Chapter 46.

"Show me Lucia," I said to my sister.

She shook her head. "George, George-"

"Never mind the bulls.h.i.t.Show me Lucia. "

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 succ.u.mbed to Peter's pressure, confronted my own complicated fears, and returned to the Crypt.

This time Rosa brought me to a place she called theperistylium . 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 cafe 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 s.e.xually; 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 d.a.m.n 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 sofamiliar , 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 gla.s.s 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.

"Shedidn'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 aboutme . 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 ma.s.sage. "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 part.i.tion 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'tsupposed to know where you were.

Still, it soon became clear that we had pa.s.sed below what I had roughly labeled as Level 1, the uppermost, most modern-looking area of the Crypt, where schoolchildren studied purposefully and thescrinarii 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, part.i.tions, 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, opencubicula 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 coc.o.o.ns. The corridors, too, were always packed with people, squeezing to and fro on their endless ch.o.r.es.

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 s.p.a.ce, I thought idly. They weren't freaks.

None of them would have looked out of place in one of Rome's ancient piazzas. But c.u.mulatively, 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 cla.s.srooms above, would ever reach. n.o.body would see this-n.o.body 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 pa.s.sageway."

"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, n.o.body. 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'tneed 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 fewplans 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 pa.s.sage 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. n.o.body 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 thecalm in here? . . ."

I felt the need to cut through this odd seduction. "What about s.e.x?"

"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 n.o.body 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 cla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.ds. And these were Regina's family G.o.ds-ourG.o.ds. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here thematres 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 G.o.ds 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.