Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  "It was all just looks," I said uncomfortably. "Nothing was said."

  He fixed nonexistent glasses, intense, determined, anxious. "You think when you were in the Crypt people communicated with you just with speech?" Again he tapped at his handheld, seeking the right reference. "George, we have many channels of communication. Look at this." He pushed the handheld at me; its tiny screen showed a dense technical paper. "We have a paralanguage — vocal stuff but nonverbal, groans and laughs and sighs, and body posture, touch, motion — going on in parallel to everything we say. The anthropologists have identified hundreds of these signals — more than the chimps, more than the monkeys. Even without speech, we would have a richer way to communicate even than the chimps, and they manage to run pretty complex societies. And all this is going on under the surface of our spoken interaction." He was staring at me now. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me you didn't feel a pressure from the way people in there behaved toward you, regardless of what they actually said."

  I imagined those circles of pale, disapproving faces. I shook my head to dispel the vision.

  Peter said, "And then there are other ways to communicate. Touch, even scent... The smells, all that kissing you describe. Tasting each other, you said."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Is it? George, weaver ants communicate with pheromones. And chemical communication is a very old system. Single-celled creatures have to rely on simple chemical messages to tell them about their environment, because only multicelled creatures — like ants, like humans — are complex enough to organize clusters of cells into eyes and ears... I admit I'm speculating about this.

  "But, George, put it all together and you've got a classic recipe for an emergent system: local decision making by ignorant agents responding to local stimuli, and powerful feedback mechanisms. And then you have a genetic mandate for eusociality. All in those three slogans."

  "All right. And then what happened? How did we get from there to here — from Regina to Lucia?"

  He sighed and massaged his temples. "Look, George, if you haven't believed me up to now, you won't believe what comes next. In the wild — among the ants or the mole rats — once you get a reproductive advantage like that, of mothers over daughters, no matter how slight, you get a positive feedback.

  "People started to change. To adapt. If the daughters aren't going to get a chance to reproduce, it's better for their bodies to stay subadult. Why waste all those resources on a pointless puberty? Of course you retain the potential to become mature, in case a queen drops dead, and you have the chance to replace her. Meanwhile, it pays for the mothers to pump out the kids as long and as often as possible..."

  I felt a deep, sickening dread as his logic drew me in, step by step. "So in the Crypt they have kids every three months. And they stay fertile for decades past any outsider's menopause age."

  "It's simple Darwinian logic. It pays."

  "What about the men?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps in the early days they just let the male infants die. Again, given enough time, selection would work; if the only way to pass on your genes is through female children, you have more daughters. Of course you still need fathers. So they bring in males from outside — wild DNA to keep the gene pool healthy — but preferably somebody from the extended family outside. And a candidate has to prove his fitness."

  "Fitness?" In a way this tied in with what Rosa had said to me about why I would be a suitable stud. "Maybe the men have to prove intelligence, by forcing their way in."

  He shrugged. "Maybe. Fitness doesn't mean strength, necessarily. It just means you fit the environment. Maybe what you, or Giuliano, need more than anything else is a certain compliance. Because your children would have to comply with life in the Crypt. One thing's for sure: men are essential for making babies, so they have to be tolerated, but they are peripheral to the Order, which is built around relationships among females. Men are just sperm machines."

  "And what about Lucia's second pregnancy? She said she had only had sex once with this guy Giuliano."

  He hesitated. "I'm flying another kite here. But some female ants have an organ called a spermatheca — a bag near the top of her abdomen. It's a sperm bank. The queen stores ejaculate there, and keeps sperm in a kind of suspended animation, for years if necessary. She lets them out one at a time, and they become active again and ready to fertilize more eggs..."

  My jaw dropped. "And that's what you're saying is happening inside Lucia's body."

  He looked defensive. "I'm saying it's possible."

  "But ants have had a hundred million years. Peter, what I know about evolution you could write on a fingernail. But wouldn't such a major redesign of the human reproductive system need a lot of time?"

