Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  I tried to be brisk. The Catholic tokens went to the parish. I gave most of Dad's personal stuff to the charity shops. I kept back the photographs, and a few books that had some resonance for me — an ancient AA road atlas mapping a vanished Britain, and some of his Churchill biographies — nothing I'd ever read or used, but artifacts that had lodged in my memory. I didn't want this stuff, but of course I couldn't bear to throw any of it out, and I knew Gina would take none of it.

  I swept it all into a trunk and hauled it into the boot of my car. My boxed-up TV21 collection went in there also, thus beginning a migration from one attic to another. I wondered what would happen to all this junk when I died in my turn.

  I kept out the little picture of my "sister," though.

  I had the phone disconnected, sorted out such details as the TV license, but left the utilities running, billed to my account, to keep the house dry and intact, the better to present it to prospective buyers. On the last morning I cut the grass, knocked over the anthills, and did a little brisk weeding. It seemed the right thing to do. I was going to miss those big old azaleas. I wondered about taking a cutting, but I didn't know how to. I didn't have a garden to grow it in anyhow.

  I engaged a house clearance firm — "friendly and sympathetic service," according to the Yellow Pages. A surveyor with an undertaker's doggedly glum manner came, glanced efficiently over the furniture and utilities, and made an offer for the lot. It seemed ruinously low. Part of me, loyal to the notion of what my dad's reaction would have been, was inspired to fight back. But I just wanted shut of the business, as the surveyor surely calculated, and the deed was done.

  The last step was to place the house with a real estate agent, where a kid with spiky gelled hair and a cheap suit lectured me about "market stress" and how long it would take to get an offer. We were, of course, negotiating over the sale of the home where I'd grown up; I suspected the Gelled Arsehole sensed my vulnerability. But fuck it. I signed the forms and walked away.

  I left the keys with Peter. He promised to check over the place until it was sold. I felt uncomfortable with this — I didn't like the idea of becoming entangled in some kind of debt to him — but unless I was to house-sit myself I needed somebody to do what he was offering.

  I didn't quite know why I was uncomfortable about Peter. There had always been something needy about him. And if Peter wanted to work his way back into my life, he had found an angle to do it. Perhaps, I thought, he imagined we would become Internet pen pals, swapping reminiscences about TV21. Perhaps, like the Gelled Arsehole, Peter had spotted my vulnerability and was exploiting it for his own ends.

  Or maybe I was just being uncharitable. Whichever, as I set off back to London, I drove away watching him waving with a handful of keys.

  • • •

  When I got back to work, there was nothing for me to do, literally. Which tells you all you need to know about my career.

  I worked for a smallish software development company called Hyf — a bit of Anglo-Saxon that is apparently the root of hive, for we were all supposed to be busy busy bees. We were based near Liverpool Street

  , in the upper floor of what used to be a small rail station, long disused. The office was open-plan, save for a small hardware section where minis hummed away in blue-lit air-conditioning. It was an environment of neck-high partitions, trendy curved desks that made it impossible to get close to your PC without stretching out your arms like a gibbon, and everywhere a flurry of polystyrene Starbucks containers, yellow stickies, postcards from skiing holidays, and the occasional bit of "comedy" Internet porn.

  Walking down the central aisle under the pleasing architecture of the Victorian-era curved roof, I hurried along. I found I didn't want much to speak to anybody — and nor did they to me; most had probably already forgotten the reason I had been away. As usual there was a whole series of scents as I walked down that aisle. The combative mix of cigarette smoke and air-freshener sprays was overlaid with a strong coffee stink and the stale scents of yesterday's lunch. Sometimes, when I worked in there late at night, I could swear I picked up a subtle and unmistakable almond whiff.

  I was privileged enough to have an office, one of a set arrayed along the side walls of the office, for I was a manager, in charge of "test coordination," as we called it. I hung up my jacket and dug a bottle of Evian water from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I booted up my PC and waited for it to download my intranet mails. I riffled through the snail mail: just a few flyers from software utilities vendors.

  Vivian Cave walked into the office next to mine. She was late thirties, perhaps forty, a midheight graying blonde. She spotted me through the glass walls that separated us, gave me a half smile, and raised an invisible glass to her lips. Drink later? I waved back. Sure.

  The PC screen speckled with icons. I found a total of thirty-two mails, after four working days away. Just eight a day? And most of them were routine stuff about Internet viruses, an offer to sell an unused snorkel set, and a mighty eleven mails with soccer score updates sent to the rest of the office by one diligent observer working late during a European Champions League match. But nothing from my line manager, or the software development project managers whom I was supposed to work with.

  No work for George today. I knew I should launch myself into the online reports, or storm around the office setting up meetings. With a role like mine, fighting for work was part of the job.

  I kicked the door closed, sat down, and sipped slowly at my Evian.

  I'd been here three years. It wasn't the first job of its kind I'd taken. I'd drifted into positions like this much as I'd drifted into my career in software development in the first place.

