Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Hardly anything. It runs schools, and sells information for family trees.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  I hesitated. “I think it’s some kind of cult. That’s why it’s so secretive, why Rosa just — disappeared.”

  “A cult.” He thought about the word. “You mean that pejoratively, don’t you? What kind of cult, do you suppose?”

  I shrugged. “A cult of Mary. That’s what the name says.”

  “You are right, and you are wrong,” he said. “The group does have the form of a religious order, but it is an unusual one. The Vatican has had contacts with the Order since its inception. At times of crisis in Rome’s long history the Order and the Vatican have even worked together …

  “It’s certainly not a convent: children are born within its confines. Its focus isn’t on Mary, in a sense — not just on the mother, you see — but on the family. And in that sense it’s very Italian, of course. Italians aren’t like north Europeans, George. We’re a very — umm, local people. In England, young people leave home as soon as they can, for college, or work. Here, people stay at home. The family remains intact. It’s common to have several generations of adults under one roof, or at least living close by. There is a word — campanilismo — the sense of one’s loyalty to one’s campanile, the bell tower.”

  “You can’t generalize like that about a whole nation.”

  “Of course not,” he said easily. “But I believe you will need to think this way if you wish to understand your sister’s situation.”

  “This is what I’ll find in the Order?”

  “I’m telling you that the Order is like a family, but a family sixteen centuries deep. These are very close bonds, George. You will find your sister has exchanged one family for another — and she may not want to reverse that exchange.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  He spread those long pianist’s fingers on the table. “It’s your choice. But first let me show you my archaeological project. No, I insist.” He snapped his fingers; the waiter responded immediately.

  * * *

  It turned out his project concerned a small church called San Clemente, some minutes’ walk away, on the other side of the Colosseum. As a guest of Claudio’s I didn’t have to pay any entrance fee. Inside and out the church looked unprepossessing.

  “But,” said Claudio enthusiastically, “it is one of Rome’s best examples of a ‘layered’ church.” By which he meant one building laid down on top of another. He took me down through the layers. It was a fascinating, eerie experience.

  “You have an eighteenth-century facade, behind which is this twelfth-century basilica. Here is a rather remarkable mosaic of that period, showing the triumph of the Cross … But below all that we have a still earlier church, from the fourth century. I am working with some Dominican monks on the excavation of this layer.” Not that anybody was working here today. “And below that is a mithraeum.” This had probably originally been a town house of the imperial days, dedicated in the first century for use as a temple to the god Mithras, a secretive cult for men only. There was a faded fresco on one wall. It had been of the wife of an emperor, said Claudio, but retouched later to make it a portrait of the Madonna and Child. “And we believe there are layers yet to be unturned under that as well …”

  He smiled in the gloom. “Look around you, George. Consider the deep layers of history, the extended and changing usage, of this one small church alone; and consider how little we understand even of this patch of ground. Then remember you are in Rome, where everything is drenched in history, in continuity through change. And then think of the Order. Rather like the Vatican, the Order is woven into this fabric of history and humanity …”

  I was beginning to form an impression that this smooth clergyman was a lot less forthcoming than his appearance suggested. He was good at eating up time, at deflecting my questions, at probing into my personality, uttering vague forebodings and generating doubt: better at all that bullshit than putting himself on the line and taking responsibility to do anything. Maybe that’s a quality you need to get along in the Vatican, I thought; the Church hasn’t survived two thousand years by being proactive. But it wasn’t helping me.

  And it was more than that. It was a feeling I’d had when meeting the headmistress, even Gina, even Lou. Every time I tried to take a step closer to Rosa I felt as if I were pressing against an invisible, intangible barrier, a force field of words and looks and subtle body language. It was as if all these people had been trying to put me off the search — perhaps without even realizing they were doing it.

  But I’m a stubborn bugger if nothing else, and having come so far I wasn’t about to give up. And maybe the wine was making me snappy. I decided to challenge him. “You work for the Order, don’t you?”

  “I’ve had some dealings with it.”

  “You find it recruits,” I said rudely. I was guessing, but I hit a mark.

  He lost his smile. “If I perceive a person in need, and if through the Order I can meet that need—”

  “Will you get me that contact or not?”

  He nodded curtly. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send it to your hotel.”

  * * *

  When I got back to my room I booted up the Internet connection again. I found two more emails from Peter. In the first mail, to my surprise, he said he had booked a flight to Rome. He said he thought I needed help.

  “I think we’re up against a cult here, George. Some kind of weirdo mother-fixated Marian cult. And it’s nearly as old as the church itself. If the Vatican is siphoning funds they’re going to stonewall … Go back to your tame Jesuit,” he wrote. “Maybe he can get me into the Vatican Secret Archives. All Slan(t)ers know that the answers to most of the universe’s mysteries are to be found in there …” Well, maybe. I knew that Peter was of course following his own agenda — mine was just incidental to him — and I wondered if there was more to this sudden change of plan.

  The second of his emails was more thoughtful.

  “We’re so short-lived, George. The Empire is buried a long way down, so far down it defeats the capacity of life to measure it. The oldest recorded human lived about one hundred twenty years. So if you go just a little more than a century deep you would find no human who’s alive today — and yet you’re still just a twentieth of the way back to the emperors.

