Coalescent

Chapter 37

The da Vinci Airport is a few miles southwest of Rome. I got a cab to the city center. The driver might have been fifty. His face was like brown, crumpled leather. He seemed cheerful enough. He had a little wooden puppet hanging from his rearview mirror, like a red-painted Pinocchio.

We drove through rings of development. The outermost belt was the most modern, as you’d expect, a string of deeply ugly modern residential suburbs — tower blocks that would have shamed Manchester at its worst — and industrial sites, power plants, and other necessary but unattractive infrastructure. There were posters for British and American movies and pop stars, and an awful lot of kids in MANCHESTER UNITED soccer shirts and Yankees baseball caps. I could have been anywhere.

But within that concrete girdle there was a more attractive zone, of apartment blocks laid out around narrow roads and small greened squares. It looked like a nineteenth-century development. Here the traffic knotted up. My driver edged forward, honking, muttering, and gesturing.

We were close to the people now, pedestrians who squeezed their way along the narrow roads, mopeds that buzzed around us. Romans looked small, dark, round, a bit careworn. There was dirt and litter everywhere. Evidently the Romans had cleaned up their city in a great burst of enthusiasm to greet the year 2000. If that was so, I’d have hated to visit in 1999. The apartment blocks had rows of shuttered windows, and they were painted startlingly bright colors, yellow, orange, purple, even pink. It didn’t look British — colors like that don’t work well in the rain of London or Birmingham — still, I could have been in any great European city, I thought, in Paris or Brussels.

But then we reached the Aurelian Wall. “Mura, mura,” said the cabdriver, pointing. It was a great shoulder of brick, looming high above the road, dark, brooding, powerful, and the cars crept around its base like tinfoil toys. Even this first great slab could have absorbed all the scraps and fragments of wall I had seen in London, I thought, awed.

There was graffiti on the mura, though, in among the ads for trashy pop music and the political posters. I had no Italian, but I could recognize that the slogans were about immigrants and crime. The graffiti was everywhere, on every wall and doorway, every lamppost and bus shelter. Not the sign of a contented society.

I had twenty-four hours free before I was to meet Claudio Nervi, the tame Jesuit whose name I had extracted from Gina, and the resumption of my search for my sister. Twenty-four hours to decompress.

I had booked a hotel close to the Forum area, just like a regular tourist. The receptionist was a thin, neat young man in a black suit. His English was broken but serviceable: he was actually the first Italian I’d encountered since landing who had any English at all beyond a couple of words.

My room was small, and had a view of what looked like a back alley. But the Roman Forum was in sight from my room, just as the hotel’s brochure promised, although you had to peer through alleyways of brickwork to make out the fallen pillars and strolling tourists. But that brickwork, I found out later, was itself a ruin of a development called Trajan’s Market, a kind of giant shopping mall of antiquity. Anyhow the restricted view kept the price of my room down.

I unpacked, and searched unsuccessfully for a tea maker. The only English-language TV channel was CNN. But the room had an Internet connection, workable through the TV for the hire of a portable keyboard for a charge of a few euros, or a few thousand lira, according to the yellowing, outdated note on the TV cabinet.

I found a series of emails from Peter, sent from wherever he was ensconced with his Slan(t)ers in America. I paged through most of it, filing it in my mental category of “Peter’s spooky stuff” — and enduring the occasional heart-stopping moment as the connection, always slow, threatened to freeze altogether. Some of it was kind of interesting, though.

One of the Slan(t)ers’ principal activities was to search the world’s media for “anomalies” — any peculiar patterns, inexplicable events, that might show the fraying of the fringe of our worldview. It’s a hobby that’s been enjoyed by the UFOlogists since the fifties, I understand. And of course the rise of the Internet has turned this into an industry: the Slan(t)ers had search and pattern-recognition software, more powerful than the fastest commercial search engine, Peter boasted, capable of picking through the vast slurry of information, rumor, hoax, and plain garbage that pours onto our information superhighway every day.

And, Peter said, while he had been in the States this endless searching had turned up something about his mysterious dark matter.

“If a chunk of dark matter were to pass through the Earth, we wouldn’t see it. It would just pass through the planet’s substance. But its gravitation would trigger seismic events: shock waves in the Earth’s structure radiating away from its path. And, happily, we monitor seismic activity quite comprehensively …”

There is a global network of some five thousand government-sponsored seismic survey sites. They listen for the songs of the Earth, the great low-frequency waves that travel through the planet’s crust. What the government monitors specifically look for are waves emanating from a single point source, which could be the location of an earthquake, say, or an illegal underground nuclear test. “Clean” signals of that kind are extracted from the data and published. The rest of the information is written off as meaningless noise. “And much of it probably is,” said Peter. “You can get a seismic signature if a heavy truck passes by your station.”

But all the data was put online nowadays by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Australian Seismological Network, and the Slan(t)ers had been able to get their hands on it. And in the disregarded “noise,” they had seen “linear signals,” as Peter put it — signals that emanated not from a point, but from a straight line. “What you have is a track through the Earth’s layers,” said Peter, “as if you’d fired a bullet through a wedding cake.”

There had been occasional observations of linear signals for years. The Slan(t)ers, though, seeking patterns ignored by the seismologists, had found three such events in the last year.

Peter said, “Knowing the timing of the events, you can unwind the turning of the Earth to trace the path back beyond the planet to its origin, or destination. We can’t find a unique destination for our three tracks — but they do seem to have a common origin. The sun. Somehow the sun is firing out dark matter nuggets, and some of them are passing through the Earth. What does this mean? Damned if I know. But there’s more … I’m attaching a graphic file.” Which I wouldn’t be able to download here.

I skimmed Peter’s verbose description, trying to get to the meat. Apparently, this particular “linear track,” actually the second observed by the Slan(t)ers, wasn’t so linear after all. “A little while after penetrating the upper mantle,” said Peter, “this nugget’s track diverged through about forty degrees. Then it skimmed the core and shot out of the Earth, in the vague direction of Mars. George, you see the significance? Dark matter passes through the Earth’s core like a hot knife through butter. Earth’s gravity field isn’t intense enough to impose a deflection like that. This nugget changed course…”

Well, it was intriguing. But throughout my relationship with him, much of the information Peter tried to give me was simply too much for me — the ideas too big, too dislocated from the everyday, the stretching of my worldview too much to take. This was just such an example.

I sent him a note about how extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Then I shut down the system.

I ate that night in a little open-air tourist-trap restaurant, a complicated walk of a few blocks from the hotel. Most of the menu was seafood, served with or without pasta.

The next morning I walked around Rome. It was a voyage of discovery; I knew nothing about the city. My geographical research before setting off had been restricted to renting The Italian Job, which, it turned out, was set in Turin.

In the ancient area of the forums, embellished by all the Caesars and ruined by time, herds of tourists grazed. I passed a couple of old ladies, American, who were debating whether to go with their guide into yet another site, the Forum of Augustus. “I’m getting a little tired,” said one. “I think I’ll go back to the bus. Will you do this one for me, dear?” She handed her tiny digital camera to the other. So, I thought unkindly, it’s the camera that is actually taking the tour.

The area was cut through by a wide, attractive road called the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which led from the Colosseum to the National Monument. The Monument had been erected in the nineteenth century to celebrate Italian national unity. The locals called it the Vittoriano, after the king Victor Emmanuel — or, less respectfully, the Typewriter. And meanwhile that great via had been built by Mussolini, who had bulldozed his way over the ruins of the forums with barely a squeak from compliant archaeologists, in order to build a route for his fascist processions.

The National Monument dominated the broad, open square of the Piazza Venezia, the hub of the Roman traffic system: if all roads lead to Rome, they said, so all Roman roads led to the Venezia. And in the piazza the Roman drivers just drove at each other, neither giving nor expecting mercy. In Rome, the cars were clearly fueled by testosterone as much as petrol. And yet, I thought, watching for a few minutes from a pavement cafй, the crowding traffic actually cleared its way through quite efficiently. Somehow amid the apparent chaos, things sorted themselves out — just not the way I was used to.

I spent the morning poking around shopping streets. As the sun climbed so did the temperature, and I was soon sweating through my heavy English shirt; I stopped frequently at cafй s or grocery stores for bottled water.

I quickly formed an impression of the Romans. Small and dark they were, and they all talked constantly. And they were intense: I decided that the characteristic Roman tone of voice was aggrieved exposition, just this side of exploding. They all seemed to have cell phones clamped to their ears, almost all the time — even quite small children — their eyes glazed, their free hands gesturing eloquently, futilely. The cell phone might have been invented for Italians.

But I did wonder what they had to talk about. The monuments all seemed to close for siesta periods in the middle of the day, the post offices all shut at one, the banks would open for maybe an hour in the afternoons if you were lucky, and everything closed on Mondays. The xenophobe in me wondered how I would feel if I were German or French, a fellow traveler on the great adventure of the single European currency. And yet, I knew, the Italian economy was actually large and healthy.

Somehow, like the traffic, the work got done, things sorted themselves out.

The Jesuit mother church is called the Gesu, just a block from the Venezia. Claudio Nervi was waiting for me on the pavement outside. “Call me Claudio,” he said, shaking my hand, after I greeted him as “Father.”

He was perhaps fifty and his hair was neatly combed silver-gray. His eyes were blue, but his thin face was deeply tanned — he was handsome, in an aging-patrician way. He wore a black suit with the regulation priest’s white collar, but the suit was suspiciously well cut, and I wondered if it came from a design house. He seemed poised, confident, intelligent.

“Well now—” He stretched his long arms. “ — welcome to Rome. It’s good to meet you, and I hope I can help you with your difficulty.”

I thanked him. “Your English is good.” It was, with the kind of upper-crust accent so familiar from Noлl Coward films that nobody in England dares use in public nowadays.

He smiled. “I spent some years studying in a seminary near Oxford. Look, are you in a rush? Would you like to see the church? …”

I followed him into the gloom of the Gesu.

A handful of worshipers, old folk, sat patiently in the pews. The church was sumptuously decorated, as many Roman churches are, with a lush Baroque painting on one wall.

But on one high side altar, a human arm was on display.

At first I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. I stepped closer. On top of that altar was a reliquary, an elaborate oval casket in gold and crystal, with an angel floating beside it. And inside the casket there was indeed a human arm, intact from the elbow socket down. There were even bits of flesh, black and withered, clinging to the bones.

Claudio was murmuring softly, “Many visitors are struck by the wealth of Roman churches. One looks at every surface, and the eye is greeted by treasure, and dazzled. But they are after all the result of two millennia of dedicated wealth accretion — one can’t put it any other way — although today the Vatican is not stupendously rich; it is less wealthy than many of the larger American dioceses, for instance … Oh. I see you have met our hero.”

The arm turned out to be a relic of Saint Francis Xavier, who in the sixteenth century had been a Jesuit missionary to India and Japan. He had died of a fever on an island off the coast of China, and had been buried there. The Jesuit general in Rome had ordered the body exhumed and reburied on Goa — and that the right arm be cut off at the elbow, to be enshrined back in Rome.

I shuddered. “The Catholic Church always did major on relics.”

“It’s all rather primitive, of course. But such things do actualize religion in the popular mind. And besides—” He waved at the gruesome body part. “ — aren’t we all fascinated by relics, of one kind or another, by physical traces of what went before — even in our own lives? What is your quest now, if not driven by relics of your own past?”

I said, a bit ruefully, “You know, I can tell you’re a priest. When I was a kid, the parish priest spun every last sermon out of an analogy like that.”

He smiled. “Then on his and my behalf, I apologize.”

“And besides, I’m just looking for my sister. I never thought of it as a quest.”

“What else could it be?”

I glanced around the church. I felt self-conscious with the worshipers present. “You have, um, an office here?”

“No. I’m conducting a project for the Pontifical Institute for Christian Archaeology. The Vatican, you know. I work out of an office there. Perhaps you’d be interested in seeing where I actually archaeologize. It’s not far from here.” He rubbed his hands together. “But first, lunch.”

He wouldn’t listen to my protests that I had eaten a sandwich in the hotel, and wasn’t swayed by the fact that it was already past three. He took me to a small restaurant a few minutes’ walk away from the main road, where, he said, we would find the best cucina romanesca, what the Romans themselves ate.

The waiter was round and smiling, dressed in an implausibly white shirt and bow tie. Although the cooking smells made me salivate, I knew I really wasn’t very hungry, so we both settled on soup. It was tagliolini alla baccorola, which is little tubes of pasta stuffed with bacon and cheese and drowned in a hot chicken broth. That and a few bread sticks and a glass of fruity white wine went down very well, but I knew it was going to make me sleepy later.

The real reason Claudio wanted to buy me lunch soon began to emerge: so he could mess with my head.

“So,” Claudio said around his soup, “you seek your sister. But it isn’t a quest.”

“It’s a loose end,” I said.

“But if you pull on loose ends your sweater can unravel.” He smirked at this sally. “I’m just interested in why you need to find her.”

“My father’s death. I feel as if the whole thing won’t be over until I find Rosa.”

“But what will you say to her?”

“Hell, I don’t know—”

“Will you talk about your father?”

“Probably. What else?”

He put down his spoon. He said gently, “You see, I think you’re curious. Perhaps even envious. You want to understand why she was sent away, to this opportunity — or to this prison, depending on how it’s turned out for her — and why not you. Isn’t that true? But it’s really your father you should have spoken to.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I snapped. I had spent too many years breathing Catholic air. I felt deep responses kick in to the gentle prying, the effortless assumption of moral superiority. “Look — Claudio — why are we having this conversation?”

He steepled his fingers over his soup bowl. “The encounter you are planning could be very painful. I’ve seen such meetings before — for instance, among long-separated refugees — and, believe me, I know. And the information I am providing for you is setting up that encounter. I feel I would be avoiding my responsibilities as a human being if I didn’t raise that.”

“Are you saying you won’t give me the contact for the Order?”

“Oh, I’ve said no such thing.” But on the other hand, he wouldn’t give me the details, not yet; it seemed I had more intangible barriers to hurdle yet. “What do you know about the Order?”

“Hardly anything. It runs schools, and sells information for family trees.”

“What do you think it is?”

I hesitated. “I think it’s some kind of cult. That’s why it’s so secretive, why Rosa just — disappeared.”

“A cult.” He thought about the word. “You mean that pejoratively, don’t you? What kind of cult, do you suppose?”

I shrugged. “A cult of Mary. That’s what the name says.”

“You are right, and you are wrong,” he said. “The group does have the form of a religious order, but it is an unusual one. The Vatican has had contacts with the Order since its inception. At times of crisis in Rome’s long history the Order and the Vatican have even worked together …

“It’s certainly not a convent: children are born within its confines. Its focus isn’t on Mary, in a sense — not just on the mother, you see — but on the family. And in that sense it’s very Italian, of course. Italians aren’t like north Europeans, George. We’re a very — umm, local people. In England, young people leave home as soon as they can, for college, or work. Here, people stay at home. The family remains intact. It’s common to have several generations of adults under one roof, or at least living close by. There is a word — campanilismo — the sense of one’s loyalty to one’s campanile, the bell tower.”

“You can’t generalize like that about a whole nation.”

“Of course not,” he said easily. “But I believe you will need to think this way if you wish to understand your sister’s situation.”

“This is what I’ll find in the Order?”

“I’m telling you that the Order is like a family, but a family sixteen centuries deep. These are very close bonds, George. You will find your sister has exchanged one family for another — and she may not want to reverse that exchange.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

He spread those long pianist’s fingers on the table. “It’s your choice. But first let me show you my archaeological project. No, I insist.” He snapped his fingers; the waiter responded immediately.

It turned out his project concerned a small church called San Clemente, some minutes’ walk away, on the other side of the Colosseum. As a guest of Claudio’s I didn’t have to pay any entrance fee. Inside and out the church looked unprepossessing.

“But,” said Claudio enthusiastically, “it is one of Rome’s best examples of a ‘layered’ church.” By which he meant one building laid down on top of another. He took me down through the layers. It was a fascinating, eerie experience.

“You have an eighteenth-century facade, behind which is this twelfth-century basilica. Here is a rather remarkable mosaic of that period, showing the triumph of the Cross … But below all that we have a still earlier church, from the fourth century. I am working with some Dominican monks on the excavation of this layer.” Not that anybody was working here today. “And below that is a mithraeum.” This had probably originally been a town house of the imperial days, dedicated in the first century for use as a temple to the god Mithras, a secretive cult for men only. There was a faded fresco on one wall. It had been of the wife of an emperor, said Claudio, but retouched later to make it a portrait of the Madonna and Child. “And we believe there are layers yet to be unturned under that as well …”

He smiled in the gloom. “Look around you, George. Consider the deep layers of history, the extended and changing usage, of this one small church alone; and consider how little we understand even of this patch of ground. Then remember you are in Rome, where everything is drenched in history, in continuity through change. And then think of the Order. Rather like the Vatican, the Order is woven into this fabric of history and humanity …”

I was beginning to form an impression that this smooth clergyman was a lot less forthcoming than his appearance suggested. He was good at eating up time, at deflecting my questions, at probing into my personality, uttering vague forebodings and generating doubt: better at all that bullshit than putting himself on the line and taking responsibility to do anything. Maybe that’s a quality you need to get along in the Vatican, I thought; the Church hasn’t survived two thousand years by being proactive. But it wasn’t helping me.

And it was more than that. It was a feeling I’d had when meeting the headmistress, even Gina, even Lou. Every time I tried to take a step closer to Rosa I felt as if I were pressing against an invisible, intangible barrier, a force field of words and looks and subtle body language. It was as if all these people had been trying to put me off the search — perhaps without even realizing they were doing it.

But I’m a stubborn bugger if nothing else, and having come so far I wasn’t about to give up. And maybe the wine was making me snappy. I decided to challenge him. “You work for the Order, don’t you?”

“I’ve had some dealings with it.”

“You find it recruits,” I said rudely. I was guessing, but I hit a mark.

He lost his smile. “If I perceive a person in need, and if through the Order I can meet that need—”

“Will you get me that contact or not?”

He nodded curtly. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send it to your hotel.”

When I got back to my room I booted up the Internet connection again. I found two more emails from Peter. In the first mail, to my surprise, he said he had booked a flight to Rome. He said he thought I needed help.

“I think we’re up against a cult here, George. Some kind of weirdo mother-fixated Marian cult. And it’s nearly as old as the church itself. If the Vatican is siphoning funds they’re going to stonewall … Go back to your tame Jesuit,” he wrote. “Maybe he can get me into the Vatican Secret Archives. All Slan(t)ers know that the answers to most of the universe’s mysteries are to be found in there …” Well, maybe. I knew that Peter was of course following his own agenda — mine was just incidental to him — and I wondered if there was more to this sudden change of plan.

The second of his emails was more thoughtful.

“We’re so short-lived, George. The Empire is buried a long way down, so far down it defeats the capacity of life to measure it. The oldest recorded human lived about one hundred twenty years. So if you go just a little more than a century deep you would find no human who’s alive today — and yet you’re still just a twentieth of the way back to the emperors.

“No mammal lives longer than humans, no elephant, no dog or horse. Your grandmother’s parrot might beat a century. The oldest insects are jewel beetles that die at thirty; the crocodiles might last to sixty. The oldest land animals of any kind are tortoises — Captain Cook gave one to the king of Tonga that supposedly lived one hundred eighty-eight years — and some mollusks, like the ocean quahog, a thick- shelled clam, can last a couple of hundred years. But that’s all. So if you go just two centuries deep into the abyss you leave behind all the living animals.

“Deeper than that and there are only the plants. In the gardens of the villa of the Emperor Hadrian there is said to be a cypress tree that has lived a thousand years, but even that is only halfway back to Hadrian himself. Oh, there is a great redwood that is said to be seven thousand years old, and living bacteria found in the gut of a frozen mastodon were more than eleven thousand years old — but such wrinklies are rare. Everything else has since died as we do, George, the grass, the fungi, the bugs; we may as well all be mayflies …

“Nothing living survives from the time of the emperors — not even vegetable memories. You are delving in deep time indeed, George. But you mustn’t let it frighten you.”

A new message came in. From Claudio, it was a telephone number for the Order. In fact, said Claudio’s note, it was a direct line for my sister, for Rosa. My heart beat faster.

Chapter 38

It was in the year 667 that Totila came to Rome. He wore an iron collar around his neck, for he was a criminal who undertook this pilgrimage as expiation.

Totila was a simple man, a farmer from southern Gaul. He had not denied the charge against him, of stealing a little bread to feed his daughters’ swollen bellies. His crops had been ruined by floods and banditry, and he had had no choice. That didn’t make it any less of a sin, of course. But the bishop had been lenient; his mouthfuls of bread had won him only a flogging, which would probably leave no scars, and the great chore of this journey to the capital of the world.

But in his whole life Totila had never walked more than half a day’s journey from the place he had been born. Across Europe, the calm of empire had been replaced by turbulence, and this was not an age for traveling. The journey was itself overwhelming, a jaunt into endless strangeness.

And as he neared Rome itself, when he joined the flood of pilgrims who trampled along the weed- choked road that led to the city, and when he walked through the great arched gateway into the city itself, Totila felt as if his soul would spin out of his body in bewilderment.

Rome was a city of hills, on which great buildings sprawled — palaces and temples, arches and columns. But even at the center, two centuries after the last of the western emperors, white marble was scorched by fire, many of the buildings lacked roofs, and he could see grass and weeds thrusting through the pavement, and ivy and vines clinging to crumbling stone. Away from the central area much of the city within the walls was demolished altogether, flattened and burned out, and given over to green. Cattle and goats wandered amid bits of masonry that poked through the grass.

The many new churches, though, were fine and bright.

He wandered to the Forum area. It was dense with stalls selling food and drink, and many, many Christian tokens and relics. And people were buying. Some must be pilgrims like himself — he saw iron rings around necks and arms, marking out fellow criminals — but others were well dressed and evidently wealthy.

There was a blare of trumpets.

Suddenly he found himself being shoved along by a great swarm of bodies. Confused, scared, he kept his hand over his chest where, inside his tunic, his leather purse dangled on its bit of rope, for he had heard of the criminality of the Romans. He strained to see over the heads of the crowd.

A procession passed: a series of swarthy slaves, soldiers stripped to the waist with shield and trumpets, and a gilded sedan chair. In the dense Italian sunlight it was a dazzling, glittering vision, and Totila cast down his eyes.

“You’re blessed,” a voice whispered in his ear.

He turned, startled, to see a small dark man smiling at him. “Blessed?”

“It’s not every pilgrim who gets to see the Emperor himself. After all,” the man said dryly, “the great Constans does not grace us with his presence very often, preferring the comforts of Constantinople, where there are no goats nibbling your legs, so I’m told …”

These days Rome was once again under the sway of Constantinople, capital of the Empire in the east — much good it did anybody. Constans was staying in one of the old palace buildings on the Palatine, crumbled and roofless though he found it. But the Emperor had brought nothing to the city. On the contrary, he seemed intent on stripping it of such treasures as statues and marbles, and even the gilded bronze tiles on the roof of the Pantheon.

There was a scattering of boos as the Emperor passed.

“My name is Felix,” the strange man said to Totila. “And you look lost.”

“Well …”

As the crowd broke up, Felix took Totila’s arm. Totila let the man lead him away, lacking any better idea; he had to speak to somebody.

Felix was about forty, simply dressed, but he seemed well fed, calm, composed. He spoke a basic Latin, heavily accented but easy to understand. It was hard to resist his air of command. Totila let Felix buy him a cup of wine and some bread.

Felix eyed Totila’s collar. “You are here for a holy purpose,” he said solemnly.

“Yes. I—”

Felix held up his hand. “I’m no bishop to hear your sins. I’m your friend, Totila, a friend of all pilgrims. I want to help you find what you want, here in Rome, for it is a big and confusing place — and full of crooks if you don’t know what you’re doing!”

“I’m sure it is.”

