Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  The package contained a single brass token, which turned out to be for a seat in the amphitheater. There was no other label or note. Regina’s pulse hammered.

  As she counted down the days before the show, her sleep was even more disturbed than usual.

  * * *

  On the appointed day, Regina set out early in the morning. As she walked through the dense streets, she felt as nervous as if she were seven years old again and approaching her mother’s bedroom, where Julia would be putting on her jewelry, and Carta would be fixing her hair.

  And then she came upon the amphitheater itself. It was a tremendous wall of marble broken by four stories of colonnades, from which statues peered down at the thronging crowd. Her heart surged at its magnificence.

  Her little token directed her to a numbered entrance. She had to walk a long way around the perimeter before she found the right one. Vendors worked the milling crowds, selling drinks, sweetmeats, hats, and favors for star performers. There were, she learned, a total of seventy-six entrances through which the crowd could be processed. There were also six unnumbered entrances, four for the Emperor’s party, and two for the use of the gladiators — one through which they would walk back to their barracks if they survived, and the other through which their corpses would be dragged out if not. But no gladiators fought to the death these days; the emperors had banned lethal contests some thirty years before, when a Christian martyr, righteously interposing himself between two warriors, had been killed by a mob eager for its ration of blood.

  Her entrance was an arch with detailed stucco paintwork, though much of the paint had faded and cracked away. She passed through and found herself inside the hollowed-out belly of the great building, a maze in three dimensions of corridors and staircases up and down which people trooped — the big radial staircases were graphically called vomitoria. But Regina’s ticket kept her on the ground level, and led her along a short corridor, deeper into the guts of the complex.

  She emerged into daylight, and a wash of color and noise.

  She found herself in a small concrete box lined with wooden benches. There was nobody else here; she sat down tentatively, on the end of a bench. She was surprised to find herself here, for she knew that these boxes were reserved for the Emperor’s family, and for senators, magistrates, priests, and other notables.

  She was in one of a series of boxes set just above the level of the wooden floor itself. Around her, the arena was a tremendous elliptical bowl. Behind her, rows of wooden seats rose up in four great terraces. The seats were quickly filling up, and the faces of the people receded to mere dots in the shadows of the upper tiers.

  She saw workmen on the perimeter of the stadium’s huge open roof. They hauled huge sheets of cloth over a spiderweb of ropes suspended over the gaping roof itself: this awning would shelter the spectators from the sun. It was said that the workers were sailors from the docks, a thousand of them brought here for their skills in working rigging and sails.

  And when she looked across the floor to the far side of the arena, the people in those distant seats merged into a sea of movement, color, and flesh, a mob ordered by the amphitheater’s vast geometry. In one glance she could take in twenty thousand people — perhaps four times the population of old Verulamium, as if whole cities had been picked up and shaken until their human inhabitants had tumbled out into this gigantic dish of marble and brick.

  On the arena floor the spectacle had already started. To the blaring music of trumpets and an immense hydraulic organ, a parade of chariots raced around the floor, each bearing a gladiator dressed in a purple or gold cloak. They were chased by slaves carrying shields, helmets, and weapons. The crowd began to roar for their favorites. Though the arena was not yet full the noise was already powerful — exhilarating, terrifying — and the air was full of the scent of wood chips, blood, and sweat, making Regina shiver.

  More performers appeared in the middle of the arena floor. They rose from trapdoors, but so cunning was the effect that it looked as if they had erupted from nowhere. They put on boxing matches, women fencers, and a series of clownish acts — like a race between two enormously fat slaves, driven by the spear tips of soldiers, which finished with both slaves left flat out and panting on the ground. The crowd appeared to enjoy it all.

  Then the acrobats, jugglers, and clowns were cleared away, and a squadron of workers emerged to litter the arena floor with shrubbery and rocks. The traps sprung open again, and out poured a host of animals: leopards, bears, lions, giraffes, ostriches, even an elephant. These animals, startling and strange to Regina’s eyes, wandered aimlessly, suddenly thrust into this great bowl of noise and sunlight, clearly terrified. Even the great predator cats were unable to take advantage of the confusion and closeness of their prey. Warriors ran on armed with spears, swords, nets, and shields, and they began to goad the bewildered beasts.

  As the creatures began to die the noise of the crowd rose to a crescendo.

  “So I am in time for the animal show.” Regina could feel a warm breath on her cheek, smell a subtle scent of incense. The sudden voice, speaking a stilted Latin, was a woman’s, soft in Regina’s ear, with the husky growl of age. Regina couldn’t see the arena anymore. “Once, you know, these games had religious significance. They were called offerings. But now we live in coarsened times, and the games are merely spectacles to placate the crowds of Rome, whom even the emperors fear. That is why the morning show, which still delivers authentic deaths, even if only of animals and criminals, is so popular …”

  She had planned for this moment, tried to anticipate it. But now that it was here she felt frozen solid, like one of the hapless statues on the arena walls.

  She turned.

