Quietus
Page 14
The past few times she’d visited, Niccoluccio had overflowed with questions. He’d wanted to know where he was, why he’d been healed, why she’d chosen him. He was much more interested in why than how. He’d never asked how her medical machines functioned.
He’d chosen the right questions. Those were the ones she could actually begin to answer. She’d avoided specifics, but told the truth.
She’d told him that she and her team were foreigners from a very distant land, and that they’d come to Europe to learn about its peoples. They had amazing tools, tools so advanced that they seemed as magic to Niccoluccio. She didn’t intend to use them to harm anyone. She had used them to save him.
Niccoluccio had asked if Habidah was an ambassador from Prester John. Prester John was a native rumor, a mythical Christian king in the far east, crusading against the infidel. Habidah had just smiled and shaken her head.
She’d expected him to ask, eventually, if she was Christian. The question never came. He seemed to already know the answer. For a monk, he was more open-minded than she’d expected. He seemed to want to like her. If that meant closing his mind to certain problems, then he would.
Joao’s nose wrinkled as he watched Niccoluccio. “He might help. If he’s interested. If he likes what he sees of us. If he doesn’t try to expose us. If he doesn’t catch the plague and die. If you don’t have to spend more time babysitting him than you do working on your surveys. If he even knows what information is valuable to us. If he even goes somewhere useful. And even if that’s all true, you still had no right to put us in this position, or a native in an environment completely alien to him.”
“I firmly believe he would rather be here than where he was.”
Kacienta said, “You’ve endangered the whole project. I have no choice but to send a report about this back home.”
“Seconded,” Joao said. “It’s going right in our next transmission.”
“Fine,” Habidah said. “Does that mean we’re done here?”
Silence followed. She took that to mean the meeting was finished. She stood. “Now, unless you’d like to help, you should get to your next assignments.”
She walked out of the room before anyone answered.
She expected Feliks, at least, to come after her. No one followed. She breathed out. That had been more difficult than she expected. But so long as the university hadn’t recalled her, she was still in charge. She didn’t have to defend her decisions. She just had to make them.
Of course, how long she would remain in charge remained an open question.
When she entered Feliks’ office, Niccoluccio stood at once. He bowed deeply. For the past day, he’d been treating her like an honored ambassador. Habidah inclined her head in return. She sat on one of the desk chairs.
She’d remained in costume these past few days to help him stay comfortable. He remained standing, formal but not stiff. It took an effort to extract the bitterness of the meeting from her voice. She made herself smile. “How do you feel this morning?”
“Irritated under my neck.” He pointed to the patch under his chin, not touching as if to show how good a boy he’d been by not picking at it. “Otherwise, I can walk and not feel as if my legs are on fire, or that my head is on the end of a twenty-foot pole.”
“Good. That means you’ll be ready to go soon.”
He shifted. “It may surprise you to hear this, but I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We’ve left you in here so long I expected that you would think of this as a prison cell.”
“I am accustomed to living in cells.”
She smiled, and this time didn’t have to force it. “Of course.”
“I don’t wish to further impose on you, not without finding some way to repay you for your hospitality.” He hesitated. “But I don’t wish to leave. I have told you about my monastery.”
“We wouldn’t send you back there.”
Niccoluccio let out a long breath, though he’d been holding it for days. “Thank you. If I may, I have more questions for you.”
Habidah nodded, bracing herself.
“You and your companions didn’t just come here to learn about us, did you?”
“No. We also came here because of the pestilence.” It was always a struggle to know just how much to tell him. “The pest is annihilating our people as much as yours. We traveled here to learn about it, or at least how to better cope with it.”
The mention of the plague seemed to strike Niccoluccio as a physical blow. “I’m afraid you will not learn much from me. I’m not suited for life outside a monastery. If it hadn’t been for you, the pestilence would have killed me as surely as if I had actually contracted it.”
“You lost more than most people ever have or will, and you’re still coherent and talking.”
“I do not feel very coherent when I think about it.”
She pursed her lips. He’d had some kind of breakdown in the forest, true. She would have expected him to have another here, but he’d remained intact. Few like him could have done the same. “Would you prefer that we take you to another monastery?”
Niccoluccio shook his head without speaking.
Habidah asked, “Do you want to tell me why?”
“I do not believe I am worthy of my vows.”
She hadn’t expected that, but she didn’t pursue the subject. “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
“The only place in Christendom I could call home is Florence. My father still lives there. He may or may not allow me into his home.”
“We’ve been to many cities in Italy, but not Florence. Not yet. I’d love to take you there and see it.”
Niccoluccio hesitated, winding himself up to say something. “Madam, I would rather do anything that I could to repay your kindness. You have treated me with more hospitality than I ever deserved. I could not in good conscience leave without doing something in return.”
Habidah had to restrain herself from smiling again. His life was almost as much a mystery to her as hers was to him, but he was certainly disarming. Charming, almost.