From somewhere Felix produced a scroll. “This is a guide to the most holy sites. It tells you what routes to follow, what to see …” The scroll looked expensively produced, and when Felix told him the price Totila demurred; it would empty his purse in a stroke.

Felix’s eyes narrowed. “Very well. Then I will be your guide, sir pilgrim!”

So, the rest of that day, Felix led Totila through Rome.

Everywhere they went there were reassuring crowds of pilgrims. Totila peered at the arrows that had pierced the body of Saint Sebastian, and the chains that had bound Saint Peter, and the grill on which Saint Laurence had been burned.

It had been the initiative of Pope Gregory some decades before to send appeals throughout Europe to call pilgrims to Rome, the mother of the church; and they had come. The city had quickly organized itself to cater for the new industry, which had brought much-needed revenue.

Totila shook his head when Felix brought him to a stall where he could have bought “martyrs’ bones,” a grisly collection of finger joints and toe bones. But he dropped a few coins in the bowls of half-starved mendicants, and made offerings at various shrines. He noticed that some of the worse-off mendicants were tended to by women — all young, all with pale gray eyes, dressed in distinctive white robes — who gave them food, and cleaned their wounds.

Felix watched all this, and eyed Totila’s purse.

At last, as the evening began to fall, Felix led Totila to the Greek quarter of the city where, he said, Totila would be able to find cheap lodgings.

And in a dark alleyway, between two impossibly tall and crumbling tenement buildings, Felix produced a fine blade with which he slit open Totila’s purse, and pierced Totila’s belly for good measure.

As Totila slumped to the filth-strewn ground, Felix counted the coins in his palm and snorted. “Hardly worth my trouble.”

Totila gasped, “I’m sorry.”

Felix looked down, surprised, and laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault.” And he walked away, into the gathering gloom.

Totila lay in the stench of ordure and urine, unable to move. He kept his hands clamped over his belly,

but he could feel the blood seeping through his fingers.

Somebody was here, standing before him. It was a woman in a white, purple-edged robe. She was one of those who tended the poor. She knelt in the dirt, pulled his hands away from his side, and inspected his wound. “Don’t try to move,” she said.

“This is a holy place to die, here in Rome.”

“There is no good place to die,” she murmured. “Not like this.” She had pale gray eyes, he saw, the gray of cloud.

Having bound him up, she managed to get him to his feet and took him to an inn. She left him money, in a new leather purse.

He stayed two nights.

When he was able to walk, he approached the innkeeper with some trepidation, for he wasn’t sure he had the funds to pay for his lodging. But he found that the account had already been settled.

Before he left Rome, Totila tried to find the woman who had helped him. But though everybody knew of the women in white, and of their charitable work for the helpless poor and victims of accident and crime — some called them angels, others virgins — nobody knew where they could be found. They seemed to melt out of the rubble of Rome by day, and disappear by night, like ghosts of a different past.

Chapter 39

On the day I was due to meet Rosa I woke early, having passed a nervous, restless night.

Before breakfast I crept downstairs, tiptoed past the concierges, and walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The dawn wasn’t far advanced, and the traffic was light. Around me was the old Roman Forum, nestling in the timeless safety of its valley, and the Palatine and Capitoline Hills bristled with the imperial palaces and other mighty buildings of later antiquity.

In my week in Rome, I’d walked and walked, from the Vatican in the west to the Appian Way in the south, along the banks of the Tiber, and around great stretches of the Aurelian Wall. Like Edinburgh or San Francisco, Rome was a city of hills — that was the first thing that struck you — you really couldn’t walk far without heading either uphill or down, and after a few days my thighs and calves felt as hard as a soccer player’s.

But what was unlike any city I’d visited before was the sense of time here.

This place had been in continuous occupation since the Iron Age. It was as if time were untethered here, and great reefs of history kept sticking up into modern times, mounds of past as enduring as the ancient hills themselves.

Rome was starting to intimidate me, just as Peter had warned. It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in when meeting my long-lost sister.

I’d arranged to meet Rosa in a little coffee bar off the Appian Way, which was where, in our brief, terse phone call, she’d said she worked. The Way is an ancient road that leads south from a gateway on the Aurelian Wall. It was a fine morning and I decided to walk, to clear my head and get my blood pumping.

But I soon regretted the decision. The road was narrow, in long stretches without pavement at all, and the traffic was as disrespectful here as in the rest of the city. But perhaps it had been so for two thousand years, I thought; I shouldn’t complain.

I survived a terrifying jog through a narrow tunnel beneath a road and rail bridge, and arrived at a junction close to a little church called Domine Quo Vadis. Across the street was a coffee bar.

And there, sitting at a pavement table, was an elegant woman in her forties. She wore a cream trouser suit. She sat easily, with her legs folded, a coffee cup before her, a cell phone in one hand. As I crossed the road she turned off the phone. She left it on the table, though, where it sat throughout our meeting, a mute reminder of her connections to another world.

When I reached the table she smiled — bright, white teeth — and stood up. She had expensive-looking sunglasses pushed up onto her brushed-back mouse-blond hair, not a streak of gray, and her eyes were as pale and smoky as my mother’s had been. “George, George …” It turned out I was a little taller than her, so I had to lean to let her kiss me. She buffed my cheeks, as if we were two London PRs on a routine business meeting.

But this close to her, there was something in her smell — a sweet milkiness under the cosmetics, the smell of home perhaps — that made me, briefly, want to melt. Yes, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl in bright, blurry kid-memory images I’d long lost. I found myself struggling for composure.

She pulled back and regarded me, her face so like my own, her expression cool. “Please.” She waved me to a seat. With effortless ease she called the waiter, and I ordered a cappuccino.

“So, after all this time,” I said gruffly.

She shrugged. “The situation is not of our making.”

“I know. But it’s still damn odd.”

She began talking, brightly, of the church over the road. “Have you had time to see it? Domine quo vadis — ’Lord, where are you going?’ Peter had escaped from prison in Rome, and he met Jesus here and asked Him that question. Jesus replied, ‘To let myself be crucified a second time.’ He left His footprints in the road. You can see them inside the church. But if they are genuine, Christ had big feet …” She laughed.

She talked easily, fluently, her voice well modulated: neutrally accented English, perhaps the slightest Italian singsong. She looked at ease here. She looked Italian. Whereas I felt shabby and out of place.

The coffee arrived, which gave me a little cover.

“I don’t know what to say. What do we do, swap life stories?”

She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. “Just relax. I’m sure we will work it out.”

The sudden, unexpected touch oddly shocked me. “I don’t think I have much more to tell you anyhow,” I said. As a preliminary to our meeting I had sent her a long email from my hotel room.

“You told me about your past,” she said. “But not your future.”

“That’s a little more cloudy. I’ve come to a fork in the road, I think.”

“Because of Father’s death?”

Not Dad but Father. “I think things had been building up anyhow. I need a change.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

With that slight sharpness, she looked at me, her smile more empty. “And in return for your biography, you expect mine?”

“You’re my sister. I came all this way to meet you. Yes, I want to know what’s become of you. You sell family trees,” I said. “That’s pretty much all I know about you.”

She smiled. “That and the fact that I belong to a weirdo woo-woo cult … Don’t worry; I know what people think of us. All right.” In brisk, almost rehearsed phrases, she sketched her career for me, her life.

She seemed to be a kind of account manager, dealing with services and products for major clients — not individuals, but companies, universities, even churches and governments. After being sent over here by our father, she had been put through schooling good enough to get her to a baccalaureate. She hadn’t gone away to university, but, staying within the Order, had studied history and business administration to degree level. Then she had gone to work for the family firm, so to speak.

Even after this smooth patter she stayed out of focus. Thinking over what she had said, I found I couldn’t visualize her school, or even the kind of social conditions she had been brought up in — not a family, that was for sure.

She began to talk about the Order’s business. “Yes, we sell genealogy information. I brought some stuff for you to see …” She dug some promotional literature out of her bag: glossy, well produced. Tracing ancestry was one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet, she told me. “We’re even offering a DNA matching service,” she said. “If you’re of British ancestry, say, you’ll soon be able to tell whether you are of ancient stock, or came over with the Romans, or the Saxons, or the Vikings.

“There is a finite genealogical universe out there. Only a finite number of human beings have ever existed, and each of them had a mother and father, links to the great chain of descent. We see no limit in principle as to the information we may one day retrieve …” She was quite evangelical as she described all this. It was more than just a product to her, I saw.

But I felt as if she were pitching a sale. I didn’t know how brother and sister were supposed to behave, after a forty-year separation. It isn’t a situation you come across every day. But for sure it wasn’t talking about DNA databases and high-speed Internet access options.

Actually, as she talked, she reminded me of Gina. Something about her cold competence, her distance from me.

I put aside the brochures. “You’re telling me about genealogy,” I said. “Not you.”

She sat back. “Then what do you want to know?”

“You never came home.”

She nodded. “But this is home, George. This is family, for me.”

“It may feel like that, but—”

“No.” Again she covered my hand, shockingly casual. “You don’t understand. The Order is family — our family. That’s why Father was happy to send me here.” And she reminded me of our story of the ancient past, of Regina, who had survived the collapse of Britain, and who had eventually come to Rome — where she had helped found the Order.

I was tired of this story. “That’s just a family legend,” I said. “Nobody can trace back to the Romans …”

“ We can.” She grinned, almost playfully. “We keep records, George. That’s the one thing we do better than anything else. Our huge bank of historical data is the spine on which we have built our genealogy business. George, it’s true about Regina. There has been a continuous thread of descent, from Regina’s day to this, as the Order has survived. But that central line of family persists. And it’s our family.

“Maybe now you can see why I stayed here.” Again she touched me, unexpectedly. She slid one hand under my palm, and let the other rest on top, massaging the webbing between my thumb and forefinger with the ball of her thumb. It was extraordinarily intimate — not sexual — compelling, oddly confining. She said, “So that’s why you don’t need to rescue me.”

“What do you mean?”

She laughed. “Come on, George. Isn’t that why you’re really here? To save me from my miserable exile. Perhaps on some level you were expecting to find the little girl you last saw, all those years ago. And I’ve somehow disappointed you by turning out to be a grown woman, with a life of her own, and capable of making her own choices. I don’t need saving, as you can see.”

I said angrily, “Okay. Maybe I’m a patronizing dope with no imagination. But I’m here, Rosa.”

She surprised me by standing up. “But we each have our own lives, George. Well, that’s that.” She began extracting money from a small billfold. “Let me treat you,” she said. “I insist.”

I stood uncertainly. I hadn’t been in control of any of this conversation, I realized, from first to last. “Is that it?”

“We must stay in touch. Isn’t email marvelous? How long are you in Rome?—”

“Rosa, for Christ’s sake.” I struggled briefly for control. “Don’t we have any more to say to each other? After all this time?”

She hesitated. “You know, some said I shouldn’t see you.”

“Some who?”

“People in the Order.”

“You told them about me?”

“We tell each other everything.”

“Why shouldn’t you have met me?”

“Because you might be a threat,” she said simply. Her gaze was fixed on me. “But now I’ve met you I’m not so sure.”

I had the impression she was recalculating.

She had felt impelled to go through with the meeting with me, to give me the minimum contact required to send me away, and keep me away. But now something — my persistence, maybe my distress — was making her rethink that plan. I know that’s a cold analysis of her thinking. But I really didn’t believe, even then, that whatever new plans she was drawing up had anything to do with compassion.

She made an abrupt about-face. “Maybe you’re right. It shouldn’t end here. As you said, you came all this way, did all that detective work, for me.” Her eyes narrowed, and I thought she was making a decision. “Tell you what. Perhaps you’d like to see where I work, and live. What do you think?” She dropped her sunglasses onto her nose, businesslike.

She was following her own peculiar agenda, I saw. I really didn’t know what she wanted of me. But it was a chance to spend a little more time with her. What else could I do but accept?

And so she took me to the Catacombs.

The entrance wasn’t far away. Aboveground there was little to see: a very small chapel, a couple of souvenir and refreshment stalls, a ticket booth, all set in a little scruffy parkland. It was lunchtime and the public areas were locked up, the ticket booth windows covered with CHIUSO notices: this was Rome, after all. But a few bewildered-looking tourists lingered by the refreshment stalls, buying overpriced hot dogs and bottled water.

They watched enviously as Rosa led me to a small stone block, the size and shape of Doctor Who ’s TARDIS. It had a heavy green door, which she opened with a swipe card. This was the public entrance to the Catacombs of Agrippina, Rosa told me. She palmed a switch, and electric light flooded down from strip lights set in the ceiling.

Steps cut down into the dark. Rosa led the way, her heeled shoes clattering on the worn stone steps. When I pulled the door closed after me, it locked automatically. It immediately felt colder. It was a creepy experience, even in the electric light.

At the bottom of the steps I found myself in a gallery. It was narrow enough for me to reach out and touch both walls, and it was tall, perhaps twenty-five feet high, with an arched roof. The walls were notched, with box-shaped cavities cut deep into them. The light was dim, the electric lamps sparsely scattered. There was more light, in fact, coming from the skylight trenches cut down from the surface.

Rosa gave me the guided tour. “People say they’ve never heard of a Saint Agrippina. There never was one, so far as we know. She was probably just a well-off local matron, sympathetic to the Christians’ cause, who gave them the use of her land …”

Burials had given the early Christian community here a problem. Space was always at a premium in Rome. Because of their beliefs the Christians were reluctant to cremate, but land was expensive, even this far out of town. So they began to dig.

“The rock here is tufa,” Rosa said. “Soft, volcanic. It’s easy to work, and it hardens when exposed to the air. And the Romans were used to working underground anyhow. They would dig sewers, waterworks, underground passages for servants to cross from one side of a great villa to another. Many houses would even have a cryptoporticus, an underground recreation area. So when they needed a place to bury their dead the Christians dug, and dug …”

We descended another steep staircase and found ourselves in yet another gallery that stretched on out of sight. The corridors branched, one after another, and the walls were all cut with those deep notches.

I was already thoroughly lost, disoriented. We were alone, and the only sounds were our footsteps and Rosa’s gentle voice, softly echoing. The temperature had settled to a mild chill. Around me those open notches gaped like black mouths — and I had no doubt what they had once held. It was an eerie experience.

“The oldest levels are the highest,” she said. “Which makes sense if you think about it. They just kept digging, down and down. They would cut out family vaults, called cubicula, and these niches are called loculi.”

“Niches for the bodies,” I said, my throat hoarse.

“Yes. Wrapped in linen, or perhaps embalmed. Even popes were buried in the Catacombs. But many of the tombs were pillaged in later centuries. Bones were taken away by desecrators, or by seekers of holy relics, or for reburial. Still, some undisturbed tombs were rediscovered over the last few centuries — perhaps there are more still to find. George, this Catacomb alone encompasses fifteen miles, over four levels. And it is estimated that in all the Catacombs some half a million people were buried, over the centuries.”

Like so many numbers associated with ancient Rome, it was a stunning, impossible figure.

“Look.” She pointed to symbols, painted faintly on the walls. The light was kept low to protect the paintwork, it turned out. “Covert Christian symbols, from the days of repression and persecution. The fish you will recognize. The dove, and here the olive branch, symbolizes peace. The anchor implies resurrection. Oh, here is the famous chi-rho, formed of the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name.” It looked like the letters P and X superimposed. “And here—” Carved above one of the loculi, it was like the simple fish symbol, but two fish touched, mouth to mouth, so that it was almost like an infinity.

“What’s that?”

“The symbol of the Order.” I recognized it from my Internet search. She was studying me. “How do you feel?”

“I’m in a two-thousand-year-old graveyard. A little freaked out.”

“You aren’t worried by the enclosure? The narrow walls, the depth — you don’t feel claustrophobic?”

I thought about that. “No.”

“And if I told you I have more to show you yet — that we will go much deeper …”

“Are you setting me some kind of test, Rosa?”

“Yes, I suppose I am. Something about the way we talked in the cafй … You’ve reacted well so far, and I think you’re ready to see more.” She held out her hand. “Will you come? You’re free to go, whenever you like.”

By now I had come to distrust her obviously calculated touching, the overwhelming feelings it evoked in me. But I took her hand again. “What next — open sesame?”

“Something like that.”

We were standing before an innocent-looking niche, empty as the others. It had a two-fish symbol carved over it. Now, to my surprise, Rosa dug out a swipe card and passed it into a slot hidden inside the stone, up behind the fish. I glimpsed a red light, heard the unexpected humming of electronic gear.

And then, with a stony grind, a kind of trapdoor opened up beneath me — and bright light flooded up into the dusty air. I leaned forward to see. There was another staircase, but this was of polished metal, and it led down to a floor of gleaming tiles.

There was a whole room down there — a modern office, I saw. I glimpsed a desk, a girl behind it in a simple white smock, peering up at us. Fluorescent light glared up gray-white but dazzling bright after the gloom of the Catacomb. I was amazed — even stunned. It was the last thing I’d have expected to see; it was hard to believe it was real.

Rosa was grinning. “Welcome to my underground lair, Austin Powers.”

“Not funny,” I snapped.

“Oh, lighten up.” She turned and descended. I followed.

And so I entered the Crypt for the first time.

The receptionist sat behind her wide marble desk, smiling at us. I glimpsed a winking rack of small TV monitors behind the surface of the desk, and one red-eyed camera peered directly at me from a wall. It was all quite normal, electric bright, certainly not as chill as the Catacombs. But there was no daylight, of course, not a scrap; it reminded me how far I was underground.

“We don’t use this entrance much,” said Rosa. “There are many ways in, from our shops and offices on the surface — most of them in the suburbs to the west of the Appian Way — though we have a couple of routes that lead to the center of the city. But I wanted to bring you this way. It is the oldest.” She smiled, almost mischievously. “I suppose I wanted to put on a show … Are you okay?”

I simply had no idea what to expect. “I’ve never been in a convent before,” I said.

“You aren’t in one now. Come on.”

We walked toward the wall of the anteroom. Automatic doors slid out of sight. We stepped into a corridor, just as brightly lit as the anteroom.

The corridor curved out of sight. It was my first impression of the true size of the place. For sure it was a hell of a lot bigger than the anteroom.

And the corridor was full of people: a great murmuring crowd, deep underground.

There must have been hundreds, just in that first glimpse. The human traffic in that corridor was as dense as Oxford Circus on a summer Saturday, or Times Square at New Year. Most of them were women. Many were in street clothes, but some wore a kind of uniform, a simple white dress or trouser suit with sewn-in threads of purple. They walked in neat files, passing in and out of the rooms that branched off the corridor.

Then there was the smell : not an unpleasant smell, not a locker-room stink, but there was something animal in the air, something potent. The air was hot, humid, and noisy; I found myself breathing hard, dragging for breath.

All this concealed far underground, under that sleepy tourist-trap park.

Nobody seemed aware of anything strange, nobody but me. It was all I could do to keep from staggering back, into the relative calm of the anteroom.

Rosa was leaning toward me. “Don’t let it get to you. I know how you feel. But it’s always like this here. Come on …” Holding my hand, she pulled me forward, and we waded into the streams of people.

Suddenly I was surrounded by faces, all young, many smiling, few showing curiosity at this big sweating Englishman who had been thrust in among them. They all seemed to be talking, and the hubbub battered me, like a wind. But they parted around us, accepted us into the flow.

We passed offices with desks and partitioned cubicles, potted plants and coffee machines. They all seemed very mundane, if crowded and noisy compared to most offices I’d seen, almost as crowded as the corridors. In some places there were copies of the kissing-fish infinity symbol of the Order, done out in chrome strips and fixed to marble walls. All very corporate.

On many of the walls slogans had been incised — in places crudely, by hand, and in others more professionally. They were in Latin, which I can’t read. I tried to memorize them, meaning to ask Peter about them later; there seemed to be three key phrases.

Rosa said that the varying sizes of rooms had names, in the Order’s peculiar internal language — basically modern Italian, I would learn, but laced with terms derived from Latin, and other sources I didn’t recognize. The room names seemed to be a macabre joke, a remembrance of the Crypt’s origin. The largest vaults of all were called cubicula, like the family tombs in the Catacombs, the next largest arcosolia, like the large tombs of the wealthy and the popes — and the smallest of all loculi, like the lonely niche-graves of the poor.

But there were few loculi, I would learn, because members of the Order were never alone: the bigger the room, the bigger the crowd, the better.

The deeper in we penetrated, the more powerful that animal smell became. It was like walking into a lion’s cage.

I tried to keep a clear head. “The workers here seem young,” I said. “Nobody much over twenty-five or thirty?”

“Actually, most people here are older than that.”

“They don’t look it …”

“There are some youngsters, of course. Everybody has to learn. But most of the Order’s younger members work downbelow.”

“Downbelow?”

“On the lower levels.”

“There are lower levels ?”

We passed through a domain of libraries. The books were densely packed, and, as you see in some academic archives, the shelf units ran on rails: in a whole room there would be only enough space for a single passageway between a pair of shelves, and you would have to turn a little handle to make the shelves roll back and forth until you got the access you wanted. There was a lot of material. Farther on there were rooms more like museum departments, which contained what looked like extremely ancient manuscripts, scrolls and clay tablets, all held in air-conditioned isolation and low light, many of them in the drawers of glass-topped cabinets.

This area was the scrinium, said Rosa, the Order’s term for the monumental internal record center that had now been turned outward to fuel the Internet genealogy business. Rosa showed me cabinets full of somewhat dog-eared index cards. There was so much material, she said, that even the indices had an index. We passed a computer center, where great mainframes hummed behind sealed windows. I got a fresh sense of the power and wealth of this place.

Before we left the scrinium Rosa gave me a small hardback book. It turned out to be the story of Regina, our Roman British ancestress — “A more complete biography than of anyone else in the ancient world, even the Caesars,” Rosa said. “Bedtime reading.”

A little farther on, to my surprise, we came to classrooms, where children, mostly girls, sat in neat rows, or worked in groups at desks, or labored over baffling-looking experiments in a science.

Rosa told me that few of these pupils belonged to the Order. Offering quality education to outsiders had been the Order’s earliest significant money earner — earliest in the Order’s terms, I learned, meaning ‘fifth century after Christ.’ She said they even had accounting records that went back that far, though the earliest entries were of limited use: they predated the invention of the double-entry bookkeeping system by the best part of a millennium.

“How inconvenient,” I murmured.

In one place there was even a small theater, where a group of young teenagers was rehearsing a play.

Schools. A theater. A play. And all of this, remember, dug deep into the ground below four levels of Catacombs.

Again we walked on.

In that first visit I didn’t even come close to figuring out the geography of the Crypt. The place isn’t designed to give you long vistas and perspectives anyhow; it’s designed to disorient, to make you forget where you are.

I would discover later that the Crypt was organized on three great levels. But each of those levels was subdivided by intermediate floors and mezzanines. The layout was functional, and changed all the time according to need, the arbitrary divisions between compartments blurring. All that helped mix up the geography in everybody’s heads, of course. I certainly didn’t figure out, that first time, how far those branching corridors and mushrooming chambers led; I never came to anything that could have been an outside wall, a layer of tufa like that I had seen carved out in the Catacombs above. Even so, I could see that the Crypt was immense.

And it was full of people. That was the one thing that struck me every second.

They were all around me, all the time, everywhere we walked. They all seemed similar, all smooth-faced and ageless, all of a compact, rounded build — and not tall; I was one of the tallest there, so I was seeing over the heads of the crowd. I was immersed in touch constantly: they would brush against me, and sometimes one would rest a hand on my shoulder as she squeezed past. There was that smell, the overall leonine stink of the compound, but something subtler when one of them came close, the milky sweetness I had noticed about Rosa.