  Leaving school, fairly bright but hopelessly unfit, I'd had vague TV21 dreams of becoming a scientist — an astrophysicist maybe, probing the far reaches of the universe, or a space engineer, building and controlling rockets and spacecraft. I was bright enough for college, but a few "down-to-Earth" harangues from my dad the accountant had made me see the wisdom of keeping my options open.

  I got a place at Warwick University, where I read math. It was a bright, friendly place, the math faculty at the time was sparky and innovative — the home of then-trendy catastrophe theory — and I soon found myself forgetting the ostensible reasons I'd gone there. Working my way tidily through the groves of axioms, postulates, and corollaries, I quickly hit my intellectual limits, but I discovered in myself a deep appreciation of logic and order.

  In my last year I traipsed around the milk round of potential employers, trying to find something that would plug into that interest in mathematical logic. I found it in software development — which brings a wry smile to the lips of all my acquaintances who have ever found themselves staring at a blue screen with a baffling error message.

  But software ought to be logical. The math underlying relational databases, for instance, accessed by virtually every Internet user every day, is pure and beautiful. There is a whole discipline called "formal methods" in which you set out what you want to achieve and write a program that is a self-proof that it will do exactly what it's supposed to do.

  That was the dream, as I began my career — first in Manchester, and then, inevitably, in London, the center of everything in Britain. When I could afford it I took a small flat in Hackney, and started a gruesome daily traveling routine by bus and Tube. But as I started work, first in the software development departments of large corporations and then in independent development houses, I soon found that rigor was expensive — less so than the cost of fixing all the bugs later, but an upfront cost virtually nobody was willing to pay.

  Eventually I drifted into testing, the one place where you are supposed to be rigorous. For a while I prospered. The fashion was for development methods that were, if not formal, at least structured and so open to inspection. I would draw up my test plans covering every conceivable condition the software could take, with predictions of how it should react. I turned up errors at every level from ty
pos in the code to compilation into machine code to fundamental design flaws — but that was okay; that was the job, and it was satisfying to make things better.

  But there was a constant pressure to cut costs on testing, which higher-level managers could never quite figure the benefit of, and endless turf wars between competing teams of developers and the testers come to rip to pieces "their" code. I started to be bypassed by development managers who could boast they were delivering something of direct benefit to the end user — and who, unlike me, had significant budgets and teams to run.

  Not only that, they were all tall men. It's always tall men who get on in management hierarchies, no doubt some deep primate thing. I'm a man but was never that tall, so was stuffed from the start. My trace of a Manchester accent didn't help, either.

  And then, in the nineties, a new wave of software development techniques came along. The new languages were much lower level than some of those in the past: that is, closer to the machine. As a developer you could deliver all sorts of fancy miracles. But your code would be dense and highly interconnected: difficult for an outsider to read, hard to test, all but impossible to maintain. In the wine bars and pubs of post-yuppie London I would rage against this retreat from the mathematical high ground to a kind of medieval craftsmanship, and the lower standards it would bring. But the tide was against me, even as giant applications in the stock exchange and the health service crashed and burned, even as every user of PC software howled with rage at errors so fundamental they should never have gotten past the most elementary level of inspection.

  Long before I was out of my thirties my career was stalling. I still had choices, even stable employment of a sort. Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all.

  And so here I was at Hyf. I was aware that I was really a kind of totem, a personalized embodiment of the company's illusory commitment to "high-quality deliverables." But I'd stayed there, for three years already. Whatever I thought of the job I had bills to pay and a pension to build up. And, just sometimes, I managed to get some work done that satisfied my need to carve order from chaos — a need, as I was going to find out, that went deep in me and my family, indeed.

  If I sat up in my chair I could see the end wall of the office, a slab of Victorian brickwork capped by the curving roof of the old station structure. I was struck now how good the brickwork was compared to my father's house. A station clock maybe six feet across was set into the wall, a translucent disc marked with big Roman numerals and two spearlike hands. The back was faced over with glass that revealed the works, which still operated. Sales types would use it to impress clients. I stared at the big minute hand long enough to see it wobble its way through two, three, four minutes. It was a relic of vanished days, I thought, days of heroic engineering. There have always been engineers in my family.

  It struck me suddenly how young everybody was here — everybody but me, that is. None of them was interested in the brickwork.

  The big station clock reached eleven-thirty, and I hadn't done a damn thing all morning. In the afternoon, I told myself, I would resume the good fight. For now, I shut down the computer, gathered my jacket, and walked out for an early and long lunch.

  • • •

  It was a gray day, unseasonably cold for mid-September. I bought a small orange juice and an avocado and bacon sandwich from a Pret A Manger. I walked as far as Saint Katherine's Dock before settling to a bench and eating.

  Then, restless, cold, reluctant to go back to work, I walked toward Liverpool Street

  .

  On impulse I stopped into a cybercafé. It was half empty, despite the time of day, and the customers were either eating or chatting rather than logging on. I bought my time credits and a tall latte, and sat at an empty terminal, placing myself as far from anybody else as possible.

