Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Of course, he couldn’t always have his solitude. Today, he had hardly sat before Brother Rinieri rounded the corner, wooden cups in hand. Rinieri offered one. Water. A peace offering for disturbing his isolation.

  Long ago, the German monk, Brother Gerbodo, had been Niccoluccio’s closest companion. As he’d aged, though, Niccoluccio had discovered the value in more placid company. He and the old and philosophical infirmarer often sat together for hours.

  Sometimes, Rinieri questioned him. It didn’t feel like a breach of the monastery’s silence. Conversations with Rinieri felt like an extension of his own thoughts.

  Rinieri said, “Prior Lomellini asked me a question today. He wanted to know if there was anything that I, as infirmarer, would change about the way Sacro Cuore is run.”

  “You might as well ask a novice. You haven’t made use of the infirmary for years.”

  “Then suppose I were to ask a novice,” Rinieri said, pointedly. For all the time Niccoluccio had spent here, it was easy to forget that so many of the others had been here longer. “Would you have anything to say?”

  “I cannot remember a time in which Sacro Cuore was more in God’s grace.”

  “I certainly remember when things were worse. The trouble is in elucidating the difference between what we did then and what we’re doing now.”

  “That must have been years before I arrived. Nothing in Sacro Cuore has changed for as long as I remember.”

  “We rebuild every memory as we remember it,” Rinieri said, looking to the cloister. “Nothing quite existed in the past as we remember now.”

  Niccoluccio followed his gaze. Sacro Cuore looked exactly as it had the day he’d arrived, as it always had. He shrugged.

  Rinieri said, “One of the limitations of being human. Not only do we forget, but we forget how much we’ve forgotten. We fill the gaps with nostalgia and fantasy and lose the ability to tell the difference.”

  “God will make the truth plain in the end,” Niccoluccio said.

  “For those willing to see it.” Rinieri leaned against the backrest. Niccoluccio folded his hands in his lap. A persistent itch troubled the back of his neck. After a while, he glanced back.

  The wind that touched Niccoluccio’s cheeks was warm as any, but snow covered the cloister and the trees were bereft of leaves. The infirmary and library both seemed dirtier and meaner. Mounds of fresh-dug frozen earth lined the churchyard. The infirmary door hung open. Niccoluccio knew what he’d find inside.

  He held up his hand. “Please. Stop.”

  When he gathered the courage to look, Sacro Cuore was as it should have been. He breathed out. It took him a moment to realize that Brother Rinieri had taken his hand and guided it back to the bench.

  He looked down. Rinieri folded his fingers inside Niccoluccio’s.

  Rinieri said, “It takes a lot of work to make the world the way it should be.”

  “It’s the only kind of work worth doing.”

  “You’ve put a lot into Sacro Cuore. You should be proud.”

  Niccoluccio looked to the library. “There’s always more to do.”

  Maybe the void wasn’t so empty after all.

  Someone was picking through his memories. Weaving them in new shapes. Adding to them.

  There was a pattern in all this entropy. He saw, in the not-memories, blackness between starry expanses, balls of poison gas and liquid metal seas, spiraling cities encircling blank skies. Other potential lives touched the edge of his thoughts, each aware of him in the periphery of their thoughts.

  They were all shades of himself. Every single one of them, with different guises and divergent histories.

  In the midst of this strangeness, he instinctively latched onto the familiar: toward Sacro Cuore. A Sacro Cuore, at least.

  Just looking at it, he knew it was a life created, constructed. An unfamiliar concept appeared in his mind. Simulated.

  He had no voice, but that couldn’t stop him from speaking. His words rippled down his chain of thoughts and into the void. Who did this?

  No answer. Niccoluccio got the strange impression that this wasn’t because the void had no answer, but rather because there were no words that could have provided one. Whatever else there was of the universe when sense and form and reason were stripped away, there was at least a mind. Minds, on their most intimate level, didn’t communicate with words.

