Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  He waved a hand. "What I'm trying to tell you is that the archives are overwhelming. There are scholars who have spent most of their lives in here. It isn't even all cataloged, and our only search engine is shoe leather. The idea that someone like your friend can just come in here—"

  "Peter said you would be like this," I said bluntly.

  He looked aristocratically bemused. "I'm sorry? Like what?"

  "Obstructive. It's true, isn't it? It's just as when you stalled over giving me a contact with the Order in the first place. You don't want to come right out and refuse to help. Instead you're trying to put me off."

  He pursed his lips, his eyes cloudy. I felt a stab of guilt; perhaps he hadn't even been aware of what he was doing. "Perhaps I'm not sure if I should help you."

  Something in the way he said that triggered an idea in my head. I said at random, "But you could help us, if you wanted to. Because you've done searches here on the Order yourself."

  He wouldn't concede that, but his aristocratic nostrils flared. "You are making big inductive leaps."

  "If you have, you could help Peter find what he wants very quickly."

  "You haven't told me why I should."

  "Because of Lucia." I knew Peter had told him about the girl. "Here's the bottom line. Peter and I think she is coming to harm, because of the Order. I certainly don't know for sure that she isn't. You're a priest; you wear the collar. Can you really turn away from a child in trouble?... You can't, can you?" I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. "And that's why you've done your own researches. You've had your own suspicions about the Order—"

  He said nothing. He was right that I was making big inductive leaps in the dark, but sometimes my nose is good. Still, I could see he was in conflict, pulled by two opposing loyalties.

  "Look," I said, "help us. I give you my word that we will do you no harm."

  "I don't matter," he said, with a priest's steely moral authority.

  "Very well — no harm to anything you hold dear. My word, Claudio. And perhaps we will do a lot of good."

  He said little more that day. He showed me out, his remaining conversation brief and stiff. I suspected I had compromised whatever friendship I had with him.

  But a day later, perhaps after sleeping on it, he got in touch.

  Under Claudio's guidance, Peter immersed himself in the archives for days on end. And he surfaced with a string of tales: the diaries of pilgrims and nobles, records of wars and sackings, the account of a thwarted love affair — and even a mention of one of my own ancestors, a different George Poole...

  • • •

  George Poole had first come to Rome in 1863, in the company of the British government's chief commissioner of works, Lord John Manners. Poole was a surveyor. It had been a time when the Modern Age, in the form of hydraulics, telegraphs, steam power, and railways, was just beginning to touch the old city, and British engineers, the best in the world, were at the forefront.

  Poole had even been in the presence of the pope himself, for a time. He had seen the papal train, with its white-and-gold-painted coaches, and even a chapel on bogie wheels. The pope had come to the opening of a steel drawbridge, built by the British, across the Tiber at Porta Portese. The pontiff took a great interest in the new developments, and had asked to meet Manners and have the bridge mechanism explained to him — much to his lordship's embarrassment, for in the middle of his working day he was carrying an umbrella and wearing an old straw hat.

  When Poole came back to Rome twelve years later, it was in his own capacity as a consulting engineer. He returned at the invitation of a rather shadowy business concern fronted by one Luigi Frangipani, a member of what was said to be one of Rome's great ancient families.

  Poole expected that much would have changed. During his first visit it had been just three years since the great triumph of the Risorgimento had seen Italy unified under Victor Emanuele II. Now Rome was the capital of the new Italy. Among Poole's circle of old friends, there had been great excitement at these developments, and much envy over his visit, for he was coming to a Rome free of the dominance of the popes for the first time in fourteen centuries.

  But Poole was disappointed with what he found.

  Even now the great political and technological changes seemed to have left no mark on Rome itself. Within its ancient walls, the city was still like a vast walled farm. He was startled to see cattle and goats being driven through the city streets, and pigs snuffling for acorns near the Flaminian Gate. The source of wealth was still agriculture and visitors, pilgrims and tourists; there was still no industry, no stock exchange.

