Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  When I reached the table she smiled — bright, white teeth — and stood up. She had expensive-looking sunglasses pushed up onto her brushed-back mouse-blond hair, not a streak of gray, and her eyes were as pale and smoky as my mother’s had been. “George, George …” It turned out I was a little taller than her, so I had to lean to let her kiss me. She buffed my cheeks, as if we were two London PRs on a routine business meeting.

  But this close to her, there was something in her smell — a sweet milkiness under the cosmetics, the smell of home perhaps — that made me, briefly, want to melt. Yes, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl in bright, blurry kid-memory images I’d long lost. I found myself struggling for composure.

  She pulled back and regarded me, her face so like my own, her expression cool. “Please.” She waved me to a seat. With effortless ease she called the waiter, and I ordered a cappuccino.

  “So, after all this time,” I said gruffly.

  She shrugged. “The situation is not of our making.”

  “I know. But it’s still damn odd.”

  She began talking, brightly, of the church over the road. “Have you had time to see it? Domine quo vadis — ’Lord, where are you going?’ Peter had escaped from prison in Rome, and he met Jesus here and asked Him that question. Jesus replied, ‘To let myself be crucified a second time.’ He left His footprints in the road. You can see them inside the church. But if they are genuine, Christ had big feet …” She laughed.

  She talked easily, fluently, her voice well modulated: neutrally accented English, perhaps the slightest Italian singsong. She looked at ease here. She looked Italian. Whereas I felt shabby and out of place.

  The coffee arrived, which gave me a little cover.

  “I don’t know what to say. What do we do, swap life stories?”

  She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. “Just relax. I’m sure we will work it out.”

  The sudden, unexpected touch oddly shocked me. “I don’t think I have much more to tell you anyhow,” I said. As a preliminary to our meeting I had sent her a long email from my hotel room.

  “You told me about your past,” she said. “But not your future.”

  “That’s a little more cloudy. I’ve come to a fork in the road, I think.”

  “Because of Father’s death?”

  Not Dad but Father. “I think things had been building up anyhow. I need a change.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  With that slight sharpness, she looked at me, her smile more empty. “And in return for your biography, you expect mine?”

  “You’re my sister. I came all this way to meet you. Yes, I want to know what’s become of you. You sell family trees,” I said. “That’s pretty much all I know about you.”

  She smiled. “That and the fact that I belong to a weirdo woo-woo cult … Don’t worry; I know what people think of us. All right.” In brisk, almost rehearsed phrases, she sketched her career for me, her life.

  She seemed to be a kind of account manager, dealing with services and products for major clients — not individuals, but companies, universities, even churches and governments. After being sent over here by our father, she had been put through schooling good enough to get her to a baccalaureate. She hadn’t gone away to university, but, staying within the Order, had studied history and business administration to degree level. Then she had gone to work for the family firm, so to speak.

  Even after this smooth patter she stayed out of focus. Thinking over what she had said, I found I couldn’t visualize her school, or even the kind of social conditions she had been brought up in — not a family, that was for sure.

  She began to talk about the Order’s business. “Yes, we sell genealogy information. I brought some stuff for you to see …” She dug some promotional literature out of her bag: glossy, well produced. Tracing ancestry was one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet, she told me. “We’re even offering a DNA matching service,” she said. “If you’re of British ancestry, say, you’ll soon be able to tell whether you are of ancient stock, or came over with the Romans, or the Saxons, or the Vikings.

  “There is a finite genealogical universe out there. Only a finite number of human beings have ever existed, and each of them had a mother and father, links to the great chain of descent. We see no limit in principle as to the information we may one day retrieve …” She was quite evangelical as she described all this. It was more than just a product to her, I saw.

  But I felt as if she were pitching a sale. I didn’t know how brother and sister were supposed to behave, after a forty-year separation. It isn’t a situation you come across every day. But for sure it wasn’t talking about DNA databases and high-speed Internet access options.

  Actually, as she talked, she reminded me of Gina. Something about her cold competence, her distance from me.

  I put aside the brochures. “You’re telling me about genealogy,” I said. “Not you.”

  She sat back. “Then what do you want to know?”

  “You never came home.”

  She nodded. “But this is home, George. This is family, for me.”

  “It may feel like that, but—”

  “No.” Again she covered my hand, shockingly casual. “You don’t understand. The Order is family — our family. That’s why Father was happy to send me here.” And she reminded me of our story of the ancient past, of Regina, who had survived the collapse of Britain, and who had eventually come to Rome — where she had helped found the Order.

  I was tired of this story. “That’s just a family legend,” I said. “Nobody can trace back to the Romans …”

  “ We can.” She grinned, almost playfully. “We keep records, George. That’s the one thing we do better than anything else. Our huge bank of historical data is the spine on which we have built our genealogy business. George, it’s true about Regina. There has been a continuous thread of descent, from Regina’s day to this, as the Order has survived. But that central line of family persists. And it’s our family.