And then there were the faces. It took me some minutes, after entering that first corridor, to recognize how similar they all were. They were all like Rosa, and therefore like me, almost all of them with oval faces, broad, flat noses — and the slate-gray eyes that have been a family trait for generations. They were all around me, faces like mirrors of mine — if younger, smoother, happier. There was a constant racket, but nobody seemed to be shouting, arguing, barging past anybody else; everybody was busy, but nobody was rushing or stressed out. Despite the hubbub, there was a great sense of order about the place.

I felt confused, baffled, battered by astounding impressions. But, odd though it seems, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve always been drawn to order, regularity — not control, necessarily, but calm. And this place, for all its unfamiliarity and surface strangeness, was at heart a deep well of calm; I could sense that immediately.

What I felt was: I belong here.

Rosa brought me to a kind of balcony. It was a rare viewpoint offering a cutaway view of at least some of the Crypt, like looking down into a shopping mall from a top level. Rosa pointed out a row of open- roofed chambers lined with bunk beds: dormitories. Farther away was a blocky structure that was a hospital, she said. People were everywhere I looked, moving, working, interacting with each other in little knots.

“There must be—” I waved a hand at the teeming masses below. “ — a control center. Some kind of management structure.”

“No control center. No bridge on this great underground submarine.” Rosa was watching my face. “How do you feel now? Are you thinking about all the rock over your head? Do you feel shut in, lost?”

“I’m in an underground city, by God,” I said. “I have to keep reminding myself that all this is dug into the ground under a Roman suburb … You know, I still haven’t got you in focus, Rosa.”

She wasn’t fazed. “But the Order is me. I told you, it’s my family — and yours. If you can’t see that, you can’t see anything about me.” She waved her hand. “George, do you blame our parents, Father, for my being sent away — for this peculiar gap in your life?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure.”

“ I don’t blame them,” she said definitely. “They did what they had to do to enable the family to survive. I understand that now, and I think I understood it even as a child.” I wondered if that could be true. “And besides, look around you. I’ve hardly suffered by being sent here.”

Suddenly I felt resentful. I hadn’t come here to see this vast subterranean city, after all, but her. And she seemed barely perturbed by my presence. This wasn’t enough of a reaction for me, emotionally. I wanted to break down her complacency — to make her see me.

Harm may not have come to her. But harm has come to me, I thought.

I had no idea how long I had been down there. At last, something prompted me to get out of there.

Rosa didn’t protest. She escorted me back along that long corridor, back to the anteroom, and then up to the Catacombs. We climbed alone, in the perpetual darkness, up the levels, before ascending that last staircase and emerging from the Catacomb’s gloomy entrance.

It was dark, I saw, shocked. I must have been in the great pit in the ground for six, seven, eight hours. The place was deserted, the refreshment stalls shut up for the night. But the air was fresh, and smelled of the lemon trees in the scrubby parkland. I breathed deep, trying to clear my head of that leonine underground tang.

But standing there alone, out of the Crypt, I felt bereft.

I walked out of the Catacomb compound and began searching for a cab. When I found one, a couple of blocks away, I recoiled from the driver’s face — dark, eyes deep brown — a perfectly normal, even handsome human face, but not like mine.

Rosa had let me go gracefully enough when I asked to leave. It was only later, thinking over the day, that I understood that she had decided — during our very first meeting at that coffee bar, as I tried to come to terms with suddenly meeting my sister again for the first time since childhood — to try to recruit me into the Order. Her first instinct had been to exclude me; after meeting me she had decided I should somehow be inducted. And everything she had shown me, everything she had done and said from that moment on, had been designed with that intent in mind. It had nothing to do with me at all.

Chapter 40

Francesca walked with her companion through the civitas Leonina.

Leo Frangipani wanted to tell Francesca about the Pope’s plans for a Holy Year, to be held in the forthcoming year 1300. “It’s going to be a marvel,” he said. “They are planning how to display the holy relics to maximize the revenue. It’s said that the priests are already practicing with the rakes they will use to drag in the money thrown by the crowds onto their altars …” He was watching her. “Ah, you disapprove! These fishers of the endless river of the gullible and faithful that washes through Rome—”

“Not at all,” she said. “Anybody would disapprove of thievery. But the pilgrims believe their money is well spent, and if it goes to preserve Rome, mother of the world, then surely they are right.”

“Perhaps so. I do know that you ladies in white prefer to give your money away … I’ll never understand how you survive.”

But survive the Order did, after more than eight centuries.

The civitas Leonina was a city within a city, centered on the Vatican Hill, where stood Constantine’s vast and crumbling basilica, the wheel hub of Christianity. The area was a huddle of monasteries, lodging houses, churches, oratories, taverns, cells for hermits, even an orphanage and a poorhouse, the latter of which was funded, discreetly, by the Order.

There were many services here for the pilgrims — or, depending which way you looked at it, plenty of people with ambitions to separate pilgrims from their money. The cobblers would repair soles worn out from walking, butchers, fishmongers, and fruiterers would feed your body, and farmers would sell you straw for your bedding, some of it still caked with dung. And then there were the vendors of linen strips that had been in contact with the tomb of one martyr, and dried flowers said to have grown over the grave of another, and you could buy candles, relics, rosaries, icons, and vials of holy water and oil. Guides and beggars wandered everywhere, looking for the gullible. Even under the walls of Constantine’s basilica itself moneylenders thronged and called, ringing coins on the tops of their tables.

But it was a thriving place; for every vendor there must have been ten potential purchasers — and probably as many criminals, Francesca thought uneasily.

She knew she stood out from the crowd. Though she had eschewed the Order’s habitual white robes for a simple dress of brown-dyed wool, she wore a thick layer of cream and unguent on her face to protect her skin from the unaccustomed sun, and spectacles made of blue glass protected eyes used to candlelight and oil lamps. She looked different, and therefore was no doubt a target for beggars and thieves alike.

She had no fear, for with her was a Frangipani: a tall, imposing, well-dressed young man with a very visible sword at his waist, a scion of one of the city’s wealthier families. But to Francesca, used to the calm of the Crypt’s underground cloisters, this was a crowded, dirty, disturbing place.

And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity. Just as in ages past they had no doubt been drawn to the Colosseum, or the triumphs of the Caesars — other contagious ideas, all now vanished like the dew.

But she was pious, and the Order itself was of course deeply Christian; she felt dismayed to be formulating such doubts, and did her best to put them out of her mind.

As they climbed up out of the residential area toward the higher ground of the ancient hills, Francesca got a broader view of the city. She could see how small and cramped the densely populated area was, set within the area called the disabitato, the great expanse of scrubland and farms that occupied the rest of the space within the old walls. Here and there monuments of the imperial age loomed out of the green, but many of them had been badly damaged by time, demolished by siege weapons, or the marble broken up and burned for lime.

There had been centuries of conflict, with Rome a battleground between popes and antipopes, and between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. Rome had paid a terrible price. But now the papacy had thrown off the yoke of the German emperors, and Rome had begun slowly to recover. On the higher ground, the mansions and palaces of the rich loomed with their towers of burnt red brick. The Frangipani family, in fact, had built a series of towers all the way around the old Circus Maximus, the emperors’ racetrack.

Leo was watching her.

She could read what he was thinking. He was trying to make out her body through her ground-length dress, its hem and sleeves now stained by Roman dirt. He was a good-looking boy, and he was scarcely older than she was, at twenty-four.

She felt a welcome flush. She was, after all, a woman. Which was, indirectly, the reason she was here.

“We’re here to talk business,” she reminded Leo gently.

“That’s so.” He stepped back, his smile apologetic, and averted his eyes.

“You have secured your interests in the land in Venice?”

“In principle.” He smiled. “All I need is the deposit …”

Times were changing — and it was Francesca’s instinct that the Order must change to suit.

Over the centuries the Order had continued to develop its charitable work. But it was a business, after a fashion. For every hundred of the poor or unfortunate whom the Order helped — so had been learned — there was always one who became rich enough later to make a significant donation to the Order’s coffers, wishing to show his gratitude to those who had saved him when he was at his lowest. It was a long game, but the amounts doled out to the poor were actually so small that the gamble was more than worth taking. It was a business, like Rome’s pilgrim-fleecing industry — but if it served a pious end it was surely a business worth carrying out.

But now there were new opportunities. After the death of the last Emperor in Rome, the cities and towns across western Europe had shrunk back, to be replaced by small hamlets and migrants, with few communities numbering more than a thousand. Now agricultural innovations were seeping across Europe from Germany. Major communities were developing again — Venice, it was said, had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants — and with this revival had come new opportunities for profit.

Young Leo’s scheme was simple: to buy marshland close to Venice, drain it, and then farm it until such time as he could sell it off in the face of the expected expansion of the city. Francesca could see the sense of it. For a small initial outlay he could multiply his holdings many times within a few years, and thus make his name within his family.

Francesca was prepared to make the loan to enable him to do this. But she had asked something in return. Now she outlined her latest plans: she needed soldiers.

As it spread out relentlessly, deep beneath the old Appian Way, the Order had broken through into another set of underground chambers, occupied by a group of Aryan Christians with a way of life strangely similar to the Order’s: run by a small group of women with massive extended families, served by a network of childless nieces and daughters … It seemed that similar pressures, surrounding the collapse of Rome, had induced similar solutions. It said a great deal for the secrecy of the Crypt and its dark twin that the two groups had remained unaware of each other for so long.

But they could not coexist, of course. Francesca had seen that straight away, felt it on a deep gut level. The other “Crypt” had to be broken up, assimilated.

If you uncovered a problem you were expected to fix it yourself: that was the Order’s central mode of working. So Francesca had made a quick decision. Leo would find soldiers to cleanse the parallel crypt, and the Order would break through and occupy the abandoned chambers. At a stroke the Crypt’s effective size would be increased by more than half, and the Order would gain many servants.

If Francesca succeeded in her scheme she would gain great prestige within the Order — and, she hoped,

get close to the matres. She had realized a year ago that Livilla, oldest of the matres, was dying. And it had been only a few months later that her own blood had started to flow — at the age of twenty-three, for the first time in her life. Then had come the realization that she, through skill, cunning and luck, might take Livilla’s place.

The next time a bachelor was brought in from the city, it would be her body that would bewitch him, her loins that would bear his child. When she thought about that prospect she felt a dull ache in the pit of her belly, and a soreness in her breasts.

Conversely, if Leo’s Venice adventure succeeded he would gain great influence in his family. They were both the same, really, she thought. The pursuit of individual ambitions, tied into the goals of the group: it was the way things were. As she studied his face, she saw that Leo understood this.

Leo still wasn’t sure, though. He rubbed his nose. “I’m no soldier, Francesca. I’ve no idea if this plan, of sending mercenaries into the Catacombs like field mice into a sewer, will work.”

She smiled. “Then hire a general who will know.”

He laughed. “I don’t think we need a general. But I do know somebody who might be able to help, as it happens …”

“Then bring him to me.”

They concluded their business. When they parted he made playfully to kiss her cheek, despite its thick plastering of cream, but she would not allow it.

Chapter 41

Peter turned up at my hotel a couple of days after my first descent into the Crypt. He stood there in the lobby, as big as Fred Flintstone, crumpled, faintly smelling of sweat, and yet untroubled. He arrived oddly short of luggage, bringing not much more than a carry-on bag, and he was out of money.

The first thing he said was, “Did you bring your duffel coat?”

“What? … No, I didn’t bring my duffel coat. What’s that got to do with anything?”

He grinned. “In Roman times the British used to export duffel coats. A duffel was a modish item for a while. It was called the byrrus Britannicus. George, you could have been fashionable for once in your life.”

“Peter, forget duffel coats. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Cash-flow problems,” he said.

“What are you talking about? You own a house, for God’s sake. You must have savings—”

“My accounts have been frozen,” he said. “Long story. Look, obviously I’ll pay you back …”

Maybe I’m naive. It was a time in my life in which various people, including a Jesuit and my long-lost sister, seemed to have little difficulty keeping me away from awkward truths with simple deflections and guile. But that day I was distracted, as I had been since coming out of the Crypt. I couldn’t get the memory out of my head; it was as if the milky air of the place were a drug, and I had been addicted in one quick hit.

So that was why I went with the flow concerning Peter, why I found it hard to focus on his evasions about what he’d been doing, why he’d turned up in this state. It just didn’t seem to matter.

I didn’t want to stump up for a separate room; the hotel was cheap but not that cheap. I upgraded to a twin, in my name. We moved into the room that afternoon.

It didn’t take Peter long to unpack. That carry-on contained nothing much but his laptop and a couple of changes of clothes, some of which still had shop labels on them, as if he had purchased them in a hurry. He didn’t even have a razor; he borrowed mine until he bought a pack of disposables.

He showered, shaved, sent his traveling clothes down to the hotel laundry. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon voraciously reading the little book Rosa had given me on my alleged ancestress Regina.

That evening, he let me buy him a meal at my favorite of the little roadside restaurants. I told Peter as much as I could about my sister Rosa, and the Order, and the Crypt. He just listened.

On a napkin I wrote down the three Latin slogans I had tried to memorize in the Crypt. He used online dictionaries, accessed through his handheld, to translate them:

Sisters matter more than daughters.

Ignorance is strength.

Listen to your sisters.

“What do you think they mean?”

“Damned if I know,” he said. He filed them away, intending to research them later.

I tried to explain the appeal of the place.

Once I had a friend who had grown up in a series of military camps. They were rather bland fifties- flavor estates, dotted around the country. But they were secure, behind their barriers of wire and men with guns, and inside there were only service personnel and their families. There was no crime, no disorder, no graffiti or vandalism. Once he had grown up and completed his own service in the air force, my friend was finally expelled from his barbed-wire utopia. It seemed to me he spent his whole life after that looking back from our chaotic world at the little islands of order behind the wire. I had always known how he had felt.

And that was how I felt about the Crypt now. But there were conflicting emotions — yes, a desire to return, but at the same time a dread of being dragged back into that pit of faces, the scents, the endless touching.

I tried to express all this. Peter made Halloween gestures. “They’ll eat your soul!”

It wasn’t funny.

After we’d eaten, we strolled back toward the hotel. But it was a fine night, dusty and warm, and we were in Rome, for God’s sake. So we stopped at an alimentari, a grocery store, where I bought a bottle of limoncello. Close to the hotel there was a little square of greenery, with water fountains and cigarette butts and dog turds. We found a relatively clean bench and sat down. The limoncello was a lemon liqueur they manufactured down the coast near Sorrento. It was bright yellow and so sweet it stuck to your teeth. But it wasn’t so bad after the insides of our mouths were coated by the first couple of slugs, and it topped off the wine we had drunk.

The sky was smoggy that night, and glowed faintly gray-orange. There was plenty of light from the lamps that played on the monuments in the Forum and on the great gaudy Vittoriano. We were cupped by the great shoulders of Trajan’s Market, which loomed all around us.

I had taken a couple of walks around Trajan’s Market, which I found astonishing. You couldn’t say the ruins were attractive: the market was just a mound of brickwork, of streets and broken-open domes and little doorways. But it had been a shopping mall, for God’s sake. The little units — all neatly numbered and set on multiple levels along colonnaded passageways, or in great curving facades that would have graced the Georgians — had been planned and leased out, just like a modern development.

“That’s what strikes you,” I said to Peter. “There’s nothing medieval about this area — not like the center of British cities. Everything is planned, laid out in neat curves and straight lines. The Forum looks antique, if you know what I mean. Columns and temples, very ancient Greek. But the big palaces look like the ruins of the White House. And this market looks like the ruins of Milton Keynes.”

“Except Milton Keynes won’t last so well as Roman brickwork. They didn’t have slaves to mix the concrete so well.”

“You know, in the Dark Ages they used this place as a fortress. From shopping mall to barricade.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Decline and fall, eh? But there were a few junctions in Rome’s history where things might have turned out different.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the loss of Britain. Needn’t have happened. Britain wasn’t just some kind of border outpost. Britain was protected by the ocean — mostly anyhow — from the pressures of the barbarians, and internally it was mostly at peace. For centuries it was a key source of wheat and weapons for the troops in Gaul and Germany, and it had a reserve of troops that could have been used to reverse the setbacks in western Europe. Even after the calamities of the early fifth century — if the emperors had won Britain back, they might have stabilized the whole of the western Empire. Maybe your grannie understood some of this.”

“If she ever existed.”

“If she existed. Well, she was the daughter of a citizen, the granddaughter of a soldier. If you’re living in great times, decisive times, you know about it, even if you only glimpse a small part of it.”

“Do you think this story of Regina can be true?”

“Well, I read the book. It’s plausible. The place-names are authentic. Durnovaria is modern Dorchester, Verulamium Saint Albans, Eburacum York. Some of the detail makes sense, too. The old Celtic festival of Samhain eventually mutated into Halloween … Trouble is, nobody really knows much about how Roman Britain fell apart anyhow. For sure it wasn’t like the continent, where the barbarian warlords tried to keep up the old imperial structures, though with themselves on the top. In Britain we got the Saxons — it was an apocalypse, like living through a nuclear war. The history and archaeology are scratchy, ironically, precisely because of that.”

I nodded, and sipped a little more limoncello. The bottle was already getting low. “And if the Empire had survived—”

He shrugged. “Rome would have had to fight off the expansion of Islam in the seventh century, and the Mongols in the thirteenth. But its armies would have handled the Golden Horde better than its medieval successors. It could have endured. Its eastern half did.”

“No Dark Ages—”

“The one thing you get with an empire is stability. A solemn calm. Instead of which we got a noisy clash of infant nations.”

“No feudalism,” I said. “No barons. No chivalry. And no English language. We’d all have ended up speaking some descendant of Latin, like French, Spanish—”

“No Renaissance. There would have been no need for it. But there would have been none of the famous Anglo-Saxon tradition of individual liberty and self-determination. No Magna Carta, no parliaments. If the Romans had gone to the Americas they wouldn’t have practiced genocide against the natives, as we did. That wasn’t the Roman way. They’d have assimilated, acculturated, built their aqueducts and bathhouses and roads, the apparatus of their civilizing system. The indigenous nations, in North and South America, would have survived as new Roman provinces. It would have been a richer world, maybe more advanced in some ways.”

“But no Declaration of Independence. And no abolition of slavery, either.”

There would have been losses, then. But the fall of Rome — all that bloodshed, the loss of learning — the collapse of order: no, I realized, I didn’t think that was a good thing. The order of empires appealed to me — even if, for example, the Soviet Union had been just such an empire by any reasonable definition. But that was my inner longing for order and regularity expressing itself.

We sat for a while, listening to the cicadas chirp in the trees, whose green leaves looked black as oil in the smoggy orange light. One of the other drunks was watching us; he raised his brown paper bag in ironic salute, and we toasted him back.

“So. My sister,” I said. “What do you think of her ?”

He shrugged. “Sounds inhuman. I don’t know how you ought to behave when your long-lost brother turns up out of the blue, but surely it’s not like that.”

I nodded. “What do you think we’re dealing with?”

“A cult. A creepy fringe-Catholic cult. I think your sister has been indoctrinated. No wonder she reacted like a robot.”

I forced a smile. “If you’re thinking of deprogramming her, forget it. She says she doesn’t need saving.”

“Well, she would say that.” More gently he said, “And after forty years, and after being taken at such a young age, there’s probably very little left of your sister anyhow.” He sighed. “Your dad was a good friend of mine. But he had a lot to answer for.”

“What about the Order?”

“You know, Jesus Himself never meant to found a church. As far as He was concerned, He was living in the end times. He had come to proclaim the kingdom of God. The early church was scattered, chaotic, splintered; it was a suppressed movement, after all.”

“And women—”

“When the persecutions began, women had it particularly tough. Women martyrs were made available for prostitution. Women would need a place to hide, a way to gather strength, to endure …”

“So the story of the Order makes sense.”

“Once it became the religion of the Empire, the church quickly tightened up. Heresy wasn’t to be tolerated: for the first time you had Christians cheerfully persecuting other Christians. In the centuries that followed, as the popes got a grip, the church became centralized, legalized, politicized, militarized. The Order would have had no place in the worldview of the popes.”

“Yet it survived.”

He rubbed his chin. “The Order is obviously secretive, but it’s been sitting there an awfully long time, an hour’s walk from the Vatican itself. The church has to know about it. There have to be some kind of links.” He smiled. “I told you I always wanted to go have a root around in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.

Maybe now’s the time.”

I said dubiously, “I’ll have to ask Claudio.”

I wasn’t happy with his response. On some level he might be right. But he hadn’t taken on board what I’d tried to tell him about what I thought of as the earthy aspects of the Crypt: the faces, the smells, that deep pull I felt to remain there, to go back. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to expose all this spooky biological stuff to him.

Anyhow, though I couldn’t shape the thought, I was sure there was more to the Order than just a cult. But maybe Peter was going to have to see it for himself.

As if on cue, an opportunity to do just that offered itself.

Peter had booted up his laptop — he was never without it — and every so often he checked his email. Now he discovered a note from some American kid called Daniel Stannard, who had somehow found his way through the Internet jungle to us. Daniel had concerns about a girl called Lucia, who sounded like she was some kind of refugee from the Order. Daniel wanted to meet us.

Peter smiled, a bit glassily. “I think the door of our secretive subterranean sisterhood has opened, just a crack.”

Right then I was drunk enough not to care. “I wonder if my great-grannie really did shag King Arthur.”

He snorted. “She’d have had a job, as he never existed …”

There were traces of history about Arthur. He cropped up in sources of Celtic mythology, like the Mabinogion from Wales, and you could trace Arthur in the genealogies of the Welsh kings. An inscription bearing the name ARTORIUS had even been found at one of Arthur’s supposed strongholds. But by the ninth century, the myth was spreading. What Welsh prince wouldn’t want his name linked with Arthur? And that ARTORIUS inscription, on closer inspection, looked more like ARTOGNUS …

Peter said, “The Roman British elite only managed to score a few victories against the Saxons. It was a desperate time. They must have looked for hope — and what is Arthur, not dead but sleeping, if not an embodiment of hope? It’s a lovely story. But it’s got nothing to do with the truth.”

Perhaps, I thought. But unlike Peter, I had seen the Crypt, and its ancient, meticulous records. Perhaps I would be able to believe in Arthur — and it would be delicious if I could believe my remote great- grandmother had once kissed him, and in her way bested him.

We swapped the limoncello again, and I changed the subject.

“So,” I said, “what became of that invisible spaceship that took a right in the center of the Earth?”

He glanced at me, a bit wearily. “You still don’t take it seriously. George, something happened. It came from the sun. It made straight for the Earth, and it changed course. If it had been visible it would have been the story of the century.”

“I don’t see why you’re so fascinated by dark matter in the first place.”

He slapped the brick wall behind him. “Because for every ton of good solid brick, there are ten of dark matter, out there, doing something. Most of the universe is invisible to us, and we don’t even know what it’s made of. There are mysteries out there we can’t even guess at …” He lifted his hand and flexed his fingers. “Baryonic matter, normal matter, is infested with life. Why not dark matter, too? Why shouldn’t there be intelligence? And if so, what is it doing in our sun? ”

I shook my head. I was drunk, and starting to feel sour. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, neither do I. But I’m trying to join the dots.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice again. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think there’s a war going on out there. Some kind of struggle. It’s going on above our heads, and we can’t even see it.”

I grunted. “War in Heaven? The dark against the light? I’ll tell you what this sounds like to me. Peter, your background’s showing. You’ve just somehow sublimated your Catholic upbringing into this great space-opera story of war in the sky.”

His mouth opened and closed. “I have to admit I never thought of that. Well, you might be right. But my psychological state doesn’t change the reality of the data — or the consequences. Just suppose you are a field mouse stuck in a World War I trench. What do you do?”

“You keep your head down.”

“Right. Because one misdirected shell could wipe out your whole damn species. That’s why some of us,” he whispered, “believe that it would be a mistake to announce our presence to the stars.”

I frowned. “I thought we’d already done that. We’ve been blasting TV signals to the skies since the days of Hitler.”

