Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  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.

  We hadn't gone fifty yards before we met a party coming the other way. Daniel's arms were pinned by his escorts, a burly male nurse on one side, a security guy on the other. The nice young lady doctor was talking to him, steadily, calmly, about how they had been unsure about our credentials, and it was only proper that they should ask the girl herself about her family...

  When he saw us Daniel struggled harder. "They took her back," he said, despairing. "The Order. They came, and they took her back!"

  Chapter 44

  It was in the year 1778 that Edmund found Minerva, and lost her.

  He was twenty-three years old. He had come to Rome as part of his "Grand Tour," in the traditional style, funded by his father's money and his own youth and energy. He stayed in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna, which had become known as the English Ghetto. The apartment, a decent first floor and two bedchambers on the second, was small but well furnished, and cost no more than a scudo per day.

  Edmund fell into the company of one James Macpherson, a forty-year-old Jacobite refugee and hardened rake, who proved a willing guide to the various delights of Rome — as long, of course, as Edmund continued to be a source of cash. Edmund understood this relationship very well, and was careful not to let James take advantage. But Edmund was catholic in his tastes, and soon learned to relish the vitella mongana, which he thought the most delicate veal he had ever tasted, and drank great quantities of Orvieto, a decent white wine.

  Rome proved to be great fun. Night and day the piazzas were crowded with acrobats and astrologers, jugglers and tooth drawers. In the cramped, garlic-stinking alleys where grand mansions loomed over tiny houses, shop signs hung everywhere, of barbers, tailors, surgeons, and tobacconists. But the alleys were always clogged with noise and filth, since the Romans had the rude habit of relieving themselves against any convenient doorway or wall, and left their garbage heaped in every corner, waiting for the irregular call of the waste collectors.

  But amid the noise, filth, and debauchery, there were true wonders.

  Edmund found Saint Peter's and its piazza quite stunning — he had James bring him back to it day after day, for there always seemed something new to see in it — and he was enchanted by the area around the great cathedral, where elegant domes and cupolas rose from the morning mist. And then there were the older monuments, sticking out of the past. Edmund often had James escort him to the top of the Palatine, where mature cypress trees waved gently among the ruined palaces.

  Edmund found the Romans themselves pleasant and civil — as well they might be, he thought, for they were surely the most indolent people in Europe. There was no industry here, no commerce, no manufacturing. The people relied for their income on the steady flow of money from all over Christian Europe, which continued as it had for centuries.

  And religion dominated everything about the city. At any one time there were as many pilgrims and other visitors, it was said, as residents. There were three thousand priests and five thousand monks and nuns serving three hundred monasteries and convents and four hundred churches. It was fashionable to dress like a cleric even if you had not taken holy orders. A greater contrast to the dynamic industrial bustle of England could scarcely be imagined; sometimes the cleric-choked city struck Edmund as being in the grip of a great madness.

  Edmund was not struck by the women of Rome, whose beauty, he thought, did not match their city's. He remembered a remark of Boswell's that only a few Roman women were pretty, and most of the pretty ones were nuns. But he was not above letting James introduce him to courtesans, of whom he seemed to know a great number. Edmund had not come here for debauchery, but he was no monk, and he had to admit it was a peculiar thrill to indulge his carnal appetites here in the home of the mother church — where, he learned, some of the prostitutes actually carried licences issued by the pope himself!

  But all that changed when he met Minerva.

  • • •

  One night he took in an operette at the Capranica. It was hard to make out the performance for the drinking and gambling going on in the private box James had hired. James introduced him to the raucous company of the singers and actors, and in the course of a very long evening Edmund was astonished to learn that some of the beautiful "girls" who mingled with the company were in fact castrati. Happily he avoided making a fool of himself.

  The next morning, his head more than usually cloudy, Edmund walked alone to the Forum.

  He found a fallen column to sit on. The Forum was a meadow littered with ruins. He watched the hay carts lumbering across the open space, and animals grazing among the lichen-coated ruins. As the rising sun banished the last of the morning mist, despite his mildly aching head, he felt tranquility settle on him. It was a scene of ruin, yes, and there was poignancy in seeing the shabby huts of carpenters erected on the rostrum where once Cicero had stood. But there was great peace here, as if the present had somehow made a settlement with the past.