  Niccoluccio’s feet took him around the cloister without conscious effort. They knew which stones might trip him, where to turn. He could have strolled blinded.

  He laid his hand on the infirmary door as he passed. He always did. It was the only time he allowed himself to remember plagues and visitors from other worlds. Which parts were might-have-beens and which the definitely-weres eluded him more often than they should. He’d lost track of time, cause and effect. Time and determination were mortal concerns. Sacro Cuore had become what it was intended to be, as St Bruno and St Francis had always meant a monastery to be: a place to cleanse and soothe a man’s soul in preparation for Paradise.

  There was no peace in the monastery greater than his bench behind the calefactory. It was the one thing he could remember that had changed since he’d arrived – the only thing that he, personally, had changed.

  Every week, Rinieri joined him. Sometimes they conversed, even argued, but more often – as today – sat in silence. Niccoluccio hadn’t felt so close to a man since Pietro. Their love was a kind of tenderness that, when it existed in the outside world, could not survive long. It hardly seemed to matter that Rinieri was older. Niccoluccio felt old himself, older than he should have.

  He sensed time marching on, but rarely its effects. It was the same with most here. For instance, their former prior, Prior Giannello, hadn’t died in office like his predecessors. When his time should have ended, he’d retired, hobbling off to become Sacro Cuore’s librarian. He spent his days shuffling between his books and his personal garden. His was the kind of life Niccoluccio aspired to.

  Niccoluccio had not known Giannello well before his retirement. Giannello had struck him as firm but kindly, as generous in spirit as his replacement, Prior Lomellini, was severe. But Niccoluccio had only just graduated from his novitiate when Lomellini was elected prior.

  When Niccoluccio entered the library that afternoon and found Giannello reading, the back of his head tickled. Part of him was sure Giannello shouldn’t have been there. He had to be misremembering something.

  Giannello had pulled his chair closer to the light of the window. A hidebound manuscript rested on his hip. He looked up at the interruption, his question unasked.

  Every year, each monk was given a selection of five books to pore over, read and reread. Niccoluccio could quote his from memory. He was anxious, insofar as he was ever anxious, for something new. “It’s time for me to change my texts.”

  Giannello heaved himself out of his chair. “Lomellini has full reading lists for the other brothers, but only gave me one book for you.”

  Niccoluccio tried to hide his surprise. Lomellini held himself to standards as high as Sacro Cuore’s other monks, and was never unorganized. “Well – I can start with that one.”

  “This one has no annotations or commentaries, so be sure to use a guide to aid your interpretation of the text.”

  “What manner of guide?”

  Brother Giannello tapped his chest. “This one.”

  Niccoluccio accepted the manuscript from Giannello’s shaking hands. Curious, he retired to a seat by the open door and opened the book. He frowned. It wasn’t illuminated, nor bound particularly well. It hadn’t been written by a saint or a luminary of the order, but an ordinary Carthusian monk. He didn’t recognize the author’s name. The text was a long and winding account of his journey through a winter forest, alone and starving, pursued by wolves.

  He mouthed each line, word for word, remembering. Then he set the book aside. “What a grim little tale,” he said.

  “He came as close to death as any mortal coul
d,” Giannello said. “I think it’s important to recognize the value of his experience, even if he wasn’t a saint.”

  Niccoluccio said, “I used to think about death all the time. That doesn’t make me a sage. This monk may have believed he was about to die, but he never faced it. He survived to write about it.” He drummed his fingers on the book’s cover, trying to hide his agitation.

  Some inner voice was screaming at him. He hadn’t heard from it in a long time, but now it was insistent, telling him this book didn’t exist. It was an abstraction of a real thing, real memories, conjured by a power he hadn’t yet comprehended. That voice was easy to set aside. The book had taken this form only because he was in a library. Had he been in his cell, it would have been a dream. Had he been in the church, it would have come as one of Lomellini’s sermons. Someone wanted to shake him, to force him to confront this.

