Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

I felt confused, baffled, battered by astounding impressions. But, odd though it seems, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve always been drawn to order, regularity — not control, necessarily, but calm. And this place, for all its unfamiliarity and surface strangeness, was at heart a deep well of calm; I could sense that immediately.

What I felt was: I belong here.

Rosa brought me to a kind of balcony. It was a rare viewpoint offering a cutaway view of at least some of the Crypt, like looking down into a shopping mall from a top level. Rosa pointed out a row of open- roofed chambers lined with bunk beds: dormitories. Farther away was a blocky structure that was a hospital, she said. People were everywhere I looked, moving, working, interacting with each other in little knots.

“There must be—” I waved a hand at the teeming masses below. “ — a control center. Some kind of management structure.”

“No control center. No bridge on this great underground submarine.” Rosa was watching my face. “How do you feel now? Are you thinking about all the rock over your head? Do you feel shut in, lost?”

“I’m in an underground city, by God,” I said. “I have to keep reminding myself that all this is dug into the ground under a Roman suburb … You know, I still haven’t got you in focus, Rosa.”

She wasn’t fazed. “But the Order is me. I told you, it’s my family — and yours. If you can’t see that, you can’t see anything about me.” She waved her hand. “George, do you blame our parents, Father, for my being sent away — for this peculiar gap in your life?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure.”

“ I don’t blame them,” she said definitely. “They did what they had to do to enable the family to survive. I understand that now, and I think I understood it even as a child.” I wondered if that could be true. “And besides, look around you. I’ve hardly suffered by being sent here.”

Suddenly I felt resentful. I hadn’t come here to see this vast subterranean city, after all, but her . And she seemed barely perturbed by my presence. This wasn’t enough of a reaction for me, emotionally. I wanted to break down her complacency — to make her see me .

Harm may not have come to her. But harm has come to me, I thought.

I had no idea how long I had been down there. At last, something prompted me to get out of there.

Rosa didn’t protest. She escorted me back along that long corridor, back to the anteroom, and then up to the Catacombs. We climbed alone, in the perpetual darkness, up the levels, before ascending that last staircase and emerging from the Catacomb’s gloomy entrance.

It was dark, I saw, shocked. I must have been in the great pit in the ground for six, seven, eight hours. The place was deserted, the refreshment stalls shut up for the night. But the air was fresh, and smelled of the lemon trees in the scrubby parkland. I breathed deep, trying to clear my head of that leonine underground tang.

But standing there alone, out of the Crypt, I felt bereft.

I walked out of the Catacomb compound and began searching for a cab. When I found one, a couple of blocks away, I recoiled from the driver’s face — dark, eyes deep brown — a perfectly normal, even handsome human face, but not like mine .

Rosa had let me go gracefully enough when I asked to leave. It was only later, thinking over the day, that I understood that she had decided — during our very first meeting at that coffee bar, as I tried to come to terms with suddenly meeting my sister again for the first time since childhood — to try to recruit me into the Order. Her first instinct had been to exclude me; after meeting me she had decided I should somehow be inducted. And everything she had shown me, everything she had done and said from that moment on, had been designed with that intent in mind. It had nothing to do with me at all.

Francesca walked with her companion through the civitas Leonina .

Leo Frangipani wanted to tell Francesca about the Pope’s plans for a Holy Year, to be held in the forthcoming year 1300. “It’s going to be a marvel,” he said. “They are planning how to display the holy relics to maximize the revenue. It’s said that the priests are already practicing with the rakes they will use to drag in the money thrown by the crowds onto their altars …” He was watching her. “Ah, you disapprove! These fishers of the endless river of the gullible and faithful that washes through Rome—”

“Not at all,” she said. “Anybody would disapprove of thievery. But the pilgrims believe their money is well spent, and if it goes to preserve Rome, mother of the world, then surely they are right.”

“Perhaps so. I do know that you ladies in white prefer to give your money away … I’ll never understand how you survive.”

But survive the Order did, after more than eight centuries.

The civitas Leonina was a city within a city, centered on the Vatican Hill, where stood Constantine’s vast and crumbling basilica, the wheel hub of Christianity. The area was a huddle of monasteries, lodging houses, churches, oratories, taverns, cells for hermits, even an orphanage and a poorhouse, the latter of which was funded, discreetly, by the Order.

There were many services here for the pilgrims — or, depending which way you looked at it, plenty of people with ambitions to separate pilgrims from their money. The cobblers would repair soles worn out from walking, butchers, fishmongers, and fruiterers would feed your body, and farmers would sell you straw for your bedding, some of it still caked with dung. And then there were the vendors of linen strips that had been in contact with the tomb of one martyr, and dried flowers said to have grown over the grave of another, and you could buy candles, relics, rosaries, icons, and vials of holy water and oil. Guides and beggars wandered everywhere, looking for the gullible. Even under the walls of Constantine’s basilica itself moneylenders thronged and called, ringing coins on the tops of their tables.

But it was a thriving place; for every vendor there must have been ten potential purchasers — and probably as many criminals, Francesca thought uneasily.

She knew she stood out from the crowd. Though she had eschewed the Order’s habitual white robes for a simple dress of brown-dyed wool, she wore a thick layer of cream and unguent on her face to protect her skin from the unaccustomed sun, and spectacles made of blue glass protected eyes used to candlelight and oil lamps. She looked different , and therefore was no doubt a target for beggars and thieves alike.

She had no fear, for with her was a Frangipani: a tall, imposing, well-dressed young man with a very visible sword at his waist, a scion of one of the city’s wealthier families. But to Francesca, used to the calm of the Crypt’s underground cloisters, this was a crowded, dirty, disturbing place.

And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity. Just as in ages past they had no doubt been drawn to the Colosseum, or the triumphs of the Caesars — other contagious ideas, all now vanished like the dew.

But she was pious, and the Order itself was of course deeply Christian; she felt dismayed to be formulating such doubts, and did her best to put them out of her mind.

As they climbed up out of the residential area toward the higher ground of the ancient hills, Francesca got a broader view of the city. She could see how small and cramped the densely populated area was, set within the area called the disabitato , the great expanse of scrubland and farms that occupied the rest of the space within the old walls. Here and there monuments of the imperial age loomed out of the green, but many of them had been badly damaged by time, demolished by siege weapons, or the marble broken up and burned for lime.