Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  After crossing several bridges, she found a run-down travelers’ house bordering a slum. Infrared revealed only two people: a middle-aged man and woman, both with poor circulation and cold extremities. It was single story and had three vacant rooms, one of which was leaking. A pulse scan found that the rushes hadn’t been changed since the quarantine, except in the landlords’ room.

  It took three knocks to rouse the inhabitants. A hefty, balding man in a buttonless brown tunic and nightcap came to the door. Meloku, hands folded meekly, pleaded her case. She was Constance, a woman who’d fled her home in the countryside for a reason she refused to state. Even with the plague approaching, that was as good as saying that she was running away from her husband. Many women like her did. She’d reached the island republic just before the quarantine.

  His skepticism ended when she pulled a handful of silver coins out of her pocket, enough to pay for a five-day stay. He showed her to a room that had two candles, a straw mattress, and woolen sheets. The walls were solid, at least, and he’d taken her to the room without the leaking roof. Meloku handed over her payment and held her tongue when he said he’d replaced the rushes only a few weeks ago.

  Alone, she was tempted to take a moment to test the bed. But Companion ticked away quietly in the corner of her mind. It was always judging her, measuring her. That was why she had it.

  She opened her field kit, and from it took five thumbnail-sized discs. She placed one on each wall, and a third on the floor. When she activated them, a red flicker distorted the wood around them. The room was now sound-proofed – imperfectly so, admittedly, but enough to fool a merely human ear. She could be up pacing all night, and her hosts would never hear.

  Her colleagues preferred to get out, interact with their subjects. Meloku had a hard time being personal. Besides, she was better at multitasking. She had a grade of demiorganics normally restricted to Unity military officers. She played along with her team because she’d had to, but she might as well have been as alien among them as anywhere else on this plane. Every time she spoke with them, laughed with them, ate with them, she made herself remember that.

  Next, she planted a quartet of field projectors around her door frame. They, too, were military-grade. Even her augmented eyes couldn’t register the security field switch on. When she gave the door an experimental kick, it struck back hard as titanium.

  She turned. The air scintillated with red, blue, and green lines and icons, a satellite view of Venice. Her demiorganics projected the map directly into her visual cortex. She could have conjured it as an abstract idea, as knowledge rather than a scene, but too much of her remained stubbornly human and attached to her senses.

  Five minutes’ analysis was all she needed to identify Venice’s neighborhoods and traffic arteries. Potential vectors for plague transmission sprouted as bright red arrows and percentile probabilities. Before long, she had five good guesses as to where the first infections would appear and how they would spread.

  Over the next several nights, Meloku snuck out and planted eavesdroppers in every position she’d marked. Each time she returned, the map of Venice shrank, squeezed out by camera views. Eventually, the floating images expanded into the third dimension, layering atop each other.

  She tracked every boat, from the slave galleons to two-person canal rafts. She kept a careful measure of the quarantine efforts at the piers. Those who had the means were evacuating to their country homes. Their neighbors gave them dark and jealous glances, sometimes broke into their homes minutes after they left. Even before the plague reached Venice, the city lost more and more of itself each day. Everyone knew what was coming.

  The plague took longer to arrive than she’d expected. She was left with nothing to do but sit and watch. She daydreamed about stealing the team’s shuttle and taking it to Avignon anyway.

  Inevitably, the plague seeped through the quarantine, and gave her plenty else to think about.

  It arrived via two vectors at once, three days apart. The first vortex of death tugged at the city from the east. It started as a handful of bodies, and quickly became dozens upon dozens. At the same time, another rash of infection appeared along the Grand Canal. Meloku nearly mistook it for the same outbreak, but these victims developed up to two buboes rather than one, and died more painfully. It was a different strain, and must have arrived through the harbor. Even with the largest ships barred from entering, plenty of canal boats came and went by night. A city like Venice could never be completely cut off from the world.

  The plague spread through the city’s arteries. She could actually track the waves of death striking homes along the roads and canals, and working their way inward from there, like ink seeping through a sponge. One hundred people died each day. Then two hundred. Even with most of the city shut indoors, the plague spread without restraint. Pigs and cats and loose dogs roamed the streets and bridges, dying of the plague like everything else, carrying their pestilential rat fleas with them.

  As Meloku hoped, her landlords died. The eavesdropper she’d planted on the street outside saw the husband struggling home with a fever. Two days later, she watched through the walls as their infrared signatures cooled to ambient. She would no longer have to plan her trips around their waking hours.

  The other members of her team focused their studies on the common people, the illiterate masses, those who had no voice and no power. Meloku didn’t know why they bothered. There were only five of them. They would get some spectacular individual stories to sell back in the Unity, certainly. But it was like trying to understand a colony of ants by dissecting one worker.

  It was the systems that were important. Venice was a snarl of competing interests and vainglorious wealth, but its response to the plague was comprehensive, organized, and likely the most effective that the natives’ knowledge allowed. The eavesdroppers tracked talk of a commission of nobles and knights formed to protect their city against the plague. Already, the commission had shut down drinking houses and banned wine boats from the canals, killing a major avenue of plague transmission.

