Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Lomellini turned to the infirmarer, Brother Rinieri. Rinieri was the youngest of the chapter house’s office-holders – which did not mean he was young. He answered at once. “I can do no better work elsewhere than here. Whatever will be done is God’s will.” He had clearly rehearsed his answer.

  The sacrist was next: “God’s will does not need my permission. If I shall die of the pestilence, I shall die regardless of where I am. I would rather die serving.”

  The precentor, the novice-master, and the almoner took their turns. Like the other senior office-holders, they’d clearly known what to expect of this meeting, and had already assembled their answer.

  The cellarer, the brother in charge of the monastery’s supplies, was the last to speak. “I would like to take my leave for reasons which I have discussed in private with the prior.” He cast his gaze briefly to Lomellini, and then to the floor.

  Silence followed. So, Lomellini’s control of the officers wasn’t as complete as he wanted everyone to believe. Niccoluccio kept his gaze rigidly focused on the wall.

  It was left to the almoner, the brother in charge of tending to poor visitors, to announce the obvious: the monastery’s meager winter supplies couldn’t cope with many additional travelers or refugees, certainly not if they were sick. He said, “We should send a messenger to the bishop to request additional financial resources.”

  Brother Rainuccio, one of those Lomellini had singled out earlier, stood and humbly bowed. “I would like to volunteer for that assignment.”

  Lomellini said, after a moment, “The pestilence travels swiftly. That duty would likely expose whoever volunteered to travel to more danger than staying. That goes without mentioning the ordinary hardships of travel during winter.”

  Rainuccio said, “My offer to serve stands.”

  Brother Rainuccio could hardly make the perilous journey alone. Niccoluccio swallowed. If he volunteered now, he would surely get chosen to go with Rainuccio.

  Barring trips to the lay community a mile away, Niccoluccio hadn’t set foot outside Sacro Cuore in twelve years. He’d had several opportunities. He could have transferred, traveled as a messenger to the bishop, or gone to purchase supplies. He hadn’t wanted to. Until this moment.

  The moment passed. Brother Arrigheto stood and said, simply, “I wish to accompany Brother Rainuccio.” The monks around him tried to hide their relief. Niccoluccio breathed out. A little of the burden of the choice lifted off his shoulders.

  Brother Durante, the second monk Lomellini had mentioned, stood on trembling legs. “I have a great anxiety about this pestilence,” he said, and then hesitated under Lomellini’s gaze. For a moment, he seemed unsure about what he’d planned to say next. “However, I will serve in any capacity my superiors desire.”

  Then on through the brothers. Most echoed Durante, deferring their decision to Lomellini, which was as good as saying they would stay. Gerbodo was next. As he was the last of the brothers Lomellini had singled out, everyone’s attention fixed on him. He said, “God’s grace delivered me here, and I trust that God’s grace will deliver us from pestilence. If not here, then in the kingdom of our salvation.” He sounded sincere enough, but he didn’t meet Lomellini’s eyes. After he returned to his seat, he stared ahead at nothing, as if his thoughts had left his body.

  Niccoluccio stood when his turn arrived. Not all of the brothers had, but it was only proper. As before, he needed a moment to find his voice.

  He thought he’d known what he was going to say until the moment arrived. The words came before he realized he needed to say them. “If it is necessary that I die, then I will die, as we all eventually must. ‘Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.’ As with every other worldly thing, this pestilence is the Father’s will. Moreso, and more long-lasting, is this brotherhood. We are made brothers here by our shared love of Christ. I am nothing without Sacro Cuore. I will not run from it.”

  He only realized near the end that everyone was watching him. After a moment’s hesitation, he returned to his seat. Then it was the next brother’s turn to speak.

  It took several minutes for the flush to leave Niccoluccio’s cheeks. He felt dizzy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken so long. There was more to this headiness, though, than the act of making sound.

