Coalescent

Chapter 49

As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.

Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.

Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter’s spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice — the last waves of a frozen ocean — and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.

Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that shielded much of the Galaxy’s true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was — though surely Earth’s sun would be invisible from here.

Once, all of humanity and all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had shivered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.

His heart swelled with pride.

Captain Dower called, “Heads up.”

Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminishing to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.

Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. “That’s our destination. First impressions — you, Abil?”

Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. “Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak—”

“It isn’t big enough,” came a voice from the darkness. “I mean, a crater that size ought to be cup-shaped, like a scoop out of the ice. You only get rim mountains and splash-back central peaks with much larger craters. And anyhow I haven’t seen any other craters here. This planet is a sunless rogue. Impacts must be rare, if you wander around in interstellar space.”

That had been Denh. She was in Abil’s unit, and Abil needed to get back in the loop.

“So,” he said, “what do you think it is, smart-ass?”

“That peak is tectonic,” Denh said. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like granite to me.”

Dower nodded. “And the rim feature?”

“… I can’t explain that, sir.”

“Honesty doesn’t excuse ignorance. But it helps. Let’s go see.”

The shuttle dropped vertiginously toward the ground.

The profile of the rim feature was — strange. It was a raised ridge of some gray-white, textured substance. It ran without a break all around that distant mountain. It had a bell-shaped profile, rising smoothly from the ice on either side, and a rounded summit. Its texture was odd — from a height it looked fibrous, or like a bank of grass, trapped in frost. Not like any rock formation Abil had ever seen.

The shuttle slowed almost to a stop now, and began to drift down toward the upper surface of the rim feature.

Abil saw that distance had fooled him. Those “fibers” were not blades of grass: they were bigger than that. They were limbs — arms and legs, hands and feet — and heads: human heads. The rim was a wall of the dead, a heaping of corpses huge enough to mimic a geological feature, naked and frozen into incorruptibility.

Abil was astounded. Nothing in the predrop briefings had prepared him for this.

“It’s a ring cemetery,” Dower said matter-of-factly. “Warren worlds are subtly different, but the template is the same, every damn time.” She glanced around sharply at the hundred faces. “Everybody okay with this?”

“There are just so many of them,” somebody said. “If the whole of the rim wall is like this — miles of it — there must be billions of them.”

“It’s an old colony,” Dower said dryly.

The shuttle swam on, heading toward the central mountain.

On the edge of a lake of frozen oxygen, the shuttle landed as gently as a soap bubble. Dower ordered a skinsuit check — each trooper checked her own kit, then her buddy’s — and the walls of the shuttle popped to nothingness.

Gravity was about standard. When Abil clambered off his small T-shaped chair he dropped the yard or so to the ground without any problem. He walked around, getting the feel of the ground and the gravity, listening to the whir of the exoskeletal servers built into his suit, checking telltales that hovered before him in a display of Virtual fireflies.

Around him a hundred troopers did likewise, stalking around the puddle of light cast by the shuttle’s floods. Their backpacks glimmered murky green, the color of pond water.

Abil walked out to the edge of the light, where it blurred and softened to smeared-out gray. The water ice was hard under his feet, hard and unyielding. The surface of the frozen ocean was dimpled and pocked. Here and there frost glimmered, patches of crystals that returned the lights of his suit, or of the stars. The frost was not water but frozen air.

Oxygen, of course, was a relic of life. So there must have been life here — life that mightn’t have been so different from Earth-origin life — long gone, crushed out of existence as the sun receded and the cold’s unrelenting fist closed. Perhaps that life had spawned intelligence: perhaps this world had once had a name. Now it only had a number, generated by the great automated catalogs on Earth — a number nobody ever used, for the tars called it simply “the Target,” as they called every other desolate world to which they were sent.

“Gather ’round,” Dower called.

Abil joined the cluster of troopers around Dower. He found his own unit, marked by red arm stripes. He joined them, showing his command stripes of red and black.

“Look here.” Dower pointed to the edge of the oxygen lake.

Footprints, on the water ice shore: human prints, made by some heavy-treaded boot in a shallow nitrogen frost, quite clear.

“The warren’s bio systems are probably highly efficient recyclers, but nothing is perfect. They still need oxygen …”

Abil walked up to the prints. His own foot was larger, by a few sizes. Standing here, he saw that the prints led back, away from the oxygen lake, forming a path that snaked almost dead straight toward the central mountain. And when he looked the other way, beyond the lake, he saw more trails leading off toward the rim, the circular heap of corpses.

