Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  In broken phrases he sketched his beliefs. The Order was an anthill, a mole rat colony, a termite mound, he told her. It was not a human society. “Your handful of mamme-nonne, pumping out infants. Your sterile sisters—”

  Rosa frowned. “Celibacy is common in Catholic orders.”

  “Not celibate. Sterile, ” he hissed.

  She listened to his arguments, her face working.

  “And you can’t argue with the reality of Lucia,” he said. “Suppose she walked into a medical office in Manchester. The doctor would think Lucia was extraordinary — and so would you, if not for the fact that you grew up here. You have all been down in this hole for a long time. Time enough for adaptation, selection — evolution, Rosa.”

  Lucia looked up at me. “What’s he saying? If I am not human, what am I?”

  Rosa touched her hands. “Hush, child. It’s all right …” She paced around, her heels clicking softly on the rock floor. I had no real idea what was going through her mind.

  “Suppose it’s true,” she said suddenly. “It’s hard to get my head around this nonsense — but suppose I concede that you’re right. That we have formed a — a sort of self-organizing collective here. Even that, in some way, after all these centuries, we have somehow diverged from the common human stock.”

  “You’re waking up,” Peter said.

  She snapped, “I don’t think you are in any position to patronize me. Let’s remember that you are the nutcase stuck in a hole in the wall with Semtex stuck up his arse.”

  “Go on, Rosa,” I said quickly. “Suppose it’s true. Then what?”

  “Then—” She raised her hands, lifted her head to the levels hidden above us, the great underground city. “If this is a new way, maybe it’s a better way. We have found a way to run a society, safely and healthily, with population densities orders of magnitude higher than anything else humans have hit on. What is the purpose of any human society? It is surely to provide a system in which as many people as possible can live out lives as long and healthy and happy and peaceful as possible. Wouldn’t it be better for humankind, and this whole crowded planet, if everyone lived peaceably together as they do here?”

  “Little drone, you know too much,” he whispered.

  She walked boldly up to the cleft. “Show your face, McLachlan.”

  He switched on his torch. His face, eerily underlit, hovered in the shadows, his expression unreadable.

  Rosa said, “Suppose you’re right. Suppose we are a new form — your word was Coalescents.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then shouldn’t you accept us for what we are?” She spread her arms. “What have you found, here in this cave under the Appian Way? Aren’t we Homo superior ?”

  He clicked off his torch; his face disappeared into the dark.

  Rosa had an intense expression, almost a look of triumph.

  I asked, “Did you believe all that?”

  She glanced at me. “Not a word. I just want him out of there.” She was formidable indeed, I realized; I felt perversely proud.

  Peter whispered again, from the dark. “George, she must have already figured some of this out for herself. Even if she didn’t want to face it. I just put it into words for her. She knew it all the time. Really, she’s too smart for the hive, for her own good.”

  “But she’s listening,” I said quickly. “Maybe we should take it easy. Don’t do anything destructive. We’ll get the Order to open up, bring in the health professionals, the social workers …”

  “There’s no time for that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “No time …” He fell silent, breathing heavily.

  I tiptoed away. “I think he’s tiring,” I said to Rosa.

  “Then,” she said, “before he triggers his dead man’s switch by falling asleep, I think you have a decision to make.”

  “ I have a decision?”

  “I can’t say any more. But perhaps McLachlan will listen to you. You can encourage him to blow us all up. You can persuade him to walk away.” Of course she was right, I saw, horrified; the decision had to be mine. “Just remember,” she said coldly, “that there is a place for you here. Even now, even after you brought this lunatic into our Crypt. This can be your home, too. If you do anything to harm us, then you will lose that choice, too.”

  I seemed to smell the pounds of Semtex Peter had lodged somewhere in the rock, sense the great weight of the subterranean city around me, the thousands of lives it contained.

  Behind us Lucia sat quietly on her bench, her baby on her lap; her gaze was fixed on its face, as if she wanted to shut us out, a malevolent world that wanted to use and control her and her child, even those of us motivated to save her — and I couldn’t blame her.

  * * *

  Now it was my turn to do some pacing. I tried to ignore the hammering of my heart, the remote stink of the Crypt, and to think clearly.

  Did I agree with Peter?

  Peter’s theorizing about hives and eusociality was all very well. But the reality of the Crypt, which I felt in my blood, was a good deal warmer than his hostile analysis, a lot more welcoming. And I wasn’t about to argue with Rosa about the Order’s history, and the work it had done over centuries. Whatever Peter said, I felt I had no more right to close that down than to shut down the Vatican.

  And then there was Homo superior.

  I had seen for myself that Peter’s “Coalescents” were not like other humans. Perhaps they were a more advanced form; perhaps Rosa was right that we would need the warm, fecund discipline of Order living to survive a difficult future on a crowded Earth. In which case, what right did I have to make decisions about their future? … I felt I was losing touch with the world. I drew on the thick, musty air, suddenly longing for a fresh blast of cool oxygen-rich topside atmosphere to clear my head. I was one man, flawed, vulnerable, mortal, woefully ignorant, and these issues escalated above me on every scale. How could I possibly make a decision like this?

  For some reason I thought of Linda, my ex-wife. She had always had a lot more common sense than I did. What would Linda say, if she was here?

  Look around you, George.

  Lucia looked up at me, her eyes full of bewilderment, her body battered by childbirth, her face prematurely lined with pain.

  Cut the bullshit. Remember what you said to that kid Daniel: you admired him because he had responded to this wretched child Lucia on a human level. You were as pompous as always, but you were right. Well, look at Lucia now, George; look at her with that scrap of a baby. I wouldn’t trust you to adjudicate on the future of humankind. And I’m not interested in your self-pitying whinging about whether you’ll die childless or not. But you are a fully functioning human being. Act that way …

  Of course. It was obvious.

