Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“It was all just looks,” I said uncomfortably. “Nothing was said.”

He fixed nonexistent glasses, intense, determined, anxious. “You think when you were in the Crypt people communicated with you just with speech?” Again he tapped at his handheld, seeking the right reference. “George, we have many channels of communication. Look at this.” He pushed the handheld at me; its tiny screen showed a dense technical paper. “We have a paralanguage — vocal stuff but nonverbal, groans and laughs and sighs, and body posture, touch, motion — going on in parallel to everything we say. The anthropologists have identified hundreds of these signals — more than the chimps, more than the monkeys. Even without speech, we would have a richer way to communicate even than the chimps, and they manage to run pretty complex societies. And all this is going on under the surface of our spoken interaction.” He was staring at me now. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you didn’t feel a pressure from the way people in there behaved toward you, regardless of what they actually said .”

I imagined those circles of pale, disapproving faces. I shook my head to dispel the vision.

Peter said, “And then there are other ways to communicate. Touch, even scent … The smells, all that kissing you describe. Tasting each other, you said.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? George, weaver ants communicate with pheromones. And chemical communication is a very old system. Single-celled creatures have to rely on simple chemical messages to tell them about their environment, because only multicelled creatures — like ants, like humans — are complex enough to organize clusters of cells into eyes and ears … I admit I’m speculating about this.

“But, George, put it all together and you’ve got a classic recipe for an emergent system: local decision making by ignorant agents responding to local stimuli, and powerful feedback mechanisms. And then you have a genetic mandate for eusociality. All in those three slogans.”

“All right. And then what happened? How did we get from there to here — from Regina to Lucia?”

He sighed and massaged his temples. “Look, George, if you haven’t believed me up to now, you won’t believe what comes next. In the wild — among the ants or the mole rats — once you get a reproductive advantage like that, of mothers over daughters, no matter how slight, you get a positive feedback.

“People started to change. To adapt. If the daughters aren’t going to get a chance to reproduce, it’s better for their bodies to stay subadult. Why waste all those resources on a pointless puberty? Of course you retain the potential to become mature, in case a queen drops dead, and you have the chance to replace her. Meanwhile, it pays for the mothers to pump out the kids as long and as often as possible …”

I felt a deep, sickening dread as his logic drew me in, step by step. “So in the Crypt they have kids every three months. And they stay fertile for decades past any outsider’s menopause age.”

“It’s simple Darwinian logic. It pays .”

“What about the men?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps in the early days they just let the male infants die. Again, given enough time, selection would work; if the only way to pass on your genes is through female children, you have more daughters. Of course you still need fathers. So they bring in males from outside — wild DNA to keep the gene pool healthy — but preferably somebody from the extended family outside. And a candidate has to prove his fitness.”

“Fitness?” In a way this tied in with what Rosa had said to me about why I would be a suitable stud. “Maybe the men have to prove intelligence, by forcing their way in.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Fitness doesn’t mean strength , necessarily. It just means you fit the environment. Maybe what you, or Giuliano, need more than anything else is a certain compliance. Because your children would have to comply with life in the Crypt. One thing’s for sure: men are essential for making babies, so they have to be tolerated, but they are peripheral to the Order, which is built around relationships among females. Men are just sperm machines.”

“And what about Lucia’s second pregnancy? She said she had only had sex once with this guy Giuliano.”

He hesitated. “I’m flying another kite here. But some female ants have an organ called a spermatheca — a bag near the top of her abdomen. It’s a sperm bank. The queen stores ejaculate there, and keeps sperm in a kind of suspended animation, for years if necessary. She lets them out one at a time, and they become active again and ready to fertilize more eggs …”

My jaw dropped. “And that’s what you’re saying is happening inside Lucia’s body.”

He looked defensive. “I’m saying it’s possible.”

“But ants have had a hundred million years. Peter, what I know about evolution you could write on a fingernail. But wouldn’t such a major redesign of the human reproductive system need a lot of time ?”

He shrugged. “I’m no expert. But in the fifteen centuries since Regina there has been time for sixty, seventy, eighty generations — maybe even more. A lot of it wouldn’t involve particularly fundamental changes, just the timing of developments in the body. Evolution finds changes like that easy to make — a question of throwing a few switches, rather than rewiring the whole processor. Evolution can sometimes work with remarkable speed …

“Look at all the pieces together.” Again, he ticked points off on his fingers. “You have the multiple generations sharing their resources and caring for the young. You have reproductive divisions — the sterile workers. You have nobody in control, nothing but local agents and feedback. And then if you look at its history, the Order has done what ant colonies do: it has tried to expand, it has attacked other groups. You even have ’suicides’ — spectacular sacrifices, where the workers give up their lives so that their genetic legacy can continue: I told you what happened when the Crypt was broken open during the Sack of Rome. You could even argue that all the exterior ‘helpers,’ all the ‘family’ around the world, who send the Order money and recruits, they are part of the Order, too, like foraging ants — though of course they don’t know it.

“And listen. Ants carry out their dead and leave them in a circle, far from the nest. I plotted the burials linked to the Order, over the centuries. There’s a circle … I have a map.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“I think Regina was a kind of genius, George. An idiot savant, maybe. Of course she didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but she clearly understood emergence, and perhaps even eusociality, on some instinctive level. You can see it in her biography — the passages where she is walking around Rome, noticing how unplanned it is, but how nevertheless patterns have emerged. And she used that insight to try to protect her family. She thought she was establishing a community to protect her bloodline, a heritage of a golden past. Well, she succeeded, but not in the way she intended.

“The Order isn’t a human community, George, the way we’ve always understood it. The Order is a hive. A human hive — perhaps the first of its kind.” He smiled. “We used to think you would need telepathy to unite minds, to combine humans into a group organism. Well, we were wrong. All you need is people — that, and emergence.”

“Peter—”

He lifted his broad face to the light from the window. “It’s actually an exciting prospect we have stumbled on, George. A new kind of humanity, perhaps? A eusocial human — I call them Coalescents …”