Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

Joao said, “We need to keep from panicking, OK? OK. So – we don’t know why they’re doing any of this. I feel like it’s my obligation to point out that they could have reasons for this that we might agree with if we knew them.”

  Habidah said, “Then the amalgamates have no reason to hide those reasons from us.”

  “That’s just how they operate sometimes.”

  Meloku said, “All of the time.”

  Habidah kept a careful eye on Joao. He’d grown up on Providence Core. The amalgamates’ fortresses and planarships filled his skies from the day he was born. Their agents managed everything about life on his world, down to the traffic stops.

  She said, “If they thought we’d agree with their reasoning for what they’re doing, they’d tell us. Whatever they’re doing, it’s not something we’d voluntarily associate ourselves with, and they know it.”

  Meloku said, “We can speculate all we want, but we’re not going to learn anything new.”

  “What else can we do?” Joao asked.

  Meloku said, “We didn’t need to come back here if all we’re going to do is complain.”

  Habidah looked at Meloku, biting her tongue. But she was right. “Joao,” Habidah said, “find out where the other anthropology teams have gone. Try to get in contact with them.”

  Kacienta said, “The amalgamates and their agents could fake any messages we got back.”

  Meloku said, “Only if they cared that much about tricking us.”

  Habidah nodded to Joao, and added, “See if you can’t get us permission to visit their planes. Say that we want to compare notes.”

  Feliks said, “The amalgamates will know what we’re trying.”

  “Then let them try to stop us, and at least be honest about it.”

  “Is that all?” Meloku asked. “What are you going to have us do in the meantime?”

  Habidah said, “Joao is right. Our only two choices are to keep working, or not.”

  Kacienta asked, “Does our work even matter after all this?”

  After a moment’s consideration, Habidah said, “I believe it does. We signed up for this because we believed we could help ordinary people back in the Unity. So far as I can tell, the amalgamates have no reason to block the reports we’re sending back home. Anyone disagree?”

  No one answered, but no one could quite meet her eyes, either.

  “That settles that,” Habidah said. “We’ll head back to our assignments tonight, and keep our eyes open for other opportunities.”

  Daytime kept them all trapped in the field base. Habidah sealed herself in her quarters. She didn’t eat. She wasn’t hungry. It felt like a long time since she had been.

  She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. There were observation devices hidden here, she knew. Even with her retinal enhancements, she couldn’t find anything. With her demiorganics lodged in her head, routing her neural impulses, she couldn’t even be sure of the sanctity of her thoughts. She had no way to fight that level of surveillance.

  One uncomfortable thought had picked at her since she’d left Florence. If this were really an intelligence operation, the amalgamates could have sent more of their agents, creatures like Osia, to do their work on the ground. Yet the only gateways they’d opened were in orbit.

  If the amalgamates had been involved in her mission from the start, they would have been sure to have their interests represented.

  Someone here had to be working for the amalgamates. It could have been the base’s NAI, but it wasn’t complex enough. Anyone or anything else could have been put in place long before she and her field team arrived, but Habidah doubted that. The amalgamates would have had no reason to send her survey team if they already had agents here. They shouldn’t have needed to bother with the fiction of her assignment.

  Something her team – or the amalgamates’ agent – had found must have prompted this new operation.

  Her team’s only way to contact the Unity had been the field base’s communications gateway. If there was a spy here, they would have had to use the gateway just like anyone else.

  NAI wouldn’t let her peek inside anyone’s message traffic. But, as the survey team’s leader, she did have the authority to examine her team’s signal traffic in bulk. NAI could tell her how much traffic had gone through the gateway at which times, and to which of the Unity’s network junctions their signals had been routed.

  Sure enough, someone on her team had exchanged a great many messages with a network junction that routed to Felicity Core.

  Habidah wished she could say that the discovery was satisfying. All it seemed to mean was that her mission had been compromised from the beginning. She curled her fingers. She had to stay calm. There had to be some way to use this. If she could find out who it was – well, throwing them off her team would have to come second.

