Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  It was every transplanar anthropologist’s duty to understand and appreciate the prevailing beliefs on the planes they visited. But that didn’t mean Habidah had to believe the same things Niccoluccio did – or, in this instance, even respect them.

  She said, “There is no soul. Your mind, your brain, is a physical object. There is nothing else. If someone or something disassembled your body, then they did the same thing to your mind. That was everything you were. You’re not the same person you used to be.”

  Niccoluccio said, “I feel every bit the same.”

  “You would, if you’d been constructed to feel that way.” Niccoluccio frowned. “You know things you shouldn’t. Your thoughts have been changed in ways you could never recognize. You could even have been made to believe what’s changed has always been a part of you.”

  “I spent a great deal of time away from here. All of the things I know about you, and your people, I learned at Sacro Cuore. I was there for years. Lifetimes.” He shifted. “Even after all of it, I still have trouble believing it. There was so much of it. And so different from what I grew up with.”

  There was no point in plunging into his fiction. “You were given memories of learning. You were given a body that matched what you believed you experienced after you stepped through the gateway. No time passed here.”

  “It passed for me. It was real.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The same way you know who you are.”

  Habidah gave up. She didn’t want to tell him that she wasn’t confident in her own memories, either. “What did this to you? The amalgamates?” Even as she asked, she couldn’t believe that. The amalgamates had never revealed that they’d possessed technologies capable of rebuilding a person so completely. If they had, eradicating the Unity’s plague would have been as simple as wishing it gone.

  Niccoluccio surprised her by saying, “I don’t know.”

  “I was sure you were going to say that it was God.”

  “God is a mystery to me. He’s more of a mystery now that I know more about the planes.” Niccoluccio held up his left arm, and brushed his fingers over his skin. “What happened to me is a mystery as well.”

  “You’re not even going to question why you’re here?”

  “I know why I’m here.”

  Habidah waited.

  Niccoluccio met her gaze evenly. For the longest time, he didn’t say anything. He looked away first. “I don’t believe this is something I should simply announce all at once. In Sacro Cuore, it took me years to understand.”

  Habidah blew air through her teeth, and turned back to the desk. If he wouldn’t be of any help, she had other avenues of investigation to pursue.

  Joao may have made her a prisoner, but he hadn’t tried to – couldn’t – block her computer access. NAI still didn’t answer, but its lower-level programs continued to function. She’d only been locked out of the controls to the office door. She turned her attention to the communications chamber. Few sensors remained in working order, but their records of the moments before the incident showed a sequence of impossibilities.

  The gateway had opened on its own. It hadn’t been projected from another plane, or anywhere else. The aperture had seemed normal at first: micrometer-width, sized for communications. The sensors recorded a pinprick of light, too small to be seen by even augmented human eyes.

  Then it had inexplicably started widening.

  The field base’s generators reported that their power output hadn’t changed at all. At the same time, the power received by the gateway apparatus had increased tenfold. It kept going up. Somewhere between the generators and the gateway, an enormous amount of energy had flooded into the system.

  Habidah turned her attention to the gateway. All gateways had a destination. Pictures of the aperture in multiple spectra flooded into her. Visual, infrared, ultraviolet, radio, and even gamma – all a hot mess. Every gateway she’d seen before had offered some hint of its destination. Atmosphere leaking through, stray radio signals, muted colors.

  Here, she found chaos. This was unlike any gateway she’d seen or heard of. It didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

  The amalgamates were the only powers she could think of that could accomplish anything remotely similar to what she’d seen. Ways and Means remained in high orbit. If it was setting her up again, then there was no harm in calling it. If there was another power at work – then the amalgamates were the only creatures she knew of who could do something about it.

  And yet she hesitated to call them.

  She pulled up the field base’s communications records. NAI sent status updates back to their university on a regular basis. The last had been two days ago. The next was scheduled for tomorrow. Assuming that NAI didn’t fake those status updates, she had at least that long before the amalgamates noticed something awry. If Ways and Means hadn’t noticed anything already.

