Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  As she lay brooding, at first she imagined that the stink of smoke, the sound of screaming, was part of her own fevered imagination. But when red light began to flicker beyond her window, she realized that something serious was happening. She got out of bed, pulled on her tunic quickly, and ran to the door.

  Carta, Carausias, and the others were standing in the courtyard. Their faces shone red, as if they faced a sunset. But the sun was long gone, and the light came from a great bank of flames, visible over the silhouetted rooftops. There was a great crash, more screams, and sparks rose up like a flock of tiny, glowing birds.

  Regina ran to Carta and took her hand. “What is it?”

  “I think that was the Basilica,” Carta said.

  “It may have started there,” Carausias growled. “But it’s spreading fast. All those stalls in the Forum. The thatched roofs …”

  “I think it’s coming this way,” said Carta.

  Carausias’s voice was bitter. “Once there were volunteers to put out such fires. We’d have run with our bowls of water and our soaked blankets, and everything would be saved — or if not saved, rebuilt until it was better than before—”

  Carta snapped, “Uncle!”

  He turned and looked at her, eyes wide. “Yes. Yes. The past doesn’t matter anymore. We must leave. Even if the fire spares the house, the town is done after this. All of you, now, quickly …” He turned and ran into the house, followed by Severus and Marina.

  Carta held Regina’s shoulders. “Get your things. Nothing but what you can carry, nothing but what you need.”

  “Carta—”

  “Are you listening, Regina?”

  “Where will we go? Will we go to Londinium, and book the ship to Armorica? Perhaps we will meet Amator there—”

  Carta shook her, sharply. “You must listen. Amator is gone. I don’t know where. And he took Carausias’s money.”

  It was hard for Regina to take this in. “ All of it—”

  “All of it. All the savings.”

  “The ship—”

  “ There will be no ship. Can you not listen, child? When the house is destroyed, we will have nothing.”

  There will be no dancing, Regina thought stupidly, no more dancing. And when she thought of the growing mass in her belly she felt panic rise. “How will we live, Carta?”

  “I don’t know!” Carta yelled, and Regina saw her own fear.

  There was a fresh roar as another great section of building collapsed. From the streets outside the courtyard there came yells, screams, and a strange, twisted laughter.

  “Time is running out. Go, child!”

  Regina ran to her room. She dragged out the largest bag she thought she could carry, and scooped into it clothes, her perfumes, her pins, her jewelry, everything she could grab in those few frantic heartbeats.

  It was only at the very last moment that she thought of the matres. She unfolded a tunic, carefully wrapped the little stone goddesses, and tucked them into the bag. They were small, but they made the bag unaccountably heavier. She hoisted the bag onto her shoulder and ran out into the courtyard.

  Soon all of them had gathered, Carausias, Carta, Marina, and Severus, all laden with bags and bundles of blanket. By now the glow of the fire was bright as day, and the billowing smoke made it hard to breathe.

  Regina thought she saw moisture in Carausias’s rheumy eyes. But he turned away from his house. “Enough. Let’s go.”

  Half running, stumbling over the debris in the road, the four of them joined a ragged line of refugees who streamed out of the burning town through the northern gate and into the cold country beyond. Away from the town there were no lights, and the night was overcast. Soon they were fleeing into pitch darkness.

  Chapter 12

  Despite all the tension with Gina, I wanted to trace Uncle Lou. I stayed on in Florida a few more days, through the weekend.

  A day after that unsatisfactory conversation with my sister I got an unexpected call. It was Michael, asking me if I wanted to come over to watch the space shuttle launch.

  “Sure. I mean, if that’s okay with your mom. You’d better put her on …”

  “Whatever,” said Gina.

  So I drove over. The launch was scheduled for eight P.M.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know a launch was due,” I said. “Do they show it on TV?”

  Michael said, “On NASA TV, yes. But you can see it from the porch.”

  I felt a foolish prickle of wonder. “You can see a spaceship take off from your back door? …” I’d been to Florida many times, but that had never occurred to me.

  The boy grinned. “Sure. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Gina said, “Don’t go sitting in the damp. And don’t stay out too long if it’s delayed, and you get cold—”

  “We won’t,” I said. “Come on, kid.” I stood up and let Michael lead me by the hand, out through the darkened hall to the back door.

  At the back of the house was a long covered porch. A couple of big swing benches hung from the roof, and big electric lamps were fixed to the wooden wall, banishing the night; beyond was just darkness.

  “Shall we sit here?”

  Michael said, “It’s kind of hard on your butt. Mom puts the cushions indoors to keep them dry.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Anyhow it isn’t the best view. Come on.” Still holding my hand, the boy made his way along a gravel path, barely visible to me, that sloped down toward the coast. He stepped confidently, secure in his little domain. I tried to follow without hesitation.

  Gradually, as the house receded, a little island of light, the night opened up around us. The sky was black and huge, and speckled with stars. Behind me, inland, the lights of the city stained the scattered clouds orange-yellow. But when I looked east, toward the sea, there was only darkness. I could hear the ocean now, a low, restless growling.

