Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  After so many months she no longer felt quite so obsessively bitter about Aetius, and Marcus and Julia, and Amator — especially Amator — all the people who had, one way or another, abandoned her. As for her companions here on the farm, they had been thrown together by chance, and they were none of them perfect: Carausias an overtrusting old fool, Severus lazy, selfish, and sullen, Marina timid and lacking initiative, and Carta — dear Carta, now terribly weakened. These were not the people with whom Regina would have chosen to be spending the eighteenth year of her life. But they were her people, she was coming to see: they were the people who had taken her in after her grandfather’s death, who had sheltered her as best they could …

  It was at that moment, just as she had reached the nearest thing to contentment she had enjoyed since that night with Amator, that the first contraction came. She fell to the ground, yelling for Carta, as waves of pain rippled over her belly.

  What followed was a blur. Here were Marina and old Carausias, their faces looming over her like moons. They were too weak to carry her, so she had to get to her feet and, leaning heavily on their shoulders, limp to the house.

  Carta’s face was yellow and drawn. She looked as if she could barely stand herself. But she placed her hands on Regina’s belly, and felt the pulsing muscles, the position of the baby.

  Regina yelled, “It’s too early! Oh, Carta, make it stop!”

  Carta shook her head. “The baby has its own time … Get her on the bed, Marina, quickly.” She lifted Regina’s tunic, grubby with dirt from the fields, and placed a wooden plank, scavenged from one of the other buildings, under Regina’s buttocks.

  “Here. Take this.” It was Carausias, looming over her. He had brought her one of her precious matres. They, at least, had never abandoned her; she clutched the lumpy little statue to her chest.

  The contractions were coming in waves now.

  Carta snapped, “Regina, pull back your knees.” Regina reached down and, with a huge effort, hooked her fingers behind her knees and pulled her legs back and apart.

  Carta forced a smile. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you plow that wretched field.”

  “And who else was to do it? … Ow-w! Carta—”

  “Yes?”

  “You have done this before, haven’t you?”

  “What, delivered a baby? Have you plowed a field before?”

  With the next contraction the pain became unbelievably intense, as if she were slowly being torn apart.

  Carta leaned closer. Even through her own pain Regina saw how pale she was, her white face glistening with oily sweat. “Regina, listen to me. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No, child,” Carta said sadly. “No, I don’t think it can. Your father … You remember how he died.”

  It was an awful image to come wafting through her clouds of pain. “I could hardly forget—”

  “It was me.”

  “What?”

  “I was the one he was unfaithful with. I was the reason he punished himself.”

  Regina gasped. “Carta, how could you? You betrayed my mother—”

  Carta’s bloodless mouth worked. “He gave me no choice.”

  Marina screamed, “I can see its head!”

  Carta pulled back to see. “Marina, help me …” She reached down to support Regina’s perineum, and cupped her hand around the baby’s head. “The cord is around its neck … Uncle, give me that knife. Now, you old fool.” Even through her own pain Regina could feel Carta’s hands trembling as she worked.

  When the cord was cut, the baby’s body slid smoothly out, tumbling into Marina’s waiting arms with a last gush of fluid. Marina picked mucus from the baby’s button mouth. Carta stayed with Regina until the afterbirth had emerged, and then she packed her vagina with moss to stem the bleeding.

  Regina, despite her weakness and exhaustion, had eyes only for her baby, which had begun to wail thinly. “Let me see …”

  “It’s a girl,” Marina said, her eyes bright. She had wrapped the baby in a clean bit of blanket, and now she leaned down toward Regina so she could see the round pink face.

  Carta said, “I think — I think …” And she fell back, slumping to the floor. Regina tried to see, but could not raise her head.

  Carausias cried, “Cartumandua! Come, oh come, my little niece, we can’t have this.” He fumbled for a small flask; Regina knew it contained an extract of deadly nightshade, a heart stimulant bought at great expense from Exsuperius. He tried to pour droplets between Carta’s lips, but her face was like a wax mask.

  Her goddess heavy on her chest, fear and rage flooded Regina. “No! No, you sow, you bitch, you cow,

  you whore, Cartumandua! You won’t leave me, not you, too, you slave, not now!”

  But Carta did not respond, not even to apologize. The baby’s crying continued, thin and eerie.

  * * *

  That evening Severus returned from his hunting. He saw the baby, the mess in the hut, Carta’s body.