  But the object in his hands had weight and texture. The binding was imperfect and believable. Easy enough to set little doubts aside when the raw physicality of everything else was so convincing.

  When he’d returned to Sacro Cuore, he’d gotten used to setting the voice aside, anyway. Dreams or memories. Did it matter? Easier to rest. He got the idea that he’d been allowed to rest. Perhaps until now.

  Giannello asked, “How large do you believe the universe is?”

  Niccoluccio blinked. “Does this have to do with the book, or are you starting a new conversation?”

  “Follow me a little ways along this trail. Do you hold with the view of our brothers that the Earth is alone in a cold and perfect celestial sphere? Or might our world have company somewhere?”

  Years ago, in another lifetime, a friend of Niccoluccio’s had once described an infinite, multiplicitous cosmos to him. Consciously or not, that had been the view he had hewed to since. It was too dangerous an idea to speak of openly, though. “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Niccoluccio said. “What exists, exists.”

  “Precisely. There’s a gulf of difference between belief and fact. You know more about these facts than most of the brothers.”

  Niccoluccio shifted. “I don’t understand where you’re going.”

  Giannello smiled, kindly. “I won’t make you say anything more if you don’t want to. But an infinite cosmos would raise a number of questions. Many of them applicable to the text sitting on your lap.”

  Niccoluccio tried to put his irritation behind him. He was embarrassed by his lack of emotional control. He’d worked very hard on that. Something in the book had brought all of the failures of his youth back to him.

  “Go on, then,” he said. “I won’t interrupt.”

  “Consider the scale of the cosmos. There’s no number you can attach to the worlds out there. They’re infinite.”

  “I don’t know that they’re infinite. I was never told that.”

  “They’re infinite. The combination of molecules on any one world being limited, it therefore stands to reason that each world has an identical twin somewhere. Countless twins. In an infinite cosmos, no one world, or person, is unique.”

  Niccoluccio said nothing. He’d pondered the same things years ago. He had always assumed his thoughts were private.

  “Infinite Earths. Infinite Christendoms. Infinite Sacro Cuores – many identical and many subtly different from each other.” Giannello raised a finger to point at Niccoluccio. “Infinite young monks named Niccoluccio Caracciola.”

  Niccoluccio protested, “I’m not that young.”

  “I’ve lost count of the number of years that have passed since I came to Sacro Cuore. I’m older than any of us has a right to expect to be. Who’s to say that, on one of those other infinite Earths, old Prior Giannello couldn’t have died in his sleep and dreamed himself waking up here?”

  “Say what you like,” Niccoluccio said, still embarrassed to be discussing this. He didn’t know what he would say if any of the other brothers heard this. But he couldn’t stop himself from listening.

  “Of all the infinite worlds, there must be some so identical as to have two Prior Giannellos, just different enough that one dies in his sleep and the other wakes up. If the one that wakes has the memories of the dead man, has anything been lost?”

  Niccoluccio said, “There would be one less mortal man among the worlds, however infinite they were. His friends, too, would miss him.”

  “Back to the book in your lap. On a million million of those worlds, that young monk would have died. Frozen to death without a burial, eaten by scavengers. But on one world, something extraordinary might have saved him. A miracle. A rescue from an outsider, a friend he never could have known he had. And all the memories of those million million dead men would still be within him.”

  “That would be too much responsibility for any man to bear.”

  “Even if a minuscule fraction of Brother Niccoluccios in that situation survived, a fraction of an infinity is still infinite. If he ever died, he would always have a twin out in the cosmos who still had all his memories. Even if he tried to commit suicide, his soul could never be extinguished. No one’s ever could – not his or Giannello’s or anyone’s. They would always, somewhere, keep going.”

  Niccoluccio massaged his forehead with his fingers. He didn’t want to think about this.

  Gianello said, “We poor mortals are good at tricking ourselves into believing what we wish. As children, we convince ourselves that we’ll live forever and never change. Call it Heaven, call it Paradise. We all seek an eternal release from change. Very rarely do men or women see that the only thing that never changes is suffering. The multiverse is an endless cycle of rebirth and suffering and loss. No one can escape it by dying.”

