Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 20

I was the first to say it. "Okay, I'm sorry. But I'm really not sure I need advice right now. My family may have been something of a screwup, but there's nothing I can do to change the past. And now it's gone-Gina's fled about as far as she can go-and all I'm left with is . . ."

"This loose end. Which you can't resist tugging. Well, I think you should go. Let's face it, the death of a parent is as big a loss as either of us is ever likely to face. I think you should take some time to get through it. And if this sister thing is an excuse to do that, fine. Go to Rome. Spend some lira."

"Euros."

"Whatever."

"I was sure you'd try to stop me."

She sighed. "Listening is just one of the skills you never acquired, George." She touched my hand; her skin was warm and comfortable. "Go. If you need anything just call."

"Thanks."

"Now let's finish this stupid walk." She marched on.

We pa.s.sed out of the City area and came down Cooper's Row, pa.s.sing under the rail line into the tourist- oriented area close to the river, and the Tower. We pa.s.sed through the Tower Hill underpa.s.s by the Tube station entrance, peered at the ruin of a robust-looking medieval gate, and then walked back through the subway to where a sunken garden at the northeast corner of the underpa.s.s contained the statue of an emperor-and, ironically, right at the end of the walk, the best-preserved section of wall we'd seen all day.

We sat on a bench and sipped our water.

"One more tick for your little book," Linda said, not too unkindly.

"Yep." It was all of thirty feet high, and the Roman section itself maybe ten feet. The Roman brickwork was neat rows interspersed with red tiles that might have come from my father's house. The medieval structure above it was much rougher. "If I didn't know better I'd have said that the Roman stuff was Victorian, or later," I said. "It's as if the whole wall has been turned upside down."

Linda asked, "Civilization really did fall here, didn't it?"

"It really did."

"I wonder if she came here. That great-grandmother of yours. Regina."

". . . And I wonder if she knew that it would all disappear, as if a small nuclear bomb had been dropped on the city."

The third voice made us both jump. I turned to see a bulky, somewhat shambling figure dressed in a coat that looked even heavier than my duffel. Linda flinched away from him, and I felt the tentative mood between us evaporate.

"Peter. What are you doing here?"

Peter McLachlan came around the bench and sat down, with me between him and Linda. "You mentioned doing the walk." So I had, in an email. "I thought you'd end up here. I waited."

"How long?"

He checked his watch. "Only about three hours."

"Three hours?"

I could see Linda's expression. "Listen, George, it's been good, but I think-"

"No. Wait, I'm sorry." I introduced them quickly. "Peter, why did you want to see me?"

"To thank you. And tell you I'm going to be away for a while. I'm off to the States."

"Visiting the Slan(t)ers?" Linda caught my eye again; I pursed my lips.Don't ask.

"I feel the need to catch up. Be refreshed."

"Refreshed with what?"

He shrugged. "The energy. Thebelief . That's why I want to thank you. Somehow you have shaken me out of my rut. Your bit of mystery with your sister. Layers upon layers . . . That and Kuiper, of course."

He leaned past me and thrust his face toward Linda. "Of course you know about the Kuiper Anomaly.

Have you seen the latest developments?" He produced his handheld and started thumbing at its tiny controls, and Web pages flashed over its jewel-like screen.

Linda plucked my sleeve. "This guy is seriously weird," she whispered.

"He's an old school friend. He helped my dad. And-"

"Oh, come on. Your dad's buried. He's followed youto London . And all this spooky stuff-what does it have to do with you and your sister?"

"I don't know."

"Look, George, I changed my mind. It's as if the people around you are parts of your personality. Your family was the clingy, oppressive, Catholic part, and you need to get away from all that, not indulge it.

And this guy, he's like your-"

"My a.n.u.s."

That brought a stifled laugh. "George-go back to work. Or paint your house. Get away from memories, George. And get away from this guy, or you'll end up on a park bench muttering about conspiracies, too . . ."

"Here." Peter thrust his handheld before my face; data and diagrams chattered across it. "The Kuiper Belt is a relic of the formation of the solar system. We see similar belts around other stars, like Vega.

The outer planets, like Ura.n.u.s and Neptune, formed from collisions of Kuiper Belt objects. But according to the best theories there should have been many more objects out there-ahundred times the ma.s.s we can see now, enough to make another Neptune. And we know that such a swarm should coalesce quickly into a planet."

