Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Now, all those excuses sounded hollow. There was no principle in keeping her hands off even when there was nothing useful to observe.

  Feliks was probably watching. The amalgamates always were – if not directly, then by proxy. A hard lump burned in her throat. It stopped her from swallowing. The weight of it kept her from thinking of anything else as the shuttle pulled away.

  11

  Niccoluccio lay unmoving under a blanket of numbness. Echoes of the agony lingered in his memory.

  His body had been torn apart, he was sure of it. It had been ripped away from him one painful bit at a time, until all he was left with was the numbness and endless light and noise. The noise was like roaring rain, thunder that never faded. There was nothing intelligible in either. The light hurt to look at, but he had nothing with which to block it.

  His arm lay unmoving, pale and distant, as if through a foggy window. He felt no attachment to it. He couldn’t have looked away. He didn’t even know how.

  The light had seemed endless and perfect the first time it had washed across him, but now he spotted minute variations, splotches of shadow. Unknowable shapes, like afterimages, rippled like waves. Stars and sparks scintillated. Late at night, unable to sleep, he sometimes decided to stay awake until the call for Vigils. He would go to his garden and stare at the stars for so long that they seared into his eyes. He watched individual stars set or rise. Watching the celestial sphere had been like communing with perfection.

  He watched and waited, trying to discern patterns, but none emerged.

  He wasn’t breathing. He’d never realized, until now, how much he depended on the feeling of air coming in and out, of his chest rising. As a drum beating for hours faded into the background rhythm of awareness, so breathing had always been woven into the tapestry of his thoughts, the rhythm of his life. As Pietro and Elisa had become back home. It was just as good to escape.

  Some of the numbness parted like a curtain. A hot pressure mounted in the place where his chest had been. It was quickly becoming urgent.

  A weight pressed the center of his being. Then another close to his heart. He still had a body after all, he realized with a shock. The shadows were touching him.

  He couldn’t feel anything of his old self, could only see his body out of the corner of his eye. His arm lay across slushy mud, open-palmed. Some of the slush was stained with his blood.

  The tide of noise dwindled to nothing. The silence that persisted afterward was deeper than any he’d experienced before. The pressure in his chest was intolerable.

  This must have been what Hell was like, he realized. Dead, alienated from his body but still in it, still sensate. The pains of death and decay accumulating minute after minute, day after day, forever.

  The light shifted around him. Shadows stirred the grass. A brush like warm fingertips followed its passage. The ground fell away, and nothing touched him.

  Then the pressure in the center of his chest lifted all at once. Sweet-smelling air flooded through him. He gasped. It was like rosewater and saffron. He’d never tasted anything so striking. It was as if the most wonderful music were coursing through his body, though all remained silent.

  He was being carried away from the bloodstained ground, from the agonies and sufferings left limp and still behind him.

  When awareness returned, the blistering light had fled the world, and left him in suspension. The only sensation left was warmth, indescribable warmth, and fullness of being.

  The light that remained was warm, steady, and colored like the sun. It came in strips smooth as brushstrokes. He felt himself still rising, rising skyward, though nothing moved.

  His head spun with the delirium of it all. He rasped a laugh. His breath came lightly, and he still couldn’t control it.

  He tried to raise his hand to his forehead to steady himself, but he couldn’t move his arms. His body had ceased to be his own. He rested on a curved and cushioned pillow twice as large as his body, more comfortable than anything he’d ever felt before.

  He wasn’t alone.

  A woman sat on another black pillow. An unearthly play of blobby red light turned her into a half-silhouette. Her hair was bound tightly behind her. A wimple lay discarded across a slanted table. Straps held her body to her seat, but her arms were free.

  “Why do I deserve this?” he asked.

  She glanced back at him once before returning her attention to the lights. Her eyes were bloodshot. “Least I could do,” she muttered.

  Before Niccoluccio could speak again, another tide of euphoria crashed through him and rendered him insensate.