“Yes, but we’re getting more efficient about our use of electromagnetic radiation — tight beams, cables, optic fibers. We’re already a lot quieter, cosmically speaking, than we were a few decades ago. We can’t bring back our radio noise, but it is a thin shell of clamor, heading out from the Earth, getting weaker and weaker … Blink and you miss it. And besides, radio is primitive. The more advanced folk are surely listening out for more interesting signals. And there are some people out there who think we should start sending out just those kinds of signals.”

“I take it you aren’t one of these people.”

“Not anymore.” He was gazing into his hands as he said this, and his voice was unusually somber.

I remembered how he had fled to Rome, with no money, not much more than the clothes he stood up in. Suddenly I was suspicious. “Peter — what have you done?”

But he just smiled and reached for the bottle.

Chapter 42

It was in the year 1527 that Clement came to Rome. He was in the service of Charles V, Emperor of Germany, who also happened to be king of Spain and Naples and ruler of the Netherlands.

A huge army of German Landsknecht, mainly Lutherans, had been raised by the king’s brother, a mighty force to wreak vengeance on the Antichrist in Rome. They battled through torrential rain and snowstorms to cross the Alps. They advanced on Lombardy and joined the Emperor’s main force of Spaniards, Italians, and others.

And then they converged on Rome.

Clement, after his travels, had seen much of the world. But Rome was extraordinary.

A great circuit of wall, it was said raised by the Caesars, was still in use today, much repaired. But within its wide boundaries there were farms, vineyards and gardens, even areas of scrub and thicket where deer and wild boar roamed. Here and there you could see broken columns and shapeless ruins poking out of the greenery, draped with ivy and eglantine and populated by pigeons and other birds. The inhabited area was small and cramped, a place of narrow streets and houses hanging over the muddy waters of the patient, enduring Tiber, with the spires of the rich looming over all.

There were many fine churches and palaces. But Rome was a city trapped in the past, Clement thought, a city that would have been humbled if set aside Milan or Venice or Trieste.

And now it was to be humbled further.

The pope offered an indemnity, which tempted the army’s leaders. But the Landsknecht wanted pillage. And so it was that an undisciplined, heterogeneous, half-starved, and ragged army finally marched on Rome, dreaming of plunder. There were more than thirty thousand of them.

The attack began before dawn.

The first assault on the wall was repulsed, but the defenders, hugely outnumbered and lacking ammunition, were soon reduced to throwing rocks at those they called “half-castes” and “Lutherans.” Up went the scaling ladders, and soon Germans and Spaniards were swarming over the wall. Some of the defenders fought bravely, including the pope’s Swiss Guards, but they were quickly overwhelmed.

By the time Clement had crossed the wall the fighting was all but done. It was still dawn; still mist from the Tiber choked the city streets. Afterward, Rome was at the mercy of the Emperor’s troops. Later, Clement would remember little of the days that followed, little save bloodstained glimpses of unbelievable savagery.

The Romans were cut to pieces, even if unarmed, even if unable to defend themselves. Even invalids in hospitals were slaughtered.

The doors of churches, convents, palaces, and monasteries were broken down and their contents hurled into the streets. When people tried to shelter in the churches they were massacred; five hundred died even in Saint Peter’s. Priests were forced to take part in obscene travesties of the Mass, and if they did not they were eviscerated, or crucified, or dragged through the streets, naked and in chains. Nuns were violated, and used as tokens in games of chance, and convents were turned into brothels where the women of the upper classes were forced into prostitution. Holy relics were abused; the skull of the Apostle Andrew was kicked around the streets, the handkerchief of Saint Veronica was sold in an inn, the spear said to have pierced Christ’s side was displayed like a battle trophy by a German.

Clement took part in the torment of one wealthy man who was made to rape his own daughter, and another, a very fat man, who was forced to eat his own roasted testicles. Afterward he would not be able to credit what he had done.

The Sack of Rome was the end product of decades of suspicion, jealousy, and hostility. The Renaissance popes had been great patrons of the arts, but they had acted like ambitious princelings and made many enemies. Meanwhile the great wealth of Rome had made the city a prize that the European powers, especially France and Spain, had eyed with jealousy. French, Spaniards, and landless German Lutherans had at last made common cause under Charles’s imperial banner. But none of this could have justified the Sack.

It went on for months. It was said that twelve thousand were killed. Two-thirds of the housing stock was burned to the ground. On the resulting wasteland lay putrefying corpses, gnawed by dogs. Even on Sundays not a church bell sounded, across the whole of Rome.

One hot night Clement found himself with a party of a dozen or so that ventured outside the city walls. They were drunk. There might be nothing to find out here, but at least it would be a break from the stink of the city itself, where, it was said, by now you couldn’t find a purse worth emptying or a virgin over twelve.

The Emperor’s soldiers followed an old road the locals called the Appian Way. It was overgrown and rutted, but you could still trace its line, arrow straight. They drank, sang bawdily, and as they walked they probed with sticks and spears at the ground. There were tales of Catacombs out here, and where there were Catacombs you might find treasure.

It was Clement, as it happened, who found the door. His broken stick, in fact a smashed-off crucifix, hit wood — he thought — something solid, anyhow.

He called the others over, and soon they were scrabbling at the turf and dirt, pulling it away in great handfuls. Gradually they exposed a great square door in the ground. They tried to haul it open, but it would not budge.

So Philip, a great slab of a man from southern Spain, got to his hands and knees and began to hammer on the door. If it was not opened it would be smashed in or burned, he shouted, and it would be the worse for whoever was inside. None of this provoked a response, so the men began to gather wood for a fire, to burn their way through.

Then, without warning, the door pushed open. Philip scrambled off, and soon all the men were gathered around, hauling at the door.

A chamber in the ground was exposed. It was walled with white-painted plaster, Clement saw, and lamps flickered in the breeze. And there were women here — six of them — none younger than sixteen or older than twenty-five, he judged, and they were wearing white dresses. They stood in a row, peering up, like nuns praying. They were very pale, like ghosts, yet beautiful, and all of them full-figured.

When the men roared and reached for them, the women’s nerve broke. They clung to each other and huddled back in their pit. But they could not escape the men’s eager hands. They were hauled out of the pit, stripped, and taken, there and then, on the surface of the ancient imperial road. When the men realized the women were all virgins they fought among themselves to be first to have them. But in the end all the women were used, over and again.

As their pale bodies writhed Clement was reminded oddly of maggots, or larvae, wriggling when exposed to the light.

Once Philip and two others set on one woman at the same time. When they were done, they found they had crushed the breath out of their victim. She was left where they had finished her, for the dogs and birds to take. The other women were taken back into the city, where four of them were sold to a group of Germans, and the other gambled away.

Sated, occupied with the women, the men didn’t try to penetrate the Catacomb further, and left the pit in the ground gaping open.

A few nights after that Clement and some others went back along the Appian Way, searching for the door once more. Clement’s memory was good, and he had not been terribly drunk that night. But search as he might he could find no trace of a doorway in the ground, or of the debauchery that had been committed here, or of the woman killed. When he thought back, to that vision of the pale women writhing on the ground like uncovered worms, it seemed like a dream.

Chapter 43

We agreed to meet Daniel and Lucia inside the Colosseum. Peter and I grinned at each other when Daniel, through his emails, suggested this cloak-and-dagger rendezvous. But anyhow we went along, one bright early-November morning.

The Colosseum was only a short walk down Mussolini’s majestic boulevard from our hotel, and its ruined grandeur loomed ahead of us as we approached. In fact the Colosseum had been a key motivation for Mussolini to build his imperial way where he did, for he wanted a clear view of it from his palace off the Piazza Venezia. Its size was deceptive; it seemed to take us a long time to reach the foot of that mighty wall, even longer to walk around the tarmac apron at its base.

By the time we got to the public entrance, Peter was puffing and sweating profusely. He seemed agitated today, his untroubled demeanor gone, but he wouldn’t say what was on his mind.

We joined a glacier-pace queue of more or less patient visitors before the glass-fronted ticket office. Hucksters worked the crowd: water sellers, tropical-shirted vendors of bangles and felt hats and fake- leather handbags, and a few plausible-sounding American-accented girls who offered “official” guided tours. Groups of blokes in fake legionary uniforms, all scarlet and gold and plastic swords, volunteered to have their photos taken with tourists. With my British sensibility I vaguely imagined these were “official,” somehow sanctioned by the city or whichever authority controlled the Colosseum, until I saw them cluster around one hapless American tourist demanding twenty euros for each photograph they’d just taken.

But above all this indignity loomed the antique walls, to which marble still clung, despite fifteen hundred years of neglect and despoliation.

Peter wasn’t comfortable in the gathering heat. “Fucking Italians,” he said. “Once, you know, they could get fifty thousand people inside this stadium in ten minutes. Now this.”

At length we inched our way to the head of the queue, bought our tickets, and passed through a turnstile and into the body of the stadium.

The huge structure was a hollow shell. Inside, cavernous corridors curved out of sight to either side. Peter looked a little lost, but all this was startlingly familiar to me, a veteran of the architecture of English soccer stadiums. Still, the corridors and alcoves were littered with rubble, stupendous fragments of fallen brickwork and columns and marble carvings. The place had long been neglected; even in the seventies the Romans had used these immense corridors as a car park.

We emerged at last into bright sunlight.

The interior of the stadium was oval. Walkways curved around its perimeter at a couple of levels. Because we were early, like dutiful tourists we completed circuits of the walls, and crossed a wooden walkway that passed along the axis of the stadium floor. The original floor, made of wood, had long since rotted away, exposing brick cells where humans and animals had once been kept, waiting to fight for their lives on the stage above.

After perhaps half an hour, it was time. We made our way to the small book stall, which had been built into an alcove close to the main spectator entrance. There was quite a crowd here, for this was where you congregated for your “official” guided tours.

I had no problem recognizing Lucia.

She had exactly the look that had characterized the women and girls of the Order: not tall, stockily built, with the oval face and pale gray eyes of that huge subterranean family. I had had a lot of trouble figuring out ages in the Crypt, but Lucia looked genuinely young — perhaps sixteen, or even younger. She had blue-tinged sunglasses pushed up on her head. But her simple blue dress was grimy, the hem ripped; it looked as if she had been wearing it for days.

She was heavily pregnant, I saw, startled.

When she saw me standing before her — and she recognized my similar features — her eyes widened, and she clutched the hand of the boy with her.

He was quite different: perhaps a couple of years older, taller, slim, with reddish hair that was already receding from a pale, rounded brow. His eyes were clear blue, and he peered at us suspiciously.

“So here we are,” Peter said. “I take it you’re Lucia — you speak English?”

“Not well,” she said. Her voice was husky, her English heavily accented.

“But I do,” said the boy, Daniel. “I’m an American.”

“Good for you,” said Peter dryly.

I tried to reduce the tension. “My name is George Poole. Lucia, it seems we are distant cousins.” I smiled, and she nervously smiled back. “And this is Peter McLachlan. My friend.”

Daniel wasn’t reassured. He looked defiant, but scared. He was already out of his depth. His Internet contact with us, conducted from the safety of his home or some cybercafй, was one thing, but maybe he was having second thoughts when confronted by the reality of two hefty, sweating middle-age men. “How do we know we can trust you?”

Peter snorted, sweating. “You contacted us, remember?”

I held up a hand and gave Peter a look: Go easy on them. I said, “I’m family, and Peter is an old friend. He’s here to help. I’ve known him all my life, and I trust him. Let’s just talk. We can stay in public places all the time. Anytime you like you can just walk away. How’s that?”

Daniel, still uncertain, glanced at Lucia. She just nodded weakly.

So we walked around the curving walkway. Lucia, gravid, walked heavily and painfully, her hand on her back. Daniel supported her, holding her arm.

I whispered to Peter, “What do you think?”

He shrugged. “That poor kid looks as if she’s going to pup any minute … You think Daniel’s the father?”

“I have no idea,” I said truthfully. But somehow I thought it wouldn’t be as simple as that.

Peter chewed a nail, a habit I hadn’t noticed before. “I wasn’t expecting this. This is supposed to be about your sister, and her cult. What are we getting into here?” He had seemed oddly jumpy all day, and his nervousness was getting worse. I had no idea why — but then I knew there was a lot about Peter, not least why he was in Rome in the first place, he wasn’t telling me.

The Colosseum is a big place, and we soon found an out-of-the-way alcove where it looked as if we would be undisturbed. Lucia found a place to sit, on a worn row of steps in the shade. Daniel stood over her protectively. Peter had a couple of bottles of water in his day bag. He gave one to Lucia, and she sipped it gratefully. She was breathing hard, I saw, and sweating heavily.

“So,” said Peter. “Tell me how you got in touch with us.”

Daniel shrugged. “It wasn’t hard … I thought I needed to find somebody outside the Order, and yet with a connection. You see what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said. “Somebody else asking awkward questions.”

And so, he said, he had hacked into the Order’s email streams looking for likely candidates. “It was difficult — the Order’s traffic is heavily encrypted — but—”

“But you’re a smart little hacker,” said Peter unsympathetically.

Daniel’s eyes flashed. “I did what I had to do.”

Peter said, “Let’s cut to the chase. She’s your girlfriend, and you got her pregnant. Is that the story?”

“No!” Daniel’s denial was surprisingly hot. “I wouldn’t be so stupid.”

I studied Daniel. “How old are you, son?”

He was just seventeen; he looked older. No wonder he was out of his depth.

“If you aren’t the father, how did you get involved with Lucia?”

For the next couple of minutes he gabbled out something of his life story — how he was the son of a diplomat, a student at an expat school in the city — and how his harmless flirtation with a pretty girl he spotted at the Pantheon had led him into deep waters. When he had gotten all this out, he seemed drained, some of his nerve gone. “I was only fooling. I didn’t expect it to turn out like this. But when she asked me for help, I couldn’t refuse, could I?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sure you did the right thing.”

Since she’d come to him he had been hiding her away, though he wouldn’t say where. From her look, I doubted it was in much comfort. He hadn’t told his parents what he was doing. He had done his best, I thought, and I wondered how well I would have coped with such a situation when I was seventeen.

I asked Lucia her age. I was shocked to find she was only fifteen. She looked too worn out for that.

“All right,” said Peter. “Let’s start at the beginning. Lucia — you’re trying to get away from something. From the Order?”

That took a little translating. “Yes,” she said, “from the Order.”

“And that’s why you contacted Daniel here.”

“There was nobody else,” she said miserably. “I didn’t want to get him into trouble, but I didn’t know what else to do, and—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just tell us. Why do you want to leave the Order?”

“Because they took my baby away,” she said.

I did a double take. “Your first baby. You’re now pregnant with your second.”

“Yes.” Lucia’s eyes were downcast, and she rested her hands on her belly.

“Who was the father?”

“His name was Giuliano … something. His name doesn’t matter. He was brought in.”

“Who by?”

“By the cupola.” I didn’t understand that, and she said, “By Rosa Poole. Your sister.”

Peter and I exchanged glances.

Hesitantly I touched her hand. “You can tell us. Were you raped?”

“No.” She closed her eyes, shaking her head, almost irritably. “You don’t understand. Daniel asked the same questions. People never listen.”

I backed off. “I’m sorry. Just tell us.”

“Giuliano was brought in, and he made me pregnant, and I had my baby, and they took her away. And now this.” She patted her bulge. “I don’t want to lose this one, too. And I don’t want baby after baby. I don’t want this.” Suddenly she was crying, a flood of tears.

We three males all scrambled in our pockets; the comedy routine concluded when Daniel was the first to produce a tissue.

Peter sat back and blew out his cheeks. “Deeper and deeper. So who was the father of this second kid?”

“The same guy,” said Daniel. “The same asshole. This Giuliano, whatever.”

Peter frowned. “Then how come she doesn’t know his name?”

Daniel took a breath. “Because he only slept with her once.”

Peter thought that over, and laughed out loud.

Daniel, hotly embarrassed, said, “You don’t know the half of it, man.”

Lucia said desolately, “I told you they wouldn’t believe me.” With a tissue clutched to her nose, she looked up at me through water-filled eyes heartbreakingly like my own.

“Let’s all take it easy,” I said. “Lucia, you say you don’t want to have baby after baby … Is that what they asked you to do? The Order — umm, my sister?”

“Yes. But they never asked,” she said, with a trace of sulky petulance.

“And why you?” Peter asked.

She looked away. “Because I had grown up.”

It took a little probing to establish that she meant that she had begun her periods.

Peter asked, “So it’s some kind of baby factory down there?”

“Peter—”

“George, if you are unscrupulous about it a healthy white kid can bring in a lot of money. The big adoption services in the States—”

“It’s not like that,” Lucia said.

“But,” Peter said, “every time a girl begins her periods she is made pregnant. Right?”

“No.” She was finding this difficult, but there was determination in her face, I saw, a strength. “You just aren’t listening. Not all girls. Just some. Just me. The other girls can’t have babies.”

The rule of three mothers, I thought absently, thinking of Regina’s biography. “You mean they aren’t allowed to?”

“No,” she said. “They can’t.”

Peter thought that over. “They’re neuters?” Again he laughed.

Daniel glared at him. “It’s true, man. I’ve met one of them. A woman called Pina — about twenty-five, I think. Calls herself Lucia’s friend, but she’s no friend; she betrayed her to the other creeps. You should have seen her — no tits, hips like a ten-year-old boy’s. She’s twenty-five, but she’s prepubescent.”

It was impossible, of course. Absurd. But now I thought back to my own incursion into the Crypt, and I remembered those ageless people who had clustered around me in the corridors and mezzanines -

mostly women and girls, few men, not slim, but with no figures, no busts or hips … Rosa, I realized, had been the only woman I saw there who had looked mature. It hadn’t struck me at the time — I suppose I was simply overwhelmed by that dense, dizzying environment, by too much strangeness to notice such a simple thing — and yet, now that I thought back, it was startling.

I looked at Peter. “How could this happen?”

“And why? … I’ve no idea,” he said uneasily. “But if any of it’s true, I think this means we’re facing more than just some money-grabbing cult here, George.”

Lucia cried out, clutched her belly, bent over, and vomited.

Peter and I responded reflexively, jumping back out of the way of that stinking splash. But Daniel had better instincts. He leaned forward to grab her shoulders. “It’s okay. It’s okay …”

Peter dug in his pocket for his cell phone.

I said to Daniel, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. But she’s going to the hospital. Now. ”

“No,” he said. “The Order—”

“The hell with the Order.” One-handed, Peter had punched in 113, the code to call an ambulance. “They aren’t the fucking Illuminati — hey!”

Daniel had snatched the phone out of his hand and terminated the call. “Okay. But at least let’s take her somewhere they might not expect.”

Peter made a grab for his phone, but I pushed him back. “Where, Daniel?”

“There’s an American hospital on the Via Emilio Longoni. Thirty minutes out of town.”

“Too far,” Peter growled.

I held him back. “Let him follow his instincts,” I said. “He’s done okay for her so far, hasn’t he?”

Peter was unhappy, but subsided.

By the time Daniel had completed the call, Lucia had done vomiting. We had to help her stand. Peter and I walked at either side of the girl. She draped her arms over our shoulders, and we held her around her waist. When I brushed against her skin, she felt oddly cold, I thought, clammy.

We emerged from the Colosseum entrance into the bright light of midmorning, where the fake gladiators continued to milk the lengthening queues. People stared at us as we limped past. It struck me how helpless we were. We were essentially strangers. Poor Lucia was trapped in the travails of an evidently unwanted pregnancy, and all she had to protect her was a confused, headstrong kid and two screwed-up middle-age blokes — and we weren’t even sure if we should be getting involved in the first place.

Daniel gave Peter his phone back, and he produced a floppy disc from his waist pack. “Here. I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” He handed it to Peter.

Peter slipped it into his pocket. “What’s this?”

“About Pina no-tits. I hacked into hospital records. Lucia told me Pina was in a traffic accident a couple of years ago. Not serious, but she busted her leg, and she ended up in a city hospital for a few hours — long enough for the doctors to notice her, umm, peculiarities. And they ran some tests. The results were weird. But by the time they turned around to figure out more, she’d already gone. Whisked away by the witches from the Crypt.” He glared at Peter. “Take a look at the disc. It’s all there.”

“Oh, I will.”

Daniel walked jerkily, his shoulders set. He was angry and scared. He said, “And if you don’t believe that, wait until we get to the hospital. Wait until the American doctors see her. Then explain to me how Lucia can have gone through a full-term pregnancy in three months. Explain how she can have got pregnant again without having sex.”

Lucia bowed her head, biting her lip.

Peter and I exchanged a glance. I murmured, “Three months?”

“One thing at a time,” Peter said, and he rolled his eyes.

We all rode in the ambulance.

The Rome American Hospital turned out to be bright, modern, efficient, the reception area full of light cast from big picture windows. Lucia was taken out of our hands as soon as the ambulance doors opened, and she disappeared into the maw of the hospital.

We were quizzed about our relationship to Lucia. Peter lied with surprising smoothness. I was her uncle,

he said, visiting from England — hence the family resemblance. Daniel and Peter were friends of the family. He had already contacted the direct family, who were on their way … I thought the nurse looked skeptically at us, and perhaps she was remembering Lucia’s torn and dirty dress. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

I had to produce a credit card to guarantee payment for whatever treatment Lucia was going to need. “Ulp,” I said to Peter. “I wonder if my travel insurance will cover this.”

“I kind of doubt it. Are you concerned?”

I said, “That my bank account is about to be flattened?” I watched Daniel roaming around the reception area, restless, helpless, frustrated. “I don’t think I am, no, given the circumstances.”

“ Conception without sex. The kid actually said that, didn’t he? And three-month pregnancies. Jesus. What have we gotten into here?”

I studied him. “What’s wrong with you, Peter? I’ve never seen you so — aggressive.”

He snorted, and fixed his invisible glasses. “We came here looking for your sister, remember. Not for this.”

“Do you want to back out?”

“Rosa isn’t my sister. Do you ?”

I thought about it. I sensed that this murky mystery of poor Lucia tied in on some deep level with what I’d glimpsed of the Crypt — the biological strangeness I’d experienced, but which I’d not been able to express to Peter. If I wanted to unravel all that, I was going to have to deal with Lucia. And besides — I pictured Lucia’s face: so pale, such deep shadows around her eyes. She was just a kid, and she really was in deep trouble, I realized, and I felt a sharp instinct to help. Peter’s peculiar behavior — the furtiveness he’d shown since he’d arrived here in Rome, the half secrets he’d dropped about dark matter and the rest — was just complicating things. But it didn’t change the essentials.

“No. I’m not backing out,” I said firmly. “Simple humanity, Peter.”

He laughed without humor. “I don’t think there’s anything simple about this situation.” He cast about. “I need to get on the Internet. I’ll see if there’s a dataport in here, or maybe a phone socket. And I could use a coffee,” he called over his shoulder, pulling his laptop out of his bag.

I walked up to Daniel. “You’re pacing like an expectant father.”

He looked at me sourly. “Bad joke.”

“Yes. Sorry. Look, do you have any change? …”

Down the hall we found a machine that would dispense Starbucks-sized polystyrene beakers of coffee in return for euro coins and notes. We walked back to Peter, who had tucked himself into a corner seat and was pulling Daniel’s hacked medical file off the floppy. He accepted the coffee without looking up, flipped open the little drinking flap in the plastic lid, and took a sip, all without ceasing to work at his keyboard.

“The man’s a professional,” I said to Daniel.

“Yeah.”

We sat down. Daniel was full of nervous energy. He tapped the arm of his chair, and his legs pumped up and down in tiny, violent movements, as if he were ready to flee.

“I guess you haven’t had much experience of hospitals,” I said.

“No. Have you?”

“Well—”

“You have kids of your own?”

“No, I haven’t,” I admitted.

He turned away. “Look, it’s not the hospital that bothers me. In fact, I enjoy being surrounded by people speaking English, or at least Italian with an American accent.”

“The Order? That’s what you’re scared of?”