  “Maybe now you can see why I stayed here.” Again she touched me, unexpectedly. She slid one hand under my palm, and let the other rest on top, massaging the webbing between my thumb and forefinger with the ball of her thumb. It was extraordinarily intimate — not sexual — compelling, oddly confining. She said, “So that’s why you don’t need to rescue me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She laughed. “Come on, George. Isn’t that why you’re really here? To save me from my miserable exile. Perhaps on some level you were expecting to find the little girl you last saw, all those years ago. And I’ve somehow disappointed you by turning out to be a grown woman, with a life of her own, and capable of making her own choices. I don’t need saving, as you can see.”

  I said angrily, “Okay. Maybe I’m a patronizing dope with no imagination. But I’m here, Rosa.”

  She surprised me by standing up. “But we each have our own lives, George. Well, that’s that.” She began extracting money from a small billfold. “Let me treat you,” she said. “I insist.”

  I stood uncertainly. I hadn’t been in control of any of this conversation, I realized, from first to last. “Is that it?”

  “We must stay in touch. Isn’t email marvelous? How long are you in Rome?—”

  “Rosa, for Christ’s sake.” I struggled briefly for control. “Don’t we have any more to say to each other? After all this time?”

  She hesitated. “You know, some said I shouldn’t see you.”

  “Some who?”

  “People in the Order.”

  “You told them about me?”

  “We tell each other everything.”

  “Why shouldn’t you have met me?”

  “Because you might be a threat,” she said simply. Her gaze was fixed on me. “But now I’ve met you I’m not so sure.”

  I had the impression she was recalculating.

  She had felt impelled to go through with the meeting with m
e, to give me the minimum contact required to send me away, and keep me away. But now something — my persistence, maybe my distress — was making her rethink that plan. I know that’s a cold analysis of her thinking. But I really didn’t believe, even then, that whatever new plans she was drawing up had anything to do with compassion.

  She made an abrupt about-face. “Maybe you’re right. It shouldn’t end here. As you said, you came all this way, did all that detective work, for me.” Her eyes narrowed, and I thought she was making a decision. “Tell you what. Perhaps you’d like to see where I work, and live. What do you think?” She dropped her sunglasses onto her nose, businesslike.

  She was following her own peculiar agenda, I saw. I really didn’t know what she wanted of me. But it was a chance to spend a little more time with her. What else could I do but accept?

  And so she took me to the Catacombs.

  * * *

  The entrance wasn’t far away. Aboveground there was little to see: a very small chapel, a couple of souvenir and refreshment stalls, a ticket booth, all set in a little scruffy parkland. It was lunchtime and the public areas were locked up, the ticket booth windows covered with CHIUSO notices: this was Rome, after all. But a few bewildered-looking tourists lingered by the refreshment stalls, buying overpriced hot dogs and bottled water.

  They watched enviously as Rosa led me to a small stone block, the size and shape of Doctor Who ’s TARDIS. It had a heavy green door, which she opened with a swipe card. This was the public entrance to the Catacombs of Agrippina, Rosa told me. She palmed a switch, and electric light flooded down from strip lights set in the ceiling.

  Steps cut down into the dark. Rosa led the way, her heeled shoes clattering on the worn stone steps. When I pulled the door closed after me, it locked automatically. It immediately felt colder. It was a creepy experience, even in the electric light.

  At the bottom of the steps I found myself in a gallery. It was narrow enough for me to reach out and touch both walls, and it was tall, perhaps twenty-five feet high, with an arched roof. The walls were notched, with box-shaped cavities cut deep into them. The light was dim, the electric lamps sparsely scattered. There was more light, in fact, coming from the skylight trenches cut down from the surface.

  Rosa gave me the guided tour. “People say they’ve never heard of a Saint Agrippina. There never was one, so far as we know. She was probably just a well-off local matron, sympathetic to the Christians’ cause, who gave them the use of her land …”

  Burials had given the early Christian community here a problem. Space was always at a premium in Rome. Because of their beliefs the Christians were reluctant to cremate, but land was expensive, even this far out of town. So they began to dig.

  “The rock here is tufa,” Rosa said. “Soft, volcanic. It’s easy to work, and it hardens when exposed to the air. And the Romans were used to working underground anyhow. They would dig sewers, waterworks, underground passages for servants to cross from one side of a great villa to another. Many houses would even have a cryptoporticus, an underground recreation area. So when they needed a place to bury their dead the Christians dug, and dug …”

  We descended another steep staircase and found ourselves in yet another gallery that stretched on out of sight. The corridors branched, one after another, and the walls were all cut with those deep notches.

  I was already thoroughly lost, disoriented. We were alone, and the only sounds were our footsteps and Rosa’s gentle voice, softly echoing. The temperature had settled to a mild chill. Around me those open notches gaped like black mouths — and I had no doubt what they had once held. It was an eerie experience.

  “The oldest levels are the highest,” she said. “Which makes sense if you think about it. They just kept digging, down and down. They would cut out family vaults, called cubicula, and these niches are called loculi.”

  “Niches for the bodies,” I said, my throat hoarse.