  Ways and Means continued to send shuttles, none headed in their direction. It hadn’t directed any of its visible scanners or satellites to focus on the field base. It was simply carrying on with its subjugation of this plane.

  And that left Habidah with more of a dilemma. She didn’t want to speak with Osia or Ways and Means again, let alone alert them to this.

  She needed to learn more before she made up her mind.

  She said, “If you can’t tell me everything at once, why don’t you start with whatever you can?”

  31

  Meloku didn’t need to sleep often, but when she did, dreams arrived fast and ended quickly. She was dreaming a dream of angels and planarships when an impulse from her demiorganics jarred her awake.

  Her eyes fluttered against the darkness. She instinctively switched to infrared, but she was too scattershot, too confused, to make sense of the blobs around her. She groaned and rolled to her side. Endorphins and serotonin-killers flooded into her, but they couldn’t throw off all the effects of chemically induced sleep. Will-o’-the-wisps danced in front of her eyes.

  She snapped, “What?”

  Companion said, “The watchdog programs you left at the anthropologists’ field base are contacting you.”

  “Sorry,” Meloku said, sheepishly. There was no point in lying, in telling Companion that she hadn’t meant to be irritable when she obviously had. “What’s happening?”

  Companion said, “The signal was cut off mid-broadcast.”

  That caught Meloku’s attention. With effort, she sat and threw off her covers.

  The messages hadn’t been long. One watchdog had mentioned an electrical disturbance in the communication chamber’s power grid. Another program she’d left to watch for shuttle activity had detected a seismic disturbance, but nothing that fit the profile for a landing. And then the signal had simply ended mid-datastream.

  Meloku called the field base, and queried NAI. NAI replied that everything was normal. No earthquakes, no shuttle landings, no power spikes. Habidah was in Feliks Vine’s office with her pet monk. Kacienta and Joao were fucking in Joao’s quarters.

  Her watchdogs also reported no abnormalities. “Explain the last truncated transmission,” Meloku demanded.

  The watchdog that had reported the power anomaly replied, “False alarm / minor power spike tripped threshold.” The next chimed in, “Minute buckling in underground support occurred directly behind sensor/triggered alarm. Compensated/corrected.”

  The response came five milliseconds too late.

  The explanations didn’t rest well with her, but the delay was a warning flag by itself. There was no good explanation for it. Her watchdogs operated with the precision of a pulsar. She hadn’t thought Habidah capable of subverting them.

  Companion asked, “Shall I advise Ways and Means?”

  Meloku tried not to take too long to answer. The most likely explanation, of course, was that it was a test – another way for Companion and the amalgamates to gauge and judge her. Companion kept telling her that she needed to suppress her innate need to take charge
of a situation without arranging for backup. She needed to learn to subordinate herself.

  “At once,” she said. “Tell Ways and Means I suspect criminal tampering. Keep it apprised of anything new I discover.”

  She called up several counterintelligence programs locked away in her demiorganics’ deep memory. She’d never used them outside of training. The amalgamates approved their use only in high-stakes security crises. Anything that might threaten the amalgamates’ plans for this world certainly qualified as a security crisis, particularly if Meloku’s old colleagues weren’t as naive as they’d seemed.

  She could feel the black programs in the back of her mind: cold and dark, like beads of ice. They numbed every part of her they touched. Thoughts that touched them shrank back, withered like desiccated roots. To them, she was also an enemy. Agents like her weren’t allowed to glimpse anything of them lest she learn too much about how they functioned. She shuddered and pushed the programs on their way.

  The black programs took no prisoners. At once, their preliminary reports returned. They injected themselves into the field base’s NAI and dismantled it from the inside. They devoured NAI’s brain from the inside out, digesting it. They puppeted its remains. To anybody interacting with NAI, it would seem to speak and answer exactly as before. That was just an imitation, though – a viper wearing the skin of a grass snake.