“Damn right.”

“They can’t harm anybody here.” I pointed to a beefy security guard, who stood by the door, hands folded behind his back. “Lucia will be fine. We’re in the best place she could be …” And so on.

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced.

A typical adult-kid response came to my mind: Yes, everything will be fine, she will be okay, we can all go home. But I thought I should respect him more than that. “I really don’t understand what’s going on here, Daniel. You know more than I do. And I have no idea if she’s going to be okay.” I felt a stab of anger. “I don’t even know what okay means, for a fifteen-year-old girl who will have had two kids by some guy whose name she doesn’t even know.”

“They had no right,” he said.

“No. Whoever they are.”

“I should be at school.” He spread his hands. “What am I doing here?”

“Look — you did the right thing,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve lived a quiet life. What do I know about how to deal with situations like this? You saw a kid in trouble — a human being — and you responded on a human level. Your parents will be proud.”

He grimaced. “You don’t know my parents. When they find out about this I am toast.”

A junior doctor approached us. About thirty, she was short, brisk, competent, with severely cut hair. She had a yellow notepad in her hand.

Lucia was fine, the doctor said, in accented English. The girl was in the late stages of pregnancy, and it was possible she would soon go into labor. But the doctor looked a little puzzled as she said this, and I realized that she was keeping stuff back from us. Well, they had had only a few minutes to examine Lucia, and if even a fraction of what Lucia and Daniel had told us was true, they had a right to be baffled.

Peter hit the doctor with questions. “What about her breathing? Her metabolism, pulse rate? …” She was startled enough to try to answer him, referring to her pad a couple of times, before her customary doctor’s mask of nondisclosure slid back into place. “We’ll let you know as soon as there is more news.” And she turned and walked briskly away.

Daniel said, “What use was that? She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.” He returned to his seat, fuming, pent up.

I murmured to Peter, “Wish I hadn’t encouraged him to drink caffeine. What about those questions you were firing at the doctor?”

He looked at me. “When we were helping her to the ambulance — didn’t you feel her pulse? Boom … boom … boom. Given the state she’s in, and given that she’d just thrown up her breakfast, it was bloody slow — I estimated less than fifty a minute — slower than a top athlete’s resting rate. And she was cold. The quack’s first test results confirm it, I think. George, it kind of fits with what you told me of the Crypt. The air down there must be dense, with high humidity, high on carbon dioxide, low on oxygen.”

I nodded. “Which is why I felt breathless.”

“With low oxygen levels, you get a low metabolic rate, low body temperatures. A slow pulse, cold skin.” He rubbed his nose. “I’d like to get a look at any urine tests they do.”

“Why?”

“Because in animals, one way of getting rid of excess cee-oh-two is through your piss, in the form of flushed-out carbonates and bicarbonates. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve come up with some such adaptive mechanism.”

“ Adaptive. You’re saying she’s adapted to the Crypt.” I thought it over. “Like her pale skin. Her eyes. Those thick sunglasses.”

“It does all fit together, sort of. And there’s more. With a low metabolic rate, you’d grow more slowly, mature later. Live longer, too.”

“Could that explain the sterility?”

“I don’t know. You know, those people must have been down that hole for a very, very long time.”

“Peter — what are we dealing with here?”

He glanced at Daniel, and beckoned. We moved a few seats away from the boy.

Peter unfolded his laptop and showed me some images, which I could barely make out for the glare from the big windows. “What do you know about orangutans?”

As far as Peter could tell the file Daniel had given him on Pina was genuine. When Pina went into hospital for her broken leg, the doctors who examined her had been concerned enough by her appearance to insist on giving her more extensive tests.

“George, I think the kid was right. Pina had an imperforate hymen, and quiescent ovaries.”

“Quiescent?”

He shrugged. “Not producing eggs. Never had produced eggs. There’s a brief note here, where one doctor speculates about the mechanism—”

I waved a hand. “I’m not going to understand any of that.”

“Anyhow they never did the conclusive tests before she was sprung. I’ve been onto the search engines and looked wider. The biologists call this ‘arrested development.’ It can happen for genetic reasons — for instance, a mutation in the receptor for a certain growth factor can cause a form of dwarfism. Or if food is short — say if you’re an anorexic — puberty can be delayed. It makes a certain evolutionary sense, because if you can’t feed yourself it makes no sense to waste calories on bone mass and fatty tissue for sexual characteristics until your body can be sure it will survive. It’s actually quite common among the animals. Sometimes subordinate males don’t develop sexual characteristics. Tree shrews. Mandrill monkeys. Elephants.”

“And orangutans—”

“Even orangutans, even apes.”

“Get back to Pina. You’re saying she has this ‘arrested development,’ too.”

“It looks that way. The tests weren’t conclusive.” He sighed, closed up his laptop, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But suppose it’s true, George. Suppose that poor kid really has gone through a pregnancy that mushroomed in three months. Suppose there are neuter women down that hole in the ground, a horde of them. Suppose Lucia’s other peculiarities — her paleness, her slow metabolism — are adaptations to living underground. And suppose it’s true — it seems fantastic, but just suppose — that Lucia had sex with this guy Giuliano just once, but she’s going to continue to get pregnant, over and over …”

I sat on that plastic-coated seat, in the bright efficiency of the thoroughly modern hospital, gazing through the big windows at the gardens with their cypress trees. “ Evolution. They are evolving differently. Is that what you’re saying?”

Peter said, “If the story of Regina is true, the Order have cut themselves off, more or less, from the rest of humanity for sixteen centuries. That’s, say, sixty, seventy, eighty generations … I’m no biologist. I don’t know if that’s enough time. But it sounds like it to me.” He shook his head. “You know, twenty- four hours ago I’d never have believed we’d be having this conversation. But here we are.

“… I still don’t see the big picture, though. Evolutionary changes happen for a reason.” Peter leaned close. “You’ll have to go back, George. Back into the Crypt. Call your sister again.”

“Why?”

“We need more information. We still have more questions than answers, nothing but a lot of guesswork. If we could get Pina or one of the other neuters into the hands of the doctors—”

“Daniel.”

He looked around. “What?”

“Where’s Daniel?” While we’d been talking, the boy had disappeared from his seat.

We ran down the corridor, the way he must have gone. We heard the receptionist call us back, a sharper yell from the security guy.

We hadn’t gone fifty yards before we met a party coming the other way. Daniel’s arms were pinned by his escorts, a burly male nurse on one side, a security guy on the other. The nice young lady doctor was talking to him, steadily, calmly, about how they had been unsure about our credentials, and it was only proper that they should ask the girl herself about her family …

When he saw us Daniel struggled harder. “They took her back,” he said, despairing. “The Order. They came, and they took her back !”

Chapter 44

It was in the year 1778 that Edmund found Minerva, and lost her.

He was twenty-three years old. He had come to Rome as part of his “Grand Tour,” in the traditional style, funded by his father’s money and his own youth and energy. He stayed in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna, which had become known as the English Ghetto. The apartment, a decent first floor and two bedchambers on the second, was small but well furnished, and cost no more than a scudo per day.

Edmund fell into the company of one James Macpherson, a forty-year-old Jacobite refugee and hardened rake, who proved a willing guide to the various delights of Rome — as long, of course, as Edmund continued to be a source of cash. Edmund understood this relationship very well, and was careful not to let James take advantage. But Edmund was catholic in his tastes, and soon learned to relish the vitella mongana, which he thought the most delicate veal he had ever tasted, and drank great quantities of Orvieto, a decent white wine.

Rome proved to be great fun. Night and day the piazzas were crowded with acrobats and astrologers, jugglers and tooth drawers. In the cramped, garlic-stinking alleys where grand mansions loomed over tiny houses, shop signs hung everywhere, of barbers, tailors, surgeons, and tobacconists. But the alleys were always clogged with noise and filth, since the Romans had the rude habit of relieving themselves against any convenient doorway or wall, and left their garbage heaped in every corner, waiting for the irregular call of the waste collectors.

But amid the noise, filth, and debauchery, there were true wonders.

Edmund found Saint Peter’s and its piazza quite stunning — he had James bring him back to it day after day, for there always seemed something new to see in it — and he was enchanted by the area around the great cathedral, where elegant domes and cupolas rose from the morning mist. And then there were the older monuments, sticking out of the past. Edmund often had James escort him to the top of the Palatine, where mature cypress trees waved gently among the ruined palaces.

Edmund found the Romans themselves pleasant and civil — as well they might be, he thought, for they were surely the most indolent people in Europe. There was no industry here, no commerce, no manufacturing. The people relied for their income on the steady flow of money from all over Christian Europe, which continued as it had for centuries.

And religion dominated everything about the city. At any one time there were as many pilgrims and other visitors, it was said, as residents. There were three thousand priests and five thousand monks and nuns serving three hundred monasteries and convents and four hundred churches. It was fashionable to dress like a cleric even if you had not taken holy orders. A greater contrast to the dynamic industrial bustle of England could scarcely be imagined; sometimes the cleric-choked city struck Edmund as being in the grip of a great madness.

Edmund was not struck by the women of Rome, whose beauty, he thought, did not match their city’s. He remembered a remark of Boswell’s that only a few Roman women were pretty, and most of the pretty ones were nuns. But he was not above letting James introduce him to courtesans, of whom he seemed to know a great number. Edmund had not come here for debauchery, but he was no monk, and he had to admit it was a peculiar thrill to indulge his carnal appetites here in the home of the mother church — where, he learned, some of the prostitutes actually carried licences issued by the pope himself!

But all that changed when he met Minerva.

One night he took in an operette at the Capranica. It was hard to make out the performance for the drinking and gambling going on in the private box James had hired. James introduced him to the raucous company of the singers and actors, and in the course of a very long evening Edmund was astonished to learn that some of the beautiful “girls” who mingled with the company were in fact castrati. Happily he avoided making a fool of himself.

The next morning, his head more than usually cloudy, Edmund walked alone to the Forum.

He found a fallen column to sit on. The Forum was a meadow littered with ruins. He watched the hay carts lumbering across the open space, and animals grazing among the lichen-coated ruins. As the rising sun banished the last of the morning mist, despite his mildly aching head, he felt tranquility settle on him. It was a scene of ruin, yes, and there was poignancy in seeing the shabby huts of carpenters erected on the rostrum where once Cicero had stood. But there was great peace here, as if the present had somehow made a settlement with the past.

In one corner of the ancient space a bank of charcoal stoves had been set up, and he could smell the sour stink of cabbage and tripe. Idly he stood, brushed lichen from his trousers, and wandered that way. There were many places in Rome where you could find food being cooked in the open. Some of these open-air establishments were grand, and Edmund had enjoyed adequate lunches of salad, poached fish, cheese and fruits, rounded off with the ice cream with which the Romans seemed obsessed. But he could see that these cabbage cookers had humbler culinary ambitions than that, and that the wretched folk who clustered around the stoves were the poorest of the poor.

At first he thought the women working at the stoves must be nuns, for they wore simple white robes laced with purple thread. But they wore no wimples or hoods, and he saw that they were all young, all rather similar, almost like sisters — and all pale, as if they wore cosmetics of theatrical thickness.

That was when he saw Minerva.

She was one of the serving women. She had a beauty that made him gasp, as simple as that. Her face, small and lozenge-shaped, was symmetrical, her nose straight and neat, her mouth full and as red as cherries, and her eyes were gray, like windows on a cloudy sky. She was like her companions, but in her the combination of features had worked to stunning effect, like a perfect deal in a card game, he thought.

He felt he could have watched her all day, so enchanted was he by her simple elegance. And when she moved around the stove the sunlight, by chance, lit up her robes from behind, and he caught a glimpse of her figure, which —

Somebody was speaking to him. Startled, he came back to himself.

One of the workers was facing him — like the beauteous one, yes, not unattractive, but older, and with a sterner face. But her mouth twitched with humor.

He stammered, in English, “I’m sorry?”

She replied in careful Italian, “I asked you if you are hungry. You are evidently drawn to the scent of tripe.”

“I — ah. No. I mean, no thank you. I just—”

“Sir, we have work to do here,” she said, reasonably gently. “Important work — vital for those we serve. I fear you will distract us.”

And, he saw, she had indeed noticed him. She responded to his stares with hooded, nervous glances, but looked away.

The older woman said dryly, “Yes, she is beautiful. She can’t help it.”

“What is her name?”

“Minerva. But she is not on the menu, I’m afraid. Now if you will excuse me—” She turned, with a last, not unkind glance, and went back to her work at the stoves.

Edmund couldn’t simply stand there. Besides, some of the hapless poor were beginning to notice him, and were sniggering. He walked away, to find a place where he could sit and watch the women at work. Perhaps later he could engineer some opportunity to talk to the girl.

But to his shock, when he turned back, he saw they had gone, stoves and all, as if they had never existed. The poor, some still devouring their plates of cabbage and tripe, were dispersing.

He ran back and grabbed the shoulder of one man, though he quickly let go when he felt greasy filth under his palm. “Sir, please — the women here—”

The man could have been any age, so crusted was his face with dirt. Bits of cabbage clung to his ragged beard. He would say nothing until Edmund produced a few coins.

“The Virgins, yes.”

“Where do they come from? Where did they go? How can I find them?”

“Who cares? I’m here for cabbage, not questions.” But he said: “Tomorrow. They’ll come to the Colosseum. That’s what they told us.”

That evening Edmund felt restless in James’s company. Their usual circuit of the piazzas and taverns did not distract him. It did not help when he heard one rotund innkeeper mutter that English gentlemen on the Grand Tour were famously “milordi pelabili clienti” — a soft touch as customers.

For Edmund, the night was only an interval until he could find Minerva again among her stoves and cabbages.

A part of him warned him of his foolishness. But, though he had been in love before, he had never felt anything like the drowning desire he had experienced when he had gazed on Minerva’s perfect face, and the pale shadow of her slim body.

The next day he hurried to the Colosseum long before midday.

Edmund had to pass through a hermitage as he entered the great crater of marble and stone, with its mute circles of seats. Squalid huts of mud and scavenged brick sheltered in the great archways where senators had once passed; on the arena floor trees had grown tall and animals grazed.

There was no little row of charcoal stoves, no women in their white robes, no moist smell of cooked cabbage rising to compete with the stink of dung. There were beggars, though, milling about listlessly. They looked as disappointed as he felt, though it was hard to tell through their masks of grimy misery. None of them could answer his questions about Minerva or the Virgins.

He spent a week combing the city. But he found no sign of the Virgins, nor anybody who knew anything about them. It was as if they had just disappeared, as evanescent as the mist off the Tiber.

Chapter 45

Trying to track down what had become of Lucia at the hospital, Peter and I got nowhere fast.

We established that a woman called Pina Natalini had come in a small private ambulance to sign her out and take her away, showing valid signed certificates from a family doctor. Lucia herself, it seemed, had wanted to check out, claiming Pina as a cousin. It was all aboveboard, and I had no reason to believe the staff of the American Hospital were telling any lies about what had happened.

Surely it wasn’t the whole truth. I had no idea how much control this Pina and whoever else had come along — perhaps even Rosa — might have had over Lucia’s vulnerable mental state.

But what could we do? To the hospital staff — and indeed in my eyes — Peter, Daniel, and I had no claim over the girl. We barely knew her.

Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something. Maybe you have to be that way when you’re young — you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we’d all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the arse. In the end I winkled his father’s number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn’t accept that we could go no farther. But his motives — and I still wasn’t sure what they were — were, unlike Daniel’s, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This was my issue — my sister — and I didn’t want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order’s complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pass to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa’s old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no passes were forthcoming.

“It’s a fucking conspiracy,” Peter groused. “I’m not exaggerating — I wouldn’t use that word lightly. And it’s all connected to the Order. These bastards are working together to keep us out. We’ve hit an outer ring of defense, and we’ve barely started …”

After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my “tame Jesuit” again. A couple of days after that, Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Claudio said, grinning. “But in this context secret just means ‘private’ …” He met me at the Vatican’s Porta Sant’ Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor passes at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.

The entrance to the archives themselves was off a courtyard called the Cortile del Belvedere, within the Vatican complex.

Claudio, it turned out, regularly researched here, and he briskly showed me the areas to which visiting scholars were allowed access: a ground-floor room called the sala di studio, and the Index Room, which actually contained a thousand indices, many themselves very old.

Claudio walked me across to a rattling elevator, which took us down to what he called the bunker. This was the Manuscript Depository, built in the seventies to cope with the great inward flood of material that the Archives had had to cope with in the postwar period. It was an underground library, a basic, unadorned, ugly place, with shelving spread over two stories, and mesh flooring and steel stairs connecting everything. Some of the shelves were locked, holding sensitive material, and others were empty, waiting for more material yet to come.

We went through into the Parchment Room, where some of the more famous documents were stored for display. They were held in chests of drawers, each waist-high, with ten glass-topped drawers in each. These pieces could be stunning — often in Latin, some illuminated, others covered by wax seals.

Claudio kept up an engaging and practiced patter. From its very earliest days, even in the days of persecution, the church in Rome had adopted the imperial habit of record keeping. The first archives had been called the scrinium sanctum, a bit of language that startled me with recognition. But the archives were far from complete. The first collections had been burned around A.D. 300 by the Emperor Diocletian. When Christianity had become the religion of the Empire, the accretion of records had begun again. Little had survived, however, from the bloody turbulence of the first millennium.

In the fourteenth century the popes had, for a time, been exiled to France, and in the fifteenth a period of infighting had peaked with three rival popes rampaging around Europe — “A bibliographer’s nightmare,”

said Claudio laconically. The later popes had started trying to unify the archives in the sixteenth century. But when Napolй on had taken Italy, he hauled the whole lot away to France for a few years, doing still more damage in the process …

“But all we have is here,” Claudio said. “There are letters from popes as far back as Leo the First, from the fifth century, who faced down Attila the Hun. We have diplomas from Byzantine emperors. The correspondence of Joan of Arc. Reports of papal enclaves, accusations of witchcraft and other skulduggery in high places, sexual secrets of kings, queens, bishops, and a few popes. The records of the Spanish Inquisition, details of the trial of Galileo … Even the letter from England asking for the dissolution of the first marriage of Henry the Eighth.”

“And somewhere in all this,” I said, “is the true story of the Order. Or at least as the Vatican saw it.”

He waved a hand. “What I’m trying to tell you is that the archives are overwhelming. There are scholars who have spent most of their lives in here. It isn’t even all cataloged, and our only search engine is shoe leather. The idea that someone like your friend can just come in here—”

“Peter said you would be like this,” I said bluntly.

He looked aristocratically bemused. “I’m sorry? Like what?”

“Obstructive. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s just as when you stalled over giving me a contact with the Order in the first place. You don’t want to come right out and refuse to help. Instead you’re trying to put me off.”

He pursed his lips, his eyes cloudy. I felt a stab of guilt; perhaps he hadn’t even been aware of what he was doing. “Perhaps I’m not sure if I should help you.”

Something in the way he said that triggered an idea in my head. I said at random, “But you could help us, if you wanted to. Because you’ve done searches here on the Order yourself. ”

He wouldn’t concede that, but his aristocratic nostrils flared. “You are making big inductive leaps.”

“If you have, you could help Peter find what he wants very quickly.”

“You haven’t told me why I should.”

“Because of Lucia.” I knew Peter had told him about the girl. “Here’s the bottom line. Peter and I think she is coming to harm, because of the Order. I certainly don’t know for sure that she isn’t. You’re a priest; you wear the collar. Can you really turn away from a child in trouble? … You can’t, can you?” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. “And that’s why you’ve done your own researches. You’ve had your own suspicions about the Order—”

He said nothing. He was right that I was making big inductive leaps in the dark, but sometimes my nose is good. Still, I could see he was in conflict, pulled by two opposing loyalties.

“Look,” I said, “help us. I give you my word that we will do you no harm.”

“ I don’t matter,” he said, with a priest’s steely moral authority.

“Very well — no harm to anything you hold dear. My word, Claudio. And perhaps we will do a lot of good.”

He said little more that day. He showed me out, his remaining conversation brief and stiff. I suspected I had compromised whatever friendship I had with him.

But a day later, perhaps after sleeping on it, he got in touch.

Under Claudio’s guidance, Peter immersed himself in the archives for days on end. And he surfaced with a string of tales: the diaries of pilgrims and nobles, records of wars and sackings, the account of a thwarted love affair — and even a mention of one of my own ancestors, a different George Poole …

George Poole had first come to Rome in 1863, in the company of the British government’s chief commissioner of works, Lord John Manners. Poole was a surveyor. It had been a time when the Modern Age, in the form of hydraulics, telegraphs, steam power, and railways, was just beginning to touch the old city, and British engineers, the best in the world, were at the forefront.

Poole had even been in the presence of the pope himself, for a time. He had seen the papal train, with its white-and-gold-painted coaches, and even a chapel on bogie wheels. The pope had come to the opening of a steel drawbridge, built by the British, across the Tiber at Porta Portese. The pontiff took a great interest in the new developments, and had asked to meet Manners and have the bridge mechanism explained to him — much to his lordship’s embarrassment, for in the middle of his working day he was carrying an umbrella and wearing an old straw hat.

When Poole came back to Rome twelve years later, it was in his own capacity as a consulting engineer. He returned at the invitation of a rather shadowy business concern fronted by one Luigi Frangipani, a member of what was said to be one of Rome’s great ancient families.

Poole expected that much would have changed. During his first visit it had been just three years since the great triumph of the Risorgimento had seen Italy unified under Victor Emanuele II. Now Rome was the capital of the new Italy. Among Poole’s circle of old friends, there had been great excitement at these developments, and much envy over his visit, for he was coming to a Rome free of the dominance of the popes for the first time in fourteen centuries.

But Poole was disappointed with what he found.

Even now the great political and technological changes seemed to have left no mark on Rome itself. Within its ancient walls, the city was still like a vast walled farm. He was startled to see cattle and goats being driven through the city streets, and pigs snuffling for acorns near the Flaminian Gate. The source of wealth was still agriculture and visitors, pilgrims and tourists; there was still no industry, no stock exchange.

But there were changes. He saw a regiment of bersaglieri, trotting through the streets in their elaborate operetta-extras’ uniforms. The clerics were much less in evidence, though you would see the cardinals’ coaches, painted black as if in mourning. He even glimpsed the king, a spectacularly ugly man, passing in his own carriage. He gathered that the king was a far more popular figure than the pope had ever been, if only for his family; after all, no pope since the Middle Ages had been in a position to display a grandson!

After a day of wandering, Poole met Luigi Frangipani. They went for a walk through the cork woods on Monte Mario.

Frangipani sketched in something of the background to his approach to Poole. “There is much tension in Rome,” Frangipani said, in lightly accented English. “It is a question of time, you see, of history. Rome is a place of great families.”

“Like your own,” Poole said politely.

“Some are prepared to accept the king as their sovereign. Others are prevented from doing so by loyalty to the pope. You must understand that some of the families are descended from popes themselves! Still others have made their fortunes more recently, such as from banking, and have yet a different outlook on developments …”

Poole thought all this talk of families and tradition sounded medieval — very un-British — and he felt oddly claustrophobic. “And what is it you want of me?”

They stopped at a wooden bench, and Frangipani produced a small map of Rome.

“We Frangipani, lacking the great wealth of some other families, are not so conservative; we must look to the future. Rome has been invaded many times. But now that it is the capital, a new invasion is under way, an invasion by an army of bureaucrats. The municipality was first asked for forty thousand rooms for all those teeming officials, but could provide only five hundred. To house its ministries the government has already requisitioned several convents and palaces. But much more housing is needed.

“So there is an opportunity. There is sure to be a building boom — and there is plenty of room for it in Rome. We believe the earliest developments are likely to be here—” He pointed at his map. “ — between the Termini station and the Quirinal, and perhaps later here, beyond the Colosseum.”

Poole nodded. “You are buying the land in anticipation. And you want me to work on its development.”

