Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Neither of them answered. She told the viewwall to show her Niccoluccio. He lay with arms folded above his stomach. His chest rose and fell in languid measure.

  A well of disgust pooled in the back of her throat. Niccoluccio didn’t deserve any of what the amalgamates were doing to him. Nor did Kacienta and Joao deserve anything she’d done to them, or that might happen because of her decisions. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never should have done any of this.”

  She had expected them to agree. Joao said, “I doubt Niccoluccio would think so.”

  “No matter how I feel about him, he’s not that special. There are thousands of people like him on this plane. The only thing that makes him unique is his contact with me.” She was the reason why all this was happening to him. Someone had turned him, a weapon, into a tool to pry something loose from her. Her thoughts turned at once to Osia. She pressed her nails into her palm, hard.

  Joao said, “He’s important to you. Important enough to get you to change your behavior. That must be why all of this is happening.”

  “If Ways and Means is hoping I’ll cooperate for his sake, it’s going to be disappointed.” The idea came to her in a flash of heat: “It doesn’t make any sense for Ways and Means to be behind this.”

  Joao said, “Just because the amalgamates don’t make sense, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a plan. Meloku could tell you that.”

  “The last time I thought I spoke with Niccoluccio, I asked him about divine intervention. He told me how to find miracles. I can’t think of any reason why Ways and Means would want to fake that.”

  Joao shrugged. “It was trying to mimic him?”

  “Why not just let the real Niccoluccio talk to me if that was all?”

  “We could ask Ways and Means,” Joao said. “It’s probably listening right now.”

  On the viewwall, Niccoluccio shifted and stirred. His face twisted in discomfort.

  Kacienta was at an angle to see it, too. “Did he fall asleep, or did you tranquilize him?”

  Habidah said, “I tranqed him.” He shouldn’t have been doing that.

  She queried his medical patches. There was no response.

  She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. “Excuse me,” she said.

  The walk to Feliks’ office wasn’t very long. With the walls displaying their normal gray, it was claustrophobic. When she reached the double doors, she nearly walked flat into them. She placed her hand on them, for a moment unsure what to do. They’d never failed to open. She told NAI to open the doors, and received no answer.

  A low rumbling built underneath the floor. It reverberated from her heels to the tips of her teeth.

  “Shit,” Joao transmitted, somewhere back in the conference room.

  “What’s happening?” Habidah asked. “Is Ways and Means attacking?”

  Joao said, “The communications gateway just opened. The aperture is ten times as large as it should be.”

  “Not possible,” Habidah said. The field base was only equipped to open a pinpoint gateway. The projectors that created the gateway weren’t intended for anything larger, and the field base didn’t have the generator capacity in any case.

  “There’s an immense amount of power flooding our base,” Joao said. “That’s where the rumbling is coming from. The power feeds weren’t meant to handle that much energy. They should have blasted apart by now. The aperture is up to two millimeters. Three millimeters–”

  “Still not possible,” Habidah said. “NAI is lying to you.”

  The rest of what she said, and anything Joao might have answered, was lost under a blast of white noise. Static flooded behind her eyes, filled her ears. All of her nerves filled with fire and ice, coexisting in the same shreds of tissue – contradictions of sensation ripping her apart.

  She couldn’t think, didn’t even realize she was letting go.

  She woke on the corridor floor. She couldn’t remember falling. Her inner ear was spinning. If she hadn’t seen the walls and ceiling, she would have thought she’d tumbled into the sky.

  All she had of the past few moments was a vague sense of discontinuity. Her skin and eyes and scalp burned. She ordered her demiorganics to block the pain. Nothing. She couldn’t even be sure the thought had reached its destination. Her mind felt like it had been sectioned on Feliks’ autopsy table.

  The doors to Feliks’ office opened.

  Habidah’s awareness must have gone again. The next thing she saw was Niccoluccio beside her, trying to lift her. He didn’t have the strength. Habidah tried to speak, but she couldn’t manage it through the pain soaking every neural fiber.

