“But ants have had a hundred million years. Peter, what I know about evolution you could write on a fingernail. But wouldn’t such a major redesign of the human reproductive system need a lot of time?”

He shrugged. “I’m no expert. But in the fifteen centuries since Regina there has been time for sixty, seventy, eighty generations—maybe even more. A lot of it wouldn’t involve particularly fundamental changes, just the timing of developments in the body. Evolution finds changes like that easy to make—a question of throwing a few switches, rather than rewiring the whole processor. Evolution can sometimes work with remarkable speed . . .

“Look at all the pieces together.” Again, he ticked points off on his fingers. “You have the multiple generations sharing their resources and caring for the young. You have reproductive divisions—the sterile workers. You have nobody in control, nothing but local agents and feedback. And then if you look at its history, the Order has done what ant colonies do: it has tried to expand, it has attacked other groups. You even have ’suicides’—spectacular sacrifices, where the workers give up their lives so that their genetic legacy can continue: I told you what happened when the Crypt was broken open during the Sack of Rome. You could even argue that all the exterior ‘helpers,’ all the ‘family’ around the world, who send the Order money and recruits, they are part of the Order, too, like foraging ants—though of course they don’t know it.

“And listen. Ants carry out their dead and leave them in a circle, far from the nest. I plotted the burials linked to the Order, over the centuries. There’s a circle . . . I have a map.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“I think Regina was a kind of genius, George. An idiot savant, maybe. Of course she didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but she clearly understood emergence, and perhaps even eusociality, on some instinctive level. You can see it in her biography—the passages where she is walking around Rome, noticing how unplanned it is, but how nevertheless patterns have emerged. And she used that insight to try to protect her family. She thought she was establishing a community to protect her bloodline, a heritage of a golden past. Well, she succeeded, but not in the way she intended.

“The Order isn’t a human community, George, the way we’ve always understood it. The Order is a hive. A human hive—perhaps the first of its kind.” He smiled. “We used to think you would need telepathy to unite minds, to combine humans into a group organism. Well, we were wrong. All you need is people—that, and emergence.”

“Peter—”

He lifted his broad face to the light from the window. “It’s actually an exciting prospect we have stumbled on, George. A new kind of humanity, perhaps? A eusocial human—I call them Coalescents . . .”