Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

The brain scans Habidah had taken last night had found nothing unusual. They could have missed something. Or the technology she was trying to root out was so subtle that it had piggybacked into his brain without significantly disrupting his nervous system. Ways and Means might have scanners sensitive enough to detect it.

  Habidah’s skin chilled. Exposing Ways and Means to whatever was inside Niccoluccio was exactly what Niccoluccio had asked for. If Niccoluccio was carrying more than a message, but a weapon – a virus – then he would need some subtle means of introducing it. Like picking it up from a full brain scan.

  She asked, “How do you intend to deliver your message?”

  “I don’t know. I was never told.”

  “By calling up Ways and Means and asking for a trip to orbit?”

  “No,” he said, with sudden certainty.

  “So if I can put this all together – you need to get to Ways and Means without it knowing anything like what you just said.”

  “Your amalgamates are not kind souls. What do you think they would do to me if they knew everything I had just told you?”

  “Annihilate you from orbit,” Habidah said. “Or, at the very least, dissect your mind from a very far distance.”

  “In either case, my message would go undelivered. I need to be close.”

  Habidah waited a long time before speaking again. She didn’t know how to begin asking her next question, or if she wanted to hear the answer. She glanced to the ceiling. If Kacienta and Joao were listening, they’d given no sign.

  Her throat almost seized around her next words: “Is this the first time your master has tried to interfere with the Unity?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Niccoluccio said.

  Habidah should have felt something right now. Her body and mind had been through so much in the past twelve hours that there wasn’t much left to wring from them. This, though, was different.

  This was worse than freefall. This was walking up to the precipice with one foot over the edge. A moment of perfect clarity before the last step.

  She said, “Your master can change the laws of physics on the planes. In very subtle ways, you said. It could create threats that don’t follow the rules the rest of us understand, that are impossible to fight or even see clearly. If it wanted to attack the amalgamates, it might start by removing their base of power. Their human population. Nobody might realize it was an attack.”

  Niccoluccio looked pale and tired. His eyes were reddened. He looked like Habidah imagined she had in Messina, Genoa, and Marseilles.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  Habidah stood, paced twice before him like she was about to say something, but no words escaped her. Words wouldn’t have done anything.

  Finally, she asked, “What do you have to be sorry about any of it for?”

  “I know how much suffering it’s caused you and everyone on your planes. I lived through the same.”

  “Your master murdered billions of people. With billions more to come.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Niccoluccio asked. “Your amalgamates wouldn’t save my world.”

  Habidah let her gaze rest on the ceiling. Her hands trembled. She didn’t know why, or what she wanted to do. There was nothing to do. Not to Niccoluccio, at least. “I never tried to justify the amalgamates. I worked against them however I could. I saved you. You sound like you’re defending your master’s actions. Are you?”

  Niccoluccio opened his mouth, about to speak, but didn’t answer. Habidah extracted a wisp of satisfaction from that.

  The door whisked open. Habidah turned, saw Joao, but she didn’t have time to move before Joao was halfway across the office.

  Joao shoved Niccoluccio out of his seat and against the wall, and pinned Niccoluccio there with an arm against his throat. Niccoluccio made no effort to defend himself. Joao said, “I don’t know why you felt that was a good way to get my attention, but you’ve got it.”

  “Don’t be this stupid–” Habidah started.

  Joao drew his fist back. Habidah stepped forward, grabbed Joao’s arm before he could swing. Joao yanked away, and drove his elbow into her stomach.

  Her demiorganics blocked the pain, but all at once she couldn’t breathe. Someone grabbed Habidah’s arms. She hadn’t heard Kacienta enter. Habidah had been robbed of the strength to pull free. An oxygen deprivation warning tone from her demiorganics trilled at the edge of her hearing.

  Joao pulled his arm back again. Kacienta yanked Habidah backward. Habidah didn’t see the blows, only heard two smacks and one heavy thump. They sent shots of adrenaline down her arms. Her demiorganics finally overrode her instinctive nerve blocks and forced her to breathe. She sucked air through her nostrils.

