Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  “All right, all right,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “I feel like I haven’t slept in days, but I woke up three hours ago.”

  “You having any trouble lacing with NAI yet?”

  “Some glitches every once in a while. Nothing serious.” He waved at the bodies. “That’s why I want to get so much of this out of the way while I can still operate the equipment.”

  Feliks’ demiorganics were shutting down. The mind-machine barrier was difficult enough to cross in the best of circumstances, and his condition made it worse. The onierophage was advancing into his nervous system. Habidah had known he carried it when she’d offered him the position on her team, but she hadn’t known how long it would be until the symptoms began manifesting.

  The timetable for the remainder of the onierophage’s progression was just as much up in the air. Anywhere between three weeks and eight months from now, he would no longer be able to receive any datastreams. Once his demiorganics were fully offline, the rest of him would follow.

  The onierophage was like nothing anyone in the Unity had ever seen before. Given the sheer scale and variety of the multiverse, the Unity was forever encountering new ideas and technologies and forms of life, but the onierophage had been beyond everything, a new category. Even the amalgamates, with their long experience, had thought it impossible.

  The microbes were nearly subatomic. They were like houseflies, slippery and elusive. They darted about to escape observation. When finally isolated and examined, they seemed to contain no information at all: no DNA, no genetic coding of any kind. Just bare and basic organic chemistry that shouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of what it had.

  No quarantine worked. No method of contagion had ever been discovered. People who slept next to the infected every night, shared their air and bodily fluids, escaped catching it. Others who’d been completely isolated from Unity since the plague began had contracted it. It ate away at them, body and mind and demiorganics.

  The only constant was that it attacked mostly, if not exclusively, individuals with demiorganics. Even infected without demiorganics had had, sometime in their past, extended contact with transplanar civilization. That suggested a source of infection far in the Unity’s past. Something that might have been spreading and breeding, under the surface, for some time.

  That meant the people of this plane were safe from the onierophage, at least. Habidah wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t believed that. They only had their own pestilence to worry about.

  Some of the extraplanar pathologists at Habidah’s university were even speculating that the visible microbe was only a symptom, not the cause – that the disease was being transmitted through the quantum structure of the multiverse itself. The microbe was just a protrusion, they said, the exposed tip of a far deeper structure. Only by boring itself into some underlying fabric of reality could it have escaped all of the amalgamates’ attempts to detect it and eliminate it.

  The amalgamates had conquered threats before. The multiverse was replete with danger, as infinite in form as it was in scope. Other transplanar empires. World-eater AIs. Memetic parasites. Plane-leaping vacuum metastability events. Occasionally, news leaked through to the Unity proper, but, for the most part, the amalgamates kept them at bay.

  They’d defeated so many threats that the threats had started to blur together, play in repeat. One hostile transplanar empire was often much like the one that came before. Though the multiverse was infinite, most things, as a percentage, fit into patterns.

  But the onierophage couldn’t be categorized. If it had a controlling force, it was invisible and intangible. If it had a purpose, it was obscure. It seemed to be drawn to members of the Unity and their client planes, but, even then, that was not a rule.

  That was why her team were here. The battle to fight it was happening well beyond the ken of most people in the Unity. The amalgamates had been working on that for months, and were still.

  Habidah’s work was anthropological. She and her team had been sent here to research how other planes responded with plagues that overturned their worlds, and to come back with whatever coping strategies she could. Her team was only one of the hundreds studying similar mass death events. It had been a long time since the peoples of the technologically pampered Unity had had to deal with anything so primitive as disease. They needed to relearn how.

  The rest of the Unity viewed these projects with skepticism (if they were aware of them at all). They were concerned with solving the onierophage. They believed in discoverable cures. They were waiting for the amalgamates to find it. It was the policymakers – the people who actually had to engineer political and social answers to the facts as they were, rather than the facts they wished for – who had shown the greatest interest in projects like this. The hundreds of universities sending out teams like hers had had no shortage of funds, if not volunteers.

