Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  For her part, Habidah studiously avoided looking at him. Niccoluccio wished she would talk. Without her, he had nothing to focus on but the deck falling, and the pit opening in the center of his stomach. He’d eaten little. After his last time riding in this beast, he’d known that he would vomit otherwise.

  His stomach wasn’t alone in rebelling. The blood in his head felt about to boil. He focused on his breathing. He’d learned a great deal since the last time he’d been a passenger in this monstrosity, even knew some of the principles that kept it airborne, but there was a gulf of difference between understanding and experiencing. He held to the sides of his couch so tight that his knuckles hurt.

  The monitors were on this time. They were like seeing through dozens of eyes, all facing different directions. Ten showed the sky and clouds. The ten below showed a patchwork of greens, forests like moss. A minute later, and the clouds fell from one row of monitors to the other. They scudded between the shuttle and the ground, farther all the time.

  The horizon was a flat plane in every direction, a perfect geometric form. It was also slanted at a steep angle. He felt that, should he be placed on the ground now, he would be crawling up it like an ant on a hill.

  The only way he could force his pulse to slow was to look to Habidah. Aside from the red of her eyes, she looked calm.

  “You didn’t need to do this for me,” he said, so quietly that he wasn’t sure she heard him.

  “I’m not doing it for you.”

  Habidah had told him when and where to hide, but had not explained why. Only when he saw Joao and Kacienta leaving the shuttle without her had he understood – she meant to betray her friends.

  She said, “I’m doing it for your world. I don’t believe that anything I do or don’t do will make a difference other than that.”

  “Why do you think you don’t matter?”

  “Your master knew that all of this would happen. It understood you. It understood me. No matter how I feel, I’m just a spring in its puzzlebox.”

  “I’m not as sure about that. I’m not sure it’s aware of you, or of any of us, as singular beings.”

  “Then why does it care about us?” she asked.

  “It’s trying to keep the amalgamates, any of their shades, from becoming a threat to it or the multiverse.”

  “By destroying them,” she said.

  “No. It doesn’t believe in death. In an infinite multiverse, nothing is ever lost.”

  She looked at him for the second time since he’d boarded the shuttle. “Do you believe that?”

  “I believe I’m sitting here alive when I have no right to be. I survived circumstances that, on a hundred million other planes, would have killed me. I must have died. Yet here I am, alive. I perceive myself as continuous with them.”

  The first time he’d risen above the clouds in this beast, he couldn’t imagine going higher. Now even the clouds had fallen so far away that they looked like only a thin patina over a macrocosm of moss and dirt. Sunlight glinted off puddles smaller than his toes. It took him too long to realize that these were lakes. The horizon, too, was changing. It was becoming bent and distorted, as if the monitors were going concave. Intellectually, he knew they had risen high enough that he could begin to see the curvature of the Earth. But it was not something he had ever imagined seeing.

  The roar of the engines changed pitch. Gradually, the juddering of the deck dwindled. The air outside the shuttle was rarefying to the point of carrying no sound. The only noise came from the hull itself.

  It didn’t affect the music buried just beneath his ears.

  The orchestra was no song he recognized, no melody he could even hum. It was less like a song and more like a pattern, an unearthly kaleidoscopic sound. Yet no word other than “music” was fit to describe it.

  It was getting louder.

  He didn’t want to guess what it was building to. Something about the music made him not want to listen. He opened his mouth, about to ask Habidah if she heard it, but an abrupt force clamped his mouth shut. For just a moment, the muscles in his throat belonged to someone else.

  He wasn’t meant to tell Habidah. He’d had to stop, too, the first time he’d tried talking about it. Something kept him from panicking, but for the first time he considered what Joao had told him: that he was under something else’s complete control, and that even he couldn’t trust himself.

  He said, “Your companions must have realized we’re gone by now.”

  “Before that. I expect that your master will continue to keep them from warning Ways and Means.” Habidah’s tone said that she would rather speak about anything else.

  “They’ll be safe.”

  “Joao is dying because of your master.”

  “It doesn’t recognize that there’s any such thing as–”

  “We do. He’s suffered long enough. He never deserved it.” She made a sound deep in her throat, difficult to hear over the engines. “And what did I go and do to them.”

