Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  "Oh, shit," I said.

  "I wanted to spare you."

  "He hid them in the kitchen?"

  Peter shrugged. "Who would have thought to look there? He always was smart, your dad."

  I dug deeper into the box. "Smart, but a randy old bugger. It's porn all the way down — wait."

  Right at the bottom of the tin was a picture in a frame. It was a color photograph, very old, cheap enough for its colors to have faded. It showed two children, age three or four, standing side by side, grinning at the camera from out of a long-gone sunny day. The frame was a cheap wooden affair, the kind you can still pick up in Woolworth's.

  Peter came to see. "That's the house. I mean, this house."

  He was right. And the faces of the kids were unmistakable. "That's me." The girl was a female version of me — the same features, the blond hair and smoky gray eyes, but more delicate, prettier.

  Peter asked, "So who's that?"

  "I don't know."

  "How old did you say your sister was?"

  "Ten years older than me. Whoever this is, it isn't Gina." I carried the photograph toward the daylight, and peered at it long and hard.

  Peter's voice had an edge to it. Perhaps he was taking a subtle revenge for my accusation of theft. "Then I think your father was hiding more from you than your comics."

  A click sounded from the living room. It was the video recorder. The machinery of my father's home continued to work, clocks and timers clicking and whirring mindlessly, an animated shell around the empty space where Dad had been.

  Chapter 3

  Everything started to go wrong for Regina on the night the strange light flared in the sky. Looking back, she would often wonder at how the great events of the silent sky were so linked to the business of the Earth, the blood and the dirt of life. Her grandfather would have understood the meaning of such an omen, she thought. But she was too young to comprehend.

  And the evening had started so well, so brightly.

  Regina was just seven years old.

  • • •

  When she heard that her mother was getting dressed for her birthday party, Regina abandoned her dolls and ran whooping through the villa. She scampered all the way around three sides of the courtyard, from the little temple with the lararium — where her father, looking exasperated, was making his daily tribute of wine and food to the three matres, the family gods — and through the main building with the old burned-out bathhouse she was forbidden ever to enter, and then to her mother's bedroom.

  When she got there Julia was already sitting on her couch, holding a silver mirror before her face. Julia brushed a lock of pale hair from her forehead and murmured irritably at Cartumandua, who stepped back from her mistress, combs and pins in her hands. The slave was fifteen years old, thin as a reed, with black hair, deep brown eyes, and broad, dark features. Today, though, her face was a sickly white and slick with sweat. There were two other slave women here, standing by with colored bottles of perfume and oils, but Regina didn't know their names and ignored them.

  Regina ran forward. "Mother! Mother! Let me fix your hair!"

  Cartumandua held back the comb, murmuring in her thick country accent, "No, child. You'll spoil it. And there is no time—"

  It was just as she had spoken to Regina when she was a little girl, when Cartumandua had been given to her as her companion and guardian. But Regina didn't have to take orders like that from a slave. "No!" she snapped. "Give me the comb, Cartumandua. Give it to me!"

  "Sh, sh." Julia turned and took her daughter's small hands in her delicate, manicured fingers. She was wearing a simple white tunic, soon to be replaced by the evening's elaborate garments. "What a noise you're making! Do you want to frighten all our guests away?"

  Regina gazed into her mother's gray eyes, so much like her own — the family eyes, eyes filled with smoke, as her grandfather always said. "No. But I want to do it! And Cartumandua says—"

  "Well, she's right." Julia pulled at Regina's own unruly mop of blond hair. "She's trying to fix my hair. I can't go into my birthday party looking as if I've been held upside down by my ankles all day, can I?" That made Regina laugh. "I'll tell you what," Julia said. "Let Carta finish my hair, and then you can help with my jewelry. How would that be? You're always so good at picking out the right rings and brooches—"

  "Oh, yes, yes! Wear the dragon."

  "All right." Julia smiled and kissed her daughter. "Just for you I'll wear the dragon. Now sit quietly over there..."

