Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

And: “Ignorance is strength.”

This time Leda was with her. “I don’t understand, dear.”

“ We cannot survive. We old ones cannot run the Order forever. But the Order must be immortal. This is not a little empire and it never must be so. There must be no leader to fall, no traitor to betray us. The seniors must step back into the shadows, the Council must abdicate whatever powers it can. The Order itself must sustain its own existence. Let no one question. Let no one know more than she needs to perform her tasks. That way, if one fails, another can replace her, and the Order will go on. The Order, emerging from us all, will prevail. Ignorance is strength. ”

Leda still didn’t understand. But in the corridors of her failing mind, Regina saw it clearly.

To survive into the future you needed a system: that was the one indisputable lesson she had learned since arriving in Rome. The Romans had had a genius for organizations that functioned effectively for generations, despite political instability and corruption and all the other failings of humanity. Though the army was shamelessly used by pretenders to the throne and other adventurers for their own ends, it had always remained a military force of unparalleled effectiveness; and even though senators and others would misuse the legal system for their own ends, throughout the Empire, normal and competent processes of justice had served enormous numbers of people in every aspect of their daily lives. Even the city itself had sustained its own identity, its own organization, across a thousand years of unplanned growth, forty or fifty generations of people, for the city, too, was a system.

Systems, yes. And it was a system that she had been trying to establish here, following her instincts, bit by bit, as the years wore away. A system that would endure. A system that would work, even when the people it sustained had forgotten it existed.

The Order would be like a mosaic, she thought — but not of the kind her father used to make. Imagine a mosaic assembled not by a single master designer but by a hundred workers. Let each of them place her tesserae in harmony with those of her sisters. Then from these small acts of sympathy, from sisters simply listening to each other, a greater and enduring harmony would emerge. And it was a harmony that would survive the death of any one artisan — for the group was the artist, and the group survived the individuals …

You didn’t need a mind to create order. In fact, the last thing you wanted was a mind in control, if that mind belonged to an ambitious idiot like Artorius.

“Listen to your sisters,” she said.

“Regina?”

“That’s all you need to do. And the mosaic will emerge …”

She slept.

Lucia arranged to meet Daniel at the Diocletian Baths. This was a monument just to the northwest of the Termini, Rome’s central station. She arrived early. It was a hot, humid August day, and the sky, laden with clouds, threatened rain.

She walked around the walls. These baths had been built in the fourth century, and like many of Rome’s later monuments they actually presented an ugly face to the world, great cliffs of red brickwork. Over the centuries such monuments had been steadily stripped of their marble, so that all that was left was a kind of skeleton of what had been.

But the monument was still massive, still enduring. Walls that had once been interior were now exterior, and she could make out the shapes of domes, broken open like eggs. The exedra , once an enclosed space surrounded by porticoes and seats where citizens would gather to talk, had been given over to a traffic- choked square.

The rain began to fall. She paid a few euros to enter the museum that had been built into the baths.

There were only a few tourists here. Bored attendants sat on plastic upright chairs, as still as robots switched off at the mains. The exhibits were sparse, cluttered together, and poorly labeled, for, she learned, the museum was in the middle of a long, slow process of being rehoused. Lucia wasn’t very interested.

At the center of the museum she found a kind of cloister, a colonnaded covered walkway surrounding a patch of green. More antique detritus had been gathered here, all unlabeled. There were fragments of statues, bits of fallen pillars, broken inscriptions whose huge lettering told of the size of the monuments they had once graced. Some of the monuments had been set in the garden, where they protruded from the untidy green.

There were no seats, but she found she could perch on the low wall that fenced off the garden. She put her feet up on the wall’s cool surface, rested her neck against a pillar, and cradled her hands on her belly. Her back was hurting, and to sit was a relief. The rain fell steadily, though not hard. It hissed on the grass, and turned the streaked marble of the fragments a golden brown. There was no wind. Some of the drops reached her, here at the edge of the cover of the roof, but the rain was warm, and she didn’t mind. It was a peaceful place, away from the city’s roar, just her and the dozing attendant, the antiquities, the rain hissing on the grass.

The time she had been due to meet Daniel came and went. She waited half an hour, and still he didn’t come.

The rain stopped. A murky sunlight broke through smog the rain had failed to clear. By this time the attendant was watching her suspiciously — or perhaps it was just that he wanted to close up early.

She swiveled her legs off the wall and got to her feet. Her back still hurt, and the cool marble had made her piles itch, maddeningly, comically. Feeling very old, she made her way out of the museum.

She went back to the Crypt, for she had nowhere else to go.

That night, and the next day, whenever she found a little privacy, she made more covert calls to Daniel’s cell. But the phone was switched off, and he didn’t reply to the messages she left on his answering service.

The second day she tried to resist making any more calls. She was wary of scaring him off. She seemed to be aware constantly of the phone’s mass in her pocket or her bag, though, as she waited for it to ring.

By lunchtime she lost her nerve. She went to a corner of the scrinium offices, shielded by filing cabinets, and made another call.

This time he picked up. “… Hello?”

“I—” She stopped, took deep breaths, tried to be calm. “It’s Lucia.” She sensed hesitation. “You remember—”

“The girl in the Pantheon. Oh, shoot .” He used the English word. “We were going to meet, weren’t we?”

“Yes. At the baths.”

“Was it yesterday? I’m sorry—”

“No,” she said, forcing herself to keep an even tone. “Not yesterday. Two days ago.”

“You turned up and I didn’t. Look, I’m really sorry. That’s me all over.” His voice sounded calm, faraway, untroubled save for a little embarrassment. A voice from another world, she thought. “Let me make it up to you. I’ll buy you lunch. Tomorrow?”

“No,” she snapped.

“No?”

“It doesn’t matter about lunch … Let’s just meet,” she said.

“Okay. Whatever you want. I owe you. I don’t want you to think badly of me. Where, at the baths?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Today,” she gasped. “It has to be today.”

Again she heard him hesitate, and she cursed herself for her lack of control.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I have a study break this afternoon. I can get away. I’ll see you there. What, about three?”

“That will be fine.”

“Okay. Ciao … ”