Those striations he thought he had seen on the ice, radiating inward from the rim wall, were actually ruts, he saw now, worn into water ice as hard as granite by the passage of countless feet, over countless years. All those journeys, he thought, shuddering, out to that great heaped-up pile of mummies. Year after year, generation after generation.

Dower hefted a weapon. “This is our way in. Form up.”

Abil stood at the head of his unit. Briefly he surveyed their faces. There were ten of them, all friends — even Denh. They would support him now to their deaths. But his stripes were only provisional, and he knew that if he fouled up they would chew jockey to replace him for the next drop, wherever and whenever it was.

That wasn’t going to happen. He grinned tightly. “Reds, forward.” They formed into two rows, with Abil at the head.

They trotted along the line of the path in the ice, keeping to either side of the rut, heading steadily toward the central mountain. The going turned out to be treacherous. Even away from the main paths the ice was worn slick by the passage of human feet. There were a few stumbles, and every so often there was a silent burst of vapor as somebody stepped into an oxygen puddle. Every time one of his unit took a pratfall Abil called a halt to run fresh equipment checks.

After about a mile Dower paused. The rut had led them to a crater in the ice, maybe ten yards across — no, Abil saw, the edges of this shallow pit were too sharp for that, its circular form too regular, and the base of the pit was smooth, gunmetal gray. Dower pressed her finger to the surface, and read Virtuals that danced before her Eyes. “Metal,” she said. She beckoned to Abil. “Corporal. Find a way in.”

He stepped gingerly onto the metal surface. It was slick, and littered with bits of loose frost, but it was easier than walking on the ice. He sensed hollowness beneath his feet, though, a great volume, and he trod lightly, for fear of making a noise. He knelt down, pressed his palm to the metal surface, and waited. Where his knee touched the metal he could feel its cold, clawing at him through the diamond pattern of heating filaments in his skinsuit. It took a few seconds for results from his suit’s sensors to be displayed, in hovering Virtuals before his face.

He was rewarded with a sketchy three-dimensional cross section. The metal plate was a couple of yards thick, and much of it was solid, fused on a base of rock. But it contained a hollow chamber, an upright cylinder. Probably some kind of low-tech backup system. The covering for the hollow was no more than a couple of yards away.

He walked that way and knelt again. His fingers, scraping over the sheer surface, quickly found a loose panel. By pressing on one side of it, he made it flip up. Beneath that was a simple handle, T-shaped. He grasped this, tugged. A lid rose up, attached by mechanical hinges.

Abil peered into the pit, using his suit lights. The pit was a little deeper than he was tall. He saw a wheel in there, a wheel set on a kind of spindle. Its purpose was obvious.

Dower came to stand beside him. She grunted. “Well done, Corporal. Okay, let’s take a minute. Check your kit again.” The troopers, working in pairs, complied.

Dower pointed at the mountain. “You were right — uh, Denh. The mountain’s tectonic, not impact- created. We’re standing over a midocean ridge: a place where the crust is cracking open, and stuff from within wells up to form new ocean floor. And where that happens, you get mountains heaping up, like this. On this planet it’s still happening. The loss of the sun destroyed the surface and the air, but it made no difference to what’s going on down deep. All along this ridge you will have vents, like valves, where the heat and the minerals from within the planet come bubbling up. And that heat will keep little pockets of water liquid, even now. And where there’s liquid water—”

“There’s life.” That mumble came from a number of voices. It was a slogan from biology classes taught to five-year-olds, all across the Expansion.

“And that is the ecosystem that will have survived this planet’s ejection from its solar system: something like bacteria colonies, or tube worms perhaps — probably anaerobic, living off the minerals and the heat that seeps out of the cracks in the ground. Radioactivity will keep the planet’s core warm long after that lost sun itself has gone cold. Strange irony — life on this world will probably actually last longer than if it had stayed in orbit around its sun …”

Abil piped up: “Tell us about the warren, sir.”

She began to sketch with one finger in the loose ice. “The warren is a rough toroid dug into the ice, encircling that central peak. In places it’s nearly a mile deep. It’s not a simple structure; it’s a mess of interconnected chambers and corridors. We suspect the birthing chambers are the deepest, the closest to the mountain rock itself; that’s the usual arrangement.