  Body disposal had been quickly regulated, as well. Every plague corpse was shipped away to one of two islands. There, they were given a ritual “last view” of Venice, a prayer, and buried in graves strictly measured to a meter and half in depth. The commission outlawed keeping corpses inside homes. Every day, gondoliers plied the canals shouting, “Dead bodies, dead bodies!” Householders threw family members’ corpses into the gondolas on pain of arrest.

  The commission banned doomsayers and mourning clothes to try to keep the populace’s spirits high. When the city streets started to look too empty, they announced clemency for exiles and debt criminals, and opened the jails. Venice’s authorities firmly believed their world would continue, and fought to make everyone see it the same way. Even as the plague deaths reached their peak – with five hundred bodies shipped to the mass graves every day – the commission announced that any civil servant who’d fled and refused to return to their job in the next eight days wouldn’t have a job to come back to. Scores of fresh applicants filled the vacancies.

  Venice stood in sharp contrast to other cities, especially Messina and Siena. There, authorities seemed to have decided the plague was God’s will, and there was nothing they could do. Meloku scanned the images Habidah had captured in Messina. Venice’s organized response to the plague may have saved a few lives, but it made an even vaster difference in the way Venetians comported themselves. They fought through their mourning. The Messinans, even the healthy ones, trudged the streets when they came out at all.

  Venice’s civil government was fascinating, and worth extended study by itself, but it was local. In spite of its extended trade network and vast influence, Meloku couldn’t believe it could turn itself into an empire. She hadn’t come here to write reports.

  “I should be in Avignon right now,” Meloku muttered, alone in her room.

  Companion said, “You can make progress towards that here.”

 
Meloku started. Companion could be silent for days at a time. Meloku had nearly forgotten it was there.

  Not for the first time, she wished she could have grown up with Companion. Companion had been implanted in her twenties. Even with demiorganics, human neuroplasticity only went so far in adulthood. If she’d had Companion there since she was a toddler, she would never even have learned what it felt like to be alone. She wouldn’t need to put any effort into being a team, she’d just be one.

  From the day Companion had been let loose in her demiorganics, it had known her better than her parents. Companion was brilliant, understanding, munificent – and it was just a few clusters of neuronal pathways buried deep in her demiorganics, a fraction the size of her own messy and disjointed brain. Just one more way humans were less than the machines that governed them.

  Companion didn’t have to peer deep into her thoughts to know what she was thinking. “The onierophage is forcing us to step up the speed at which our agents are elevated into demiorganic bodies,” it thought. “Continue proving yourself, and it will be your turn.”

  She asked, “How?”

  “Can you figure that out by yourself? Or do I need to tell you?”

  Another test. That quieted her.

  She sifted through her array of cameras and stopped on the image of St Mark’s Basilica. The pearl, multi-domed cathedral drew more and more people each day. Its bells rang constantly.

  Quarantine or not, people flocked to St Mark’s. Though these people couldn’t have guessed the plague spread through rat fleas, they knew it could transmit from person to person and even that possessions were contagious. Yet they were gathering here, and not even the commission dared stop them. It said a great deal about the power their religion had over them.

  She rooted through her field kit for her tailoring supplies. Three hours later, she was Edessa Akropolites, a traveler from east of Constantinople trapped in Venice by the quarantine. Her demiorganics adjusted her accent and gave her a Greek language database. She dressed as a noblewoman, in an orange tunic of imitation Parisian fabric lined with velvet, and a violet skirt that trailed to the ground. She left her hair bound tightly behind her neck, now in a single, elaborate knot, with a scarf as a headdress. Seductive without being vulgar. She had jewelry to match, a pearl necklace and emerald and lapis rings. Two of the buttons on her sleeves were also jeweled. In sum, a rich target for a thief – especially the kind of thief who would aim to part her from her wealth by means more sophisticated than pickpocketing.

  She avoided looking at the corpses of her landlords on her way out.

  She was embarrassed to find that, like all of the other visitors approaching St Mark’s, she was awed. Meloku had seen infinitely grander things on other planes, but after spending so many days shut in her little room it was still a shock to her senses. Four lead-lined domes stood above five stone entranceways. A statue of St Mark stood upon a gable, flanked by angels, looking upon the crowds. For the means these people possessed, the craftsmanship was quite extraordinary, and would have consumed whole lifetimes of endeavor.

  Meloku sidestepped a group of filthy four to seven year-olds begging at the door, apparently orphans. St Mark’s was as bustling inside as out. The cacophony made it difficult to think. There were no formal services at the moment. Congregants clustered at the altars dedicated to Venice’s numerous patron saints. She walked down the central aisle, trying to look like she knew where she was going.

  Some Venetians kneeled silently, but still more were talking to their deity and its saints as though they were physically present. They crowded around each other, touching the same altars. A pulse scan revealed lice hopping clothing. Meloku couldn’t help her grimace.

  “Not so different from what’s going on back home,” Companion said. “Trillions lining around the amalgamates, praying for a cure.”

  “The amalgamates exist,” Meloku said. “The onierophage doesn’t spread person-to-person.”