  Michael led me off the path a little way. I found myself walking on fine sand that slid into my shoes, so that I walked with a rasp. After a few paces Michael flopped to the ground. I somewhat gingerly lowered myself down, and found myself sitting on soft sand matted with coarse grass. The grass was prickly and a little damp with dew, and I knew my back would soon get stiff. But for now I was comfortable enough.

  “My mom won’t let me go farther toward the sea at this time of night,” Michael said solemnly. A soft ripping noise told me he was tugging at the grass.

  “Well, that’s sensible.” I spotted a light, far out on the breast of the sea. I pointed it out to Michael. “I wonder if it’s something to do with the launch. Don’t they have ships to pick up those solid-rocket boosters that drop off when the shuttle flies?”

  Michael snickered. “I don’t think so. The recovery ships are a long way downrange.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Michael started talking briskly about shuttle launch operations, miming the assembly of the booster stack, and the liftoff from the Canaveral pads with his small hands. He parroted technical terms and acronyms, and when I gently tested him by asking about what lay behind the acronyms, he was always able to answer.

  It was all of a piece with his work on the Frisbees. It hadn’t been so long — Christ, just a few years — since we had watched the Apollo 13 movie on TV, and we had chanted the countdown together, because that, said Michael, was the magic you needed to make a spaceship go. Later we had talked each other through the dreadful loss of the Columbia. Now his enthusiasm was still endearing, but his depth of knowledge was startling. To him, the shuttle was no longer a magical chariot, but a piece of engineering that you could pore over and take apart and understand — and maybe even make a better version of one day.

  I suppressed a sigh. After all that he was only ten years old. Childhood is so long when you live it, but so brief when you look at it from outside. And my visits, the brief forays across the Atlantic at Christmas and in the summer, so precious to me, amounted to no more than a few days in total, spread over that evanescent
decade.

  Michael suddenly sat bolt upright. “Look! Look, there it is!”

  And so it was, right on time. Looking to the north I saw a spark of light, supernova bright, climbing, it seemed, out of the sea. Its trajectory was already curving, a graceful arc, and I saw how the spark carved out a great pillar of smoke in the dense sea air, a pillar that itself was brightly lit from the inside. All this took place in utter silence, but the sense of power was astonishing — like something natural, a waterfall or a thunderstorm — it was startling to think that this mighty display was human-made.

  We both erupted into cheers and applause, and hugged each other.

  When we ran out of cheers I could hear more distant noise, a kind of crackle like very faraway thunder, or even gunfire. It might have been the sound of people cheering, strung out along this coast, or it might have been the sound of the shuttle’s ascent. As the shuttle climbed farther its light spread over the ocean, and a hundred reflected sparks slid over the gently swelling surface, tracking the rising spacecraft.

  In the pale rocket light the face of Michael Poole Bazalget was like an upturned coin, but his mouth was set with a kind of determination, his eyes shadowed. I felt unaccountably disturbed. I wondered what this child, and his own children after him, would do with the world.

  Chapter 13

  The little party of refugees straggled up the hillside from the road.

  The farmstead was just a huddle of buildings, lost on the hill’s broad flank. There were no lights. Regina saw the gaping holes of unglazed windows, decayed roofs, fields sketched out by drystone walls but choked with weeds. Beyond the buildings a forest, dense and dark, coated the upper hillside.

  The place was abandoned.

  There were five of them — Regina, Cartumandua and Severus, Marina, Carausias — and they stood in a huddle. Already the night was falling, the cold descending. They had been on the road for nearly a month, since the burning of Verulamium, a month they had spent walking ever west. They must look as lost and helpless, Regina thought, as the buildings themselves.

  “They said they would wait,” Carausias said plaintively. “Arcadius was a friend of my brother — a close friend. They said they would wait for us.”

  Severus broke away, snarling his contempt. “I’ve heard nothing but your whining and excuses, old man, all the way from Verulamium.”

  Carta said wearily, “Severus, we’re all exhausted.”

  “And because of this old fool’s sentimental stupidity we are stranded on this hillside. I told you we should have gone to Londinium.”

  “We’ve been over this. There was nothing for us in Londinium.”

  “Arcadius said he would wait,” Carausias repeated. He rummaged beneath his cloak. “I have the letters, the letters—”

  Severus stalked off over the darkling hillside.

  Marina said, frightened, “Severus, please.”

  Carta held her back. “Let him go. He’d do no good here.”

  “But what are we to do?”

  Carta had no answer. Carausias walked purposelessly back and forth over the hillside, limping as he had done since the first day, despite the bandages that cradled his feet inside his leather shoes. It was as if they were all locked in their own heads.

  Regina crouched down, hugging her knees to her belly. At least she was spared the cramps she had suffered almost continually since they had started their great trek from Verulamium.

  Arcadius was a friend of the family who had a farmstead here, deep in the heart of the countryside to the west. It had always been the plan for Arcadius and Carausias to pool their resources and make for Armorica together. Because of Amator, Carausias had lost his money, and he admitted that it had been a year or more since he had been in contact with Arcadius, because of the unreliability of the post these days. But he was sure that Arcadius would wait for him, and would welcome them into his home.