  But there were changes. He saw a regiment of bersaglieri, trotting through the streets in their elaborate operetta-extras' uniforms. The clerics were much less in evidence, though you would see the cardinals' coaches, painted black as if in mourning. He even glimpsed the king, a spectacularly ugly man, passing in his own carriage. He gathered that the king was a far more popular figure than the pope had ever been, if only for his family; after all, no pope since the Middle Ages had been in a position to display a grandson!

  After a day of wandering, Poole met Luigi Frangipani. They went for a walk through the cork woods on Monte Mario.

  Frangipani sketched in something of the background to his approach to Poole. "There is much tension in Rome," Frangipani said, in lightly accented English. "It is a question of time, you see, of history. Rome is a place of great families."

  "Like your own," Poole said politely.

  "Some are prepared to accept the king as their sovereign. Others are prevented from doing so by loyalty to the pope. You must understand that some of the families are descended from popes themselves! Still others have made their fortunes more recently, such as from banking, and have yet a different outlook on developments..."

  Poole thought all this talk of families and tradition sounded medieval — very un-British — and he felt oddly claustrophobic. "And what is it you want of me?"

  They stopped at a wooden bench, and Frangipani produced a small map of Rome.

  "We Frangipani, lacking the great wealth of some other families, are not so conservative; we must look to the future. Rome has been invaded many times. But now that it is the capital, a new invasion is under way, an invasion by an army of bureaucrats. The municipality was first asked for forty thousand rooms for all those teeming officials, but could provide only five hundred. To house its ministries the government has already requisitioned several convents and palaces. But much more housing is needed.

  "So there is an opportunity. There is sure to be a building boom — and there is plenty of room for it in Rome. We believe the earliest developments are likely to be here—" He pointed at his map. "—between the Termini station and the Quirinal, and perhaps later here, beyond the Colosseum."

  Poole nodded. "You are buying the land in anticipation. And you want me to work on its development."

  Frangipani shrugged. "You are a surveyor. You know what is required." He said that Poole would be asked to survey the prospective purchases, and then lead any construction projects to follow. "There is much to be done. During their thousand years of control, the popes, while they ensured their own personal comfort, did little to maintain the fabric of the city concerning such mundane matters as drainage. Every time the Tiber floods the old city is immersed, and the fields beyond the walls are a malarial wasteland — why, the Etruscans managed such affairs better. We know your reputation and your experience," Frangipani concluded smoothly. "We have every faith that you will be able to deliver what we require."

  Poole asked for time to think the proposal over. He went back to his hotel room, his mind racing. He was sure from his own reading that Frangipani's analysis of the housing shortage was correct — and that this was a great opportunity for Poole personally. He could look ahead to an attachment here for years, he thought; he would have to bring the family out.

  But he was a cautious man — he wouldn't have become a surveyor otherwise — and he asked
for reassurances about Frangipani's funding before committing himself further.

  Two days later he met Frangipani again, in a café near the Castel Sant'Angelo.

  Frangipani brought a colleague this time, a silent slate-eyed woman of about forty. She introduced herself simply as Julia. She wore a plain white robe of a vaguely clerical aspect. Frangipani said she was an elder of a religious group called the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins — "Very ancient, very wealthy," Frangipani said with disarming frankness. The Order was the source of much of Frangipani's funding.

  Julia said, "The Order has a mutually beneficial relationship with the Frangipani reaching back many centuries, Mr. Poole."

  Poole nodded ruefully. "Everything in Rome has roots centuries deep, it seems."

  "But we must grasp the opportunities offered by the times."

  They talked for a while about the dynamic of the age. Julia seemed to Poole to have an extraordinarily deep perspective. "The harnessing of oil and coal is propelling a surge in the growth of cities not paralleled since the great agricultural developments of the early medieval days," she would say.

