Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Galien caught her pained breath. “Perhaps we should call that physician after all.”

  “I have no desire to be bled dry or have my piss sniffed. This is…” She searched for words. “This is a spiritual crisis, not a crisis of the body.” She still had hope that, at any moment, the sky would open with reentry sonic booms.

  Galien set a hand on her shoulder and steered her toward her bed. Before Meloku knew what had happened, she was seated next to him. He kicked her vomit-soiled blankets farther under the bed. “It certainly smells like more than a spiritual crisis.”

  Meloku didn’t know what had possessed her to allow him to lead her other than sheer distraction. For the first time, it occurred to her that she didn’t have her defenses. No tranquilizers or diamond-tipped darts, no augmented muscles.

  “It’s extremely suspect for you to be alone with me,” she stammered. “I want you to leave.”

  “Your Holiness.” Galien shifted his grip to her hand, and tightened it. “My future saint. I am extremely indebted to you for elevating me out of that refuse pile of a scribe’s office. But my livelihood is tied to yours. Everything that you made me to be depends upon you staying healthy in your body and in your wits.”

  He was the kind of person she’d chosen to keep close. It shouldn’t have surprised her that he remained driven when she least wanted him to be. He asked, “What really happened here? An intruder? A guest overstaying his welcome?”

  “Nothing so vile.”

  Galien placed his free hand on Meloku’s forehead. She jerked away. “Certainly not a fever. You’re cold as the moonlight.”

  “I truly did have a vision,” Meloku said.

  “Of what? People are going to hear what’s happened. Tell me what you saw.”

  She pushed herself a little farther, but his hand restrained her. She said, “By God’s blood, I won’t allow you to take charge of me.”

  “Very well, Your Holiness. Please tell me what it was you saw.”

  “The shadow of a demon, bent to devour the world. Swallowing angels as it advanced.”

  “Very prosaic,” Galien said.

  “This is not a play. I do not vomit for theatrics.”

  “Are you sure?” Meloku glared and he relented, or pretended to. “I know you would go to many ends to make a point, but I don’t know what point it is you’re trying to make here. It would help me serve you if I knew.”

  “All I need from you is time to interpret my dream.”

  “It’s a dream, now, is it? There’s a distinct difference between visions and dreams. Take care to choose the right word when you tell others about this.”

  She opened her mouth to snap some threat, but stopped. He had a point. She heard no shuttle. She was stuck with the natives. She had to manage them well. They were her only resource.

  Her only resource to accomplish what?

  To discover what had happened to her. To alert Ways and Means. To find out just what was going on at the old field base. To be with Companion again.

  As daunting as that list was, it helped her organize her thoughts. For all that she’d learned about herself in the last few minutes, she’d held onto at least one thing she could be proud of. She wasn’t going to give up.

  She pulled her hand away from Galien and stood. She strode back to the foggy window. She said, “This isn’t the kind of vision I would feel comfortable sharing with the mob.”

  Galien asked, “Then what profit is it?”

  “I didn’t think of the profit while I was having it.”

  Galien let his silence speak for itself.

  Meloku smiled, briefly. She underestimated the natives on occasion. “You never believed in me, did you?”

  “I believe God wants you to prosper. Everything that’s happened so far has worked in your favor.”

  “And this doesn’t match the pattern of my previous revelations.”

  “To put it that succinctly, Your Holiness – no.”

  “Just because there isn’t a pattern, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan.”

  “That sounds like the lady I knew,” Galien said. “Then what is your plan?”

  “I don’t feel like sharing it,” she said. “I’m still piecing it together.”

  “Forgive me if I should say that sounds like a contradiction.”

  “Watch yourself. I do not forgive easily, at this moment above all others.”

  He didn’t answer, but she didn’t wish to turn to see his expression. She held a hand to her temple. In spite of this outrageous headache and everything else, she was starting to recover herself. Setting goals, no matter how distant, kept her focused.

  She just wished she could speak with Companion. Whatever had happened to it, she hoped it was going to be all right.

  Everything on her list could be accomplished at once if only she could contact Ways and Means. Whatever had done this to her seemed intent on keeping her from that. It had attacked when she’d been about to warn Ways and Means of the severity of what was happening.

  Her first priority had to be to contact Ways and Means. But how to reach it when she had no way of signaling it and the enemy was likely impersonating her signals?

  She would have to create an event too big for Ways and Means to ignore. It would have to be something caused by transplanar technology. Anything natural, even a large fire, could be explained away by her impersonator. She ran through a mental list of the equipment she’d brought with her. None of her tools would work, and none of them held power supplies large enough for an explosive discharge that would attract Ways and Means’ attention.

  She did have tools like that at the field base, however. All of her personal equipment would only respond to her demiorganics. The same wasn’t true of the field base, where equipment was meant to be passed from person to person. Overloaded, the field base’s generators could lay waste to hundreds of square kilometers.

  At the field base, she’d find whatever had done this to her.