  Feliks said, “I saw our new schedule has you headed for Genoa next. Alone.”

  “There’s too much going on for any of us to work in pairs.”

  “And yet I’m supposed to stay here holding the fort.”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? You can’t travel alone with failing demiorganics. The last thing we need is for you to lose satellite contact.”

  “I can’t do anything more here. Just dissect old corpses. I want to work.”

  Their university didn’t require that someone stay behind at the field base, but strongly encouraged it. That way someone would always be ready by the shuttle. With all their tools and technology, none of them should have been in much danger, but this was still classified as a hazardous assignment. It was a weak excuse.

  Feliks asked, “What about you? Do you think you’ll be able to handle this all alone?”

  “Of course I will. Why?”

  “Your demiorganics have been pumping a lot of antidepressants into your system.”

  Damn. As her team’s medical specialist, he did double duty as their doctor. Of course he’d have access to that information. Habidah shook her head.

  Feliks asked, “Why did you request that I come along with you on this assignment, anyway?”

  “You’re one of the best I’ve worked with.”

  “Your academic history is public record, you know. Forty-seven field assignments, and never once did you ask anyone you’d worked with before to come along on your next project. Three weeks after my diagnosis, I get a call from you.”

  “I can be unpredictable. Spontaneous, even.”

  Feliks raised an eyebrow. “When was the last time you went home?”

  It was starting to gall her how completely he’d turned this conversation around on her. If he didn’t want to talk about his condition, she wouldn’t force him. “You wouldn’t ask if you hadn’t already pulled my records.”

  “Twenty years since you’ve been to Caldera. For a three-week visit.” To tell her parents goodbye and that she’d be back as soon as her field assignment wrapped up next year. Fortunately, that part wasn’t in the public records.

  Feliks leaned against the only clear desk. Muted, orange Rodinian sunlight flickered over his shoulders. “You haven’t settled anywhere since. One field assignment after another. Are you planning to go back home sometime?”

  “I did keep my clan names, you know. What are you asking?”

  “I have it better than a lot of onierophage victims. I’ve had a reasonably glorious life. I’m old. Not as old as I’d like, mind, but I’ve already had those moments where I looked back and figured out what I would rather have spent time on. I should have spent more time making friends.”

  “You think I don’t want to make friends?”

  “Well, why haven’t you?”

  “What makes you think I should?”

  “You think you should, or you wouldn’t have put me on your team.” Something about the way that Feliks was leaning struck her as uncomfortable. He wasn’t leaning to slouch, she realized. He didn’t have the energy to stand anymore. “Now that the Un
ity is falling apart, you’re starting to realize what a lot of other people are.”

  “That we don’t have much time left,” Habidah said, finishing his thought.

  After a moment’s quiet, Feliks asked, “What’s more valuable to you, staring down the end? Going to Genoa alone, and having me here? Or going with company?”

  Habidah couldn’t quite meet his gaze. In that moment, it was difficult to not resent him. For as terrible at it had been to be alone in Messina, she never would have wanted to go with someone else. She couldn’t imagine how it would help.

  But Feliks had trapped her quite neatly. He was still watching her. He folded his arms.

  “I suppose that’s one of the things we’re here to learn,” she made herself say.

  4

  The sacrist stood in the snow and beat his tabula for the hours of the Divine Offices, and now also for the deaths. One or two a day, at first, then a steady, relentless stream. A clock to tick arrhythmically along with the Liturgy of the Hours. The tally had been fourteen yesterday, up to eighteen by this morning.

  Then, after the afternoon Nones service, Prior Lomellini stood. He announced there would be no more observances of the Divine Office until the pestilence had passed. His fear of it had become so great that he could not wait to announce this during the next chapter meeting.