“Now here—” She slashed at her diagram, drawing diagonal lines that reached up from the torus and down to the face of the mountain. “Runs. Access chutes. Some of them vertical, probably the oldest,

fitted with lifting equipment; the more recent ones will have stairs and ladders. You can see these runs provide access to the surface, for the disposal of the dead, foraging missions for oxygen, perhaps other resources. These lower tunnels reach down to the face of the mountain, to the pockets of liquid water and the life-forms down there. With suitable processing the colonists will be able to live off the native organic compounds.” She looked up. “You need to know that it’s common for colonies of this type to reprocess as much of their raw material as possible.” She let that hang in the silence.

Denh said queasily, “You mean, people ? But we saw the corpses in that great ring.”

Dower shrugged. “In these wild warrens patterns vary … Just remember two things. First, across the Galaxy we are at war. Our alien enemy is pitiless, and cares nothing for your moral qualms, or even your nausea, Denh. We need warm bodies to be thrown into the war, and that’s why we’re here. We’re a press gang, nothing more. And second — remember that whatever you see down there, however strange it seems to you, these are human beings. Not like you — a different sort — but human nevertheless. So there’s nothing to fear.”

“Yes, sir,” came the ritual chorus.

“All right. Abil—”

Denh pushed herself forward. “Let me, Captain.” She jumped into the pit and rubbed her hands, pretending to spit on the palms, to the soft laughter of her mates. “Clockwise, you think?” She turned the wheel.

The ground shuddered under Abil’s feet. The great lid of metal and rock slid back, disappearing under the ice. Denh yelped, and jumped out of her hole.

The run was a broad, slanting tunnel cut into the ice. Crude steps had been etched into its lower surface, four, five, six parallel staircases. There was no light but the stars, and the spots of their skinsuits.

Eight of the ten teams would enter the run, leaving two on watch on the surface. Dower waved two units forward to take the lead. Abil’s red team was one of them.

Abil led the way into the hole. He clambered easily down the stairs, wary, descending into deeper darkness. His hands were empty; though the weapons of his team bristled behind him, he felt naked.

Abil had descended maybe two hundred yards into the hole when suddenly the ice under his feet shook again. The lid was closing over the hole, like a great eyelid, shutting out the stars. He heard hurried, gasping breaths, the sounds of panic rising in his troopers. He tried to control his own breathing. “Red team, take it easy,” he said. “Remember your briefing. We expected this.”

“The corporal’s right,” growled Dower, somewhere above him. “This is just an air lock. Just wait, now.”

For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.

There was a hiss of inrushing air. Then a coarse gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.

Dower held up her gloved hand. “You hear that?”

They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: muffled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps — many more, like an approaching crowd.

“They have runners,” Dower whispered. “Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again … It’s a pretty efficient alarm system.”

There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.

The wheel was turning with a scrape.

“They’re coming,” Dower said, hefting her weapon. “Let’s have some fun.”

The door slid back.

Chapter 50

I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.

So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards — especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used to limoncello ; I can never get it off my teeth.

I like to think Peter would have seen the aptness of my retiring here, to Amalfi. For as it happens it was here, over a century ago, that Bedford, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, fled after his remarkable adventures in the moon, and wrote his own memoir. I keep a copy of the book, a battered old paperback, in my hotel room.

Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.

I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.

When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.

Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn’t hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true identity was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.

But that was where the trail ran cold, happily for me. Peter had signed into our hotel under an assumed name, and — as far as I know — never brought any of his bomb-making equipment there. The hotel staff hadn’t seen much of him, and didn’t seem to recognize the blurred face on the news programs.

Still, I checked out — paying with cash, making sure I left no contact address at the hotel — and fled Rome, for Amalfi.

I did bring with me all that was left of Peter’s possessions. It would surely have been a mistake for me to leave them behind. And anyhow it didn’t seem right. I burned his clothes, his shaving gear, other junk. I kept his data, though. I copied it from his machines to a new laptop I had bought in Rome. Then I destroyed the machines as best I could, wiping them clean, breaking them open and smashing the chips, dumping the carcasses in the ocean.

The incident soon faded from attention: bomb attacks in crowded cities are sadly commonplace nowadays. The authorities are still digging, of course. A common theory is that maybe there is some kind of trail back to the usual suspects in the Middle East. But a consensus seems to be emerging that it must have been Peter who was primarily responsible for both attacks, in San Jose and Rome, and that he was some kind of lone nut with an unknowable grudge, for no other link has been found between the geometric optics lab and the big hole in the ground in Rome.

