Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Meloku allowed them to shuffle out. In spite of de Colville’s bravado, his companions looked pale. These men weren’t accustomed to women speaking to them like this, let alone a woman with influence. Regnault looked at her as he went.

  Galien only broke his silence when Regnault had closed the door behind him. “There is not a man I know who would have dared speak to cardinals that way,” he said. “Not even other cardinals. Not in public. Whether that was for good or for ill, you are very impressive.”

  “And you know how to flatter,” she said.

  “If you can pull off whatever you’re attempting, I will remain at your side forever.”

  It wouldn’t take long for de Colville’s companions to spread rumors of what she’d said. She’d allow a few days to for that.

  De Colville would die publicly, of fast-acting genengineered variants of plague. He attended Mass every morning. The first symptoms of the septicemic plague – fever, the skin discoloration – would begin just as Mass began, when it was too late to politely get up. By the end of the service, his fingers and toes would be hard as coal, and he would be in agony. His luckless friend would find a similar death waiting for him at dinner with Clement that night.

  And Cardinal Regnault would be back to see her the morning after, full of holy terror.

  These men were so defenseless and predictable that the next few months might as well have been written on a page. Meloku pulled back the curtain sheltering the room from the drafty window. She peered into the palace yard. Queen Joanna was approaching to pay another call on His Holiness, a veil protecting her face from a mist of light rain. She was flanked by six escorts. She seemed calm and composed, but infrared and spectrographics showed the cold sheen on her forehead, the glassy dryness of her eyes. She believed she was on a mission from God. She had met Him, after all.

  And so soon would many other monarchs scattered throughout the plane. Ways and Means had begun seeding the courts with their agents. Meloku didn’t need to ask to know they were doing the same thing she was, subverting the natives from their leadership on down. Changing the structure of their society before anyone realized what was happening.

  She turned off her enhanced senses as she watched Joanna trudge. She and her companions became distant figures again, cloaked by rain.

  Her skin felt like gnats were crawling all over her. No matter how she stood, she couldn’t get comfortable.

  Companion mused, “Here I was starting to wonder if you had a conscience.”

  “Of course I have a conscience,” she snapped. “I’ve always had a conscience. I want to do what’s best for these people.”

  “What’s best for them requires manipulating them in ways that you would never tolerate being done to yourself.”

  Meloku shifted, trying to not to show how much Companion’s sudden appearance had bothered her. Futile, of course. Companion was inside her head. “If you or the amalgamates decided that ‘influencing’ me would be best for the Unity, I would go along.” For all she knew, the amalgamates had been altering her all her life.

  “But you wouldn’t be happy about it,” Companion said. “And you’re not happy with the way this assignment has been going.”

  Meloku released air through her lips. “I’m sorry I’ve been doubting.”

  “It’s been like this since your argument with Habidah.”

  “I wasn’t able to argue against her to the best of my abilities.”

  “And you didn’t like many of the answers that you gave her.”

  Again, there was no point in denying it. Meloku stared out the window, not seeing. She said, “If the amalgamates would like to replace me with another agent, I understand.”

  “The amalgamates are facing a threat they’ve never encountered and could never have anticipated,” Companion said. “The plague is forcing them to make decisions they never have before. Small, underdeveloped planes like this one must be subordinate to our interests. We can help the natives, ease the transition for them, but in the end they’re going to have to give up control of their world.”

  Meloku cast her gaze across Avignon’s streets, from the tall, wide walls designed to impress, to the shuffling fat drunks and ecclesiastics watching prostitutes pass by. “It’s not as though they’ve done a good job managing things themselves so far.”

  “The amalgamates would not be as interested in you without your conscience,” Companion said. “Remember that. Your empathy is why the amalgamates need human agents at all, and they forgive you for it.”

  “I’ve never been accused of being very empathetic before.” A floating map of Eurasia appeared in the back of Meloku’s mind, color-coded and shaded. She’d spent the past few weeks meticulously mapping the church’s influence. Spain and France, outside Languedoc, were solid colors, but Central Europe, the northern kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, and especially the Netherlands were patchwork. England alternated between solid and broken depending on which metric she used. And the Italians, though deeply religious, resented papal control more than any other people.

  She said, “These people have the means of controlling the continent right here, in this city, but they’re frittering it away year by bloody year. The German kingdoms are just looking for an excuse to challenge Avignon. Florence is on the cusp of riot. And England will discard the papacy as soon as it becomes inconvenient.”

  “The wars are foregone conclusions,” Companion said. “We planned for them long ago. They’re not what you’re upset about. Your subconscious keeps returning to Habidah.”

  She shook her head. Companion almost, but not quite, understood. Or did it? Sometimes she had trouble understanding what was going through her own mind. “I thought I could convince her.”

  “You could change her mind by blunter means. Why do you treat her more gently than Joanna?”

  “She’s one of us. She should understand. She doesn’t have any excuse not to.” She watched a procession of clerks march out of the palace and flock, in defiance of pestilence safety laws, toward the nearest tavern. “She and the others have no idea what kind of world they’re actually living in.”