  Once again, Niccoluccio’s exclusion from the rumor circles left him caught unawares. He sat aghast, his mouth slack. He broke decorum to look about. The only thing he saw from the other brothers was the strain of the past few days. There was no surprise.

  Only once in the monastery’s two-century history had a whole day of services been canceled. That had been when the old refectory had caught fire, and fifty years before Niccoluccio’s time. Days without services was undreamt of.

  The others filed out as if in a funeral procession. Niccoluccio lowered his seat lid, but stopped before crossing the door. He stepped aside and waited for the novices to shuffle out, and then turned back toward the altar. He kneeled.

  Brother Durante had died two days ago. He tried to hide his fever until he’d collapsed in the refectory. Niccoluccio had helped carry him to the infirmary. Durante had been a wreck of shivering. He’d cried out in pain whenever Niccoluccio’s fingers had strayed close to the oily bubo under his arm.

  Durante had been Niccoluccio’s bunk neighbor during their novitiate. They’d been the only pair of novices close to the same age. Niccoluccio hadn’t forgotten the morning when he’d woken up with his hand curled in Durante’s. Durante must have grabbed it in the middle of the night. Durante never spoke about it, though he’d studiously avoided Niccoluccio’s eyes afterward. Niccoluccio had come to the monastery to get away from temptation, but the moment had felt right. Brotherhood was a special kind of love.

  And now Durante was gone. Niccoluccio had spent half the last night awake, praying that Durante’s spirit could hear him. Though they hadn’t spoken much since their novitiate, Durante’s silent presence in the church had been as much a fixture of the monastery as Prior Lomellini.

  Niccoluccio licked his dry lips. It seemed impossible to focus, even on prayer. His thoughts kept drifting like a wayward novice’s. Eventually, he decided to stop embarrassing himself in front of the altar. He forced himself to his feet.

  His knees stung from the floorboards. A symptom of creeping age. He was still young compared to many here, but these past few days, he felt his bony elbows, the pins in his knees, the ache in his back. The parts of the real world that seemed to stop existing during his novitiate had crept into the cloister.

  By the time he left the church, a glimmer of snow fell from a bright gray sky. Everyone else had returned to their posts or their cells. A silence deeper than usual permeated the cloister. For the first time in years, Niccoluccio couldn’t take any comfort from it.

  The new snow wasn’t deep enough to conceal the sacrist’s footprints by the infirmary, where he beat the news of each new death. Niccoluccio stopped by the door. The past few days, he’d heard endless coughing within, cries of pain. Today, though, he heard nothing. He shuffled quickly past, feeling guilty as he did every time. He couldn’t bear to listen even to the quiet.

  None of the dead had so far received funeral services. These were to be delayed until Death had finished reaping his harvest. The closest thing had been in the refectory during their last Sunday meal, when Prior Lomellini had suspended the usual scripture reading and allowed the brothers to speak to each other. Niccoluccio had kept his peace, but listened to the others’ stories about the departed. He’d never known any of them so well.

  Now he supposed there would be no more communal meals, either. Prior Lomellini hadn’t announced their suspension, but Niccoluccio doubted any of the brothers would be willing to take the risk. They only entered when the refectory was empty, or even, in violation of one of Sacro Cuore’s oldest rules, smuggled food into their cells.

  Niccoluccio didn’t take any food into his cell, nor did he come out in the evening to find dinner. His stomach gnawed at him. He pushed it out of his mind. He didn’t deserve to be comfortable. When it came time to sleep, he lay on top of his covers rather than let himself stay warm beneath them. His attempts to live like normal, as though this would pass, had turned to ash in his mouth. He couldn’t pretend any longer.

  He kept careful watch on the shadows on his wall, the play of moonlight through the clouds. During that last supper, one of the novices had claimed a vision of Brother Durante had come to him in the night. Durante had been dead for but a day then, but his spirit claimed to have suffered through Purgatory for what felt like a thousand years. He’d told the novice of the wonders of Paradise that awaited them all past Purgatory. One of the other novices corroborated the story. Niccoluccio didn’t believe a smattering of it.

