Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  But I stuck to my thought of Peter. "Get arse out, get arse out." I repeated it over and over, an absurd mantra. "Let me go, Rosa."

  "All right," she said, forcing a smile. "You need a little time. That's okay." She led me down the corridor. A part of me was glad to get away from the little knot of bystanders who had seen what I had done, who knew how I had betrayed them; I was glad to walk away from my shame. "Take all the time you want," Rosa said soothingly. "We'll always be here. I'll be here. You know that."

  "Get arse out," I mumbled.

  We came at last to the steel door of a modern high-speed lift. We rode up in silence, Rosa still watching me; in her eyes there was something of the pressure of the gaze of those deep Crypt dwellers, their mute disappointment.

  As we rose I'll swear my ears popped.

  I emerged into a sunlit modern office on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. I was nearly blinded by the light, and the dry oxygen-rich air seared into my lungs, making me giddy.

  Peter had hired a car. It was waiting for me on the Cristoforo Colombo, outside the Order's office. Now, to my utter dismay, he insisted on taking me for a drive.

  Chapter 47

  I was full of theories. Basically I thought the Order was just a wacko religious cult. Then, when we met Lucia, and found out about this girl Pina, I started to wonder if it was some kind of bizarre psychosexual organization, perhaps with a religious framework to give it some justification. But now, with what you described about what you found down there, George — and after I discussed it with some of the Slan(t)ers — I think I've put it together at last.

  "The Order isn't about religion, or sex, or family. It isn't about anything its members think it's about — they don't know, any more than any one ant knows what an ant colony is for. The Order exists for itself."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.

  "I know you don't. So listen."

  • • •

  We headed straight out of town until we hit the outer ring road, the GRA. Soon we were stationary, one in a long line of cars, whose roofs and windscreens gleamed in the sun like the carapaces of metaled insects. Even at the best of times this road is a linear parking lot, and now it was the end of the working day, the rush hour. We inched forward, Peter thrusting the car into the smallest gaps with the best of them, blaring his horn and edging through the crowds. I'd have been scared for my safety if not for the fact that our speed was so slow.

  The car was a battered old Punto. With a head still full of the Crypt, I felt utterly disoriented. I said, "This car belongs to the Pakistani ambassador."

  He looked at me oddly. "Oh. Michael Caine. I saw that movie, too..."

  "You're making some kind of point, aren't you?"

  "Damn right," he said. "You won't understand, not at first. And when you do understand you probably won't believe me." His knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel, and he was sweating. "So I'll have to make you see. This might be more important than you can imagine."

  I smiled. "Important. This from a man who thinks that alien ships are making three-point turns in the core of the Earth. What could be important compared to that?"

  "More than you know," he said. "George, what causes traffic jams?"

  I shrugged. "Well, you need a crowded road. Roadworks. Breakdowns."

  "What roadworks?"

  There were no works ahead, no obvious breakdowns or crash sites. And yet we were stationary.

  Peter said, "George, to make a traffic jam all you need is traffic. The jams just occur. Look around. All that makes up the traffic is individual drivers — right? And each of us makes individual decisions, based, minute to minute, on what our neighbors are doing. There's not a one of us who intends to cause a jam, that's for sure. And there's not one of us who has a global view of the traffic, like you'd get from a police chopper, say. There are only the drivers.

  "And yet, from our individual decisions made in ignorance, the traffic jam emerges, a giant organized structure involving maybe thousands of cars. So where does the jam come from?"

  We were moving forward by now, in fits and starts, but, scarily, he took his eyes off the road to look at me, testing my understanding.

  "I don't know," I admitted.

  "This is what they call emergence, George," he said. "From simple rules, applied at a low level, like the decisions made by the drivers on this damn road — and with feedback to amplify the effects, like a slowing car forcing a slowdown behind it — large-scale structures can emerge. It's called self-organized criticality. The traffic always tries to organize itself to get as many cars through as possible, but it's constantly on the point of breakdown. The jams are like waves, or ripples, passing back and forth along the lines of cars."

  It was hard for me to concentrate on this. Too much had happened today. Sitting in that lurching car, I felt as if I were in a dream. I groped for the point he was trying to make. "So the Order is like a traffic jam," I said. "The Order is a kind of feedback effect."

  "We'll get to the Order. One step at a time." He wrenched the wheel, and we plunged out of the traffic toward a junction that would lead us back toward the center of the city.

  We roared up Mussolini's great avenue, hared through the Venezia, lurched left onto the Plebiscito. Peter rammed the long-suffering Punto into a few feet of parking space. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it.

  We got out of the car, locked it up, and made for a bar. I wanted coffee. Peter went to order while I found a table.

  Peter returned with a bottle of beer. "You need this more than coffee, believe me."

  And oddly, he was right. Something about the heft of the bottle in my hand, the cool tang of the beer, that first subtle softening of perception as the alcohol kicked in, brought me back to reality, or anyhow my version of it. I raised the bottle to Peter. "Here's to me," I said. "And what I truly am. An appendage clamped to the mouth of a beer bottle."