She stood. “I was hoping that you might be able to help us learn about Florence. There’s a lot that we would like to know.”
He furrowed his brow. “Help as a… ah, a spy?”
“No. We’re not concerned with governance or diplomacy or anything to do with your army. We only want to know how average Florentines have coped with the pestilence.”
She offered him her hand. He stared at it without moving. She’d nearly forgotten how long it must have been since he’d had any contact with a woman. She said, “If you don’t mean to live in a monastery again, you need to learn how to act like it.”
After a pause, he accepted her hand, and she pulled him to his feet.
He said, “It is my blessing to serve.”
Habidah gave Niccoluccio a brief tour. If he was going to be their agent, she owed him at least that much. She showed him their kitchen and dining room, and the communications chamber. She explained that the base had been hidden to avoid frightening or harming anybody. He nodded and listened without understanding, and only truly came alive again when she demonstrated a viewwall.
She projected a map of Europe to show him where they were. He startled. Once he got control of his wits, she tried to explain how to read it. He reached out, tried and failed to touch the map, which was projected to appear half a meter underneath the wall’s surface. By the time she led him back to Feliks’ office, his head was spinning with information she knew it would take him weeks and months to digest.
The next day, while she applied a fresh medical patch over the rapidly healing bite scar on his back, he remarked, “Since I was fourteen, I wanted to join a monastery.” Lucky for him, he couldn’t see the gnarled, bark-like tissue. “I thought it would be much easier.”
She may have convinced him that she wasn’t an angel or agent of God, but that didn’t stop him from treating her like one. Or, at least, like
something more than a stranger.
She asked, “So what happened when you were fourteen?”
He let the question soak for a long moment. He didn’t seem to mind her touch. Habidah didn’t need to have researched much about monastic living to know how odd that was for a monk. She was a woman. One more way he didn’t treat her like an ordinary person.
“I confessed to my tutor what I had done,” he said. “I fell in love like most young men do. And young women.” He swallowed. “We chose to express it in ways none of us should have. With people we shouldn’t have. We were slaves to our lusts.”
From what Habidah knew about monastic life, chastity was its most prized virtue, no less so among monks than nuns. The way he struggled for words made her suspect he hadn’t spoken of it in some time. He’d probably never confessed it to his brothers.
So why had he confessed it to her?
She watched him carefully while she compressed the replacement patch. He breathed in as if about to speak, and then stopped. After several false starts, he said, “At the time, I thought I had too large a heart.”
“In the country I come from, many men and women act like you did without shame.”
He didn’t seem to hear. “I never wanted to be so in thrall to myself again. My tutor encouraged me to join a monastery.”
It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard her, she realized. Her experience with the locals had led her to expect a heap of judgment and chastisement for what she’d just said. But that was entirely absent in Niccoluccio. The only person he cared to judge was himself.
He said, “I still feel a great deal of lust in my heart. And I am afraid to die.”
“Is that why you don’t want to be taken to another monastery?”
His only answer was: “These are the things I’ve come to realize about myself.”
She was more than an angel or agent of God, she realized. She’d become his confessor. When she’d taken him in, the last thing she had ever expected of him was unremitting trust.
She trusted him, too. She had to be mindful of the power imbalance between them, certainly – under no circumstances could he be a threat to her. But that wasn’t all of it. They were so far outside each others’ experiences that neither of them had any reason to harm the other. And Habidah had demonstrated her good will from the start.
“I used to think that I was a good anthropologist,” she said.
“A what?” he asked.
“A traveler,” she said. “A professional outsider. I’m going to get in a lot of trouble for what I’ve done. And I don’t think I can do this for much longer.”
He didn’t seem to know what to say, not any more than she did. When she finished sealing the medical patch, he set his hand on hers. She let it stay there for a while before slipping away.
That night, in her quarters, she checked to make sure that Niccoluccio was sleeping before laying down. With perfect timing, her demiorganics jolted her a moment before she was about to fall asleep. She sat straight up when she read the message’s tags.
The communications gateway was open. She was receiving a call from Felicity Core.
She hadn’t expected her transgression to go so high up. She’d never been to Felicity Core, but understood that it was much like Joao’s home plane, or any of the other Core Worlds: dead gray seas, lifeless rock landscapes punctured by cloudscrapers, and pitch-dark skies. All of the Core Worlds swam through interstellar dust clouds that blocked the light of the outside universe. Their only stars were constellations of the amalgamates’ fortress-stations and planarships.
Someone or something very close to the amalgamates was calling.
Her room’s rear viewwall fuzzed on. Her demiorganics didn’t adjust her eyes fast enough. By the time she lowered her hand, a woman with solid black skin stood beside her desk.
The stranger had no hair or clothing. Her chest was flat and her pelvis was bare. Only the curve of her hips made her feminine. Her skin reflected light like plastic. A tiny, decorative nostril-less nose perched atop line-thin silver lips. Her eyes were the only thing that looked human. They were mottled brown.