  This was enough.

  Habidah raised her foot, twisted, and stomped on Kacienta’s shin. Kacienta’s demiorganics didn’t blot out the pain in time. She yelped. Habidah spun, pulling Kacienta with her. Kacienta lost her balance and her grip. Habidah shoved her into an examination table.

  Habidah took two quick steps and slammed her heel into the back of Joao’s knee. He buckled as easily as if she’d broken the bone, falling into Niccoluccio. Niccoluccio tottered. Habidah shoved Joao sideways. He collapsed. He had exhausted his energy just getting here.

  Niccoluccio’s bottom lip was swollen. Blood dribbled from his nostrils. Habidah put her back to him to shield him. Kacienta had just about recovered. Joao wiped a strand of saliva from his chin, breathing hard.

  When Joao caught his breath, he asked, “Don’t you understand what he just told you?”

  “I’m trying to,” Habidah said.

  He leveled a finger at Niccoluccio. “He’s destroying everything back home. He killed my parents. He killed Feliks. He’s killing me. He’s the reason the amalgamates are even doing this to his plane.”

  Habidah said, “It’s not him. His master.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Kacienta let go of the table. She hobbled to them, keeping her weight off her foot. Habidah remained on guard. Kacienta said, “We can take him right to the amalgamates. They’ll know how to dissect him.”

  Habidah said, “You’re not thinking this through.” It sounded awful even to hear. Of course they weren’t, not in a moment like this.

  Joao struggled to find the strength to stand. His energy had fled him in that one violent burst. Kacienta asked, “What do you want us to do? Ignore him?”

  Habidah shook her head. “No – think. It’s counting on us taking him to the amalgamates. Niccoluccio can’t signal Ways and Means to get picked up. Not without getting blasted apart. We still have a shuttle. We can get him to Ways and Means. That’s why his master sent him back to us.”

  Joao glared at Niccoluccio. “Is that right?”

  “I don’t know what it wants me to do,” Niccoluccio said. “I was never told.”

  Habidah said, “It wouldn’t need to tell you.”

  Niccoluccio peeled himself from the wall. His face was flowering bruises, but he seemed only a little shaken. He said, “You keep talking about me like I have no control over my actions.”

  Joao said, “You don’t.”

  Habidah said, “And you wanted to beat the hell out of him anyway–”

  “Stop,” Niccoluccio said. Habidah was so surprised that she did.

  Niccoluccio’s fingers trembled as he felt the blood on his lips. “I don’t need defending. I would be as furious. I was when I found out that your amalgamates could have cured our pestilence on a whim. In Sacro Cuore, there were weeks when I don’t think I could have spoken to any of you.”

  He looked at each of them in turn. His voice was stuffy from the blood, but he was at least intelligible. “I cannot believe that I have no choice in all of this. I wasn’t selected at random. My master could have sent an automaton in my place if all it wanted to do was destroy you. There’s something it wants me to have a say in.”

  Joao said, “You are an automaton and you don’t even know it. The ant
carrying poison back to its hive has no idea what it’s being used for.”

  “If there’s no way for me to prove that I’m not, then believe as you want.”

  Joao at last rose. “It’s not that I want to believe you’re under the power of a genocidal monster,” he said. “It’s that I can’t believe anything else.”

  “If I’m an automaton under the thrall of a force so mighty and cunning, then there’s nothing you can do. None of us measure up to it. But…” Niccoluccio paused, drawing it out. Once again, Habidah marveled at how much more eloquent this Niccoluccio was than the one who’d stepped through the gateway. “…If I’m right, and we all have some element of choice left to us, then what we do matters. You might as well act as though the latter is true.”

  Joao told Habidah, “You were right. There’s no point to beating him. I doubt there’s anything capable of feeling it left in there.” He glared between her and Niccoluccio, and hobbled out of the room as fast as infirmity allowed him.

  Habidah turned to Kacienta and stared, daring her to leave and lock them in again. Kacienta shook her head, muttered, “It doesn’t matter.” She went to Feliks’ laboratory sink, started to wash her face.