  He shrugged. "I'm no expert. But in the fifteen centuries since Regina there has been time for sixty, seventy, eighty generations — maybe even more. A lot of it wouldn't involve particularly fundamental changes, just the timing of developments in the body. Evolution finds changes like that easy to make — a question of throwing a few switches, rather than rewiring the whole processor. Evolution can sometimes work with remarkable speed...

  "Look at all the pieces together." Again, he ticked points off on his fingers. "You have the multiple generations sharing their resources and caring for the young. You have reproductive divisions — the sterile workers. You have nobody in control, nothing but local agents and feedback. And then if you look at its history, the Order has done what ant colonies do: it has tried to expand, it has attacked other groups. You even have 'suicides' — spectacular sacrifices, where the workers give up their lives so that their genetic legacy can continue: I told you what happened when the Crypt was broken open during the Sack of Rome. You could even argue that all the exterior 'helpers,' all the 'family' around the world, who send the Order money and recruits, they are part of the Order, too, like foraging ants — though of course they don't know it.

  "And listen. Ants carry out their dead and leave them in a circle, far from the nest. I plotted the burials linked to the Order, over the centuries. There's a circle... I have a map."

  "I don't want to see it."

  "I think Regina was a kind of genius, George. An idiot savant, maybe. Of course she didn't have the vocabulary to express it, but she clearly understood emergence, and perhaps even eusociality, on some instinctive level. You can see it in her biography — the passages where she is walking around Rome, noticing how unplanned it is, but how nevertheless patterns have emerged. And she used that insight to try to protect her family. She thought she was establishing a community to protect her bloodline, a heritage of a golden past. Well, she succeeded, but not in the way she intended.

  "The Order isn't a human community, George, the way we've always understood it. The Order is a hive. A human hive — perhaps the first of its kind." He smiled. "We used to think you would need telepathy to unite minds, to combine humans into a group organism. Well, we were wrong. All you need is people — that, and emergence."

  "Peter—"

  He lifted his broad face to the light from the window. "It's actually an exciting prospect we have stumbled on, George. A new kind of humanity, perhaps? A eusocial human — I call them Coalescents....

  • • •

  The beer felt heavy in my belly. Suddenly I longed to get out of this smoky bar — out of the noisy, crowded city altogether — away from Peter and his crazy ideas, and the Order, which was at the center of it all.

  Peter was desperate for me to understand, to believe, I saw. But I didn't want to believe; I didn't want to know. I shook my head.

  "Even if you're right," I said, "what do we do about it?"

  He smiled, but his smile was cold. "Well, that's the question. There's no point negotiating with Rosa, or anybody else in there, because she isn't in control. The organism we are dealing with is actually the collective — the Order — the hive that arises out of the interactions of the Coalescents."

  "How do you negotiate with an anthill?"
r />   "I don't know," he said. "But first we must decide what we want from it..."

  His cell phone went off, annoyingly loud. He pulled it out of his pocket, inspected its screen, and turned white. "I'm sorry," he said.

  He gathered up his gadgets and bustled out of the bar. Without breaking step he got into his car, started it up, and drove away, lurching into the dense Roman traffic. Just like that, leaving me with a bill to pay and a walk home to the hotel. I was astonished.

  When I got to the hotel he wasn't there. I wouldn't see him again, in fact, for days. When I did it was in drastically different circumstances, after I received a panicky phone call from Rosa.

  And it was only later that I found out it was at that moment in the café he had learned of the explosion at the lab in San Jose.

  Chapter 48

  Rosa glared at me. "What have you done, George? What have you done?"

  "Is this about a man called Peter McLachlan?" I'd told Rosa nothing about Peter before now; I'd had no reason to. "I haven't seen him for days, and he's not answering his calls..."

  "He's here," Rosa hissed.

  "What?"

  "Inside the Crypt."

  I just stared at her, disbelieving.