  He had a Coke Light; he raised it ironically. "As a destiny, that will do," he said seriously. "Just don't lose yourself down in that hole in the ground..."

  "Emergence," I said. "Traffic jams."

  "Yes. And think about cities."

  "Cities?"

  "Sure. Who plans cities? Oh, I know we try to now, but in the past — say, in Rome — it wasn't even attempted. But cities have patterns nevertheless, stable patterns that persist far beyond any human time horizon: neighborhoods that are devoted to fashion, or upscale shops, or artists; poor, crime-ridden districts, upmarket rich areas. Bright lights attract more bright lights, and clusters start.

  "This is what emergence is: agents working at one scale unconsciously producing patterns at one level above them. Drivers rushing to work create traffic jams; urbanites keeping up with the Joneses create neighborhoods."

  "Unconsciously. They create these patterns without meaning to."

  "Yes. That's the point. Local decision making, coupled with feedback, does it for them. We humans think we're in control. In fact we're enmeshed in emergent structures — jams, cities, even economies — working on scales of space and time far beyond our ability to map. Now let's talk about ants."

  That had come out of left field. "From cities to ants?"

  "What do you know about ants?"

  "Nothing," I said. "Except that they are persistent buggers when they get into your garden."

  "Ants are social insects — like termites, bees, wasps. And you can't get them out of your garden because social insects are so bloody successful," he said. "There are more species of ant in a square mile of Brazilian rain forest than there are species of primate across the planet. And there are more workers in one ant colony than there are elephants in all the world..."

  "You've been on the Internet again."

  He grinned. "All human wisdom is there. Everybody knows about ant colonies. But most of what everybody knows is wrong. Only the queen lays eggs, only the queen passes on her genes to the next generation. That much is true. But you probably think that an
anthill is like a little city, with the queen as a dictator in control of everything."

  "Well—"

  "Wrong. George, the queen is important. But in the colony, nobody knows what's going on globally — not even the queen. There's no one ant making any decisions in there about the destiny of the colony. Each one is just following the crowd, to build a tunnel, shift more eggs, bring back food. But out of all those decisions, the global structure of the colony emerges. That social scaling-up, by the way, is the secret of the social insects' success. If a solitary animal misses out a task, it doesn't get done. But with the ants, if one worker misses a task somebody else is sure to come along and do it for her. Even the death of an individual worker is irrelevant, because there is always somebody to take her place. Ant colonies are efficient.

  "But it is the colony that counts, not the queen. That is the organism, a diffuse organism with maybe a million tiny mouths and bodies... Bodies that organize themselves so that their tiny actions and interactions add up, globally, to the operation of the colony itself."

  "So an anthill is like a traffic jam," I guessed. "Emergent."

  "Yes. Emergence is how an anthill works. Now we have to talk about genes, which is why it works." He was off again, and I struggled to keep focused.

  "Social insects have three basic characteristics." He ticked the points off on his fingers. "You get many individuals cooperating in caring for the young — not just parents, as among most mammals, say. Second, there is an overlap of generations. Children stay at home to live with their parents and grandparents. Third, you have a reproductive division of labor—"

  "Neuters," I said.

  "Yes. Workers, who may remain sterile throughout their lives, serving the breeders..."

  I started to get a sense of where he was going. I didn't want to hear it. Dread gathered in the pit of my stomach. I pulled on the beer, drinking too fast. When I came back to George, he was talking about Darwin.

  "...Darwin himself thought ants were a great challenge to his theory of evolution. How could sterile worker castes evolve if they leave no offspring? I mean, the whole point of life is to pass on your genes — isn't it? How can that happen if you're neuter? Well, in fact, natural selection works at the level of the gene, not the individual.

  "If you're a neuter, you give up your chance of having daughters, but by doing so you help Mom produce more sisters. Why do you do it? Because it's in your genetic interests. Look, your sisters share half your genes, because you were born from the same parents. So your nieces are less closely related to you than your own daughters. But if, by remaining celibate, you can double the numbers of your nieces, you gain more in terms of genes passed on. In the long term you've won the genetic lottery.

  "The numbers are different for ants. The way they pass on their genes is different from mammals — if you're an ant your sister is actually closer to you genetically than your own daughter! — so they have a predisposition to this kind of group living, which is no doubt why it rose so early and so often among the insects. But the principle's the same.

  "George, an ant colony isn't a dictatorship, or a communist utopia. It is a family. It's a logical outcome of high population densities and a hostile external environment. Sometimes it pays to stay home with Mom, because it's safer that way — but you need a social order to cope with the crowding. So you help Mom bring up your sisters. It's harsh, but it's a stable system; emergence makes the colony as a whole work, and there is a genetic payoff for everybody, and they all get along just fine... The biologists call this way of living 'eusociality' — eu like in utopia, meaning 'perfect.' "

  "A perfect family? Now that's scary."

  "But it's not like a human family. This genetic calculus doesn't have much to do with traditional human morality... Not until now," he said mysteriously. "And it's not just ants." He played his trump card. "Consider naked mole rats."

  I had finished the beer. I let Peter call for another one.

