She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.

We approached another doorway, cut into the rock. Light poured out, comparatively bright, and I heard a noise, chattering, high-pitched, and continuous, like seagulls on a rock.

There were babies in here. They were all very young, no more than a few months old. The walls were painted bright primary colors, and the rock floor was covered by a soft rubber matting, on which lay the babies-all pale, all wispy-haired, all with blank gray eyes-so many I couldn't even count them. The air in the room was hot, dense, moist, laden with sweet infant smells of milk and baby s.h.i.t. As I gazed in at this the women of the Order pressed around me as they always did, warm and oddly sweet-scented themselves; a part of me wanted to struggle, as if I were drowning.

"From our oldest inhabitants," said Rosa dryly, "to our youngest."

"It's all true, isn't it, Rosa?" I asked her with cold dread. "Just as Lucia said. You turn young girls into old witches and keep them alive, keep them pumping out clutches of kids every year, until they're a hundred . . ."

She just ignored me. "You never had children, George. Well, neither did I. We have our nephews, I suppose, out in Miami Beach. I've never even seen them . . ." Her hand tightened on mine, and her voice was insistent, compelling. It was almost as if I were talking to myself. "You never meant to be childless, did you? But you never found the right woman-not even the girl you married-never managed to create the rightenvironment around yourself, never found a place you felt comfortable. And the years went by . . .No kids. How does that make you feel? Our little lives are brief and futile. Nothing we build lasts-not in the long run-not stone temples or statues, not even empires. But our genes endure-our genes are a billion years old already-and they will live forever,if we pa.s.s them on."

"It's too late for you," I said brutally.

She flinched. But she said, "No, it isn't. It's never too late for any of us-not here.

"Look at these children, George. None of them are my own. But they are all-cousins. Nieces, nephews.

Andthat's the reason I will always stay here. Because this is my family. My way of beating death." Her face seemed to float before me in the gloom, intense, like a distorted reflection of my own in smoky gla.s.s."And it can be yours."

At first I didn't understand. "Through nieces and nephews?"

She smiled. "For you, there might be more than that. George, every child needs a father-even here. But you want the father of your nieces to be strong, smart, capable: you want the best blood you can find.

It's best if the fathers come from the family, as long as they are remote enough genetically-and the family is so big now that's no problem . . ."

She was finally getting to the point, I realized uneasily.

"George, you're one of us. And you've shown yourself to be smart-resilient-decent, too, in your impulse to find me-even in your attempt to help Lucia, misguided though it was."

I tried to think through what she was saying. "What are you offering me? s.e.x?"

Rosa laughed. "Well, yes. But more.Family, George. That's what I'm offering you. Immortality. You came looking for me, looking for family. Well, you found both. A true family-not that flawed, sad little bunch we were in Manchester."

I could stay here, that was what Rosa was telling me. I could become part of this. Like Lucia's Giuliano, I thought. And by submitting myself as a stud-it seems laughable, but what else could you call it?-I would find a way for my heritage to live on.

For a moment I didn't trust myself to speak. But none of this seemed strange or disturbing. On the contrary, it seemed the most attractive offer in the world.

My cell phone trilled. It was a bright, clean, modern sound that seemed to cut through the murk of blood and milk that filled the air.

I pulled my hand away from Rosa. I dug out the phone, and raised it to my face. The screen was a tiny sc.r.a.p of plastic, backlit with green, that glowed bright as a star in that enclosing gloom. A text showed: GRT DNGER GET a.r.s.e OUT PTR.

I turned off the phone. The screen went blank.

Rosa was watching me. Around her the steady stream of white-robed women pushed past her, as they always did.

"Get a.r.s.e out," I said.

"What?"

"He's right." I shook my head, trying to clear it. "I need to get out of here."

Rosa's eyes narrowed.

The others, the women nearest me, reacted, too. Some of them turned to me, even breaking their stride, looking at me in a kind of mild dismay. Their reaction spread out farther, as each woman responded to what her neighbor was doing. It was as if I had detonated an invisible bomb down there, and ripples of dismay were spreading out around me.

At the focus of all that, I felt ashamed. "I'm sorry," I said helplessly.

Rosa moved closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. At that touch the posture of the strangers around us relaxed a little. There were even smiles. I felt a kind of relief, a forgiveness. I wanted to be accepted here, I realized; I couldn't bear the thought of exclusion from this close, touching group.

"It's okay," said Rosa. "You don't have to go. I can sort everything out. Tell me where your hotel is- did you say it was near the Forum? I'll call them-"

But I stuck to my thought of Peter. "Get a.r.s.e out, get a.r.s.e out." I repeated it over and over, an absurd mantra. "Let me go, Rosa."

"All right," she said, forcing a smile. "You need a little time. That's okay." She led me down the corridor. A part of me was glad to get away from the little knot of bystanders who hadseen what I had done, whoknew how I had betrayed them; I was glad to walk away from my shame. "Take all the time you want," Rosa said soothingly. "We'll always be here.I'll be here. You know that."