  I walked up to Rosa, and said as softly as I could, “Here’s the deal. I’ll help you disarm Peter. But you have to open this place up. Connect with the world. I think Lucia has suffered, and if I can stop that I will.”

  She glared at me; her anger was taking over. “What right have you to make such pronouncements? You’re a man, George, and so is that murderous fool in the rock. This is a place built by and for women. Who are you to lecture us on our humanity?”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  Gnawing her lip, she studied my face. Then she nodded curtly.

  Together, we crossed to Peter’s cleft in the rock. But things didn’t go as planned.

  * * *

  “I couldn’t hear you,” Peter whispered. “But I could see you. You’ve come to some kind of deal, haven’t you, George? A deal that is bound to preserve the hive.” He sighed, sounding desolate. “I suppose I knew this would happen. But I can’t let you do this. I shouldn’t have let you talk about negotiating at all. I’m weak, I suppose.”

  “Why can’t we talk?…”

  “It has to stop here, or it never will. Because the hive is ready to break out. Think about it. Hives need raw material — drones, lots o
f them, living in conditions of high population densities, and highly interconnected. Until the modern era, less than one human in thirty lived in a community of more than five thousand people. Today more than half the world’s population lives in an urban environment. And we are more interconnected than ever before.”

  “What are you saying, Peter?”

  “When the breakout comes it will be a phase transition — all at once — the world will transform, as water turns to ice, as a field of wildflowers suddenly blooms in the spring. In its way it will be beautiful. But it’s an end point for us. There will be new gods on Earth: mindless gods, a pointless transcendence. From now on the story of the planet will not be of humanity, but of the hive …”

  “Peter.” The situation was rapidly slipping away from me. “If you’ll just come out of there—”

  “You know why you’re prepared to betray me, to save the Order? Because you’re part of the hive, too. George, you’re just another drone — remote from the center, yes, but a drone nonetheless. Perhaps you always were. And the tragedy is, you don’t even know it, do you?”

  I felt as if the cave, the giant, densely peopled superstructure of the Crypt, was rotating around me. Was it possible I really had somehow been sucked into some emergent superorganism — was it possible that my decision now was being taken, not in my or Peter’s or Lucia’s interests, but in the mindless interests of the hive itself? If so — how could I know ? Again I longed for oxygen.

  “I can’t think through that, Peter. I’m going to follow my instinct. What else can I do?”

  “Nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing at all. But, you see, I’m the only free mind in this whole damn place. Good-bye, George.”

  “Peter!”

  I heard a click.

  And then the floor lurched.

  * * *

  I clattered into one wall, an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Some of the lights failed; I heard a bulb smash with a remote tinkle. There was a remote rumbling, as if an immense truck was passing by.

  There was a second’s respite. I saw Lucia on the ground. She was sheltering her baby. They were both gray with dust.

  Then rock fragments started hailing down from the ceiling, heavy, sharp-edged. I pushed myself away from the wall, crawled over to Lucia, and threw myself over her and the infant. I was lucky; I was hit, but by nothing large enough to hurt.

  The rumbling passed. The rock bits stopped falling. Gingerly I moved away from Lucia. We were both gray with dust, and her eyes were wide — shock, perhaps — but she and the baby seemed unhurt.

  I heard running footsteps, shouts. Torchlight flickered in the dimly lit corridor.

  Rosa was at the cleft in the rock, pulling away rubble with her bare hands. I could see a hand, a single hand, protruding from beneath the debris. It was bloody, and gray dust clung to the dripping crimson.

  I ran over. My battered legs and back were sore, my lungs and chest hurt from where I had been thrown against the wall. But I dragged at the rock. Soon my fingers were aching, the nails broken.

  Rosa, meanwhile, had taken a pulse from that protruding hand. She took my arm and pulled me away. “George, forget it. There’s nothing we can do.”

  I slowed, jerkily, as if my energy was draining. I let the last handful of rubble drop to the floor.

  I took Peter’s hand. It was still warm, but it was inert, and I could feel how it dangled awkwardly. I felt inexpressibly sad. “Peter, Peter,” I whispered. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

  Running footsteps closed on us. Hive workers, of course, drones, most of them women, all of them dressed in dust-covered smocks. Faces swam before me in the uncertain light, gray eyes troubled. I grabbed Lucia’s hand, and she clung to me just as hard. “Go,” I shouted at the drones. “Get out. There may be more falls. Take the stairs. Go, go …”

  The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.

  The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed partition walls, smashed glass. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where the mamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pushing beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.

  I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.

  It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.

  Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.

  And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.

  Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter’s crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the mass were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of the mamme-nonne. Nobody was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling mass, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.

  FOUR

  Chapter 49

  As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.

  Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.

  Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter’s spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice — the last waves of a frozen ocean — and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.

  Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that shielded much of the Galaxy’s true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was — though surely Earth’s sun would be invisible from here.

  Once, all of humanity and
all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had shivered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.

  His heart swelled with pride.

  Captain Dower called, “Heads up.”

  Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminishing to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.

  Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. “That’s our destination. First impressions — you, Abil?”

  Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. “Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak—”

  “It isn’t big enough,” came a voice from the darkness. “I mean, a crater that size ought to be cup-shaped, like a scoop out of the ice. You only get rim mountains and splash-back central peaks with much larger craters. And anyhow I haven’t seen any other craters here. This planet is a sunless rogue. Impacts must be rare, if you wander around in interstellar space.”

  That had been Denh. She was in Abil’s unit, and Abil needed to get back in the loop.

  “So,” he said, “what do you think it is, smart-ass?”

  “That peak is tectonic,” Denh said. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like granite to me.”

  Dower nodded. “And the rim feature?”

  “… I can’t explain that, sir.”