  But just in case, he kept watch.

  No spirits visited him during the night, or the day, for that matter. Only the ghosts of names he’d left in Florence, but that had happened before.

  The next morning was emptier than any he’d ever seen in Sacro Cuore. Not until these past few days had he realized just how many noises the brothers made: the creaks of floorboards and doors, the shuffles of the elder brothers’ infirm feet, the flutters of scattering birds. All of it had felt like silence, but very different from this stifling blanket. This was a silence of the grave.

  There were fresh prints in the snow where the sacrist beat his tabula. Someone else must have died during the night. Maybe more than one. Niccoluccio hadn’t woken.

  He turned, and walked again about the cloister, hoping to find something he had missed. Nothing. After too long listening to nothing but his own feet shuffling the snow, it was hard to escape the feeling that the whole of the monastery had died. Struck by a sudden fear that that was in fact the case, he hurried past the sacrist’s footprints, toward the infirmary. His heart juddered with something between shock and relief when he nearly ran into Brother Rinieri, the infirmarer, stepping through the doorway.

  Rinieri’s hood rested limply on his head. He was so bald that he’d stopped needing his hair tonsured years ago. His eyes were so tired that he hardly seemed to register the near-collision. “Brother Niccoluccio,” he said. “I’m pleased to find you still alive.”

  “No less than I am to see you.” Some of the others had wondered aloud if Rinieri wouldn’t be among the first to fall. He spent more time around the diseased than anybody.

  Rinieri trudged toward the refectory. Niccoluccio followed. Usually, smoke trailed out of the kitchen chimney. Today, nothing. Rinieri said, “It seems those of us still here have been left to fend for ourselves.”

  “Do you know when Prior Lomellini might lift the suspension of services?”

  “Prior Lomellini took ill last night,” Rinieri said.

  Niccoluccio couldn’t breathe for a moment. Rinieri looked at him with a trace of sympathy, and said, “I left him in the infirmary. It’s only a matter of time. The laws dictate that we elect a new
prior the day after Lomellini passes, but I don’t believe that will be happening. Lomellini will be our last.”

  Niccoluccio said, “Sacro Cuore has survived pestilence before.”

  “I’ve read the records enough to know that this is very different. We unlucky few are living through the end of the world.”

  It took Niccoluccio a moment to process what Rinieri had said. Ever since the pestilence, things seemed to always be moving too fast – as fast as they used to in the outside world.

  Niccoluccio said, “Every day in Florence there were people who pronounced the end of the world. They were all wrong. It’s not possible for Man to know these things.”

  Rinieri waved beyond the cloister grounds, to the leafless branches looming over the chapter house. “The only question I have is whether all of this will continue without us. Will there still be trees? Moss? Will birds return in the summer? It seems a shame to unravel the whole world because men proved unworthy.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Niccoluccio said.

  Rinieri patted him kindly on the shoulder. “You’ll see, brother.” He stepped into the refectory. Niccoluccio found himself drawn along as if tied by the wrist.

  The refectory was empty. The warm air that usually wafted from the kitchen doors was absent. Niccoluccio rinsed his hands out of habit. Rinieri went last. Encrusted brown sludge sloughed off his hands. Only then did Niccoluccio notice the persistent smell of a lavatory following him.

  There was no milk left in the kitchen. The lay farmers had cut contact with Sacro Cuore. Some kind brother had set out jugs of water. There was still bread, at least. Someone was coming in to bake it. Niccoluccio and Rinieri sat together.

  Rinieri said, “I’m going to fall asleep soon, whether I want it or not. I don’t know if I’ll wake again. More than one of us has fallen asleep professing to feel fine and woken dead, so to speak.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Two sunrises. I can’t leave my post. I can’t save them, but I can at least make them more comfortable.”