Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She hadn’t been to Caldera in nearly fifteen years. Until now, she’d believed not much had changed. Caldera was a small, conservative, scientific settlement. It resisted shock. Centuries after its founding, it maintained a stable population of just two hundred thousand.

  Eons ago, a meteorite collision had all but blown off the world’s crust. Only a thin layer had been left behind. Caldera had been settled by transplanar geologists studying the resulting continent-spanning supervolcano. Hundreds of years later, the plane still retained its academic character. Every child born on the world had free access to its universities. Its government was a council of professors that loved inflicting social engineering experiments on its populace. Most of these failed in perverse and spectacular ways, but those that stuck – like the system of clan families that had given Habidah her two other names – had become defining features of Caldera. The clans had fostered a sense of community between Caldera’s isolated, underground cities. They defined Habidah, too. She’d never gotten rid of her clan names decades after she’d left. Nor had she ever stopped thinking of herself as a scientist.

  She went straight to the news bulletins. She waved through the list of towns and clans, recognizing each of them. Even half of the reporters were familiar. As was the first name she saw, in an obituary for the president of Caldera’s second-largest university. To set an example to the rest of the plane, he had requested no funeral observance.

  The burdens of living underground on a hostile world had strained the settlers’ resources in the best of times. Now, with twenty percent of its people dead or dying, Caldera had no time to mourn.

  Caldera’s geothermal power plants were shutting down one after another for lack of manpower and expertise. Some cities had imposed brownouts for all services except atmospheric support. Small towns had been evacuated.

  There was no shortage of the dead. All of the available crematoria were running at maximum capacity. Several of the evacuated towns had been turned into holding centers of the dead. Habidah couldn’t restrain her gasp when a reporter’s optics scanned streets she recognized. They were in a town she’d visited for clan fairs. The sunlamps were off. The underground complex had become a vault. The hazy streetlights silhouetted lines upon lines of lumpy bags, blanketed in a fog of Caldera’s cold and poisonous atmosphere. There were thousands.

  Habidah’s stomach churned. Her hand was over her mouth again. She held it there to keep from throwing up.

  Caldera was missing more than just the dead. Thousands of people had simply left. They recognized that, even if the plague were cured today, Caldera had no future. The Unity was near to splintering. Planes like Caldera would be the first to be left behind.

  Three of Caldera’s five largest universities were officially recommending that provision be made for the evacuation of the entire plane. The remaining institutions were expected to join them shortly. If Caldera were evacuated, it was unlikely to ever be settled again.

  Habidah disconnected without planning to. The wall blackened.

  Before she knew what she was doing, she slammed her palm into the wall. She spun and kicked her bunk. After a moment, the wall lit again without her prompting. She faced it.

  Osia’s towering image looked down on her, her expression implacable.

  Osia said, “The Unity is facing an existential threat. I don’t think you’ve had a chance recently to appreciate that. It’s gotten much worse since you left. Unless we can cure an invisible disease, it’s going to get much worse in the months and years to come.” Osia’s voice, for once, revealed some emotion: it hardened. “So if we place the survival of our culture above the individual freedoms of primitive planes like this one, I trust future generations will forgive us.”

  “Colonizing one world won’t save the Unity,” Habidah said, dully.

  “There are dozens of others. Yours is only one of the first. But it will help.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We still don’t know how the plague spreads, but we have figured out who isn’t contracting it. Those of us who’ve transitioned to demiorganic bodies, for one. There are others. Travelers. Exiles. Monks and hermits. Scouts. Explorers. People who, for whatever reason, haven’t visited the Unity in at least five years. All of those we’ve found again have been uninfected. We’ve kept them isolated from the Unity.”

  “Turning these worlds into colonies for them won’t preserve even a hundredth of the Unity.”

  “There are representatives from every plane. They’re more than we have otherwise.”

  “Why save ordinary people at all, though? You just said the amalgamates’ servants aren’t affected by the plague. Neither are the amalgamates. Why not let the Unity die? What do the amalgamates care about ordinary people at all?”