  The first thing she had to do was find out what the amalgamates were up to.

  16

  Meloku kept waiting for Companion to say something during the flight back to Avignon. It had remained silent for days. It hadn’t even spoken when the satellites arrived. Meloku had discovered them from Joao’s frantic call like everyone else.

  Avignon rose over the shadowed horizon, a nebulous fuzz of infrared haze. It was far dimmer than it used to be.

  The plague had arrived.

  It was much easier to find discreet landing spaces these days. Infrared found a cul-de-sac with only four living people nearby, all of whom were asleep (and one in plague convulsions). The boarding ramp stretched to the cobbles. Meloku hastened down it. She could have done without the disruption of that meeting. It was a wonder the amalgamates hadn’t sent her alone, or, at the very least, chosen a team of ideologically trustworthy anthropologists.

  She’d toured this part of the city twice before. It had been a bustling neighborhood. Tonight, the smell of death clung to the ground. Most of its occupants lay in bloated decay, and the survivors had fled.

  New cemeteries sprang up all over the city, but they weren’t enough to contain the dead. As Meloku passed the trio of brothels nearest the heart of the papacy, she started passing bodies under the snow. A wandering pig had uncovered one corpse and was chewing off long, leathery strips of flesh. Farther down the street, two more pigs lay dead, victims of their scavenge.

  A slow Armageddon was sweeping the city. The people who tried to their best to help usually fared the worst. The monks at the almshouse she passed, La Pignotte, had taken in as many of the sick as they could. They hadn’t survived their charity. The almshouse stood empty but for corpses.

  The survivors hadn’t taken long to see enemies everywhere. Men attacked Jews in the streets. The fact that the Jews suffered from the plague as much as anyone didn’t deter their persecution. On her walk to be picked up, Meloku had seen the pyres, ashes, and bones left of three men, a woman, and a child.

  Whatever the amalgamates had in mind, Meloku wished they’d hurry. These people obviously weren’t fit to govern themselves.

  Closer to the papal palace, bonfires burned on street corners. No one had died in these fires. The papal court’s physicians had recommended them as a defense against the plague. Clement VI had sealed himself away in his study with a lit fire, and breathed in the smoke. These were actually reasonable measures, though nobody here understood why. The smoke warded off fleas.

  Infrared showed five servants inside de Colville’s manor. Only two were sleeping. They thought that she was still in her room. When she’d gone to the field base, she’d told the servants she needed to shut herself inside her room for the day to “commune with her saints.” No one questioned her. She’d taken care to build her reputation as an eccentric.

  The back door was poorly locked. A few minutes of playing hide-and-seek with the servants’ infrared shadows, and she was back in her plush room. Her bed was four times the size it needed to be. She sank into it as though it were a cloud. She had no idea what to do next.

  Even back home, she’d never lived in a room this c
omfortable. Her home, Mhensis, was covered almost entirely by ocean. It was a tourist destination, a getaway, for people craving marine adventure. Like all resorts, the people who lived and worked there didn’t enjoy their lives.

  Growing up, she’d spent most of her year alone on an island while her parents staffed tourist seaskimmers. Her schoolteacher NAI had been her favorite company. Her favorite days had been the ones in which she hadn’t seen any other kids at all. The other kids were herdlike, judgmental, and could never be as fascinating as an AI engineered to entertain and instruct her. The NAI had caught her asocial tendencies early and tried to curb them. It had only ever succeeded in getting her to tolerate her peers, never to accept them.

  Her parents’ seaskimmer was of course no place for a child: cramped spaces full of sex, drugs, and politics. Mhensis’ seaskimmers were a favorite destination for powerbrokers from other planes. The deals they made there were not the sort deemed suitable for their publics: market-manipulating, vote-trading, petty corruption, all the usual bugbears of human-run societies.