  “Yes. Wrapped in linen, or perhaps embalmed. Even popes were buried in the Catacombs. But many of the tombs were pillaged in later centuries. Bones were taken away by desecrators, or by seekers of holy relics, or for reburial. Still, some undisturbed tombs were rediscovered over the last few centuries — perhaps there are more still to find. George, this Catacomb alone encompasses fifteen miles, over four levels. And it is estimated that in all the Catacombs some half a million people were buried, over the centuries.”

  Like so many numbers associated with ancient Rome, it was a stunning, impossible figure.

  “Look.” She pointed to symbols, painted faintly on the walls. The light was kept low to protect the paintwork, it turned out. “Covert Christian symbols, from the days of repression and persecution. The fish you will recognize. The dove, and here the olive branch, symbolizes peace. The anchor implies resurrection. Oh, here is the famous chi-rho, formed of the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name.” It looked like the letters P and X superimposed. “And here—” Carved above one of the loculi, it was like the simple fish symbol, but two fish touched, mouth to mouth, so that it was almost like an infinity.

  “What’s that?”

  “The symbol of the Order.” I recognized it from my Internet search. She was studying me. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m in a two-thousand-year-old graveyard. A little freaked out.”

  “You aren’t worried by the enclosure? The narrow walls, the depth — you don’t feel claustrophobic?”

  I thought about that. “No.”

  “And if I told you I have more to show you yet — that we will go much deeper …”

  “Are you setting me some kind of test, Rosa?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am. Something about the way we talked in the cafй … You’ve reacted well so far, and I think you’re ready to see more.” She held out her hand. “Will you come? You’re free to go, whenever you like.”

  By now I had come to distrust her obviously calculated touching, the overwhelming feelings it evoked in me. But I took her hand again. “What next — open sesame?”

  “Something like that.”

  We were standing before an innocent-looking niche, empty as the others. It had a two-fish symbol carved over it. Now, to my surprise, Rosa dug out a swipe card and passed it into a slot hidden inside the stone, up behind the fish. I glimpsed a red light, heard the unexpected humming of electronic gear.

  And then, with a stony grind, a kind of trapdoor opened up beneath me — and bright light flooded up into the dusty air. I leaned forward to see. There was another staircase, but this was of polished metal, and it led down to a floor of gleaming tiles.

  There was a whole room down there — a modern office, I saw. I glimpsed a desk, a girl behind it in a simple white smock, peering up at us. Fluorescent light glared up gray-white but dazzling bright after the gloom of the Catacomb. I was amazed — even stunned. It was the last thing I’d have expected to see; it was hard to believe it was real.

  Rosa was grinning. “Welcome to my underground lair, Austin Powers.”

  “Not funny,” I snapped.

  “Oh, lighten up.” She turned and descended. I followed.

  And so I entered the Crypt for the first time.

  * * *

  The receptionist sat behind her wide marble desk, smiling at us. I glimpsed a winking rack of small TV monitors behind the surface of the desk, and one red-eyed camera peered directly at me from a wall. It was all quite normal, electric bright, certainly not as chill as the Catacombs. But there was no daylight, of course, not a scrap; it reminded me how far I was underground.

  “We don’t use this entrance much,” said Rosa. “There are many ways in, from our shops and offices on the surface — most of them in the suburbs to the west of the Appian Way — though we have a couple of routes that lead to the center of the city. But I wanted to bring you this way. It is the oldest.” She smiled, almost mischievously. “I suppose I wanted to put on a show … Are you okay?”

  I simply had no idea what to expect. “I’ve never been i
n a convent before,” I said.

  “You aren’t in one now. Come on.”

  We walked toward the wall of the anteroom. Automatic doors slid out of sight. We stepped into a corridor, just as brightly lit as the anteroom.

  The corridor curved out of sight. It was my first impression of the true size of the place. For sure it was a hell of a lot bigger than the anteroom.

  And the corridor was full of people: a great murmuring crowd, deep underground.

  There must have been hundreds, just in that first glimpse. The human traffic in that corridor was as dense as Oxford Circus on a summer Saturday, or Times Square at New Year. Most of them were women. Many were in street clothes, but some wore a kind of uniform, a simple white dress or trouser suit with sewn-in threads of purple. They walked in neat files, passing in and out of the rooms that branched off the corridor.

  Then there was the smell : not an unpleasant smell, not a locker-room stink, but there was something animal in the air, something potent. The air was hot, humid, and noisy; I found myself breathing hard, dragging for breath.

  All this concealed far underground, under that sleepy tourist-trap park.

  Nobody seemed aware of anything strange, nobody but me. It was all I could do to keep from staggering back, into the relative calm of the anteroom.

  Rosa was leaning toward me. “Don’t let it get to you. I know how you feel. But it’s always like this here. Come on …” Holding my hand, she pulled me forward, and we waded into the streams of people.

  Suddenly I was surrounded by faces, all young, many smiling, few showing curiosity at this big sweating Englishman who had been thrust in among them. They all seemed to be talking, and the hubbub battered me, like a wind. But they parted around us, accepted us into the flow.