As for that great underground city under the Appian Way, before the authorities were able to penetrate it fully — and I’ve no idea how they did it — the swarming drones cleared it out. There was little left to see but the infrastructure, the rooms, the partitions, the great vents for circulating the air. The purpose of some rooms was obvious — the kitchens with their gas supply, the dormitories where the frames of the bunk beds have been left intact, the hospitals. Some other chambers I could have identified, had anybody asked me, like the nurseries and the deep, musty, mysterious rooms where the mamme-nonne had lived. They even dismantled their suite of mainframe computers.

It was obvious to everyone that some great project had been sustained down here, for a long time. But it was impossible to say what that project might have been. Conspiracy theories proliferated; the most popular seems to be that the Crypt was a Doctor Strangelove nuclear war bunker, perhaps built by Mussolini himself.

Remarkably enough, the Order itself wasn’t linked with the Crypt. Somehow the surface offices closed off their links with the underground complex — they must have been prepared for an eventuality like this — so that they were able to pose as just more accidental victims of the disaster. When things calmed down they even continued to sell their genealogy services, presumably based on local copies of the Order’s core data. You’d never have known anything happened.

Not all the drones from the Crypt vanished into the alleyways. As it happened Pina, Lucia’s untrustworthy friend, suffered a broken arm when she fell through a smashed ceiling, and was trapped under rubble. The drones couldn’t get her out before the firefighters reached her. She was taken to one of Rome’s big teaching hospitals. I conscripted Daniel’s help to hack into the relevant hospital files to find out what happened.

When the doctors began to study her, and dug out the old files they had compiled when she was trapped after that similar accident years before, they were startled by Pina’s “subadult” condition. They were able to trace the mechanism of her sterility. An impaired hypothalamic hormone secretion led to an inadequate gonadotrophic secretion, which in turn blocked ovulation … And so on. I didn’t really understand any of this, and I didn’t know any medics I could trust to decode it for me. I don’t suppose it mattered anyhow, for though the doctors could figure out how the sterility occurred, they couldn’t figure out why. And Pina, evidently, wouldn’t talk.

They kept her in hospital for two months. Strangely, by the end of that time, there were some changes in the condition of her body. It seemed that her glands were starting to secrete the complex chain of hormones that would have been necessary to trigger ovulation: it was as if she was entering puberty at last, at the much-delayed age of twenty-five. Perhaps if all the drones could be removed from the hive, they too would “recover.”

But before this process was complete Pina disappeared from the hospital. She was checked out by “relatives,” just as Lucia had been. I didn’t hear of her again.

I did hear of Giuliano Andreoli, as it happened, having searched for his name on the Internet. Lucia’s first lover was arrested for attempted rape, but committed suicide in his cell before the case could be brought to trial. I could imagine what Peter would have made of that: to the Order, Giuliano was just a sperm machine, used once and then discarded, pushed out into the glaring light of the outside world and an empty future. What he had known in the hive, that brief overwhelming moment of love and lust, must have come to seem like a dream.

As for Lucia herself, she is now living with Daniel and his family, in their bright, airy home in the hills outside Rome. Daniel’s parents turned out to be decent, humane folk. And usefully enough, like many expats they don’t entirely trust the competence of the Italian authorities, and were happy to get Lucia medical treatment privately and discreetly.

Lucia has had her third baby — a boy, in fact, lusty and healthy. It turned out to be a simple procedure to snip out her spermatheca, as Peter had called it, the little sac on her womb that would have continued to bleed Giuliano’s seed into her for the rest of her life. Daniel’s family now talk of putting her through school.

I don’t know whether there will ever be love between Daniel and Lucia. Even now that the pressure of relentless childbirth is off her, nobody seems to know how her body will adjust in the future. And she is damaged. She has never heard what became of her first child, who must have been in one of those immense crиches on that fateful day. I think that is a wound that will never heal. But at least in Daniel, and his family, she has found good friends.

Sometimes, though, I wonder about Lucia’s true destiny.

In all the reports about the Crypt, what was most notable for me was what was missing. The little carved matres, for instance, which Regina had brought from Roman Britain — the symbolic core of her family, and then of the Order. They were never mentioned, never found.

Peter told me that among some species of social insects the colonies breed by sending out a queen and a few workers, to start a colony all over again. I think I will try to keep watch on Lucia and her young family.