  • • •

  Rosa had met me in the Order's surface office on the Cristoforo Colombo. Compared to her sly manipulation of a few days before, there was no warmth, none of her seductive talk of family and blood, no touching. In that bright, sunlit, modern office, she was a pillar of hostility and anger.

  We weren't alone. Under a wall decorated with a chrome representation of the Order's kissing-fish symbol, a salesgirl was talking an elderly couple through a brochure on the Order's genealogy services. The old folk turned and stared at us, dismayed and perhaps a little frightened. But the assistant was of the Order. She looked at me with blank smoke-gray eyes, slowly hardening to anger. I was sure she didn't know why she felt that way. I quailed nevertheless.

  Rosa glanced at the customers. She said, "Come through."

  I followed her to the elevator at the back, which took us down to the big modern anteroom, where cameras peered at me, insectile. The receptionist-guard behind her broad marble desk stared at me with undisguised hostility.

  I asked, "If Peter's here, who let him in?"

  "Nobody. He found a way down one of the old ventilation shafts."

  I remembered the ancient, disused chimney; yes, I realized, if you knew what you were doing, it wouldn't be so hard to work your way in. I laughed. "Peter's a bit tubby for a potholer."

  She stood close to me. I smelled something of the animal stink of the Crypt about her. Her fists were clenched, her body rigid, every muscle suffused with anger. "You think this is funny? Do you? Funny? He isn't one of us. He has nothing to do with the Order. And he's here because of you."

  "I didn't tell him where the shaft outlets were. I don't even know myself."

  "Evidently you told him enough for him to work it out. You betrayed our trust, George. You betrayed my trust. I took you into my home. I showed you its treasures. And you told an outsider. Perhaps you aren't fit to join us after all."

  Her cold, angry rejection was powerful. It hurt badly to feel such exclusion, despite my ambiguous feelings about the whole setup.

  "Rosa, I know Peter. Outsider or not he's an old friend who was good to Dad in his final years. He is — odd. Obsessive, eccentric. He has big ideas. But even if it's true he's broken in here he's harmless."

  "Harmless. Really." Rosa walked behind the marble desk to the guard's PC. It took her a couple of minutes to find what she wanted. She swiveled the screen on its mount to show me. "This is an Interpol report. Posted by the FBI." Illustrated by small, grainy photographs, it was a report of an explosion at a university science lab in San Jose, California. The lab had been devoted to something called "geometric optics." The blast had destroyed the building and killed three people, including a cleaner and the head of the facility. The FBI appeared convinced it was some kind of sabotage. In the corner of the image the FBI had posted two photographs, of suspects they associated with the incident.

  One of them was, indubitably, Peter's face.

  I stood back. "Shit."

  "Our face-recognition software pulled this up not five minutes after we got our first clear shot of him."

  "It has to be a mistake. Peter's an eccentric, not a criminal. I can't believe he'd have anything to do with an incident like this."

  Rosa briskly spun the screen back. "Tell it to the FBI. And in the meantime, this 'harmless' friend, this suspected bomber, this murderer, is holed up inside the Crypt — and you led him here."

  "What do you expect me to do?"

  "Come down there with me and get him out."

  I hesitated. I dreaded walking deeper into this mess. But I knew I had no choice.

  Rosa walked me to the high-speed elevators that would take us back into the downbelow. The doors slid open with a pneumatic sigh.

  Once more I was swallowed up.

  • • •

  I stepped out into the now familiar crush.

  Even as we hurried toward the scene of the crisis, I lifted my head and took deep breaths. The air was clammy and shallow, and my lungs pulled, trying to extract oxygen. But there was that powerful animal stink again, the musk of sweat and piss, of blood and milk, so suffocating, and yet somehow so exhilarating.