  After a moment, Osia asked, “Do you really think we’re that cold?”

  “Yes.” When Osia didn’t answer, Habidah pressed, “The amalgamates could have sailed off to the far corners of the multiverse. Not a single one of them has ever tried. Not in thousands of years. They’ve all stayed with the Unity. Everyone knows it’s not out of altruism.”

  “I’ve read all of the conspiracy theories about the amalgamates, Dr Shen.”

  “For all the weapons, satellites, and factories you have up there, you can’t actually control the peoples of this world, not without human agents getting their hands dirty. It must be the same way with the multiverse as a whole. Humans are by far the most common sentient animal we’ve found. The amalgamates, on the other hand, are unique. To control any significant number of planes, you need humans.”

  “While I’d love to debate this at length, Dr Shen, we both have more pressing questions.”

  “The answer you’re looking for is ‘no.’ Under no circumstance will I help you colonize and manipulate the peoples of this world.”

  “Their lives are short, brutish, and replete with suffering. We can help.”

  “If the amalgamates were truly prepared to help them, they’d cure their plague. They can do that at any time now that Ways and Means is here. It’s letting this plague weaken them, leave them vulnerable so their agents can march in and take over.”

  “We’re a wealthy civilization, but we don’t have unlimited resources. If you don’t understand the transactional costs by now, I’m not sure you ever will.”

  “Whatever you look like, you’re still a person. You know what I’m saying is right.”

  Osia stared at Habidah for a long time.

  “Goodbye, Dr Shen,” she said, and her image vanished.

  When Habidah checked, she saw that her connection to the Unity had been severed again.

  She rested her head in her hands. Her thoughts roiled. For, as sure as she had made herself sound, she wasn’t. She couldn’t keep from thinking of Niccoluccio. By trying to protect him, she was making decisions for him and everyone else on this plane, but they might not have been the ones he would choose.

  Would he subordinate himself to the amalgamates in exchange for their guidance? Wasn’t submission to a higher power the founding ideal of monastic life? The amalgamates were no gods, but on this plane, they might as well be. They certainly acted like gods. They’d withheld their plague cures to mold this world into a shape more pleasing. Niccoluccio’s god had done worse.

  Though she should have gone to Joao, she nearly tried calling Niccoluccio. She needed somebody she could be less guarded around. Ways and Means still allowed his signal to reach her. Her medical monitor said he was healthy and sound.

  It would be best for him to let him figure out his own life, without an alien woman using him as a crutch. Still, she’d hoped he would have called before now. They hadn’t spoken since she’d left him in Florence.

  She breathed into her hands, and stepped out to tell Joao what she’d discovered.

  24

  Dioneo came to the dining room as Niccoluccio and Elisa were finishing their breakfast. He halted, and waited for Elisa to stand. He politely escorted her to
the door. Then, after it was shut, he spun on Niccoluccio.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever paid attention to that woman,” Dioneo hissed, in a tone that made it clear he remembered exactly how much attention Niccoluccio used to pay her, “but she’s a well-known adulteress. If her cuckold husband hadn’t perished from the pestilence, he would have died of humiliation. Your reputation could be brought to ruin if you’re seen with her again.” Dioneo jabbed a finger into Niccoluccio’s chest, uncharacteristically hard. “Right now, your reputation is the only thing you have of value to anyone.”

  Niccoluccio was too stunned to speak. Dioneo promptly returned to the dining room, where Niccoluccio could hear him informing Catella that Elisa was not to be allowed in again. Whether she cared or not, Niccoluccio knew she would obey her husband. That was the only kind of woman Dioneo would have married.

  It was easy to catch up with Elisa. Niccoluccio dropped his jogging pace to a walk beside her.

  Her mourning veil hid her until he was beside her. She glanced to him. Through her veil, he saw the skin underneath her eyes was stained. She said, “After the way your brother spoke to me, I didn’t think I would see you again.”

