Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

He shrugged. “Sounds inhuman. I don’t know how you ought to behave when your long-lost brother turns up out of the blue, but surely it’s not like that.”

I nodded. “What do you think we’re dealing with?”

“A cult. A creepy fringe-Catholic cult. I think your sister has been indoctrinated. No wonder she reacted like a robot.”

I forced a smile. “If you’re thinking of deprogramming her, forget it. She says she doesn’t need saving.”

“Well, she would say that.” More gently he said, “And after forty years, and after being taken at such a young age, there’s probably very little left of your sister anyhow.” He sighed. “Your dad was a good friend of mine. But he had a lot to answer for.”

“What about the Order?”

“You know, Jesus Himself never meant to found a church. As far as He was concerned, He was living in the end times. He had come to proclaim the kingdom of God. The early church was scattered, chaotic, splintered; it was a suppressed movement, after all.”

“And women—”

“When the persecutions began, women had it particularly tough. Women martyrs were made available for prostitution. Women would need a place to hide, a way to gather strength, to endure …”

“So the story of the Order makes sense.”

“Once it became the religion of the Empire, the church quickly tightened up. Heresy wasn’t to be tolerated: for the first time you had Christians cheerfully persecuting other Christians. In the centuries that followed, as the popes got a grip, the church became centralized, legalized, politicized, militarized. The Order would have had no place in the worldview of the popes.”

“Yet it survived.”

He rubbed his chin. “The Order is obviously secretive, but it’s been sitting there an awfully long time, an hour’s walk from the Vatican itself. The church has to know about it. There have to be some kind of links.” He smiled. “I told you I always wanted to go have a root around in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.

Maybe now’s the time.”

I said dubiously, “I’ll have to ask Claudio.”

I wasn’t happy with his response. On some level he might be right. But he hadn’t taken on board what I’d tried to tell him about what I thought of as the earthy aspects of the Crypt: the faces, the smells, that deep pull I felt to remain there, to go back. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to expose all this spooky biological stuff to him.

Anyhow, though I couldn’t shape the thought, I was sure there was more to the Order than just a cult. But maybe Peter was going to have to see it for himself.

As if on cue, an opportunity to do just that offered itself.

Peter had booted up his laptop — he was never without it — and every so often he checked his email. Now he discovered a note from some American kid called Daniel Stannard, who had somehow found his way through the Internet jungle to us. Daniel had concerns about a girl called Lucia, who sounded like she was some kind of refugee from the Order. Daniel wanted to meet us.

Peter smiled, a bit glassily. “I think the door of our secretive subterranean sisterhood has opened, just a crack.”

Right then I was drunk enough not to care. “I wonder if my great-grannie really did shag King Arthur.”

He snorted. “She’d have had a job, as he never existed …”

There were traces of history about Arthur. He cropped up in sources of Celtic mythology, like the Mabinogion from Wales, and you could trace Arthur in the genealogies of the Welsh kings. An inscription bearing the name ARTORIUS had even been found at one of Arthur’s supposed strongholds. But by the ninth century, the myth was spreading. What Welsh prince wouldn’t want his name linked with Arthur? And that ARTORIUS inscription, on closer inspection, looked more like ARTOGNUS …

Peter said, “The Roman British elite only managed to score a few victories against the Saxons. It was a desperate time. They must have looked for hope — and what is Arthur, not dead but sleeping, if not an embodiment of hope? It’s a lovely story. But it’s got nothing to do with the truth.”

Perhaps, I thought. But unlike Peter, I had seen the Crypt, and its ancient, meticulous records. Perhaps I would be able to believe in Arthur — and it would be delicious if I could believe my remote great- grandmother had once kissed him, and in her way bested him.

We swapped the limoncello again, and I changed the subject.

“So,” I said, “what became of that invisible spaceship that took a right in the center of the Earth?”

He glanced at me, a bit wearily. “You still don’t take it seriously. George, something happened. It came from the sun. It made straight for the Earth, and it changed course. If it had been visible it would have been the story of the century.”

“I don’t see why you’re so fascinated by dark matter in the first place.”

He slapped the brick wall behind him. “Because for every ton of good solid brick, there are ten of dark matter, out there, doing something . Most of the universe is invisible to us, and we don’t even know what it’s made of. There are mysteries out there we can’t even guess at …” He lifted his hand and flexed his fingers. “Baryonic matter, normal matter, is infested with life. Why not dark matter, too? Why shouldn’t there be intelligence? And if so, what is it doing in our sun? ”

I shook my head. I was drunk, and starting to feel sour. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, neither do I. But I’m trying to join the dots.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice again. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think there’s a war going on out there. Some kind of struggle. It’s going on above our heads, and we can’t even see it.”

I grunted. “War in Heaven? The dark against the light? I’ll tell you what this sounds like to me. Peter, your background’s showing. You’ve just somehow sublimated your Catholic upbringing into this great space-opera story of war in the sky.”

His mouth opened and closed. “I have to admit I never thought of that . Well, you might be right. But my psychological state doesn’t change the reality of the data — or the consequences. Just suppose you are a field mouse stuck in a World War I trench. What do you do?”

“You keep your head down.”

“Right. Because one misdirected shell could wipe out your whole damn species. That’s why some of us,” he whispered, “believe that it would be a mistake to announce our presence to the stars.”

I frowned. “I thought we’d already done that. We’ve been blasting TV signals to the skies since the days of Hitler.”

“Yes, but we’re getting more efficient about our use of electromagnetic radiation — tight beams, cables, optic fibers. We’re already a lot quieter, cosmically speaking, than we were a few decades ago. We can’t bring back our radio noise, but it is a thin shell of clamor, heading out from the Earth, getting weaker and weaker … Blink and you miss it. And besides, radio is primitive. The more advanced folk are surely listening out for more interesting signals. And there are some people out there who think we should start sending out just those kinds of signals.”

“I take it you aren’t one of these people.”

“Not anymore.” He was gazing into his hands as he said this, and his voice was unusually somber.

I remembered how he had fled to Rome, with no money, not much more than the clothes he stood up in. Suddenly I was suspicious. “Peter — what have you done?”

But he just smiled and reached for the bottle.

It was in the year 1527 that Clement came to Rome. He was in the service of Charles V, Emperor of Germany, who also happened to be king of Spain and Naples and ruler of the Netherlands.