  Part II

  12

  For the first few hours, it was easy to move without thinking. All Habidah had to do was what came naturally. The medical patches did the rest.

  The shuttle’s spotlights and the roar of its unbaffled thrusters had scared the wolves away. She found the man lying unbreathing, in shock from blood loss. She’d planted a medical patch on his chest to restart his heart, and another to regulate his breathing. A third flooded him with enough adrenaline and endorphins to convince his brain to keep going. Dermal spray stemmed the bleeding.

  Given rest and warmth, a healthy man could have convalesced without intervention other than a transfusion, but this man was far from healthy. She cradled him in her arms and hauled him into the shuttle. Now it was her turn to flood her system with endorphins. Even with muscular enhancements, she’d never built herself to carry other people. By the time she got him strapped in, she’d had to block the pain receptors from torn muscles.

  The monk – and it didn’t take long to discover that he was a monk, once he came to some semblance of consciousness and started babbling – was unnaturally gaunt and bony. No wonder those wolves had thought him viable prey. He had no coat. Given the freezing rain the satellites said was coming over the horizon, he would certainly have frozen to death.

  It was plain just from looking at him that he needed more help than a lift to the nearest town. His blood pressure was too light to feel his pulse. The medical patches supersaturated his blood with oxygen. Soon, though, he’d need a transfusion.

  She ordered the shuttle to head to the field base.

  Feliks would notice. A landing or two might have gone unremarked upon, but not this. Kacienta was at the field base, too, and Habidah couldn’t hide from her. It would have been undignified to even try.

  Now that she’d made the fatal choice, she might as well own it. She called Kacienta. “I’m bringing back an injured guest. Be standing by with the blood synthesis and transfusion kit when I arrive. B positive.”

  She cut the transmission before Kacienta could ask.

  The monk stirred. He squinted through his endorphin and painkiller-induced delirium. His gaze traveled around before locking on the monitors. “A miracle.”

  “Suppose it is,” Habidah said, for lack of a better answer. There was no way that the monk, or frankly anyone on this plane, would attribute his rescue to worldly causes. She wondered how far to let him go along imagining this was divine intervention.

  It would be better for him to know some of the truth. “It may be a miracle, but I’m certainly not.”

  The monk tried to focus on her. “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody. My leaders will be upset when they find out I’ve done this.”

  He seemed a little smaller. “Did you come from Heaven or from Hell?”

  “I’m from a farm south of Lyon,” she said, and that did a good job of shutting him up for a moment. “That’s where my, ah… wagon is taking you now.”

  “Quite a journey,” he said, after a moment.

  “It’s a fast wagon.”

  She was nearly there already. The field base’s landing beacon shone above the horizon. The monk moaned as the shuttle dropped. At least he had eaten so little that he had nothing to throw up.

  The shuttle landed with a jarring clunk, prompting another gasp. “Nothing’s gone wrong,” she said. Rather than startle hi
m by allowing the shuttle to undo his safety harness, she tugged it loose for him. He hitched his arm over her shoulder. “The road’s a little rough this time of year.”

  He said nothing, though of course he would have been an idiot if he’d believed her. Habidah took his whole weight on her shoulder. She pulled him through the ventral corridor and down the boarding ramp. A wall of freezing air greeted them. The monk’s gaze lolled up. He gaped at the shuttle’s silhouette. She pushed his head downward before he could believe what he’d seen.

  He looked around the wide, moonlit plain. He slurred, “We were near a forest,” though he didn’t seem very agitated by this fact. He just wanted to let her know.

  She ground her teeth and dragged him. He tried to walk, but could only manage one or two steps before slumping into her. She had to kick the farmhouse doors ajar. The ramp entrance, at least, opened automatically. Light flooded the walk down.

