Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  6

  Before Habidah and Feliks reached Genoa, the plague ships had come and gone. The Genoese had been ready. Genoese cogs came to meet the plague galleys, bowmen standing in their towers with arrows nocked, until the galleys turned away.

  The shuttle arrived at night. It drew a cloak of dark over itself. Habidah had the shuttle spiral over Genoa while she conducted a deep scan for any sign of infection: significant quantities of corpse gas expulsions, people with abnormally high body temperatures, a lack of movement from neighborhood to neighborhood. Nothing. The Genoese seemed to have escaped for the time being. She breathed out.

  Feliks watched her from the acceleration couch opposite hers. He’d been quiet throughout the flight, but he’d rarely taken his eyes off her. His concern grated on her. He was the sick man, not her.

  Visual scanning didn’t reveal much besides a few flickering fires. Otherwise, Genoa was as solid black as the open wilderness. To Genoa’s inhabitants, the night must have seemed like a different world, cold and wild and dangerous. It was no wonder many of them believed that the plague spread most easily at night, carried on ill winds. Switching to infrared to pick a landing site felt like cheating.

  The shuttle set down just inside the city walls, in an open square near a well. The moment she and Feliks set foot on soil, the ramp folded up. The shuttle vanished with a whisper and a suggestion of a shadow. A cold autumn breeze swept in.

  Still thinking of the dark, Habidah turned her retinal infrared off. She wanted to see the world as the locals saw it. Her breath caught in her throat. She might as well have struck herself blind. She couldn’t even see Feliks. The world seemed so closed in around her. She only lasted a few seconds before she turned infrared on again.

  Feliks waited. He knew her retinal infrared was switching on and off, Habidah realized. She wondered if there was a single member of the team he wasn’t always monitoring.

  “Empathetic understanding is core to your analytic approach,” he said, as they walked. “Unusual for an anthropologist, isn’t it?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “It places your health at more risk during this assignment.”

  “Not as much risk as other people around here.”

  “That’s my point. You’re worrying more about the natives, about people you can’t help, than your own wellbeing.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the locals,” she said, with an arched eyebrow, and left him to interpret that.

  Anyway, if she was after “empathetic understanding” then she was doing a miserable job of it. She couldn’t even stand a few seconds of claustrophobia.

  An overcast hid the stars and moon, but the hot outlines of Genoa’s sleeping inhabitants shone through their walls. She needed only spin a circle to know that she and Feliks were absolutely alone, unobserved. None of the locals could ever be so sure. Here she was, immune from the plague, ensconced in technology; she’d never be able to understand the peril that these people felt themselves in every day.

  She and Feliks started by tacking a handful of thumbnail-sized sensors around the city, but their chief accomplishment that night was to get their own feel for the city’s streets and neighborhoods. They walked past small churches and around the Cathedral of St Lawrence. Habidah took infrared snapshots of the carvings adorning the richest churches, and of the architecture of the poorest. The carved doorways and loggias and swaying banners told a score about the locals’ values, and the weight they placed on their own ostentatiousness.

  She said, “It’s going to be interesting to see how much of this the locals will keep pursuing in the face of the plague.”

  Feliks asked, “Comfort in luxury goods?” His breath was flagging, but he had more energy than yesterday. For now, he kept up fine.

  “Worth considering, if it works here. There’s no shortage of high technology luxury goods in the Unity. The amalgamates could always find some new ones. Reshape a few economies to chase after them.” Anything and everything might bring some solace.

  The amalgamates would never admit to having so much control over the Unity’s member worlds as to reshape their economies. Publicly, the amalgamates only “ran” the Unity in the sense that they set trade policy among member worlds. They also managed the gateways linking planes, ostensibly as a public service. The Unity was supposed to be more of a loose federation of planes coming together for mutual benefit and defense. Unified only to outsiders, in the sense that an attack on one plane would be perceived as an attack on all. The amalgamates, with their powerful planarships and other secret weapons, were judges of last resort as well as security against truly outrageous threats.

  Everyone with half a mind and a will to not self-deceive knew that the amalgamates did more than they professed. The chancellor of Habidah’s university, who had organized this along with hundreds of other universities across the planes, made no secret of her sympathy to the amalgamates. And she had let Habidah know that her findings were of interest to them, and would be forwarded on.

  It would not be the first time the amalgamates had read her work. They soaked up all kinds of data from throughout the Unity. They controlled all of its gateways – communication gateways, too. Absorbing their message traffic was just a happy bonus of their position.

  This assignment was the first time anyone had admitted it so openly to Habidah, though.

  Sunrise let her finally turn off retinal infrared. Bright pink shadows silhouetted the mountains to the north. The markets bustled with activity, stall and store owners setting up for the day. Fear of the plague didn’t slow them, at least. The Genoese knew that the threat came from outside the city, not within. Several spice merchants had closed, and recently enough that the smell of pepper and saffron still lingered about them.

  She and Feliks headed closer to the city gates, into the poorer neighborhoods. There, they passed an empty house. The door was locked, and the two beds within were covered in dust and bereft of sheets. A few minutes’ chat with the neighbors found that the landlord, a clergyman from the Cathedral of St Lawrence, was having trouble finding tenants.