  Everything Habidah did, she did to satisfy her ego. To convince herself that she was a good person. She was maintaining contact with that monk. She and he called each other at odd times. Once, he had called her in the middle of the night, when demiorganic telemetry insisted she was asleep. He had kept transmitting at the pace of conversation, as if content that she might be listening.

  There was something very odd about that relationship that Meloku meant to plumb further. She meant to eavesdrop but had not yet mustered the will.

  Companion said, “Habidah is recovering contact with her remaining teammates. Joao is already at your old field base, and Kacienta is on her way.”

  “I thought I locked down their shuttle.”

  “Ways and Means unlocked it. It thinks that they may be of use.”

  Meloku’s stomach tightened. “Ways and Means doesn’t understand what it would take to get them on our side.”

  “Would you like to help Osia persuade them?”

  She tried to hide it, but couldn’t stop acid from rising in her throat. She hadn’t realized how much Habidah had affected her. Maybe it was this whole damned world, and everything she was doing to it.

  “No,” she said. “They’re less important than anything else I could be doing.”

  Companion sensed her mood. It sent a wave of endorphins and warmth to thaw the back of her mind. Meloku pretended to stare at the map. Only when she managed to push her objections below her conscious and subconscious minds – the only levels at which Companion could read her – did she get to work.

  23

  A call stirred Habidah out of sleep. At first, she thought it a hallucination. She hadn’t even been allowed to contact anyone when Feliks died – suddenly and peacefully – a week after she’d returned.

  Whoever it was could only be signaling her with the amalgamates’ permission.

 
; She pushed her feet out of bed. She stared at the wall a while, let the message drum against her subconscious before answering. The viewwall flicked to life. A larger-than-real Osia stared down at her. She stood in front of a dark background. Her jet-black skin made her difficult to distinguish. It was only from memory than Habidah knew that Osia even had a nose.

  Habidah was dressed only in her underclothes. She said nothing, waiting for Osia to speak first. The timing of the call, the lack of warning or time to make herself presentable, meant that Osia was trying to put her on edge.

  Osia said, “I’m prepared to give you permission to contact the Unity.”

  Habidah blinked. It took her a moment to know how to react. She said, “With anything I might say about your project censored.”

  Osia inclined her head. “The security of our project is important. So are your concerns. I haven’t had an opportunity to express my condolences for the passing of Dr Vine. I’ve been given to understand that the two of you knew each other well.”

  “You would know,” Habidah said, drily.

  “On long-term transplanar assignments, it’s traditional for the project leader to inform the families of those who’ve died.”

  Osia’s background check would have let her know that Habidah had little family or friends to speak of. There was nothing in Osia’s voice to indicate that she wasn’t sincere. “I will tell them,” Habidah said, with a cracked voice.

  Osia nodded and vanished.

  Habidah queried NAI. The communications gateway was open.

  She stood and dressed, taking her time. Ways and Means would be listening to everything she sent home, of course. Her thoughts raced, trying to think of some way that she could get word out. Even if the whole Unity knew about the amalgamates’ project, though, she doubted that would stop them. Most people simply wouldn’t care. This was a primitive little plane. Everyone back home had worse troubles. They weren’t here; they didn’t know these people.

  She pinged Joao. He’d returned on the shuttle a day after Feliks had died. He was in Feliks’ quarters, packing his belongings. Joao had volunteered to spare Habidah from having to ask.

  He said, “Osia just called me. Guessing she told the same thing to you.”

  Habidah said, “They want something they won’t say.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “I’ll contact Feliks’ family.” She hesitated. “Thank you for preserving his remains. I wasn’t in a state where I could ask you.”

  “Not a problem.” She and Joao weren’t friends, but Habidah didn’t think that she could have gone on without a companion of some kind. “Want to return the favor? I don’t think I’m up to contacting my family. I don’t want to tell them how I’m doing. If you could, I would appreciate it.”

  Habidah sent back a wordless affirmation. She sat cross-legged on her bunk, and turned her attention back to the wall.

  After a moment breathing deeply, she connected to the Unity.

  Communications between planes was the challenge that, long ago, had necessitated the creation of AIs as sophisticated as the amalgamates. There was hardly a more daunting task in the multiverse. Even small gateways swallowed hideous amounts of power. To save enough energy to make transplanar communication economical, the aperture opened and closed after every bit in a datastream. Accomplishing that, never mind predicting the millisecond the response would arrive and opening just in time to allow it through, took a mind beyond human understanding.

  It was one of the many reasons the Unity couldn’t exist without the amalgamates. All of its message traffic routed through them and the Core Worlds.

  A hot flood of information rushed into her demiorganics. The wall showered her in dazzling icons: directories, guides, news bulletins, heaps of advertisements, gossamer maps of connections to millions of planes, demiorganic firmware updates, and mounds of her own unanswered mail tugged at different parts of her senses and awareness.

  Reading the chart of network connections that would put her in contact with Feliks’ home plane, Rodinia, was like following a water droplet down a spiderweb. Her signal leapfrogged thirty-five gateways, each opening and closing in tandem with millions of other signals. It was dizzying to follow.