  Gianello turned his heavy-lidded eyes back to Niccoluccio. “You’ve been chasing death for too long. It’s time someone opened your eyes to what is really happening to you.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough for one day,” Niccoluccio said. That screaming voice was becoming too much to ignore. He closed the book, stood deliberately, and placed it back on its shelf.

  Gianello didn’t stop him when he walked away.

  The next morning, it was the winter again, and everyone in Sacro Cuore was dead.

  Niccoluccio had spoken with the other brothers only yesterday, but they had been dead for months. He’d buried them himself. His hands were callused from digging.

  He trod through the cloister, listless. Snow fell sullenly. All his graves were buried under a cold blanket. The silence that had been so comforting had become pervasive, threatening. He cleared his throat just to make noise. His hands stung from the cold, which at least kept him from feeling the blisters.

  He stopped by the open door to the infirmary. The odor kept him from going any farther. It had gotten so bad that he stopped bringing any of the brothers there to die. There was nothing there now, or anywhere else. He knew he should pack and leave. Report to church authorities. But he’d done that before. All it had gotten him was a long and circuitous route back here.

  That voice didn’t need to scream any more. It just spoke. He listened.

  He closed the door. On the other side, Brother Rinieri waited for him.

  Niccoluccio had buried Rinieri two weeks ago. This Rinieri looked as he had been years ago, just yesterday, when they’d sat behind the calefactory. Rinieri offered his hand. He led Niccoluccio on their walk around the cloister.

  Rinieri said, “No matter how far you travel across the planes, a core part of you formed here. You can’t escape it even if you manage to forget it.”

  “None of what I’ve seen is real,” Niccoluccio said. “The past few years have all been figments from someone else’s imagination.”

  “You knew that even then, and that didn’t stop you from living it.”

  Niccoluccio looked dolefully at Rinieri. Rinieri held his free hand to his chest. “I’m no figment. I’ve been brought here for you, but in all respects I am the same man who was your friend when the pestilence struck.”

  “I don’t
understand how. He died.”

  Rinieri just looked at him, one eyebrow raised, as a school teacher would. Niccoluccio swallowed. Of course. Infinite worlds, infinite Sacro Cuores – infinite Rinieris, as well. Whatever power had pulled him to this void between the cosmos had taken Rinieri as well, or recreated him. There didn’t seem to be any meaningful difference.

  Niccoluccio looked down at Rinieri’s hand. “In my real memories we never held hands.”

  “These are not just memories. This is just as real to you and I as anything you’ve experienced before. Now you’ve seen more than one Sacro Cuore.”

  “Why wait so many years before telling me the truth?”

  “We’ve let you have some respite. You have a lot of work left to do.”

  “What work?”

  Rinieri glanced at the sky, though Niccoluccio couldn’t see anything but gray. “There are, unfortunately, a number of ways to travel from one plane of the cosmos to another. People build empires that span the planes. Left to their own devices, they’d grow and grow, subsuming billions – trillions – of worlds in their wake.”

  “What do billions or even trillions matter against infinity?”

  Rinieri smiled thinly. “The power that brought us here lives in the space between the planes. Your friend Habidah would tell you that there’s no such thing as a space between the planes. That’s how well hidden it is. Its task is to ensure that no single force grows strong enough to subsume the multiverse. You might call it a king, exercising divine dominion. It aims to protect the diversity and wellbeing of its worlds.”

  “But why?”

  “If it hadn’t acted, nearly every world like ours would have been dominated by a foreign power long ago. The space between the planes is hidden, but not impossible to find. Given time to grow, they would spill over into this place. From here, it’s possible to not just change one plane, but to change all of them, with a thought. Any power who managed it could claim all the multiverse.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Why does this power want to ‘protect’ other worlds?”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you were in its place?”