  Her black programs hunted and consumed her watchdogs in the same manner, considering them already compromised.

  Meloku’s frown deepened. The black programs had found nothing. The situation was exactly as her watchdogs reported it. Habidah and her monk remained in Feliks’ office, and Joao and Kacienta at their labors. There had been no alarms, no abnormalities, no detected infiltration other than her own.

  The reported power spike was too suspicious to ignore. Yet the gateway apparatus itself was powered down, cold. Even the air was undisturbed.

  She slumped, frustrated. None of this was adding up. On a whim, she checked the timestamps of the reports.

  The first report from her black programs had come back five milliseconds late.

  Adrenaline pounded into her chest.

  The remainder of the reports had come back exactly on time, but that couldn’t hide the glaring error in the first. She’d been told that the black programs had never been bested by any power encountered. This was either one hell of a test, or she’d just brushed up against something the likes of which the Unity had never encountered. Either way, her response should be the same.

  “Contact Ways and Means at once,” Meloku told Companion. “Highest priority. Our project has been compromised by an extraplanar power–”

  A spear of white-hot energy shot between her eyes, through the center of her brain. The spear drove upward, twisted, and sheared her mind neatly in two.

  The next thing she remembered, she was on the floor, tangled in blankets, pain like needles screeching across bare nerves. She felt as though she lay on sheets of nails, that her fingernails were being pulled out, and her skin had ignited. She must have screamed. She heard pounding, as if at a great distance, at her door.

  “Mistress! Your Holiness!” It was Aude, her cook and chambermaid. Her knocking grew increasingly desperate. She tried to knock the door down. She wouldn’t be getting in. Meloku had secured her door with field projectors.

  Meloku choked. Her tongue wouldn’t work, and tasted like moldy copper. She cast her blankets off. A flood of dizziness overwhelmed her. She couldn’t swallow. She was about to vomit, she realized; a wholly alien and disorienting sensation. She hadn’t thrown up since she’d been a toddler, when her first augmentations had been installed. Her demiorganics should have clamped down on that.

  She tumbled to her side and heaved her dinner across the floorboards. She coughed viciously, and spat. Her mouth tasted of malarial swampwater and citrus. She ordered her demiorganics to block all but essential sensory input. Pain and nausea continued to rack her body. She tried again.

  “Please open the door, Your Holiness!” Aude cried.

  The pain was fading, at least. “Go away!” Meloku shouted, when at last she could. She sat against her bed, shivering. Her knees and elbows were bruised from the seizure. At least she seemed to have avoided biting her tongue.

  She had definitely come under some kind of attack. She tried to call up records of the seconds before the whiteout. Again her demiorganics refused to answer.

  “I’ll go and get help, Your Holiness,” Aude said. “In God’s name, I swear to you that I can help.”

  Fury seized Meloku’s throat. “Go die of the pestilence!” she rasped.

  Aude’s bare footsteps thumped down the stairwell. Meloku rested her head on her knees. Her mind felt empty, sluggish. “Companion,” she said, aloud. “Help.”

  She waited. Silence. A slowly widening pit began opening in the center of her stomach.

  She kicked her soiled sheets away. Whatever had happened, it had been enough of a shock that her demiorganics seemed to have been jarred out of contact with her nervous system. The pain was nearly gone, and still nothing answered her. She looked about, lost, and gave the mental command to switch to retinal infrared. Her bedchamber remained dark.

  Her pulse thudded against her ears. She spat again, but her mouth was too dry for the taste to come out. She’d had her first demiorganics installed when she was five. She’d never been without something answering her thoughts since. No wonder she felt like she couldn’t think. Part of her was missing.

  She counted another ten seconds before wailing in panic.

  A minute later, she was on her feet, leaning on the window shutters. Her whole body shook. Adrenaline seared her chest. She could hardly keep from hyperventilating. Her pulse beat fast, making her head spin. Her body hadn’t been unregulated for all of her adult life.

