Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  We three males all scrambled in our pockets; the comedy routine concluded when Daniel was the first to produce a tissue.

  Peter sat back and blew out his cheeks. “Deeper and deeper. So who was the father of this second kid?”

  “The same guy,” said Daniel. “The same asshole. This Giuliano, whatever.”

  Peter frowned. “Then how come she doesn’t know his name?”

  Daniel took a breath. “Because he only slept with her once.”

  Peter thought that over, and laughed out loud.

  Daniel, hotly embarrassed, said, “You don’t know the half of it, man.”

  Lucia said desolately, “I told you they wouldn’t believe me.” With a tissue clutched to her nose, she looked up at me through water-filled eyes heartbreakingly like my own.

  “Let’s all take it easy,” I said. “Lucia, you say you don’t want to have baby after baby … Is that what they asked you to do? The Order — umm, my sister?”

  “Yes. But they never asked,” she said, with a trace of sulky petulance.

  “And why you?” Peter asked.

  She looked away. “Because I had grown up.”

  It took a little probing to establish that she meant that she had begun her periods.

  Peter asked, “So it’s some kind of baby factory down there?”

  “Peter—”

  “George, if you are unscrupulous about it a healthy white kid can bring in a lot of money. The big adoption services in the States—”

  “It’s not like that,” Lucia said.

  “But,” Peter said, “every time a girl begins her periods she is made pregnant. Right?”

  “No.” She was finding this difficult, but there was determination in her face, I saw, a strength. “You just aren’t listening. Not all girls. Just some. Just me. The other girls can’t have babies.”

  The rule of three mothers, I thought absently, thinking of Regina’s biography. “You mean they aren’t allowed to?”

  “No,” she said. “They can’t.”

  Peter thought that over. “They’re neuters?” Again he laughed.

  Daniel glared at him. “It’s true, man. I’ve met one of them. A woman called Pina — about twenty-five, I think. Calls herself Lucia’s friend, but she’s no friend; she betrayed her to the other creeps. You should have seen her — no tits, hips like a ten-year-old boy’s. She’s twenty-five, but she’s prepubescent.”

  It was impossible, of course. Absurd. But now I thought back to my own incursion into the Crypt, and I remembered those ageless people who had clustered around me in the corridors and mezzanines -

  mostly women and girls, few men, not slim, but with no figures, no busts or hips … Rosa, I realized, had been the only woman I saw there who had looked mature. It hadn’t struck me at the time — I suppose I was simply overwhelmed by that dense, dizzying environment, by too much strangeness to notice such a simple thing — and yet, now that I thought back, it was startling.

  I looked at Peter. “How could this happen?”

  “And why? … I’ve no idea,” he said uneasily. “But if any of it’s true, I think this means we’re facing more than just some money-grabbing cult here, George.”

  Lucia cried out, clutched her belly, bent over, and vomited.

  * * *

  Peter and I responded reflexively, jumping back out of the way of that stinking splash. But Daniel had better instincts. He leaned forward to grab her shoulders. “It’s okay. It’s okay …”

  Peter dug in his pocket for his cell phone.

  I said to Daniel, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. But she’s going to the hospital. Now. ”

  “No,” he said. “The Order—”

  “The hell with the Order.” One-handed, Peter had punched in 113, the code to call an ambulance. “They aren’t the fucking Illuminati — hey!”

  Daniel had snatched the phone out of his hand and terminated the call. “Okay. But at least let’s take her somewhere they might not expect.”

  Peter made a grab for his phone, but I pushed him back. “Where, Daniel?”

  “There’s an American hospital on the Via Emilio Longoni. Thirty minutes out of town.”

  “Too far,” Peter growled.

  I held him back. “Let him follow his instincts,” I said. “He’s done okay for her so far, hasn’t he?”

  Peter was unhappy, but subsided.

  By the time Daniel had completed the call, Lucia had done vomiting. We had to help her stand. Peter and I walked at either side of the girl. She draped her arms over our shoulders, and we held her around her waist. When I brushed against her skin, she felt oddly cold, I thought, clammy.

  We emerged from the Colosseum entrance into the bright light of midmorning, where the fake gladiators continued to milk the lengthening queues. People stared at us as we limped past. It struck me how helpless we were. We were essentially strangers. Poor Lucia was trapped in the travails of an evidently unwanted pregnancy, and all she had to protect her was a confused, headstrong kid and two screwed-up middle-age blokes — and we weren’t even sure if we should be getting involved in the first place.

  Daniel gave Peter his phone back, and he produced a floppy disc from his waist pack. “Here. I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” He handed it to Peter.

  Peter slipped it into his pocket. “What’s this?”

  “About Pina no-tits. I hacked into hospital records. Lucia told me Pina was in a traffic accident a couple of years ago. Not serious, but she busted her leg, and she ended up in a city hospital for a few hours — long enough for the doctors to notice her, umm, peculiarities. And they ran some tests. The results were weird. But by the time they turned around to figure out more, she’d already gone. Whisked away by the witches from the Crypt.” He glared at Peter. “Take a look at the disc. It’s all there.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Daniel walked jerkily, his shoulders set. He was angry and scared. He said, “And if you don’t believe that, wait until we get to the hospital. Wait until the American doctors see her. Then explain to me how Lucia can have gone through a full-term pregnancy in three months. Explain how she can have got pregnant again without having sex.”

