Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  And then, with a stony grind, a kind of trapdoor opened up beneath me — and bright light flooded up into the dusty air. I leaned forward to see. There was another staircase, but this was of polished metal, and it led down to a floor of gleaming tiles.

  There was a whole room down there — a modern office, I saw. I glimpsed a desk, a girl behind it in a simple white smock, peering up at us. Fluorescent light glared up gray-white but dazzling bright after the gloom of the Catacomb. I was amazed — even stunned. It was the last thing I'd have expected to see; it was hard to believe it was real.

  Rosa was grinning. "Welcome to my underground lair, Austin Powers."

  "Not funny," I snapped.

  "Oh, lighten up." She turned and descended. I followed.

  And so I entered the Crypt for the first time.

  • • •

  The receptionist sat behind her wide marble desk, smiling at us. I glimpsed a winking rack of small TV monitors behind the surface of the desk, and one red-eyed camera peered directly at me from a wall. It was all quite normal, electric bright, certainly not as chill as the Catacombs. But there was no daylight, of course, not a scrap; it reminded me how far I was underground.

  "We don't use this entrance much," said Rosa. "There are many ways in, from our shops and offices on the surface — most of them in the suburbs to the west of the Appian Way — though we have a couple of routes that lead to the center of the city. But I wanted to bring you this way. It is the oldest." She smiled, almost mischievously. "I suppose I wanted to put on a show... Are you okay?"

  I simply had no idea what to expect. "I've never been in a convent before," I said.

  "You aren't in one now. Come on."

  We walked toward the wall of the anteroom. Automatic doors slid out of sight. We stepped into a corridor, just as brightly lit as the anteroom.

  The corridor curved out of sight. It was my first impression of the true size of the place. For sure it was a hell of a lot bigger than the anteroom.

  And the corridor was full of people: a great murmuring crowd, deep underground.

  There must have been hundreds, just in that first glimpse. The human traffic in that corridor was as dense as Oxford Circus on a summer Saturday, or Times Square at New Year. Most of them were women. Many were in street clothes, but some wore a kind of uniform, a simple white dress or trouser suit with sewn-in threads of purple. They walked in neat files, passing in and out of the rooms that branched off the corridor.

  Then there was the smell: not an unpleasant smell, not a locker-room stink, but there was something animal in the air, something potent. The air was hot, humid, and noisy; I found myself breathing hard, dragging for breath.

  All this concealed far underground, under that sleepy tourist-trap park.

  Nobody seemed aware of anything strange, nobody but me. It was all I could do to keep from staggering back, into the relative calm of the anteroom.

  Rosa was leaning toward me. "Don't let it get to you. I know how you feel. But it's always like this here. Come on..." Holding my hand, she pulled me forward, and we waded into the streams of people.

  Suddenly I was surrounded by faces, all young, many smiling, few showing curiosity at this big sweating Englishman who had been thrust in among them. They all seemed to be talking, and the hubbub battered me, like a wind. But they parted around us, accepted us into the flow.

  We passed offices with desks and partitioned cubicles, potted plants and coffee machines. They all seemed very mundane, if crowded and noisy compared to most offices I'd seen, almost as crowded as the corridors. In some places there were copies of the kissing-fish infinity symbol of the Order, done out in chrome strips and fixed to marble walls. All very corporate.

  On many of the walls slogans had been incised — in places crudely, by hand, and in others more professionally. They were in Latin, which I can't read. I tried to memorize them, meaning to ask Peter about them later; there seemed to be three key phrases.

  Rosa said that the varying sizes of rooms had names, in the Order's peculiar internal language — basically modern Italian, I would learn, but laced with terms derived from Latin, and other sources I didn't recognize. The room names seemed to be a macabre joke, a remembrance of the Crypt's origin. The largest vaults of all were called cubicula, like the family tombs in the Catacombs, the next largest arcosolia, like the large tombs of the wealthy and the popes — and the smallest of all loculi, like the lonely niche-graves of the poor.

  But there were few loculi, I would learn, because members of the Order were never alone: the bigger the room, the bigger the crowd, the better.

  The deeper in we penetrated, the more powerful that animal smell became. It was like walking into a lion's cage.

  I tried to keep a clear head. "The workers here seem young," I said. "Nobody much over twenty-five or thirty?"

  "Actually, most people here are older than that."

  "They don't look it..."

  "There are some youngsters, of course. Everybody has to learn. But most of the Order's younger members work downbelow."

  "Downbelow?"

  "On the lower levels."

  "There are lower levels?"

  We passed through a domain of libraries. The books were densely packed, and, as you see in some academic archives, the shelf units ran on rails: in a whole room there would be only enough space for a single passageway between a pair of shelves, and you would have to turn a little handle to make the shelves roll back and forth until you got the access you wanted. There was a lot of material. Farther on there were rooms more like museum departments, which contained what looked like extremely ancient manuscripts, scrolls and clay tablets, all held in air-conditioned isolation and low light, many of them in the drawers of glass-topped cabinets.