"I don't understand. Peter, I think-"

"Something disturbed the Kuiper Belt.Something whipped up those ice b.a.l.l.s, about the time of the formation of Pluto-so preventing the formation of another Neptune. Since then the Kuiper objects have been broken up by collisions, or have drifted out of the belt."

"When was this disturbance?"

"It must have been around the time the planets were forming. Maybe four and a half billion years ago."

He peered at me, eyes bright. "You see? Layers of interference. The Anomaly, the Galaxy core explosions, now this tinkering with the very formation of the solar system.This is what we're going to investigate."

"We?"

"The Slan(t)ers, in the States. You read my emails."

"Yes . . ." I turned. Linda had gone. I stood up, trying to see her, but as the rush hour approached the crowds pouring into the Tube station were already dense.

Peter was still in midflow, sitting on the bench, talking compulsively, bringing up page after page of data. He was hunched forward, his posture intense.

Standing there, I could either go after Linda, or stay with Peter. I felt that somehow I was making a choice that might shape the whole of the rest of my life.

I sat down. "Show me again," I said.

TWO.

Chapter 17.

For Lucia it had begun eleven months before the death of George Poole's father. And it began, not with death, but with stirrings of life.

It came at night, only a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She was woken by a spasm of pain in her belly, and then an ache in her thighs. When she reached down and touched her legs she felt wetness.

At first she felt only hideous embarra.s.sment. She imagined she had wet her bed, as if she were a silly child. She got out of bed and padded down the length of the dormitory, past the bunk beds stacked three high, the hundred girls sleeping in this great room alone, to the bathroom.

And there, in the bathroom's harsh fluorescent light, she discovered the truth: that the fluid between her legs, and on her fingers and her nightclothes, wasn't urine at all, but blood-strange blood, bright, thin.

She knew what this meant, of course. Her body was changing. But the shame didn't go away, it only intensified, and was supplemented now by a deep and abiding fear.

Why me? she thought. Whyme ?

She cleaned herself up and went back to bed, past the stirring ranks of the girls, many of them turning and muttering, perhaps disturbed by her scent.

Lucia was able to conceal that first bleeding from the other girls, from Idina and Angela and Rosaria and Rosetta, her crowding, chattering sisters with their pale gray eyes, all so alike. You weren't supposed to keep secrets, of course. Everybody knew that. There were supposed to be no secrets in the Crypt. But now Lucia had a secret.

And then her second period came, during a working day. The stab of pain warned her in time for her to rush to the bathroom again. The cubicles had no doors, of course-though before her menarche it had never occurred to Lucia to notice the lack-but she was lucky to find the room empty, and was able again to conceal what had happened, even though she vomited, and this time the pain lasted for days.

But now she had compounded her secret.

She hated the situation. More than anything she cared what the people around her thought of her. The other girls were her whole world. She was immersed in them night and day, surrounded by their scent and touch and kisses, their conversation and their glances, their judgments and opinions; she was shaped by them, as they, she knew, were shaped in turn by her. But ever since she had started growing taller than the average, at the age of ten or so, barriers between her and her old friends had subtly grown up.

That got worse at age twelve or thirteen, when her hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s started to develop, and she had started to look like a young woman among children. And nowthis .

She didn't want any of it. She wanted to be the same as everybody else; she didn't want to bedifferent .

She wanted to be immersed in the games, and the gossip of what Anna said to Wanda, and how Rita and Rosetta had fallen out, and Angela would have to choose between them . . . She didn't want to be talking about blood between her legs, pain in her belly.

She had to tell somebody. So she told Pina.

It was during a coffee break at work.

This was November, and Lucia's regular schooling was in recess. For the second year she had come to work in the big office called thescrinium . This was an ancient Latin word meaning "archive." Despite the antique name, it was a modern, bright, open-plan area with cubicles and part.i.tions, PCs and laptops, adorned with potted plants and calendars, and with light wells admitting daylight from the world above.

This bright, anonymous place might have been an office in any bank or government ministry. Even the ubiquitous symbol of the Order, two schematic face-to-face kissing fish, was rendered on the wall in bronze and chrome, like a corporate logo. Quite often you would even see acontadino or two in here- literally "countryman" or "peasant," this word meant "outsider; not of the Order."

But beyond the office was a computer center, a big climate-controlled room where high-capacity mainframes hummed and whirred in bluish light. And beyond that were libraries, great echoing corridors, softly lit and laced with fire-preventive equipment. Lucia didn't know-n.o.body in her circle knew-how far such corridors extended, off into the darkness, tunneled out of the soft tufa rock; it didn't even occur to her to ask the question. But it was said that if you walked far enough, the books gave way to scrolls of animal skin and papyrus, and tablets with Latin or Greek letters scratched in clay surfaces, and even a few pieces of carved stone.