  Only the novices weren’t allowed to speak. The prior spoke for them. The only way for them to leave Sacro Cuore was to give up their vows, and Lomellini clearly wasn’t about to offer them the opportunity. In total, besides Rainuccio and Arrigheto, only two brothers requested leave of the charterhouse.

  The cellarer said nothing, kept his eyes downcast, when Lomellini announced that the charterhouse could not spare supplies for travel for anyone but Rainuccio and Arrigheto. Any other brothers who wished to leave would have to do so with their own resources. In the midst of winter, that meant not leaving at all. They all lived in imitation of Christ’s poverty.

  Niccoluccio and the other monks followed the officers out in the reverse of the order that they’d arrived. The novices trailed everyone else. Every brother had their own chores. The others were already going their separate ways, off to their own worlds.

  Niccoluccio returned to his cell and sat with folded legs. He focused on his copy of the Letters of St Jerome, not really reading even the passage he had quoted to the others. He had just managed to slip into a meditative trance when the sacrist began beating his tabula outside again.

  Niccoluccio had gotten all the way to the church when he realized that no one was following him. He glanced to the mechanical clock at the edge of the cloister. It was too early for Prime. Yet the sacrist was standing outside the infirmary, still beating his wooden tabula. Others gathered around him.

  Niccoluccio’s wits needed time to catch up with him. His stomach sank as though he were falling. The sacrist was drumming a pattern of beats Niccoluccio had only heard a few times before. It was a different kind of announcement, signifying the death of a brother.

  3

  On the day Habidah had arrived in Messina, she’d rented a room in a quiet little wayfarer’s lodge a few houses away from a church. She visited only to sleep. Thanks to genengineering, she needed only three hours’ rest per day. Now that her observation had begun in earnest, she got by on one and a half, and substituted stimulants and neurochemical reprofiling for the remainder. She paid for it with a leaden weight behind her eyes.

  Surrounded by so much misery, she hardly noticed, and certainly didn’t complain. She needed to be about at all hours, watching, studying. Even ninety minutes could have meant the difference between returning with useful data, or nothing at all.

  Her work took her through the docks and whorehouses and moored ships of dead and dying, to the parish churches and cathedral, to the homes of the wealthy merchants. She visited hospitals no longer tended by any living nurses. The hospitals had hardly been safe or sanitary before the plague, but now they were just repositories for the bodies of strangers, living or dead, discovered in the streets. She walked through the ashen remains of a whole block of slums the city authorities had burned to try to contain the plague. She’d gone to packed churches, filled with endless processions, prayers, pleas for help, and watched the plague spread seed there, too.

  On the seventh day after the Genoan plague ship arrived, her landlord had died, along with his wife and five out of his six children. Their street’s priest had shipped the sixth, a nine year-old boy, dead-eyed and silent to the nearest orphanage. The priest had hardly looked at him, hadn’t touched him for fear of infection. She lost track of what happened to the boy, though she knew the overpacked orphanages also festered with plague.

  When she came back to her cozy little room, no one came for rent. No one told her to leave, either. No one seemed to own the house at all anymore. The church down the street still saw traffic, but it was neighbored by empty houses, abandoned or sealed and occupied only by the dead. Not only had the owners died, but so had a
ny inheritors foolish enough to visit and survey the property.

  Her daily walks took her past mass graves on the peninsula outside the city. The lots of misshapen, crow-pecked earth looked like they’d come from another plane. She tightened her scarf against the cold wind and broken gray skies, and hurried past. She was here to study the living, not the dead. But the dead were everywhere.

  Everyone but the gravediggers stayed away from the graveyards. It wasn’t just the smell that repelled them. Or the faces and broken, shovel-smashed limbs poking through the soil. Or even the fact of the mass graves themselves, antithetical as they were to the religious sensibilities of the people. It was the danger. Habidah had seen wild dogs wander into the graveyards to scavenge and come back hours later, pestilential and drooling bloody foam.