  Lucia bowed her head, biting her lip.

  Peter and I exchanged a glance. I murmured, “Three months?”

  “One thing at a time,” Peter said, and he rolled his eyes.

  We all rode in the ambulance.

  * * *

  The Rome American Hospital turned out to be bright, modern, efficient, the reception area full of light cast from big picture windows. Lucia was taken out of our hands as soon as the ambulance doors opened, and she disappeared into the maw of the hospital.

  We were quizzed about our relationship to Lucia. Peter lied with surprising smoothness. I was her uncle,

  he said, visiting from England — hence the family resemblance. Daniel and Peter were friends of the family. He had already contacted the direct family, who were on their way … I thought the nurse looked skeptically at us, and perhaps she was remembering Lucia’s torn and dirty dress. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

  I had to produce a credit card to guarantee payment for whatever treatment Lucia was going to need. “Ulp,” I said to Peter. “I wonder if my travel insurance will cover this.”

  “I kind of doubt it. Are you concerned?”

  I said, “That my bank account is about to be flattened?” I watched Daniel roaming around the reception area, restless, helpless, frustrated. “I don’t think I am, no, given the circumstances.”

  “ Conception without sex. The kid actually said that, didn’t he? And three-month pregnancies. Jesus. What have we gotten into here?”

  I studied him. “What’s wrong with you, Peter? I’ve never seen you so — aggressive.”

  He snorted, and fixed his invisible glasses. “We came here looking for your sister, remember. Not for this.”

  “Do you want to back out?”

  “Rosa isn’t my s
ister. Do you ?”

  I thought about it. I sensed that this murky mystery of poor Lucia tied in on some deep level with what I’d glimpsed of the Crypt — the biological strangeness I’d experienced, but which I’d not been able to express to Peter. If I wanted to unravel all that, I was going to have to deal with Lucia. And besides — I pictured Lucia’s face: so pale, such deep shadows around her eyes. She was just a kid, and she really was in deep trouble, I realized, and I felt a sharp instinct to help. Peter’s peculiar behavior — the furtiveness he’d shown since he’d arrived here in Rome, the half secrets he’d dropped about dark matter and the rest — was just complicating things. But it didn’t change the essentials.

  “No. I’m not backing out,” I said firmly. “Simple humanity, Peter.”

  He laughed without humor. “I don’t think there’s anything simple about this situation.” He cast about. “I need to get on the Internet. I’ll see if there’s a dataport in here, or maybe a phone socket. And I could use a coffee,” he called over his shoulder, pulling his laptop out of his bag.

  I walked up to Daniel. “You’re pacing like an expectant father.”

  He looked at me sourly. “Bad joke.”

  “Yes. Sorry. Look, do you have any change? …”

  Down the hall we found a machine that would dispense Starbucks-sized polystyrene beakers of coffee in return for euro coins and notes. We walked back to Peter, who had tucked himself into a corner seat and was pulling Daniel’s hacked medical file off the floppy. He accepted the coffee without looking up, flipped open the little drinking flap in the plastic lid, and took a sip, all without ceasing to work at his keyboard.

  “The man’s a professional,” I said to Daniel.

  “Yeah.”

  We sat down. Daniel was full of nervous energy. He tapped the arm of his chair, and his legs pumped up and down in tiny, violent movements, as if he were ready to flee.

  “I guess you haven’t had much experience of hospitals,” I said.

  “No. Have you?”

  “Well—”

  “You have kids of your own?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I admitted.

  He turned away. “Look, it’s not the hospital that bothers me. In fact, I enjoy being surrounded by people speaking English, or at least Italian with an American accent.”

  “The Order? That’s what you’re scared of?”

  “Damn right.”

  “They can’t harm anybody here.” I pointed to a beefy security guard, who stood by the door, hands folded behind his back. “Lucia will be fine. We’re in the best place she could be …” And so on.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  A typical adult-kid response came to my mind: Yes, everything will be fine, she will be okay, we can all go home. But I thought I should respect him more than that. “I really don’t understand what’s going on here, Daniel. You know more than I do. And I have no idea if she’s going to be okay.” I felt a stab of anger. “I don’t even know what okay means, for a fifteen-year-old girl who will have had two kids by some guy whose name she doesn’t even know.”

  “They had no right,” he said.

  “No. Whoever they are.”

  “I should be at school.” He spread his hands. “What am I doing here?”

  “Look — you did the right thing,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve lived a quiet life. What do I know about how to deal with situations like this? You saw a kid in trouble — a human being — and you responded on a human level. Your parents will be proud.”

  He grimaced. “You don’t know my parents. When they find out about this I am toast.”

  A junior doctor approached us. About thirty, she was short, brisk, competent, with severely cut hair. She had a yellow notepad in her hand.

