Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

We reached Level 3, the deepest downbelow of all.

Many of the walls here were bare rock, polished so smooth by the passage of bodies they gleamed. It was clearly very old — and yet this level, the deepest, was paradoxically the youngest of this great inverted city.

The corridors here were still narrower than those above. They branched as we walked, until once again I had completely lost my bearings. The air was hot, moist, and thick, and was at first suffocatingly hard to breathe. Carbon dioxide is heavy, I remembered dimly, and it must pool, here at the bottom of the great chamber of the Crypt. But as my body became accustomed to the conditions the viselike pain that gripped my chest eased.

And everywhere we walked we had to push through the endless crowds, the smoky gray eyes huge in the gloom. Nobody spoke, here on Level 3. They just moved wordlessly around each other, on their way through the endlessly branching corridors. The only sounds were the rustle of their soft-soled shoes on the rocky floor, and the steady flow of their breathing — and even that, it seemed to me, was synchronized, coming in overlapping waves of whispers, like the lapping of an invisible ocean. I had the sense of these soft, rounded little creatures all around me, in the corridors that stretched off into the darkness every direction I looked, and of thousands more in the tremendous airy superstructure of galleries and corridors and chambers above me.

As I describe it now it sounds oppressive, claustrophobic. But it did not feel like that at the time.

Rosa seemed to sense that. “You belong here, George,” she said softly. “I’m your sister, remember. If it’s good enough for me … Can’t you feel the calm in here? …”

I felt the need to cut through this odd seduction. “What about sex?”

“What about it?”

“You’ve a lot of young people here, cooped up together. There must be love affairs — casual flings—” I felt awkward; trying to discuss such issues with my long-lost sister, I was reaching for fifties euphemisms. “Do you let people screw?”

She stared at me in icy disapproval. “First of all,” she said, “it isn’t a question of ‘letting’ people do anything. There is nobody to ‘let’ you, or to stop you come to that. People just know how to behave.”

“How? Who teaches them?”

“Who teaches you to breathe? … And anyhow it tends not to be an issue. Most of the men here are gay. Or don’t have an inclination either way. Others usually leave.” She said this as if it were the most usual setup in the world.

It might fit in. Peter, in his long, rambling analyses of what we had learned about the Order, had speculated it might be some kind of heredity cult. Like neuter women, like Pina, gay men could help out with the raising of the fecund ones, the Lucias. But neither class would be any threat to the precious gene pool, because they didn’t contribute to it.

“Okay, but — Rosa, how come most of the people here are women?”

She looked uncomfortable. “Because most people born here are female.”

“Yes, but how? Some kind of genetic engineering? … But you were around a long time before anybody even conceived of the notion of a gene. So how do you manage it? What do you do with the excess boys? Do you do what the Spartans did with their baby girls?—”

She stopped and glared at me, suddenly as angry as I had seen her. “We don’t murder here, George. This is a place that gives life, not death.” It was as if I had insulted somebody she loved — as, perhaps, I had.

“Then how?”

“There are more girls than boys. It just happens. You ask a lot of questions, George. But in the Crypt we don’t like questions.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

She glared at me. “If you really understood that, you would understand everything.” She walked on, but her gait was stiff, her shoulders hunched.

We came to an alcove, cut into the rock. Before it a little shrine had been set up, a kind of altar carved of pale marble. Slender pillars no more than three feet tall supported a roof of finely shaped stone. A glass plate had been fixed before it. Rosa paused here, and looked on reverently.

“What’s this?”

“A most precious place,” she said. “George, Regina herself built this, fifteen centuries ago. It has been rebuilt several times since — this level didn’t even exist for centuries after Regina’s death — but always exactly as she had intended it. And what it contains, she brought from home … Take a look inside.”

I crouched and peered. I saw three little statues, standing in a row. They looked like grumpy old women wearing duffel coats. The statues were poorly made, lumpy and with grotesque faces; they weren’t even identical. But they were very ancient, I saw, worn by much handling.

Rosa said, “The Romans used to believe that each household had its own gods. And these were Regina’s family gods — our gods. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here the matres have stayed ever since, as have Regina’s descendants. So you see, this is our home, mine and yours. Not Manchester, not even Britain. This is why we belong here, because this is where our deepest roots go down into the earth. This is where our family gods are …”

All part of the sales pitch, I told myself. And yet I was impressed, even touched. Rosa made a kind of genuflection before moving on.

A way farther on, we came to a doorway.

It was a big room — I strained to see — but it had the atmosphere of an old people’s rest home. A series of large chairs had been set out in the musty dark. The chairs looked elaborate, as if packed with medical equipment. Figures reclined in the chairs. Attendants moved silently back and forth, nurses perhaps, but wearing the bland smock uniforms of the Order. Most of the “patients” wore blankets over their legs, or over their whole bodies, and drips had been set up beside two of them. The faces of the women in the chairs looked caved in, old. But I could see bulges over the bellies of several of them, bulges that looked like nothing so much as pregnancy.

In one of the chairs, far from the door, a woman was sitting up. She looked younger, and her hair looked blond, not gray. Something about the shape of her face reminded me of Lucia. But she was too far away for me to see clearly, and an attendant came to her and pressed something to her neck, and the woman subsided back into silence.

“A hundred years old, and still fertile …” Rosa murmured.

It was all just as Peter and I had put together from the garbled accounts of Lucia and Daniel. But even so, standing here, confronted by the almost absurd reality of it, it was all but impossible to believe.

She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.

We approached another doorway, cut into the rock. Light poured out, comparatively bright, and I heard a noise, chattering, high-pitched, and continuous, like seagulls on a rock.

There were babies in here. They were all very young, no more than a few months old. The walls were painted bright primary colors, and the rock floor was covered by a soft rubber matting, on which lay the babies — all pale, all wispy-haired, all with blank gray eyes — so many I couldn’t even count them. The air in the room was hot, dense, moist, laden with sweet infant smells of milk and baby shit. As I gazed in at this the women of the Order pressed around me as they always did, warm and oddly sweet-scented themselves; a part of me wanted to struggle, as if I were drowning.

“From our oldest inhabitants,” said Rosa dryly, “to our youngest.”