  The woman beside her wore a simple white stola and a cloak of fine wool. She was upright, slim, gray- haired, her face still handsome despite the wrinkles at her eyes and mouth, and the tightening of her skin by years of Italian light. But the smoke-gray eyes were clear and unchanged, and, in her sixties, she was still beautiful.

  “Mother.”

  “Yes, child.”

  They embraced. But it was almost formal. Her mother’s muscles were stiff, as stiff as her own. It was always going to be like this, Regina thought. For Julia to have survived in Rome she must have found a core of steel. It was a meeting of two strong women; it was not a gushing reunion.

  Before them, disregarded, the professional beast slayers continued their taunting of the animals, whipping the beasts to a fury to satisfy the passions of the baying, jostling crowd.

  * * *

  They exchanged information. Facts, not feelings.

  Julia seemed uninterested in Regina’s brief account of her life since the night her father had died. To Julia, it seemed, Britain was a cold and dismal place far away and best forgotten. Or perhaps there was some morsel of guilt, Regina thought, even now uncomfortably lodged in her heart, trivial but irritating, like a seed between her teeth.

  Julia was scarcely more animated as she quietly told her own story. “I came to Rome to be with my sister. Your aunt—”

  Regina rummaged in her memory. “Helena.”

  “Helena, yes …” Helena, some ten years older than Julia herself, was, it turned out, still alive — one of the few seventy-year-olds in all of Rome. “But then,” Julia said dryly, “we have always been a long- lived family.”

  Julia had needed help from her sister. Contrary to what Regina had always believed, Julia had left Britain with little in the way of the family fortune. Before his death Marcus — always nervous, always overcautious — had taken to burying his money in hoards, in and around the villa. “And there, so far as I know, the family’s money lies still, rotting in the earth. Unless it has been purloined by Saxons, bacaudae, or other undesirables.” She seemed not to care very much.

  Sister Helena, it turned out, had maneuvered herself into a very influential position in Rome, for she had been one of the chief attendants to the Vestal Virgins.

  The Virgins w
ere a relic of Rome’s earliest days. It was said the order had been founded by Numa Pompilius, the first king to follow Romulus himself, who had designated acolytes to attend to the sacred flame of Vesta, goddess of hearth and fireside. Novices were handed over between the ages of six and ten to the Pontifex Maximus, Rome’s chief priest, and were required to remain pure for thirty years. The order had become central to the purity and strength of Rome, and the sacred fire had not been extinguished for centuries.

  “But the flame burns no more,” murmured Julia. “When Constantine began to build his Christian churches, everything changed.”

  There were many who believed that the extinguishing of the flame symbolized the decline of Rome itself, for the city had been sacked just sixteen years later. But some of the Virgins and their attendants, including a younger Helena, had not been without worldly wisdom as well as divine. Plenty of money had been salted away for just such a catastrophe.

  “A faction of the Virgins found a way to survive,” Julia said. “We still serve a god, still dedicate the purity of our young to her service. But she is a different god. We call ourselves the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. And we still report to the Pontifex Maximus — but now he is the pope of the Christians.”

  Regina gaped. “Mary — the mother of the Christ? Mother, have you become a Christian?”

  “One must adapt.” Julia smiled, and for a moment Regina saw something of Aetius’s strength and resilience in his daughter’s eyes. “And as you can see, we can still afford one of the amphitheater’s best boxes. Your aunt Helena has two daughters, Leda and Messalina — I suppose Messalina is about your age. Messalina, too, has children, daughters.” All daughters, Regina noted absently, no sons. Julia went on, “And I have one daughter—”

  Regina closed her eyes. “Mother, you have two daughters.”

  Briefly Julia reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled back. “Two daughters, then. Your sister is called Leda.”

  “Half sister—”

  “Yes. Her father is dead. He was uninteresting.” This dismissal was chilling. “And now,” Julia said softly, “ you are here. What do you want, Regina?”

  Regina spread her hands. “I am here to build a better life than I could have found in Britain.” She told her mother something of the extirpating advance of the Saxons, and the foolishness of the British leaders like Artorius, still dreaming of empires. “And,” she said, “I have come here for repayment of certain debts.”

  “Debts owed by this Amator. And, no doubt, by me.”

  Regina said evenly, “You had a duty to protect me — a duty doubled by my father’s death. You didn’t fulfill that duty. If it hadn’t been for Aetius—”

  Julia nodded, considering. “We are not rich, my Order. But we can take you in — you and your daughter — if that is acceptable. We are family: Leda, and Helena and her daughters, myself, we all live in the same community.”

  The proposal sounded acceptable to Regina. After all the family would be together, a network of mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, sisters and cousins.

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “Good. We can discuss terms later.”

  Terms? … We are bargaining, Regina thought, bargaining with duty and guilt. How cold we are — and how like me this woman is — or how like her I have become.

  The crowd bayed again, and Regina glanced back at the sun-drenched arena.

  The beast slayers had almost done their work. The last animals were released — but they were not beasts but humans, Regina thought at first. Very tall, very naked, they ran like the wind, faster than anybody she had ever seen. And, she saw, their heads above their very human faces were flat, their brows reaching back from great ridges set over eye sockets, within which terror and bafflement was easy to discern.