  Kacienta was hurrying up to meet them. Habidah hadn’t seen her face-to-face in months. She, too, was a small woman, and squatter, with long, dark brown hair and skin a shade too dark to be native to the region. At least she was in costume, hair hidden under a wimple. Her lips tightened. She hoisted the monk’s other arm over her shoulder.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” she hissed. Habidah pretended she didn’t hear.

  The moment she reached the bottom of the ramp, the monk gasped. Too late, Habidah noticed the viewwalls were on, and projecting scenes of a vast, sandy-walled cavern. Sun globes cast sharp shadows across the kilometer-wide walls. A carpet of patchy green farmland clung to the distant floor like moss. Skyscraper-sized tunnels wormholed the walls. Habidah felt like a microbe lost in a sponge. This was Kacienta’s home plane, Arbor.

  Like Habidah’s world, much of Arbor was underground, but the similarities ended there. Kacienta hadn’t grown up in warrens and bunkers but in vast caverns like worlds, each ten or more kilometers in diameter, with their own climates and microecologies. They exported genengineered fungi and fauna to the rest of the Unity. It was as cosmopolitan, if not as high-technology, as Providence Core, Joao’s home. Kacienta was accustomed to dealing with outsiders – and seemed to have a low tolerance for all of them. She glared at the monk.

  Habidah ordered the illusion off. The corridor became flat, claustrophobic gray walls. The monk shook his head and winced.

  The double doors to Feliks’ office slid open of their own accord. The monk started. When they were through them, he glanced around her shoulder as if to see who might have opened them.

  Habidah tried not to show her relief when she saw that Feliks had disposed of his plague corpses. She laid the monk atop the first of the three white examination beds. Kacienta had rolled the blood synthesis kit out of storage. It sat on a cart, broad, gray-and-black, rectangular, about the size of a head. Thin tubes dangled out its side, drawing organic sludge from feedlines plugged into the wall. The device clicked and ticked like a pair of knitting needles.

  Kacienta picked up a fat, needle-tipped tube. The monk tried to struggle off the bed, but Habidah held his arm steady. He looked at the ceiling, and didn’t fight the second and third needles. With the mélange of painkillers swimming in his system, Habidah doubted he would have noticed if he hadn’t been looking. She held his arm regardless. His flesh was cold.

  “I put tranquilizers in the feed,” Kacienta sent. She transmitted rather than spoke to keep the monk from understanding.

  She hadn’t said a single word to the monk. The monk seemed perplexed by the room’s lights. He raised his free hand, palm out, as if to feel for heat.

  Kacienta could monitor him. Habidah didn’t want to watch him fade away. Gradually, Habidah let go. She told him, “I’m going to step out for just a moment and let your friends know where you are. I’ll be back.”

  The monk, still holding up his hand, said nothing. Habidah wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

  As she stepped through the doors, the monk told her, “Niccoluccio Caracciola.”

  She halted on the other side, and looked back. Somehow he’d found the strength to crane his head. He was staring at her with quiet, taut desperation.

  “Habidah Shen,” she managed to say before the doors shut.

  The monk spent three days regaining his health, fading in and out of a drug-induced coma. Finally, Habidah took him off his tranquilizers and let him wake. She spoke to him as he stirred so he would have a voice to listen to.

  She brought him food and warm milk from the kitchen. He drank quietly and said little. He looked about the walls of Feliks’ office, mesmerized by its clean, simple shapes. Finally, he turned to her, visibly trying his best to absorb what she was saying. It was obviously too much for him. He smiled, confused.

  When Habidah had to leave, she made sure to lock him in.

  Feliks remotely supervised his convalescence while finishing up in Genoa. He hadn’t said anything to Habidah – yet. Habidah hadn’t answered his one call. Considering how quickly he and NAI usually patched up most injuries, three days had been a very long recovery period. The bites and blood loss had only been Niccoluccio’s most superficial problems. He’d been hypothermic. He’d been starved over the past few days, and eaten poorly for longer. She could count his ribs. His arms and legs were just as bony.

  One important medical test came back negative right away. There was no trace of the plague bacillus. That was the only thing she couldn’t cure.