  So Regina sat, and Julia turned back to her mirror, and Cartumandua resumed her work on her mistress's hair. It was an elaborate style: the center was braided, drawn back, and wrapped around, while another braided piece rose directly from Julia's forehead to be pulled back across the head. The silent attendant women anointed the hair with perfume and oils, and Cartumandua inserted jet pins, dark against Julia's bright golden hair, to keep it all in place.

  Regina watched, rapt. It was a complicated style that took time and care to assemble, and needed the focused attention of a whole team of assistants — which was, as Regina had heard her mother say in one of those adult conversations she didn't really understand, why she wore it in the first place. Other people might be burying their money in the family mausoleum, but she was going to wear the family's wealth and let everybody know about it. And it was fashionable on the continent, at least according to the images on the most recent coins to reach Britain from the continental mints. Julia was determined to keep up with the latest styles, even if she was stuck out here in the southwestern corner of Britain, about as far from Rome as you could get without falling off the edge of the world.

  Regina loved parties, of course. What seven-year-old didn't? And Julia gave plenty of them, lavish affairs that illuminated the villa here on the outskirts of Durnovaria. But even more than the parties themselves, Regina loved most of all these elaborate preparations: the subtle scents, the soft clinks of the bottles in the hands of the silent slaves, the hissing of the combs through her mother's hair, and Julia's instructions, soft or firm as required, as she expertly commanded her little team in their complex task.

  As the styling continued Julia smiled at Regina and began to sing, softly — not in her native British tongue, but in Latin, an old, strange song taught her by her own father. Its words, about mysterious vanished gods, were still baffling to Regina, despite her own fitful attempts to learn the language at her grandfather's insistence.

  At last Julia's hair was finished. Cartumandua allowed the attendants to approach with their bottles of perfume and cream. Some of these little bottles were carved in elaborate shapes; Regina's favorite was a balsarium in the shape of a bald-headed child. Julia selected a face cream of sandalwood and lavender on a base of animal fat, a little white lead for her cheeks, soot to make her eyebrows contrast strikingly with her blond hair, and one of her most precious perfumes, said to come from a faraway place called Egypt. Regina was under strict instructions never to play with any of this stuff, for it had become so hard to find; until things got back to normal, so her mother said, and the big trade routes that spanned the Empire opened up again, this was all the stock she had of these wonderful things, and they were precious.

  Finally it was time to select the jewelry. As Julia slid a selection of rings onto each finger, most of them set with precious stones and intaglios, Regina demanded that she be allowed to bring her mother the dragon brooch herself. It was a very old British design, but rendered in the Roman style, a swirl of silver that was almost too big for Regina to hold in her small hands. She approached Julia with the marvelous brooch held out before her, and her mother smiled, the white lead on her cheeks shining like moonlight.

  • • •

  It was midsummer, and the afternoon was long. The sky was blue as a jackdaw's egg and free of cloud, and it stayed bright even when the sun had long disappeared.

  By the slowly dimming light, the guests arrived, walking, riding, or in their chaises. Most of them came fr
om Durnovaria, the nearest town. Some of them stood in the balmy summer air of the courtyard, around the fountain that had never worked in Regina's lifetime, while others sat in couches or basket chairs, talking, drinking, laughing. They began to pick at the food set out on the low slate tables. There were round loaves of fresh-baked bread, and bowls of British-grown fruit like raspberries, wood strawberries, and crab apples. In addition to salted meat, there were plenty of oysters, mussels, cockles, snails, and fish sauce — and, obtained at great expense, some figs and olive oil from the continent. The highlights were showy extravagances of culinary labor: dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, sausages with damsons and pomegranates, peahens' eggs in pastry.