Frangipani shrugged. “You are a surveyor. You know what is required.” He said that Poole would be asked to survey the prospective purchases, and then lead any construction projects to follow. “There is much to be done. During their thousand years of control, the popes, while they ensured their own personal comfort, did little to maintain the fabric of the city concerning such mundane matters as drainage. Every time the Tiber floods the old city is immersed, and the fields beyond the walls are a malarial wasteland — why, the Etruscans managed such affairs better. We know your reputation and your experience,” Frangipani concluded smoothly. “We have every faith that you will be able to deliver what we require.”

Poole asked for time to think the proposal over. He went back to his hotel room, his mind racing. He was sure from his own reading that Frangipani’s analysis of the housing shortage was correct — and that this was a great opportunity for Poole personally. He could look ahead to an attachment here for years, he thought; he would have to bring the family out.

But he was a cautious man — he wouldn’t have become a surveyor otherwise — and he asked for reassurances about Frangipani’s funding before committing himself further.

Two days later he met Frangipani again, in a cafй near the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Frangipani brought a colleague this time, a silent slate-eyed woman of about forty. She introduced herself simply as Julia. She wore a plain white robe of a vaguely clerical aspect. Frangipani said she was an elder of a religious group called the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins — “Very ancient, very wealthy,” Frangipani said with disarming frankness. The Order was the source of much of Frangipani’s funding.

Julia said, “The Order has a mutually beneficial relationship with the Frangipani reaching back many centuries, Mr. Poole.”

Poole nodded ruefully. “Everything in Rome has roots centuries deep, it seems.”

“But we must grasp the opportunities offered by the times.”

They talked for a while about the dynamic of the age. Julia seemed to Poole to have an extraordinarily deep perspective. “The harnessing of oil and coal is propelling a surge in the growth of cities not paralleled since the great agricultural developments of the early medieval days,” she would say.

Clearly the Order was not run by fools; they intended to profit from the latest developments, just as, no doubt, they had profited in one way or another from previous changes throughout their long history.

Poole had more immediate concerns, however. He began to talk of his tentative plans to bring his family to Rome, and asked about schooling. Julia smiled and said that the Order provided education of a very high standard, including classes in English for the children of expatriates. It would not be difficult to find places for Poole’s children, if he so desired.

After some days of further negotiation, the decision was made, the deal done.

George Poole would stay in Rome for twenty years, in which time he played his part in the advance of a great tide of brick, stone, and mortar over the ancient gardens and parks. His two daughters completed their education with the Order. But Poole found himself spending a good proportion of his income on relieving the conditions of his laborers and their families, part of a great throng of three hundred thousand in the growing city by the end of the century, who found themselves sleeping under ancient arches or on the steps of churches, or in the shantytowns that sprouted in many open spaces.

Even so he went back to England wealthy enough to retire. But one of his daughters, somewhat to her parents’ disquiet, elected to join the Order herself when her tuition was complete.

“And that’s how a Poole came to Rome,” Peter said. “George, you have roots in the Order on both your mother’s side and your father’s …

“This stuff is incredible. And I believe I still haven’t seen the half of it. I think there has been a relationship between the Vatican and the Order that goes back to the founding of them both. Surely the Order has provided funds to the popes over the centuries. Surely it has provided refuge or support in turbulent times — perhaps it has sponsored one candidate for holy offices over another.

“And in that great scrinium you describe, which unlike the Vatican Archive hasn’t been burned by emperors or chewed by rats or plundered by Napolй on, there are secrets that no pope could bear to have revealed, even in these enlightened times. George, no wonder your tame Jesuit hovered over me all day. This stuff is explosive — your Order has got the pope by the balls! … George, you have to go back down there.”

“Show me Lucia,” I said to my sister.

She shook her head. “George, George—”

“Never mind the bullshit. Show me Lucia. ”

Chapter 46

But she just sat back in her chair and sipped her coffee.

I tried to keep up the pressure, tried to maintain my angry front. But it was hard. For one thing we weren’t alone. Inside the Crypt, you were never alone.

I had finally succumbed to Peter’s pressure, confronted my own complicated fears, and returned to the Crypt.

This time Rosa brought me to a place she called the peristylium. It was a small chamber, crudely cut out of the rock — but it contained a kind of garden, stone benches, trellises, a small fountain. There were even growing things here, exotic mushrooms sprouting in trays of dark soil, their colors bright and unreal. The garden was obviously very old, its walls polished smooth by centuries of soft contacts. A small stand supplied coffee, sweets, and cakes. Anywhere else this would have been a Starbucks concession, but not here; there were no logos on Crypt coffee cups.

Like everywhere else, the little garden was full of the ageless women of the Crypt. It was like an open- air cafй in a crowded shopping street, maybe, or a crowded airport concourse, with a dense, fluid, constantly changing, never thinning crowd. But the grammar of this crowd was different, the way they squeezed past each other, smiled, touched — for all these people were family. They talked brightly, loudly, and continually, sitting in circles cradling their coffees, close enough that their knees or shoulders touched. They would even kiss each other on the lips, softly, but not sexually; it was as if they were tasting each other.

And, sitting with Rosa with our own coffees, I was stuck right in the middle of it, in a bubble of unending conversation, constantly touched — an apologetic hand would rest briefly on my shoulder, a smiling gray-eyed face float before me — and my head was full of the powerful animal musk of the Crypt. It was like being immersed in a great warm bath. It wasn’t intimidating. But it was damn hard to think straight.

As Rosa surely knew, which was why she had brought me here.

And on top of that I had to deal with my own complicated emotional situation. I still found Rosa’s face extraordinarily disturbing. She was, after all, my sister. She was so familiar, and something warm in me responded every second I spent with her. But at the same time it was a face I hadn’t grown up with, and there would always be a glass wall between us. It was quietly heart wrenching.

I tried to focus. “Rosa, if there’s nothing wrong, why not show Lucia to me?”

“There’s nothing that the doctors can’t handle. You’d only disturb her.”

“She came to me for help.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on my wrist — more of her endless touching. “No,” she said. “ She didn’t come to you. That hacker boyfriend found you.”

“Daniel isn’t her boyfriend.”

She sat back. “Well, there you go. Anyhow, I don’t think all this really has anything to do with Lucia.”

“All what?”

“Your insistence on coming back to the Crypt. This isn’t about Lucia. It’s not really about me. It’s about you.” Her eyes were fixed on me. “Let’s cut through all this. The truth is, you’re jealous. Jealous of me.”

“Rubbish,” I said weakly.

“You know I got the better deal, don’t you? Our family failed, as so many little families do.” She said that, little families, with utter contempt. “It wasn’t just the money problems … Mother and Father saw a way to give one of us a better chance. They knew that this opportunity was sitting here. It had to be me — this is mostly a community of women. If anybody should be envious, maybe it should be Gina, my sister, not you.”

And perhaps Gina was envious, I reflected. Perhaps that was what underlay her sourness, and her decision to get about as far away from Manchester and her past as she could.

But I protested, “I don’t envy you. That’s ridiculous. I just think the Order keeps getting in the way.”

“Of what?” Again she touched my wrist, and her fingers moved in that circular motion, a brief, tender massage. “Look, George — I can’t be separated from the Order. Can’t you see that yet? We come as a package. And if you want to ‘connect’ with me you have to deal with that.” She stood up and brushed down her skirt. “You came all the way to Rome to save me, didn’t you? What a hero. And now you’ve found out I don’t want to be saved, you’ve decided to rescue poor Lucia instead. But don’t you think you have a duty to figure out what it is you’re saving us all from?” She held out her hand to me. “What, are you stuck in that chair? Come on.”

Her tone of command, the outstretched hand, were compelling. And we had, oddly, become a center of attention, her standing, me sitting, a kind of eddy in the endless stream of people. I was surrounded by faces, all turned on me with a kind of half smile. I felt the most intense pressure to go with Rosa.

I drained my coffee, reached up, took her hand, and stood.

She was, of course, still working on my recruitment into the Order, or at least on neutralizing me as a threat. I knew that. She was following her own agenda. But by now, so was I.

We were brother and sister. What damaged goods we were.

Walking still deeper into the Crypt, we took the stairs.

That wasn’t as simple as it sounds. The structure of the place internally was very complicated, with floors and partition walls and bits of mezzanines all over the place, and we had to walk sometimes hundreds of yards from one staircase to the next. Everything was bathed in a pearly, sourceless fluorescent glow, and looked the same in every direction. As I got turned this way and that I was soon lost. But that was probably intentional; inside the Crypt you weren’t supposed to know where you were.

Still, it soon became clear that we had passed below what I had roughly labeled as Level 1, the uppermost, most modern-looking area of the Crypt, where schoolchildren studied purposefully and the scrinarii worked amid their computers and card indices and steel library shelves. It was a big place; Level 1 was actually several stories and mezzanines. Now we clambered down steel staircases into the heart of the level below, Level 2, which I had only glimpsed before from the mezzanine levels above.

The furniture, partitions, ceiling tiles, lighting, and other equipment were modern, just as above. Nevertheless there was a different atmosphere down here. The corridors seemed narrower, lower, more confining, darker, while most of the chambers were big — if not huge — mighty, open cubicula each of which could have held hundreds of people. The businesses of the Order, like the genealogy service, were run from Level 1, but most of the rooms down here were given over to functions that served more basic needs. I was shown an immense hospital, equipped with modern gear but oddly open-plan, a refectory the size of an aircraft hangar, and dormitories in which rows of bunk beds, jammed close in together, marched into the distance.

I never saw a room empty, anywhere in the Crypt, and so it was here. The hospital seemed to have few patients, but swarmed with activity. People were sleeping in some of the dormitories, even in midmorning, perhaps night-shift workers tucked into their bunk beds like rows of insect pupae in their cocoons. The corridors, too, were always packed with people, squeezing to and fro on their endless chores.

Crowding around me, they would touch, squeeze past, smile just as politely as above, and I saw the same faces, the family face, as I thought of it now, with low cheekbones, pale gray eyes. But the denizens of Level 2 had a slightly different look about them. Many were very pale, and they seemed to have exaggerated features — large, flaring nostrils, big eyes, even prominent ears. They were all a similar size, smaller than either Rosa or me. Compact, to fit into a compact space, I thought idly. They weren’t freaks. None of them would have looked out of place in one of Rome’s ancient piazzas. But cumulatively, there was an impression of subtle difference, even from the level above.

And few of them talked. Oddly, it took me a while to notice that. But there was little of the incessant chatter of Level 1. Here, there were words exchanged, brief conversations, but no hubbub. It was, I thought, as if words weren’t really needed here.

It struck me that I had already come deeper than most members of the public, like the schoolchildren in their classrooms above, would ever reach. Nobody would see this — nobody but another member of the Order — and to her, who had grown up with it, none of this would seem strange at all.

And the air was thicker, warmer, and more redolent with that earthy animal musk. I soon felt breathless; my chest strained as I breathed, my lungs ached. After a time I began to feel sleepy, and I had a vague sense of the Crypt and its inhabitants swimming past me, as if I were in a waking dream.

I struggled to think.

“Most people born in the Crypt stay here. Is that true?”

“Not all,” Rosa said. She talked about how people would be sent “outside,” for a day, a month, even years, during their education, or as part of their work. “Like Lucia. And some leave for good, like our own grandmother—”

“Grannie?”

“She was born here, but died in Manchester. You didn’t know that, did you? How do you think families like ours, branches of Regina’s ancient clan, end up in England, or America, or elsewhere? Of course people leave — they always have — sometimes for good. But they retain a loyalty to the Order.” She smiled. “It’s our shared heritage, after all.”

There was a lot I never learned about the Order — how they allocated their children surnames, for instance. I wondered vaguely how babies born here were formally registered, whether the Order had some tame functionary in Rome’s registry of births and deaths. Perhaps some of them grew up here without any official record at all, never leaving the Crypt, living and dying invisible to the state.

Rosa brought me to a kind of open oven, a brick-lined niche in the wall taller than I was. I lingered, curious. A wide chimney snaked up out of sight, caked with soot. There was no fire burning. This was very old — I recognized narrow Empire-era red bricks, the thick-packed mortar between them.

“So what’s this, a barbecue?”

Rosa smiled. “Part of our ventilation system. Or it was. Nowadays we have modern air-conditioning equipment — ducts, pumps, fans, dehumidifiers, even carbon dioxide scrubbers. But that kind of gear has only become available in the last few decades or so. In the eighteenth century we did buy one of James Watt’s first steam engines, but that was deinstalled and sold off to a museum long ago … The very first builders, digging down from the Catacombs, adapted techniques used in the deep mines. You’d light a fire under here and keep it burning, all day.” She pointed upward. “The smoke and heat would rise up the chimney — and, rising, would draw air through the Crypt. Elsewhere there are vents to allow more air in. Sometimes they would work bellows.”

“So you’d get a circulation. Ingenious.”

“In case of problems with the airflow, the Order members would have to block a corridor or passageway.”

“With what?”

“With their bodies, of course. They’d just run to where the problem was. It sounds crude, but it worked very well.”

“Who told them what to do?”

She seemed puzzled by the question. “Why, nobody. You’d look around, see there was a problem, follow your neighbors, do what they were doing. Just as if you were putting out a fire. You don’t need to be told to do that, do you? You just do it …”

I had no reason to disbelieve her. I had still seen no senior management floor, no corner offices for the Big Cheeses, no evidence of a chain of command. Evidently things just worked, the way Rosa had described.

She was still talking about the ventilation system. She slapped the solid brick wall. “The old infrastructure is still there. Always will be. Even now — though we have our own generators, like a hospital, independent of the public supply — we prepare for power outages. The youngsters are still taught about the old ways, given simple drills. If the very worst happened, we could always revert to the old methods.”

I peered at the ancient brickwork. “The very worst? …”

“If everything fell apart. If there was no more power at all.”

That took me aback. “You’re planning for how to keep the air supply functioning, even if civilization falls. ”

“Not planning, exactly. There are few plans here, George. But — well, we’re here for the long term. And you read Regina’s story. Civilizations do sometimes inconveniently fall …”

We walked on, down the crowded corridor. She led me away from the ancient hearth, down further staircases — some of them metal, some of them older, cut from the stone itself — staircases that led ever deeper into the core of the Crypt.

We reached Level 3, the deepest downbelow of all.

Many of the walls here were bare rock, polished so smooth by the passage of bodies they gleamed. It was clearly very old — and yet this level, the deepest, was paradoxically the youngest of this great inverted city.

The corridors here were still narrower than those above. They branched as we walked, until once again I had completely lost my bearings. The air was hot, moist, and thick, and was at first suffocatingly hard to breathe. Carbon dioxide is heavy, I remembered dimly, and it must pool, here at the bottom of the great chamber of the Crypt. But as my body became accustomed to the conditions the viselike pain that gripped my chest eased.

And everywhere we walked we had to push through the endless crowds, the smoky gray eyes huge in the gloom. Nobody spoke, here on Level 3. They just moved wordlessly around each other, on their way through the endlessly branching corridors. The only sounds were the rustle of their soft-soled shoes on the rocky floor, and the steady flow of their breathing — and even that, it seemed to me, was synchronized, coming in overlapping waves of whispers, like the lapping of an invisible ocean. I had the sense of these soft, rounded little creatures all around me, in the corridors that stretched off into the darkness every direction I looked, and of thousands more in the tremendous airy superstructure of galleries and corridors and chambers above me.

As I describe it now it sounds oppressive, claustrophobic. But it did not feel like that at the time.

Rosa seemed to sense that. “You belong here, George,” she said softly. “I’m your sister, remember. If it’s good enough for me … Can’t you feel the calm in here? …”

I felt the need to cut through this odd seduction. “What about sex?”

“What about it?”

“You’ve a lot of young people here, cooped up together. There must be love affairs — casual flings—” I felt awkward; trying to discuss such issues with my long-lost sister, I was reaching for fifties euphemisms. “Do you let people screw?”

She stared at me in icy disapproval. “First of all,” she said, “it isn’t a question of ‘letting’ people do anything. There is nobody to ‘let’ you, or to stop you come to that. People just know how to behave.”

“How? Who teaches them?”

“Who teaches you to breathe? … And anyhow it tends not to be an issue. Most of the men here are gay. Or don’t have an inclination either way. Others usually leave.” She said this as if it were the most usual setup in the world.

It might fit in. Peter, in his long, rambling analyses of what we had learned about the Order, had speculated it might be some kind of heredity cult. Like neuter women, like Pina, gay men could help out with the raising of the fecund ones, the Lucias. But neither class would be any threat to the precious gene pool, because they didn’t contribute to it.

“Okay, but — Rosa, how come most of the people here are women?”

She looked uncomfortable. “Because most people born here are female.”

“Yes, but how? Some kind of genetic engineering? … But you were around a long time before anybody even conceived of the notion of a gene. So how do you manage it? What do you do with the excess boys? Do you do what the Spartans did with their baby girls?—”

She stopped and glared at me, suddenly as angry as I had seen her. “We don’t murder here, George. This is a place that gives life, not death.” It was as if I had insulted somebody she loved — as, perhaps, I had.

“Then how?”

“There are more girls than boys. It just happens. You ask a lot of questions, George. But in the Crypt we don’t like questions.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

She glared at me. “If you really understood that, you would understand everything.” She walked on, but her gait was stiff, her shoulders hunched.

We came to an alcove, cut into the rock. Before it a little shrine had been set up, a kind of altar carved of pale marble. Slender pillars no more than three feet tall supported a roof of finely shaped stone. A glass plate had been fixed before it. Rosa paused here, and looked on reverently.

“What’s this?”

“A most precious place,” she said. “George, Regina herself built this, fifteen centuries ago. It has been rebuilt several times since — this level didn’t even exist for centuries after Regina’s death — but always exactly as she had intended it. And what it contains, she brought from home … Take a look inside.”

I crouched and peered. I saw three little statues, standing in a row. They looked like grumpy old women wearing duffel coats. The statues were poorly made, lumpy and with grotesque faces; they weren’t even identical. But they were very ancient, I saw, worn by much handling.

Rosa said, “The Romans used to believe that each household had its own gods. And these were Regina’s family gods — our gods. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here the matres have stayed ever since, as have Regina’s descendants. So you see, this is our home, mine and yours. Not Manchester, not even Britain. This is why we belong here, because this is where our deepest roots go down into the earth. This is where our family gods are …”

All part of the sales pitch, I told myself. And yet I was impressed, even touched. Rosa made a kind of genuflection before moving on.

A way farther on, we came to a doorway.

It was a big room — I strained to see — but it had the atmosphere of an old people’s rest home. A series of large chairs had been set out in the musty dark. The chairs looked elaborate, as if packed with medical equipment. Figures reclined in the chairs. Attendants moved silently back and forth, nurses perhaps, but wearing the bland smock uniforms of the Order. Most of the “patients” wore blankets over their legs, or over their whole bodies, and drips had been set up beside two of them. The faces of the women in the chairs looked caved in, old. But I could see bulges over the bellies of several of them, bulges that looked like nothing so much as pregnancy.

In one of the chairs, far from the door, a woman was sitting up. She looked younger, and her hair looked blond, not gray. Something about the shape of her face reminded me of Lucia. But she was too far away for me to see clearly, and an attendant came to her and pressed something to her neck, and the woman subsided back into silence.

“A hundred years old, and still fertile …” Rosa murmured.

It was all just as Peter and I had put together from the garbled accounts of Lucia and Daniel. But even so, standing here, confronted by the almost absurd reality of it, it was all but impossible to believe.

She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.

We approached another doorway, cut into the rock. Light poured out, comparatively bright, and I heard a noise, chattering, high-pitched, and continuous, like seagulls on a rock.

There were babies in here. They were all very young, no more than a few months old. The walls were painted bright primary colors, and the rock floor was covered by a soft rubber matting, on which lay the babies — all pale, all wispy-haired, all with blank gray eyes — so many I couldn’t even count them. The air in the room was hot, dense, moist, laden with sweet infant smells of milk and baby shit. As I gazed in at this the women of the Order pressed around me as they always did, warm and oddly sweet-scented themselves; a part of me wanted to struggle, as if I were drowning.

“From our oldest inhabitants,” said Rosa dryly, “to our youngest.”

“It’s all true, isn’t it, Rosa?” I asked her with cold dread. “Just as Lucia said. You turn young girls into old witches and keep them alive, keep them pumping out clutches of kids every year, until they’re a hundred …”

She just ignored me. “You never had children, George. Well, neither did I. We have our nephews, I suppose, out in Miami Beach. I’ve never even seen them …” Her hand tightened on mine, and her voice was insistent, compelling. It was almost as if I were talking to myself. “You never meant to be childless, did you? But you never found the right woman — not even the girl you married — never managed to create the right environment around yourself, never found a place you felt comfortable. And the years went by … No kids. How does that make you feel? Our little lives are brief and futile. Nothing we build lasts — not in the long run — not stone temples or statues, not even empires. But our genes endure — our genes are a billion years old already — and they will live forever, if we pass them on.”

“It’s too late for you,” I said brutally.

She flinched. But she said, “No, it isn’t. It’s never too late for any of us — not here.

“Look at these children, George. None of them are my own. But they are all — cousins. Nieces, nephews. And that’s the reason I will always stay here. Because this is my family. My way of beating death.” Her face seemed to float before me in the gloom, intense, like a distorted reflection of my own in smoky glass. “And it can be yours.”

At first I didn’t understand. “Through nieces and nephews?”

She smiled. “For you, there might be more than that. George, every child needs a father — even here. But you want the father of your nieces to be strong, smart, capable: you want the best blood you can find. It’s best if the fathers come from the family, as long as they are remote enough genetically — and the family is so big now that’s no problem …”

She was finally getting to the point, I realized uneasily.

“George, you’re one of us. And you’ve shown yourself to be smart — resilient — decent, too, in your impulse to find me — even in your attempt to help Lucia, misguided though it was.”

I tried to think through what she was saying. “What are you offering me? Sex?”

Rosa laughed. “Well, yes. But more. Family, George. That’s what I’m offering you. Immortality. You came looking for me, looking for family. Well, you found both. A true family — not that flawed, sad little bunch we were in Manchester.”

I could stay here, that was what Rosa was telling me. I could become part of this. Like Lucia’s Giuliano, I thought. And by submitting myself as a stud — it seems laughable, but what else could you call it? — I would find a way for my heritage to live on.

For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak. But none of this seemed strange or disturbing. On the contrary, it seemed the most attractive offer in the world.

My cell phone trilled. It was a bright, clean, modern sound that seemed to cut through the murk of blood and milk that filled the air.

I pulled my hand away from Rosa. I dug out the phone, and raised it to my face. The screen was a tiny scrap of plastic, backlit with green, that glowed bright as a star in that enclosing gloom. A text showed: GRT DNGER GET ARSE OUT PTR I turned off the phone. The screen went blank.

Rosa was watching me. Around her the steady stream of white-robed women pushed past her, as they always did.

“Get arse out,” I said.

“What?”

“He’s right.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I need to get out of here.”

Rosa’s eyes narrowed.

The others, the women nearest me, reacted, too. Some of them turned to me, even breaking their stride, looking at me in a kind of mild dismay. Their reaction spread out farther, as each woman responded to what her neighbor was doing. It was as if I had detonated an invisible bomb down there, and ripples of dismay were spreading out around me.

At the focus of all that, I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

Rosa moved closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. At that touch the posture of the strangers around us relaxed a little. There were even smiles. I felt a kind of relief, a forgiveness. I wanted to be accepted here, I realized; I couldn’t bear the thought of exclusion from this close, touching group.

“It’s okay,” said Rosa. “You don’t have to go. I can sort everything out. Tell me where your hotel is — did you say it was near the Forum? I’ll call them—”

But I stuck to my thought of Peter. “Get arse out, get arse out.” I repeated it over and over, an absurd mantra. “Let me go, Rosa.”