  She made her way to the front three rows. The pews were overfull. The crowd spilled over the edges and onto the floor. Five children wailed next to their mother, who was trying to ignore them and pray. Meloku filtered out their noise to have a thought left to herself.

  After applying another filter for the smell, Meloku strolled around the aisles until she found the type of people she was looking for: five ecclesiastical officials in black and red robes. They stood away from the crowd, their backs to her. Audio sorting detected a French accent.

  Meloku strode past the full pews and, like so many others around her, took refuge on the floor. Her expensive dress drooped onto the stone. She folded her legs, closed her eyes, and mouthed an approximation of prayer. Her demiorganics found a passage of scripture appropriate for a woman praying for her soul.

  As she expected, when she opened her eyes, two of the robed officials were beside her. “Madam,” said the nearest, appalled. He was a man of heavy girth, a stubbly dark beard, and a voice that gave him away as Venetian. “The floor is no place for a woman like yourself.”

  Meloku dabbed her eyes. “God be with you, sir,” she said, heavy on the accent. She looked to the full benches. “I had nowhere else to rest my legs.”

  She knew at once that the man beside him was the Frenchman, even before he spoke. The avarice of the Avignon papacy was legendary. He was tonsured, but humility ended there. His curled, pointed shoes – the ridiculous height of fashion – were long enough that she couldn’t imagine him walking up stairs. Jeweled rings studded six of his fingers. No doubt his robe was hiding more expensive clothes underneath.

  The Frenchman said, “You are welcome in the baptistery, if you would care to join us. We have closed it to the people for the time being, but it is more comfortable.”

  Meloku accepted his hand up, and meekly let him lead her. The Frenchman took her through an open door to the left of the farthest nave, and into an empty round room. Images of saints looked down upon them from the golden walls. A statue of St John the Baptist stood upon the font.

  The Frenchman’s companion hadn’t followed. On another day, a woman in “Edessa’s” position would have refused to go further with a lone man, even a clergyman. The plague had upturned the world, though. She needed him to think Edessa vulnerable.

  He directed her to a bench and sat beside her. “It gives me grief to see ladies like yourself in these conditions.” He paused. “I admit, I do not see many travelers from so far east here.”

  “I came here with my husband. We were traveling for business, to buy silver.”

  “He is not with you now?”

  She told her demiorganics to make her tear up. “He rests on San Giorgia d’Alega.” The island held one of Venice’s mass gravesites.

  “Would that you were safe back home. It’s not often that travelers take their wives with them, for this reason among many others.”

  “He could not bear to be separated from me for so long.”

  “And now you are trapped here with the rest of us. I, too, have been forbidden from returning home until the pestilence has passed.”

  “Oh? You are not Venetian?”

  He smiled thinly. His eyes traveled once over her body. “No, madam. I am a delegate from the papal offices in Avignon, here to visit the bishop.”

  As he would expect her to, she at once bowed her head. When she had recovered herself, he said, “What I meant to say earlier was that I did not expect to see someone from so far east here, at St Mark’s. Not since the divide between our churches.”

  “Oh! I never meant to come as a schismatic. I never had the opportunity to know anything but my church until I arrived–”

  “Quite all right. And understandable.”

  “I attended services when I was a child, but my husband wouldn’t allow me to leave home after we wed. This is the first chance I’ve had.”

  She laid out her story. Edessa had been raised Orthodox, but had lost contact with the church once her jealous husband began forcing her to stay at home or travel
with him. Her only exposure to formal religion since had been here, in Catholic Italy.

  She nodded to the golden mosaicked walls. “Even when I was a girl, I never felt anything at church like I do here. This place isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen there. It’s so grand, so humbling, so… so… I can’t explain what it’s done to me.”

  The legate seized upon her hints. “Do you have anything waiting for you when you go home? A family… a church to belong to?”

  She shook her head. “Only property. Certainly not a church, not now. I don’t feel I could after what I’ve seen here.”

  “It’s a terrible thing, not to have a church.”

  “The world is more and more a terrible place.”

  “We try our best to make our own beauty and solace in it. You’ve come to the right place to start.” He hesitated. She could taste his greed, like sweat. “You are thinking, perhaps, of converting?”

  “That is a very difficult question to ask a woman.”

  “I would be willing to help you through the transition.”

  She looked at the granite statue covering the baptismal font and pretended to steel herself.

  After a long enough pause, she said, “I’ve come to believe that this church could mean something to me no other ever has. I feel a blindfold has been lifted. But I would be afraid to convert without a guide. I would not be able to go home. I have no one here.”

  He took one of her hands in his. “I would be only too happy to serve.”

  She couldn’t do anything but pretend not to notice his hand. Women of this culture weren’t allowed to notice the obvious, least of all when it was something that they wanted. She needed to pretend diffidence to be attractive to this type of man. Judging from his longing look, she’d done a good job of it.

  She smiled weakly. She’d worn underclothing authentic to her noblewoman’s costume, on the chance that it might matter. Companion had been right after all. She didn’t need to be in Avignon to find her route into it.