  She sat in the conference room with Joao and Kacienta, watching Niccoluccio through the cameras. He was picking at the patch on the side of his neck. Habidah had told him not to, but he still did when he thought she wasn’t watching. The patch had adhered so firmly that he would have had better luck removing his ear.

  Kacienta said, “We should have kept him on tranquilizers.”

  Habidah hadn’t yet figured out what had made Kacienta choose extraplanar anthropology, except perhaps as a stepping stone to another field. This was only her third field assignment. She was the team’s data analyst, meaning she spent large chunks of her time cloistered here, compiling reports. That seemed to suit her.

  Joao said, “It doesn’t matter. He already saw everything in that room before you two put him under.”

  Joao had arrived a day ago. Feliks, too, was on his way. His shuttle had just landed. Only Meloku had refused to return. She participated remotely. When she spoke, her voice was even cooler than usual. “He might have assumed that he had been dreaming or hallucinating.”

  Kacienta said, “If too many of the locals know we’re here, they’ll certainly change their collective response to the plague. It will contaminate our work.”

  Joao said, “Whatever. It’s not the point. If we think he might get out and say something that would interfere with the survey, we can drop him off in Australia. The point is that this is a completely unnecessary, and risky, entanglement. We didn’t come here to help these people. We came to help us. Any time and effort we don’t spend on our mission comes at the expense of millions of people back home.”

  Habidah kept her eyes on the monitor. There wasn’t much to say in her defense. She wasn’t particularly worried about this one man changing the world. Kacienta was overestimating the influence of a lone monk. Niccoluccio was all but powerless. He had no friends to return to. Satellites confirmed that the monastery Niccoluccio named had been completely abandoned.

  Niccoluccio gave up his attempt to peel off the medical patch. He felt back and forth the smooth contours of his bed. She smiled briefly. It was like watching a puppy explore a new home.

  Joao said, “This is endangering everything we’re doing. There are only five of us. We can’t spend our energy helping these people. If we did, we’d run out of resources long before we accomplished what we came here to do.”

  The door whisked open. Feliks entered, still in Genoan costume. Habidah swallowed. She’d been dreading this. He paused to lean on the edge of the table. After glancing at her, he focused on Joao. He’d been listening in. “Do you
think that, because Dr Shen helped this one man, we’re now going to instantly abandon our mission and spend all of our time helping the locals?”

  “That’s where I’m afraid this is going to lead, yes.”

  “You must have learned about the slippery slope fallacy sometime in those expensive Core World schools.”

  “Even the time we’re spending here, talking about ‘this one man,’ is too much.”

  “You were scheduled to be on your way back from Siena regardless, yes?”

  “Yes, to get ready for my next assignment, not fret over this.”

  Feliks walked to the end of the table and sat. Habidah watched him until he turned his eyes to her. She looked away. She’d been waiting for his scolding. Apparently, if it was forthcoming, it would only happen in private. That felt almost worse.

  Habidah told Joao, “You said there were only five of us. Now there are six.”

  Joao swiveled his chair to face Habidah. “Excuse me?”

  “I did what I did. I’m not making excuses for it.” Nor would she ever take it back. “But it’s already done. Can’t any of you see the opportunities he presents?”

  Meloku said, “Opportunities to keep sabotaging our project.”

  Habidah let that pass. She traced circles on the table. “Our resources have always been stretched thin. We can only cover a few of the plague sites, and then briefly. Meloku, you told me that we need to study a place before and after the plague strikes. What if we had a correspondent who could? Someone with a native perspective.”

  Feliks watched her carefully. “Do you think he’d be agreeable to that?”

  “He’s certainly not hostile. He thinks I was sent by God whether I’m aware I was or not.” She nodded at the screen. Niccoluccio was muttering a prayer under his breath. NAI’s lip-reading software scrawled the lines of a psalm underneath his image. “He wants to learn.”