eorge Poole is working a dead-end software quality control job in modern Manchester when he learns of his father's unexpected death. While clearing out the family home, he learns he had a twin sister, Rosa, who was apparently given to a secret Catholic order when very young. Peter McLaughlin, a childhood friend still living in the old neighborhood, encourages George to try to find her. Peter also reveals that he is part of a loose-knit Internet group trying to understand the importance of a huge alien artifact just discovered in the Kuiper Belt.
Regina is a young aristocrat living in fourth-century Britain as the Roman Empire crumbles and Saxon hoards begin the destroy her civilization. She struggles to survive on her own, and through intelligence and sheer tenacity becomes consort to a local leader who will provide the basis for the legend of King Arthur. At great personal sacrifice, she finally makes her way to Rome with her young daughter, where to save her family she joins a quasi-religious order of women who survive living in catacombs beneath a rumbling Rome.
George Poole also travels to modern Rome in search of Rosa. Despite the reticence of his Vatican contacts to talk about the mysterious Order that took his sister, George and Rosa finally make contact. She introduces him to a secret society of thousands of mostly young women who look strikingly similar living in an extensive system of catacombs under modern Rome. He learns that the Order was started by Regina, who is their ancient ancestor, and that it survives through charity, selling genealogical data and running private schools, as well as its Vatican connections. While deep in the tunnels with his swarms of his new coalescent family, he feels strangely content, although other aspects of the Order cause him to worry. Peter shows up unexpectedly, and comes to believe the Order, like the Kuiper anomaly, is a threat to mankind.
Brief scenes at the end of the book reveal a far future where interstellar troops attack a planetwide society of hive-minded humans, suggesting that Peter might be right.
A good start for Destiny's Children
Coalecent is the first novel in Baxter's Destiny's Children trilogy, and provides a very promising start. It is a historical novel intertwined with a contemporary suspense novel in which a hard-SF story breaks through at the very end.
Regina's story is the most compelling, featuring fine characterization and vivid and colorful historical settings. There are a few scattered scenes featuring characters in the Order between Regina's time and George's, and they are also fascinating, and more would have been interesting. George's contemporary story pales somewhat in comparison, especially the sections that are essentially a travelogue of modern Rome. The SF parts—the secret of the mysterious Order that has evolved over many centuries and the alien anomaly in the Kuiper Belt—are clearly the most fascinating aspects of the story, but their full significance remains to be revealed in subsequent books.
This trilogy promises to continue exploring some of the same themes as Baxter's Manifold trilogy. The upcoming Destiny's Children novels will undoubtedly deal with the far-future conflict between normal and coalescent humans, and also reveal the purpose of the mysterious aliens in the Kuiper Belt. Baxter always thinks big, and one can expect future novels in the series to provide a unique view of a potential future of mankind.
