Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Niccoluccio hesitated. “That depends on what I would have to do.”

  Rinieri looked to the dormitory and the dead patches of gardens. “You tend to your gardens, pulling weeds before they can overrun it. You would still do it even if you didn’t depend upon the vegetables. It’s your obligation to keep it healthy.”

  “And by ‘weeding,’ you mean…?”

  “I do mean destruction. But destruction on a far smaller scale than these empires would inflict. Remember what Giannello taught you. In an infinite cosmos, there is no such thing as death. Everyone that dies still lives elsewhere. This empire of Habidah’s cannot be allowed to change that.”

  Niccoluccio looked back down at Rinieri’s hand. For the first time this morning, he allowed himself to believe that this was real – that this was the same Brother Rinieri he’d buried a lifetime ago. A trillion Rinieris, and more, lived out in the worlds Habidah told him of.

  Even in an infinite cosmos, it was a miracle that they had been brought together again. Niccoluccio only knew one force capable of miracles on such a scale.

  The void poured a thousand years into Niccoluccio, a battering like standing underneath a waterfall. A million of his different lives touched the periphery of his consciousness. A thousand years ago, he’d lived through each of them. Somewhere in the planes, he was living through it again.

  Niccoluccio sat on his bench, admiring the stars.

  The stars at Sacro Cuore were a broth of luminous cloud. They were brighter than they had seemed before. Not many of the other brothers came out at night. They were convinced that the dark air was a source of contagion, just as Niccoluccio had been until only a few years ago.

  Under Brother Giannello’s tutelage, Niccoluccio had learned to see things differently. Of all the things Giannello had taught him, the germ theory of disease had shocked him the most. It had been the first to throw his certainties into disarray. After that, everything he’d learned had surprised him, but little stunned him. He no longer lived in the world he’d been born in. He had no ground left to be uprooted from. The theory of gravity, of relativity, of the multiverse – a new idea every week.

  He hadn’t gone along with it well. He’d found some way to fight against each new discovery. The illustrations in Giannello’s texts were too abstract and unreal to believe. Blobs of organelles suspended in jelly, bound by fat. Balls of flaming gas like giant alchemic vials, turning light elements into heavier elements. Easier to believe in the angels and kings and dog-headed gazelles that usually danced into the margins.

  Even the very first one, the germ theory of disease, Gianello had had to show him using strange contraptions, tubules full of lenses. Gianello never explained the contraption, but Niccoluccio knew he hadn’t made them himself. They stole into the refectory after breakfast to peer into the wash basin. It had taken two hours of increasingly loud argument to convince Niccoluccio that the little animals he saw were in the water rather than on the surface of the lenses. A dozen times, he’d held it up to the light, trying to see.

  They’d still been arguing when they left. All the brothers in the cloister had looked to them. Niccoluccio reddened. They’d broken all manner of rules by going to the refectory by themselves. The other brothers might think they were sneaking food. He and Gianello would hear from Lomellini.

  Gianello paid them no mind. He hobbled back into the library. When they were alone, Niccoluccio asked, “Do all the others know these things, too? Or is it just you and I?”

  “They’ll know if they’re called to know,” Gianello answered.

  “Why me?” Niccoluccio sat heavily beside the books. “Why, of all the people in the monastery, in all the world, did you choose me to show this to?”

  “You’re a good man, in a good position to help.”

  Niccoluccio shook his head. He waved to the lone book still sitting atop the shelf, the story of his other life. “Any of the characters in there would be better. Habidah. Her team. You must have some purpose in mind. With them, at least, you wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of teaching so much.” Everything he’d learned so far would be basic to them. And he still had so much further to go.

  “The anthropologists came from a different place, with their own preconceptions,” Gianello said. “It would be difficult to convince them. And, uniquely among all of us, you ended in a place where you can influence them.”

  “I see,” Niccoluccio said. And he did. He’d been chosen because Habidah had chosen him. It was his connection to her that made him important. But he didn’t say that.