“All right,” she said, forcing a smile. “You need a little time. That’s okay.” She led me down the corridor. A part of me was glad to get away from the little knot of bystanders who had seen what I had done, who knew how I had betrayed them; I was glad to walk away from my shame. “Take all the time you want,” Rosa said soothingly. “We’ll always be here. I’ll be here. You know that.”

“Get arse out,” I mumbled.

We came at last to the steel door of a modern high-speed lift. We rode up in silence, Rosa still watching me; in her eyes there was something of the pressure of the gaze of those deep Crypt dwellers, their mute disappointment.

As we rose I’ll swear my ears popped.

I emerged into a sunlit modern office on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. I was nearly blinded by the light, and the dry oxygen-rich air seared into my lungs, making me giddy.

Peter had hired a car. It was waiting for me on the Cristoforo Colombo, outside the Order’s office. Now, to my utter dismay, he insisted on taking me for a drive.

Chapter 47

“I was full of theories. Basically I thought the Order was just a wacko religious cult. Then, when we met Lucia, and found out about this girl Pina, I started to wonder if it was some kind of bizarre psychosexual organization, perhaps with a religious framework to give it some justification. But now, with what you described about what you found down there, George — and after I discussed it with some of the Slan(t)ers — I think I’ve put it together at last.

“The Order isn’t about religion, or sex, or family. It isn’t about anything its members think it’s about — they don’t know, any more than any one ant knows what an ant colony is for. The Order exists for itself.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I know you don’t. So listen.”

We headed straight out of town until we hit the outer ring road, the GRA. Soon we were stationary, one in a long line of cars, whose roofs and windscreens gleamed in the sun like the carapaces of metaled insects. Even at the best of times this road is a linear parking lot, and now it was the end of the working day, the rush hour. We inched forward, Peter thrusting the car into the smallest gaps with the best of them, blaring his horn and edging through the crowds. I’d have been scared for my safety if not for the fact that our speed was so slow.

The car was a battered old Punto. With a head still full of the Crypt, I felt utterly disoriented. I said, “This car belongs to the Pakistani ambassador.”

He looked at me oddly. “Oh. Michael Caine. I saw that movie, too …”

“You’re making some kind of point, aren’t you?”

“Damn right,” he said. “You won’t understand, not at first. And when you do understand you probably won’t believe me.” His knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel, and he was sweating. “So I’ll have to make you see. This might be more important than you can imagine.”

I smiled. “ Important. This from a man who thinks that alien ships are making three-point turns in the core of the Earth. What could be important compared to that?”

“More than you know,” he said. “George, what causes traffic jams?”

I shrugged. “Well, you need a crowded road. Roadworks. Breakdowns.”

“What roadworks?”

There were no works ahead, no obvious breakdowns or crash sites. And yet we were stationary.

Peter said, “George, to make a traffic jam all you need is traffic. The jams just occur. Look around. All that makes up the traffic is individual drivers — right? And each of us makes individual decisions, based, minute to minute, on what our neighbors are doing. There’s not a one of us who intends to cause a jam, that’s for sure. And there’s not one of us who has a global view of the traffic, like you’d get from a police chopper, say. There are only the drivers.

“And yet, from our individual decisions made in ignorance, the traffic jam emerges, a giant organized structure involving maybe thousands of cars. So where does the jam come from?”

We were moving forward by now, in fits and starts, but, scarily, he took his eyes off the road to look at me, testing my understanding.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“This is what they call emergence, George,” he said. “From simple rules, applied at a low level, like the decisions made by the drivers on this damn road — and with feedback to amplify the effects, like a slowing car forcing a slowdown behind it — large-scale structures can emerge. It’s called self-organized criticality. The traffic always tries to organize itself to get as many cars through as possible, but it’s constantly on the point of breakdown. The jams are like waves, or ripples, passing back and forth along the lines of cars.”

It was hard for me to concentrate on this. Too much had happened today. Sitting in that lurching car, I felt as if I were in a dream. I groped for the point he was trying to make. “So the Order is like a traffic jam,” I said. “The Order is a kind of feedback effect.”

“We’ll get to the Order. One step at a time.” He wrenched the wheel, and we plunged out of the traffic toward a junction that would lead us back toward the center of the city.

We roared up Mussolini’s great avenue, hared through the Venezia, lurched left onto the Plebiscito. Peter rammed the long-suffering Punto into a few feet of parking space. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.

We got out of the car, locked it up, and made for a bar. I wanted coffee. Peter went to order while I found a table.

Peter returned with a bottle of beer. “You need this more than coffee, believe me.”

And oddly, he was right. Something about the heft of the bottle in my hand, the cool tang of the beer, that first subtle softening of perception as the alcohol kicked in, brought me back to reality, or anyhow my version of it. I raised the bottle to Peter. “Here’s to me,” I said. “And what I truly am. An appendage clamped to the mouth of a beer bottle.”

He had a Coke Light; he raised it ironically. “As a destiny, that will do,” he said seriously. “Just don’t lose yourself down in that hole in the ground …”

“Emergence,” I said. “Traffic jams.”

“Yes. And think about cities.”

“Cities?”

“Sure. Who plans cities? Oh, I know we try to now, but in the past — say, in Rome — it wasn’t even attempted. But cities have patterns nevertheless, stable patterns that persist far beyond any human time horizon: neighborhoods that are devoted to fashion, or upscale shops, or artists; poor, crime-ridden districts, upmarket rich areas. Bright lights attract more bright lights, and clusters start.

“This is what emergence is: agents working at one scale unconsciously producing patterns at one level above them. Drivers rushing to work create traffic jams; urbanites keeping up with the Joneses create neighborhoods.”

“Unconsciously. They create these patterns without meaning to.”

“ Yes. That’s the point. Local decision making, coupled with feedback, does it for them. We humans think we’re in control. In fact we’re enmeshed in emergent structures — jams, cities, even economies — working on scales of space and time far beyond our ability to map. Now let’s talk about ants.”

That had come out of left field. “From cities to ants?”

“What do you know about ants?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except that they are persistent buggers when they get into your garden.”

“Ants are social insects — like termites, bees, wasps. And you can’t get them out of your garden because social insects are so bloody successful,” he said. “There are more species of ant in a square mile of Brazilian rain forest than there are species of primate across the planet. And there are more workers in one ant colony than there are elephants in all the world …”

“You’ve been on the Internet again.”

He grinned. “All human wisdom is there. Everybody knows about ant colonies. But most of what everybody knows is wrong. Only the queen lays eggs, only the queen passes on her genes to the next generation. That much is true. But you probably think that an anthill is like a little city, with the queen as a dictator in control of everything.”

“Well—”

“ Wrong. George, the queen is important. But in the colony, nobody knows what’s going on globally — not even the queen. There’s no one ant making any decisions in there about the destiny of the colony. Each one is just following the crowd, to build a tunnel, shift more eggs, bring back food. But out of all those decisions, the global structure of the colony emerges. That social scaling-up, by the way, is the secret of the social insects’ success. If a solitary animal misses out a task, it doesn’t get done. But with the ants, if one worker misses a task somebody else is sure to come along and do it for her. Even the death of an individual worker is irrelevant, because there is always somebody to take her place. Ant colonies are efficient.

“But it is the colony that counts, not the queen. That is the organism, a diffuse organism with maybe a million tiny mouths and bodies … Bodies that organize themselves so that their tiny actions and interactions add up, globally, to the operation of the colony itself.”

“So an anthill is like a traffic jam,” I guessed. “Emergent.”

“Yes. Emergence is how an anthill works. Now we have to talk about genes, which is why it works.” He was off again, and I struggled to keep focused.

“Social insects have three basic characteristics.” He ticked the points off on his fingers. “You get many individuals cooperating in caring for the young — not just parents, as among most mammals, say. Second, there is an overlap of generations. Children stay at home to live with their parents and grandparents. Third, you have a reproductive division of labor—”

“Neuters,” I said.

“Yes. Workers, who may remain sterile throughout their lives, serving the breeders …”

I started to get a sense of where he was going. I didn’t want to hear it. Dread gathered in the pit of my stomach. I pulled on the beer, drinking too fast. When I came back to George, he was talking about Darwin.

“… Darwin himself thought ants were a great challenge to his theory of evolution. How could sterile worker castes evolve if they leave no offspring? I mean, the whole point of life is to pass on your genes — isn’t it? How can that happen if you’re neuter? Well, in fact, natural selection works at the level of the gene, not the individual.

“If you’re a neuter, you give up your chance of having daughters, but by doing so you help Mom produce more sisters. Why do you do it? Because it’s in your genetic interests. Look, your sisters share half your genes, because you were born from the same parents. So your nieces are less closely related to you than your own daughters. But if, by remaining celibate, you can double the numbers of your nieces, you gain more in terms of genes passed on. In the long term you’ve won the genetic lottery.

“The numbers are different for ants. The way they pass on their genes is different from mammals — if you’re an ant your sister is actually closer to you genetically than your own daughter! — so they have a predisposition to this kind of group living, which is no doubt why it rose so early and so often among the insects. But the principle’s the same.

“George, an ant colony isn’t a dictatorship, or a communist utopia. It is a family. It’s a logical outcome of high population densities and a hostile external environment. Sometimes it pays to stay home with Mom, because it’s safer that way — but you need a social order to cope with the crowding. So you help Mom bring up your sisters. It’s harsh, but it’s a stable system; emergence makes the colony as a whole work, and there is a genetic payoff for everybody, and they all get along just fine … The biologists call this way of living ‘eusociality’ — eu like in utopia, meaning ‘perfect.’ “

“A perfect family? Now that’s scary.”

“But it’s not like a human family. This genetic calculus doesn’t have much to do with traditional human morality … Not until now,” he said mysteriously. “And it’s not just ants.” He played his trump card. “Consider naked mole rats.”

I had finished the beer. I let Peter call for another one.

Naked mole rats turned out to be spectacularly ugly little rodents — Peter showed me pictures on his handheld — that live in great underground colonies beneath the African deserts. They have bare, unweathered skin, and their bodies are little fat cylinders, to fit into their dark tunnels.

The mole rats’ favorite food is tuber roots, which they have to go dig for. But the roots are widely scattered. So although they are stuck in cramped conditions underground, it is better to produce a lot of little mole rats than a few big ones, because many little helpers tunneling off to find the roots are more likely to succeed than a few.

“Exactly the conditions where you might expect eusociality to develop,” Peter said. “A situation where you’re forced to live with high population density, limited resources …”

Mole rats live in great swarms — and in each colony, of maybe forty individuals, at any one time there is only one breeding pair. The other males simply keep zipped up, but the other females are functionally sterile. They are kept that way by behavior, by bullying from the “queen.”

The workers even have specialized roles — nest building, digging, transporting food. A mole rat will go through several roles as she ages, gradually moving outward from the center. “Some of the ants are like that,” Peter said. “The young serve inside the nest, where they do such chores as nest cleaning. When they get older they serve outside, maybe constructing or repairing the nest, or foraging for food …”

For the mole rats, everything works fine until the queen shows signs of falling from her throne. The sterile workers suddenly start to develop sexual characteristics, and there is a bloody succession battle — and the prize for the victor is nothing less than the chance to pass on her genes.

“And that’s why the old fogies are pushed out to the perimeter of the colony,” Peter said coldly. “They are the ones in the front line when a jackal digs up a tunnel — but they are dispensable. You want your young at the center, where they can be quickly deployed to replace the reproductive. But the old ones sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group readily enough. That’s another eusocial trait — suicide to protect others.

“You see what I’m saying. The mole rats are eusocial,” he said. “There is absolutely no doubt about that. As eusocial as any ant or termite or bee — but they are mammals.”

He talked on about mole rats, and other mammals with traces of eusociality — hunting dogs in the desert, for instance. One detail startled me. In the mole rat warrens, the rodents would swarm and huddle to control the flow of air through their passageways. It was just like the Crypt, though I hadn’t told him about Rosa’s antique ventilation system.

By now I knew exactly where he was going. I felt cold.

“Mammals but not human,” I said heavily. “And humans make choices about how they live their lives, Peter. Rational and moral choices. We’re in control of ourselves, in a way no animal can be.”

“ Are we? How about that traffic jam?”

“Peter — get to the point. Forget the mole rats. Talk about the Order.”

He nodded. “Then we have to talk about Regina, your great-great-greatest-grandmother. Because it all started with her.”

In those first few turbulent decades, for the band of women huddling in their pit under the Appian Way, it had been just as it was for a band of naked mole rats out on the savanna — or so Peter’s analysis went.

With imperial Rome crumbling around them, it became a lot safer for daughters to stay home with their mothers, to extend the Crypt rather than to migrate.

“So you have just the same kind of resource and population pressures as in a mole rat colony.”

I frowned. “But Regina would never have made a choice about eusociality. In the fifth century she couldn’t even have formulated it.”

“But she had the right instinct. It’s all there, in her own words. Remember those three slogans, carved on the walls?”

“Sisters matter more than daughters. Ignorance is strength. Listen to your sisters.”

“Yes.” He called up another file on his handheld. “… Here we are.”

It was an extract from Regina’s biography. I read: “Regina asked her followers to consider the blood of Brica, her daughter, and that of Agrippina, her granddaughter. Agrippina’s blood is half the blood of Brica, half of her father, and so a quarter mine, said Regina. But if Agrippina were to have a baby her blood would mix with the father’s, and so the baby would be only an eighth mine. Suppose I have to choose between a baby of Agrippina’s, or another baby of Brica’s. I can only choose one, for there is no room for both. Which should I choose? And they said, You would choose for Brica to have another child. For sisters matter more than daughters …”

Peter looked at me. “ Sisters matter more than daughters. Regina thought in terms of keeping her blood from being diluted. It doesn’t matter that the mechanics actually works with genes — her instinct was right. And once that is established, much else follows. The breeding rights of a few mothers, your mamme-nonne, are favored over everybody else’s rights, even over their own children’s. The drones’ only chance of passing on their own genes is to help their mothers, and their sisters …”

It was the first time he had used the word drones.

“Slogan two: Ignorance is strength. Regina understood systems. And she wanted the Order’s system, the whole, to dominate over the parts. She didn’t want some charismatic fool taking over and ruining everything in the pursuit of some foolish dream. So she ordered that everybody should know as little as possible, and should follow the people close to them. The Order drones are agents who work locally, with only local knowledge, and no insight into the bigger picture.

“Three: Listen to your sisters. That slogan encourages feedback. Inside the Crypt there’s a relentless pressure to conform. You told me you felt it, when you were in the Crypt, the endless social weight. Poor Lucia, who wouldn’t conform, suffered exclusion. The social pressure is a homeostasis — like the temperature regulator of an air-conditioning system, a negative feedback that keeps everybody in their place.”

“It was all just looks,” I said uncomfortably. “Nothing was said.”

He fixed nonexistent glasses, intense, determined, anxious. “You think when you were in the Crypt people communicated with you just with speech?” Again he tapped at his handheld, seeking the right reference. “George, we have many channels of communication. Look at this.” He pushed the handheld at me; its tiny screen showed a dense technical paper. “We have a paralanguage — vocal stuff but nonverbal, groans and laughs and sighs, and body posture, touch, motion — going on in parallel to everything we say. The anthropologists have identified hundreds of these signals — more than the chimps, more than the monkeys. Even without speech, we would have a richer way to communicate even than the chimps, and they manage to run pretty complex societies. And all this is going on under the surface of our spoken interaction.” He was staring at me now. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you didn’t feel a pressure from the way people in there behaved toward you, regardless of what they actually said.”

I imagined those circles of pale, disapproving faces. I shook my head to dispel the vision.

Peter said, “And then there are other ways to communicate. Touch, even scent … The smells, all that kissing you describe. Tasting each other, you said.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? George, weaver ants communicate with pheromones. And chemical communication is a very old system. Single-celled creatures have to rely on simple chemical messages to tell them about their environment, because only multicelled creatures — like ants, like humans — are complex enough to organize clusters of cells into eyes and ears … I admit I’m speculating about this.

“But, George, put it all together and you’ve got a classic recipe for an emergent system: local decision making by ignorant agents responding to local stimuli, and powerful feedback mechanisms. And then you have a genetic mandate for eusociality. All in those three slogans.”

“All right. And then what happened? How did we get from there to here — from Regina to Lucia?”

He sighed and massaged his temples. “Look, George, if you haven’t believed me up to now, you won’t believe what comes next. In the wild — among the ants or the mole rats — once you get a reproductive advantage like that, of mothers over daughters, no matter how slight, you get a positive feedback.

“People started to change. To adapt. If the daughters aren’t going to get a chance to reproduce, it’s better for their bodies to stay subadult. Why waste all those resources on a pointless puberty? Of course you retain the potential to become mature, in case a queen drops dead, and you have the chance to replace her. Meanwhile, it pays for the mothers to pump out the kids as long and as often as possible …”

I felt a deep, sickening dread as his logic drew me in, step by step. “So in the Crypt they have kids every three months. And they stay fertile for decades past any outsider’s menopause age.”

“It’s simple Darwinian logic. It pays.”

“What about the men?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps in the early days they just let the male infants die. Again, given enough time, selection would work; if the only way to pass on your genes is through female children, you have more daughters. Of course you still need fathers. So they bring in males from outside — wild DNA to keep the gene pool healthy — but preferably somebody from the extended family outside. And a candidate has to prove his fitness.”

“Fitness?” In a way this tied in with what Rosa had said to me about why I would be a suitable stud. “Maybe the men have to prove intelligence, by forcing their way in.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Fitness doesn’t mean strength, necessarily. It just means you fit the environment. Maybe what you, or Giuliano, need more than anything else is a certain compliance. Because your children would have to comply with life in the Crypt. One thing’s for sure: men are essential for making babies, so they have to be tolerated, but they are peripheral to the Order, which is built around relationships among females. Men are just sperm machines.”

“And what about Lucia’s second pregnancy? She said she had only had sex once with this guy Giuliano.”

He hesitated. “I’m flying another kite here. But some female ants have an organ called a spermatheca — a bag near the top of her abdomen. It’s a sperm bank. The queen stores ejaculate there, and keeps sperm in a kind of suspended animation, for years if necessary. She lets them out one at a time, and they become active again and ready to fertilize more eggs …”

My jaw dropped. “And that’s what you’re saying is happening inside Lucia’s body.”

He looked defensive. “I’m saying it’s possible.”

“But ants have had a hundred million years. Peter, what I know about evolution you could write on a fingernail. But wouldn’t such a major redesign of the human reproductive system need a lot of time ?”

He shrugged. “I’m no expert. But in the fifteen centuries since Regina there has been time for sixty, seventy, eighty generations — maybe even more. A lot of it wouldn’t involve particularly fundamental changes, just the timing of developments in the body. Evolution finds changes like that easy to make — a question of throwing a few switches, rather than rewiring the whole processor. Evolution can sometimes work with remarkable speed …

“Look at all the pieces together.” Again, he ticked points off on his fingers. “You have the multiple generations sharing their resources and caring for the young. You have reproductive divisions — the sterile workers. You have nobody in control, nothing but local agents and feedback. And then if you look at its history, the Order has done what ant colonies do: it has tried to expand, it has attacked other groups. You even have ’suicides’ — spectacular sacrifices, where the workers give up their lives so that their genetic legacy can continue: I told you what happened when the Crypt was broken open during the Sack of Rome. You could even argue that all the exterior ‘helpers,’ all the ‘family’ around the world, who send the Order money and recruits, they are part of the Order, too, like foraging ants — though of course they don’t know it.

“And listen. Ants carry out their dead and leave them in a circle, far from the nest. I plotted the burials linked to the Order, over the centuries. There’s a circle … I have a map.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“I think Regina was a kind of genius, George. An idiot savant, maybe. Of course she didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but she clearly understood emergence, and perhaps even eusociality, on some instinctive level. You can see it in her biography — the passages where she is walking around Rome, noticing how unplanned it is, but how nevertheless patterns have emerged. And she used that insight to try to protect her family. She thought she was establishing a community to protect her bloodline, a heritage of a golden past. Well, she succeeded, but not in the way she intended.

“The Order isn’t a human community, George, the way we’ve always understood it. The Order is a hive. A human hive — perhaps the first of its kind.” He smiled. “We used to think you would need telepathy to unite minds, to combine humans into a group organism. Well, we were wrong. All you need is people — that, and emergence.”

“Peter—”

He lifted his broad face to the light from the window. “It’s actually an exciting prospect we have stumbled on, George. A new kind of humanity, perhaps? A eusocial human — I call them Coalescents…”

The beer felt heavy in my belly. Suddenly I longed to get out of this smoky bar — out of the noisy, crowded city altogether — away from Peter and his crazy ideas, and the Order, which was at the center of it all.

Peter was desperate for me to understand, to believe, I saw. But I didn’t want to believe; I didn’t want to know. I shook my head.

“Even if you’re right,” I said, “what do we do about it?”

He smiled, but his smile was cold. “Well, that’s the question. There’s no point negotiating with Rosa, or anybody else in there, because she isn’t in control. The organism we are dealing with is actually the collective — the Order — the hive that arises out of the interactions of the Coalescents.”

“How do you negotiate with an anthill?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But first we must decide what we want from it …”

His cell phone went off, annoyingly loud. He pulled it out of his pocket, inspected its screen, and turned white. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He gathered up his gadgets and bustled out of the bar. Without breaking step he got into his car, started it up, and drove away, lurching into the dense Roman traffic. Just like that, leaving me with a bill to pay and a walk home to the hotel. I was astonished.

When I got to the hotel he wasn’t there. I wouldn’t see him again, in fact, for days. When I did it was in drastically different circumstances, after I received a panicky phone call from Rosa.

And it was only later that I found out it was at that moment in the cafй he had learned of the explosion at the lab in San Jose.

Chapter 48

Rosa glared at me. “What have you done, George? What have you done? ”

“Is this about a man called Peter McLachlan?” I’d told Rosa nothing about Peter before now; I’d had no reason to. “I haven’t seen him for days, and he’s not answering his calls …”

“He’s here,” Rosa hissed.

“What?”

“Inside the Crypt.”

I just stared at her, disbelieving.

Rosa had met me in the Order’s surface office on the Cristoforo Colombo. Compared to her sly manipulation of a few days before, there was no warmth, none of her seductive talk of family and blood, no touching. In that bright, sunlit, modern office, she was a pillar of hostility and anger.

We weren’t alone. Under a wall decorated with a chrome representation of the Order’s kissing-fish symbol, a salesgirl was talking an elderly couple through a brochure on the Order’s genealogy services. The old folk turned and stared at us, dismayed and perhaps a little frightened. But the assistant was of the Order. She looked at me with blank smoke-gray eyes, slowly hardening to anger. I was sure she didn’t know why she felt that way. I quailed nevertheless.

Rosa glanced at the customers. She said, “Come through.”

I followed her to the elevator at the back, which took us down to the big modern anteroom, where cameras peered at me, insectile. The receptionist-guard behind her broad marble desk stared at me with undisguised hostility.

I asked, “If Peter’s here, who let him in?”

“Nobody. He found a way down one of the old ventilation shafts.”

I remembered the ancient, disused chimney; yes, I realized, if you knew what you were doing, it wouldn’t be so hard to work your way in. I laughed. “Peter’s a bit tubby for a potholer.”

She stood close to me. I smelled something of the animal stink of the Crypt about her. Her fists were clenched, her body rigid, every muscle suffused with anger. “You think this is funny? Do you? Funny? He isn’t one of us. He has nothing to do with the Order. And he’s here because of you.”

“I didn’t tell him where the shaft outlets were. I don’t even know myself.”

“Evidently you told him enough for him to work it out. You betrayed our trust, George. You betrayed my trust. I took you into my home. I showed you its treasures. And you told an outsider. Perhaps you aren’t fit to join us after all.”

Her cold, angry rejection was powerful. It hurt badly to feel such exclusion, despite my ambiguous feelings about the whole setup.