  Habidah sat hard on the nearest countertop. Niccoluccio gingerly touched the bruises blossoming between his eye and his temple. The bleeding, at least, had stopped. Habidah broke the silence. “You really believe you lived years since the last time you saw us, don’t you?”

  “I do, and did.”

  Kacienta finished with the sink. She dried her face with her sleeves, gave Niccoluccio a hateful look, and limped out. When Habidah checked, her demiorganics reported that the doors had been left unlocked. She couldn’t quite feel relieved.

  Niccoluccio opened his mouth, but Habidah cut him off with a wave of her hand. She didn’t want to hear it any more than the others did. He stared at her for a long moment. Habidah could only meet that stare for a few seconds.

  Then she, too, left him.

  33

  Niccoluccio lost track of the amount of time he spent alone afterward. He leaned against the wall, trying to recollect himself. Then he sat facing the corner. Nothing helped him calm the voices raging in his head.

  In Sacro Cuore, meditation had come easily. He’d earned that through practice. Here, he couldn’t stop replaying arguments in his head, thinking of the things he should have said or would like to have said. More, there was a song – or snippets, at least, of a music he couldn’t remember – playing, repeating itself deep in his head.

  He reached to caress the top of his cheek and winced. He hadn’t had arguments like that back in Sacro Cuore. Some of the novices had been so hot-blooded, but not him. The pain was worse now than in the moment.

  The muscles in his arms burned. His pulse still pounded in his throat. He stood and paced, weaving between tables. So much here was alien. He doubted that the tables were just beds, as Habidah had told him. The counters and desks lining the walls were filled with equipment and proboscises whose purposes he didn’t care to guess at. The first time he’d come here, if he hadn’t already trusted Habidah, he would have believed it a torture chamber.

  He didn’t know what he was meant to do next. No one had come back for him. He straightened his habit and approached the door. It whispered open.

  He felt no more at ease outside. The corridor was cramped, at most twenty feet long. It was a perfectly geometrical cavern. Something hissed. Cold air brushed his scalp.

  The nearest door took him to a cell obviously meant to be someone’s living space. It had rumpled sheets over a raised mattress, drawers, and not much else. Aside from the whisper of ventilation, all was quiet.

  After another several minutes of poking around doors, he found a ramp leading up. The door at the top opened like all the others. There was nothing beyond except darkness. The air was warmer, humid, tasted of grass and dust and rotted wood. The outdoors.

  He stepped out. The door shut behind him, encasing him in darkness.

  At length, his eyes adjusted. He stood in a barn. Moonlight edged through cracks in the wall. Decayed rushes covered the floor. Everything was steeped in dust. He half-remembered this from the last time he’d been through.

  The barn door squeaked open when he pushed. On the other side, the dust turned to mud. The top of the barn’s roof dripped. His toes dipped in a puddle. The sky was half stars, half moon-silvered clouds.

  Stepping outside didn’t leave him any less disoriented. It shouldn’t have been night. He didn’t feel tired. What time had it been at Sacro Cuore when he’d left? He couldn’t remember.

  Out here, he heard the music even more clearly. It was all loose notes and odd trilling, like a troupe of musicians tuning their instruments. It repeated, but never exactly the same. He’d started to describe it to Habidah, but something had clamped down on the thought, made him stop.

  A dark shadow loomed over the eastern sky, too near to be a cloud. Habidah’s flying beast. The shuttle. Only when he looked closely did he see wan yellow lights underneath. They slanted upward in two parallel lines, from the ground to the shuttle’s belly. They were far dimmer than stars.

  He padded to them. Lost in the dark, without perspective, they made him think of a torchlit street seen from far away. This was how the walls of Florence looked at night – a ring of watchfires encircling a sea of shadows and sleepers. He bent, put his hand between the lights. He touched metal. This, then, was the boarding ramp. The lights were guides to keep people from falling.

