Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  NAI was only quasi-sentient. It wasn’t capable of understanding what had happened. When she asked to send a message, it simply told her that the base’s communications gateway wouldn’t open. Someone on the other end had blocked the gateway from forming.

  She expected to find Feliks at his desk. Instead, he was stretched out on one of the beds he’d used to examine plague victims. Habidah stepped quietly, afraid of what she’d find. But he was awake, watching something. Pale red light shone from the ceiling.

  He said, “I was hoping they wouldn’t stop you from traveling back.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out how much longer I’ll be with you.”

  She looked to the image on the ceiling. Veins, muscle tissue, nerves and bone rotated round a helix of numbers. They were labeled with Feliks’ name. “Do you really think you’ll see something the rest of the Unity hasn’t?”

  “Of course not. But I like to study. It’s a kind of solace.”

  The final stages of Feliks’ disease had already begun. Every part of his body was weathering a slow, grinding attack that the lab’s instruments could hardly see. His marrow’s ability to produce fresh blood cells had faltered. His demiorganics sporadically refused to carry signals. Now his muscles were dying, including his heart. His pulse experienced long periods of thready, irregular activity.

  Habidah said, “You’d think they’d reopen the gateway to let you back home, see your world another time.”

  Feliks said, “I wouldn’t think that. Anyway, I wouldn’t have come on this assignment if I needed to see home again.”

  “Stop that. I’m trying to be angry on your behalf.”

  Feliks snorted.

  Habidah asked, “You’re really at peace with it, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I would call it ‘peace.’ But I’m more comfortable with it than I was before I started studying this world.”

  “I’m not. Everything we’ve seen, everything I’ve learned about what we’re doing here, just makes it worse. I mean… fuck, Feliks, what are we supposed to do now?”

  “‘Let it happen,’ would be my guess.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We don’t have any choice. Refusing to accept that might be the biggest reason any of us are suffering right now.”

  “That’s a ton of shit. People are suffering because they’re dying, losing their friends and families.”

  Feliks shrugged. “That’s my experience of dying. All I can do is share it with you.”

  Habidah had a thousand things to say to that, but she held her tongue. She wouldn’t tell a dying man he was wrong to have found solace.

  Feliks said, “More of the Unity is coming around to think the same way.”

  “That we’re all doomed?”

  “I have less than a fraction of the intellectual resources the amalgamates devoted to the problem. The fact that one of them is here says a lot.”

  Habidah said, as the realization struck, “The amalgamates are looking at ways of surviving the plague beyond curing it.”

  “Plague exiles should be a temporary problem,” Feliks said. “The amalgamates could solve it any number of ways. Put the exiles into cold stasis or slingshot them around a pair of suns at relativistic speeds. Shelve them on empty worlds. Basically put them aside until they develop a cure. Settling an already inhabited world is a permanent solution.”

  Habidah said, “They’re setting up house here in the event the rest of the Unity dies.”

  “On many other planes like this one, I’ll bet.”

  If that was true, it seemed to her like the amalgamates were getting ahead of themselves. A plan like this wouldn’t save more than the minutest fraction of the Unity’s population. The Unity was in bad shape, but not close to disintegrating.

  She was missing something, but couldn’t feel the shape of it. Not yet. The amalgamates did like to think ahead. The Unity wasn’t dead, not yet, but maybe this meant they were writing it off.

  Habidah strode the length of Feliks’ office. She had never felt claustrophobic underground before. The weight of the earth pressed the two of them together.

  Feliks asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “Get off this plane. Cure the plague. Send Ways and Means home.”

  “You’re not important enough. None of us are. All we can do is help one person at a time. Isn’t that why you saved the monk?”

  “That was all I could get away with. And even that was a stretch.”

  “How much do you think you could get away with now?” he asked. “If you were to start saving more of the natives now, do you really think the amalgamates would stop you?”

  Habidah stopped pacing.

  Helping Niccoluccio had been a stone tossed into a pond. A brief splash and then nothing. She hadn’t saved him, not like she’d hoped. He’d lost his vocation, his friends, everyone he’d known. No wonder she hadn’t heard from him since she’d left him in Florence. She couldn’t have saved what he needed saved. And now Ways and Means had come to overturn everything that remained. She’d preserved his body, but she couldn’t shelter him from loss any more than she could protect Feliks.

  After a long breath, she said, “I could never save enough.”

  Feliks blew air through his lips, unsuccessfully trying to hide his frustration with her.

  She said, “I wish I could be more like you, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, you’re right. I should try. I can help more than him.” Niccoluccio had been something, at least. He just hadn’t been enough.

  He shook his head. “Not in the long run. Not any more than the people out there could cure their own plague.”

  “Some of them are at least trying to help.”

  “Doctors and priests and nuns. Most of them are dead. You’re right. The children who fled from their parents, and the parents who fled from their children, are the ones who stayed safe.” He touched her wrist. “At some point, we need to figure out when we’re hurting ourselves more than we’re helping others, and pull back and take care of ourselves.”

  She swallowed. She reached with her free hand to touch Feliks’ fingers. The two of them did nothing but look at each other.

