Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“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 me, 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.