  This area was the scrinium, said Rosa, the Order's term for the monumental internal record center that had now been turned outward to fuel the Internet genealogy business. Rosa showed me cabinets full of somewhat dog-eared index cards. There was so much material, she said, that even the indices had an index. We passed a computer center, where great mainframes hummed behind sealed windows. I got a fresh sense of the power and wealth of this place.

  Before we left the scrinium Rosa gave me a small hardback book. It turned out to be the story of Regina, our Roman British ancestress — "A more complete biography than of anyone else in the ancient world, even the Caesars," Rosa said. "Bedtime reading."

  A little farther on, to my surprise, we came to classrooms, where children, mostly girls, sat in neat rows, or worked in groups at desks, or labored over baffling-looking experiments in a science.

  Rosa told me that few of these pupils belonged to the Order. Offering quality education to outsiders had been the Order's earliest significant money earner — earliest in the Order's terms, I learned, meaning 'fifth century after Christ.' She said they even had accounting records that went back that far, though the earliest entries were of limited use: they predated the invention of the double-entry bookkeeping system by the best part of a millennium.

  "How inconvenient," I murmured.

  In one place there was even a small theater, where a group of young teenagers was rehearsing a play.

  Schools. A theater. A play. And all of this, remember, dug deep into the ground below four levels of Catacombs.

  Again we walked on.

  • • •

  In that first visit I didn't even come close to figuring out the geography of the Crypt. The place isn't designed to give you long vistas and perspectives anyhow; it's designed to disorient, to make you forget where you are.

  I would discover later that the Crypt was organized on three great levels. But each of those levels was subdivided by intermediate floors and mezzanines. The layout was functional, and changed all the time according to need, the arbitrary divisions between compartments blurring. All that helped mix up the geography in everybody's heads, of course. I certainly didn't figure out, that first time, how far those branching corridors and mushro
oming chambers led; I never came to anything that could have been an outside wall, a layer of tufa like that I had seen carved out in the Catacombs above. Even so, I could see that the Crypt was immense.

  And it was full of people. That was the one thing that struck me every second.

  They were all around me, all the time, everywhere we walked. They all seemed similar, all smooth-faced and ageless, all of a compact, rounded build — and not tall; I was one of the tallest there, so I was seeing over the heads of the crowd. I was immersed in touch constantly: they would brush against me, and sometimes one would rest a hand on my shoulder as she squeezed past. There was that smell, the overall leonine stink of the compound, but something subtler when one of them came close, the milky sweetness I had noticed about Rosa.

  And then there were the faces. It took me some minutes, after entering that first corridor, to recognize how similar they all were. They were all like Rosa, and therefore like me, almost all of them with oval faces, broad, flat noses — and the slate-gray eyes that have been a family trait for generations. They were all around me, faces like mirrors of mine — if younger, smoother, happier. There was a constant racket, but nobody seemed to be shouting, arguing, barging past anybody else; everybody was busy, but nobody was rushing or stressed out. Despite the hubbub, there was a great sense of order about the place.

  I felt confused, baffled, battered by astounding impressions. But, odd though it seems, I didn't feel uncomfortable. I've always been drawn to order, regularity — not control, necessarily, but calm. And this place, for all its unfamiliarity and surface strangeness, was at heart a deep well of calm; I could sense that immediately.

  What I felt was: I belong here.

  Rosa brought me to a kind of balcony. It was a rare viewpoint offering a cutaway view of at least some of the Crypt, like looking down into a shopping mall from a top level. Rosa pointed out a row of open-roofed chambers lined with bunk beds: dormitories. Farther away was a blocky structure that was a hospital, she said. People were everywhere I looked, moving, working, interacting with each other in little knots.

  "There must be—" I waved a hand at the teeming masses below. "—a control center. Some kind of management structure."

  "No control center. No bridge on this great underground submarine." Rosa was watching my face. "How do you feel now? Are you thinking about all the rock over your head? Do you feel shut in, lost?"

  "I'm in an underground city, by God," I said. "I have to keep reminding myself that all this is dug into the ground under a Roman suburb... You know, I still haven't got you in focus, Rosa."

  She wasn't fazed. "But the Order is me. I told you, it's my family — and yours. If you can't see that, you can't see anything about me." She waved her hand. "George, do you blame our parents, Father, for my being sent away — for this peculiar gap in your life?"

  I frowned. "I'm not sure."

  "I don't blame them," she said definitely. "They did what they had to do to enable the family to survive. I understand that now, and I think I understood it even as a child." I wondered if that could be true. "And besides, look around you. I've hardly suffered by being sent here."

  Suddenly I felt resentful. I hadn't come here to see this vast subterranean city, after all, but her. And she seemed barely perturbed by my presence. This wasn't enough of a reaction for me, emotionally. I wanted to break down her complacency — to make her see me.

  Harm may not have come to her. But harm has come to me, I thought.

  • • •

  I had no idea how long I had been down there. At last, something prompted me to get out of there.