As for my sister, I haven’t seen Rosa since I lost sight of her in the crush, deep in the Crypt. I don’t think she could have gone back to the Order, though. In the end she knew too much — more than she was supposed to know — and yet she needed to know it. It must be necessary from time to time for the Order to throw up somebody like Rosa with an overview, somebody capable of perceiving greater scales, more complex threats. Peter’s understanding was itself a threat to the Order — and she had to develop an equivalent understanding to beat him. But a drone isn’t supposed to know she’s in a hive. Ignorance is strength. In the end she saved the Order by sacrificing herself, as a good drone should, and knew what she was doing every step of the way.

Thus I found my sister, and lost her again.

There are other loose ends I can’t resist tugging on.

I’ve been reading about eusocial organisms. I’ve learned that one characteristic of hives, just as much as the sterility of the workers and the rest, is suicide — the willingness of a drone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and so for the long-term interests of its genetic heritage. You see it when a termite mound is broken open, or a predator tries to get into a mole rat colony. It’s seen as proof by the biologists that the key organism is the global community, the hive, not the individual, for the individual acts completely selflessly. It was certainly true of the Order. When the Crypt was attacked, such as during the Sack of Rome, some of the members gave their lives to save the rest.

But here’s the rub. In the end Peter committed suicide, to protect — what? He had no family. The future of humankind? But again, he had no children — and no direct connection to that future.

What he did have a connection to was the Slan(t)ers.

The Slan(t)ers have no leader; their network has no central point. Their behavior is dictated by the behavior of those “around” them in cyberspace, and governed by simple rules of online-protocol feedback. Among the Slan(t)ers — I’ve found — there are virtually none with children. They are too busy with Slan(t)er projects for that.

The Slan(t)ers don’t have any physical connection, as did the Order. They don’t even live in the same place. And their interest in the group isn’t in any way genetic, as with the Order. There is no pretense that the Slan(t)ers are a family in the normal sense. But nevertheless, I believe the Slan(t)ers are another hive — a new, even purer form of human hive made possible by electronic interconnections — a hive of the mind, in which only ideas, not genes, are preserved.

Peter believed that everything he did was in the service of the future of humankind. But I believe that he wasn’t really acting for any rational goals. The Slan(t)ers, the hive as a whole, had recognized the existence of another hive — and, like a foraging ant coming on another colony, Peter attacked.

At the crux, Peter wondered if I was a hive creature myself. Perhaps I was; perhaps I am. I am sure he was. And if the Order truly was a hive — and if it wasn’t unique, if the Slan(t)ers are, too, a new sort altogether — then how many others are out there ?

Anyhow, just because Peter was really following hive dictates doesn’t mean he was wrong about the human future.

On his computer I found a few emails he’d been composing to send me, never finished.

“I think about the future. I believe that our greatest triumph, our greatest glory, lies ahead of us. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that just as the great events of the past shape us now, so that mighty future — the peak age of humankind, the clash of cymbals — has echoes in the present, too ? The physicists now say you have to think of the universe, and all its long, singular history, as just one page in a great book of possibilities, stacked up in higher dimensions. When those pages are slammed together, when the great book is closed, a Big Bang is generated, the page wiped clean, a new history written. And if time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the farthest future, would you at last touch the past? Are we influenced and shaped, not just by the past, but echoes of the future? …”

Sometimes at night I look up at the stars, and I wonder what strange future is folding down over us even now. I wish Peter was here, so we could talk this out. I can still see him leaning closer to me conspiratorially, on our bench in that dismal little park by the Forum, the sweet smell of limoncello on his breath.

Chapter 51

Beyond the air lock door, there was a tunnel. It branched and bifurcated, and the light glowed pearl gray. It was like looking into a huge underground cathedral, shaped from the glistening ice.

And in the foreground was a mob.

There must have been a hundred people in the first rank alone, and there were more ranks behind, dimly glimpsed, more than Abil could count. They were small, squat, powerful looking. They were mostly unarmed, but some carried clubs of rusty metal. And they were naked, all of them. They looked somehow unformed, as if ill defined. The males had small, budlike genitals, and the females’ breasts were small, their hips narrow. None of them seemed to have any body hair.

All this in a single glimpse. Then the Coalescents surged forward. They didn’t yell, didn’t threaten; the only noise was the pad of their feet on the floor, the brush of their flesh against the ice walls. Abil stood, transfixed, watching the human tide wash toward him.

Denh screamed, “Drop! Drop!”

Reflexively Abil threw himself to the ground. Laser light, cherry red, threaded the air above him, straight as a geometrical exercise.

