Stephen Baxter - Destiny's Children 1 - Coalescent

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STEPHEN BAXTER

COALESCENT

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

Coalescentis a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey®Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

e-ISBN 0-345-45787-0

ONE

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.

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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: theyswarm , 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 cafés 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 fornine 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.

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

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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, togo 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.

Chapter2

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

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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.

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.”

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“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

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.

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“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.

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.

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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,

though. It was comforting. And the community.”

“Yes, the community.” Peter was from Irish Catholic stock, my mother’s family Italian American. Both

clichés, 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.

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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.

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 seemedold , 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?”

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“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.”

“Guilt?”

“I suppose. He was never a true father. But he sent money over, and took Mum and Gina over to the

States a few times, when Gina was small. Then we inherited some property in Florida, left to my mother

by a cousin she’d met over there. Gina went to work over there, took the house, raised a family. She

works in PR—I’m sorry, it’s a complicated story—”

“Family stories are like that.”

“Episodic. No neat narrative structure.”

“That makes you uncomfortable.”

It was a perceptive remark I wouldn’t have expected from the Peter I’d known. “I suppose it does. It’s

all kind of a tangle. Like a spider’s web. I felt as if I got myself out of it, by building a life in London.

Now I have to get tangled up again.” And I resented it, I realized, even as I tried to finish these few last

chores for my father.

Peter asked, “Do you have kids of your own?”

I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn’t asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since

school, his circumstances now. “How about you?”

“I never married,” he said simply. “I was a policeman—did you know that?”

I grinned; I couldn’t help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?

Evidently he was used to the reaction. “I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early . . .”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Other things to do.” I would find out later what those “other things” were. “Look, let me

help. Go see to the rest of the house. I’ll sort this out—I can fill a bin liner for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s okay. I’d like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I’ll just leave it.”

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“You’re very thoughtful.”

He shrugged. “You’d do the same for me.”

I wasn’t sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated

strata. But I didn’t say any more.

I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter’s cell phone calling

for attention.

My father’s bedroom.

The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a

waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was

alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left

it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the

past, a fading still image on a broken video.

I turned off the lamp, closed the book. I poked about the room listlessly, unsure what to do.

The dressing table before the window had always been my mother’s domain. Even now the rows of

family photographs—my graduation, smiling American grandkids—looked just as when I’d last seen

them, perhaps as she’d left them. The dust was thicker behind the photographs, as if Dad had barely

touched this corner since she’d gone. There was some mail scattered on the surface, a few bills, a

postcard from Rome.

Cancer had taken my mother. She had always been a young mother, just nineteen when I was born. She

still seemed young when she died, right to the end of her life.

On his last night my father had emptied his pockets here, never to fill them again. I threw a grimy

handkerchief into the laundry bag. I found a little change and some bills, which I absently pocketed—the

coins felt heavy and cold through the fabric of my pocket—and his wallet, slim and containing a single

credit card, which I also took.

The dresser had two small drawers. In one was a bundle of mail in opened envelopes, from my sister,

my mother, my younger self. I pushed the letters back into the drawer, a task for later. In the other

drawer were a few checkbook stubs, a couple of bank account passbooks, and bank statements and credit

card bills, held neatly together with treasury tags. I swept all this stuff up and crammed it into my jacket

pocket. I knew I was being a coward in my priorities: closing down his financial affairs was something I

could do on remote control, easily, without leaving my comfort zone.

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