.

  He looked down at the woman who had reached up to him. Her face really was beautiful, he thought, narrow and delicate, with high cheekbones and large blue eyes. She smiled at him, showing a row of teeth that came to points. He felt warmed. He longed to speak to her.

  An attendant leaned over her, a girl who might have been twelve. He thought the girl was kissing the pregnant woman. When the girl pulled away her jaws were opened wide, and a thin rope of some kind of paste, glistening faintly green, pulsed out of her throat, passing from her mouth into the breeder's. It was beautiful, Abil thought, overwhelmed; he had never seen such pure love as between this woman and the girl.

  But he, in his clumsy, bloodstained suit, would forever be kept apart from this love. He felt tears well. He fell to his knees and reached forward with bloodstained gloves. The breeding woman screeched and thrashed backward. The attendant girl, regurgitated paste dribbling from her mouth, instantly hurled herself at him. She caught him off-balance. He fell back, and his head cracked on the ground. He struggled to get up. He had to get back to the mother, to explain.

  There was an arm around his throat — a suited arm. He struggled, but his lungs were aching. He heard Denh's voice call: "Kill the breeders. Move it!" A gloved hand passed before Abil's face, closing his faceplate, shutting out the noise of babies crying, and through its murky pane he saw fire flare once more.

  • • •

  The captain sat on the edge of Abil's sick bay bed. "Denh is acting corporal for now," Dower said gently.

  Abil sighed. "It's no more than I deserved, sir."

  Dower shook her head. "That damn curiosity of yours. You certainly made a mistake, but hardly a fatal one. But you weren't adequately briefed. In a way the fault's mine. I argue with the Commissaries before every drop. They would tell you grunts nothing if they had the chance, I think, for they believe nobody but them needs to know anything."

  "What happened to me, sir?"

  "Pheromones."

  "Sir?"

  "There are many ways to communicate, tar. Such as by scent. You and I are poor at smelling, you know, compared to our senses of touch, sight, hearing. We can distinguish only a few scent qualities: sweet, fetid, sour, musky, dry... But those Coalescent drones have been stuck in their hole in the ground for fifteen thousand years. Now, the human species itself is only four or five times older than that. There has been plenty of time for evolutionary divergence."

  "And when I cracked my faceplate — "

  "You were overwhelmed with messages you couldn't untangle." Dower leaned closer. "What was it like?"

  Abil thought back. "I wanted to stay there, sir. To be with them. To be like them." He shuddered. "I let you down."

  "There's no shame, tar. I don't think you're going to make a corporal, though; command isn't for you." Dower's metal Eyes glistened. "You weren't betrayed by fear. You were betrayed by your curiosity — perhaps imagination. You had to know what it was like in there, didn't you? And for that you risked your life, and the lives of your unit."

  Abil tried to sit up. "Sir, I — "

  "Take it easy." Dower pushed him back, gently, to his bed. "I told you, there's no shame. I've been watching you. It's one of the responsibilities of command, tar. You have to test those under you, all the time, test and assess. Because the only way the Expansion is
going to prosper is if we make the best use of our resources. And I don't believe the best use of you is to stick you down a hole in charge of a bunch of grunts." Dower leaned closer. "Have you ever considered working for the Commission for Historical Truth?"

  A vision of chill intellects and severe black robes filled Abil's mind. "The Commission, sir? Me?"

  Dower laughed. "Just think about it... Ah. We're about to leave orbit."

  Abil could sense the subtle inertial shift, as if he was in a huge elevator, rising from the frozen planet.

  Dower snapped her fingers, and a Virtual of the Target materialized between their faces. Slowly turning, bathed in simulated light, the planet was like a toy, sparkling white, laced here and there by black ridges of true rock, stubborn mountain chains resisting the ice. Starships circled it like flies.

  Dower reached out to touch one dimpled feature.

  The view expanded, to reveal a broad, walled plain. Abil realized he was looking down on the warren he had visited. Around the mountain peak, great cracks had been cut into the ground. Drones were being shepherded out of the warren by the mop-up squads. The drones filed toward the bellies of freighters that had settled from space, down onto the ice, to swallow them up. The drones looked bewildered, and they milled to and fro. Here and there one or two broke lines, and even lunged at the troopers. The silent spark of weapons cut them down.

  For every live drone that came walking to the surface, Abil saw, a dozen carcasses were hauled out.

  Dower saw his expression. "There were probably a billion drones in that one hive alone. A billion. We'll be lucky to ship out more than a hundred thousand."

  "A hundred thousand — is that all, sir?"