  Clearly the Order was not run by fools; they intended to profit from the latest developments, just as, no doubt, they had profited in one way or another from previous changes throughout their long history.

  Poole had more immediate concerns, however. He began to talk of his tentative plans to bring his family to Rome, and asked about schooling. Julia smiled and said that the Order provided education of a very high standard, including classes in English for the children of expatriates. It would not be difficult to find places for Poole's children, if he so desired.

  After some days of further negotiation, the decision was made, the deal done.

  George Poole would stay in Rome for twenty years, in which time he played his part in the advance of a great tide of brick, stone, and mortar over the ancient gardens and parks. His two daughters completed their education with the Order. But Poole found himself spending a good proportion of his income on relieving the conditions of his laborers and their families, part of a great throng of three hundred thousand in the growing city by the end of the century, who found themselves sleeping under ancient arches or on the steps of churches, or in the shantytowns that sprouted in many open spaces.

  Even so he went back to England wealthy enough to retire. But one of his daughters, somewhat to her parents' disquiet, elected to join the Order herself when her tuition was complete.

  • • •

  "And that's how a Poole came to Rome," Peter said. "George, you have roots in the Order on both your mother's side and your father's...

  "This stuff is incredible. And I believe I still haven't seen the half of it. I think there has been a relationship between the Vatican and the Order that goes back to the founding of them both. Surely the Order has provided funds to the popes over the centuries. Surely it has provided refuge or support in turbulent times — perhaps it has sponsored one candidate for holy offices over another.

  "And in that great scrinium you describe, which unlike the Vatican Archive hasn't been burned by emperors or chewed by rats or plundered by Napoléon, there are secrets that no pope could bear to have revealed, even in these enlightened times. George, no wonder your tame Jesuit hovered over me all day. This stuff is explosive — your Order has got the pope by the balls!... George, you have to go back down there."

  Chapter 46

  Show me Lucia," I said to my sister.

  She shook her head. "George, George—"

  "Never mind the bullshit. Show me Lucia."

  But she just sat back in her chair and sipped her coffee.

  I tried to keep up the pressure, tried to maintain my angry front. But it was hard. For one thing we weren't alone. Inside the Crypt, you were never alone.

  • • •

  I had finally succumbed to Peter's pressure, confronted my own complicated fears, and returned to the Crypt.

  This time Rosa brought me to a place she called the peristylium. It was a small chamber, crudely cut out of the rock — but it contained a kind of garden, stone benches, trellises, a small fountain. There were even growing things here, exotic mushrooms sprouting in trays of dark soil, their colors bright and unreal. The garden was obviously very old, its walls polished smooth by centuries of soft contacts. A small stand supplied coffee, sweets, and cakes. Anywhere else this would have been a Starbucks concession, but not here; there were no logos on Crypt coffee cups.

  Like everywhere else, the little garden was full of the ageless women of the Crypt. It was like an open-air café in a crowded shopping street, maybe, or a crowded airport concourse, with a dense, fluid, constantly changing, never thinning crowd. But the grammar of this crowd was different, the way they squeezed past each other, smiled, touched — for all these people were family. They talked brightly, loudly, and continually, sitting in circles cradling their coffees, close enough that their knees or shoulders touched. They would even kiss each other on the lips, softly, but not sexually; it was as if they were tasting each other.

  And, sitting with Rosa with our own coffees, I was stuck right in the middle of it, in a bubble of unending conversation, constantly touched — an apologetic hand would rest briefly on my shoulder, a smiling gray-eyed face float before me — and my head was full of the powerful animal musk of the Crypt. It was like being immersed in a great warm bath. It wasn't intimidating. But it was damn hard to think straight.

  As Rosa surely knew, which was why she had brought me here.

  And on top of that I had to deal with my own complicated emotional situation. I still found Rosa's face extraordinarily disturbing. She was, after all, my sister. She was so familiar, and something warm in me responded every second I spent with her. But at the same time it was a face I hadn't grown up with, and there would always be a glass wall between us. It was quietly heart wrenching.