  “Of course you would. I’m sorry I didn’t look for you.”

  Elisa brushed a hand under her veil but, when she spoke, her voice was steady. “You had more important affairs.”

  He didn’t, but there was no use saying that. That regret would follow him forever. Niccoluccio had never felt like he’d come home until he’d seen her. “I missed everything I shouldn’t have.” Elisa had summarized the years for him last night, but it felt unreal. She could only give him words, not experience.

  “I missed a great deal, too, and I was here,” she said. “When Pietro died, I wanted to attend his funeral, but my husband wouldn’t let me.”

  When Niccoluccio tried expressing his condolences for her husband’s death, she cut him off. “That man might as well have been my father’s husband, not mine. My father was the one who chose him. Certainly the only one I’ve ever met who liked him. I kept seeing Pietro, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Elisa looked back to him. Her attitude had hardened since last night. She’d come to him desperate, looking for help. At night, she might have tricked herself into thinking she’d found it. Now, in the sunlight, she could see him as he really was.

  Niccoluccio increasingly did not like what he saw reflected in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t needed to leave. But I don’t know how much help I would have been if I had stayed.”

  “It’s all right,” Elisa said, bitterly. “It’s all the world that’s turned to shit, not just us.”

  “There’s so much more to the universe than our world.”

  Elisa turned. This time he couldn’t see her eyes under the veil. “You sound like a man getting ready to preach.”

  “I need to share what’s on my mind with someone.” If Elisa was expecting to hear a streetside sermon, she was going to be surprised. After everything he had been through, Niccoluccio no longer needed religion to speak of God.

  This world was a very small part of the cosmos. All the troubles of their lives would be washed away by time. Throughout his childhood, that had been a terrifying thought. Even in Sacro Cuore, he’d shied from it. Since meeting Habidah, though, it eased the pain in his joints, the heat lumped in his throat. If nothing that mankind accomplished was significant, then neither were its pains.

  There were worlds covered in vast oceans; worlds of nothing but open sky. Worlds of fire and worlds of peace. All of them rich in their own peoples, and all of them so much unlike their world that he could never describe them to her or even imagine them. He’d wanted to weep when Habidah had told him of them. It had felt like grief at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. These other worlds had no bearing on their world or on the pestilence, but it felt good to speak of them.

  He had never met anyone in as much pain as Elisa. When they’d spoken of the dead, they had elided over her children. They were what she could least bear speaking about. She listened. Niccoluccio began to feel foolish, but he continued. He had spent so long at Sacro Cuore that he had forgotten how to speak to people.

  She said, at last, “Your life at that monastery must have been much more interesting than I imagined, if this is the man it turned you into.”

  “It was not the monastery that made me think like this.”

  “You’ve been somewhere very strange, that’s certain,” she said. “I don’t think that any of it helped much, but I would still like to hear more. It might be nice to believe.”

  Niccoluccio belatedly recognized the narrow streets. They were near the parish of San Lorenzo. His church was around the next intersection, beyond the shuttered bakery. “I didn’t mean to take you so far afield,” Niccoluccio said. “I wasn’t thinking, as usual. Would you like me to walk you back to your home?”

  “I can find my way on my own, thank you. I came this way to listen to you.”

  “Then would you like to… to make a habit of walking, like today?”

  She stopped just short of the bakery. “If you would keep me distracted, I could not think of any greater kindness.” She extended her hand.

  Niccoluccio clasped her fingers but did not kiss her knuckles. After a while, she walked back the way she had come. He had to make an effort not to follow.

  He forced himself to turn to the Church of San Lorenzo. His thoughts still buzzed. He wanted to think about anything except the ledgers in front of him. But Sacro Cuore had taught him to put his labors above his love, and above even his peace of mind. Labor, Prior Lomellini had said, was the path to the peace of God.