  Severus stayed that night and the next. He helped Carausias and Marina prepare the body, and he used the plow to dig a shallow grave in the rocky ground at the top of the hill. But when Carta’s body was buried, he walked away, taking nothing but the clothes on his back. Regina knew they would never see him again.

  Chapter 14

  “I followed General Clark as we climbed the steps of the cordonata toward the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. And all around Rome the bells of the campanili rang out …”

  Lou Casella, my mother’s uncle, my great-uncle, was over eighty. He was a short, stocky man, bald save for a fringe of snow-white hair, with liver-spotted skin stretched over impressive muscles. His voice was soft, husky, and to my ears, mostly educated by movies and TV, he sounded like a classic New York Italian American, something like an old Danny DeVito, maybe. He sat facing Lake Worth, sunset light glimmering in his rheumy familiar eyes — the family eyes, gray as smoke — as he told me how, in June 1944 at age twenty-two, he had entered Rome as an aide to General Mark Clark, commander of the victorious Fifth Army.

  “In the place where I stood with Clark, Brutus, fresh from the murder of Caesar, once came to speak to the people. Augustus made sacrificial offerings to Jupiter. Greek monks prayed their way through the Dark Ages. Gibbon was inspired to write his great history. And now here we were, a bunch of ragged- ass GIs. But we’d made our own piece of history already. All I could see was faces, thousands upon thousands of Roman faces turned up toward us.

  “And even then I knew that among those hopeful crowds I would find family …”

  * * *

  I had found Lou in a retirement home just off Seaspray Avenue in Palm Beach.

  “What the hell kind of a coat is that?” he asked of my duffel. It was the first thing he said to me. “Where do you think you are, Alaska? Haven’t seen a thing like that since the army.”

  It had taken me a while to trace him. The address Gina gave me was out of date. She wasn’t apologetic. “I haven’t seen him for ten years,” she said. “And anyhow you don’t think of people that age changing address, do you?”

  Evidently Lou was an exception. His old address had been a rented apartment in Palm Beach. There was no forwarding contact, but Dan advised me to try the American Association of Retired Persons, which turned out to be a muscular lobby group. They were reluctant to give me his address, but acted as a third party to put us in touch. In all it took a couple of days before Lou finally called me at my hotel, and invited me over.

  Lou showed me around his rest home. It was like a spacious hotel, every room sunlit, with dozens of white-coated staff and its own immense grounds. You could get permits for golf courses and private beaches. There was a daily program of exercise. As well as old-folk nostalgic social events like wartime picture shows and big-band dances, I saw notices for guest speakers from universities and other learned organizations on such topics as Florida history, coastal flora and fauna, art
deco, even the history of Disney.

  When I enthused about all this, Lou slapped me down. He called the place “the departure lounge.” He walked me to a dayroom, where rows of citizens sat in elaborate armchairs, propped up before a gigantic, supremely loud wide-screen TV. “They like reality shows,” he said. “Like having real live people here in the room with them. We do have a little community here. But every so often one of us just gets plucked out of here, and we all fight over his empty chair. So don’t get all nostalgic about being old. You’re fine so long as you keep fit, and you don’t lose your marbles.” He tapped his bare, sun- leathered cranium. “Which is why I walk three miles a day, and swim, and play golf, and do the New York Times crossword every day.”

  I was impressed. “You complete the crossword?”

  “Did I say complete? … So you want to talk about your sister.”

  I’d told him the story on the phone. I’d brought a copy of the photograph, scanned and cleaned up by Peter McLachlan; Lou had glanced at it but didn’t seem much interested. “I want to close the whole business off,” I said.

  “Or you’re picking a scab,” he said warningly. “I never met her, your sister. So if you want to know what she’s like—”

  “Just tell me the story,” I said. I spread my hands, and tried to imitate his Godfather accent. “Picture the scene. Rome, nineteen forty-four. The liberating army is welcomed by a smiling populace—”

  He laughed, and clapped me on the back. “Shithead. Christ, you are your father’s boy; he made the same kind of dumb jokes. All right, I’ll tell you the story. And I’ll tell you what was told to me by Maria Ludovica.”

  “Who?”

  “Your cousin,” he said. “Or whatever.”

  Maria Ludovica. It was the first time I’d heard the name. It wouldn’t be the last.

