Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
Coalescent
Stephen Baxter
To Neil, Ann, Katherine, Anna, and Clare Baines
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
ONE
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
Chapter 1
I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can't face going back to Britain—not yet—and to be here is a great
relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome.
I've taken a room in a house on the Piazza Spirito Santo. There is a small bar downstairs, where I sit in
the shade of vine leaves and drink Coke Light, or sometimes the local lemon liqueur, which tastes like
the sherbet-lemon boiled sweets I used to buy as a kid in Manchester, ground up and mixed with vodka.
The crusty old barman doesn't have a word of English. It's hard to tell his age. The flower bowls on the
outdoor tables are filled with little bundles of twigs that look suspiciously like fasces to me, but I'm too
polite to ask.
Amalfi is a small town nestling in a valley on the Sorrento Peninsula. This is a coast of limestone cliffs,
into which the towns have been carved like seabird nesting grounds. People have adapted to living on a
vertical surface: there are public staircases you can follow all the way to the next town. Nothing in Italy
is new—Amalfi was a maritime power in the Middle Ages—but that sense of immense age, so
oppressive in Rome, is absent here. And yet much of what shaped the horror in Rome is here, all around
me.
The narrow cobbled streets are always crowded with traffic, with cars and buses, lorries and darting
scooters. Italians don't drive as northern Europeans do. They just go for it: they swarm, as Peter
McLachlan would have said, a mass of individuals relying on the unwritten rules of the mob to get them
through.
And then there are the people. Just opposite my bar there is a school. When the kids are let out in the
middle of the day—well, again, they swarm; there's really no other word for it. They erupt into the
piazza in their bright blue smocklike uniforms, all yelling at the tops of their voices. But it's soon over.
Like water draining from a sieve, they disperse to their homes or to the café s and bars, and the noise
fades.
And, of course, there is family. You can't get away from that in Italy.
Amalfi used to be a center for making rag paper, a technique they learned from the Arabs. Once there
were sixty mills here. That number has dwindled to one, but that one still supplies the Vatican, so that
every papal pronouncement can be recorded forever on acid-free rag paper, now made fine enough for a
computer printer to take. And that surviving Amalfi mill has been operated without a break by the same
family for nine hundred years.
The swarming crowds, the thoughtless order of the mob, the cold grasp of ancient families: even I see
visions of the Coalescents everywhere I look.
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
And I see again that extraordinary crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with
the plume of gray-black tufa dust still hanging in the air above it. Workers from the offices and shops,
clutching cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in
their world. And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.
Obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them—but nobody
led. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers
around them, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who pushed
forward in turn. When it reached the edge of the road, the flowing mob broke up, forming ropes and
tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining, probing 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.
I suppose I'm trying to compensate. I spend a lot of my time alone, in my room, or walking in the hills
that loom over the towns. But a part of me still longs, above everything else, to go back, to immerse
myself once more in the Coalescents' warm tactile orderliness. It is an unfulfilled longing that, I suspect,
will stay with me until I die.
How strange that my quest to find my own family would lead me to such mysteries, and would begin
and end in death.
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
Chapter 2
It began at a strange time for everybody, in fact. The news had just emerged about the Kuiper Anomaly,
the strange new light beyond the sky. London is the place to be when a story like that breaks, the kind of
massive, life-changing news that you want to share with your friends, at the office watercoolers or in the
pubs and coffee bars, and chew over the latest wrinkles.
But I had to go home, to Manchester. It was duty. I had lost my father. I was forty-five.
My father's house, the family home where I had grown up, was one of a short street of identical
suburban properties: a neat little semidetached, with scraps of lawn at the front and back. Standing in the
drive on a dazzling, bright September morning, I tried to keep control of my emotions, tried to think like
a stranger.
When they were built in the fifties, not long before my birth, these little houses must have seemed
desirable compared to the back-to-back terraces of the inner city, and a hell of a lot better than the tower
blocks that would follow in a few years' time. But now, in the first decade of the new century, the
brickwork looked hasty and cheap, the little flower beds were subsiding, and some of the exterior work,
like the plaster-covered breeze blocks that lined the driveways, was crumbling. Not much of the street's
original character remained. There were plastic-framed double-glazed windows, rebuilt roofs and
chimney stacks, flat-roofed bedrooms built over the garages, even a couple of small conservatories
tacked on the front of the houses opposite my father's, to catch the southern light. After nearly fifty years
the houses had mutated, evolved, become divergent.
The people had changed, too. Once this had been a street of young families, with us kids playing
elaborate games that paused only when the occasional car came sweeping in off the main road. One car
to a household then, Morris Minors, Triumphs, and Zephyrs that fit neatly into the small garages. Now
there were cars everywhere, cluttering every drive and double-parked along the pavement. Some of the
small gardens had been dug out and paved over, I saw, to make even more room for the cars. There
wasn't a kid to be seen, only cars.
But my home, my old home, was different from the rest.
