Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 48

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 ch.o.r.es 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 s.e.xual characteristics, and there is a b.l.o.o.d.y succession battle- and the prize for the victor is nothing less than the chance to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sageways. 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 a.n.a.lysis 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, yourmamme-nonne , are favored over everybody else's rights, even over their own children's. The drones' only chance of pa.s.sing on their own genes is to help their mothers, and their sisters . . ."

It was the first time he had used the worddrones .

"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 gla.s.ses, 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 onin 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, andthey 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 actuallysaid ."

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 cl.u.s.ters of cells into eyes and ears . . . I admit I'm speculating about this.

"But, George, put it all together and you've got a cla.s.sic 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 ma.s.saged 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 p.u.b.erty? 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. Itpays ."

"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 pa.s.s 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 meanstrength , 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 s.e.x 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e 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 oftime ?"

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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sages 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 themCoalescents . . ."

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, becauseshe 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 cafe 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 a.s.sistant 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?"

"n.o.body. 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 ofyou ."

"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 betrayedmy trust. I took you into my home. I showed you its treasures. And you told anoutsider . 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." Ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sociated with the incident.

One of them was, indubitably, Peter's face.

I stood back. "s.h.i.t."

"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."