The swarming crowds, the thoughtless order of the mob, the cold grasp of ancient families: even I see visions of the Coalescents everywhere I look.

And I see again that extraordinary crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with the plume of gray-black tufa dust still hanging in the air above it. Workers from the offices and shops, clutching cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands. Obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them—but nobody led. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers around them, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who pushed forward in turn. When it reached the edge of the road, the flowing mob broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining, probing 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.

I suppose I’m trying to compensate. I spend a lot of my time alone, in my room, or walking in the hills that loom over the towns. But a part of me still longs, above everything else, to go back, to immerse myself once more in the Coalescents’ warm tactile orderliness. It is an unfulfilled longing that, I suspect, will stay with me until I die.

How strange that my quest to find my own family would lead me to such mysteries, and would begin and end in death.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

It began at a strange time for everybody, in fact. The news had just emerged about the Kuiper Anomaly, the strange new light beyond the sky. London is the place to be when a story like that breaks, the kind of massive, life-changing news that you want to share with your friends, at the office watercoolers or in the pubs and coffee bars, and chew over the latest wrinkles.

But I had to go home, to Manchester. It was duty. I had lost my father. I was forty-five.

My father’s house, the family home where I had grown up, was one of a short street of identical suburban properties: a neat little semidetached, with scraps of lawn at the front and back. Standing in the drive on a dazzling, bright September morning, I tried to keep control of my emotions, tried to think like a stranger.