  “No mammal lives longer than humans, no elephant, no dog or horse. Your grandmother’s parrot might beat a century. The oldest insects are jewel beetles that die at thirty; the crocodiles might last to sixty. The oldest land animals of any kind are tortoises — Captain Cook gave one to the king of Tonga that supposedly lived one hundred eighty-eight years — and some mollusks, like the ocean quahog, a thick- shelled clam, can last a couple of hundred years. But that’s all. So if you go just two centuries deep into the abyss you leave behind all the living animals.

  “Deeper than that and there are only the plants. In the gardens of the villa of the Emperor Hadrian there is said to be a cypress tree that has lived a thousand years, but even that is only halfway back to Hadrian himself. Oh, there is a great redwood that is said to be seven thousand years old, and living bacteria found in the gut of a frozen mastodon were more than eleven thousand years old — but such wrinklies are rare. Everything else has since died as we do, George, the grass, the fungi, the bugs; we may as well all be mayflies …

  “Nothing living survives from the time of the emperors — not even vegetable memories. You are delving in deep time indeed, George. But you mustn’t let it frighten you.”

  A new message came in. From Claudio, it was a telephone number for the Order. In fact, said Claudio’s note, it was a direct line for my sister, for Rosa. My heart beat faster.

  Chapter 38

  It was in the year 667 that Totila came to Rome. He wore an iron collar around his neck, for he was a criminal who undertook this pilgrimage as expiation.

  Totila was a simple man, a farmer from southern Gaul. He
had not denied the charge against him, of stealing a little bread to feed his daughters’ swollen bellies. His crops had been ruined by floods and banditry, and he had had no choice. That didn’t make it any less of a sin, of course. But the bishop had been lenient; his mouthfuls of bread had won him only a flogging, which would probably leave no scars, and the great chore of this journey to the capital of the world.

  But in his whole life Totila had never walked more than half a day’s journey from the place he had been born. Across Europe, the calm of empire had been replaced by turbulence, and this was not an age for traveling. The journey was itself overwhelming, a jaunt into endless strangeness.

  And as he neared Rome itself, when he joined the flood of pilgrims who trampled along the weed- choked road that led to the city, and when he walked through the great arched gateway into the city itself, Totila felt as if his soul would spin out of his body in bewilderment.

  Rome was a city of hills, on which great buildings sprawled — palaces and temples, arches and columns. But even at the center, two centuries after the last of the western emperors, white marble was scorched by fire, many of the buildings lacked roofs, and he could see grass and weeds thrusting through the pavement, and ivy and vines clinging to crumbling stone. Away from the central area much of the city within the walls was demolished altogether, flattened and burned out, and given over to green. Cattle and goats wandered amid bits of masonry that poked through the grass.

  The many new churches, though, were fine and bright.

  He wandered to the Forum area. It was dense with stalls selling food and drink, and many, many Christian tokens and relics. And people were buying. Some must be pilgrims like himself — he saw iron rings around necks and arms, marking out fellow criminals — but others were well dressed and evidently wealthy.

  There was a blare of trumpets.

  Suddenly he found himself being shoved along by a great swarm of bodies. Confused, scared, he kept his hand over his chest where, inside his tunic, his leather purse dangled on its bit of rope, for he had heard of the criminality of the Romans. He strained to see over the heads of the crowd.

  A procession passed: a series of swarthy slaves, soldiers stripped to the waist with shield and trumpets, and a gilded sedan chair. In the dense Italian sunlight it was a dazzling, glittering vision, and Totila cast down his eyes.

  “You’re blessed,” a voice whispered in his ear.

  He turned, startled, to see a small dark man smiling at him. “Blessed?”

  “It’s not every pilgrim who gets to see the Emperor himself. After all,” the man said dryly, “the great Constans does not grace us with his presence very often, preferring the comforts of Constantinople, where there are no goats nibbling your legs, so I’m told …”

  These days Rome was once again under the sway of Constantinople, capital of the Empire in the east — much good it did anybody. Constans was staying in one of the old palace buildings on the Palatine, crumbled and roofless though he found it. But the Emperor had brought nothing to the city. On the contrary, he seemed intent on stripping it of such treasures as statues and marbles, and even the gilded bronze tiles on the roof of the Pantheon.

  There was a scattering of boos as the Emperor passed.

  “My name is Felix,” the strange man said to Totila. “And you look lost.”

  “Well …”

  As the crowd broke up, Felix took Totila’s arm. Totila let the man lead him away, lacking any better idea; he had to speak to somebody.

  Felix was about forty, simply dressed, but he seemed well fed, calm, composed. He spoke a basic Latin, heavily accented but easy to understand. It was hard to resist his air of command. Totila let Felix buy him a cup of wine and some bread.

  Felix eyed Totila’s collar. “You are here for a holy purpose,” he said solemnly.