  He was weeping, speaking. It didn’t seem like he was speaking to her.

  “Dying is one thing. I don’t want her to suffer.”

  The next time Habidah knew anything, Niccoluccio was gone. The fires in her veins were dying but not gone. She had ash for blood. She still felt like she was plummeting. She scrabbled for purchase, but the walls were ice-smooth.

  She finally fought to her feet and braced herself between the narrow walls. Her demiorganics finally dampened the pain, but they could do nothing for her sense of balance. The floor quaked as though a crevice had opened and the field base were sliding down into it. Standing, even leaning, took effort.

  “Habidah,” Joao said, and even in the transmission she could hear his strain. He’d been struck down, too. “He’s gone to the communication chamber.”

  Habidah turned, and, as fast as her jelly legs allowed, ran.

  The doors to the communications chamber opened without a fight. She clung to the frame. She found a ruin on the other side.

  The chamber’s far wall had caved in. It looked as though a catapulted stone had punched through it, leaving an open and jagged gap. Spiderweb fissures spread to the floor. A blinding white light shone through the breach, flash-frozen lightning.

  Habidah’s demiorganics calmly identified the spectra while the rest of her stared. The wavelengths were that of a raw interplanar tear. The same had shone in the sky when Ways and Means had arrived.

  Only that had been in dead vacuum. It hadn’t screamed. Her demiorganics had already blocked her hearing to keep the pain below her tolerance threshold.

  All of the chamber’s lights had gone out, but the gateway showed her enough. She saw smashed monitors, broken chairs, and shards of metal and plastic scattered across the floor, all juddering in rhythm with the earthquake. A stream of dust poured on her shoes. A light strip dangled by its power cables, casting a manic shadow across the walls. Joao and Kacienta had beaten her here. They crouched under desks. Kacienta had clapped her hands over her bleeding ears.

  The quaking traveled up Habidah’s back, clacked her teeth and ground her joints together. She tried taking a step, but a bad jolt forced her to grab for the wall. She could no more move than she could think.

  The field base’s microaperture communications gateway was buried behind the broken part of the wall. It never should have been able to generate anything like what she was seeing. She shielded her eyes and peered through the gaps in her fingers. Even the amalgamates couldn’t have hidden a larger gateway so well. It could have been another interplanar gateway impinging on theirs, but why would an interloper open the gateway exactly there?

  Just before she closed her fingers, she caught a glimpse of shadow, an impression of a human form.

  Her heart slammed against her chest. She looked again, but even her demiorganics couldn’t discern anything through the glare and retinal shadows.

  The next convulsion drove her to her knees. The floor beat on her kneecaps, drove a stake of agony through the back of her neck. Her demiorganics blocked every sound, but she swore she could hear anyway. The tear sounded like a perpetual shriek, the air of the world rushing into vacuum – but there was no wind. Pain screamed across her eardrums.

  Just when she thought she couldn’t tolerate any worse, just when she was about to let go, it stopped.

  The shadow
s that blanketed the room were so deep, and her eyes so mistreated and maladjusted, that she couldn’t see anything. She fell to the floor and kept on falling.

  28

  As soon as Habidah left Niccoluccio alone, a deep and inexplicably calming sleep claimed him. It was like falling into a well. He was no longer joined with his body. His thoughts turned to dreams.

  He felt himself, warm and breathing peacefully, at the end of a long tether. The rest of him drifted into a vacuum so deep that it wasn’t dark. It was a fog of absence, a lack of color or awareness or sight. He had never experienced a dream like this.

  Habidah’s image emerged from the nothing, sat beside him. Knowledge came to him suddenly, as though it had been implanted. He said, “You’re not Habidah.”

  “I never have been,” she said.

  He tried to pull himself up to look at her. The motion was meaningless in this non-space, but he could see her more clearly. “For how long?”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you listen at all, or if you only hear what you want to.”