  When Meloku graduated at fourteen, she’d finally been able to accompany her parents, working in the ship’s stores. The politics of it all had fascinated her. She’d immediately started watching self-important people and studying their habits: who they slept with, what foods and drugs and medicines fed their addictions. It had been easy to make sure their needs were met. Some of them even asked her to ferry messages. They were always archaically handwritten, missives so sensitive that they couldn’t be trusted to transmission.

  As it turned out, they were right to be wary. They were being watched. The amalgamates and their agents had their hands in everything. They needed to see the messages she was carrying. They made contact through their agents, and told her how she could open the envelopes without triggering the traps inside.

  So she started working for the amalgamates, too.

  The amalgamates were very selective about the people they employed. Meloku had always been proud of that. Companion had been one of the amalgamates’ first gifts, a non-neutered AI to guide and mentor her. Even its existence was highly secret. No one was supposed to know that the amalgamates allowed non-neutered AIs to exist.

  Her teammates on long-term cover assignments like this had long ago stopped bothering her. But Habidah had pried under her skin. She didn’t understand why Habidah had to be here. This mission would have been so much easier with an ally in charge. She closed her eyes, and, unsuccessfully, tried to sink into her daily two hours of sleep.

  “You must be dying to know,” Companion said.

  Meloku was impressed with herself for keeping her wits about her.

  “Not nearly so badly as the others,” she said.

  “I can tell you a little,” Companion said.

  The next morning, Meloku beamed as she strolled through the Palais des Papes’ courtyard. The ecclesiastical trolls and toadies along her way only smiled briefly in return. She wasn’t the day’s main attraction.

  She should have been impatient. Instead she felt magnanimous. Her smile was genuine.

  She wrapped her gown and fur coat about her when she reached the courtyard, but her demiorganics stifled the cold. The men and women in the gathering crowd weren’t so lucky. She took her privileged position in the front row. There were fewer clergymen about than there would have been in normal times, but the upper echelons of the church had survived in far greater numbers than the street and church-level preachers. As with kings and queens, their attention to hygiene insulated them.

  A trumpet blast was the cue for the men about her to straighten themselves into neat, orderly rows. Meloku stood, folded her hands, and waited. A minute later, Queen Joanna’s procession entered.

  The visiting queen rode at the fore of thirty lance-bearing knights and thirty more handmaidens carried in litters. She was seated atop a white mare, sheltered by a purple silk canopy carried by four men. Two grooms led her horse so that she could carry the scepter and the orb of her rulership. A carmine-and-violet fur cloak touched only her shoulders. She must have been freezing, but she did an admirable job of hiding that. She couldn’t hide her cold skin from an infrared scan, of course, but that only confirmed what Meloku already knew: this woman was an accomplished actress.

  She was extraordinarily beautiful for her age. Her blonde hair was neatly stitched and covered by a ribbed headdress. Three gold and silver necklaces draped over her shoulders. The shape they made pointed to her cleavage, an appropriately chaste and deniable statement of sexuality.

  Meloku smiled beatifically, but of course Joanna didn’t notice her. Yet.

  This was another one of Habidah’s irritating qualities. She paid little attention to anything truly important about the cities she visited. Not politics, not governance, and certainly not leaders. Everything Meloku knew about Queen Joanna, she’d had to discover herself. Certainly no one else had researched her.

  One of the mysteries of the multiverse was that the Unity itself was the largest transplanar empire it had ever encountered. All of the others it encountered had numbered thousands of planes at most, typically hundreds or dozens. Simple reasoning about the infinite nature of the multiverse suggested that there should be – and were – larger somewhere. They must have been so rarefied that they were close to impossible to find.

  Meloku privately suspected that the amalgamates were among the few creatures capable of controlling such vast estates. They had the intellect. All of the other transplanar empires she had personal experience with had been run by the usual warlords, overly ambitious algorithms, or other engineered minds. They produced more ruins and rubble than functioning civilizations.