"Get a.r.s.e out," I mumbled.

We came at last to the steel door of a modern high-speed lift. We rode up in silence, Rosa still watching me; in her eyes there was something of the pressure of the gaze of those deep Crypt dwellers, their mute disappointment.

As we rose I'll swear my ears popped.

I emerged into a sunlit modern office on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. I was nearly blinded by the light, and the dry oxygen-rich air seared into my lungs, making me giddy.

Peter had hired a car. It was waiting for me on the Cristoforo Colombo, outside the Order's office. Now, to my utter dismay, he insisted on taking me for a drive.

Chapter 47.

"I was full of theories. Basically I thought the Order was just a wacko religious cult. Then, when we met Lucia, and found out about this girl Pina, I started to wonder if it was some kind of bizarre psychos.e.xual organization, perhaps with a religious framework to give it some justification. But now, with what you described about what you found down there, George-and after I discussed it with some of the Slan(t)ers -I think I've put it together at last.

"The Order isn't about religion, or s.e.x, or family. It isn't aboutanything its members think it's about- they don't know, any more than any one ant knows what an ant colony is for. The Orderexists for itself ."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.

"I know you don't. So listen."

We headed straight out of town until we hit the outer ring road, the GRA. Soon we were stationary, one in a long line of cars, whose roofs and windscreens gleamed in the sun like the carapaces of metaled insects. Even at the best of times this road is a linear parking lot, and now it was the end of the working day, the rush hour. We inched forward, Peter thrusting the car into the smallest gaps with the best of them, blaring his horn and edging through the crowds. I'd have been scared for my safety if not for the fact that our speed was so slow.

The car was a battered old Punto. With a head still full of the Crypt, I felt utterly disoriented. I said, "This car belongs to the Pakistani amba.s.sador."

He looked at me oddly. "Oh. Michael Caine. I saw that movie, too . . ."

"You're making some kind of point, aren't you?"

"d.a.m.n right," he said. "You won't understand, not at first. And when youdo understand you probably won't believe me." His knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel, and he was sweating. "So I'll have to make you see. This might be more important than you can imagine."

I smiled. "Important.This from a man who thinks that alien ships are making three-point turns in the core of the Earth. What could be important compared to that?"

"More than you know," he said. "George, what causes traffic jams?"

I shrugged. "Well, you need a crowded road. Roadworks. Breakdowns."

"What roadworks?"

There were no works ahead, no obvious breakdowns or crash sites. And yet we were stationary.

Peter said, "George, to make a traffic jam all you need is traffic. The jams just occur. Look around. All that makes up the traffic is individual drivers-right? And each of us makes individual decisions, based, minute to minute, on what our neighbors are doing. There's not a one of us whointends to cause a jam, that's for sure. And there's not one of us who has a global view of the traffic, like you'd get from a police chopper, say. There are only the drivers.

"And yet, from our individual decisions made in ignorance, the traffic jam emerges, a giant organized structure involving maybe thousands of cars. So where does the jam come from?"

We were moving forward by now, in fits and starts, but, scarily, he took his eyes off the road to look at me, testing my understanding.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"This is what they callemergence , George," he said. "From simple rules, applied at a low level, like the decisions made by the drivers on this d.a.m.n road-and with feedback to amplify the effects, like a slowing car forcing a slowdown behind it-large-scale structures can emerge. It's called self-organized criticality. The traffic always tries to organize itself to get as many cars through as possible, but it's constantly on the point of breakdown. The jams are like waves, or ripples, pa.s.sing back and forth along the lines of cars."

It was hard for me to concentrate on this. Too much had happened today. Sitting in that lurching car, I felt as if I were in a dream. I groped for the point he was trying to make. "So the Order is like a traffic jam," I said. "The Order is a kind of feedback effect."

"We'll get to the Order. One step at a time." He wrenched the wheel, and we plunged out of the traffic toward a junction that would lead us back toward the center of the city.

We roared up Mussolini's great avenue, hared through the Venezia, lurched left onto the Plebiscito.

Peter rammed the long-suffering Punto into a few feet of parking s.p.a.ce. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it.

We got out of the car, locked it up, and made for a bar. I wanted coffee. Peter went to order while I found a table.

Peter returned with a bottle of beer. "You need this more than coffee, believe me."

And oddly, he was right. Something about the heft of the bottle in my hand, the cool tang of the beer, that first subtle softening of perception as the alcohol kicked in, brought me back to reality, or anyhow my version of it. I raised the bottle to Peter. "Here's to me," I said. "And what I truly am. An appendage clamped to the mouth of a beer bottle."

He had a c.o.ke Light; he raised it ironically. "As a destiny, that will do," he said seriously. "Just don't lose yourself down in that hole in the ground . . ."

"Emergence," I said. "Traffic jams."

"Yes. And think about cities."

"Cities?"