  Finally, though, she reached Rodinia. Rodinia’s Public Commission had chosen to welcome visitors with an old-fashioned orbital view of their world. A live image of its lake-dappled megacontinent glittered across the wall. Arrow-straight irrigation canals crisscrossed its plains. Its western shorelines were smudged gray from a hundred city-sized rain factories.

  Habidah stared for a moment, and wondered what it would have been like to grow up on such a throwback. Everything about this plane, from the clean air to the lack of visual noise polluting its dark side, said that Rodinia wanted to appear a simple world, almost frontier rustic. If any of this had shaped Feliks’ character, she’d missed it.

  Rodinia’s directories listed a sparse few million inhabitants, most of them employee-shareholders of the same three companies. Rodinia was an agricultural world, trundled over by building-sized harvesters. Most people living here supervised the machines, and that was all. Everyone who didn’t have a reason to stay left for more interesting planes. Like Feliks.

  Habidah ran a search for Feliks’ family. Zero results. She tried again. That didn’t make sense. She had their names in Feliks’ personnel record. Mother, two fathers, two sisters, all on Rodinia.

  It was only when she expanded her search into other directions that she discovered her mistake. She had been searching the records of the living.

  Feliks’ parents had been cremated at the Vine Extended Family Mortuary Garden, recently expanded to cope with the influx of onierophage dead. A lump formed in Habidah’s chest. Feliks had never mentioned this. Had he known? Had his family ever contacted him, or he them? She’d never find out. Only one of Feliks’ sisters was alive. She hadn’t appeared on normal directories because she had withdrawn to a coastal hospice for onierophage victims. She didn’t want to be contacted.

  Osia had known Habidah would find this, of course.

  Habidah backtracked to Rodinia’s address directory, and compared the results to an archived list from several months ago. Millions had been excised. Fifteen percent of Rodinia’s population had died in the past twelve months, with another five percent expected to die in the next six.

  Many of Rodinia’s farms had gone dark. Power plant after power plant was shutting down. Its news bulletins were all panic and fear. The plane’s Head Commissioner had died two days ago, the second office-holder in nine weeks. Counseling centers were overloaded, and hospitals so busy that most patients were sent home to die. And still the onierophage was spreading.

  There was nothing else to do. She withdrew down the string of connections, back to the Core Worlds. This time to Providence Core, Joao’s home.

  For a moment she stared, unseeing, until the news bulletins finally broke through the visual noise. According to them, the Unity was vastly smaller than the last time she’d been there. Thousands upon thousands of planes had dropped out of contact. Some no longer had populations large enough to sustain themselves and had evacuated. Others had quarantined themselves from the Unity, going independent. The amalgamates, loathe to allow any plane to leave their influence, simply allowed this to happen. Occasionally, some of these planes resurfaced, infected and begging for help. Most simply vanished.

  Perhaps she was getting old-fashioned, too. She reflexively pulled her attention up to an orbital view just to escape. Providence Core and its sun hung suspended in a solid black sky, dotted with lights too few and too near to be stars. Below, Providence Core’s cities were stars on velvet, mirrored by rings of satellites and stations above. Two gem-faceted planarships, Trade and Finance and Foreign Operations, glittered in the sky.

  This solar system, like all the Core Worlds, was in a thick interstellar dust cloud. It blocked most light from the outside universe. Only the sun shone through. The amalgamates had chosen these p
lanes because the minimized cosmic radiation was perfect for their communications networks. They and their fleets and stations were the only objects in the sky.

  But even here the amalgamates were helpless. Providence Core had been infected later than most planes, but suffered a comparatively higher death rate. Twenty percent of its people had perished. Another five percent were slated to die in six months. Before long, the death rate would approach that of cities on this plane.

  Habidah fetched an orbital image of Providence Core a year ago, and compared. Seas of darkness had opened in the middle of the continents, gradually reaching toward the coast. Providence Core consumed half the energy it had a year ago. The difference hadn’t just come from the deaths, but from the failure of industry after industry as panic, trade quarantines, and economic depression swept the Unity.

  The plane was crowded with bodies. There were not enough crematoria to accommodate the dead, nor time for funerals. Some families held onto their dead, waiting. Freezer warehouses were packed full of bodies. Graveships plied the oceans and stars, waiting forever to be unloaded.

  It was unlikely that the plague spread by contact, but cities were nigh-abandoned. People no longer wanted to live near their neighbors. Parents had left sick children behind (and vice versa), often in the care of an NAI, but sometimes just to die.

  Habidah hadn’t realized she’d been holding her hand over her mouth. She lowered it.

  A search for Joao’s family produced more results than Feliks’. Father, dead. Mother, migrated to extraplanar hospice. Surviving relatives included a brother, a niece, two cousins, and an uncle. Habidah had no idea what to say to any of them. She nearly called Joao to ask, but stopped. Like Feliks, he hadn’t mentioned any deaths in his family. If he hadn’t heard, she’d need to find a better time to tell him.

  Against her better instincts, she leapfrogged her signal home. To Caldera.