  Lucia was fine, the doctor said, in accented English. The girl was in the late stages of pregnancy, and it was possible she would soon go into labor. But the doctor looked a little puzzled as she said this, and I realized that she was keeping stuff back from us. Well, they had had only a few minutes to examine Lucia, and if even a fraction of what Lucia and Daniel had told us was true, they had a right to be baffled.

  Peter hit the doctor with questions. “What about her breathing? Her metabolism, pulse rate? …” She was startled enough to try to answer him, referring to her pad a couple of times, before her customary doctor’s mask of nondisclosure slid back into place. “We’ll let you know as soon as there is more news.” And she turned and walked briskly away.

  Daniel said, “What use was that? She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.” He returned to his seat, fuming, pent up.

  I murmured to Peter, “Wish I hadn’t encouraged him to drink caffeine. What about those questions you were firing at the doctor?”

  He looked at me. “When we were helping her to the ambulance — didn’t you feel her pulse? Boom … boom … boom. Given the state she’s in, and given that she’d just thrown up her breakfast, it was bloody slow — I estimated less than fifty a minute — slower than a top athlete’s resting rate. And she was cold. The quack’s first test results confirm it, I think. George, it kind of fits with what you told me of the Crypt. The air down there must be dense, with high humidity, high on carbon dioxide, low on oxygen.”

  I nodded. “Which is why I felt breathless.”

  “With low oxygen levels, you get a low metabolic rate, low body temperatures. A slow pulse, cold skin.” He rubbed his nose. “I’d like to get a look at any urine tests they do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in animals, one way of getting rid of excess cee-oh-two is through your piss, in the form of flushed-out carbonates and bicarbonates. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve come up with some such adaptive mechanism.”

  “ Adaptive. You’re saying she’s adapted to the Crypt.” I thought it over. “Like her pale skin. Her eyes. Those thick sunglasses.”

  “It does all fit together, sort of. And there’s more. With a low metabolic rate, you’d grow more slowly, mature later. Live longer, too.”

  “Could that explain the sterility?”

  “I don’t know. You know, those people must have been down that hole for a very, very long time.”

  “Peter — what are we dealing with here?”

  He glanced at Daniel, and beckoned. We moved a few seats away from the boy.

  Peter unfolded his laptop and showed me some images, which I could barely make out for the glare from the big windows. “What do you know about orangutans?”

  * * *

  As far as Peter could tell the file Daniel had given him on Pina was genuine. When Pina went into hospital for her broken leg, the doctors who examined her had been concerned enough by her appearance to insist on giving her more extensive tests.

  “George, I think the kid was right. Pina had an imperforate hymen, and quiescent ovaries.”

  “Quiescent?”

  He shrugged. “Not producing eggs. Never had produced eggs. There’s a brief note here, where one doctor speculates about the mechanism—”

  I waved a hand. “I’m not going to understand any of that.”

  “Anyhow they never did the conclusive tests before she was sprung. I’ve been onto the search engines and looked wider. The biologists call this ‘arrested development.’ It can happen for genetic reasons — for instance, a mutation in the receptor for a certain growth factor can cause a form of dwarfism. Or if food is short — say if you’re an anorexic — puberty can be delayed. It makes a certain evolutionary sense, because if you can’t feed yourself it makes no sense to waste calories on bone mass and fatty tissue for sexual characteristics until your body can be sure it will survive. It’s actually quite common among the animals. Sometimes subordinate males don’t develop sexual characteristics. Tree shrews. Mandrill monkeys. Elephants.”

  “And orangutans—”

  “Even orangutans, even apes.”

  “Get back to Pina. You’re saying she has this ‘arrested development,’ too.”

>   “It looks that way. The tests weren’t conclusive.” He sighed, closed up his laptop, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But suppose it’s true, George. Suppose that poor kid really has gone through a pregnancy that mushroomed in three months. Suppose there are neuter women down that hole in the ground, a horde of them. Suppose Lucia’s other peculiarities — her paleness, her slow metabolism — are adaptations to living underground. And suppose it’s true — it seems fantastic, but just suppose — that Lucia had sex with this guy Giuliano just once, but she’s going to continue to get pregnant, over and over …”

  I sat on that plastic-coated seat, in the bright efficiency of the thoroughly modern hospital, gazing through the big windows at the gardens with their cypress trees. “ Evolution. They are evolving differently. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Peter said, “If the story of Regina is true, the Order have cut themselves off, more or less, from the rest of humanity for sixteen centuries. That’s, say, sixty, seventy, eighty generations … I’m no biologist. I don’t know if that’s enough time. But it sounds like it to me.” He shook his head. “You know, twenty- four hours ago I’d never have believed we’d be having this conversation. But here we are.

  “… I still don’t see the big picture, though. Evolutionary changes happen for a reason.” Peter leaned close. “You’ll have to go back, George. Back into the Crypt. Call your sister again.”

  “Why?”

  “We need more information. We still have more questions than answers, nothing but a lot of guesswork. If we could get Pina or one of the other neuters into the hands of the doctors—”

  “Daniel.”

  He looked around. “What?”

  “Where’s Daniel?” While we’d been talking, the boy had disappeared from his seat.

  We ran down the corridor, the way he must have gone. We heard the receptionist call us back, a sharper yell from the security guy.