Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Venus, once the object of Sulla’s adolescent lust, had matured into a capable woman. She looked pleased, but a little frightened. But Messalina stayed on her feet some time, quietly arguing; she did not want to criticize her daughter before this group, but obviously thought her sister would be a better choice.

Leda pressed Regina to give a reason for her recommendation. Regina was not sure she could have articulated it. She had always made her decisions by instinct, and then had to rationalize them later. But it was best for the Order; she was sure of that.

A precedent had to be set. She knew in her heart that the Order could not be entrusted forever to its most senior members. She herself was in her sixties now, and while she had not slowed down as much as poor Messalina, she knew she would not last forever. She did not want the Order to be dependent on her. On the contrary, she wanted assurance that the Order would long survive her. She would like to arrange things so that anybody of healthy mind could serve on the Council and the business of the Order would still be done.

In fact, if she could have found a way, she would have abolished the Council altogether. The Order’s systems, operating independently, should sustain it — just as once the great systems of taxation and spending, of law and class, had sustained the Empire itself far beyond the life of any one person, even the greatest of emperors.

Even though no individual human was immortal, there was no reason why the Order should not live forever. But to do that it had to shake off its reliance on people.

Of course, as the talking ran down, Regina’s decision was upheld. Venus was welcomed to the select group of twelve Council members with a ripple of applause.

Messalina resumed her seat with ill grace. There was personal tension here, for Messalina had been a member of the Order long before her cousin Regina had arrived from Britain, with her rough accent and brisk ways: Regina was still a newcomer here, even after seventeen years. But Regina brushed that aside. Such things mattered nothing to her, as long as she achieved what she set out to achieve.

After a little more business the meeting wound up.

Brica approached her mother. Deep in her sixth pregnancy, she walked almost as cautiously as old Messalina, and she propped her hands on her back for support. Beside her, her eldest daughter Agrippina walked with eyes shyly downcast.

Regina smiled, and put her hand on Brica’s bulge. “I can feel her, or him,” Regina said. “Restless little soul.”

“She longs to be out in the world — as I long for her to be out, too.”

Brica truly did look exhausted. She was in her forties now, and this child, her third by her second husband, had proven especially trying. Besides, that new husband was not so supportive as dull but good- hearted Castor — who had eventually fallen in love with a woman from beyond the Order, and now lived in contentment with a young second family in a jostling suburb, safe from the subterranean strangeness of the Crypt. But still, Agrippina had proven a strong support as she had grown, as had Brica’s second daughter, eleven years old, named Julia for her long-dead great-grandmother.

It was Agrippina, as it happened, that Brica wanted to talk about.

“Her bleeding has begun,” Brica said softly, and Agrippina’s face purpled. “It is time for her celebration — the first of my children to become a woman.” Brica hugged her daughter. “Already the boys watch her — I’ve seen their eyes — and soon she will be having babies of her own.”

“Oh, Mother, ” muttered the wretched Agrippina.

“I’ll be a grandmother,” said Brica. “And you, Mother, a great -grandmother. With Agrippina fertile I won’t be having any more children of my own … I hope this will be the last before my change … As for the ceremony—”

“No,” said Regina sharply.

Agrippina looked at her in shock.

Brica said, “But every girl since Venus — on my own wedding day, as you remember well, Mother — has been celebrated.” Anger flared briefly. “What are you saying — that my daughter, your own blood, isn’t good enough for such an honor?”

“No, of course not.” Regina thought fast, but inconclusively. It had been another impulsive decision, whose basis she didn’t yet understand herself. “I didn’t mean that. Of course you must plan the ceremony,” she said, seeking time to think.

But she and Brica were of course long-established combatants, and Brica had caught that note of sharpness. She glared at her mother, but her face was a hollow-eyed mask of fatigue, and she clearly did not want to argue.

Brica took her daughter’s arm. “Fine. Come, Agrippina.” And they left the peristylium without looking back.

Since that dreadful day when the Vandals had ravaged Rome, things had changed greatly for the Order.

As the Order’s wealth had increased, a great deal had been invested in the estate on the Appian Way, which today served primarily as a school. But even more money had been sunk underground.

The use of the Catacombs had proven so obviously valuable that nobody had objected when Regina had suggested extending and modifying them. The old cemetery directly beneath the house remained, almost unmodified; for a Christian order it would have been disrespectful to have disturbed such a shrine. But the tunnels had been greatly extended, and new rooms and passageways had been dug into the soft rock.

After fifteen years of steady burrowing the Order’s underground warren, buried deep in the Roman ground, had spread over two levels. It housed three hundred people, almost all of them women and children. It was comfortable, once you got used to the dim light and cramped corridors. Of course the Crypt would always be dependent on the surface world, for an inflow of food and water, an outflow of sewage, and for money and building materials and labor: the complex could never cut adrift of the world, like a ship sailing away into an underground sea. But the Council had done all they could to maintain a wide range of links and relationships with suppliers and customers and allies in the outside world, making their sources as diverse as possible, so they were dependent on no one group or person.

As the depth of the Crypt had increased, incidences of flooding or collapse had been dealt with by brute force, with the application of plenty of Roman concrete and brick. Problems with ventilation and heating had been more insidious. Air shafts had been dug out, to be concealed aboveground as artfully as possible. Great fires were lit at the base of some of these shafts, so that the rising air would draw fresh breezes through the tunnels — a practice adopted from deep mines, many of whose engineers Regina had hired to supervise the extension of the Crypt.

But the air shafts alone weren’t enough. There had been a near disaster when a group of five students had been found unconscious, the air in their room foul, a stagnant puddle at the end of a corridor. It had been fortunate for all concerned, Regina thought, that only one student had died — and that her parents, a stoical equestrian family, had been happy to accept the death of their elder daughter as a price to be paid for the safety of their two younger children, both also with the Order. After that incident an elaborate air- monitoring system had been evolved. In every passageway and room there were candles burning, bits of reed dangled from the walls to show the air currents, and caged birds sang in most of the main chambers and corridors.

And it had been found that the simplest way to adjust the environment was by moving people.

A person blocked the flow of air, consumed its vital goodness, and pumped a lot of heat into it besides. So you could improve the flow of air into a problematic region by simply evacuating the passageways around it and moving the people somewhere else. You could likewise cool an area by taking out its people — or warm it up, by crowding more people in. It was impossible to solve every problem by “huddling.” The kitchens, and the nursery and crиche where the Order’s babies were cared for en masse, were a constant difficulty. But on the whole, with careful monitoring and analysis, the system worked well, and was becoming increasingly effective as they learned.