  Since then, he tried to spend at least a few minutes each night alone on his bench. Every night for the past several weeks, he’d come out here and watched. Each night, he found something new to appreciate or to wonder at. Each day, it became more and more intensely personal.

  He was being prepared for something. He would rather think on anything else. There was so much in the multiverse worth reflecting upon, more than he could comprehend in another five lifetimes.

  He could say goodbye when he wanted. He didn’t know when that would be, except that it would happen. Even in a multiverse in which no one truly died, things always changed.

  This night was so quiet that he could hear Rinieri from as far away as the cloister. Niccoluccio had determined, through careful questions, that Rinieri and Lomellini were the only other monks who seemed privy to Giannello’s secrets. Lomellini spoke rarely. The rest of the brothers lived in their own private worlds.

  Rinieri watched the stars with him for a little while. After a while, Rinieri held a shadowed hand to the stars. “It’s worth protecting, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t imagine anything that could threaten this vastness.”

  “Until you came back to us, you couldn’t imagine much of what you’ve learned.”

  Niccoluccio considered that. He still couldn’t imagine much of what he had learned. The stars out there, the microbes in the soil, and the other planes of the multiverse were nothing he could touch. There was a deep well of stubbornness still in him that made him argue with every new revelation Gianello shared with him.

  Rinieri was used to long pauses in their conversation. He let Niccoluccio be. After a while, Niccoluccio said, “Yes, it is worth stopping.”

  Rinieri lowered his hand, but kept his eyes on the stars. “There’s so much variety out there. And so many forces that would make everything the same if they could.”

  “You mean Habidah’s people. Her empire.”

  “They don’t know about us. We want to contact them. You will deliver a message.”

  Niccoluccio folded his hands in his lap. Brother Rinieri would give him all the time in the multiverse to consider this, he knew. But he didn’t need it.

  Niccoluccio asked, “What happens to you when I leave?”

  “The simulation, the power that sustains our being here, will disappear.”

  Niccoluccio blinked and looked around: at the forest, at the calefactory, and finally at Rinieri. “All this will just… cease?”

  “Remember what you’ve learned. Nothing dies. And I, and all the others, will still exist somewhere in the multiverse. It can be no other way. In some other world, on some plane, there will be another Sacro Cuore just like this. Whether it’s real or another simulation, it doesn’t matter.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Three thousand, eight hundred and nine years. Or so I’ve perceived, while I was being prepared for you.”

  Niccoluccio stared. He had stopped counting his summers after the sixtieth, and that had been a long time ago. “The others?”

  “Only as long as you. They’re on their own journeys. They’ll continue them elsewhere when this simulation ends.”

  “All this – the sky, the forest, this monastery, you – just for me.”

  “If you tell Habidah that you’re to deliver a message, she’ll help you get it where it needs to go.”

  Niccoluccio nodded, slowly. “You could have spoken wit
h her. Given her the message directly.”

  “I would ask you to trust in our decisions, but I think it better to ask for more. Have faith in me, and have faith that you’re being led in the direction you need to go.”

  “Faith was what brought me to Sacro Cuore.”

  “Both times, it turned out to be where you needed to go.”

  Niccoluccio wouldn’t let go of Rinieri’s hand. He didn’t want to go. Nothing in Paradise was supposed to change. The eternal life Rinieri had promised him was nothing like the Paradise that all of Niccoluccio’s devotions had promised him.

  Yet he couldn’t say he was unhappy. And he had some time yet.

  He gradually put himself back together, thought by thought, stitching sensations and memories. He felt a winter night’s breeze against his cheek, touched the stars in the sky above Sacro Cuore. Diamond-sharp, they cut his fingertips. A hundred nights whirled around him, then a thousand, ten thousand, a lifetime.

  Some of it wasn’t hallucination. He felt his hands, fingers curling, grabbing nothing. His breath. His foot. His legs moved in slow rhythm.