  21

  The business of managing the parish of San Lorenzo was just that: a business. So much money passed between hands. Sacro Cuore hadn’t seemed like this, not at his level. Niccoluccio wondered if it had been all along.

  For the first few days after he took office, all he knew was where the money was not going. His salary was a pittance, especially for the wealthy San Lorenzo parish, but it was enough to live upon. Most of San Lorenzo’s clergy were not so fortunate. They lived off parishioners’ donations. In San Lorenzo, that was easier than other neighborhoods, but even here clergy were poor. Some of them slept on the church floor.

  Niccoluccio stayed in his office until it was too dark to read. He had spent the day poring over records of weekly tithes. There was no way to satisfy the bishop’s demands without charging double for services, and this in a city clamoring for long-delayed funerals. His only alternative was ransacking the parish churches and selling San Lorenzo’s triptych of John the Evangelist’s life. He was sure that the mob of San Lorenzo would have lynched him if he breathed the idea. He nearly contacted Habidah to ask for advice. The thought persisted, rising at odd moments.

  His head hurt, and his eyes rested on needles. His back was stiff with idleness. He forced himself to his feet and ambled into the church. Dioneo and Ambrogiuolo were waiting.

  Dioneo said, “You’ve made yourself too scarce since coming here. I’ve hardly had a chance to see my own brother.”

  “I come back to your home every night,” Niccoluccio said. “The problem has been that you are not often there.” Dioneo wanted him to come carousing, as he had offered several times already.

  Ambrogiuolo said, “You’re going to squander your fame if you don’t show you
rself.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve earned any fame.”

  “Yet people are talking about you. The only survivor of Sacro Cuore! How could they not? A number of my friends and I will be dining together tonight. I would be pleased to have you join us.”

  Niccoluccio was no fool. He had been put in San Lorenzo for a reason. Ambrogiuolo and Dioneo had wanted him to experience the strain of the papacy’s demands on the city. They’d made a compelling argument. Niccoluccio was a vowed servant of the church, but he no longer knew what to think of its highest members.

  “This once,” Niccoluccio said. “And if you do not mind if I keep my peace for the evening.”

  The three of them walked the twilit city in silence, past the shadow-spired cathedral and into the nearby ecclesiastical offices. Ambrogiuolo led him to a candlelit dining room. Stepping into the smell of roast mallard was like slipping underneath the veil of a waterfall. This was a different world from the one outside. Chatter filled his ears like a rumble of water.

  Niccoluccio had once expected that men of the church would eat moderately. He wasn’t surprised to see the feast laid out. In addition to the mallard, there were legs of pork, pheasant, and a centerpiece of roast goose. The pomegranates and figs alone were more expensive than any meal at the monastery. Someone had brought silver spoons and knives. Malvesey wine and ale sat together in uneasy company.

  Not all present were clergymen. Dioneo, of course, was a civil official. Two men wore the liveries of the Visdomini and the Tosinghi, two of Florence’s great families. A third was dressed in layers of folding robes, each a different color. Dioneo whispered in Niccoluccio’s ear that the robed man was the family’s new lawyer. Niccoluccio took the nearest open seat, next to the lawyer. Without waiting or asking, Dioneo scooped mounds of food onto Niccoluccio’s plate.

  At Sacro Cuore, Niccoluccio had believed that he had conquered his senses. That Niccoluccio must have died there. As soon as he smelled the roast goose, Niccoluccio knew he was lost. It felt as though someone else were lifting his hand to his knife.

  A few minutes later, his appetite half-sated, he began to hear the conversation. Dioneo’s friends had gathered to discuss the old bishop, whose life seemed to finally be nearing its end. Messengers flowed from his household daily, but the man himself hadn’t been seen in weeks.

  The lawyer said, “No doubt his replacement will be little different. Another man of Avignon.”

  Ambrogiuolo said, “No one living can remember the last time we had a Florentine for a bishop.”

  The goose left Niccoluccio heady. He reached for the ale without thinking, and said, “Plenty of public posts aren’t filled by natives. The podesta, for example.” The podesta was a special police captain, always a foreigner. It was his task to keep the peace between the city’s noble families – such as the Tosinghi and Vosdomini men seated here.

  Ambrogiuolo countered, “Clergymen do not police the city. Clergymen are of the city.”

  Dioneo said, “You’ve served the diocese long enough to know that the church can’t function with the demands the bishop is placing on us. This is not a matter of selfishness. This is a matter of our trying to avoid riots.”

  “What would you suggest as a cure?” Niccoluccio asked. “Rebel?”

  Niccoluccio had been in the monastery for so long that he’d forgotten how to speak to the people of his home. He hadn’t meant to shock them, but the silence that swept the table was deep. The man across from him, a procurator from the cathedral chapter, cleared his throat. “Of course not. All we would wish to do is place a worthy man in the bishopric.”

  Dioneo said, “Even if that means appointing him ourselves.”

  Now it was Niccoluccio’s turn to blanch. “The pope would never allow that.” That was rebellion, whether they called it so or not. The papacy guarded few rights more jealously than that of appointing bishops.

  “The people of Florence would back us,” Dioneo said. “Clement would have to muster the force to convince us otherwise.”

