It was obvious to everyone that some great project had been sustained down here, for a long time. But it was impossible to say what that project might have been. Conspiracy theories proliferated; the most popular seems to be that the Crypt was a Doctor Strangelove nuclear war bunker, perhaps built by Mussolini himself.
Remarkably enough, the Order itself wasn’t linked with the Crypt. Somehow the surface offices closed off their links with the underground complex — they must have been prepared for an eventuality like this — so that they were able to pose as just more accidental victims of the disaster. When things calmed down they even continued to sell their genealogy services, presumably based on local copies of the Order’s core data. You’d never have known anything happened.
Not all the drones from the Crypt vanished into the alleyways. As it happened Pina, Lucia’s untrustworthy friend, suffered a broken arm when she fell through a smashed ceiling, and was trapped under rubble. The drones couldn’t get her out before the firefighters reached her. She was taken to one of Rome’s big teaching hospitals. I conscripted Daniel’s help to hack into the relevant hospital files to find out what happened.
When the doctors began to study her, and dug out the old files they had compiled when she was trapped after that similar accident years before, they were startled by Pina’s “subadult” condition. They were able to trace the mechanism of her sterility. An impaired hypothalamic hormone secretion led to an inadequate gonadotrophic secretion, which in turn blocked ovulation … And so on. I didn’t really understand any of this, and I didn’t know any medics I could trust to decode it for me. I don’t suppose it mattered anyhow, for though the doctors could figure out how the sterility occurred, they couldn’t figure out why. And Pina, evidently, wouldn’t talk.
They kept her in hospital for two months. Strangely, by the end of that time, there were some changes in the condition of her body. It seemed that her glands were starting to secrete the complex chain of hormones that would have been necessary to trigger ovulation: it was as if she was entering puberty at last, at the much-delayed age of twenty-five. Perhaps if all the drones could be removed from the hive, they too would “recover.”
But before this process was complete Pina disappeared from the hospital. She was checked out by “relatives,” just as Lucia had been. I didn’t hear of her again.
I did hear of Giuliano Andreoli, as it happened, having searched for his name on the Internet. Lucia’s first lover was arrested for attempted rape, but committed suicide in his cell before the case could be brought to trial. I could imagine what Peter would have made of that: to the Order, Giuliano was just a sperm machine, used once and then discarded, pushed out into the glaring light of the outside world and an empty future. What he had known in the hive, that brief overwhelming moment of love and lust, must have come to seem like a dream.
As for Lucia herself, she is now living with Daniel and his family, in their bright, airy home in the hills outside Rome. Daniel’s parents turned out to be decent, humane folk. And usefully enough, like many expats they don’t entirely trust the competence of the Italian authorities, and were happy to get Lucia medical treatment privately and discreetly.
Lucia has had her third baby — a boy, in fact, lusty and healthy. It turned out to be a simple procedure to snip out her spermatheca, as Peter had called it, the little sac on her womb that would have continued to bleed Giuliano’s seed into her for the rest of her life. Daniel’s family now talk of putting her through school.
I don’t know whether there will ever be love between Daniel and Lucia. Even now that the pressure of relentless childbirth is off her, nobody seems to know how her body will adjust in the future. And she is damaged. She has never heard what became of her first child, who must have been in one of those immense crиches on that fateful day. I think that is a wound that will never heal. But at least in Daniel, and his family, she has found good friends.
Sometimes, though, I wonder about Lucia’s true destiny.
In all the reports about the Crypt, what was most notable for me was what was missing. The little carved matres, for instance, which Regina had brought from Roman Britain — the symbolic core of her family, and then of the Order. They were never mentioned, never found.
Peter told me that among some species of social insects the colonies breed by sending out a queen and a few workers, to start a colony all over again. I think I will try to keep watch on Lucia and her young family.
As for my sister, I haven’t seen Rosa since I lost sight of her in the crush, deep in the Crypt. I don’t think she could have gone back to the Order, though. In the end she knew too much — more than she was supposed to know — and yet she needed to know it. It must be necessary from time to time for the Order to throw up somebody like Rosa with an overview, somebody capable of perceiving greater scales, more complex threats. Peter’s understanding was itself a threat to the Order — and she had to develop an equivalent understanding to beat him. But a drone isn’t supposed to know she’s in a hive. Ignorance is strength. In the end she saved the Order by sacrificing herself, as a good drone should, and knew what she was doing every step of the way.
Thus I found my sister, and lost her again.
There are other loose ends I can’t resist tugging on.
I’ve been reading about eusocial organisms. I’ve learned that one characteristic of hives, just as much as the sterility of the workers and the rest, is suicide — the willingness of a drone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and so for the long-term interests of its genetic heritage. You see it when a termite mound is broken open, or a predator tries to get into a mole rat colony. It’s seen as proof by the biologists that the key organism is the global community, the hive, not the individual, for the individual acts completely selflessly. It was certainly true of the Order. When the Crypt was attacked, such as during the Sack of Rome, some of the members gave their lives to save the rest.
But here’s the rub. In the end Peter committed suicide, to protect — what? He had no family. The future of humankind? But again, he had no children — and no direct connection to that future.
What he did have a connection to was the Slan(t)ers.
The Slan(t)ers have no leader; their network has no central point. Their behavior is dictated by the behavior of those “around” them in cyberspace, and governed by simple rules of online-protocol feedback. Among the Slan(t)ers — I’ve found — there are virtually none with children. They are too busy with Slan(t)er projects for that.
The Slan(t)ers don’t have any physical connection, as did the Order. They don’t even live in the same place. And their interest in the group isn’t in any way genetic, as with the Order. There is no pretense that the Slan(t)ers are a family in the normal sense. But nevertheless, I believe the Slan(t)ers are another hive — a new, even purer form of human hive made possible by electronic interconnections — a hive of the mind, in which only ideas, not genes, are preserved.