The light sliced through the mob. Limbs were cut through and detached, intestines spilled from unzipped chest cavities, even heads came away amid unfeasibly huge founts of crimson blood. Now there was noise, screams, cries, and soft grunts.

The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carcasses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.

Abil had never confronted death on such a scale — a thousand or more dead in seconds — it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn’t even murder but a kind of mass suicide. The Coalescents’ only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in its way. But that wouldn’t happen, Abil thought sadly.

So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. “Forward the throwers!”

Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.

But the flames wouldn’t hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. “Go, go, go!”

He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.

And he faced more people — thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.

But they ran into flames. The front rank melted back like snowflakes.

After that Abil let the flamers take the lead. They just cut a corridor through the swarming crowd, and the troopers strode ahead over a carpet of burning flesh and cut bone. The crowd closed behind them, clustering like antibodies around an infection, but the troopers’ disciplined and well-drilled weapons fire kept them away. It was as if they were hacking their way into some huge body, seeking its beating heart. As drones died all around him Abil began to feel numbed by it all, as the waves of faces, all so alike, crisped in the brilliant glare of the flames.

As they worked deeper, though, he began to notice a change. The assailants here were just as ferocious, but they seemed younger. That was part of the pattern he had been trained to expect. He wished he could find a way to spare the smallest, the most obviously childlike. But these young ones threw themselves on his troopers’ flames as eagerly as their elders.

And then, quite suddenly, the troopers burst through a final barrier of drones, and found themselves in the birthing chamber.

It was a vast, darkened room, where ancient fluorescents glowed dimly. The troopers fanned out. They were covered in blood and bits of charred flesh, he saw, leaving bloody footprints where they passed. They looked as if they had been born, delivered through that terrible passage of death. One flamethrower still flared, but with a gesture Abil ordered it shut off.

In this chamber, people moved through the dark, as naked as those outside. Nobody came to oppose the troopers. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for the drones that anybody should harm those who spent their lives here.

Cautiously Abil moved forward, deeper into the gloom. The air was warm and humid; his faceplate misted over.

Women, naked, nestled in shallow pits on the floor, in knots of ten or a dozen. Some of the pits were filled with milky water, and the women floated, relaxed. Attendants, young women and children, moved back and forth, carrying what looked like food and drink. In one corner there were infants, a carpet of them who crawled and toddled. Abil moved among them, a bloody pillar.

The women in the pits were all pregnant — tremendously pregnant, he saw, with immense bellies that must have held three, four, five infants. In one place, a woman was actually giving birth. She stood squat, supported by two helpers. A baby slid easily out from between her legs, to be caught, slapped, and cradled; but before its umbilical was cut another small head was protruding from the woman’s vagina. She seemed in no pain; her expression was dreamy, abstract.

One of the breeder women looked up as he passed. She reached up a hand to him, the fingers long and feather-thin. Her limbs were etiolated, spindly; her legs could surely not have supported the weight of her immense, fecund torso. But her face was fully human.

On impulse, curious, he reached up and ran his thumbnail under his chin. His faceplate popped and swung upward. Dense air, moist and hot, pressed in on him.

The smells were extraordinary. He distinguished blood, and milk, and piss and shit, earthy human smells. There was a stink of burning that might have come from his own suit, a smell of vacuum, or of the battle he had waged in the corridors beyond this place.

And there was something else, something stronger still. Abil had never seen an animal larger than a rat. But that was how he labeled this smell: a stink like that of a huge rat’s nest, pungent and overpowering.

He looked down at the woman who had reached up to him. Her face really was beautiful, he thought, narrow and delicate, with high cheekbones and large blue eyes. She smiled at him, showing a row of teeth that came to points. He felt warmed. He longed to speak to her.

An attendant leaned over her, a girl who might have been twelve. He thought the girl was kissing the pregnant woman. When the girl pulled away her jaws were opened wide, and a thin rope of some kind of paste, glistening faintly green, pulsed out of her throat, passing from her mouth into the breeder’s. It was beautiful, Abil thought, overwhelmed; he had never seen such pure love as between this woman and the girl.

But he, in his clumsy, bloodstained suit, would forever be kept apart from this love. He felt tears well. He fell to his knees and reached forward with bloodstained gloves. The breeding woman screeched and thrashed backward. The attendant girl, regurgitated paste dribbling from her mouth, instantly hurled herself at him. She caught him off-balance. He fell back, and his head cracked on the ground. He struggled to get up. He had to get back to the mother, to explain.

