Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  As Totila slumped to the filth-strewn ground, Felix counted the coins in his palm and snorted. "Hardly worth my trouble."

  Totila gasped, "I'm sorry."

  Felix looked down, surprised, and laughed. "Don't be silly. It's not your fault." And he walked away, into the gathering gloom.

  • • •

  Totila lay in the stench of ordure and urine, unable to move. He kept his hands clamped over his belly, but he could feel the blood seeping through his fingers.

  Somebody was here, standing before him. It was a woman in a white, purple-edged robe. She was one of those who tended the poor. She knelt in the dirt, pulled his hands away from his side, and inspected his wound. "Don't try to move," she said.

  "This is a holy place to die, here in Rome."

  "There is no good place to die," she murmured. "Not like this." She had pale gray eyes, he saw, the gray of cloud.

  Having bound him up, she managed to get him to his feet and took him to an inn. She left him money, in a new leather purse.

  He stayed two nights.

  When he was able to walk, he approached the innkeeper with some trepidation, for he wasn't sure he had the funds to pay for his lodging. But he found that the account had already been settled.

  Before he left Rome, Totila tried to find the woman who had helped him. But though everybody knew of the women in white, and of their charitable work for the helpless poor and victims of accident and crime — some called them angels, others virgins — nobody knew where they could be found. They seemed to melt out of the rubble of Rome by day, and disappear by night, like ghosts of a different past.

  Chapter 39

  On the day I was due to meet Rosa I woke early, having passed a nervous, restless night.

  Before breakfast I crept downstairs, tiptoed past the concierges, and walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The dawn wasn't far advanced, and the traffic was light. Around me was the old Roman Forum, nestling in the timeless safety of its valley, and the Palatine and Capitoline Hills bristled with the imperial palaces and other mighty buildings of later antiquity.

  In my week in Rome, I'd walked and walked, from the Vatican in the west to the Appian Way in the south, along the banks of the Tiber, and around great stretches of the Aurelian Wall. Like Edinburgh or San Francisco, Rome was a city of hills — that was the first thing that struck you — you really couldn't walk far without heading either uphill or down, and after a few days my thighs and calves felt as hard as a soccer player's.

  But what was unlike any city I'd visited before was the sense of time here.

  This place had been in continuous occupation since the Iron Age. It was as if time were untethered here, and great reefs of history kept sticking up into modern times, mounds of past as enduring as the ancient hills themselves.

  Rome was starting to intimidate me, just as Peter had warned. It wasn't the right frame of mind to be in when meeting my long-lost sister.

  • • •

  I'd arranged to meet Rosa in a little coffee bar off the Appian Way, which was where, in our brief, terse phone call, she'd said she worked. The Way is an ancient road that leads south from a gateway on the Aurelian Wall. It was a fine morning and I decided to walk, to clear my head and get my blood pumping.

  But I soon regretted the decision. The road was narrow, in long stretches without pavement at all, and the traffic was as disrespectful here as in the rest of the city. But perhaps it had been so for two thousand years, I thought; I shouldn't complain.

  I survived a terrifying jog through a narrow tunnel beneath a road and rail bridge, and arrived at a junction close to a little church called Domine Quo Vadis. Across the street was a coffee bar.

  And there, sitting at a pavement table, was an elegant woman in her forties. She wore a cream trouser suit. She sat easily, with her legs folded, a coffee cup before her, a cell phone in one hand. As I crossed the road she turned off the phone. She left it on the table, though, where it sat throughout our meeting, a mute reminder of her connections to another world.

  When I reached the table she smiled — bright, white teeth — and stood up. She had expensive-looking sunglasses pushed up onto her brushed-back mouse-blond hair, not a streak of gray, and her eyes were as pale and smoky as my mother's had been. "George, George..." It turned out I was a little taller than her, so I had to lean to let her kiss me. She buffed my cheeks, as if we were two London PRs on a routine business meeting.

