Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

The beer felt heavy in my belly. Suddenly I longed to get out of this smoky bar — out of the noisy, crowded city altogether — away from Peter and his crazy ideas, and the Order, which was at the center of it all.

Peter was desperate for me to understand, to believe, I saw. But I didn’t want to believe; I didn’t want to know. I shook my head.

“Even if you’re right,” I said, “what do we do about it?”

He smiled, but his smile was cold. “Well, that’s the question. There’s no point negotiating with Rosa, or anybody else in there, because she isn’t in control . The organism we are dealing with is actually the collective — the Order — the hive that arises out of the interactions of the Coalescents.”

“How do you negotiate with an anthill?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But first we must decide what we want from it …”

His cell phone went off, annoyingly loud. He pulled it out of his pocket, inspected its screen, and turned white. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He gathered up his gadgets and bustled out of the bar. Without breaking step he got into his car, started it up, and drove away, lurching into the dense Roman traffic. Just like that, leaving me with a bill to pay and a walk home to the hotel. I was astonished.

When I got to the hotel he wasn’t there. I wouldn’t see him again, in fact, for days. When I did it was in drastically different circumstances, after I received a panicky phone call from Rosa.

And it was only later that I found out it was at that moment in the cafй he had learned of the explosion at the lab in San Jose.

Rosa glared at me. “What have you done, George? What have you done? ”

“Is this about a man called Peter McLachlan?” I’d told Rosa nothing about Peter before now; I’d had no reason to. “I haven’t seen him for days, and he’s not answering his calls …”

“He’s here,” Rosa hissed.

“What?”

“Inside the Crypt.”

I just stared at her, disbelieving.

Rosa had met me in the Order’s surface office on the Cristoforo Colombo. Compared to her sly manipulation of a few days before, there was no warmth, none of her seductive talk of family and blood, no touching. In that bright, sunlit, modern office, she was a pillar of hostility and anger.

We weren’t alone. Under a wall decorated with a chrome representation of the Order’s kissing-fish symbol, a salesgirl was talking an elderly couple through a brochure on the Order’s genealogy services. The old folk turned and stared at us, dismayed and perhaps a little frightened. But the assistant was of the Order. She looked at me with blank smoke-gray eyes, slowly hardening to anger. I was sure she didn’t know why she felt that way. I quailed nevertheless.

Rosa glanced at the customers. She said, “Come through.”

I followed her to the elevator at the back, which took us down to the big modern anteroom, where cameras peered at me, insectile. The receptionist-guard behind her broad marble desk stared at me with undisguised hostility.

I asked, “If Peter’s here, who let him in?”

“Nobody. He found a way down one of the old ventilation shafts.”

I remembered the ancient, disused chimney; yes, I realized, if you knew what you were doing, it wouldn’t be so hard to work your way in. I laughed. “Peter’s a bit tubby for a potholer.”

She stood close to me. I smelled something of the animal stink of the Crypt about her. Her fists were clenched, her body rigid, every muscle suffused with anger. “You think this is funny? Do you? Funny? He isn’t one of us. He has nothing to do with the Order. And he’s here because of you .”

“I didn’t tell him where the shaft outlets were. I don’t even know myself.”

“Evidently you told him enough for him to work it out. You betrayed our trust, George. You betrayed my trust. I took you into my home. I showed you its treasures. And you told an outsider . Perhaps you aren’t fit to join us after all.”

Her cold, angry rejection was powerful. It hurt badly to feel such exclusion, despite my ambiguous feelings about the whole setup.

“Rosa, I know Peter. Outsider or not he’s an old friend who was good to Dad in his final years. He is — odd. Obsessive, eccentric. He has big ideas. But even if it’s true he’s broken in here he’s harmless.”

“Harmless. Really.” Rosa walked behind the marble desk to the guard’s PC. It took her a couple of minutes to find what she wanted. She swiveled the screen on its mount to show me. “This is an Interpol report. Posted by the FBI.” Illustrated by small, grainy photographs, it was a report of an explosion at a university science lab in San Jose, California. The lab had been devoted to something called “geometric optics.” The blast had destroyed the building and killed three people, including a cleaner and the head of the facility. The FBI appeared convinced it was some kind of sabotage. In the corner of the image the FBI had posted two photographs, of suspects they associated with the incident.

One of them was, indubitably, Peter’s face.

I stood back. “Shit.”

“Our face-recognition software pulled this up not five minutes after we got our first clear shot of him.”

“It has to be a mistake. Peter’s an eccentric, not a criminal. I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with an incident like this.”

Rosa briskly spun the screen back. “Tell it to the FBI. And in the meantime, this ‘harmless’ friend, this suspected bomber, this murderer , is holed up inside the Crypt — and you led him here.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Come down there with me and get him out.”

I hesitated. I dreaded walking deeper into this mess. But I knew I had no choice.

Rosa walked me to the high-speed elevators that would take us back into the downbelow. The doors slid open with a pneumatic sigh.

Once more I was swallowed up.

I stepped out into the now familiar crush.

Even as we hurried toward the scene of the crisis, I lifted my head and took deep breaths. The air was clammy and shallow, and my lungs pulled, trying to extract oxygen. But there was that powerful animal stink again, the musk of sweat and piss, of blood and milk, so suffocating, and yet somehow so exhilarating.

I was full of doubts about the Order, full of conflicting emotions. I had listened to Peter’s extraordinary arguments about eusociality and hives and Coalescents, a new form of humanity. And above all, stuck in my head, was the image of Lucia, a fifteen-year-old tortured by the exploitation of her fecundity by — well, by somebody in this place, for some purpose, not her own. But for all that it was good to be back. I belonged here: walking down these dense corridors again, I seemed to feel it on some deep cellular level. However the Order was sending me signals, through body language or chimp grunts or scent or whatever the hell, it was certainly getting through.

But the Crypt felt different today.

All those ageless female faces, and a few male, all with their smoky gray eyes, peered at me uncertainly, eyes wide, mouths downturned. I was sure that few of them would know anything about what was going on, but they picked up their cues from Rosa, and then from each other, and as we walked they all unthinkingly flinched away from me. That silent rejection hurt.

But even through this self-pitying ache, I noticed the Crypt was quiet : people spoke, but softly, leaning to whisper in each others’ ears. They even walked quietly, their feet padding gently on the floor. I listened for the hum of generators, the hiss and low roar of the air-conditioning systems, but could hear nothing.