  In one corner of the ancient space a bank of charcoal stoves had been set up, and he could smell the sour stink of cabbage and tripe. Idly he stood, brushed lichen from his trousers, and wandered that way. There were many places in Rome where you could find food being cooked in the open. Some of these open-air establishments were grand, and Edmund had enjoyed adequate lunches of salad, poached fish, cheese and fruits, rounded off with the ice cream with which the Romans seemed obsessed. But he could see that these cabbage cookers had humbler culinary ambitions than that, and that the wretched folk who clustered around the stoves were the poorest of the poor.

  At first he thought the women working at the stoves must be nuns, for they wore simple white robes laced with purple thread. But they wore no wimples or hoods, and he saw that they were all young, all rather similar, almost like sisters — and all pale, as if they wore cosmetics of theatrical thickness.

  That was when he saw Minerva.

  She was one of the serving women. She had a beauty that made him gasp, as simple as that. Her face, small and lozenge-shaped, was symmetrical, her nose straight and neat, her mouth full and as red as cherries, and her eyes were gray, like windows on a cloudy sky. She was like her companions, but in her the combination of features had worked to stunning effect, like a perfect deal in a card game, he thought.

  He felt he could have watched her all day, so enchanted was he by her simple elegance. And when she moved around the stove the sunlight, by chance, lit up her robes from behind, and he caught a glimpse of her figure, which —

  Somebody was speaking to him. Startled, he came back to himself.

  One of the workers was facing him — like the beauteous one, yes, not unattractive, but older, and with a sterner face. But her mouth twitched with humor.


  He stammered, in English, "I'm sorry?"

  She replied in careful Italian, "I asked you if you are hungry. You are evidently drawn to the scent of tripe."

  "I — ah. No. I mean, no thank you. I just—"

  "Sir, we have work to do here," she said, reasonably gently. "Important work — vital for those we serve. I fear you will distract us."

  And, he saw, she had indeed noticed him. She responded to his stares with hooded, nervous glances, but looked away.

  The older woman said dryly, "Yes, she is beautiful. She can't help it."

  "What is her name?"

  "Minerva. But she is not on the menu, I'm afraid. Now if you will excuse me — " She turned, with a last, not unkind glance, and went back to her work at the stoves.

  Edmund couldn't simply stand there. Besides, some of the hapless poor were beginning to notice him, and were sniggering. He walked away, to find a place where he could sit and watch the women at work. Perhaps later he could engineer some opportunity to talk to the girl.

  But to his shock, when he turned back, he saw they had gone, stoves and all, as if they had never existed. The poor, some still devouring their plates of cabbage and tripe, were dispersing.

  He ran back and grabbed the shoulder of one man, though he quickly let go when he felt greasy filth under his palm. "Sir, please — the women here—"

  The man could have been any age, so crusted was his face with dirt. Bits of cabbage clung to his ragged beard. He would say nothing until Edmund produced a few coins.

  "The Virgins, yes."

  "Where do they come from? Where did they go? How can I find them?"

  "Who cares? I'm here for cabbage, not questions." But he said: "Tomorrow. They'll come to the Colosseum. That's what they told us."

  • • •

  That evening Edmund felt restless in James's company. Their usual circuit of the piazzas and taverns did not distract him. It did not help when he heard one rotund innkeeper mutter that English gentlemen on the Grand Tour were famously "milordi pelabili clienti" — a soft touch as customers.

  For Edmund, the night was only an interval until he could find Minerva again among her stoves and cabbages.

  A part of him warned him of his foolishness. But, though he had been in love before, he had never felt anything like the drowning desire he had experienced when he had gazed on Minerva's perfect face, and the pale shadow of her slim body.

  The next day he hurried to the Colosseum long before midday.

  Edmund had to pass through a hermitage as he entered the great crater of marble and stone, with its mute circles of seats. Squalid huts of mud and scavenged brick sheltered in the great archways where senators had once passed; on the arena floor trees had grown tall and animals grazed.

  There was no little row of charcoal stoves, no women in their white robes, no moist smell of cooked cabbage rising to compete with the stink of dung. There were beggars, though, milling about listlessly. They looked as disappointed as he felt, though it was hard to tell through their masks of grimy misery. None of them could answer his questions about Minerva or the Virgins.