There was an arm around his throat — a suited arm. He struggled, but his lungs were aching. He heard Denh’s voice call: “Kill the breeders. Move it!” A gloved hand passed before Abil’s face, closing his faceplate, shutting out the noise of babies crying, and through its murky pane he saw fire flare once more.

The captain sat on the edge of Abil’s sick bay bed. “Denh is acting corporal for now,” Dower said gently.

Abil sighed. “It’s no more than I deserved, sir.”

Dower shook her head. “That damn curiosity of yours. You certainly made a mistake, but hardly a fatal one. But you weren’t adequately briefed. In a way the fault’s mine. I argue with the Commissaries before every drop. They would tell you grunts nothing if they had the chance, I think, for they believe nobody but them needs to know anything.”

“What happened to me, sir?”

“Pheromones.”

“Sir?”

“There are many ways to communicate, tar. Such as by scent. You and I are poor at smelling, you know, compared to our senses of touch, sight, hearing. We can distinguish only a few scent qualities: sweet, fetid, sour, musky, dry … But those Coalescent drones have been stuck in their hole in the ground for fifteen thousand years. Now, the human species itself is only four or five times older than that. There has been plenty of time for evolutionary divergence.”

“And when I cracked my faceplate—”

“You were overwhelmed with messages you couldn’t untangle.” Dower leaned closer. “What was it like?”

Abil thought back. “I wanted to stay there, sir. To be with them. To be like them.” He shuddered. “I let you down.”

“There’s no shame, tar. I don’t think you’re going to make a corporal, though; command isn’t for you.” Dower’s metal Eyes glistened. “You weren’t betrayed by fear. You were betrayed by your curiosity — perhaps imagination. You had to know what it was like in there, didn’t you? And for that you risked your life, and the lives of your unit.”

Abil tried to sit up. “Sir, I—”

“Take it easy.” Dower pushed him back, gently, to his bed. “I told you, there’s no shame. I’ve been watching you. It’s one of the responsibilities of command, tar. You have to test those under you, all the time, test and assess. Because the only way the Expansion is going to prosper is if we make the best use of our resources. And I don’t believe the best use of you is to stick you down a hole in charge of a bunch of grunts.” Dower leaned closer. “Have you ever considered working for the Commission for Historical Truth?”

A vision of chill intellects and severe black robes filled Abil’s mind. “The Commission, sir? Me? ”

Dower laughed. “Just think about it … Ah. We’re about to leave orbit.”

Abil could sense the subtle inertial shift, as if he was in a huge elevator, rising from the frozen planet.

Dower snapped her fingers, and a Virtual of the Target materialized between their faces. Slowly turning, bathed in simulated light, the planet was like a toy, sparkling white, laced here and there by black ridges of true rock, stubborn mountain chains resisting the ice. Starships circled it like flies.

Dower reached out to touch one dimpled feature.

The view expanded, to reveal a broad, walled plain. Abil realized he was looking down on the warren he had visited. Around the mountain peak, great cracks had been cut into the ground. Drones were being shepherded out of the warren by the mop-up squads. The drones filed toward the bellies of freighters that had settled from space, down onto the ice, to swallow them up. The drones looked bewildered, and they milled to and fro. Here and there one or two broke lines, and even lunged at the troopers. The silent spark of weapons cut them down.

For every live drone that came walking to the surface, Abil saw, a dozen carcasses were hauled out.

Dower saw his expression. “There were probably a billion drones in that one hive alone. A billion. We’ll be lucky to ship out more than a hundred thousand.”

“A hundred thousand — is that all, sir?”

“The waste is terrible — yes, I know. But what does it matter? They were a billion purposeless lives, the culmination of a thousand pointless generations. And look here.”

She tapped at the floating image. The deep-buried colony turned red, showing as a clear torus shape around the ice-buried mountain. And when the viewpoint pulled back, Abil saw that there were many more such red blotches scarring the planet’s white face, from pole to pole, around the equator.

“There are about a thousand warrens on this one planet,” Dower murmured. “Probably most of them unaware of each other. We probably won’t even be able to clean them all out. I’ve seen this before, many times, on worlds as different from this, tar, as you can imagine — but all warrens are essentially the same. Anywhere where the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing.”