  We sat in a bright dayroom, and began to talk.

  * * *

  “When we had operations established, and we got the electricity back to the hospitals on the second day, and the phones working on the third, and so forth, I had time to look around a little … I knew the family had roots in Rome. I knew where my grandparents had come from — near the Appian Way — and it wasn’t hard to dig out some Casellas in the area. Whatever you say about those fascists, they kept good records.”

  So young Sergeant Casella had ventured nervously down the Appian Way, the ancient road that led south out of Rome. In that hot autumn of 1944 the area was crowded with refugees, and everything was shabby, poor, dirty, deprived, despite the liberators’ best efforts.

  He had found a “nest of Casellas,” as he put it, an extended family living under the stern eye of a black- wrapped widow who turned out to be a cousin of his father. “It was a small house in a kind of down-at- the-heel suburb. I mean it had been down-at-the-heel even before the damn occupation. And now there were, hell, twenty people living in there, stacked up. Refugees, even a wounded soldier—”

  “All relatives.”

  “Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero, and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms — dense and thick and buttery, though God knows where she got the butter from …” He closed his eyes. “I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn’t bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

  “They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing … I couldn’t tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn’t.”

  “And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?”

  “It was all I could think of.”

  By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking for him. In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

  “Maria was really your cousin?”

  “No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents — your, uh, great- great — grandparents, I guess — who left Rome for the States in the first place. Hell, I don’t know what you’d call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know — you have them,” he said, looking at me. “But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an ass — well, I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was sexy like you wouldn’t believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn’t keep his hands off her.”

  “Mussolini?”

  “She was never a fascist — that’s what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four — but I believed her. It turns out she’d known the Duce since the thirties. She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it.”

  “And she became — what, his mistress?”

  “You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in ‘thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism.”

  I did the math quickly. “Thirteen each?”

  He grinned. “They were heroes. But we’ve always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too.” That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. “The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where Maria kissed a glass case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief — the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an assassination attempt.” He winked at me. “But that wasn’t all she kissed.”

  I spluttered.

  “Come on, kid. I think we need a walk.”

  * * *

  And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.

  Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a classic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than

  four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue, four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro’s, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world’s largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

  Lou said, “So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?”

  “Too bloody expensive.”

  “Yeah, but if you were rich enough your head would work differently. You don’t spend to get stuff. You spend as a statement. But it hasn’t always been this way. I started to come here in the early sixties. We had a beach house, farther up the coast.”

  “We?”

  “Lisa, my wife. Two boys. Already growing up, even then.” He didn’t mention the wife and kids again; I inferred the usual story, the wife had died, the kids rarely visited. “It was a good place for the summer. But back then it was kind of different.” The town had been founded in the nineteenth century as a winter playground for the well heeled. In the twenties had come further develop
ment. “It was a winter town. In the summer they used to dismantle the traffic lights! Now, though, it stays open all year. Some say it’s the richest town in the Union.”

  “So you’ve done well to end up here,” I said.

  “ End up. You’re not around old people much, are you?”

  “Shit. I—”

  “Ah, forget it. Yes, I did okay. Stock options—” His talk drifted back to the Second World War. He had been a draftee. “I was lucky. Spared the fighting. I already had some business experience, helping my father run his machine shop as a kid. So I got staff positions. Logistics. Requisitions. The work was endless.

  “The invasion of Italy was the biggest bureaucratic exercise in history. We were heroes of paperwork.” I grinned dutifully. “But it was good experience. I learned a hell of a lot, about people, business, systems. Stuff you learn in the army you can apply anywhere.

  “I went back home after the war, but my father’s business felt too small, with all respect to the old man.” Having grown up in New York — he was old enough to remember the Wall Street crash — Lou took some positions in the financial industry. “But I got impatient with being so far from the action. After Italy,

  moving funds around, buying and selling stocks, watching numbers on a ticker tape — it was all too remote. I’m not a miner or an engineer. But I wanted to work somewhere I could see things being built.”

  So, after taking some kind of business degree, he had moved to California to work for none other than North American Aviation in Downey, California.

  “It was North American built Apollo. You know, the moon ship?” I nodded. Evidently he was used to younger people never having heard of the program. “Not all of it,” he said. “Just the CSM — the command and service modules, the part that came back to Earth. I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part — but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon.”