Habidah swallowed. She’d never spoken with a prosthetic before. Not many people earned the privilege of transferring their minds into wholly demiorganic bodies. All who had were, in some way or another, servants of the amalgamates.
“Ms Shen. We’ve been reviewing your team’s reports with interest. The last one in particular caught our attention.”
“Doctor Shen. Thank you.”
So those lips were capable of smiling. “Very well, Dr Shen. My name is Osia. I won’t do you the disservice of pretending that you don’t know what I’m calling about.”
“I wasn’t aware what I’d done would concern anyone outside the university.”
“I’m working with your university in this matter.”
The woman stood in front of a bone-white background. Habidah checked the call’s location tag. She hid a jolt of surprise. Osia was calling from one of the amalgamates’ strongholds: the planarship Ways and Means, in high orbit above Felicity Core. The planarship was named after the amalgamate it hosted.
“The amalgamates take an acute interest in anything that might affect the politics of our response to the plague. I volunteered to serve your university.”
“Does that mean they’re having you call to fire me?”
“Ways and Means would like to ask you not to interfere with the locals again. It understands that this is a difficult assignment, but would prefer your efforts focused on your job. Otherwise, the arrangements you’ve made with the monk are retroactively approved.”
Habidah blinked. “That’s all you’re going to say?”
Osia arched the skin above her eye, as if daring her to disagree. “That’s all.”
When Habidah didn’t respond, Osia’s image whisked into nothingness.
Habidah couldn’t sleep for hours. Nothing about that had been right. She’d never spoken to anyone so close to the amalgamates before.
Osia’s presence had been just as much a message as anything she’d said. It felt like a threat. Only Habidah had no idea what she was being threatened into doing – or not doing.
13
Niccoluccio had been more amenable to a transmitter implant than Habidah expected. She wasn’t sure if he entirely understood what she’d asked. He kept feeling his lower neck, where she’d told him it was.
“There’s nothing to feel,” she told him, as she guided him into the shuttle’s acceleration couch. Again, she pulled the safety harness over his shoulders herself, though the shuttle could have done it for her. “It’s very small, and deep under your skin.”
“And you may remove it whenever you like?” Niccoluccio asked doubtfully.
“We certainly will before we leave your land.”
She sat in the couch beside him. Niccoluccio groaned at the weight of liftoff. Habidah had turned off all of the monitors. He didn’t need to know how fast or high they traveled.
He asked, “You’ll be able to hear whatever I say?”
“Only what you want us to. It’s just like I said – to activate it, you have to talk under your breath. You don’t even have to move your lips. Just flex the muscles.” She’d gone over the subvocal transmitter three times. At least it kept him distracted from the shaking and swaying. “There’s another device in your ear that will let you hear our answer.”
He immediately felt his ears. “Will everyone on your ‘team’ be able to hear and speak to me?”
“Your message will be received by whoever’s available. Usually that’s going to be Joao or Kacienta.”
He hesitated. “Would it be possible to ensure that I speak only to you?”
“Joao and Kacienta are trustworthy.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust them. It would be better to say I would rather speak with you.”
She looked at him, but his expression was impenetrable – mostly because his eyes were screwed shut. “All right.”
Faster than Niccoluccio would have believed, the shuttle ripped through the skies of central Italy. The sound-dampening fields neutralized its sonic booms. Unfortunately, some of that energy occasionally reflected into the shuttle. The shuttle thundered and shook as if it crashed through a lightning bolt. Niccoluccio cried out.
The turbulence lasted only a moment before the dampeners compensated. Niccoluccio yelled, “What went wrong? Are we dead?” Habidah grabbed his hand to keep him from clawing his way out of his harness.
By the time the shuttle landed, he had just about recovered his voice. Habidah still held his hand to keep him steady. He glared at the dark bulk of the shuttle, for once unintimidated by its size. “I will never go back in that beast if I can help it.”
Habidah gave him a moment to notice where he was. She’d landed at the edge of a vineyard a bare kilometer from Florence’s walls. Dawn was still an hour away, but stars and moon shone brightly. Niccoluccio fell silent at once when he spotted the pale shadows of the city walls. He recognized that little bit of Florence at once. “Did I faint? We came so far so quickly.”
He still didn’t know how far they’d really traveled. She said, “The city gates will open before dawn.” According to the satellite records, anyway.
“I know.” He started to step forward, and was stopped by the tug of Habidah’s arm. Only then did he seem to realize that he was still holding Habidah’s hand, and that Habidah wasn’t coming with him.
She said, “This is your home, not mine. I have another assignment in Marseilles.” She should have been there weeks ago. The plague’s late arrival in Genoa had delayed her. “My superiors don’t want me to get more involved. I’ve done too much already.”
“I can’t bring myself to pass the gates alone. I would rather wander the wilderness again.”