In one place two of the colonies were in contact; tendrils of pale pink reached out from their red cores, and where they touched, crimson flared. Dower spoke a soft command. The simulated image’s time scale accelerated, so that days, weeks passed in seconds. Abil could see how the two colonies probed toward each other, over and again, and where they came in contact crimson flared — a crimson, he realized, that showed where people were dying.

“They’re fighting,” he said. “It’s almost as if the colonies are living things themselves, sir.”

“Well, so they are,” Dower said.

“But — a thousand of them. That makes um, a trillion people on this light-starved planet alone — all living off the scrapings from the thermal vents …”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it? Oh, the Coalescents are efficient. But they are just drones. We own history.” She waved her hands and produced a new image, a star field, crossed by a great river of light. She pointed to the Galaxy core. “Leave the Coalescents to their holes in the ground. That is where we are going, tar; that is where our destiny will be made — or broken.”

When she had gone Abil restored the image of the slowly turning globe, its white surface pustulous with warrens.

There were no cities here, he thought, no nations. There were only the Coalescent colonies. The huge entities waged their slow and silent battles against each other, shaping and spending the lives of their human drones — drones who may have believed they were free and happy — and all without consciousness or pity. On this world the story of humankind was over, he thought. On this world, the future belonged to the hives.

But there were other worlds.

The starship leapt away with an almost imperceptible lurch. The frozen world folded over on itself and dropped into darkness.

Chapter 52

One of my favorite walks is quite short. You follow the staircases cut into the rock, and pass through alleyways and under archways, and between the tottering houses that lean so close they almost touch. After only a few minutes, you can clamber all the way from Amalfi to Atrani, a tiny medieval town that nestles in the next bay along this indented coastline.

In the central piazza of Atrani there is an open-air cafй where you can sip coffee or Coke and watch the sun slide over the looming volcanic hills. It’s peaceful enough, so long as you avoid the times when the schoolchildren flood through the square, or the early evenings when young men pose for the girls on their gleaming scooters and motorbikes.

Yesterday — it was a Sunday — I made the mistake of sitting there at noon. All was peaceful, just a few churchgoers, everybody remarkably smartly dressed as they strolled through the square, talking in that intense, very physical way the Italians have. The waiter had just brought me my coffee.

And somebody set off a cannon. I jumped out of my seat, my heart pounding. The waiter didn’t spill a drop.

The shot turned out to be from a church set high on the hillside, where the clergy celebrate each Sabbath with a little pyrotechnics. But in the square of Atrani the noise was deafening.

It is never quiet in Italy.

I know I can’t hide out here forever. Some time soon I’ll have to reconnect with the real world.

For one thing my money won’t last forever. There has been a stock market crash.

It was actually quite predictable. There’s an analysis that dates back to the Great Depression that has detected cycles, called Elliott waves, in the various economic ups and downs. Why do these simple analyses work? Because they are models of the human herd instinct. The traders on the stock exchange floor don’t make rational decisions based on such factors as the intrinsic value of a stock. They just see what their neighbors are doing, and copy them. Just like the rest of us.

Predictable or not, the crash has wiped out a chunk of my savings. So I must move on.

I intend to finish this account, and then … Well, I don’t quite know what to do with it, save to send it to Claudio at the Vatican Archives. It seems right that it should be preserved. If Rosa ever gets in touch again, she will get a copy, too.

I think I should pay another visit to my sister Gina in Miami Beach. She should know what became of Rosa — she’s her sister, too, whether she likes it or not. And perhaps Great-Uncle Lou will enjoy hearing of the fate of Maria Ludovica, the mamma-nonna, who was still producing babies like popping peas from a pod at the age of a hundred.

As for me, after that, I will go home, back to Britain. Maybe not to London, though. Somewhere without the crowds. I need a job, but I want to go freelance. I can’t bear the thought of becoming enmeshed in another huge organization, a great press of people all around me.

I think I’ll look up Linda. I haven’t forgotten how my instinct, in those dreadful moments in the depths of the Crypt, was to turn to her memory for support. One way or another she’s been there for me since we met. There’s a lot to build on.

Unlike Peter, I refuse to believe the future is fixed.

I hope one day to put all this behind me. But sometimes I am overwhelmed. If I am in a crowd, sometimes I will detect a whiff of that leonine animal musk of the Coalescents, and I have to retreat to my room, or the fresh air of the empty hills above the towns. I will never be free of it. And yet a part of me, I know, will always long to be immersed again in that dense warmth, to be surrounded by smiling faces like mirrors of my own, to give myself up to the mindless, loving joy of the hive.