  She shuddered. Her other choices weren’t great, either. Ways and Means had other agents on this world, but the nearest, in Paris, had left, abandoning the French court as uncontrollable. She didn’t remember where the next agent was. She’d counted on her demiorganics to keep track of that.

  She said, “I need to prepare for a journey.”

  “Leave Avignon? Just when you’ve got the city pinched between your fingers?”

  “I never did this for me. It was all for a higher power.”

  Galien reached over her shoulder and pulled the shutters closed. “I have a hard time imagining a city more suited to the glorification of God than Avignon. If He would have you in another city, the opportunities would have to be great.”

  “I’m not traveling to another city. I need to find the demon in my dream.”

  “And where would it be?”

  She hoped to disarm him with precision: “Forty-five miles south of Lyon.”

  Galien scoffed. “I thought you said that you had dreams of faraway places. I grew up farther than that, and walked here.” Still, he sounded relieved. A trip across France was hardly the crusade he’d imagined.

  “It’s far away to me,” Meloku said.

  “You traveled here from Constantinople, did you not?”

  Meloku didn’t answer.

  “Your Holiness?” he asked, and for the first time tonight he sounded unsure.

  “I need help to get there.” Without demiorganics, she couldn’t trust her abilities in a fight against Habidah, not alone. “Mercenaries. Horses. Food and fodder. However much my money will pay for on short notice. We’ll collect benefices from the cardinals.”

  “You’re certain this will all lead to the profit of God?” Galien asked, doubtfully.

  “In the end.”

  “The French will hardly welcome an armed party traversing their territory.”

  “The French can’t stop the English or the bandits already ravaging them.”

  “For as much as you have the people and
prelates of Avignon under your power, I doubt many of them will be enthusiastic about your expedition.”

  “You can’t talk me out of this.”

  “I’m trying to keep you from throwing out all God has given you so far. Your reputation–”

  She turned sharply, and let a little bit of her carefully rebuilt control fail. “My reputation is not worth dogshit if it will not help me in my time of need. And neither are you people.” Right then, she would have turned Avignon into a pyre if only it would catch Ways and Means’ attention.

  Galien paled. It suited him.

  He nodded and silently ducked out the door. Meloku, blood cooling, walked to her bed. It took a while to even her breath.

  There was no point in going to sleep now. Without her demiorganics to regulate her, she might sleep for eight hours. She couldn’t afford that. She couldn’t miss anything, not even when it seemed all there was to do was think and wait and watch.

  The sky outside her clouded window shone still and silent. Without her enhanced senses, it was all dead to her.

  32

  Habidah slept unevenly, as if her demiorganics hadn’t fully come back online. She drifted between nightmare and awareness, staring half-lidded at the monsters lingering in the shadows in the office ceiling. She rolled to the other side of the medical bed. Abruptly, she sat and ordered the lights on.

  According to her demiorganics, she’d been out three hours. Lights or no, Niccoluccio still slept deeply. Habidah slipped off her bed and padded to him. His face was slack, a mask of death. She was almost tempted to check to see if he had died. But his chest rose and fell. He was more peaceful than she had ever seen him.

  Not that she had seen him often.

  She sat on the nearest bed. Breathing or not, he might as well have been dead to her. She still had no cause to say he wasn’t dead. By his own account, his body had been dismembered and a facsimile constructed in its place. Whether this Niccoluccio believed it or not, his old self was dead. This was a memory sent to manipulate her.

  And yet, looking at him, she couldn’t convince herself of that. He seemed a changed man, but not a different one. He’d been almost apologetic about coming back, which certainly fit him.

  She rested her forehead in her hands. Part of the problem was that she’d never really known him to begin with. There had been times that, in spite of their limited contact, she’d felt closer to him than anyone on this plane. That had been a fraud, too. The only time she’d spoken with the real man had been when he’d physically been here. The other conversations had been with whatever force controlled him now. Likely the only reason he seemed familiar was that she was accustomed to the same liar.

  Then again, she hadn’t been the only target of these deceptions. Niccoluccio’s master had sent messages to him as well, impersonating her. Why would it have needed to do that if the old Niccoluccio had never been important?

  Her belly rumbled. She wondered if Joao or Kacienta would bother to bring food. She folded her legs and stared at Niccoluccio. By the time morning found them, she was no closer to untangling the knots in her stomach.

  Niccoluccio blinked drowsily. Habidah fetched him a glass of water from the lab sink, and showed him to the closet lavatory. When he returned, Habidah said, “You said you were going to save this plane. From us, presumably.” She could think of nothing else that posed so much danger to his world, not even his plague. “How do you mean to do that?”

  “It’s not just this plane,” Niccoluccio said. “Your, well… It’s…” He was clearly struggling to explain. He spoke as though he knew everything, but he’d had to put it in words until now. “Your masters threaten many other planes, as well.”

  “Masters. You mean the amalgamates.”

  “Yes. I don’t know that much about them, but I do know they’re too large for a human imagination to comprehend. They’re far beyond us.”

  “Not so different from your master, then,” Habidah said.