In these vaulted, interconnected rooms the Order had stored its records ever since its first founding, sixteen centuries before. Nowadays the archive was more valuable than it had ever been, for it had become a key source of income for the Order. Information was sold, much of it nowadays via the Internet, to historians, to academic inst.i.tutions and governments, and to amateur genealogists trying to trace family roots.

Lucia worked here as a lowly clerk-or, in the sometimes archaic language of the Order, as one of thescrinarii , under a supervisingbibliotecharius . She spent some of her time doing computer work, transcribing and cross-correlating records from different sources. But mainly she worked on transcription. She would copy records, by hand, from computer screens and printouts onto rag paper sheets.

The Order made its own rag paper, once manufactured by breaking up cloth in great pounding animal- driven pestles, but now directly from cotton in a room humming with high-speed electrical equipment. It was medieval technology. But the rag paper, acid-free, marked by special noncorrosive inks, would last far longer than any wood-pulp paper. The Order had little faith in digital archives; already there were difficulties accessing records from older, obsolescent generations of computers and storage media. If you were serious about challenging time, rag paper was the way to do it.

Hence Lucia's paradoxically old-fas.h.i.+oned a.s.signment. But she rather liked the work, although it was routine. The paper always felt soft and oddly warm to her touch, compared to the coa.r.s.e stuff you got from wood pulp.

Her tasks had taught her the importance of accuracy; the archive's main selling point, aside from its historical depth, was its unrivaled reliability. And Lucia's calligraphy was careful, neat-and accurate, as proven by the triple layers of checks all her work was put through. It seemed likely, said the supervisors, that thescrinium would be her career path in the future, when she finished her schooling.

But that, of course, was thrown into uncertainty, like everything else in her life, by the unwelcome arrival of womanhood.

Pina sat on Lucia's desk, her hands clasped together over her knees as if in prayer. They had no privacy, here as anywhere else, of course; there must have been fifty people in the office that morning, working or chatting, and the waist-high part.i.tions hid nothing. Lucia spoke so softly that Pina had to lean closely to hear.

Pina was ten years older than Lucia. She had a small, pretty face, Lucia thought, lacking cheekbones but with a pleasing smoothness. Her eyes were a little darker than most, a kind of graphite gray, and her hair was tied neatly back. Her mouth was small and not very expressive when she talked, which gave her an aura of seriousness compared to other girls-that, and her ten years' age difference, of course. Still, though, her features were quite similar to those of everybody else, including Lucia's, the typical oval face, the gray eyes well within the range of variation.

And, though she was twenty-five, she was small, smaller than Lucia, with a slim figure, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s only the slightest swellings under the white blouse she wore.

She had been friendly to Lucia since her first day here in thescrinium , showing her the basics of her work and such essentials as how to work the coffee machine. Now Pina looked uncomfortable, Lucia thought, but she was listening.

"Don't worry," she said. "Anyhow, now you've drawn me into your secret."

"I'm sorry. If it's one it's a secret, if it's two-"

"It's a conspiracy," Pina said, completing the creche singalong phrase. "Well, I'll forgive you.

Especially as it can't remain a secret for long."

Lucia pulled a face. "I don'twant any of this. I never wanted to be taller-I don't want this bleeding."

"It isn't unnatural."

"Yes, but why me? I feel-"

"Betrayed? Betrayed by your own body?" Pina touched her arm, a gesture of support. "If it's any consolation I don't think you're the only one . . . I suppose my memory is that bit deeper than yours.

Things have been different the last few years. People have been-" She waved her hands vaguely. "- agitated. Every summer the new cadres come up from the downbelow schools, all fresh faces and bright smiles, like fields of flowers. Always charming. There are always one or two who stand out from the crowd."

"Like me."

"But in the last few years there have been more." Pina shrugged. "There are some who say there is trouble with thematres . Perhaps that's somehow disturbing us all."

Lucia had only ever heard the wordmatres a few times in her life. Some called those mysterious figures themamme-nonne -the mother-grandmothers. She had only the dimmest idea about them.Ignorance is strength -another creche slogan. You weren't even supposed to talk about subjects like thematres . . .

She pulled back from Pina. Suddenly it was too much; she was cras.h.i.+ng through too many taboo barriers. "I should get back to work," she said.