  The lawyer said, “It’s been done before,” and left it at that.

  All of them knew what that meant, even should their conspiracy succeed. Excommunications. Possibly an interdict for the whole city, barring clergy from performing services, even Last Rites. In a city ravaged by pestilence, that would spark a revolt. All had happened in Florence before. These men had fallen silent when he’d mentioned it not because they were appalled by the thought, but because they hadn’t wanted to call it what it was.

  Niccoluccio ate in silence, allowing the conversation to turn to more comfortable matters. In spite of the church’s financial difficulties, the cathedral chapter was buying the land of pestilence victims to speculate on prices. More important, though, was falconry. The lawyer had just purchased a new falcon, his second, and was anxious to pit it against his friends’.

  Niccoluccio’s head spun from ale. The juices of roast goose lingered on his tongue. As his dinner companions began to stand, Niccoluccio turned to the door. It would have been wiser to stay with his brother, travel in a group, but Niccoluccio kept going and didn’t look back.

  He gave no farewells. He just walked. No one came after him. The firelight leaking through the open door dwindled behind him. Before long, his footsteps were alone in the night.

  Niccoluccio sang a hymn under his breath as he marched. Though the words came to him easily, the melody didn’t quite end up like he remembered. Lomellini would have tanned his hide if he’d heard.

  Niccoluccio had gotten accustomed to walking the cloister after dark, on his way to Vigils or his early morning labors. He’d known the path as surely as if he could see it. Here, some desultory lights from homes and a half-shrouded sky were all he had to guide his way. Few people risked traveling in night’s miasmatic winds. It occurred to him then that he would do well to be afraid. He shrugged the thought away. If a robber came upon him, he had nothing worth taking, not even his life.

  His hymn quieted as he got farther from the cathedral. The streets narrowed. There were fewer signs of the pest at night. No boarded doors, no empty houses, at least none that he could see. He could almost pretend Florence was as he had left it, half his lifetime ago. He remembered the smells too well, the pig shit and nightsoil and moldering rot, but it all seemed so much stronger than he remembered.

  He should not have come back here. He realized that at once, though the strange burning had been building up in his throat for days. The grease on his lips proved that he succumbed to temptation too easily. He should have gone with Habidah, wherever she was. Failing that, he should have lost himself in the wilderness. He didn’t want to live like this. Given his options, that was tantamount to saying that he didn’t want to live at all. A mortal sin. As with all sins lately, it took effort to push the thought of it away.

  His hymn ended. He trudged through the winding streets, under an ever-darkening sky, only half-sure where he was going.

  In the manner that Habidah had taught him, he asked, “Are you there?”

  Her reply took a long moment. “I’m here, Niccoluccio.” Her voice sounded so much like she was right beside him. As before, in the back of his mind, a deep disquiet settled over him. The first few words she spoke hadn’t sounded like her. He told himself that it was just their means of communication giving him difficulty. She had said that there may be times when, due to the arrangement of the stars above them, they may not be able to talk right away.

  As though her voice were like someone trying on a glove, though, it didn’t take her long to sound like her. “I’m sorry if I sounded distracted. We’ve been busy. Things are looking up. Several new agents are coming to help us.”

  Something about the way she said that left him unsettled. He swallowed to cool the heat in his throat. “I agreed to come back here to help you learn about our ways of living,” he said. “Could you also tell me about yours? Your home? I feel it would do me a great deal of good. I only need know a little if you have better things to
do.”

  Habidah let out a long breath, as if deciding how much to say. “I come from several lands grouped together, into countries collectively called the Unity. It’s… it’s larger than I can describe. Larger than I can imagine. I don’t think any human could. Take a thousand continents the size of Europe and stack them atop each other, and then add a million more, and all cosmos above them.”

  She paused to give Niccoluccio a chance to absorb that. Of course he couldn’t. She’d said before that she’d come from another land, another continent. He hadn’t believed her, and she seemed to know it. It was still astounding how fast the pretext disappeared.

  She said, “It has cities made of glass and diamond and gold, worlds of perpetual lavafalls, or seas of clouds. I grew up on the side of a volcano larger than every land you’ve seen on a map. I swam in green oceans the size of this world.”

  Niccoluccio ought not to believe this, either. Everything he’d seen of her and the wonders she’d worked made it impossible not to. He hoped his voice didn’t sound broken. “Are the people of these places Christian?”

  “Of all the places we’ve visited, yours is the only one with a religion like it.”

  That ought to have cut him to the quick. He’d known the answer before he asked. It hadn’t mattered then any more than it mattered now.

  He let out a cold breath. If any of his brothers from Sacro Cuore had been able to hear his thoughts, they would have told him he was damned. He couldn’t convince himself that they were wrong, but neither could he rouse himself to care.

  Anticipating how he would react, Habidah said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, leaning against a brick wall. “I’ll get better.”

  “You have a unique vision. All of the Abrahamic religions on this world do. Few in the Unity see the body and the mind as separate in the way you do. I’ve appreciated learning about it.” She hesitated, and seemed to realize that she wasn’t helping.

  “I ought to focus on the assignment you gave me, not all these politics.”