  “Perhaps not,” Niccoluccio said. Habidah caught two tacit admissions. First, that Niccoluccio’s master was at least on the level of the amalgamates. Second, that it was his master. “The creature that sent me isn’t God. I know that. It lives between the planes.”

  “Between the planes” was, as Habidah understood transplanar physics, a nonsense phrase. There was nothing “between” the planes, either physically or mathematically. It was less real than an imaginary number. She glanced at the ceiling. Joao and Kacienta were certainly listening.

  “The force that sent me aims to save the planes from each other,” Niccoluccio said. “Some interplanar contact is unavoidable. But when large, powerful groups spread across the cosmos, swallowing plane after plane, they threaten the diversity of the multiverse.”

  “The Unity is large, yes, but it still only encompasses a few hundred thousand planes.”

  “The amalgamates don’t know about the space between the planes, let alone how to live there. What do you think they’d do if they could?”

  Habidah didn’t have to think. “They’d try to invade it.”

  “From there, controlling other planes isn’t a matter of force. It’s a matter of will. In that space, there’s no such thing as single planes, but shades of them that all blend together. Your amalgamates would be able to expand themselves unto infinity.”

  “I don’t understand. How could anything change an infinite number of planes?”

  Niccoluccio chewed his lip as he struggled to find the words. He seemed increasingly uncomfortable, like the words he searched for weren’t his own. “You and I exist on a single plane. We can only affect things here. That space, between the planes, is different. It’s easy enough to change the laws of every plane from there. On infinite planes, if you wanted. If you were intelligent enough, you could do it in very subtle ways, too. Your amalgamates could code copies of themselves into every plane that ever was or will be. And eliminate anything they found uncontrollable.”

  Now it was Habidah’s turn to be at a loss for words. These concepts were so far beyond the man she’d known that it was increasingly easy to believe that she was talking to a stranger. “I can’t imagine any single being is capable of that.”

  He said, “Managing the multiverse takes an intelligence beyond our capacity to imagine.”

  “You might call it divine,” she said.

  She’d meant to bait him, but he answered, “Yes.”

  “And yet you don’t believe that your master is also your God.”

  “I believe that there are shades of being that you and I could never understand.”

  Habidah cupped her fingers around her mouth. “Even if all this is true, the amalgamates shouldn’t be of any concern to your master. They don’t have any idea about this space.”

  “They will.”

  “Your master is worried that, if the amalgamates manage that, they’ll become as powerful as it.”

  “No. It isn’t like that. It protects the multiverse from influences that would change or dominate it. Otherwise, it leaves the planes alone.”

  “Why?”

  “It aims to preserve the multiverse as it is, in the infinite diversity of the planes.”

  “At the very least, that’s what it wants you to believe about itself.”

  “It could be lying. I can’t pretend that there’s no chance of it.”

  “But you don’t believe that it is.”

  Niccoluccio said, quietly, “No.”

  Habidah leaned toward him. “You would never believe anything else if that’s the way it programmed you.”

  Niccoluccio nodded. “You already know the amalgamates have lied to you. You would stop what they’re doing if you could. Given a choice between trusting them and trusting an unknown, which would you choose?”

  Her stomach knotted tighter. Rather than answer, she asked, “You said earlier that you had several conversations with ‘me’ before we found each other again. But I only remember having one with you. At least until I got the call to come
save you.”

  Niccoluccio said, “I know that wasn’t you.”

  Habidah only just resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. “I mean – why talk to you so many times, but only once to me?” She’d gone over her demiorganics’ recording of their conversation a dozen times. The more she’d gone over it, the more recalcitrant and withdrawn the false Niccoluccio had seemed. He had wanted to lead her somewhere, but hadn’t wanted to say too much else, either.

  He shrugged, and just looked at her. He didn’t know. Habidah had an idea.

  Niccoluccio was sweet, but he was naive even for his world. That meant easier to manipulate. Outsiders like her and her team were a lot cagier than a naif like him. Niccoluccio’s master had exposed itself to them as few times as possible, giving them fewer opportunities to note any inconsistencies. It had been, at least for a while, afraid of being caught.

  She asked, “How do you intend to stop the amalgamates?”

  “I don’t know. I just have a message to deliver.”

  “What is it?”

  Niccoluccio shrugged. He didn’t seem to know, or he was pretending not to.

  Habidah said, “It’s got to be more than words. Words wouldn’t need subterfuge. I’m guessing the reason the amalgamates haven’t beaten down our doors is because your master is keeping this all hidden. It’s sending them false data, faking our regular messages.”

  Niccoluccio only looked confused. After a moment watching him, Habidah believed that he didn’t know what she was talking about. She pressed: “If all you needed to do was tell the amalgamates something, you could do that right now, through the cameras.”

  “I have to be in their presence, yes.”

  “And then what will happen?”

  “I have in me… it’s a kind of thought. An idea. I dreamed about it. It was gorgeous. It had symmetry, colors, layers like rivers crashing together. I can still picture it, but I can’t describe it.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, but halted. He seemed even more confused.