“It’s simple Darwinian logic. It pays.”

“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 pass 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 mean strength, 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 sex 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 ejaculate 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 of time ?”

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 nobody 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 passages 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 them Coalescents…”

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, because she 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 circumstances, 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 cafй 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 assistant 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.