  Despite all of that, she had to try to think, to figure out what had happened. She had to stay calm, take stock of her resources. She asked her demiorganics for a medical diagnosis. Her cheeks burned when nothing happened. She set her hand on her chest, took deep breaths.

  Companion couldn’t be gone for good. That just wasn’t going to happen. She’d never been alone since it had been installed.

  OK – the first thing she knew for sure was that her demiorganics were nonresponsive or dead. Possibly for good. How could that have happened? The first option was that her demiorganics, and Companion, had been remotely shut down by a hostile force. The second was that they had been damaged, again by a hostile force. The shock she’d experienced certainly seemed to indicate some kind of nervous system trauma.

  It had all happened when she’d investigated the event at the field base. Her counterintelligence programs had been compromised. The reports they’d sent back to her could also have been compromised.

  That meant she could have been compromised, too. Any virus so advanced would have little trouble crossing the synaptic barriers between her demiorganics and her organic brain, and rewriting her like a piece of software. Just like she’d tried to rewrite the field base’s NAI.

  She couldn’t assume that that was the case. She had to keep moving. The only way she could do that was by believing she was still herself.

  She needed to communicate to Ways and Means. A shuttle could pick her up in minutes. She dug her field kit from under her bed before she remembered that all of the equipment she’d brought with her – the field projectors and weapons and sensors – had been made to interface directly with her demiorganics. They wouldn’t function for an ordinary human being.

  She opened the shutters and looked to the stars. Her demiorganics sent status updates to Ways and Means every few minutes. When it stopped receiving those, it would realize something had happened. A shuttle should have already been on its way to meet her.

  That was assuming, of course, that whatever power had attacked her hadn’t anticipated that. If it was as powerful as it seemed, it wouldn’t have any trouble subverting a satellite and faking the updates she sent to Ways a
nd Means.

  She stared at the stars, hoping, willing – praying – for one of them to come for her.

  After ten minutes, her jaw hurt from clenching. Voices clamored at her door. The door shook with the force of their pounding. The security field shone a gentle blue.

  Meloku instinctively ordered her field generators to power down. Nothing. She groaned, restraining frustrated tears, and walked to the door. The field generators, at least, could be turned off. From the other side of the door, the field was impenetrable, but the protection only went one way. She waved her fingers a centimeter in front of the projectors, disrupting the particle stream. The field flared violet and vanished.

  The door cracked open; a man fell through. Without infrared, it took too long to recognize him. Galien. Aude stepped over him.

  “Well?” Meloku asked, as if nothing was wrong. The quaver in her voice gave her away.

  Aude dropped to her knees. “Forgive me, your Holiness. You were screaming. Your door – it was as if a demon were holding–”

  “I suffered a vision,” Meloku said, and paused to try to figure out where to go from there. The pause lingered. “It was a messa… it was a revelation. I am not ready to talk about it yet.”

  Galien picked himself up. He dusted his legs and eyed her. As superstitious as these people were, they could also be cynical enough to surprise her. Galien always spoke on two levels. “Shall I fetch a physician?” he asked. “Prepare medicines?”

  “There is no physician alive that can cure a terror of God,” Meloku said. “Go.”

  Aude swiftly departed. Galien took a step as if to follow, but stopped. “I have never known you to struggle so dearly with your reasons.” With her lies, he meant.

  “I did have a vision,” Meloku said. Maybe a touch of the truth would soothe the anxiety from her voice. “About terrible deeds in a faraway place.”

  “Outremer?” Galien ventured.

  “Farther.”

  “Prester John’s kingdom?”

  “Only idiots believe in Prester John in this age,” Meloku snapped. “There is no far eastern Christian kingdom attacking the infidels from their opposite borders. It’s all steppe horsemen.” She put a hand to her forehead. She was getting a terrible headache.