Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“Little drone, you know too much,” he whispered.

She walked boldly up to the cleft. “Show your face, McLachlan.”

He switched on his torch. His face, eerily underlit, hovered in the shadows, his expression unreadable.

Rosa said, “Suppose you’re right. Suppose we are a new form — your word was Coalescents .”

“Yes.”

“Then shouldn’t you accept us for what we are?” She spread her arms. “What have you found, here in this cave under the Appian Way? Aren’t we Homo superior ?”

He clicked off his torch; his face disappeared into the dark.

Rosa had an intense expression, almost a look of triumph.

I asked, “Did you believe all that?”

She glanced at me. “Not a word. I just want him out of there.” She was formidable indeed, I realized; I felt perversely proud.

Peter whispered again, from the dark. “George, she must have already figured some of this out for herself. Even if she didn’t want to face it. I just put it into words for her. She knew it all the time. Really, she’s too smart for the hive, for her own good.”

“But she’s listening,” I said quickly. “Maybe we should take it easy. Don’t do anything destructive. We’ll get the Order to open up, bring in the health professionals, the social workers …”

“There’s no time for that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“No time …” He fell silent, breathing heavily.

I tiptoed away. “I think he’s tiring,” I said to Rosa.

“Then,” she said, “before he triggers his dead man’s switch by falling asleep, I think you have a decision to make.”

“ I have a decision?”

“I can’t say any more. But perhaps McLachlan will listen to you. You can encourage him to blow us all up. You can persuade him to walk away.” Of course she was right, I saw, horrified; the decision had to be mine. “Just remember,” she said coldly, “that there is a place for you here. Even now, even after you brought this lunatic into our Crypt. This can be your home, too. If you do anything to harm us, then you will lose that choice, too .”

I seemed to smell the pounds of Semtex Peter had lodged somewhere in the rock, sense the great weight of the subterranean city around me, the thousands of lives it contained.

Behind us Lucia sat quietly on her bench, her baby on her lap; her gaze was fixed on its face, as if she wanted to shut us out, a malevolent world that wanted to use and control her and her child, even those of us motivated to save her — and I couldn’t blame her.

Now it was my turn to do some pacing. I tried to ignore the hammering of my heart, the remote stink of the Crypt, and to think clearly.

Did I agree with Peter?

Peter’s theorizing about hives and eusociality was all very well. But the reality of the Crypt, which I felt in my blood, was a good deal warmer than his hostile analysis, a lot more welcoming. And I wasn’t about to argue with Rosa about the Order’s history, and the work it had done over centuries. Whatever Peter said, I felt I had no more right to close that down than to shut down the Vatican.

And then there was Homo superior .

I had seen for myself that Peter’s “Coalescents” were not like other humans. Perhaps they were a more advanced form; perhaps Rosa was right that we would need the warm, fecund discipline of Order living to survive a difficult future on a crowded Earth. In which case, what right did I have to make decisions about their future? … I felt I was losing touch with the world. I drew on the thick, musty air, suddenly longing for a fresh blast of cool oxygen-rich topside atmosphere to clear my head. I was one man, flawed, vulnerable, mortal, woefully ignorant, and these issues escalated above me on every scale. How could I possibly make a decision like this?

For some reason I thought of Linda, my ex-wife. She had always had a lot more common sense than I did. What would Linda say, if she was here?

Look around you, George.

Lucia looked up at me, her eyes full of bewilderment, her body battered by childbirth, her face prematurely lined with pain.

Cut the bullshit. Remember what you said to that kid Daniel: you admired him because he had responded to this wretched child Lucia on a human level. You were as pompous as always, but you were right. Well, look at Lucia now, George; look at her with that scrap of a baby. I wouldn’t trust you to adjudicate on the future of humankind. And I’m not interested in your self-pitying whinging about whether you’ll die childless or not. But you are a fully functioning human being. Act that way …

Of course. It was obvious.

I walked up to Rosa, and said as softly as I could, “Here’s the deal. I’ll help you disarm Peter. But you have to open this place up. Connect with the world. I think Lucia has suffered, and if I can stop that I will.”

She glared at me; her anger was taking over. “What right have you to make such pronouncements? You’re a man, George, and so is that murderous fool in the rock. This is a place built by and for women. Who are you to lecture us on our humanity?”

“Take it or leave it.”

Gnawing her lip, she studied my face. Then she nodded curtly.

Together, we crossed to Peter’s cleft in the rock. But things didn’t go as planned.

“I couldn’t hear you,” Peter whispered. “But I could see you. You’ve come to some kind of deal, haven’t you, George? A deal that is bound to preserve the hive.” He sighed, sounding desolate. “I suppose I knew this would happen. But I can’t let you do this. I shouldn’t have let you talk about negotiating at all. I’m weak, I suppose.”

“Why can’t we talk?…”

“It has to stop here, or it never will. Because the hive is ready to break out. Think about it. Hives need raw material — drones, lots of them, living in conditions of high population densities, and highly interconnected. Until the modern era, less than one human in thirty lived in a community of more than five thousand people. Today more than half the world’s population lives in an urban environment. And we are more interconnected than ever before.”

“What are you saying, Peter?”

“When the breakout comes it will be a phase transition — all at once — the world will transform, as water turns to ice, as a field of wildflowers suddenly blooms in the spring. In its way it will be beautiful. But it’s an end point for us. There will be new gods on Earth: mindless gods, a pointless transcendence. From now on the story of the planet will not be of humanity, but of the hive …”

“Peter.” The situation was rapidly slipping away from me. “If you’ll just come out of there—”

“You know why you’re prepared to betray me, to save the Order? Because you’re part of the hive, too. George, you’re just another drone — remote from the center, yes, but a drone nonetheless. Perhaps you always were. And the tragedy is, you don’t even know it, do you?”

I felt as if the cave, the giant, densely peopled superstructure of the Crypt, was rotating around me. Was it possible I really had somehow been sucked into some emergent superorganism — was it possible that my decision now was being taken, not in my or Peter’s or Lucia’s interests, but in the mindless interests of the hive itself? If so — how could I know ? Again I longed for oxygen.

“I can’t think through that, Peter. I’m going to follow my instinct. What else can I do?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing at all. But, you see, I’m the only free mind in this whole damn place. Good-bye, George.”