  He walked on a cold and hard floor. Heat like sunlight burned on his back. An immense light shone behind him. The reflections on the far walls were so bright that he raised his arm to shield his eyes. But already the light was dimming.

  He stepped through a jagged-toothed gap. Dust fell on his scalp. The floor shook underneath his soles, though, as before, he was somehow in a pocket of calm. Shards of metal danced across the floor. Behind them, bodies. Two people huddled under desks. Another, nearer, was face down. He didn’t need to look closely to recognize Habidah.

  He rushed to her. When he turned her over, he found her face pale and drawn tight, like she was struggling to wake. She was breathing. Her face was screwed up, her eyes shut. Her cheeks and forehead bled, cut in several places.

  He cradled her head into his lap. Across the room, her companions were stirring. She was trying to speak, but didn’t have the breath.

  “I learned so much I don’t know how to begin telling you,” he told her. “I’m back. I understand now.” His voice trembled. He didn’t know how much he should say, and how much she would grasp. This, at least, would be clear: “I’m here to start making things better.”

  30

  In an instant, the noise and light and shaking ceased everywhere but inside Habidah’s head.

  The wall monitors were dead. Shadow spun about her. A light streamed through the still-open door, shrouded in cascading dust. The ceiling nearest the gateway had crumpled and split.

  What they’d just witnessed should have been impossible – and what little of it was possible should have killed them. The dust fell onto her cheeks, into her eyes and mouth. Coughing, she tried to push onto her knees. The spinning floor wouldn’t allow her. She needed to get over to Joao and Kacienta. Her head kept getting away from her. A firm hand grasped her shoulder.

  Someone was holding her head. Her reflexes were so deadened that she couldn’t strike at whoever it was. She spun, and ended up grasping her captor for support. He helped her to her feet.

  Niccoluccio. He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.

  She could step where he steered. He half-carried, half-supported her toward Kacienta, and then lifted her, too. He staggered, but somehow managed their weight well enough to hobble toward the door. Habidah glanced back at Joao. He lay limp but breathing.

  The lights in the corridor still worked. She got a better look at Niccoluccio. He looked no older than a minute ago, but he’d changed. Somehow he’d put on weight. His cheeks were a healthy red. He wore the same monk’s habit, but it was freshly laundered. His tonsure must have been shaved again, because it was far neater than it had been a minute ago.

  She was reminded of the differences between the signal she’d received from the bugs in his system, and the one she’d bounced off the satellites. It was almost as if he wasn’t the same person, but a facsimile, the little differences the too-obvious clues of a poorly composed mystery.

  Niccoluccio helped Habidah and Kacienta to seated positions against the far wall. “I didn’t want any of that to happen,” he said. “I would have stopped it if I could.”

  Habidah didn’t have the strength to answer. She focused instead on climbing to her feet, using the wall as leverage. Niccoluccio returned to the communications chamber. He came back far dustier, with Joao supported on his shoulder. He helped Joao slump beside Kacienta.

  Signals from Habidah’s demiorganics were starting to make sense again. In infrared and other spectra, he seemed an unaugmented human, perfectly normal for the plane. Joao was more alarming. His body temperature was half a degree too cool. His breath had gone thready, like Feliks in Genoa.

  Kacienta sat with her back against the wall and her knees bunched to her chest. She said, “I don’t know how you got inside our heads, but–”

  “It wasn’t me,” Niccoluccio said.

  “–we won’t play any part in whatever you’re trying to do to us, to this plane–”

  “Kacienta,” Habidah said. “If he’s inside our heads, he’s already won.”

  With effort, Joao forced himself to his feet. Niccoluccio tried to help him up. Joao shrugged it off. Without a word, Joao hobbled down the hall, into another room.

  Kacienta nodded at Habidah. She told Niccoluccio, “You’ve been in her head since you met her. That’s why she couldn’t stop thinking about you. Why she always had to go so far out of her way for you.”