  “Yes. I—”

  Felix held up his hand. “I’m no bishop to hear your sins. I’m your friend, Totila, a friend of all pilgrims. I want to help you find what you want, here in Rome, for it is a big and confusing place — and full of crooks if you don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  From somewhere Felix produced a scroll. “This is a guide to the most holy sites. It tells you what routes to follow, what to see …” The scroll looked expensively produced, and when Felix told him the price Totila demurred; it would empty his purse in a stroke.

  Felix’s eyes narrowed. “Very well. Then I will be your guide, sir pilgrim!”

  So, the rest of that day, Felix led Totila through Rome.

  * * *

  Everywhere they went there were reassuring crowds of pilgrims. Totila peered at the arrows that had pierced the body of Saint Sebastian, and the chains that had bound Saint Peter, and the grill on which Saint Laurence had been burned.

  It had been the initiative of Pope Gregory some decades before to send appeals throughout Europe to call pilgrims to Rome, the mother of the church; and they had come. The city had quickly organized itself to cater for the new industry, which had brought much-needed revenue.

  Totila shook his head when Felix brought him to a stall where he could have bought “martyrs’ bones,” a grisly collection of finger joints and toe bones. But he dropped a few coins in the bowls of half-starved mendicants, and made offerings at various shrines. He noticed that some of the worse-off mendicants were tended to by women — all young, all with pale gray eyes, dressed in distinctive white robes — who gave them food, and cleaned their wounds.

  Felix watched all this, and eyed Totila’s purse.

  At last, as the evening began to fall, Felix led Totila to the Greek quarter of the city where, he said, Totila would be able to find cheap lodgings.

  And in a dark alleyway, between two impossibly tall and crumbling tenement buildings, Felix produced a fine blade with which he slit open Totila’s purse, and pierced Totila’s belly for good measure.

  As Totila slumped to the filth-strewn ground, Felix counted the coins in his palm and snorted. “Hardly worth my trouble.”

  Totila gasped, “I’m sorry.”

  Felix looked down, surprised, and laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault.” And he walked away, into the gathering gloom.

  * * *

  Totila lay in the stench of ordure and urine, unable to move. He kept his hands clamped over his belly,

  but he could feel the blood seeping through his fingers.

  Somebody was here, standing before him. It was a woman in a white, purple-edged robe. She was one of those who tended the poor. She knelt in the dirt, pulled his hands away from his side, and inspected his wound. “Don’t try to move,” she said.

  “This is a holy place to die, here in Rome.”

  “There is no good place to die,” she murmured. “Not like this.” She had pale gray eyes, he saw, the gray of cloud.

  Having bound him up, she managed to get him to his feet and took him to an inn. She left him money, in a new leather purse.

  He stayed two nights.

  When he was able to walk, he approached the innkeeper with some trepidation, for he wasn’t sure he had the funds to pay for his lodging. But he found that the account had already been settled.

  Before he left Rome, Totila tried to find the woman who had helped him. But though everybody knew of the women in white, and of their charitable work for the helpless poor and victims of accident and crime — some called them angels, others virgins — nobody knew where they could be found. They seemed to melt out of the rubble of Rome by day, and disappear by night, like ghosts of a different past.

  Chapter 39

  On the day I was due to meet Rosa I woke early, having passed a nervous, restless night.

  Before breakfast I crept downstairs, tiptoed past the concierges, and walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The dawn wasn’t far advanced, and the traffic was light. Around me was the old Roman Forum, nestling in the timeless safety of its valley, and the Palatine and Capitoline Hills bristled with the imper
ial palaces and other mighty buildings of later antiquity.

  In my week in Rome, I’d walked and walked, from the Vatican in the west to the Appian Way in the south, along the banks of the Tiber, and around great stretches of the Aurelian Wall. Like Edinburgh or San Francisco, Rome was a city of hills — that was the first thing that struck you — you really couldn’t walk far without heading either uphill or down, and after a few days my thighs and calves felt as hard as a soccer player’s.

  But what was unlike any city I’d visited before was the sense of time here.

  This place had been in continuous occupation since the Iron Age. It was as if time were untethered here, and great reefs of history kept sticking up into modern times, mounds of past as enduring as the ancient hills themselves.

  Rome was starting to intimidate me, just as Peter had warned. It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in when meeting my long-lost sister.

  * * *

  I’d arranged to meet Rosa in a little coffee bar off the Appian Way, which was where, in our brief, terse phone call, she’d said she worked. The Way is an ancient road that leads south from a gateway on the Aurelian Wall. It was a fine morning and I decided to walk, to clear my head and get my blood pumping.

  But I soon regretted the decision. The road was narrow, in long stretches without pavement at all, and the traffic was as disrespectful here as in the rest of the city. But perhaps it had been so for two thousand years, I thought; I shouldn’t complain.

  I survived a terrifying jog through a narrow tunnel beneath a road and rail bridge, and arrived at a junction close to a little church called Domine Quo Vadis. Across the street was a coffee bar.

  And there, sitting at a pavement table, was an elegant woman in her forties. She wore a cream trouser suit. She sat easily, with her legs folded, a coffee cup before her, a cell phone in one hand. As I crossed the road she turned off the phone. She left it on the table, though, where it sat throughout our meeting, a mute reminder of her connections to another world.