  I tried to focus. "Rosa, if there's nothing wrong, why not show Lucia to me?"

  "There's nothing that the doctors can't handle. You'd only disturb her."

  "She came to me for help."

  She leaned forward and put her hand on my wrist — more of her endless touching. "No," she said. "She didn't come to you. That hacker boyfriend found you."

  "Daniel isn't her boyfriend."

  She sat back. "Well, there you go. Anyhow, I don't think all this really has anything to do with Lucia."

  "All what?"

  "Your insistence on coming back to the Crypt. This isn't about Lucia. It's not really about me. It's about you." Her eyes were fixed on me. "Let's cut through all this. The truth is, you're jealous. Jealous of me."

  "Rubbish," I said weakly.

  "You know I got the better deal, don't you? Our family failed, as so many little families do." She said that, little families, with utter contempt. "It wasn't just the money problems... Mother and Father saw a way to give one of us a better chance. They knew that this opportunity was sitting here. It had to be me — this is mostly a community of women. If anybody should be envious, maybe it should be Gina, my sister, not you."

  And perhaps Gina was envious, I reflected. Perhaps that was what underlay her sourness, and her decision to get about as far away from Manchester and her past as she could.

  But I protested, "I don't envy you. That's ridiculous. I just think the Order keeps getting in the way."

  "Of what?" Again she touched my wrist, and her fingers moved in that circular motion, a brief, tender massage. "Look, George — I can't be separated from the Order. Can't you see that yet? We come as a package. And if you want to 'connect' with me you have to deal with that." She stood up and brushed down her skirt. "You came all the way to Rome to save me, didn't you? What a hero. And now you've found out I don't want to be saved, you've decided to rescue poor Lucia instead. But don't you think you have a duty to figure out what it is you're saving us all from?" She held out her hand to me. "What, are you stuck in that chair? Come on."

  Her tone of command, th
e outstretched hand, were compelling. And we had, oddly, become a center of attention, her standing, me sitting, a kind of eddy in the endless stream of people. I was surrounded by faces, all turned on me with a kind of half smile. I felt the most intense pressure to go with Rosa.

  I drained my coffee, reached up, took her hand, and stood.

  She was, of course, still working on my recruitment into the Order, or at least on neutralizing me as a threat. I knew that. She was following her own agenda. But by now, so was I.

  We were brother and sister. What damaged goods we were.

  • • •

  Walking still deeper into the Crypt, we took the stairs.

  That wasn't as simple as it sounds. The structure of the place internally was very complicated, with floors and partition walls and bits of mezzanines all over the place, and we had to walk sometimes hundreds of yards from one staircase to the next. Everything was bathed in a pearly, sourceless fluorescent glow, and looked the same in every direction. As I got turned this way and that I was soon lost. But that was probably intentional; inside the Crypt you weren't supposed to know where you were.

  Still, it soon became clear that we had passed below what I had roughly labeled as Level 1, the uppermost, most modern-looking area of the Crypt, where schoolchildren studied purposefully and the scrinarii worked amid their computers and card indices and steel library shelves. It was a big place; Level 1 was actually several stories and mezzanines. Now we clambered down steel staircases into the heart of the level below, Level 2, which I had only glimpsed before from the mezzanine levels above.

  The furniture, partitions, ceiling tiles, lighting, and other equipment were modern, just as above. Nevertheless there was a different atmosphere down here. The corridors seemed narrower, lower, more confining, darker, while most of the chambers were big — if not huge — mighty, open cubicula each of which could have held hundreds of people. The businesses of the Order, like the genealogy service, were run from Level 1, but most of the rooms down here were given over to functions that served more basic needs. I was shown an immense hospital, equipped with modern gear but oddly open-plan, a refectory the size of an aircraft hangar, and dormitories in which rows of bunk beds, jammed close in together, marched into the distance.