Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  A group of soldiers stood before the largest roundhouse, their hands resting casually on the hilts of their swords. They wore leather body armor, short tunics, and woolen trousers. The people of the farmstead stood in a sullen row before the soldiers. With them was the boy Bran, grandson of Exsuperius. His face was blackened by soot, perhaps from the burning of his home, and he stood in subdued silence, a mute testament to the power of these new arrivals.

  “There are more of them down on the road,” Brica whispered. “A few carts, too, and a sort of trail of people behind them. Their leader came up and demanded to be let in — we didn’t know what to do — you weren’t here—”

  “It’s all right,” Regina said.

  “Are they Saxons?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  One of the soldiers was taller than the rest, obviously the commander. He wore a red cloak and an elaborate leather cuirass, inset with metal buckles. He was perhaps thirty, but his face was lined with the dirt of the road. Regina’s first impression was of strength, competence, but fatigue. And his short brown hair was brushed forward, in the Roman style — even his garb was almost Roman. For a brief moment her heart beat a little faster. Was it possible that the comitatensis had returned?

  She stood between her people and the interlopers. She drew herself to her full height, disregarding the dirt on her face and legs, her disheveled clothes, the people in their mud-colored clothes behind her.

  The leader hadn’t even noticed her. “Riothamus — “ One of the soldiers tapped his shoulder, indicating Regina. He seemed surprised to find himself facing a woman. He asked, “Are you the leader here?”

  “If you wish it. And what rank are you, riothamus ?” She pronounced the word mockingly, masking disappointment. It was Latin, but a version of a British word — ’high king.’ This was no soldier, no officer of the imperial army, but a mere warlord.

  He nodded. “That is the only rank I have, and not one I wished for.”

  “Oh, really?”

  He spread his hands. “I am not here to harm you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “And you did not harm this boy, Bran, by burning down his home.”

  “I did him the least harm that way.”

  “Your definition of harm is interesting.”

  He grinned, his eyebrows raised. “Defiance! We have found a new Boudicca, boys.” He won a ripple of laughter from his troops.

  She drew herself up. “You will not mock us. We are living poorly here; I can’t deny that. But if you think we are illiterate Saxons—”

  “Oh, I can see you are no Saxons.” He waved a hand. “Your grain pit, for instance … I have seen some Saxon farmers. There are many in this country already, you know, off to the east. The way they do things is sometimes better, sometimes worse than what you have worked out here. But they do not do things quite like this. And it is the threat of the Saxons that has brought me here. Listen to me,” he said, raising his voice to address the rest of the people. “Things have changed. The Saxons are coming. ”

  “We know that,” Regina said.

  He growled, “Perhaps you have heard of Vortigern. That foolish kinglet was much troubled by Pict raiders from the north. So he invited in the Saxons, to help keep the Picts at bay.” It had been an old trick of the Romans, Regina knew, to allow in one set of enemies as allies to oppose another lot. “I will not deny that the Saxons did a good job. They are sea pirates after all, and fared well against the Picts in their clumsy coracles.

  “But,” said the riothamus, “the Saxons, under their brute of a leader Hengest, who is already notorious on the continent, betrayed Vortigern. They brought in more and more of their cousins, and demanded more and more in tribute from Vortigern. But the more they took from him, the less he could pay them, and the weaker he became.

  “Now Vortigern is dead, his council slain. And now that they have a foothold in the east, the Saxons are becoming greedy.

  “You may have heard of their cruelty. They are not the Romans! They hate towns and villas and roads, all things of the Empire. And they hate the British. They are spreading across the countryside like a plague. They will burn these flimsy huts, they will drive you out of here, and if you resist they will kill you.”

  “The Emperor will help us,” somebody called.

  The riothamus laughed, but it was a grim sound. “There have been pleas. No help comes. We must help ourselves. I will help you,” he said boldly. “I am building a new kingdom in the west — I have a capital there. It is a place the Romans themselves struggled to defeat, and it will see off a few hairy Saxons.” There was a little laughter at that, and Regina saw the skill in his mixture of fear and humor. “But I need you with me. The land is emptying. Everybody flees, fearing the raiders. And if you come with me—” He drew his sword, and flashed its polished surfaces in the air above his head. “ — I swear before the gods that I and Chalybs will protect you to my own death!” Chalybs, which he pronounced Calib, was the Latin for “steel.”

  He was met by uncertain silence.

  Regina stepped forward to face him. “We don’t need you, or your shining Chalybs. For all your posturing and speeches you are just another thug, another warlord, as bad as the Saxons or the Picts.”

  The riothamus eyed her. “You have done well to survive here, Boudicca. Few have prospered so well. I can see you are a strong woman.”

  She glared. “Strong enough not to be patronized by a popinjay like you.”

  He seemed to want to convince her. “I am earnest in what I say. I am not a Saxon or a Pict. I am like you. I am your kind. I grew up in Eburacum, where my father was one of the landowners …”

  “Earnest or not — son of a citizen or not — you are still a warlord. And if I submit to you it will only be because I have no choice, because of your force, not because of your rhetoric.”

  He laughed. “Are you bargaining with me? I offer you survival, with me, in my compound. But you want more than survival, don’t you?”

  She glared at him. “I am old now—”

  “Not so old.”

  “ — and I may not live to see the day when the emperors return. When we don’t have to scratch at the land like animals, and live in fear of barbarians. I may not see it. But my daughter will, and her daughters. And that is what I want for my family. For them to be ready …” She fell silent, suddenly aware of how wistful she sounded, before this silent tower of muscle in his scuffed cuirass.

  “I have met Romans,” he said softly. “I have dealt with them in southern Gaul and elsewhere. You know what the Romans call us? Celtae. It means ‘barbarians.’ Their Empire is a thousand years old. We were barbarians before our assimilation, and we are barbarians now. That is how they think of us.”

  She shook her head tightly. “My daughter is no barbarian. And when things get back to normal—”

  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 sharpener 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.