Our house still had the original wooden concertina-style garage doors, and the small wooden-framed
windows, including the bay at the front of the house where I used to sit and read my comics. But I could
see how the woodwork was chipped and cracked, perhaps even rotten. There had once been an ivy, an
extravagant green scribble over the front of the house. The ivy was long gone, but I could see the scars
on the brickwork where it had clung, palely weathered. Just as when my mother had been alive—she'd
gone ten years earlier—my father would only do the most basic renovation. He did most of his work for
the building trade, and he said he had enough of building and decorating during the week.
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
One of the few nods to modernity I could spot was the silver box of a burglar alarm stuck prominently
on the front wall. Dad's last burglary had been a few years back. It had taken him days to notice it,
before he had discovered the neatly broken lock on the garage door, and the smashed window in the car
he rarely used, and the neatly coiled turd on the floor. Kids, the police had said. Panic reactions. My
father had been defiant, but he had been troubled by the draining of his own strength, and his inability to
fight back as he always had before against the cruel selfishness of others. I had paid for the alarm and
arranged for it to be installed. But, I'm ashamed to say, this was the first day I'd actually seen it in place.
Alarm or not, a single windowpane in the front door gaped, broken and unrepaired.
“George Poole. It is George, isn't it?”
I turned, startled. The man standing before me was bulky, balding. He wore clothes that were vaguely
out of joint, perhaps too young for him—bright yellow T-shirt, jeans, training shoes, a chunky-looking
cell phone stuck in a chest pocket. Despite his bearlike size you instantly got an impression of shyness,
for his shoulders were hunched as if to mask his height, and his hands, folded together in front of his
belly, plucked at each other.
And despite the graying hair, high forehead, and thickened neck and jaw, I recognized him straight away.
“Peter?”
His name was Peter McLachlan. We had been in the same year at school, for most of our careers in the
same classes. At school he was always Peter, never Pete or Petey, and I guessed he was the same now.
He stuck out his hand. His grip was tentative, his palm cold and moist. “I saw you drive up. I bet you're
surprised to find me standing here.”
“Not really. My father used to mention you.”
“Nice duffel coat,” he said.
“What? … Oh, yeah.”
“Takes me back to school days. Didn't know you could buy them anymore.”
“I've a special supplier. Caters for the style-challenged.” It was true.
We stood there awkwardly for a moment. I always did feel awkward with Peter, for he was one of those
people who could never relax in company. And there was something different about his face, which took
me a couple of seconds to cue in on: he wasn't wearing the thick glasses that had always been inflicted
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
on him as a kid in the seventies. I couldn't see the telltale eye widening of contacts; maybe he'd had laser
surgery.
“I'm sorry about breaking your window,” he said now.
“That was you?”
“It was the night he died. Your father didn't come to the door when I brought him his evening paper. I
thought it was best to check …”
“You found him? I didn't know.”
“I would have had to go into the house to fix the window, and I thought I shouldn't until you—you
know.”
“Yes.” Moved by his thoughtfulness, I gently slapped his shoulder. I could feel muscles under his sleeve.
But he flinched. He said, “I'm sorry about your father.”
“I'm sorry you had to find him.” I knew I had to say more. “And thanks for checking on him.”
“Didn't do him much good, I'm afraid.”
“But you tried. He told me how you used to look out for him. Mow the lawn—”
“It wasn't any trouble. After all, I got to know him when we were kids.”
“Yes.”
“You haven't been in there yet, have you?”
“You know I haven't if you saw me park,” I said a bit sharply.
“Do you want me to come in with you?”
“I don't want to trouble you anymore. I should do this.”
“It's no trouble. But I don't want to impose …”
We were circling around the issue, still awkward. In the end, of course, I accepted the offer.
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
We walked up the drive. Even the tarmac was rotten, I noted vaguely; it crackled softly under my
weight. I produced a key, sent me by the hospital that had notified me of the death. I slid it into the Yale
lock, and pushed the door open.
There was a noisy bleeping. Peter reached past me to punch a code into a control box set in an open
cupboard in the porch. “He gave me the code,” he said. “The burglar alarm. In case of false alarms, you
know. That's how I was able to turn it off, when I broke the window to get in. In case you were
wondering how … I was a key holder. But he had a deadbolt and a chain, which was why I had to break
the window—”
“It's okay, Peter,” I said, a little impatient. Shut up. He never had known when to do that.
He subsided.
I took a breath and stepped into the house.
* * *
Here it all was, my childhood home, just as it had always been.
In the hall, a hat stand laden with musty coats, a telephone table with a seventies-era handset and a heap
of scribbled names, numbers, and notes piled up in a cardboard box, notes in Dad's handwriting. In an
alcove Dad had carved out of the wall, a small, delicate statue of the Virgin Mary. Downstairs, the
dining room with the scarred old table, the small kitchen with greasy-looking stove and Formica-topped
table, the living room with bookshelves, battered sofa and armchairs, and a surprisingly new TV system,
complete with VCR and DVD. The narrow staircase—exactly fifteen stairs, just as I'd counted as a child
—up to the landing, where there was a bathroom, the master bedroom and three small rooms, and the
little hatchway to the attic. The wallpaper was plain, but it didn't look as shabby as I'd expected, or
feared. So Dad must have decorated since I'd last visited, five or six years ago—or had it done, perhaps
by Peter, who stood on the doormat behind me, a great lumpen presence. I didn't want to ask him.