  But this close to her, there was something in her smell — a sweet milkiness under the cosmetics, the smell of home perhaps — that made me, briefly, want to melt. Yes, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl in bright, blurry kid-memory images I'd long lost. I found myself struggling for composure.

  She pulled back and regarded me, her face so like my own, her expression cool. "Please." She waved me to a seat. With effortless ease she called the waiter, and I ordered a cappuccino.

  "So, after all this time," I said gruffly.

  She shrugged. "The situation is not of our making."

  "I know. But it's still damn odd."

  She began talking, brightly, of the church over the road. "Have you had time to see it? Domine quo vadis — 'Lord, where are you going?' Peter had escaped from prison in Rome, and he met Jesus here and asked Him that question. Jesus replied, 'To let myself be crucified a second time.' He left His footprints in the road. You can see them inside the church. But if they are genuine, Christ had big feet..." She laughed.

  She talked easily, fluently, her voice well modulated: neutrally accented English, perhaps the slightest Italian singsong. She looked at ease here. She looked Italian. Whereas I felt shabby and out of place.

  The coffee arrived, which gave me a little cover.

  "I don't know what to say. What do we do, swap life stories?"

  She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. "Just relax. I'm sure we will work it out."

  The sudden, unexpected touch oddly shocked me. "I don't think I have much more to tell you anyhow," I said. As a preliminary to our meeting I had sent her a long email from my hotel room.

  "You told me about your past," she said. "But not your future."

  "That's a little more cloudy. I've come to a fork in the road, I think."

  "Because of Father's death?"

  Not Dad but Father. "I think things had been building up anyhow. I need a change."

  "I understand."

  "Do you?"

  With that slight sharpness, she looked at me, her smile more empty. "And in return for your biography, you expect mine?"

  "You're my sister. I came all this way to meet you. Yes, I want to know what's become of you. You sell family trees," I said. "That's pretty much all I know about you."

  She smiled. "That and the fact that I belong to a weirdo woo-woo cult... Don't worry; I know what people think of us. All right." In brisk, almost rehearsed phrases, she sketched her career for me, her life.

  She seemed to be a kind of account manager, dealing with services and products for major clients — not individuals, but companies, universities, even churches and governments. After being sent over here by our father, she had been put through schooling good enough to get her to a baccalaureate. She hadn't gone away to university, but, staying within the Order, had studied history and business administration to degree level. Then she had gone to work for the family firm, so to speak.

  Even after this smooth patter she stayed out of focus. Thinking over what she had said, I found I couldn't visualize her school, or even the kind of social conditions she had been brought up in — not a family, that was for sure.

  She began to talk about the Order's business. "Yes, we sell genealogy information. I brought some stuff for you to see..." She dug some promotional literature out of her bag: glossy, well produced. Tracing ancestry was one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet, she told me. "We're even offering a DNA matching service," she said. "If you're of British ancestry, say, you'll soon be able to tell whether you are of ancient stock, o
r came over with the Romans, or the Saxons, or the Vikings.

  "There is a finite genealogical universe out there. Only a finite number of human beings have ever existed, and each of them had a mother and father, links to the great chain of descent. We see no limit in principle as to the information we may one day retrieve..." She was quite evangelical as she described all this. It was more than just a product to her, I saw.

  But I felt as if she were pitching a sale. I didn't know how brother and sister were supposed to behave, after a forty-year separation. It isn't a situation you come across every day. But for sure it wasn't talking about DNA databases and high-speed Internet access options.

  Actually, as she talked, she reminded me of Gina. Something about her cold competence, her distance from me.

  I put aside the brochures. "You're telling me about genealogy," I said. "Not you."

  She sat back. "Then what do you want to know?"

  "You never came home."

  She nodded. "But this is home, George. This is family, for me."