  “Did you intend to harm them?”

  “Of course not. That hardly makes a difference.”

  “I don’t see–”

  Habidah tightened her grip on her couch’s harness. He saw and fell silent. He wasn’t helping.

  After a while, she said, “I have no guarantee that a lot of people aren’t going to suffer even more because of what I’m doing for you.”

  “I’ve been thinking a great deal about why I had to come here. I don’t think it would be to hurt people. My master has far better ways to hurt people.”

  Habidah glanced sideways at him. “Your message for the amalgamates?”

  “I still don’t know what it is. But think about this. If the Unity is dismantled, there will be no need for the onierophage. My master doesn’t care about ending lives. Only about protecting itself and the multiverse.” He wondered where those words had come from. They only sounded partially like his own.

  Habidah turned back to the monitors, her jaw tense. There were plainly a lot of things she wanted to say, but wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.

  The sky changed timbre. It had started at a light morning blue. Now it was darker, an early evening. Twilight boiled out of the center of the sky. It was not yet dim enough to see stars, but night couldn’t be far.

  Billowing, white-hot gas streamed across the monitors facing the Earth. Engine exhaust. The shuttle gradually arced its course. The changes were so subtle that he couldn’t feel them, and only see them in the trails. The horizon slipped across one monitor, and fell onto the next.

  When the shuttle’s flight finally leveled, the horizon had a pronounced curve. It was indistinct, hazy. A corona of atmosphere clung to the horizon, very thin. For once, it was fine that Habidah was silent, because he wouldn’t have trusted himself to speak. The world seemed so distant, the clouds and their shadows so small, that it hardly seemed like a real place. Far to the south, sunlight glinted off water. The Mediterranean. Even the sun had changed. It had gone from yellow to a washed-out white. Somehow its sparkling reflection in the sea remained gold.

  There was the Channel, and England. Italy forked toward Saracen shores.

  “We’ll reach Ways and Means in another hour,” Habidah said. “It’s seen our launch. Its agents are demanding to know what we’re doing.”

  “What are you going to tell them?” he asked.

  Habidah took a moment to gather herself. Niccoluccio knew that, with the machines in her head, she could have contacted her masters without opening her mouth. Yet she spoke aloud for his benefit: “This is Dr Habidah Shen. I am requesting immediate and emergency landing clearance aboard Ways and Means.”

  A pause for a voice only she could hear. Then: “Something new has come up and I’m not equipped to deal with it. The passenger aboard my shuttle is a native of this plane.” Another pause. “Yes, the same I had contact with before. He knows more than he should about us and the Unity. I can’t explain how. I didn’t tell him. He claims to have had contact with a creature responsi
ble for the onierophage. I’d like to turn him over to you and wash my hands of him at the earliest opportunity.”

  The longest pause yet followed. Niccoluccio’s breath stuck in his chest. Then Habidah said, “I will surrender control of the shuttle to you.”

  That appeared to be the end of the conversation. Habidah eased her grip on her couch. She still wouldn’t turn to look at him. “They didn’t need to ask,” she told him. “They would have seized control regardless.”

  One of the monitors now showed an image that, however abstract, was obviously a celestial map. Rings looped around a perfect sphere. It reminded him of an astrolabe. One of the rings spiraled outward, meeting the outermost. The shuttle rode that first line, he guessed. And the outer ring had to contain their destination: the planarship Ways and Means.

  He swallowed. On the map, Ways and Means was just an abstracted orbital path, an infinitely thin line. But Niccoluccio knew it had to be vaster than any structure he’d seen before, vaster than Florence. The vessel housed not just the mind of the amalgamate, but its complexes of factories, sensors, vehicles, engines, and, lastly, living quarters for the augmented humans that served it. For all that Niccoluccio’s mission hinged on that ship, he knew astonishingly little about it. He couldn’t remember reading anything about it. He didn’t even know what it looked like.

  “You’re not going to like this next part,” Habidah said, and that was the only warning he got.

  The engine roar shut off. The deck ceased shaking. Niccoluccio’s stomach fell into his throat.