  He spent a week combing the city. But he found no sign of the Virgins, nor anybody who knew anything about them. It was as if they had just disappeared, as evanescent as the mist off the Tiber.

  Chapter 45

  Trying to track down what had become of Lucia at the hospital, Peter and I got nowhere fast.

  We established that a woman called Pina Natalini had come in a small private ambulance to sign her out and take her away, showing valid signed certificates from a family doctor. Lucia herself, it seemed, had wanted to check out, claiming Pina as a cousin. It was all aboveboard, and I had no reason to believe the staff of the American Hospital were telling any lies about what had happened.

  Surely it wasn't the whole truth. I had no idea how much control this Pina and whoever else had come along — perhaps even Rosa — might have had over Lucia's vulnerable mental state.

  But what could we do? To the hospital staff — and indeed in my eyes — Peter, Daniel, and I had no claim over the girl. We barely knew her.

  Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something. Maybe you have to be that way when you're young — you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we'd all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the arse. In the end I winkled his father's number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

  That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn't accept that we could go no farther. But his motives — and I still wasn't sure what they were — were, unlike Daniel's, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This was my issue — my sister — and I didn't want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

  Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

  But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

  While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order's complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

  At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pass to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa's old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no passes were forthcoming.

  "It's a fucking conspiracy," Peter groused. "I'm not exaggerating — I wouldn't use that word lightly. And it's all connected to the Order. These bastards are working together to keep us out. We've hit an outer ring of defense, and we've barely started..."

  After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my "tame Jesuit" again. A couple of days after that, Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

  • • •

  "I hate to disappoint you," Claudio said, grinning. "But in this context secret just means 'private'..." He met me at the Vatican's Porta Sant' Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor passes at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.

  The entrance to the archives themselves was off a courtyard called the Cortile del Belvedere, within the Vatican complex.

  Claudio, it turned out, regularly researched here, and he briskly showed me the areas to which visiting scholars were allowed access: a ground-floor room called the sala di studio, and the Index Room, which actually contained a thousand indices, many themselves very old.

  Claudio walked me across to a rattling elevator, which took us down to what he called the bunker. This was the Manuscript Depository, built in the seventies to cope with the great inward flood of material that the Archives had had to cope with in the postwar period. It was an underground library, a basic, unadorned, ugly place, with shelving spread over two stories, and mesh flooring and steel stairs connecting everything. Some of the shelves were locked, holding sensitive material, and others were empty, waiting for more material yet to come.

  We went through into the Parchment Room, where some of the more famous documents were stored for display. They were held in chests of drawers, each waist-high, with ten glass-topped drawers in each. These pieces could be stunning — often in Latin, some illuminated, others covered by wax seals.

  Claudio kept up an engaging and practiced patter. From its very earliest days, even in the days of persecution, the church in Rome had adopted the imperial habit of record keeping. The first archives had been called the scrinium s
anctum, a bit of language that startled me with recognition. But the archives were far from complete. The first collections had been burned around A.D. 300 by the Emperor Diocletian. When Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, the accretion of records had begun again. Little had survived, however, from the bloody turbulence of the first millennium.

  In the fourteenth century the popes had, for a time, been exiled to France, and in the fifteenth a period of infighting had peaked with three rival popes rampaging around Europe — "A bibliographer's nightmare," said Claudio laconically. The later popes had started trying to unify the archives in the sixteenth century. But when Napoléon had taken Italy, he hauled the whole lot away to France for a few years, doing still more damage in the process...

  "But all we have is here," Claudio said. "There are letters from popes as far back as Leo the First, from the fifth century, who faced down Attila the Hun. We have diplomas from Byzantine emperors. The correspondence of Joan of Arc. Reports of papal enclaves, accusations of witchcraft and other skulduggery in high places, sexual secrets of kings, queens, bishops, and a few popes. The records of the Spanish Inquisition, details of the trial of Galileo... Even the letter from England asking for the dissolution of the first marriage of Henry the Eighth."

  "And somewhere in all this," I said, "is the true story of the Order. Or at least as the Vatican saw it."