  "It may feel like that, but—"

  "No." Again she covered my hand, shockingly casual. "You don't understand. The Order is family — our family. That's why Father was happy to send me here." And she reminded me of our story of the ancient past, of Regina, who had survived the collapse of Britain, and who had eventually come to Rome — where she had helped found the Order.

  I was tired of this story. "That's just a family legend," I said. "Nobody can trace back to the Romans..."

  "We can." She grinned, almost playfully. "We keep records, George. That's the one thing we do better than anything else. Our huge bank of historical data is the spine on which we have built our genealogy business. George, it's true about Regina. There has been a continuous thread of descent, from Regina's day to this, as the Order has survived. But that central line of family persists. And it's our family.

  "Maybe now you can see why I stayed here." Again she touched me, unexpectedly. She slid one hand under my palm, and let the other rest on top, massaging the webbing between my thumb and forefinger with the ball of her thumb. It was extraordinarily intimate — not sexual — compelling, oddly confining. She said, "So that's why you don't need to rescue me."

  "What do you mean?"

  She laughed. "Come on, George. Isn't that why you're really here? To save me from my miserable exile. Perhaps on some level you were expecting to find the little girl you last saw, all those years ago. And I've somehow disappointed you by turning out to be a grown woman, with a life of her own, and capable of making her own choices. I don't need saving, as you can see."

  I said angrily, "Okay. Maybe I'm a patronizing dope with no imagination. But I'm here, Rosa."

  She surprised me by standing up. "But we each have our own lives, George. Well, that's that." She began extracting money from a small billfold. "Let me treat you," she said. "I insist."

  I stood uncertainly. I hadn't been in control of any of this conversation, I realized, from first to last. "Is that it?"

  "We must stay in touch. Isn't email marvelous? How long are you in Rome?—"

  "Rosa, for Christ's sake." I struggled briefly for control. "Don't we have any more to say to each other? After all this time?"

  She hesitated. "You know, some said I shouldn't see you."

  "Some who?"

  "People in the Order."

  "You told them about me?"

  "We tell each other everything."

  "Why shouldn't you have met me?"

  "Because you might be a threat," she said simply. Her gaze was fixed on me. "But now I've met you I'm not so sure."

  I had the impression she was recalculating.

  She had felt impelled to go through with the meeting with me, to give me the minimum contact required to send me away, and keep me away. But now something — my persistence, maybe my distress — was making her rethink that plan. I know that's a cold analysis of her thinking. But I really didn't believe, even then, that whatever new plans she was drawing up had anything to do with compassion.

  She made an abrupt about-face. "Maybe you're right. It shouldn't end here. As you said, you came all this way, did all that detective work, for me." Her eyes narrowed, and I thought she was making a decision. "Tell you what. Perhaps you'd like to see where I work, and live. What do you think?" She dropped her sunglasses onto her nose, businesslike.

  She was following her own peculiar agenda, I saw. I really didn't know what she wanted of me. But it was a chance to spend a little more time with her. What else could I do but accept?

  And so she took me to the Catacombs.

  • • •

  The entrance wasn't far away. Aboveground there was little to see: a very small chapel, a couple of souvenir and refreshment stalls, a ticket booth, all set in a little scruffy parkland. It was lunchtime and the public areas were locked up, the ticket booth windows covered with CHIUSO notices: this was Rome, after all. But a few bewildered-looking tourists lingered by the refreshment stalls, buying overpriced hot dogs and bottled water.

  They watched enviously as Rosa led me to a small stone block, the size and shape of Doctor Who's TARDIS. It had a heavy green door, which she opened with a swipe card. This was the public entrance to the Catacombs of Agrippina, Rosa told me. She palmed a switch, and electric light flooded down from strip lights set in the ceiling.

  Steps cut down into the dark. Rosa led the way, her heeled shoes clattering on the worn stone steps. When I pulled the door closed after me, it locked automatically. It immediately felt colder. It was a creepy experience, even in the electric light.