  The guests loudly admired Julia's latest decor. In the main hall the plaster walls were painted with blocks of purple or gray veined with blue, and the dado was an elegant design of small rectangles outlined in green. Regina had learned that the old design — nature-themed, with imitation marbling, garlands, and candelabra all adorned with ears of yellow barley — was now seriously out of fashion on the continent. Her father had complained loud and long about the expense of repainting the walls, and the difficulty of finding workmen these days. Her grandfather had just raised his thick eyebrows and said something about how absurd it was to paint one half of a villa when the other half had burned down and you couldn't afford to fix it...

  But to Regina's young eyes, the new design looked much better than the old, and that was all that mattered.

  The entertainment started soon after the first guests arrived. Julia had hired a storyteller, an old man — perhaps as old as fifty — with a great ferocious gray-black beard. He told a long and complicated story, entirely from memory, about how the hero Culhwch had sought the hand of the daughter of the giant Ysbadden. It was an ancestral tale of the olden days before the coming of the Caesars. Few people listened to him — even Regina was too excited to stay for long, though she knew it was a good story — but the old man would patiently tell and retell his stories all night, and as the party wore on, and as the drink had its effect, his deep voice would attract more attention. At the start of the evening, though, the musicians were more popular. They played a mixture of instruments from Britain and the Continent, bone flutes and panpipes, harps and citharas and tibias, and their bright music drifted like smoke on the still air.

  Julia's father, Regina's grandfather, was here. Aetius was a towering soldier who, after adventures abroad, was now stationed at a mysterious, magic-sounding, faraway place called the Wall. And having traveled the length of the diocese of Britain for his only daughter's twenty-fifth birthday party, he stomped around the villa and grumbled loudly at all the expense — "It's as if the Rhine never froze over," he would say mysteriously.

  Marcus, Regina's father, was a thin, clumsy man with severely cut dark hair and a drawn, anxious-looking face. He was dressed in his toga. This formal garment took skill to wear, for it was very heavy and you had to walk correctly to make the drapery fall easily, and Marcus wasn't used to it. So he walked about slowly and ponderously, as if he were wearing a great suit of lead. No matter how carefully he took each step — and he didn't dare sit down — the precious toga dragged on the floor, or folded and flapped awkwardly, or fell open to reveal his white tunic underneath.

  But Marcus proudly wore his Phrygian cap, pointed forward at the front, which marked him out as an adherent of the cult of Cybele, old-fashioned but popular locally. Four hundred years after the birth of Jesus, Christianity was the religion of the empire. But in the provinces Christianity remained a cult of the cities and villas, with the countryside people — who comprised most of the population — still clinging to their ancient pagan ways. And even among the elite, older cults still lingered. Cybele herself was a mother goddess who had come from Anatolia, imported into Rome after a conquest.

  If Marcus was always going to be awkward in polite company, Julia herself was every bit the hostess. She wore a long stola over a long-sleeved shift, tied at the waist. The thick material of the stola, brightly colored blue and red, fell in heavy folds, and she wore a mantle over her shoulder, pinned in place with the wonderful dragon brooch. Not a hair seemed out of place, and to Regina she lit up every room more brightly than any number of bronze lamps or candlesticks.

  As for Regina herself, she flitted through the rooms and the courtyard, where the oil lamps and candles glimmered like fallen stars. She was shadowed by Cartumandua, who was under strict instructions about the foods Regina could eat and what she could drink (especially since the infamous incident of the barley ale). Everywhere Regina went people bent to greet her, the faces of the women thick with powder, the men greasy with sweat and the effects of wine or beer, but everyone smiling and complimenting her on her hair and her dress. She lapped up their attention as she recited her Latin verses or prayers to Christ, and danced to the bright music. One day, Regina knew, she would become a lady as grand and elegant as her mother, with her own retinue of slaves — none so clumsy and sallow as Cartumandua, she was determined about that — and she would be the center of attention at her own parties, every bit as lavish as her mother's, perhaps even at this very villa. And as the evening wore on, she just wished she could somehow drag the sun back up above the horizon, to put off the dread hour of bedtime a little longer.

