Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something . Maybe you have to be that way when you’re young — you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we’d all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the arse. In the end I winkled his father’s number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn’t accept that we could go no farther. But his motives — and I still wasn’t sure what they were — were, unlike Daniel’s, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This was my issue — my sister — and I didn’t want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order’s complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pass to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa’s old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no passes were forthcoming.

“It’s a fucking conspiracy ,” Peter groused. “I’m not exaggerating — I wouldn’t use that word lightly. And it’s all connected to the Order. These bastards are working together to keep us out. We’ve hit an outer ring of defense, and we’ve barely started …”

After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my “tame Jesuit” again. A couple of days after that , Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Claudio said, grinning. “But in this context secret just means ‘private’ …” He met me at the Vatican’s Porta Sant’ Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor passes at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.

The entrance to the archives themselves was off a courtyard called the Cortile del Belvedere, within the Vatican complex.

Claudio, it turned out, regularly researched here, and he briskly showed me the areas to which visiting scholars were allowed access: a ground-floor room called the sala di studio , and the Index Room, which actually contained a thousand indices, many themselves very old.

Claudio walked me across to a rattling elevator, which took us down to what he called the bunker. This was the Manuscript Depository, built in the seventies to cope with the great inward flood of material that the Archives had had to cope with in the postwar period. It was an underground library, a basic, unadorned, ugly place, with shelving spread over two stories, and mesh flooring and steel stairs connecting everything. Some of the shelves were locked, holding sensitive material, and others were empty, waiting for more material yet to come.

We went through into the Parchment Room, where some of the more famous documents were stored for display. They were held in chests of drawers, each waist-high, with ten glass-topped drawers in each. These pieces could be stunning — often in Latin, some illuminated, others covered by wax seals.

Claudio kept up an engaging and practiced patter. From its very earliest days, even in the days of persecution, the church in Rome had adopted the imperial habit of record keeping. The first archives had been called the scrinium sanctum , a bit of language that startled me with recognition. But the archives were far from complete. The first collections had been burned around A.D. 300 by the Emperor Diocletian. When Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, the accretion of records had begun again. Little had survived, however, from the bloody turbulence of the first millennium.

In the fourteenth century the popes had, for a time, been exiled to France, and in the fifteenth a period of infighting had peaked with three rival popes rampaging around Europe — “A bibliographer’s nightmare,”

said Claudio laconically. The later popes had started trying to unify the archives in the sixteenth century. But when Napolй on had taken Italy, he hauled the whole lot away to France for a few years, doing still more damage in the process …

“But all we have is here,” Claudio said. “There are letters from popes as far back as Leo the First, from the fifth century, who faced down Attila the Hun. We have diplomas from Byzantine emperors. The correspondence of Joan of Arc. Reports of papal enclaves, accusations of witchcraft and other skulduggery in high places, sexual secrets of kings, queens, bishops, and a few popes. The records of the Spanish Inquisition, details of the trial of Galileo … Even the letter from England asking for the dissolution of the first marriage of Henry the Eighth.”

“And somewhere in all this,” I said, “is the true story of the Order. Or at least as the Vatican saw it.”

He waved a hand. “What I’m trying to tell you is that the archives are overwhelming. There are scholars who have spent most of their lives in here. It isn’t even all cataloged, and our only search engine is shoe leather. The idea that someone like your friend can just come in here—”

“Peter said you would be like this,” I said bluntly.

He looked aristocratically bemused. “I’m sorry? Like what?”

“Obstructive. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s just as when you stalled over giving me a contact with the Order in the first place. You don’t want to come right out and refuse to help. Instead you’re trying to put me off.”

He pursed his lips, his eyes cloudy. I felt a stab of guilt; perhaps he hadn’t even been aware of what he was doing. “Perhaps I’m not sure if I should help you.”

Something in the way he said that triggered an idea in my head. I said at random, “But you could help us, if you wanted to. Because you’ve done searches here on the Order yourself. ”

He wouldn’t concede that, but his aristocratic nostrils flared. “You are making big inductive leaps.”

“If you have, you could help Peter find what he wants very quickly.”

“You haven’t told me why I should.”

“Because of Lucia.” I knew Peter had told him about the girl. “Here’s the bottom line. Peter and I think she is coming to harm, because of the Order. I certainly don’t know for sure that she isn’t. You’re a priest; you wear the collar. Can you really turn away from a child in trouble? … You can’t, can you?” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. “And that’s why you’ve done your own researches. You’ve had your own suspicions about the Order—”

He said nothing. He was right that I was making big inductive leaps in the dark, but sometimes my nose is good. Still, I could see he was in conflict, pulled by two opposing loyalties.

“Look,” I said, “help us. I give you my word that we will do you no harm.”

“ I don’t matter,” he said, with a priest’s steely moral authority.