  At the bottom of the steps I found myself in a gallery. It was narrow enough for me to reach out and touch both walls, and it was tall, perhaps twenty-five feet high, with an arched roof. The walls were notched, with box-shaped cavities cut deep into them. The light was dim, the electric lamps sparsely scattered. There was more light, in fact, coming from the skylight trenches cut down from the surface.

  Rosa gave me the guided tour. "People say they've never heard of a Saint Agrippina. There never was one, so far as we know. She was probably just a well-off local matron, sympathetic to the Christians' cause, who gave them the use of her land..."

  Burials had given the early Christian community here a problem. Space was always at a premium in Rome. Because of their beliefs the Christians were reluctant to cremate, but land was expensive, even this far out of town. So they began to dig.

  "The rock here is tufa," Rosa said. "Soft, volcanic. It's easy to work, and it hardens when exposed to the air. And the Romans were used to working underground anyhow. They would dig sewers, waterworks, underground passages for servants to cross from one side of a great villa to another. Many houses would even have a cryptoporticus, an underground recreation area. So when they needed a place to bury their dead the Christians dug, and dug..."

  We descended another steep staircase and found ourselves in yet another gallery that stretched on out of sight. The corridors branched, one after another, and the walls were all cut with those deep notches.

  I was already thoroughly lost, disoriented. We were alone, and the only sounds were our footsteps and Rosa's gentle voice, softly echoing. The temperature had settled to a mild chill. Around me those open notches gaped like black mouths — and I had no doubt what they had once held. It was an eerie experience.

  "The oldest levels are the highest," she said. "Which makes sense if you think about it. They just kept digging, down and down. They would cut out family vaults, called cubicula, and these niches are called loculi."

  "Niches for the bodies," I said, my throat hoarse.

  "Yes. Wrapped in linen, or perhaps embalmed. Even popes were buried in the Catacombs. But many of the tombs were pillaged in later centuries. Bones were taken away by desecrators, or by seekers of holy relics, or for reburial. Still, some undisturbed tombs were rediscovered over the last few centuries — perhaps there are more still to find. George, this Catacomb alone encompasses fifteen miles, over f
our levels. And it is estimated that in all the Catacombs some half a million people were buried, over the centuries."

  Like so many numbers associated with ancient Rome, it was a stunning, impossible figure.

  "Look." She pointed to symbols, painted faintly on the walls. The light was kept low to protect the paintwork, it turned out. "Covert Christian symbols, from the days of repression and persecution. The fish you will recognize. The dove, and here the olive branch, symbolizes peace. The anchor implies resurrection. Oh, here is the famous chi-rho, formed of the first two Greek letters of Christ's name." It looked like the letters P and X superimposed. "And here — " Carved above one of the loculi, it was like the simple fish symbol, but two fish touched, mouth to mouth, so that it was almost like an infinity.

  "What's that?"

  "The symbol of the Order." I recognized it from my Internet search. She was studying me. "How do you feel?"

  "I'm in a two-thousand-year-old graveyard. A little freaked out."

  "You aren't worried by the enclosure? The narrow walls, the depth — you don't feel claustrophobic?"

  I thought about that. "No."

  "And if I told you I have more to show you yet — that we will go much deeper..."

  "Are you setting me some kind of test, Rosa?"

  "Yes, I suppose I am. Something about the way we talked in the café... You've reacted well so far, and I think you're ready to see more." She held out her hand. "Will you come? You're free to go, whenever you like."

  By now I had come to distrust her obviously calculated touching, the overwhelming feelings it evoked in me. But I took her hand again. "What next — open sesame?"

  "Something like that."

  We were standing before an innocent-looking niche, empty as the others. It had a two-fish symbol carved over it. Now, to my surprise, Rosa dug out a swipe card and passed it into a slot hidden inside the stone, up behind the fish. I glimpsed a red light, heard the unexpected humming of electronic gear.