Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  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.”

  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 betwe
en 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,” this 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 — ho
w 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.