  Rosa didn't protest. She escorted me back along that long corridor, back to the anteroom, and then up to the Catacombs. We climbed alone, in the perpetual darkness, up the levels, before ascending that last staircase and emerging from the Catacomb's gloomy entrance.

  It was dark, I saw, shocked. I must have been in the great pit in the ground for six, seven, eight hours. The place was deserted, the refreshment stalls shut up for the night. But the air was fresh, and smelled of the lemon trees in the scrubby parkland. I breathed deep, trying to clear my head of that leonine underground tang.

  But standing there alone, out of the Crypt, I felt bereft.

  I walked out of the Catacomb compound and began searching for a cab. When I found one, a couple of blocks away, I recoiled from the driver's face — dark, eyes deep brown — a perfectly normal, even handsome human face, but not like mine.

  Rosa had let me go gracefully enough when I asked to leave. It was only later, thinking over the day, that I understood that she had decided — during our very first meeting at that coffee bar, as I tried to come to terms with suddenly meeting my sister again for the first time since childhood — to try to recruit me into the Order. Her first instinct had been to exclude me; after meeting me she had decided I should somehow be inducted. And everything she had shown me, everything she had done and said from that moment on, had been designed with that intent in mind. It had nothing to do with me at all.

  Chapter 40

  Francesca walked with her companion through the civitas Leonina.

  Leo Frangipani wanted to tell Francesca about the Pope's plans for a Holy Year, to be held in the forthcoming year 1300. "It's going to be a marvel," he said. "They are planning how to display the holy relics to maximize the revenue. It's said that the priests are already practicing with the rakes they will use to drag in the money thrown by the crowds onto their altars..." He was watching her. "Ah, you disapprove! These fishers of the endless river of the gullible and faithful that washes through Rome—"

  "Not at all," she said. "Anybody would disapprove of thievery. But the pilgrims believe their money is well spent, and if it goes to preserve Rome, mother of the world, then surely they are right."

  "Perhaps so. I do know that you ladies in white prefer to give your money away... I'll never understand how you survive."

  But survive the Order did, after more than eight centuries.

  The civitas Leonina was a city within a city, centered on the Vatican Hill, where stood Constantine's vast and crumbling basilica, the wheel hub of Christianity. The area was a huddle of monasteries, lodging houses, churches, oratories, taverns, cells for hermits, even an orphanage and a poorhouse, the latter of which was funded, discreetly, by the Order.

  There were many services here for the pilgrims — or, depending which way you looked at it, plenty of people with ambitions to separate pilgrims from their money. The cobblers would repair soles worn out from walking, butchers, fishmongers, and fruiterers would feed your body, and farmers would sell you straw for your bedding, some of it still caked with dung. And then there were the vendors of linen strips that had been in contact with the tomb of one martyr, and dried flowers said to have grown over the grave of another, and you could buy candles, relics, rosaries, icons, and vials of holy water and oil. Guides and beggars wandered everywhere, looking for the gullible. Even under the walls of Constantine's basilica itself moneylenders thronged and called, ringing coins on the tops of their tables.

  But it was a thriving place; for every vendor there must have been ten potential purchasers — and probably as many criminals, Francesca thought uneasily.

  She knew she stood out from the crowd. Though she had eschewed the Order's habitual white robes for a simple dress of brown-dyed wool, she wore a thick layer of cream and unguent on her face to protect her skin from the unaccustomed sun, and spectacles made of blue glass protected eyes used to candlelight and oil lamps. She looked different, and therefore was no doubt a target for beggars and thieves alike.

  She had no fear, for with her was a Frangipani: a tall, imposing, well-dressed young man with a very visible sword at his waist, a scion of one of the city's wealthier families. But to Francesca, used to the calm of the Crypt's underground cloisters, this was a crowded, dirty, disturbing place.

  And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people
drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity. Just as in ages past they had no doubt been drawn to the Colosseum, or the triumphs of the Caesars — other contagious ideas, all now vanished like the dew.

  But she was pious, and the Order itself was of course deeply Christian; she felt dismayed to be formulating such doubts, and did her best to put them out of her mind.

  • • •

  As they climbed up out of the residential area toward the higher ground of the ancient hills, Francesca got a broader view of the city. She could see how small and cramped the densely populated area was, set within the area called the disabitato, the great expanse of scrubland and farms that occupied the rest of the space within the old walls. Here and there monuments of the imperial age loomed out of the green, but many of them had been badly damaged by time, demolished by siege weapons, or the marble broken up and burned for lime.

  There had been centuries of conflict, with Rome a battleground between popes and antipopes, and between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. Rome had paid a terrible price. But now the papacy had thrown off the yoke of the German emperors, and Rome had begun slowly to recover. On the higher ground, the mansions and palaces of the rich loomed with their towers of burnt red brick. The Frangipani family, in fact, had built a series of towers all the way around the old Circus Maximus, the emperors' racetrack.

  Leo was watching her.

  She could read what he was thinking. He was trying to make out her body through her ground-length dress, its hem and sleeves now stained by Roman dirt. He was a good-looking boy, and he was scarcely older than she was, at twenty-four.