  The minds that, like the amalgamates, were complex enough came with their own problems. They tended to disparage the help of lesser species, their inhabitants, and multiplied themselves instead. Even one mind of the amalgamates’ caliber, so determined, had the power to wipe out its progenitors. And so those empires, too, fell prey to civil wars.

  The amalgamates had struck a perfect balance. They kept their numbers limited to minimize the chance of one of their own going rogue. Enough of them to handle the tasks that took a truly powerful intelligence. But most of their strength came from their human civilizations, and the engines of human economies, managed at a remove. It was why, for all their powers, the amalgamates used agents like Meloku. And it was why fribbles like Joanna were important.

  Joanna was the fugitive queen of Naples. She’d married a seventeen year-old Hungarian prince, Andreas. Thanks to Pope Clement VI’s support, she had retained full sovereignty. Andreas received no power. However, Andreas’s mother intervened with Clement, and Andreas, too, had received sovereignty. He’d immediately set the whole Neapolitan aristocracy against him by, among other things, releasing three violent brothers arrested on charges of treason, and returning properties that long since had been disbursed to other nobles.

  Not long after, Andreas was hung from a balcony and thrown to the ground. Joanna claimed to have been barred in her room by the actual conspirators while the murder took place. And maybe she was telling the truth. But if she hadn’t been complicit in the murder then, she’d become so afterward. She’d moved to protect her cousins and other members of her court, who almost certainly had committed the crime. She’d cast aspersions on Andreas’s Hungarian bodyguards instead, calling them drunkards. Her investigation had gone nowhere beyond one scapegoat chamberlain.

  The Hungarians had invaded Naples in retaliation for the murder. Joanna had fled. In the midst of the plague, she’d traveled to Avignon to stand trial for Andreas’s murder in the papal court. She already had the court’s sympathies. They saw her willingness to travel during the plague, and especially to pest-ridden Avignon, as proof that she believed that God would allow her the opportunity to prove her innocence.

  Meloku doubted the Hungarians could maintain their hold over Naples for long. Andreas had been especially unpopular among the Neapolitans. The Hungarians had marched an
army into Naples, but they didn’t have the means or the will to keep it there. Both sides had declared a truce, with the war to be resolved by papal trial.

  The procession halted in the courtyard. The knights and their lances stirred as Joanna dismounted. Some of her handmaids left their litters. Joanna spared no time for them. Accompanied by eight of her advisers and lawyers, she strode through the doors to the consistory, where the trial would take place. Meloku had not been invited to that, but her eavesdroppers kept track.

  The consistory was also used for receptions, but today’s overcast left it shadowed. It took an awkward half-minute for Joanna to shed her cloak and approach. The far end had a raised dais with two levels. The top tier held Pope Clement, sitting on one of a pair of velvet-and-gold thrones. The other throne was empty. There was no such thing as subtle symbolism in Avignon. All of the cardinals still alive and present in Avignon stood on the lower level of the dais, watching and waiting.

  Joanna stepped to the dais, and kneeled on a pillow that had been placed before Clement. This was scripted, as was the kiss she placed on his slipper. And the kiss on the mouth that he gave her in return.

  What was not scripted was the warm embrace he treated her with afterward. That was what she had been waiting for, though. It had shown her everything she needed to know.

  Pope Clement had his own bills to collect. Joanna’s persecutors, the Hungarians, were allies of the English in their war against the French. The papacy of Avignon was French in every way but officially. The papacy would be rewarded for anything that constrained the Hungarians’ power.

  Meloku and several other papal officials waited in the hall outside when the first day of the papal court concluded. She stood to attention when the royal procession began to emerge. Joanna was fourth out the door.

  This time, Joanna couldn’t quite hide her chill. She held her arms to her chest and her breath trembled. Yet she smiled. She inclined her head at each man she passed. She only halted when she reached Meloku.