I would discover later that the Crypt was organized on three great levels. But each of those levels was subdivided by intermediate floors and mezzanines. The layout was functional, and changed all the time according to need, the arbitrary divisions between compartments blurring. All that helped mix up the geography in everybody’s heads, of course. I certainly didn’t figure out, that first time, how far those branching corridors and mushrooming chambers led; I never came to anything that could have been an outside wall, a layer of tufa like that I had seen carved out in the Catacombs above. Even so, I could see that the Crypt was immense.

And it was full of people. That was the one thing that struck me every second.

They were all around me, all the time, everywhere we walked. They all seemed similar, all smooth-faced and ageless, all of a compact, rounded build—and not tall; I was one of the tallest there, so I was seeing over the heads of the crowd. I was immersed in touch constantly: they would brush against me, and sometimes one would rest a hand on my shoulder as she squeezed past. There was that smell, the overall leonine stink of the compound, but something subtler when one of them came close, the milky sweetness I had noticed about Rosa.

And then there were the faces. It took me some minutes, after entering that first corridor, to recognize how similar they all were. They were all like Rosa, and therefore like me, almost all of them with oval faces, broad, flat noses—and the slate-gray eyes that have been a family trait for generations. They were all around me, faces like mirrors of mine—if younger, smoother, happier. There was a constant racket, but nobody seemed to be shouting, arguing, barging past anybody else; everybody was busy, but nobody was rushing or stressed out. Despite the hubbub, there was a great sense of order about the place.

I felt confused, baffled, battered by astounding impressions. But, odd though it seems, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve always been drawn to order, regularity—not control, necessarily, but calm. And this place, for all its unfamiliarity and surface strangeness, was at heart a deep well of calm; I could sense that immediately.

What I felt was: I belong here.

Rosa brought me to a kind of balcony. It was a rare viewpoint offering a cutaway view of at least some of the Crypt, like looking down into a shopping mall from a top level. Rosa pointed out a row of open-roofed chambers lined with bunk beds: dormitories. Farther away was a blocky structure that was a hospital, she said. People were everywhere I looked, moving, working, interacting with each other in little knots.

“There must be—” I waved a hand at the teeming masses below. “—a control center. Some kind of management structure.”