Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.
I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.
When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.
Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn’t hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true identity was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.
But that was where the trail ran cold, happily for me. Peter had signed into our hotel under an assumed name, and — as far as I know — never brought any of his bomb-making equipment there. The hotel staff hadn’t seen much of him, and didn’t seem to recognize the blurred face on the news programs.
Still, I checked out — paying with cash, making sure I left no contact address at the hotel — and fled Rome, for Amalfi.
I did bring with me all that was left of Peter’s possessions. It would surely have been a mistake for me to leave them behind. And anyhow it didn’t seem right. I burned his clothes, his shaving gear, other junk. I kept his data, though. I copied it from his machines to a new laptop I had bought in Rome. Then I destroyed the machines as best I could, wiping them clean, breaking them open and smashing the chips, dumping the carcasses in the ocean.
The incident soon faded from attention: bomb attacks in crowded cities are sadly commonplace nowadays. The authorities are still digging, of course. A common theory is that maybe there is some kind of trail back to the usual suspects in the Middle East. But a consensus seems to be emerging that it must have been Peter who was primarily responsible for both attacks, in San Jose and Rome, and that he was some kind of lone nut with an unknowable grudge, for no other link has been found between the geometric optics lab and the big hole in the ground in Rome.
As for that great underground city under the Appian Way, before the authorities were able to penetrate it fully — and I’ve no idea how they did it — the swarming drones cleared it out. There was little left to see but the infrastructure, the rooms, the partitions, the great vents for circulating the air. The purpose of some rooms was obvious — the kitchens with their gas supply, the dormitories where the frames of the bunk beds have been left intact, the hospitals. Some other chambers I could have identified, had anybody asked me, like the nurseries and the deep, musty, mysterious rooms where the mamme-nonne had lived. They even dismantled their suite of mainframe computers.
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.