  The most interesting thing she’d found so far had been outside Messina’s cathedral, the Duomo of Santa Maria Assunta. A mob had surrounded a visiting ecclesiastic. They’d begged him to bring the relics of St Agatha from his town, Catania. They were convinced that only the mercy of a saint could save them. They clung to his robes like foam in a tidal pool. He’d tried to leave, but had finally needed to push and kick. He’d shouted that God had cursed them, that no Messinan would be welcome inside the walls of Catania, and that the relics of St Agatha would be protecting Catania instead. The riot hadn’t been long following that.

  Now there was talk about a compromise solution, about dipping the relics of St Agatha in holy water and then bringing the holy water here. A last-ditch transference of holy mercy. It was amazing, the amount of effort and hope put into the effort. They saw no other defense short of fleeing, and fleeing usually just spread the plague farther.

  These were the kind of stories she was here to find. Her satellites filled in the statistics. A month ago, Messina in infrared had been bright orange with fires and body heat. Now the glow had gone blotchy. Whole neighborhoods had been abandoned, or close to it. The living stayed indoors, far from their neighbors. Every day, the city got dimmer.

  She hadn’t been ready for any of it. She’d known, going in, that she wouldn’t be. Even that helped a little bit. Her demiorganics were working extra duty combating exhaustion and keeping her brain chemistry from spiraling into depression.

  She was out again, and had just passed an ivy-wreathed merchant’s house, when a tremor buzzed the edge of her thoughts. A call, flagged important. Someone trying to get her attention.

  Joao sent, “Habidah.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “So you are still with us. Have you been listening to the chatter?”

  Habidah had been dimly aware of her team’s voices in the back of her head, but she hadn’t really listened to any of them. Joao was supposed to have just finished a long-term observation at Constantinople. The location tag appended to his datastream claimed he was calling from seventy kilometers south of Lyon: their field base.

  She was in charge of her little team. She should have been paying closer attention. “I’ve been busy,” she sent. “Did I miss anything important?”

  “The Genoan ships are still seaborne. I thought you’d have something to say about that.”

  Habidah stopped walking. “Still? They were nearly dead the last time I saw them.”

  “Never underestimate merchants sitting on depreciating cargo.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she sent. “The one I saw was barely moving. I’d started to think it wouldn’t make Messina.”

  “Check the satellite feeds yourself. We have another satellite crossing that part of the Mediterranean in, ah, seventeen minutes.”

  “I didn’t say I thought you were lying. Never mind.” She kept forgetting that Joao had been raised on a Core World. Its inhabitants were raised by NAIs more than by humans, and tended to be literal-minded. “Hell. Where next?”

  “Three of the ships returned to Genoa. The Genoans kicked them out in time. We haven’t detected any plague transmission there. Other cities weren’t so quick. Another of the plague ships is close to making port in Marseilles. And it looks like the one you saw is headed toward the Iberian Peninsula.”

  “Keep tracking them.” The rest of her anthropological survey team must have been sharing news for hours, and she’d never noticed. After the past few days, it seemed very distant. But this would alter all they’d predicted of the plague’s spread overland. “You’ve already rescheduled everyone?”

  “Mmhmm. Meloku just arrived. You’ll get the shuttle next.”

  “I’ve already got just about everything I need from here, anyway.”

  She rested her hand on the lip of an abandoned wagon. She hadn’t quite told the truth. It would have been valuable to stay in Messina to see what happened with the relics and how people responded when they didn’t stop the plague. She hardly wanted to stay here longer, anyway. Not that where she ended up next would be much better.

  She eyed the merchant’s house. Its owner was one of those who’d fought over the Flemish cloth. She’d kept track. A quick infrared scan showed only a single person inside. The thermal signature matched the maid’s. Mistress of the house, now. Habidah had spotted her wearing her employers’ clothes and jewelry. There was no one to stop her any more than there was anyone to collect rent for Habidah’s lodge.

  Habidah turned. She trudged southward under a cold and empty evening, her hands drawn into her sleeves. Her course took her along the piers, and then the gray beach outside the city. The cacophony was gone. The piers were empty. The fish sellers’ stalls were deserted. The only ships were far away, moored and quarantined for the duration.