  That had been the promise that had sustained them through that first, terrifying night of flight from burning Verulamium — the first dismal hours when they had tried to sleep out in the open, keeping away from the stream of refugees, the crying children and limping invalids, the drunks — the promise that had kept them all going through the days and nights of their hike ever west, as Carausias and Severus had used the last of their money to buy a little food, water, and shelter from broken-down inns.

  Then the countryside had been hostile. The collapse of the Roman province had affected most directly the one in ten who had lived in the villas and towns, many of whom were now trying to find a place in the countryside, like Regina and her party. But the farmers had been affected, too, however they had grumbled about tax. Without the need to produce a surplus to pay the Emperor’s taxes the farmers had cut their workload back to what was necessary to maintain their families. But with the towns declining there was no market to sell or trade what surplus there was, and there was nowhere to buy manufactured goods like pottery or tools. Iron goods in particular were in very short supply, for people had forgotten the ancient craft of iron making. Many farms were being operated at a more basic level than the farmers’ ancestors had achieved centuries before.

  Anyhow there had been no place for Regina and her party: no hospitality, no offers of help from hungry, resentful, suspicious people, and they had used up the last of their money on overpriced inns. But it didn’t matter. Once they got here, to this hill farm and Carausias’s friends, everything would be all right.

  But now here they were, and there was nobody after all. It was just another betrayal. As never before the future seemed a blank, black, terrifying emptiness. Regina wrapped her arms over her belly and the growing, hungry life it contained.

  Carta sat beside her. “Are you all right?”

  “None of us is all right,” Regina said. “What a mess.”

  “Yes. What a mess,” Cartumandua said. “This farm must have been abandoned at least a year. Poor, foolish Carausias.”

  “There’s nothing for us here.”

  “But there is nowhere else to go, and we have no more money,” said Carta grimly. “It doesn’t seem such a bad location to me. There is water down there.” She pointed to a marshy area at the foot of the grassy hill, the thread of a sluggish river beyond. “The fields are overgrown but they have been worked before; they should not be difficult to plow. This hillside is a little away from the road. Perhaps we will not be such a target for the bacaudae.”

  “What are you talking about? Who is going to plow the fields? How will we pay them?”

  “Nobody will plow them for us,” Carta said doggedly. “ We will plow them.”

  Regina stared at her. “You are making up stories. We have nothing to eat now. We’ll be lucky to live through the night. And, if you haven’t noticed, it is the autumn. What crops will we grow in the winter? And besides — Carta, I don’t want to be a farmer.”

  “And I didn’t want to be a slave,” Carta said. “I survived that, and I will survive this. As will you.” She clambered to her feet and pulled Regina’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go and take a look at the buildings.”

  Reluctantly Regina followed.

  * * *

  The farm buildings were clustered around a square of churned-up mud. There were three barnlike structures, with neat rectangular plans of the Roman kind, and the remains of a roundhouse, a more primitive building with a great conical roof of blackened thatch, and walls of wattle and daub.

  Regina drifted toward the square-built structures, the most familiar. Once they must have been smart, bright buildings; she could see traces of whitewash on the walls and a few bright red tiles still clinging to the wooden slats of the roofs. But one had been burned out altogether, and the roofs of the others, all but stripped of tiles, had rotted through. She stepped through a doorway. The floor was littered with rubble and cracked by a flourishing community of weeds. Something scuttled away in the gloom.

  Carta pointed at the roundhouse. “We’d be better off in this.”

  R
egina wrinkled her nose. “In that mud pie? I can smell it from here. And look at that rotting thatch — there are animals living in it !”

  “But we have a better chance of repairing it,” Carta said. “Face it, Regina — how are we to bake roof tiles?”

  “We could get them replaced.”

  Carta laughed tiredly. “Oh, Regina — by whom? Where are the craftsmen? And how are we to pay them? … Regina, I know this is hard. But I don’t see anybody standing around waiting to help us, do you? If we don’t fix it ourselves — well, it won’t get fixed.”

  Regina rested a hand on her belly. Carta’s realism and doggedness somehow made things worse, not better.

  There was a call from the lower slopes of the hillside. Severus was returning, with something heavy and limp slung over his shoulder. Regina soon made out the iron stink of blood, and a deeper stench of rot. Grunting, Severus let his burden fall to the muddy ground. It was the carcass of a young deer. Its head had almost been severed from its body, presumably by Severus’s knife. Severus was sweating, and his tunic was stained deep with blood. “Got lucky,” he said. “Leg stuck in a trap. Already dying, I think. See?”

  The deer had been very young, Regina saw. Its horns were mere stubs, and its body small and lithe. But one of its legs dangled awkwardly, and a putrid smell rose from blackened flesh.

  Severus leaned over the limp corpse. With inefficient but brutal thrusts he dug his knife into the hip joint above the deer’s good hind leg. With some noisy sawing of cartilage and bone, he ripped the joint apart, and hung the limb over his shoulder. “We’ve got neighbors,” he said, pointing with his bloody knife. “I saw lights. A farmstead over that way, over the ridge. I’m going to see if they’ll trade.”