And the floor was covered with infants. “The current crop of one- to two-year-olds,” Rosa murmured.

There were about two hundred babies here, in this one great room. Adults dressed in pale gray uniforms walked among them. The children were dressed in identical blue-and-white romper suits, though some of them had worked free an arm or leg. The children played with each other and the toys that littered the floor, exploring, gnawing. The babies were a carpet of wriggling forms — like worms, Lucia thought oddly, or like stranded fish. She could smell them, a dense, pale smell of milk and piss and poops, and the noise they made was a shrill roar. And when they chanced to look toward her, they all had the same oval face, pale hair, smoke-gray eyes.

The attendants looked young themselves — some of them surely younger than Lucia herself. It occurred to Lucia that there was a pattern of age in the Crypt. She had seen it for herself. In these deep levels most people were young, children and young adults helping in the nursery, and doing basic maintenance. Older women, like Pina, tended to work at the higher levels, the schools and libraries, and in the surface offices. It wasn’t an exclusive pattern; a few people, like Rosa, seemed comfortable everywhere. But still, she thought, the Crypt was like a great onion, layers divided by age, the oldest outside, getting younger as you penetrated deeper — until at the center were the youngest of all, the babies, and, paradoxically, the very oldest, the matres.

But this was another heretical analysis that she must try to block from her mind.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rosa murmured.

“You do?”

“You’ve mixed with outsiders. I was brought up as a contadino, remember. You’re seeing this through the eyes of an outsider — and you’re thinking how strange this would seem to them.”

Perhaps I was, Lucia thought.

“You don’t have to deny it,” Rosa murmured. “Well, so it would be strange to anybody who grew up in a little nuclear family. It seemed strange to me, until I understood how right it all was … Once you were a child like this, Lucia. Once you played in this room, as these children do now.”

“I know.”

“And then, with your year group, you moved through the stages of your life, the crиches and nursery schools, and then your formal schooling on the top story … And more children took your place here.”

Lucia shrugged. “Everybody knows about that. It’s the way the Order is renewed.”

“Yes, of course it is. Now come.” She walked on, and Lucia followed.

They went through a door, and passed down another corridor. It was colder here, and darker, lit only by a string of dangling bulbs.

Rosa said as they walked, “Ten thousand people live here, in the Crypt. Every year, about one percent of us die — some accidents and illnesses, mostly old age. That’s a hundred a year. That’s how many have to be replaced. You said it yourself: the Order must be renewed. Has it occurred to you to wonder how?”

Lucia frowned. “There must be a hundred babies a year, then. To maintain the numbers.”

“That’s right. Just as we saw in the nursery. The future of the Order: every year a hundred warm bodies are passed into the great processing machine of the Crypt at one end, and a hundred cold ones carried out the other. Eh?”

Lucia shuddered. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“But accurate enough. All right. But where do the babies come from, Lucia?”

Lucia, uncomfortable, said, “The matres.”

“That’s right. The matres, the mothers of us all. Lucia, you know that the Order is very old. Once the Order was small, and there were only three matres — like the three ancient goddesses in this alcove. But the Order grew, and we needed more babies, and the matres had to become nine, three times three. And then the Order grew again, and the nine became twenty-seven, three by three by three …”

It didn’t seem at all strange to Lucia that to keep up an output of a hundred babies each of those twenty- seven must produce three or four babies each, every year.

They came to a little alcove, carved into the wall. In the alcove, behind a thick slab of glass, stood three tiny statues, grimy with age, worn with much handling. They looked like women, but they all wore hooded cloaks. Perhaps they were figures of Befana, Lucia thought.

Rosa touched the glass. “This is bulletproof … These are the first matres, the symbolic heart of the Order — just as the twenty-seven flesh-and-blood matres are its wombs.

“But soon, the twenty-seven will become twenty-six. Maria Ludovica is not, in fact, the oldest of the matres, but she is the frailest. And Maria is dying, Lucia.” Rosa’s eyes seemed huge in the dark. “The last decade, as Maria has weakened, has been a time of turmoil, and more girls like you have emerged — who have become mature, I mean. It is the way of things. Soon somebody must replace Maria. The twenty-seven must be restored.”

“You’re talking about me,” Lucia whispered.

“It has taken me some time to convince certain others that you are the right candidate.” Rosa seemed proud, as if she had won some victory.

Lucia felt only numb. She couldn’t imagine the consequences of what Rosa was saying. She could see nothing to connect her fifteen-year-old self to the wizened, pregnant old woman she had met. “But I am nothing,” she said. “A month ago I was starving to death because nobody would talk to me.”

“In a way it was your — ah — breakout that helped me establish you as the right candidate. You have strength of mind, Lucia, strength of character. Not many of your contemporaries could have endured so much. And we need strength to face the future. The world changes, and the Order must change with it. We need a certain independence of thinking in our children, a will to accept the unfamiliar — even though there is a paradox, for to get by we all must accept our place in the Order, and not think too hard, as you know to your cost.”

“It’s impossible,” Lucia whispered.

“No.” Rosa took her arm. “Just a little hard to imagine, that’s all. And now, here is the man I want you to meet …”

Lucia turned. The man was right behind them. She hadn’t heard him approach.

He was perhaps thirty. He was taller than Lucia, and bulkier; his body looked a little soft, flabby, and his skin was pale. He wore casual clothes, a pale blue shirt and jeans. His hair was dark and neatly combed, but he had something of the features of the sisters, of Lucia and Rosa themselves.

He smiled at her. And as he glanced over Lucia’s figure his gray eyes were alive with something of the intensity of the contadino boys.

Rosa touched Lucia’s lips with one fingertip. “Don’t say anything. You mustn’t speak to each other. Lucia, this is Giuliano Andreoli. He’s a contadino, strictly speaking. But he’s actually your distant cousin — you can tell from the coloring — you can look him up in the scrinium if you like. He lives in Venice. He’s a bricklayer … I think that’s enough. Come now.”

She took Lucia’s arm and led her away. Lucia looked back, but Giuliano was already out of sight, around the bend of the corridor.

“I don’t understand,” whispered Lucia.

“Reproductive biology, Lucia. To produce babies you don’t need just mothers, but fathers, too. Oh, of course, nowadays the new biotechnologies could make anything possible, but the ancient ways are the best, I think … Ninety-five percent of the babies born here are girls. Most of the boys leave after their schooling, and those who stay are mostly either homosexual or neuter.” Neuter: it seemed a strange, cold, clinical term. Rosa went on, “So where are the fathers to come from? From outside, of course — though we like to keep it in the family if we can.”