  The bulk of the city disappeared behind the hills. There were still plenty of people in Messina, but it was hard to resist the impression that she’d left Messina deserted but for graves. On the day she’d arrived, she’d been able to hear the noises of the city even from here. Now, there was just the wind.

  Eventually, she was alone under an encroaching twilight. Houses stood about her, but infrared revealed that none were occupied.

  She stopped in a little cove, looked up, and waited.

  A patch of gray sky rippled. A dark, smooth shape resolved out of the clouds. It was fuzzy at the edges, as if just coming into focus on a bad camera. Its hull was inky black and broadly wedge-shaped, but that was all the impression that crept through the camouflage fields. By the time it extruded landing struts and settled onto the rocks, Habidah still hadn’t quite managed to make it out. The sound-dampening field was even more effective. She couldn’t hear the hiss of the landing jets until she stepped up to it.

  As she stepped through the camouflage fields, there was a brief and disconcerting moment in which her vision went foggy. Then everything solidified at once, and she could see the whole craft. The ventral thrusters hissed in her ears, and their ice-cold wind brushed her cheek.

  The shuttle came in low, a swooping blackbird. The craft was slender at the nose and bulkier in the rear, where its engines and sensor packages were housed. It possessed what Habidah privately considered an excessive number of wings. But it was a multipurpose craft, a university rental, designed to be as much at home in the liquid metal core of a gas giant or the corona of a star as a terrestrial atmosphere. Its long, narrow wings rippled with exhaust. It spotlighted her. A boarding ramp extended from its belly.

  She strode up. For all the craft’s bulk, there was surprisingly little space inside. The bulkheads were as dark as the hull. A tiny corridor divided a passenger cabin, a lavatory, and a sleeping space that doubled as personal storage. The rear bulkheads hid cargo compartments, but they weren’t pressurized. This shuttle had been designed to be tolerable for a few days, maybe as long as a week. A service vehicle, nothing more.

  The passenger cabin held three acceleration couches, all empty. A handful of displays with exterior camera views ringed the bulkheads. The images could have been sent to any passenger’s demiorganics, but not all at once – not without overstressing their visual cortices. The monitors were the shuttle�
��s one concession to creature comforts.

  There was no one else aboard. The shuttle NAI didn’t even wait for her to finish settling into the middle couch before running through the liftoff routine. It was punctilious about its schedules. Like all NAIs, it didn’t have the creativity to be otherwise.

  Habidah’s demiorganics opened a datastream to it. It slid into the back of her awareness at once. Talking to NAIs was not like talking to humans. It never would be. NAIs, neutered AIs, held true to their names. They were as complex as humans, often more so, but held back from making the final leap to self-awareness and ambition. They made for discussion as interesting as a calculator’s.

  Habidah’s masters, the amalgamates, had started as AIs themselves. They managed the Unity’s affairs from a distance. Outside of the amalgamates’ own Core Worlds, most member planes retained their own independent governments, surrendering control only over their trade laws. Transplanar trade was vital to the Unity. But when the amalgamates squeezed, they had grips of razors. They would not brook any competitors entering their niche. Those wars had been fought long ago.

  Several additional datastreams filtered into her head as her systems neatly laced with the shuttle’s. In a moment, the shuttle felt like an extension of her own body. She felt herself inside the passenger cabin, a knot of feeling inside a bundle of sensation. It was uncannily like being in her own stomach.

  Her couch’s safety harness snapped painlessly over her shoulders. A firm press of acceleration shoved her into her couch. Wind whipped past her wings. Her landing struts sank into the ventral hull. A view of Messina rose above the horizon, turned tiny by distance.

  The shuttle shot straight through the clouds. Gray wisps peeled past the forward-facing monitor like a curtain parting. Then all of the displays turned deep blue. It wasn’t until she had several moments alone in the open sky that Habidah began to feel better.