  Naked mole rats turned out to be spectacularly ugly little rodents — Peter showed me pictures on his handheld — that live in great underground colonies beneath the African deserts. They have bare, unweathered skin, and their bodies are little fat cylinders, to fit into their dark tunnels.

  The mole rats' favorite food is tuber roots, which they have to go dig for. But the roots are widely scattered. So although they are stuck in cramped conditions underground, it is better to produce a lot of little mole rats than a few big ones, because many little helpers tunneling off to find the roots are more likely to succeed than a few.

  "Exactly the conditions where you might expect eusociality to develop," Peter said. "A situation where you're forced to live with high population density, limited resources..."

  Mole rats live in great swarms — and in each colony, of maybe forty individuals, at any one time there is only one breeding pair. The other males simply keep zipped up, but the other females are functionally sterile. They are kept that way by behavior, by bullying from the "queen."

  The workers even have specialized roles — nest building, digging, transporting food. A mole rat will go through several roles as she ages, gradually moving outward from the center. "Some of the ants are like that," Peter said. "The young serve inside the nest, where they do such chores as nest cleaning. When they get older they serve outside, maybe constructing or repairing the nest, or foraging for food..."

  For the mole rats, everything works fine until the queen shows signs of falling from her throne. The sterile workers suddenly start to develop sexual characteristics, and there is a bloody succession battle — and the prize for the victor is nothing less than the chance to pass on her genes.

  "And that's why the old fogies are pushed out to the perimeter of the colony," Peter said coldly. "They are the ones in the front line when a jackal digs up a tunnel — but they are dispensable. You want your young at the center, where they can be quickly deployed to replace the reproductive. But the old ones sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group readily enough. That's another eusocial trait — suicide to protect others.

  "You see what I'm saying. The mole rats are eusocial," he said. "There is absolutely no doubt about that. As eusocial as any ant or termite or bee — but they are mammals."

  He talked on about mole rats, and other mammals with traces of eusociality — hunting dogs in the desert, for instance. One detail startled me. In the mole rat warrens, the rodents would swarm and huddle to control the flow of air through their passageways. It was just like the Crypt, though I hadn't told him about Rosa's antique ventilation system.

  By now I knew exactly where he was going. I felt cold.

  "Mammals but not human," I said heavily. "And humans make choices about how they live their lives, Peter. Rational and moral choices. We're in control of ourselves, in a way no animal can be."

  "Are we? How about that traffic jam?"

  "Peter — get to the point. Forget the mole rats. Talk about the Order."

  He nodded. "Then we have to talk about Regina, your great-great-greatest-grandmother. Because it all started with her."

  • • •

  In those first few turbulent decades, for the band of women huddling in their pit under the Appian Way, it had been just as it was for a band of naked mole rats out on the savanna — or so Peter's analysis went. With imperial Rome crumbling around them, it became a lot safer for daughters to stay home with their mothers, to extend the Crypt rather than to migrate.

  "So you have just the same kind of resource and population pressures as in a mole rat colony."

  I frowned. "But Regina would never have made a choice about eusociality. In the fifth century she couldn't even have formulated it."

  "But she had the right instinct. It's all there, in her own words. Remember those three slogans, carved on the walls?"

  "Sisters matter more than daughters. Ignorance is strength. Listen to your sisters."

  "Yes." He called up another file on his handheld. "...Here we are."

 
It was an extract from Regina's biography. I read: "Regina asked her followers to consider the blood of Brica, her daughter, and that of Agrippina, her granddaughter. Agrippina's blood is half the blood of Brica, half of her father, and so a quarter mine, said Regina. But if Agrippina were to have a baby her blood would mix with the father's, and so the baby would be only an eighth mine. Suppose I have to choose between a baby of Agrippina's, or another baby of Brica's. I can only choose one, for there is no room for both. Which should I choose? And they said, You would choose for Brica to have another child. For sisters matter more than daughters..."

  Peter looked at me. "Sisters matter more than daughters. Regina thought in terms of keeping her blood from being diluted. It doesn't matter that the mechanics actually works with genes — her instinct was right. And once that is established, much else follows. The breeding rights of a few mothers, your mamme-nonne, are favored over everybody else's rights, even over their own children's. The drones' only chance of passing on their own genes is to help their mothers, and their sisters..."

  It was the first time he had used the word drones.

  "Slogan two: Ignorance is strength. Regina understood systems. And she wanted the Order's system, the whole, to dominate over the parts. She didn't want some charismatic fool taking over and ruining everything in the pursuit of some foolish dream. So she ordered that everybody should know as little as possible, and should follow the people close to them. The Order drones are agents who work locally, with only local knowledge, and no insight into the bigger picture.

  "Three: Listen to your sisters. That slogan encourages feedback. Inside the Crypt there's a relentless pressure to conform. You told me you felt it, when you were in the Crypt, the endless social weight. Poor Lucia, who wouldn't conform, suffered exclusion. The social pressure is a homeostasis — like the temperature regulator of an air-conditioning system, a negative feedback that keeps everybody in their place."