  Feliks sat heavily on the wooden doorstep, his face red. Habidah went alone to hunt down the clergyman. By the time she returned, key in hand and several silver coins lighter, he was still breathing heavily. He was able to get inside under his own power, but fell on the bed before Habidah could throw out the old and moldy dried heather mattress.

  Feliks didn’t wake until the next morning. By then, Habidah had gotten to know the neighbors. One, a woman with soap-scarred black hands, promised to be a rich source of gossip. Another, a pilgrim en route to Rome and trapped in Genoa for fear of the plague, had promised to share all of his views on the church with her.

  Habidah sat on the edge of his bed. “You sure you want to stay here?”

  “Positive,” Feliks said, and forced himself to get up.

  She took it easy with him regardless. He courteously declined to notice. She limited their morning expeditions to the neighborhood, which worked just as well because it was poorer and likely to be hit hardest by the plague.

  They met fishermen, seamstresses, former soldiers with deep-gouged old wounds, carpenters, and dockmen. They lived across from an old mercenary with a missing eye and a bubbly patchwork of scar tissue where half his scalp should have been. Their neighbor was a former Greek galley slave who’d escaped by slipping loose his shackles and diving overboard. Next to him was a forty-year-old woman who’d successfully raised seven children and been left with three more when her sister had eloped with a second husband. Elsewhere were a bald old ex-clergyman who illegally preached on the corner and was rumored to receive a stipend from an old mistress, and an apprenticing furrier who bragged about a scar on his arm he claimed resembled a saint, and a different saint every week.

  Life among neighbors in Genoa was intimate. Everyone on this narrow, corkscrew-like street knew everyone. Habidah and Feliks had been noticed before they’d moved in. She fit in well. Back i
n the Unity, she’d been short. In this city, with its poor nutritional balance, her height was just average. Feliks was huge next to her. They took the guise of a married couple, with Feliks recovering from a long illness (nearly the truth). Nobody asked where she went while he stayed. Habidah would hardly have been the first prostitute on their street, not even the first married prostitute.

  There was no way to be sure when the plague would enter Genoa, only that it would. Habidah perused the rest of her team’s reports at night, when she couldn’t get her three hours of sleep. Meloku’s reports from Venice were sparse and clinical, with almost no useful conclusions. Kacienta was in the skies, scouting plague transmission vectors. Her map looked like black bile pulsing through the veins of the continent.

  After their morning walks, Feliks stayed inside to compile their data. They both knew this was an excuse to let him stay off his feet. Habidah took long and leisurely walks through the rest of the city, perused shops and markets. But the churches got most of her attention.

  The Genoese knew about the plague – what’s more, they knew it was coming. In spite of travel restrictions and the ever-present political turmoil of Italy, news arrived every day. They waited in dread and prayer, and overstuffed their churches. No matter the venue, from the poorest church with a nailed-together altar to the Cathedral of St Lawrence, Habidah had a hard time finding space to stand. The sermons focused on ritual and repentance. The cathedral’s clergymen were particularly animated about “God’s holy Sunday,” and lectured that their audience’s failure to keep it had brought His wrath. Those close enough to hear absorbed every word. Now that the news of the plague had had weeks to settle in, a strongly ritualistic, performative mythos was taking shape. Believing the plague could have been averted by proper genuflecting was a classic attempt to control things that could not be controlled. She’d seen it many times before.

  She knew exactly how the plague bacilli spread. Infrared picked up the rats waiting in the walls. She already knew which households would be most at risk. Like seeing in the dark, though, knowing this obstructed her understanding. These people hadn’t even developed a germ theory of disease. As far as they were concerned, it might as well have been the hand of God carrying off half the world. She couldn’t think that way.

  Habidah crouched against a church wall and listened to another in an endless stream of psalms. Then again, maybe she and Feliks were more like the locals than she wanted to believe. Everyone in the Unity was still waiting for the amalgamates to cure the onierophage. They had to take it on faith that the amalgamates would prevail, if not in curing the disease, then in stopping its spread.

  In all their explorations of trillions of planes, the Unity had never found minds as powerful as the amalgamates. The amalgamates had emerged from the AI wars that had racked the Unity in its lost early age, fifteen thousand years ago. The battles had been fought over datastreams, and entered the outside world only when the AIs had bombed key power plants or network junctions. But the electronic warfare corrupted most of the era’s databases and records, and left the wars more mystery, speculation, and legend than fact.

  The wars had reportedly lasted only half a day, with battles measured in fractions of a second. The victorious AIs had survived only by forming power blocs. They’d enforced the permanency of their alliances by merging together. Their unified minds were sculpted out of hundreds or thousands of individual AIs. They programmed safeguards into every AI created after them, neutered their capabilities to ensure that no other AIs would threaten their positions.