"Sure. Who plans cities? Oh, I know we try to now, but in the past-say, in Rome-it wasn't even attempted. But cities have patterns nevertheless, stable patterns that persist far beyond any human time horizon: neighborhoods that are devoted to fashion, or upscale shops, or artists; poor, crime-ridden districts, upmarket rich areas. Bright lights attract more bright lights, and cl.u.s.ters start.

"This is what emergence is: agents working at one scale unconsciously producing patterns at one level above them. Drivers rushing to work create traffic jams; urbanites keeping up with the Joneses create neighborhoods."

"Unconsciously. They create these patterns without meaning to."

"Yes.That's the point. Local decision making, coupled with feedback, does it for them. We humans think we're in control. In fact we're enmeshed in emergent structures-jams, cities, even economies- working on scales of s.p.a.ce and time far beyond our ability to map. Now let's talk about ants."

That had come out of left field. "From cities to ants?"

"What do you know about ants?"

"Nothing," I said. "Except that they are persistent b.u.g.g.e.rs when they get into your garden."

"Ants are social insects-like termites, bees, wasps. And you can't get them out of your garden because social insects are so b.l.o.o.d.y successful," he said. "There are more species of ant in a square mile of Brazilian rain forest than there are species of primate across the planet. And there are more workers in one ant colony than there are elephants in all the world . . ."

"You've been on the Internet again."

He grinned. "All human wisdom is there. Everybody knows about ant colonies. But most of what everybody knows is wrong. Only the queen lays eggs, only the queen pa.s.ses on her genes to the next generation. That much is true. But you probably think that an anthill is like a little city, with the queen as a dictator in control of everything."

"Well-"

"Wrong.George, the queen is important. But in the colony, n.o.body knows what's going on globally- not even the queen. There's no one ant making any decisions in there about the destiny of the colony.

Each one is just following the crowd, to build a tunnel, shift more eggs, bring back food. But out of all those decisions, the global structure of the colony emerges. That social scaling-up, by the way, is the secret of the social insects' success. If a solitary animal misses out a task, it doesn't get done. But with the ants, if one worker misses a task somebody else is sure to come along and do it for her. Even the death of an individual worker is irrelevant, because there is always somebody to take her place. Ant colonies areefficient .

"But it is the colony that counts, not the queen.That is the organism, a diffuse organism with maybe a million tiny mouths and bodies . . . Bodies that organize themselves so that their tiny actions and interactions add up, globally, to the operation of the colony itself."

"So an anthill is like a traffic jam," I guessed. "Emergent."

"Yes. Emergence ishow an anthill works. Now we have to talk about genes, which iswhy it works." He was off again, and I struggled to keep focused.

"Social insects have three basic characteristics." He ticked the points off on his fingers. "You get many individuals cooperating in caring for the young-not just parents, as among most mammals, say.

Second, there is an overlap of generations. Children stay at home to live with their parents and grandparents. Third, you have a reproductive division of labor-"

"Neuters," I said.

"Yes. Workers, who may remain sterile throughout their lives, serving the breeders . . ."

I started to get a sense of where he was going. I didn't want to hear it. Dread gathered in the pit of my stomach. I pulled on the beer, drinking too fast. When I came back to George, he was talking about Darwin.

". . . Darwin himself thought ants were a great challenge to his theory of evolution. How could sterile worker castes evolve if they leave no offspring? I mean, the whole point of life is to pa.s.s on your genes -isn't it? How can that happen if you're neuter? Well, in fact, natural selection worksat the level of the gene , not the individual.

"If you're a neuter, you give up your chance of having daughters, but by doing so you help Mom produce more sisters. Why do you do it? Because it's in your genetic interests. Look, your sisters share half your genes, because you were born from the same parents. So your nieces are less closely related to you than your own daughters. But if, by remaining celibate, you candouble the numbers of your nieces, you gain more in terms of genes pa.s.sed on. In the long term you've won the genetic lottery.

"The numbers are different for ants. The way they pa.s.s on their genes is different from mammals-if you're an ant your sister is actually closer to you genetically than your own daughter!-so they have a predisposition to this kind of group living, which is no doubt why it rose so early and so often among the insects. But the principle's the same.

"George, an ant colony isn't a dictatorship, or a communist utopia.It is a family. It's a logical outcome of high population densities and a hostile external environment. Sometimes it pays to stay home with Mom, because it's safer that way-but you need a social order to cope with the crowding. So you help Mom bring up your sisters. It's harsh, but it's a stable system; emergence makes the colony as a whole work, and there is a genetic payoff for everybody, and they all get along just fine . . . The biologists call this way of living 'eusociality'-eulike inutopia , meaning 'perfect.' "

"A perfect family? Now that's scary."

"But it's not like a human family. This genetic calculus doesn't have much to do with traditional human morality . . . Not until now," he said mysteriously. "And it's not just ants." He played his trump card.

"Consider naked mole rats."