Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“Why?”

“Because in animals, one way of getting rid of excess cee-oh-two is through your piss, in the form of flushed-out carbonates and bicarbonates. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve come up with some such adaptive mechanism.”

“ Adaptive. You’re saying she’s adapted to the Crypt.” I thought it over. “Like her pale skin. Her eyes. Those thick sunglasses.”

“It does all fit together, sort of. And there’s more. With a low metabolic rate, you’d grow more slowly, mature later. Live longer, too.”

“Could that explain the sterility?”

“I don’t know. You know, those people must have been down that hole for a very, very long time.”

“Peter — what are we dealing with here?”

He glanced at Daniel, and beckoned. We moved a few seats away from the boy.

Peter unfolded his laptop and showed me some images, which I could barely make out for the glare from the big windows. “What do you know about orangutans?”

As far as Peter could tell the file Daniel had given him on Pina was genuine. When Pina went into hospital for her broken leg, the doctors who examined her had been concerned enough by her appearance to insist on giving her more extensive tests.

“George, I think the kid was right. Pina had an imperforate hymen, and quiescent ovaries.”

“Quiescent?”

He shrugged. “Not producing eggs. Never had produced eggs. There’s a brief note here, where one doctor speculates about the mechanism—”

I waved a hand. “I’m not going to understand any of that.”

“Anyhow they never did the conclusive tests before she was sprung. I’ve been onto the search engines and looked wider. The biologists call this ‘arrested development.’ It can happen for genetic reasons — for instance, a mutation in the receptor for a certain growth factor can cause a form of dwarfism. Or if food is short — say if you’re an anorexic — puberty can be delayed. It makes a certain evolutionary sense, because if you can’t feed yourself it makes no sense to waste calories on bone mass and fatty tissue for sexual characteristics until your body can be sure it will survive. It’s actually quite common among the animals. Sometimes subordinate males don’t develop sexual characteristics. Tree shrews. Mandrill monkeys. Elephants.”

“And orangutans—”

“Even orangutans, even apes.”

“Get back to Pina. You’re saying she has this ‘arrested development,’ too.”

“It looks that way. The tests weren’t conclusive.” He sighed, closed up his laptop, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But suppose it’s true, George. Suppose that poor kid really has gone through a pregnancy that mushroomed in three months. Suppose there are neuter women down that hole in the ground, a horde of them. Suppose Lucia’s other peculiarities — her paleness, her slow metabolism — are adaptations to living underground. And suppose it’s true — it seems fantastic, but just suppose — that Lucia had sex with this guy Giuliano just once , but she’s going to continue to get pregnant, over and over …”

I sat on that plastic-coated seat, in the bright efficiency of the thoroughly modern hospital, gazing through the big windows at the gardens with their cypress trees. “ Evolution. They are evolving differently. Is that what you’re saying?”

Peter said, “If the story of Regina is true, the Order have cut themselves off, more or less, from the rest of humanity for sixteen centuries. That’s, say, sixty, seventy, eighty generations … I’m no biologist. I don’t know if that’s enough time. But it sounds like it to me.” He shook his head. “You know, twenty- four hours ago I’d never have believed we’d be having this conversation. But here we are.

“… I still don’t see the big picture, though. Evolutionary changes happen for a reason.” Peter leaned close. “You’ll have to go back, George. Back into the Crypt. Call your sister again.”

“Why?”

“We need more information. We still have more questions than answers, nothing but a lot of guesswork. If we could get Pina or one of the other neuters into the hands of the doctors—”

“Daniel.”

He looked around. “What?”

“Where’s Daniel?” While we’d been talking, the boy had disappeared from his seat.

We ran down the corridor, the way he must have gone. We heard the receptionist call us back, a sharper yell from the security guy.

We hadn’t gone fifty yards before we met a party coming the other way. Daniel’s arms were pinned by his escorts, a burly male nurse on one side, a security guy on the other. The nice young lady doctor was talking to him, steadily, calmly, about how they had been unsure about our credentials, and it was only proper that they should ask the girl herself about her family …

When he saw us Daniel struggled harder. “They took her back,” he said, despairing. “The Order. They came, and they took her back !”

It was in the year 1778 that Edmund found Minerva, and lost her.

He was twenty-three years old. He had come to Rome as part of his “Grand Tour,” in the traditional style, funded by his father’s money and his own youth and energy. He stayed in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna, which had become known as the English Ghetto. The apartment, a decent first floor and two bedchambers on the second, was small but well furnished, and cost no more than a scudo per day.

Edmund fell into the company of one James Macpherson, a forty-year-old Jacobite refugee and hardened rake, who proved a willing guide to the various delights of Rome — as long, of course, as Edmund continued to be a source of cash. Edmund understood this relationship very well, and was careful not to let James take advantage. But Edmund was catholic in his tastes, and soon learned to relish the vitella mongana , which he thought the most delicate veal he had ever tasted, and drank great quantities of Orvieto, a decent white wine.

Rome proved to be great fun. Night and day the piazzas were crowded with acrobats and astrologers, jugglers and tooth drawers. In the cramped, garlic-stinking alleys where grand mansions loomed over tiny houses, shop signs hung everywhere, of barbers, tailors, surgeons, and tobacconists. But the alleys were always clogged with noise and filth, since the Romans had the rude habit of relieving themselves against any convenient doorway or wall, and left their garbage heaped in every corner, waiting for the irregular call of the waste collectors.

But amid the noise, filth, and debauchery, there were true wonders.

Edmund found Saint Peter’s and its piazza quite stunning — he had James bring him back to it day after day, for there always seemed something new to see in it — and he was enchanted by the area around the great cathedral, where elegant domes and cupolas rose from the morning mist. And then there were the older monuments, sticking out of the past. Edmund often had James escort him to the top of the Palatine, where mature cypress trees waved gently among the ruined palaces.

Edmund found the Romans themselves pleasant and civil — as well they might be, he thought, for they were surely the most indolent people in Europe. There was no industry here, no commerce, no manufacturing. The people relied for their income on the steady flow of money from all over Christian Europe, which continued as it had for centuries.

And religion dominated everything about the city. At any one time there were as many pilgrims and other visitors, it was said, as residents. There were three thousand priests and five thousand monks and nuns serving three hundred monasteries and convents and four hundred churches. It was fashionable to dress like a cleric even if you had not taken holy orders. A greater contrast to the dynamic industrial bustle of England could scarcely be imagined; sometimes the cleric-choked city struck Edmund as being in the grip of a great madness.