  I logged onto my home email account, got into a search engine, and typed "Mary Queen Virgins" into the query line.

  Of course I could have done this at work; most people would, I suppose. But my strict but useless sense of what was right tripped me up. I had always felt uncomfortable purloining the firm's resources, from computer time to paper clips, always aware that in the end somebody somewhere would have to work a little harder to make up for my petty theft. Or perhaps it was just that I wanted to keep my private affairs out of the office.

  Most of the results were dross: straightforward crank sites put up by religious nuts of one kind or another, a remarkably large number of churches with similar names, and the usual irritating clutter from the high schools and colleges that have developed the antisocial habit of placing the entire contents of their course materials on the public Internet, thus baffling every search engine yet devised. I skimmed past most of this stuff. I felt confident I could discard anything from outside Europe — in fact from outside the single-currency Euro zone, since I knew my father had once used euros.

  At last I hit on a major-looking site. "THE PUISSANT ORDER OF HOLY MARY QUEEN OF VIRGINS — About Us — Information — Contact Us — Site Map — Genealogy Resources..." The URL showed it was based in Italy.

  I dug into the link, and found myself facing a WELCOME screen. The wallpaper behind the lettering and icons was the face of the Madonna, taken from a medieval painting I didn't recognize, a beautiful, sad, impossibly young visage. Beside her was a kind of corporate logo, a twist of chrome: it might have been an extended infinity symbol, or an outline of two fish face to face. The background colors were pale blue and white, colors I had always associated with my mother's statues of the Virgin, and, just looking at the screen I felt oddly rested, oddly at home. As did, no doubt, every other Catholic boy logging on from around the world.

  I poked around in the site. There were plenty of smiling female faces and beautiful old buildings. It was a busy design, I thought with my software professional's eye, but it seemed to be comprehensive, with language options in English (the default), Italian, Spanish, French, German, and even Japanese, Chinese, and some Arabic tongues.

  The order, it seemed, was an ancient Catholic grouping based in Rome itself. They were making money by offering a subscription genealogy service — something like the famous Mormon site, to which they had links, but if anything more comprehensive. Since I was calling from a UK address I was offered a range of British-focused resources, including a deeds database spanning from 1400 to 1900, five hundred maps of the UK, Ireland, and Europe, a charter of baronial pedigrees that went as deep as the thirteenth century, and information from censuses up to the end of the twentieth century. There was even a Titanic passenger list. They had 350 million names indexed and cross-referenced over five hundred years, boasted the pop-ups.

  I skimmed through most of this stuff, wondering what it had to do with my father. As far as I know he had never been much interested in family trees — and certainly, if he had been paying a thousand quid a month for these services, he hadn't had anything to show for it.

  But then my eye was caught by a user ID in the contact line: casella24. My mother's maiden name had been Casella.

  I fired off a quick email, telling casella24 of my father's death, and asking for details of his contacts with the order. Always assuming I had the right place.

  I finished my coffee, logged off, and made my way back to work.

  • • •

  At the end of the afternoon Vivian took me out for the drink she had promised.

  We made our way to a bar just off Liverpool Street

  . Called the Sphinx, the place had been made over several times during my working life in London. Now it was done out in faux brickwork painted a dull yellow, and specialized in acrid Egyptian coffee. It actually had loose sand scattered on the floor. But somehow the atmosphere worked.

  Over the long bar was a series of TV screens. Most of them were tuned to music and sports, and somewhere a tinkling pop song was playing. But one screen carried a news channel. The newsreader was a g
irl with an achingly beautiful face, and over her shoulder was an image I recognized: it was the glistening tetrahedron that had been found in the Kuiper Belt. Evidently the Anomaly was still news, even days after my conversation with Peter. I felt vaguely surprised to see it again. The association brought back unwelcome memories of Manchester.

  Vivian ordered a glass of house white and sipped it slowly. She asked me about the funeral. I tried to tell her something of my feelings of dislocation.

  "Midlife crisis," she said immediately. "Welcome to the twenty-first century."

  "I always looked forward to the twenty-first century. I just didn't plan on being old in it. I mean, look at these arseholes..."

  The gathering in the bar was a typical London noncommunity. There were some small groups at the tables scattered over the sandy floor, but an awful lot of people were alone, at the tables or the bar or walking across the floor — alone, that is, save for their cell phones, which they worked persistently.

  "So young, and so fucking arrogant, as if they own the place. They walk around as if London were built yesterday, a playground just for them. And look at the way they thumb away at those damn phones." I mimicked texting. "Another few years and kids will be born that are all giant thumbs and no brains, hopping around on knuckle joints."

  "You're ranting, George," Vivian said with her usual even good humor. "Maybe you're right about the phones, though. It is an odd way to live, isn't it, to ignore the people physically with you while contacting friends who might be hundreds of miles away? You'd think the new technology would bring us together. Instead it seems to be pushing us apart."