Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

It was dark, the walls coated with rich flocked wallpaper and the floor thickly carpeted, and it was cluttered with ancient-looking furniture. It was an old lady’s room, she thought miserably. But she had it to herself, and though she often missed the presence of others, the susurrus of hundreds of girls breathing all around her in the night, it was a haven of peace.

Her body’s changes proceeded at their own frightening pace, and the weight in her belly grew daily. From the eighth week a doctor attended her twice a day. She was called Patrizia; she might have been forty, but she was slim, composed, ageless.

Patrizia pressed Lucia’s gums, which had become spongy. “Good,” she said. “That’s normal. The effect of pregnancy hormones.”

“My heart is rattling,” Lucia said. “Though I feel sleepy all the time, it keeps me awake.”

“It’s having to work twice as hard. Your uterus needs twice as much blood as usual, your kidneys a quarter more—”

“I am always breathless. I pant — puff, puff, puff.”

“The fetus is pressing on your diaphragm. You are breathing more rapidly and more deeply to increase your supply of oxygen.”

“I can feel my ribs spreading. My hips are so sore I can barely walk. I get pins and needles in my hands and cramps in my feet. I either have constipation or diarrhea. I am a martyr to piles. My veins make my legs look like blue cheese—”

Patrizia laughed. “All this is normal!”

“Yesterday I felt the baby kick.”

Patrizia, for once, hesitated. “Perhaps you did.”

“But this is my eighth week . I am still in my first trimester!”

Patrizia looked down on her. “Somebody has been reading too much.”

“Actually, I have been looking up the Internet from my cell phone.” And from that she had learned the startling fact that among contadino women a pregnancy would last nine months, and you would not expect to have more than one child a year …

“There is nothing for you to learn on the Internet. Child, we have been delivering babies here for the best part of two thousand years — our way, and successfully.” She placed her hand on Lucia’s forehead. “You must trust us.”

But after that conversation Patrizia took her cell phone away.

In the weeks that followed, the changes in her body only seemed to accelerate. She was subject to many more tests, some of them conducted with very modern equipment. She had a chorion biopsy, and a fetoscopy, and an alpha-fetoprotein test, and amniocentesis. Her baby was imaged with ultrasound. She was astonished at its size and development.

And then — just thirteen weeks after her sole intercourse with Giuliano — she went into labor.

Everything was a blur. She found herself squatting, naked, in a darkened room. Pina was behind her, supporting her under her armpits. Pina spoke to her, but she couldn’t hear what she said. There was little pain, for electrodes taped to her flesh were passing currents through her back.

Patrizia was here, working competently, calmly, and quickly. And she was surrounded by women — Rosa, other doctors and nurses, even some of the matres , a great huddle of femaleness, touching her, stroking her belly and shoulders, kissing her softly, their lips tasting sweet, somehow reassuring.

In the last moments there was a sense of calm, she thought. It was oddly like a church. People spoke softly, if they spoke at all, and every eye was on her. She was the center of everything, for once in her life, the whole Order following the rhythms of her own body.

But it is only thirteen weeks, she thought, deep in her mind. Thirteen weeks!

The labor was as rapid as the rest of the pregnancy. When the baby crowned, she felt a burning sensation around her vagina, and then only numbness.

They showed her the baby briefly. It was a girl, a little crimson mass, but, Patrizia assured her, strong and healthy. Lucia held her, just for a moment.

Then Patrizia gently took the baby back. The nurses wrapped the child in blankets, and receded out of sight. Patrizia pressed an infuser at Lucia’s neck, and the world slipped away.

As she grew older, in the smoky, unchanging warmth of the Crypt, time flowed smoothly for Regina, despite her careful calendar keeping and record making. Still, she often thought back to the day of her last meeting with Ambrosius Aurelianus, and of her treatment of Agrippina. Her actions that day had had significant consequences — that day, at least, had become memorable.

Three years after that day, Julia, the younger sister of Agrippina, reached the time for her own menarche — and yet no blood flowed. It was not until her eighteenth year, in fact, four years older than her sister, that her bleeding finally began, and even then it was fitful. Julia was a cheerful, competent girl, more confident in fact than her older sister, but it had been as if her body itself had been frightened by the treatment Agrippina had received from Regina, and had wished to postpone the same as long as possible.

Regina welcomed this strange development — even though it scared her a little to think that such strange powers might exist in the world, in her .

Some time after that, she heard of another consequence of that fateful day.

Artorius had mounted his last campaign. Thanks to the treachery of his “ally” the imperial prefect Arvandus, he had finally been defeated, by the Visigoth king Euric. He retreated to the kingdom of the Burgundians, after which nothing more was heard of him. He certainly never returned to Britain; he was probably dead.

Perhaps if she had stayed at his side, Regina wondered, her cunning might have kept him alive a little longer. But any money she had given Artorius, any support, would merely have been frittered away on one more campaign, one more battle, until death finally caught up with him.

Ambrosius Aurelianus went on to greater glories, though. After Artorius, his own leadership qualities emerged, and his defeat of the Saxons at the battle of Mount Badon granted the British a respite. It was a feat that won Ambrosius the nickname last of the Romans .

But more Saxons arrived to reinforce their petty coastal kingdoms. They pushed farther west and north, and the British, expelled from their homes, succumbed or fled, just as Artorius had long foreseen. And in the wake of the Saxons, Roman Britain was erased, down to the foundations. The despairing British were left with nothing but legends of how Artorius was not dead, but sleeping, his mighty sword Chalybs at his side.

There came a day when Brica’s womb dried.

“But I am content,” Regina said to Leda, her half sister. They were sitting in the peristylium , the strange underground garden of the Crypt, where the mushrooms seemed to glow like lanterns. The three most senior women of the inner family were here: Regina herself, Leda, and Venus, granddaughter of Regina’s aunt Helena. “Brica has given me eight grandchildren — three boys, who have already started their apprenticeships in the world beyond, and five fine and beautiful workers for the Order. Nobody could do more.”

“Yes, Regina.”

“We are healthy stock — and our lives are long, in the shelter of the Crypt.”

It was true. It was six years after the visit of Ambrosius Aurelianus. Regina was now in her seventies, and Brica herself was over fifty. Even at Rome’s height, few people had lived beyond forty, fewer still past fifty; and in the current times of turmoil, with rampant disease, poor supplies of food and water, and assaults from barbarians, that average was dropping steadily. But not in the Crypt.