  With that squabble out of the way, the amalgamates had turned their attention to protecting themselves. The multiverse was full of wonders and terrors. Thanks largely to the amalgamates, Habidah had had plenty of experience with the wonders, and little with the terrors. Rival transplanar empires, runaway AIs, nonhuman xenophobes, hyper-invasive species, and other bogeys skirmished with the Unity all the time. The amalgamates had not yet been bested.

  It was an open secret that the amalgamates maintained their empire of human civilizations to protect themselves from all of these. Even they couldn’t control everything – not without multiplying themselves to the point of risking another civil war.

  Humans were not the most common sentient species in the multiverse, but they tended to produce the kind of civilizations that the amalgamates found most useful. Humans were grasping, avaricious, and social. They harnessed those traits to build vast industrial economies. By incorporating so many human-populated planes and their output into their empire, the amalgamates controlled much more than they could have managed alone.

  The amalgamates lived in or above the Unity’s eleven Core Worlds, their intellects residing in fortress-stations or planarships. Each took responsibility for a different aspect of the Unity’s governance. Together they managed the Unity’s affairs across its countless and ever-expanding member worlds. They enticed planes into the Unity with the promise of their vast interplanar trade. They were above the affairs of individuals. They managed through a multiplicity of agents and neutered AIs. The NAI that managed the field base was a low-level example. Another agent oversaw the university that had sent Habidah and her team here. Even planes that had rejected the amalgamates’ control were reputedly riddled with the amalgamates’ agents.

  Now even those planes were stricken by the onierophage. Planes that had long ago tried to cut all contact with the Unity opened their gateways for the first time in centuries, asking the amalgamates for help.

  Habidah watched men and women line themselves in front of their saints’ altars and relics. She couldn’t ever remember being comforted by the idea of the amalgamates, but she supposed it must have been true. She’d never trusted them, exactly, but she’d never feared them either. The amalgamates rarely interacted with individuals other than their agents, but they were always there, as concrete in form as they were abstract in personality.

  For these people, their God was the reverse. He was thunderous when given voice by the preachers, but absent from their daily lives. What would it be like to be as afraid of the amalgamates as these people were of their God? She couldn’t imagine.

  The plague breached Genoa’s walls in winter, when it would have its worst effect.

  Satellite observation picked it up first. It started with mass rat deaths, the city’s invisible animal population dying and dispersing. Pigs and dogs next. Then the infrared signatures of people living along one of Genoa’s eastern avenues began winking out. More and more people stayed inside as they realized what was going on long before the city authorities did. But even people who stayed died. Few Genoese lived in houses impervious to rats and fleas.

  By the time the plague reached the markets, it was too late for even the most stringent quarantine to preserve Genoa.

  Feliks reclined on his bed and sifted through the blood samples Habidah had taken from the locals through handshakes. It took him only a few minutes to pronounce that he expected sixty to seventy percent mortality.

  Habidah hurried through the streets. She drew her coat against the cold. The same cold had long since been at work repressing the locals’ immune systems, leaving them fewer defenses than if the plague struck during the autumn. It wasn’t easy to tell the empty houses from those filled with the dead. So far, the empty houses outnumbered the ones with corpses. Plenty of Genoese had fled for the countryside. More left every day.

  She stopped at the end of one street when she saw three militiamen standing in front of a cart, hauling a woman and two sick girls aboard. Vomit stained the woman’s tunic and her eyes were closed, but she was still alive, and far from the sickest Habidah had seen. The girls were pale and hollow-eyed, but awake. They meekly allowed the militiamen to lift them into the cart.

  Habidah trailed the cart. The militiamen pulled two more living plague victims out of an alley. The cart left through the city’s northern gates, quickly waved through by the on-duty watchmen. Habidah lost track of it as she waited in the lines with all the
other people fleeing the city.

  Outside the walls, the cart’s tracks led her to a sizable wooden house, much longer than it was wide. It was obviously of fresh construction. Unused planks and sawdust littered the ground around it.

  The Genoese didn’t want anything to do with the dying and the dead. They left plague victims in their homes. Those who had no homes, or who fell in the streets or other public places, were hauled to “hospitals” set up outside the city walls. The authorities claimed the sick would be taken care of there. No one believed that. The hospitals were mass graves that hadn’t been dug yet.

  Habidah carried a medical kit, concealed under her coat. She’d grabbed it this morning without letting herself think about why. The amalgamates had, through their agents in the university, specifically forbidden her team from possessing the cure to the plague. She did have painkillers, though. And fever reducers.

  Infrared picked up hundreds of living people inside a space that would have been uncomfortable for dozens, lying atop each other, feverish, suffering. And that wasn’t counting the corpses interspersed among them. If the hospital had once had nurses or physicians, then they, too, had been felled. More likely they had abandoned their posts, or never been assigned.

  Habidah had painkillers for a dozen people, at most. If she requested more, the field base’s NAI would notice. Word would get back to the university.

  Her hand drifted away from her medical kit.

  She made herself walk back. She turned off her demiorganics’ nerve dampeners. She wanted to at least experience the same cold these people did. It kept her from thinking clearly, but it also forced her to focus on the things right in front of her: on keeping herself moving, hopping from one warm place to another, and on taking comfort in the indoors. Just like these people.