  I was full of doubts about the Order, full of conflicting emotions. I had listened to Peter's extraordinary arguments about eusociality and hives and Coalescents, a new form of humanity. And above all, stuck in my head, was the image of Lucia, a fifteen-year-old tortured by the exploitation of her fecundity by — well, by somebody in this place, for some purpose, not her own. But for all that it was good to be back. I belonged here: walking down these dense corridors again, I seemed to feel it on some deep cellular level. However the Order was sending me signals, through body language or chimp grunts or scent or whatever the hell, it was certainly getting through.

  But the Crypt felt different today.

  All those ageless female faces, and a few male, all with their smoky gray eyes, peered at me uncertainly, eyes wide, mouths downturned. I was sure that few of them would know anything about what was going on, but they picked up their cues from Rosa, and then from each other, and as we walked they all unthinkingly flinched away from me. That silent rejection hurt.

  But even through this self-pitying ache, I noticed the Crypt was quiet: people spoke, but softly, leaning to whisper in each others' ears. They even walked quietly, their feet padding gently on the floor. I listened for the hum of generators, the hiss and low roar of the air-conditioning systems, but could hear nothing.

  "Silent running," I said to Rosa.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just like a submarine, trying to evade the sonar of the surface ships. We're in a great, static, underground submarine..."

  It struck me then that the Order, whatever its powers and wealth, being stuck immovably in this Crypt, this hole in the ground, was terribly vulnerable. No wonder Rosa had reacted so strongly to Peter's incursion. For the Crypt to be revealed was about the worst thing that could happen, because once exposed it would stay exposed. The silent running must be instinctive, I thought, a reaction bred in over generations. A great wave of fear and despondency must have rippled out through the tight-packed, touching, gossiping members of the Order, a wave of alarm but not of information, a wave that left silence and caution where it passed.

  We descended to Level 2 and hurried past the great galleries of hospital wards and dormitories. Eventually we began to pass through quieter, darker corridors. I sensed we were moving out of the core of the sprawling complex, reaching areas I hadn't seen before. Perhaps the ventilation shaft Peter had used was old, long abandoned, unguarded.

  At last we came to a wall, not of concrete or interior partition, but of tufa, honest, solid lava. I ran my hand along the wall. I felt oddly reassured to think that I wasn't in the middle of things a
nymore — that beyond my hand there were no more galleries and chambers, no more people, nothing but a tremendous mass of patient, silent rock.

  A knot of people stood before a cleft in the rock wall, all Order members. The lighting here, coming from fluorescent lamps bolted crudely to the tufa wall, was sparse and dim, and as they watched us approach, their faces, all so similar, seemed to float, disembodied, in the gloom. I recognized none of them. There were ten of them — only one was a man — but they were all tall and hefty looking inside their smocks. They were here for physical work, I thought, perhaps to wrestle Peter to the ground.

  And they were old, I realized with a shock; with crow's-feet eyes and sunken cheeks, they all showed far more visible signs of aging than I had seen in the Crypt before. Uneasily I remembered Peter's talk of aging ant warriors, of elderly mole rats sacrificed to the jackals; it was another unwelcome parallel.

  Rosa spoke briskly to these guardians and came back to me. "He's still in there."

  "Where?"

  She jerked her thumb at the cleft in the rock.

  I moved past her to take a look. The cleft was a crack in the tufa, barely wide enough for me to have squeezed into sideways. It looked as if it had been caused by a mild earthquake, and then widened by seeping water. The glow from the wall-mounted lamps didn't penetrate very far, and I cupped my hands over my eyes, peering into silent blackness.

  Suddenly light flared in my face. I fell back, rubbing my eyes. "Ow. Shit."

  A sardonic voice, made hollow by echoes, came drifting out of the cleft. "You took your time."

  • • •

  "Hello, mate. How did you get yourself in there?"

  "Let's just say it wasn't easy," he said gnomically.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Saving the future."

  "We can't get him out," Rosa said to me. "The cleft is too narrow. We haven't been able to find the way he got in — presumably from above. We might get one or two people in from the front, but they could never get behind him to bring him out. And besides, we're afraid he might harm them."