  “What?”

  “I can show you everything. But first I need your pledge that you will help me.”

  “I can’t pledge what I haven’t heard.”

  She nodded, flat in aspect. It was difficult to convince himself that this wasn’t her. Every time she spoke, she sounded exactly like Habidah.

  She offered her hand. He took it. As if he were being pulled, he felt himself sinking back into his body, lying on the infirmary bed. Whatever drugs and trickery the real Habidah had done to put him asleep were being undone. Habidah said, “Preserve your world, and countless others like it. And you. You’re a worthy man, and no one here has done right by you.”

  “Elisa did,” he said, when he was back on his bed. “Habidah did. I haven’t done right by them.”

  “They’ll be saved, just like you. In their own time.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “There’s no such thing as dead. If there were, you should have died long ago.”

  He swung his feet off the bed. They still felt distant, half-asleep. Something was wrong. The floor trembled, and dust cascaded from the ceiling. The shaking reminded him of traveling in the black-iron bird, the shuttle.

  He couldn’t stop moving. It was as though he were being led. Before he knew what he was doing, he padded toward the doors. They opened on their own. Habidah lay on the other side, eyes half-open. She’d fallen, her knees bent at an awkward angle.

  His breath quickened. He stooped beside her and tried to carry her as she had once carried him. His arms gave out. He muttered under his breath. He’d carried heavier bodies. He realized, too late, that he was crying.

  “She’ll be herself again, soon enough,” Habidah’s voice said. He couldn’t see her anymore, but he knew she was listening. “She can no more die than you or anyone else.”

  The other Habidah, the real Habidah, stared through him. She couldn’t focus. Her mouth opened and closed. Niccoluccio knew pain when he saw it. “Dying is one thing. I don’t want her to suffer.”

  After he spoke, Habidah went limp in his hands. The shadow of agony faded from her expression.

  “Who are you?” he asked the voice.

  “I’m your shepherd.”

  He set his hand on Habidah’s cheek. Before more than a few seconds had passed, he felt himself being pulled again.

  If he was on a leash, it was a gentle one. He felt nothing physical. But he couldn’t ignore the impulse to stand.

  His feet led him down the unearthly hall. The next door opened on its own. An immense light poured out, blinding him. He raised his hand, but the glare crept between his fingers and under his eyelids.

  The world around him was shaking as if about to rend itself apart, but he had somehow settled in a pocket of peace. He saw the walls buckling, felt the vibrations in the tips of his toes, but that was all that disturbed him.

  “You can still turn back. I’ve been guiding you, not forcing you. If you would willingly take your life in old Florence back, you can still have it.”

  Something in the back of Niccoluccio’s mind tickled. She’d asked him this question before.

  He took a step into the room, and then another. There was no longer any tether. At first, he looked at the floor, but finally he lifted his eyes to the light and held them there. They seared into his vision, bubbled violet blind spots on top of each other. The damage he was doing to himself didn’t seem to matter. He was falling apart anyway.

  And, soon, he was gone.

  Part III

  29

  On the day Niccoluccio arrived at Sacro Cuore, three monks came to the gates to meet him. They stood stern and straight, hands folded. Their tonsures made them seem like triplets, all of a different age. Niccoluccio’s hair was little protection against the autumn wind. He didn’t know how the monks kept from shivering.

  Of all the seasons Niccoluccio could have chosen to arrive, this was perhaps the least propitious. Soon, winter would hide the roads. Whether he wanted to stay or not, he would be trapped. For a long time, he felt frozen to the seat of the wagon.

  The monks had seen the wagon coming. Its long, bouncy trip up the road from the lay village had gone slower than Niccoluccio could have walked. Still, the offer to ride had been welcome; Niccoluccio had walked most of the rest of the trip. The wagon’s driver nudged him, and he hopped down. His heels stung, still sore. He took tremulous steps, trying not to limp. He couldn’t keep the anxiety out of his gait.