  Habidah glanced between them. Every muscle in her throat wanted to tell Kacienta that she was wrong, that her decisions had been her own – but, of course, if she had been compromised, she would believe that. She couldn’t trust her memories. Her experiences were no longer any guide to reality.

  Niccoluccio looked at them sadly. “We’re not so difficult to manipulate that we need our reason stripped away. All it took was a few words whispered at the right times…” He shrugged.

  Kacienta asked, “Who are you working for?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know who it is.”

  Habidah’s skin felt like ice.

  She looked to the half-jarred door, and then back at Niccoluccio. She felt like she was seeing him with new eyes. She asked, “How long have you known?”

  “Years. On this side of the gateway, though, not that long.”

  From the other end of the hall, Joao said, “No question we’ve asked either of you has gone anywhere before.”

  He had returned holding a slender, silver tube. It was one of the field base’s firearms, meant for emergency defense. It was capable of annihilating all three of them at once, leaving only ash and a whisper. Joao aimed the weapon at levelly at Niccoluccio.

  Joao said, “I don’t know if this will help, if you’re in all of our heads or just Habidah’s, but I’m going to do everything I can to stop you.”

  Niccoluccio said, “You don’t even know what I’m here to do.”

  “You and she can talk about it all you like in more secure quarters,” Joao said. Habidah’s stomach lurched when he waved the weapon at her, too. “I doubt it’s going to do any more good than it has before. But I know I don’t want to hear you anymore.”

  “More secure quarters” turned out to be Feliks’ office. Joao led Niccoluccio and Habidah in at gunpoint. When he left, Habidah didn’t need to check the door to know that it was sealed.

  This time, it was Niccoluccio’s turn to walk unsteadily. His hands shook as if he’d only just realized what he’d done. He fell into a chair beside Feliks’ desk.

  Habidah’s body was back under her control. The only sign of trauma left was a racing pulse. Her demiorganics had recorded the whole incident. Something had spiked electrical white noise into her nerves, disrupting her motor cortex, overwhelming her senses and pain receptors. She doubted it was a coincidence that she’d gotten the worst of it only when she’d been in a position to stop Niccoluccio.

  The office was loaded with a number of discr
eet sensors. Images of Niccoluccio’s skeleton and circulatory system streamed through her visual cortex. Data flowed into her memory.

  In most respects, this Niccoluccio was the same man who’d been here not half an hour ago. His fingerprints were identical. Same with microscar tissues, retinas, brain activity patterns, every subtle pigment in his hair and skin. Even the map of his veins matched in ways that would be impossible to mimic. Habidah doubted even the amalgamates could reproduce a body so precisely.

  But there was more.

  The bugs she had placed in him had gone missing. His muscle and body fat percentages had changed radically. Niccoluccio had become a well-fed man apparently accustomed to heavy labor. The muscles appeared entirely natural, growing in the usual ugly lumps and knots and badly healed tissues. He had shreds of grass in his clothes and a lingering odor of sheep manure. Analysis of his breath and stomach suggested that his most recent meal had been bread and milk, though she knew for certain that he hadn’t eaten in days. His hair had grown and been cut repeatedly. His skin not only had all its old scars, large and small, but also several new ones. The cadence of his voice had changed subtly; he had more of a rural Italian lilt.

  Yet, in spite of all of these signs of time passing, he had not aged. No deterioration of eyesight, reflexes, or metabolism. He didn’t have a single gray hair.

  “I know what you’re trying to figure out,” Niccoluccio said, as though he could see the sensor scans. “I can just tell you. This body isn’t mine. At least it didn’t used to be. It was built from scratch, molecule by molecule, after my old body was torn apart.”

  She stared. The fact that Niccoluccio even knew the word molecule was yet more evidence to say that he wasn’t the same man. If what he said was true, then Niccoluccio, the Niccoluccio she had known, had died when he’d stepped into that gateway.

  He said, “I was taken apart and put back together. But I’m still the same man you found and saved. The body is only a host for the soul.”