  An hour after lunchtime, he finished assembling a summary of the parish’s debts and loans. The results were as bad as expected. If the parish’s income remained diminished, and papal taxes high, the parish would have to call in all of its own loans to survive. That was, of course, contingent upon the parish’s debtors being able to pay. Niccoluccio knew very well that they couldn’t.

  He had no solutions. If he had been in any position of power, he would have already bankrupted the church caring for the poor and the dead and the dying. The state of the church’s debts mattered nothing to what its mission in the world should have been. It was a good thing he had never been placed so high up. He was not cut out for this life, these decisions.

  His feet carried him out of the church. He paused at a street cart to buy maslin bread, and didn’t think about where he was going. He needed to lose himself, as he’d used to sink into his chores at Sacro Cuore.

  Instead, his thoughts kept sticking on Habidah.

  When he called her, she asked, “So soon?” Again there was that disquieting moment when she didn’t sound like herself. It faded more quickly than last time, but he couldn’t put it out of his head.

  He stammered, “I, uhm, I know. You have bigger problems than me to worry about.”

  “Things have been going well here. The multiverse can be as much a kind place as a cruel one. Someday I hope to be able to show you that.”

  Niccoluccio’s stomach fluttered. “What do you mean?”

  “When you were with us, I’m not sure you had a chance to notice that one of our number was ill. His disease released him. Wherever he is in the multiverse, I’m sure he’s found more peace now than he had yesterday.”

  Niccoluccio did remember an older man in Habidah’s home. If he had been suffering, he’d made no mention of it. “‘Released?’ You don’t mean ‘recovered,’ do you?”

  “There was not much chance of that.”

  Niccoluccio took a bite of his bread, as a pretense for not answering straight away. Habidah did not sound like the same person. He changed the subject: “I have perhaps too delicate a question for you. Forgive me if it is too much.”

  “I can answer any question you would like.”

  “What do your people think of love and sex? Is it…?” He had been a
bout to ask if sex was a sin, but he couldn’t finish the question, even subvocally.

  “What they are to me doesn’t matter that much. I get the idea that’s not what you’re asking. There are so many other worlds in the multiverse, Niccoluccio. Love means so many different things on all them. On some worlds, it’s a fault, and on others a virtue. There are places where it’s scorned and shameful, and others where it’s celebrated in public.”

  “You can travel as you like, to any place that suits you?”

  “Any place at all, Niccoluccio.”

  A pang of jealousy faltered his step. “I think I would enjoy talking to you more about your worlds.”

  That was nearly all Niccoluccio did over the next several days: talk, to Elisa and to Habidah. He hadn’t had so much female company since he was a child. So many of the books he’d meditated upon at Sacro Cuore, from Cassian’s Conferences to St Jerome’s Letters, had warned him against feminine company and feminine corruption. Even then, those parts had seemed the smallest part of the text.

  On their next walk, Elisa said, “When I couldn’t attend Pietro’s burial, I spent all of my waking hours in prayer. I pray for him every night. I don’t know that any of it matters.”

  “Every prayer is heard,” Niccoluccio said, automatically.

  “What would a fallen woman matter?”

  “You’ve always mattered to me.”

  “I don’t believe that. You left. But on the chance you’re right, you’ve been a fool.”

  Heat built under Niccoluccio’s throat. “You are not a fallen woman.”

  Elisa laughed quietly, bitterly.

  Nobody in Florence could see the world the way he did. He could try to explain it, but never succeed. Habidah was the only person who understood even a glimmer of it.

  Their walks meandered through Florence’s more pleasant neighborhoods. The Baptistery and Cathedral of Santa Reparata wasn’t far from San Lorenzo. Other days, they walked along the Arno River and listened to the porters call to each other. Nothing compared to the peace of Sacro Cuore, but Niccoluccio’s spirits were increasingly intolerant of peace. It reminded him too much of his last days of gravedigging in the cold and empty cloister. There were flashes of that here, too, no matter how much he tried to look away. Dark, shuttered houses. Family stores abandoned. A leathery hand laying near an open shutter.