  They said nothing as Niccoluccio approached. He bowed deeply, and still they kept their silence. After a while, he rose, cheeks flushed. He wondered if one of these men was Prior Giannello. Embarrassing himself in front of the prior would be a fine way to start here.

  At last, the slender monk in front treated him to a narrow smile. “I am Brother Lomellini, the novice-master. I will shepherd you through your first year.”

  Niccoluccio swallowed and nodded. He knew better than to waste noise on pleasantries around Carthusians. He wouldn’t have trusted himself to speak regardless.

  As one, the monks turned back toward the gate. Niccoluccio’s feet had become tree roots. He felt the cold earth through his thin soles.

  He looked back. The driver was pretending not to watch. Winter’s breath had turned the forest into gray varicose veins, as unpleasant to look at as to feel. The sky behind them, though, was still the same sky that shone over Florence, upon Pietro and Elisa. He was at once reminded of all the turmoil in his heart since he’d met them.

  The sun shone cleanly through a halo of thin, translucent clouds in a manner Niccoluccio could not recall seeing outside of paintings. And yet, in an instant, he knew he had already seen it. He had been here before.

  He had never set foot here, but everything was as familiar as if it had come out of his dreams.

  Dreams, or memories.

  That took away the choice. It had already been made. He looked back to the monks. They had not gotten too far yet. By the time he caught up with Brother Lomellini, he couldn’t tell if they knew he had hesitated. They, of course, said nothing. They moved with precisely the same measured step.

  Half a mile up the trail, Brother Lomellini said, “You can still turn back, if you’d like. Your old life in Florence waits, if you would have it.”

  “I believe I’ve made that choice.”

  Lomellini looked to him, but Niccoluccio couldn’t explain what his words had really meant.

  Some immense force had blown a hole in the wall ahead of Niccoluccio. The strange, smooth surface had ripped and crumpled like paper, and all of the light of the heavens poured out of the fissure. Still using his hand to shield his eyes, he stepped toward it.

  Heat rippled across his skin. He couldn’t pull back. He didn’t particularly want to. He had never felt calmer.

  He couldn’t feel his toes. After his next step, his heels disappeared. His knees were a thousand miles away and dissipating. He was flying apart limb by limb, joint by joint.
It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, nor did he want it to stop. All motion in his chest ceased. He no longer breathed, but neither was his breathing stifled. Then his sight went, and his hearing, too.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. He unraveled thought by thought. His memories were falling out of him. They were untangling from the jumbled skein of his head, getting straighter, getting simpler. How much easier it all seemed in these nice, straight lines.

  The void might have been nothingness, but it was also open, and free. His memories kept unkinking, longer and longer, narrower and narrower. Sensations, ideas, images seemed very far away, all equally abstract. He remembered things that had never happened, things that merely could have happened. At first, he thought it was his imagination, the last dreams of a dying man.

  This morning, during Niccoluccio’s twelfth – fifteenth? twentieth? – spring at Sacro Cuore, he stepped out of the refectory early and stretched his arms. He’d spent so much of the week gripping his shovel and saw that his fingers tingled. New red buds were appearing on the eldest of the cherry trees, but the other two were too young to fruit.

  He paced the cloister, taking his time, waking his muscles. His wrists were still sore. The infirmary’s back wall had begun to buckle, and its northwest foundation had settled into the earth. The decay had gone unnoticed for too long. Though it had been a very long time since someone had gotten sick, if it happened, they would need the infirmary in good repair.

  Next up, he supposed, would be the library. The shelves were sagging again. He’d forgotten how many years it had been since he’d last repaired the library.

  Niccoluccio turned right, stepped between the chapter house and the calefactory. Out back, a stretch of knee-high grass led to the forest. He came here, out of sight, to find his peace. Years ago, he’d built a bench with a backrest. Here he could watch the squirrels and birds and, on rare days, hare and deer. He could sit still as a statue and never startle them.