“Rosa, I know Peter. Outsider or not he’s an old friend who was good to Dad in his final years. He is — odd. Obsessive, eccentric. He has big ideas. But even if it’s true he’s broken in here he’s harmless.”

“Harmless. Really.” Rosa walked behind the marble desk to the guard’s PC. It took her a couple of minutes to find what she wanted. She swiveled the screen on its mount to show me. “This is an Interpol report. Posted by the FBI.” Illustrated by small, grainy photographs, it was a report of an explosion at a university science lab in San Jose, California. The lab had been devoted to something called “geometric optics.” The blast had destroyed the building and killed three people, including a cleaner and the head of the facility. The FBI appeared convinced it was some kind of sabotage. In the corner of the image the FBI had posted two photographs, of suspects they associated with the incident.

One of them was, indubitably, Peter’s face.

I stood back. “Shit.”

“Our face-recognition software pulled this up not five minutes after we got our first clear shot of him.”

“It has to be a mistake. Peter’s an eccentric, not a criminal. I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with an incident like this.”

Rosa briskly spun the screen back. “Tell it to the FBI. And in the meantime, this ‘harmless’ friend, this suspected bomber, this murderer, is holed up inside the Crypt — and you led him here.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Come down there with me and get him out.”

I hesitated. I dreaded walking deeper into this mess. But I knew I had no choice.

Rosa walked me to the high-speed elevators that would take us back into the downbelow. The doors slid open with a pneumatic sigh.

Once more I was swallowed up.

I stepped out into the now familiar crush.

Even as we hurried toward the scene of the crisis, I lifted my head and took deep breaths. The air was clammy and shallow, and my lungs pulled, trying to extract oxygen. But there was that powerful animal stink again, the musk of sweat and piss, of blood and milk, so suffocating, and yet somehow so exhilarating.

I was full of doubts about the Order, full of conflicting emotions. I had listened to Peter’s extraordinary arguments about eusociality and hives and Coalescents, a new form of humanity. And above all, stuck in my head, was the image of Lucia, a fifteen-year-old tortured by the exploitation of her fecundity by — well, by somebody in this place, for some purpose, not her own. But for all that it was good to be back. I belonged here: walking down these dense corridors again, I seemed to feel it on some deep cellular level. However the Order was sending me signals, through body language or chimp grunts or scent or whatever the hell, it was certainly getting through.

But the Crypt felt different today.

All those ageless female faces, and a few male, all with their smoky gray eyes, peered at me uncertainly, eyes wide, mouths downturned. I was sure that few of them would know anything about what was going on, but they picked up their cues from Rosa, and then from each other, and as we walked they all unthinkingly flinched away from me. That silent rejection hurt.

But even through this self-pitying ache, I noticed the Crypt was quiet : people spoke, but softly, leaning to whisper in each others’ ears. They even walked quietly, their feet padding gently on the floor. I listened for the hum of generators, the hiss and low roar of the air-conditioning systems, but could hear nothing.

“Silent running,” I said to Rosa.

“What do you mean?”

“Just like a submarine, trying to evade the sonar of the surface ships. We’re in a great, static, underground submarine …”

It struck me then that the Order, whatever its powers and wealth, being stuck immovably in this Crypt, this hole in the ground, was terribly vulnerable. No wonder Rosa had reacted so strongly to Peter’s incursion. For the Crypt to be revealed was about the worst thing that could happen, because once exposed it would stay exposed. The silent running must be instinctive, I thought, a reaction bred in over generations. A great wave of fear and despondency must have rippled out through the tight-packed, touching, gossiping members of the Order, a wave of alarm but not of information, a wave that left silence and caution where it passed.

We descended to Level 2 and hurried past the great galleries of hospital wards and dormitories. Eventually we began to pass through quieter, darker corridors. I sensed we were moving out of the core of the sprawling complex, reaching areas I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps the ventilation shaft Peter had used was old, long abandoned, unguarded.

At last we came to a wall, not of concrete or interior partition, but of tufa, honest, solid lava. I ran my hand along the wall. I felt oddly reassured to think that I wasn’t in the middle of things anymore — that beyond my hand there were no more galleries and chambers, no more people, nothing but a tremendous mass of patient, silent rock.

A knot of people stood before a cleft in the rock wall, all Order members. The lighting here, coming from fluorescent lamps bolted crudely to the tufa wall, was sparse and dim, and as they watched us approach, their faces, all so similar, seemed to float, disembodied, in the gloom. I recognized none of them. There were ten of them — only one was a man — but they were all tall and hefty looking inside their smocks. They were here for physical work, I thought, perhaps to wrestle Peter to the ground.

And they were old, I realized with a shock; with crow’s-feet eyes and sunken cheeks, they all showed far more visible signs of aging than I had seen in the Crypt before. Uneasily I remembered Peter’s talk of aging ant warriors, of elderly mole rats sacrificed to the jackals; it was another unwelcome parallel.

Rosa spoke briskly to these guardians and came back to me. “He’s still in there.”

“Where?”

She jerked her thumb at the cleft in the rock.

I moved past her to take a look. The cleft was a crack in the tufa, barely wide enough for me to have squeezed into sideways. It looked as if it had been caused by a mild earthquake, and then widened by seeping water. The glow from the wall-mounted lamps didn’t penetrate very far, and I cupped my hands over my eyes, peering into silent blackness.

Suddenly light flared in my face. I fell back, rubbing my eyes. “ Ow. Shit.”

A sardonic voice, made hollow by echoes, came drifting out of the cleft. “You took your time.”

“Hello, mate. How did you get yourself in there?”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t easy,” he said gnomically.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving the future.”

“We can’t get him out,” Rosa said to me. “The cleft is too narrow. We haven’t been able to find the way he got in — presumably from above. We might get one or two people in from the front, but they could never get behind him to bring him out. And besides, we’re afraid he might harm them.”

I frowned. “Harm them? Harm them how? You think he’s sitting in there with a revolver?”

Rosa said heavily, “Remember San Jose.”

“Look, Rosa, I don’t know why he’s got himself stuck in a hole in the rock. But I can’t see what harm he can do you in there. I mean, all you have to do is wait a few hours, or days even, and you’ll starve him out. In fact you might have to if you want him to get through that gap.”

“This isn’t funny, George.”

“Isn’t it?” I felt a little light-headed.

“Talk to him. You say he’s your friend. Fine. Find out what he’s doing here, what he wants, what he intends. And then find a way to resolve this situation. Because if you don’t, I will.”

I tried to read her. “Will you call the police? … You won’t, will you? Or the FBI, or Interpol. You don’t want to bring them here into the Crypt, despite the danger you perceive. What are you planning, Rosa?”

She said evenly, “I’m responsible for the safety of the Crypt. As is every member of the Order. I will do whatever it takes, at whatever cost, to ensure that safety. I suggest you make sure it doesn’t come to that.” In the gloom her face was hard, set — almost fanatical — I thought she had never looked less like me, or my parents.

I nodded, chilled. “I believe you.”

I approached Peter’s wall again.

“Don’t listen to her,” he said. “Don’t let her whisper in your ear.”

“Or overwhelm me with chimp pant-hoots or pheromones? …”

“George, just get out of here.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t concern you. Just get away—”

“Of course it concerns me. That’s my sister, standing over there. But that’s not why I’m staying, Peter.”

“Then why?”

“For you, you arsehole.”

He laughed, sardonic. “I didn’t see you once in twenty years.”

“But you were a good friend to my dad. Even if I didn’t know about it until too late.”

Silence for a while. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “Okay, then. Do what you like. Arsehole yourself.”

“Yes … Peter, we need to talk.”

“About—”

“About San Jose.”

He hesitated. “So you know about that.”

“Interpol send their best. Peter, what happened over there?”

He sighed noisily. “You really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“I warn you now we will have to discuss black holes. Because that’s what they were trying to build in that lab.”

Even now, more spooky stuff. “Oh, for God’s sake …”

The drones, unaware of the odd grammar of our relationship, stirred, baffled, nervous.

Peter began to describe “geometric optics.” “A black hole is a space-time flaw, a hole out of which nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes suck in light through having ultrapowerful gravity fields …”

Black holes in nature are formed by massive collapsed stars, or by aggregates of matter at the centers of galaxies like ours — or they may have been formed in the extreme pressures of the Big Bang, the most tremendous crucible of all. It used to be thought that black holes, even microscopic ones, would be so massive and would require such immense densities that to make or manipulate them was forever beyond human reach.

But that wisdom, said George, had turned out to be false. “Light is the fastest thing in the universe — as far as we know — which is why it takes the massive gravity of a black hole to capture it. But if light were to move more slowly, then a more feeble trap might do the job.”

Tense, with the gazes of the drones boring into me, I took the bait. “Fine. How can you slow down light?”

“Anytime light passes through a medium it is slowed from its vacuum speed. Even in water it is slowed by about a quarter — still bloody fast, but that’s enough to give you refraction effects.”

Memories of O-level physics swam into my mind. “Like the way a stick in a stream will seem bent—”

“Yes. But in the lab you can do a lot better. Pass light through a vapor of certain types of atom and you’re down to a few feet per second. And if you use a Bose-Einstein condensate—”

“A what?”

He hesitated. “Supercold matter. All the atoms line up, quantum-mechanically … It doesn’t matter. The point is, light can be slowed to below walking pace. I saw the trials in that lab in San Jose. It’s really quite remarkable.”

“And then you can make your black hole.”

“You can blow your slow-moving light around — even make it move backward. Photons, thrown around like paper planes in a Texas twister. To make a black hole you set up a vortex in your medium — a whirlpool. You just pull out the plug. And if the vortex walls are moving faster than your light stream, the light gets sucked into the center and can’t escape, and you have your black hole.”

“That’s what these Californians were doing?”

“They were getting there,” Peter said. “They hit practical problems. The condensate is a quantum structure, and it doesn’t respond well to being spun around … But all this was fixable, in principle.”

“Why would anybody want to do this?”

“That’s obvious. Quantum gravity,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. I actually had to keep from laughing. I was talking to a crack in the wall, watched by ten differently evolved hive-mind drones and my own long-lost sister. “You know, on any other day this conversation would seem bizarre.”

“Pay attention, double-oh seven,” he said wearily.

Quantum gravity, it seems, is the Next Big Thing in physics. The two great theories of twentieth-century physics were quantum mechanics, which describes the very small, like atomic structures, and general relativity, which describes the very large, like the universe itself. They are both successful, but they don’t fit together.

“The universe today is kind of separated out,” said Peter. “Large and small don’t interact too much — which is why quantum mechanics and relativity work so well. You don’t find many places in nature where they overlap, where you can study quantum gravity effects, the predictions of a unified theory. But the Black Hole Kit would be a tabletop gravity field. The San Jose people hoped, for instance, to explore whether space-time itself is quantized, broken into little packets, as light is, as matter is.”

I said heavily, “What I don’t understand is why all this should cost anybody her life. How do you justify it, Peter? Omelettes and eggs?”

“You know I don’t think like that, George.”

“Then tell me why that lab was destroyed.”

“You already know.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

“Because of the future. Humankind’s future. And because of the war in Heaven.”

All this was so like our bullshit sessions in the park by the Forum. I could imagine his earnest face as he spoke, that big jaw, the small mouth, the beads of sweat on his brow, the half-closed eyes. But Rosa was watching me, skeptical, drawing her own conclusions, no doubt, about Peter’s sanity. She twirled her finger. Hurry it up.

He reminded me of what he had told me, of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, and attempts to signal to it.

“Most of it was absurd,” he whispered. “Quixotic. Like the plaques stuck on the side of Pioneer space probes. They will fail through sheer statistics, because the chance of any sentient being picking up such objects is minuscule. We are surrounded by that tremendous unintentional ripple of radio noise, spreading out everywhere at lightspeed — nothing we can do about that now … But then, most perniciously, some signaling has been intentional, and designed to succeed. Such as using the big antenna at Arecibo to throw digital signals at the nearest stars …”

“Pernicious?”

“George, where was the debate? Were you consulted? Did you vote to have your whereabouts blasted to the universe? What right had these people to act on your behalf?”

“I can’t say it keeps me awake at night.”

“It does me,” he said hoarsely. “We know there is something out there waiting for us. The Kuiper Anomaly — long faded from the news — is still out there, orbiting silently. My seismic signals, the dark matter craft that decelerated and veered inside the Earth: more evidence. Signaling is dangerous. It must be. That is why the sky is so quiet. Whoever is out there has learned to keep quiet — or has been forced to be.”

“Peter, I don’t see what this has to do with the destruction of the black hole lab.”

He sighed again. “George, there are some SETI proponents who say that our feeble attempts to signal so far are futile. Plaques on clunky spacecraft, radio signals — all of this is laughably primitive technology. Jungle drums. It won’t attract the attention of anybody advanced enough to matter.”

“Right. And the kind of technology they will use—”

“Well, we don’t know, but we can speculate. For instance, about technologies based on quantum gravity. Or even the manipulation of space-time itself. If you could do that there is no limit to what you could achieve. Warp drive — faster than light. Antigravity. The control of inertia—”

I began to see where this was going. “The San Jose Black Hole Kit would be a manipulation of space- time.”

“That toy black hole would have stood out like a single campfire shining in the middle of a darkened landscape.”

“You think the San Jose people were trying to signal to aliens?”

“Oh, they didn’t mean to. All they were doing was trying to build a test bed for quantum gravity, just as advertised. I’m sure of that. But they wouldn’t listen to our warnings — the Slan(t)ers. They would have gone on, and on, until they lit that damn campfire …”

And then I understood what had been done. I rubbed my eyes. “What did you use, Peter?”

“Semtex-H,” he whispered. “Not difficult to get hold of if you know how. Before the fall of communism the Czechs shipped out a thousand tons of the stuff, mostly through Libya. My police background …”

He hadn’t set the thing off, he said, but he had designed the system. It turned out to be simple. He had used electronics parts he bought from RadioShack to build a simple radar-activated sensor. It was based on dashboard detectors supposed to warn drivers of the presence of a police radar gun. If attached to a detonator, such a sensor could be used to set off a bomb, in response to a signal from a radar gun — or even from something smaller, lighter. He had learned these techniques in Northern Ireland.

“You know, Semtex is remarkable. It’s brown, like putty. You can mold it to any shape. And it’s safe to handle. You can hold it over a naked flame and it won’t explode, not without a detonator. So easy.”

I held my breath.

“You see, it’s all about the future,” he said softly. “That’s what I’ve come to understand. We humans find ourselves on a curve of exponential growth, doubling in numbers and capability, and doubling again. We are wolflings now, but we are growing. We will become adults, we will become strong. Billions will flow from each of us, a torrent of minds, a great host of the future. This is our predestination. The future is ours. And that is what they perceive, I think.”

“Who?”

“Those beyond the Earth. They see our potential. Our threat. They would want to stop it now, while we are still weak, cut down the great tree while it is still a sapling.”

I tried to hold this extraordinary chain of logic in my head. “All right. I can see why you thought the San Jose lab should be stopped. But what are you doing here?”

“The hive is just as much of a threat to the future. Don’t you see that yet? It is an end point to our destiny. And we have to avoid it.”

I could see a glimmer of light in the rock cleft. He was holding something; it looked like a TV remote. “Peter, what’s that?”

“The switch,” he said. “For the bomb.”

My sister stood there in her white smock, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. I didn’t need to tell Rosa her worst suspicions had turned out to be accurate.

Her attendants, the beefy drones, whispered and fluttered, wide-eyed, clutching each other and walking about in little knots. Meanwhile Peter sat silently in his cave, a brooding demon.

And I was stuck in the middle, trying to find a way out for everybody.

“Peter.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” he said dryly.

“Do you trust me?”

“What?”

“I’ve listened to your theories. I’ve taken your advice. I’ve even taken you seriously. Who else has done all that?”

He hesitated. “All right. Yes, I trust you.”

“Then listen to me. There has to be a way out of this.”

“You’re talking about negotiation? George — you said it yourself. You can’t negotiate with an anthill.”

“Nevertheless we have to try,” I said. “There are a lot of lives at stake.”

“Nobody will be hurt. I’m not some homicidal nut, George, for God’s sake. But I will open this place up. Expose it to the world.”

“But maybe you won’t even have to take the risk. Why not give it a try?” I fell silent and waited, forcing a response. Old management trick.

At last he replied. “All right. Since it’s you.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“Rosa,” he hissed now. “She is the key. The rest were born here, and are beyond hope. But Rosa might understand. She has a broader perspective, a self-awareness you’re not supposed to have, here in the termite mound. You might persuade her to see what she is. But George — you’ll have to get her on her own. Get her away from the others. Otherwise you’ll never jolt her out of it.”

“I’ll try.”

I walked up to Rosa. Her eyes narrowed as she waited for me to speak. Suddenly I had power, I realized, but it wasn’t a power I wanted. “He’ll talk. But you have to do things my way, Rosa.” I glanced at the drones, who continued to flap ineffectually behind her. “Get rid of these people.”

Rosa actually quailed. I could see that the thought of being alone in a situation like this, cut off from the rest of the Order and the subtle cues of other drones, disturbed her on some deep level. But she complied. The drones went fluttering away, out of sight around the bend of the corridor.

I snapped: “And bring Lucia here.”

She shook her head. “George, the doctors—”

“Just do it. And her baby. Otherwise I walk away.”

We confronted each other. But, just as I had waited out Peter’s response, I stared her down.

At last she backed off. “All right.” She walked a little way down the corridor, dug a cell phone out of her pocket, and made a call.

It took a few minutes for Lucia to arrive. She was dressed in a plain smock, and she was carrying a small blanket-wrapped bundle. She was barefoot, and she walked slowly, uncertainly; I glimpsed attendants, perhaps from the chambers of the mamme-nonne, lingering around the bend of the corridor. When Lucia saw me she ran toward me. “Mr. Poole — oh, Mr. Poole—”

“Are you all right?”

Her face was sallow, I saw, her cheeks sunken, her eyes rheumy. Her hair was coiffed but it looked lifeless. She had lost weight; I could see her shoulder blades protrude through the smock, and her wrists and ankles were skeletal. I would never have believed she was still just fifteen. But she was smiling, and she held up her baby to me — her second baby, I reminded myself. She handled the child awkwardly, though. “They had to fetch her from the nurseries … It’s the first time I’ve seen her since she was born. Isn’t she beautiful?”

No more than a few weeks old, the baby had a small, crumpled face, and she was sleepy; but when she opened her eyes, they were mother-of-pearl gray. The baby seemed a little agitated: strange hands, my mother would have said. I felt sad for Lucia.

“Yes, she’s beautiful.”

She rubbed her stomach. “How is Daniel?”

“With his parents.”

“I think of him often.”

“What’s wrong with your stomach? … Oh. You’re pregnant again.”

She shrugged and looked away.

I took her arm and found her a place to sit, on a bench carved out of the rock wall.

“Rosa, how did you get her out of the American Hospital?”

Rosa shrugged. “Do you really want the details? … The key was that she wanted to come out, despite everything she says. Didn’t you, child?”

Lucia huddled over her baby, hiding her face.

Rosa said, “I’ve done what you asked, George. Can I talk to him now?”

“Go ahead.”

She turned to the rock wall and raised her voice. “I don’t know why you want to do this, Peter McLachlan. What harm have we done you — or anybody? We are an ancient religious order. We dedicate ourselves to the worship of God, through Mary, the mother of His son. We were founded for benevolent reasons. We educate. We store knowledge that would otherwise be lost. In times of trouble we act as a haven for vulnerable women … You can’t deny any of this.”

“Of course not,” Peter said. “But you don’t see yourself clearly. You can’t, in fact; you’re not supposed to. Rosa, even you, who were born outside, have been here too long. Your conscious purposes — the religion, your communal projects — are just by-products. No, more than that — they are glue to bind you together, dazzling concepts that distract your conscious minds. But they are not what the Order is for. They could be replaced by other goals — cruelty instead of benevolence, futility instead of useful purpose — and the Order would work just as well. The truth is the Order exists only for itself …”

In broken phrases he sketched his beliefs. The Order was an anthill, a mole rat colony, a termite mound, he told her. It was not a human society. “Your handful of mamme-nonne, pumping out infants. Your sterile sisters—”

Rosa frowned. “Celibacy is common in Catholic orders.”

“Not celibate. Sterile, ” he hissed.

She listened to his arguments, her face working.

“And you can’t argue with the reality of Lucia,” he said. “Suppose she walked into a medical office in Manchester. The doctor would think Lucia was extraordinary — and so would you, if not for the fact that you grew up here. You have all been down in this hole for a long time. Time enough for adaptation, selection — evolution, Rosa.”

Lucia looked up at me. “What’s he saying? If I am not human, what am I?”

Rosa touched her hands. “Hush, child. It’s all right …” She paced around, her heels clicking softly on the rock floor. I had no real idea what was going through her mind.

“Suppose it’s true,” she said suddenly. “It’s hard to get my head around this nonsense — but suppose I concede that you’re right. That we have formed a — a sort of self-organizing collective here. Even that, in some way, after all these centuries, we have somehow diverged from the common human stock.”

“You’re waking up,” Peter said.

She snapped, “I don’t think you are in any position to patronize me. Let’s remember that you are the nutcase stuck in a hole in the wall with Semtex stuck up his arse.”

“Go on, Rosa,” I said quickly. “Suppose it’s true. Then what?”

“Then—” She raised her hands, lifted her head to the levels hidden above us, the great underground city. “If this is a new way, maybe it’s a better way. We have found a way to run a society, safely and healthily, with population densities orders of magnitude higher than anything else humans have hit on. What is the purpose of any human society? It is surely to provide a system in which as many people as possible can live out lives as long and healthy and happy and peaceful as possible. Wouldn’t it be better for humankind, and this whole crowded planet, if everyone lived peaceably together as they do here?”

“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.”

“Peter!”

I heard a click.

And then the floor lurched.

I clattered into one wall, an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Some of the lights failed; I heard a bulb smash with a remote tinkle. There was a remote rumbling, as if an immense truck was passing by.

There was a second’s respite. I saw Lucia on the ground. She was sheltering her baby. They were both gray with dust.

Then rock fragments started hailing down from the ceiling, heavy, sharp-edged. I pushed myself away from the wall, crawled over to Lucia, and threw myself over her and the infant. I was lucky; I was hit, but by nothing large enough to hurt.

The rumbling passed. The rock bits stopped falling. Gingerly I moved away from Lucia. We were both gray with dust, and her eyes were wide — shock, perhaps — but she and the baby seemed unhurt.

I heard running footsteps, shouts. Torchlight flickered in the dimly lit corridor.

Rosa was at the cleft in the rock, pulling away rubble with her bare hands. I could see a hand, a single hand, protruding from beneath the debris. It was bloody, and gray dust clung to the dripping crimson.

I ran over. My battered legs and back were sore, my lungs and chest hurt from where I had been thrown against the wall. But I dragged at the rock. Soon my fingers were aching, the nails broken.

Rosa, meanwhile, had taken a pulse from that protruding hand. She took my arm and pulled me away. “George, forget it. There’s nothing we can do.”

I slowed, jerkily, as if my energy was draining. I let the last handful of rubble drop to the floor.

I took Peter’s hand. It was still warm, but it was inert, and I could feel how it dangled awkwardly. I felt inexpressibly sad. “Peter, Peter,” I whispered. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

Running footsteps closed on us. Hive workers, of course, drones, most of them women, all of them dressed in dust-covered smocks. Faces swam before me in the uncertain light, gray eyes troubled. I grabbed Lucia’s hand, and she clung to me just as hard. “Go,” I shouted at the drones. “Get out. There may be more falls. Take the stairs. Go, go …”

The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.

The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed partition walls, smashed glass. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where the mamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pushing beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.

I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.

It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.

Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.

And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.

Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter’s crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the mass were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of the mamme-nonne. Nobody was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling mass, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.