  But then her grandfather pulled her aside. He took her out through the folding doors at the end of the dining room and onto the terrace, amid the rows of apple trees and raspberry canes. The tiled floor was crumbling, but the view of the countryside was beautiful. The sky was darkling, and the first wan summer stars were poking through the blue; she could just see the pale river of stars that, at this time of year, ran across the roof of the sky. Regina had learned that the Latin word villa meant "farm": she could make out the silhouetted forms of the barn and the granary and the other outbuildings, and the fields where the cattle grazed during the day. In the rolling hills beyond the villa's boundary, a single cluster of lights twinkled. It was a delightful night.

  But Aetius's face was stern.

  Aetius was a big man, a slab of strength and stillness, out of place in this glittering setting. She had expected Aetius to come to the party wearing his armor. But he had on a simple tunic of unbleached wool, with strips of color at the hem and sleeves. He wore a soldier's shoes, though, thick wooden soles strapped to his immense feet with strips of leather. Though he wore no weapon, Regina could see the scars cut deep into the muscled flesh of his arm.

  Marcus had told her that Aetius had served in the field army, and had spent four years in Europe under the command of Constantius, a British military commander who had taken his army over the ocean so that he could make a play for the imperial purple itself. Constantius had been defeated. The field army was dissipated or absorbed into other units, and never returned — save for isolated figures like Aetius, who now served with the border forces. Marcus had muttered gloomily about all this, and the weakened state of the army in Britain. But Regina understood little, and had a sunnier outlook than her grumpy old father anyway, and she thought the story of Constantius was rather exciting. An Emperor from Britain! But when she asked about his adventures Aetius just looked at her, his pale gray eyes sunken and dark.

  Now he crouched down on his haunches to face Regina, holding her small hand in one huge paw.

  She stammered nervously, "What have I done wrong?"

  "Where is Cartumandua?"

  Regina glanced around, realizing for the first time that the slave girl was not in her customary place, a few paces behind her. "I don't know. I didn't get rid of her, Grandfather. It's not my fault. I—"

  "I'll tell you where she is," he said. "She's in her room. Throwing up."

  Regina began to panic. Being told off by Aetius was a lot worse than any admonishment from her mother, and definitely from her father; if Aetius caught you, it really did mean trouble. "I didn't do anything," she complained.

  "Are you sure? I know what you used to do," he said. "You
would make her run around in circles, until she was dizzy. Your mother told me about it."

  It was shamefully true. "But that was a long time ago. It must be — oh, it must be months! I was just a little girl then!"

  "Then why is Carta ill?"

  "I don't know," Regina protested.

  His eyes narrowed. "I wonder if I should believe you."

  "Yes!"

  "But you don't always tell the truth. Do you, Regina? I'm afraid you're becoming a spoiled and willful child."

  Regina tried not to cry; she knew Aetius regarded that as a sign of weakness. "My mother says I'm a good girl."

  Aetius sighed. "Your mother loves you very much. As I do. But Julia isn't always — sensible." His grip on her hands softened. "Listen, Regina. You just can't behave this way. Life won't be the same when you grow up. I don't know how things will be — but for sure they will be different. And Julia doesn't always understand that, I don't think. And so she doesn't teach you."

  "Are you talking about Constantius?"

  "That buffoon, among other things, yes—"

  "Nobody tells me anything. I don't know what you mean. Anyway I don't care. I don't want things to be different."

  "What we want makes very little difference in this world, child," he said levelly. "Now, as to Carta. You must remember she is a person. A slave, yes, but a person. Did you know she has the name of a queen? Yes, the name of a queen of the Brigantes, a queen who may have confronted the Emperor Claudius himself." The Brigantes were a tribe of the old days, as Regina had been taught, and it had been Claudius who had brought Britain into the Empire, long, long ago. "But now," said Aetius, "that family of royalty is so poor it has had to sell its children into slavery."

  "My parents bought Carta for me."