  He stood. He knew little of how Habidah and her companions managed their affairs, but leaving the ramp extended seemed foolhardy. Even if there were no people near, any manner of animal might get in.

  A sharp, bright light from the top abruptly shone in his eyes. He held his hand up, but too late to save his night vision. In the painful blur above, he saw a human figure outlined against a square of light. Then the door hissed closed again, and all sight was lost.

  A man’s voice asked, “What the hell are you doing? Sneaking aboard?” One of Habidah’s companions. Joao. The one who’d savaged him.

  Niccoluccio would have stepped back if he could have seen where he was going. “Forgive me. I didn’t realize I was intruding.”

  Joao thumped down the ramp. He obviously didn’t have any trouble seeing where he was going. Niccoluccio shivered when Joao stopped in front of him. But Joao didn’t strike. The other man’s breath was labored. Joao said, “You’re either following me, or you’re sneaking aboard. Which is it?”

  “Neither. I was curious and I couldn’t stay inside any longer.”

  “You might not even know. If your master had programmed you to go aboard, your conscious mind would make up any excuse it wanted.”

  “I’ll leave the shuttle if you’ll talk with me.”

  Joao hesitated. “What do you want with me?”

  “We’re suffering because of what our masters did to each other.”

  Joao let out a long breath. “The amalgamates never did anything to you. They just failed to cure your plague.”

  “That’s enough, especially when it would have been so easy for them. You’d hate them too, if you were in my position. They failed to cure us because they want turn us into a servant class.”

  “I never said I agreed with what the amalgamates are doing. You know what your master is doing to us, but you’re still working for it.”

  “You’re still working for yours. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You couldn’t contact your amalgamates below. You wanted to check your shuttle’s independent communication system, use it to warn your masters.”

  Joao stood, silent for a moment. He clearly hadn’t expected Niccoluccio to understand so much. He set a firm hand on Niccoluccio’s shoulder and turned him back down the ramp. “Come on.”

  Uncertain where they were going, Niccoluccio nevertheless followed. Joao stepped confidently in the dark. Something groaned behind them, and Niccoluccio turned in time to see the little guide lights ri
se and vanish.

  Joao stopped a few feet away from the the barn. He sat. Niccoluccio had to feel around before he realized there was a log. He sat, too, a foot away. Joao didn’t object. Again, he struggled for breath.

  Niccoluccio said, “You’re not doing well.”

  “It’s like my body weighs three times as much as it used to. Just going out to the shuttle and back, I feel like I’ve been running for an hour. It’s worse now than I’ve ever felt it before. I think it’s killing me a lot faster than Feliks.”

  “I’m sincerely sorry.”

  “You’re not,” Joao said, with surprising vehemence. “You don’t even understand. You’ve never seen this before me.”

  “I’ve seen worse. At Sacro Cuore, my brothers woke screaming from the pain of the buboes. They had fevers higher than I’d ever felt. In their delirium, they imagined themselves in Hell. I couldn’t help them. But I did see it all.”

  “This plane doesn’t mean anything,” Joao said. “There are only a few hundred million people here. Do you have any idea how many live in the Unity? The Unity has a population of trillions – and those are just the official, registered citizens, never mind the satellite planes and colonies. Don’t try to put your plane’s suffering beside ours. They aren’t comparable, and it doesn’t justify anything.”

  “I wasn’t trying to justify it,” Niccoluccio said. “I was trying to empathize.”

  Joao was silent for a long time after that. Niccoluccio could sense him silently fuming. Then he said, “I don’t know if I can believe a single thing you’ve told us. If any part of it is true, it’s the most evil thing I’ve ever heard. Far more likely that this is some kind of trick, though. The amalgamates testing our loyalty, something like that.”

  “Even after you’ve seen my master do things your amalgamates never could?”

  “The amalgamates have always kept their capabilities hidden from us.”

  “They’ve never had your best interests at heart, in other words.”

  “What does that matter? It’s better than trying to murder us, like the monster who sent you.”

  “It doesn’t believe it’s murdered anyone.”