It all felt small, so damn small. I had a fantasy that I was a giant like Gulliver, trapped in the house, with
my arms stuck in the living room and kitchen, my legs pinned in the bedrooms.
Peter was looking at the Virgin. “Still a Catholic household. Father Moore would be proud.” The parish
priest, kindly but formidable, when we were both kids; he had given us our First Communions. “Do you
practice?”
I shrugged. “I'd go to Mass at Christmas and Easter with my dad, if we were together. Otherwise I guess
you'd call me lapsed. You?”
He just laughed. “Since we know so little about the universe, religion seems a bit silly. I miss the ritual,
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
though. It was comforting. And the community.”
“Yes, the community.” Peter was from Irish Catholic stock, my mother's family Italian American. Both
cliché s, in our way, I thought. I stared up at Mary's plaster face, frozen in an expression of pained
kindness. “I suppose I was used to all this stuff as a kid. Faces staring down at me from the wall. Seems
vaguely oppressive now.”
Peter was studying me. “Are you okay? How do you feel?”
Irritation flared. “Fine,” I snapped.
He flinched, and pressed his forefinger to the space between his eyes, and I realized he was straightening
nonexistent glasses.
I was suddenly ashamed. “Peter, I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. I'm not here to make you feel sorry. This is your time.” He spread his big hands. “Everything
you do now, you're going to remember for the rest of your life.”
“Christ, you're right,” I said, dismayed.
I walked the few paces to the kitchen door, which was open. There was a musty smell. A cup, saucer,
and plate sat with bits of cutlery on the table. The plate was covered with cold grease and dried flecks of
what looked like bacon. There was a little puddle of liquid in the bottom of the cup, on which green
bacterial colonies floated; I recoiled.
“I found him in the hall,” Peter said.
“I heard.” Dad had suffered a series of massive strokes. I picked up the cup, saucer, and plate and carried
them to the sink.
“I don't think the fall itself hurt him. He looked peaceful. He was lying just there.” He pointed to the
hall. “I used his phone to call the hospital. I didn't go into the rest of the house. Not even to clean up.”
“That was thoughtful,” I murmured.
I looked out of the kitchen window at the small back garden. The grass needed cutting, I noted absently,
and the pale spires of ant colonies towered amid the green. In one corner of the garden, where they
would get the most light, were the skeletal forms of the azaleas, my father's pride and joy, cherished for
years—Christ, decades. But at this time of year they were as barren and stark as at midwinter.
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Coalescent - Stephen Baxter
I looked down at the sink. Clean dishes, looking dusty, were racked up, and there was a stink of
staleness from the drain. I turned on the taps and tipped the mold out of the cup into the drainer. The
cold tea poured away, and green bacterial spots slid silently, but there was still plenty of scum clinging
to the cup. I looked for washing-up liquid, but couldn't see any, even in the small, crammed cupboard
under the sink. I pulled the cup out of the water again and looked into it, feeling foolish, futile, ensnared.
Peter was standing in the kitchen door. “I'll bring over some Fairy Liquid if you like.”
“Fuck it,” I snarled. I stepped on the pedal of the bin in the cupboard and threw in the dirty cup. But the
bin was half full and stank, too, of what might have been rotten fruit. I got to my knees and began to root
in the cupboard, pulling aside cardboard boxes and yellowed plastic bags.
“What are you looking for?”
“Bin liners. The whole damn place is a mess.” Everything seemed old, even the cans and plastic
dispensers of cleaning stuff in the cupboard, old and dirty and crusted and half used up but never thrown
out. My searching was getting more violent; I was scattering stuff around the floor.
“Take it easy,” Peter said. “Give yourself a minute.”
He was right, of course. I forced myself to back up.
He had left this, my father had, this little set of dirty dishes. He'd never come back to finish the tea. He'd
just stopped, his life cutting off at that moment, like a film breaking. Now I had to tidy this stuff away, a
chore I used to loathe as a kid: He never would clean up after himself. But when it was done, there
would be no more, no more dirty cups and greasy crockery, not ever. And as I worked my way through
the house, room by room, I would be fixing messes that he would never make again.
I said, “It's as if he's dying, a little bit more. Just by me doing this.”
“You had a sister. She was older than us, wasn't she?”
“Gina, yes. She came over for the funeral. But she went back to America. We're going to sell the house;
we share it fifty-fifty, according to Dad's will—”
“America?”
“Florida.” My maternal grandfather had been a GI, an Italian American, stationed briefly in Liverpool
some time before the war. You might say my mother was a premature war baby, conceived during that
stay. After the war the GI had not fulfilled his promise to come back to England. I told Peter all this.
“But there was a happy ending,” I said. “My grandfather got back in touch sometime in the fifties.”
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