  No, not human; they were a kind of ape, her mother told her. These ape-folk’s proximity to humanity made them a favorite of the crowds. They were brought to Rome along lengthy trade routes from China, far to the east, where isolated pockets of these creatures survived in the mountains. In this age, which seemed so crowded here in Rome, the world was still an empty and largely unexplored place, and its corners contained many relics of a deeper antiquity. The ape-folk would not fight, but they were lithe and very fast, and the beast slayers had to run them down with chariots before they could be killed.

  “Next there will be executions,” Julia said. “Bandits, rapists, heretics, and embezzling shopkeepers tied to posts so that beasts may maul them. It is a pitiable spectacle, but the crowd loves it.”

  “Mother, I brought the matres. From our lararium. I always took care of them.”

  Julia’s face was composed, but there was something in her eyes, Regina thought, something a little warmer.

  Chapter 27

  Once again Lucia journeyed with Rosa into the deep heart of the Crypt.

  This time they took a different route, using older elevator shafts and stairs. They passed down from the bright upper level with its classrooms, libraries, offices, and computer centers, down through the vast, sprawling, comfortable layer of hospitals and dormitories, recreation rooms, sports halls and food centers, and then down into the deepest level, the complex of narrow interconnected corridors and small chambers, the level where the matres lived.

  Lucia wanted to close her eyes, to shut out the detail that crammed into her mind: if you didn’t need to know it, you shouldn’t know it.

  * * *

  It was two weeks after the end of Lucia’s ostracism. Rosa had come to find her, at the end of Lucia’s working day.

  Rosa had smiled. “I’m glad you look so well.”

  Lucia returned the smile. But she felt uncomfortable. She didn’t want to think about the recent past.

  Rosa seemed to perceive this. “I understand how you feel.” She brushed Lucia’s cheek with her fingers. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  “Somebody? …”

  “He’s waiting for you now.”

  Lucia had followed her — but once more her head buzzed with unwelcome questions. He? There were very few boys or men here in the Crypt, and she was close to none of them. He … She couldn’t help but think of Daniel. She remembered his face, his oddly high forehead, his pale blue eyes, so different from everybody in the Crypt. But now that face was a dissolving memory, and she knew she must put him aside.

  On the third story, Rosa led her down a long, gloomy corridor. They came to a nursery. This was a large, bright room with smoothly rounded walls and tiny pieces of furniture in glaring red or yellow plastic. The walls were brightly painted with huge smiling faces, and from hidden speakers tinkling music played.

  And the floor was covered with infants. “The current crop of one- to two-year-olds,” Rosa murmured.

  There were about two hundred babies here, in this one great room. Adults dressed in pale gray uniforms walked among them. The children were dressed in identical blue-and-white romper suits, though some of them had worked free an arm or leg. The children played with each other and the toys that littered the floor, exploring, gnawing. The babies were a carpet of wriggling forms — like worms, Lucia thought oddly, or like stranded fish. She could smell them, a dense, pale smell of milk and piss and poops, and the noise they made was a shrill roar. And when they chanced to look toward her, they all had the same oval face, pale hair, smoke-gray eyes.

  The attendants looked young themselves — some of them surely younger than Lucia herself. It occurred to Lucia that there was a pattern of age in the Crypt. She had seen it for herself. In these deep levels most people were young, children and young adults helping in the nursery, and doing basic maintenance. Older women, like Pina, tended to work at the higher levels, the schools and libraries, and in the surface offices. It wasn’t an exclusive pattern; a few people, like Rosa, seemed comfortable everywhere. But still, she thought, the Crypt was like a great onion, layers divided by age, the oldest outside, getting younger as you penetrated deeper — until at the
center were the youngest of all, the babies, and, paradoxically, the very oldest, the matres.

  But this was another heretical analysis that she must try to block from her mind.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Rosa murmured.

  “You do?”

  “You’ve mixed with outsiders. I was brought up as a contadino, remember. You’re seeing this through the eyes of an outsider — and you’re thinking how strange this would seem to them.”

  Perhaps I was, Lucia thought.

  “You don’t have to deny it,” Rosa murmured. “Well, so it would be strange to anybody who grew up in a little nuclear family. It seemed strange to me, until I understood how right it all was … Once you were a child like this, Lucia. Once you played in this room, as these children do now.”

  “I know.”

  “And then, with your year group, you moved through the stages of your life, the crиches and nursery schools, and then your formal schooling on the top story … And more children took your place here.”

  Lucia shrugged. “Everybody knows about that. It’s the way the Order is renewed.”

  “Yes, of course it is. Now come.” She walked on, and Lucia followed.

  They went through a door, and passed down another corridor. It was colder here, and darker, lit only by a string of dangling bulbs.

  Rosa said as they walked, “Ten thousand people live here, in the Crypt. Every year, about one percent of us die — some accidents and illnesses, mostly old age. That’s a hundred a year. That’s how many have to be replaced. You said it yourself: the Order must be renewed. Has it occurred to you to wonder how?”

  Lucia frowned. “There must be a hundred babies a year, then. To maintain the numbers.”