For some reason I thought of Linda, my ex-wife. She had always had a lot more common sense than I did. What would Linda say, if she was here?

Look around you, George.

Lucia looked up at me, her eyes full of bewilderment, her body battered by childbirth, her face prematurely lined with pain.

Cut the bullshit. Remember what you said to that kid Daniel: you admired him because he had responded to this wretched child Lucia on a human level. You were as pompous as always, but you were right. Well, look at Lucia now, George; look at her with that scrap of a baby. I wouldn’t trust you to adjudicate on the future of humankind. And I’m not interested in your self-pitying whinging about whether you’ll die childless or not. But you are a fully functioning human being. Act that way …

Of course. It was obvious.

I walked up to Rosa, and said as softly as I could, “Here’s the deal. I’ll help you disarm Peter. But you have to open this place up. Connect with the world. I think Lucia has suffered, and if I can stop that I will.”

She glared at me; her anger was taking over. “What right have you to make such pronouncements? You’re a man, George, and so is that murderous fool in the rock. This is a place built by and for women. Who are you to lecture us on our humanity?”

“Take it or leave it.”

Gnawing her lip, she studied my face. Then she nodded curtly.

Together, we crossed to Peter’s cleft in the rock. But things didn’t go as planned.

“I couldn’t hear you,” Peter whispered. “But I could see you. You’ve come to some kind of deal, haven’t you, George? A deal that is bound to preserve the hive.” He sighed, sounding desolate. “I suppose I knew this would happen. But I can’t let you do this. I shouldn’t have let you talk about negotiating at all. I’m weak, I suppose.”

“Why can’t we talk?…”

“It has to stop here, or it never will. Because the hive is ready to break out. Think about it. Hives need raw material — drones, lots of them, living in conditions of high population densities, and highly interconnected. Until the modern era, less than one human in thirty lived in a community of more than five thousand people. Today more than half the world’s population lives in an urban environment. And we are more interconnected than ever before.”

“What are you saying, Peter?”

“When the breakout comes it will be a phase transition — all at once — the world will transform, as water turns to ice, as a field of wildflowers suddenly blooms in the spring. In its way it will be beautiful. But it’s an end point for us. There will be new gods on Earth: mindless gods, a pointless transcendence. From now on the story of the planet will not be of humanity, but of the hive …”

“Peter.” The situation was rapidly slipping away from me. “If you’ll just come out of there—”

“You know why you’re prepared to betray me, to save the Order? Because you’re part of the hive, too. George, you’re just another drone — remote from the center, yes, but a drone nonetheless. Perhaps you always were. And the tragedy is, you don’t even know it, do you?”

I felt as if the cave, the giant, densely peopled superstructure of the Crypt, was rotating around me. Was it possible I really had somehow been sucked into some emergent superorganism — was it possible that my decision now was being taken, not in my or Peter’s or Lucia’s interests, but in the mindless interests of the hive itself? If so — how could I know ? Again I longed for oxygen.

“I can’t think through that, Peter. I’m going to follow my instinct. What else can I do?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing at all. But, you see, I’m the only free mind in this whole damn place. Good-bye, George.”

“Peter!”

I heard a click.

And then the floor lurched.

I clattered into one wall, an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Some of the lights failed; I heard a bulb smash with a remote tinkle. There was a remote rumbling, as if an immense truck was passing by.

There was a second’s respite. I saw Lucia on the ground. She was sheltering her baby. They were both gray with dust.

Then rock fragments started hailing down from the ceiling, heavy, sharp-edged. I pushed myself away from the wall, crawled over to Lucia, and threw myself over her and the infant. I was lucky; I was hit, but by nothing large enough to hurt.

The rumbling passed. The rock bits stopped falling. Gingerly I moved away from Lucia. We were both gray with dust, and her eyes were wide — shock, perhaps — but she and the baby seemed unhurt.

I heard running footsteps, shouts. Torchlight flickered in the dimly lit corridor.

Rosa was at the cleft in the rock, pulling away rubble with her bare hands. I could see a hand, a single hand, protruding from beneath the debris. It was bloody, and gray dust clung to the dripping crimson.

I ran over. My battered legs and back were sore, my lungs and chest hurt from where I had been thrown against the wall. But I dragged at the rock. Soon my fingers were aching, the nails broken.

Rosa, meanwhile, had taken a pulse from that protruding hand. She took my arm and pulled me away. “George, forget it. There’s nothing we can do.”

I slowed, jerkily, as if my energy was draining. I let the last handful of rubble drop to the floor.

I took Peter’s hand. It was still warm, but it was inert, and I could feel how it dangled awkwardly. I felt inexpressibly sad. “Peter, Peter,” I whispered. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

Running footsteps closed on us. Hive workers, of course, drones, most of them women, all of them dressed in dust-covered smocks. Faces swam before me in the uncertain light, gray eyes troubled. I grabbed Lucia’s hand, and she clung to me just as hard. “Go,” I shouted at the drones. “Get out. There may be more falls. Take the stairs. Go, go …”

The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.

The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed partition walls, smashed glass. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where the mamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pushing beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.

I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.

It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.

Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.

And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.

Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter’s crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the mass were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of the mamme-nonne. Nobody was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed 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.