  He reflexively seized the sides of his couch. He was upside down. He was falling into his safety harness. No – the harness hung limp and flapping. The whole shuttle was plummeting.

  Habidah said, “Told you.”

  Gas burbled past his lips. He swallowed a taste like vomit.

  Some great force kicked him into the bottom of the couch. It shook loose his grip, left him fumbling. The images of Earth slipped across several monitors. Then another jolt shoved him in the opposite direction, hard into his harness. He couldn’t help his gasp. He scrambled for a different grip.

  Gradually, the engine roar resumed, and the couch pushed against him. It felt like an approximation of gravity again. Blood rushed to his head.

  The images of Earth had switched monitors. The Mediterranean and the English Channel had swapped positions. The shuttle must have flipped around. The nose was facing Earth. They must have reached the halfway point of their journey, and were decelerating.

  “We’re burning in hard,” Habidah said. “I hope you don’t change your mind, because we don’t have the fuel to deorbit.”

  He laid a hand over his stomach. Even she looked far paler than a moment ago. “You don’t belong here any more than I do,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Have you ever been aboard a planarship?”

  “I’ve been in orbit twice,” she said. “To repair malfunctioning observation satellites on other planes.”

  “When you can step between planes with a gateway, what need is there to ever go so high?” he asked. “Especially when our bodies rebel against it.”

  “It’s strategically valuable,” Habidah said. “The best place to observe and control the ground.”

  He said, “That’s why your masters live here.”

  “I’m not going to defend them,” she said.

  The thought hanging off the end of her sentence was almost audible. He prompted, “But…?”

  “But if you forced me to choose between the amalgamates and your master, I’d chose the amalgamates. I’m only here to protect your plane.”

  “You truly believe your master is less invasive than mine?”

  “It’s gotten into your head,” she said. “Rewired you inside and out.”

  “They never needed to do that to you. They used you to colonize my plane before you ever realized it.”

  Habidah laughed bitterly. “Your master is more honest about what it’s doing. Is that it?”

  “Can you convince me that’s not important?”

  Habidah was no longer listening. Her eyes were on the monitors. Niccoluccio looked, too. At first, he saw nothing different. The sky was black. The stars were washed out by the white-hot exhaust billowing out of the shuttle’s engines.

  No – there was a star. He’d almost missed it. A big star, but dim. A lighter silhouette cast against the black silk of the sky. It grew at an astonishing pace. Already it had a definite shape, an impression of substance.

  Lines of shadow splintered it, fractured it. It looked as though someone had placed window panes in the firmament. They were arranged three by three, in a grid. A tenth jutted out what Niccoluccio could only assume was the head of the vessel.

  As with the Earth, from a distance it appeared geometrically perfect. That impression faded as the shuttle closed. Ways and Means was haloed by a greenish-yellow ring, as though one of the monitors had caught a bad reflection. A band of gas encircled the planarship’s midsection. It reminded him of nothing so much as the Earth’s hazy horizon, seen from orbit. The nape of his neck cooled as the realization struck. That’s exactly what it was: air, contained.

  Some pockets of air seemed thicker than others, almost soup-like. Specks like dust motes flitted in and around the band of atmosphere. They reminded him of birds, but they must have been enormous. Light glinted off their wings. Green moss bubbled along Ways and Means’ naked hull. Rusty red rivers forked through natural-seeming canyons. Farther on, the forest turned orangeish. The rivers emptied in violet lakes.

  “Ways and Means’ menagerie,” Habidah said, without looking to see what he was watching.

  The engine roar diminished. The force holding him in his seat loosened. His stomach burbled. The planarship had become huge in the monitors, Earth-sized. For a moment, the shuttle seemed about to dive into the clouds. It changed course at the last moment, skimmed the cloud band, and kept going.

  The rest of the planarship was cloaked in insubstantiality, a moving shadow. It would have to be, Niccoluccio figured, to keep hidden. Even at this great height, Ways and Means was so large that it would have been easily visible had it reflected sunlight. Nevertheless, he could make out shapes against the deep sea darkness, like shadows against an early dawn.

  A forest of leafless trees bristled over one of the hull segments. Sparks glimmered across them, a suggestion of industry. Squat, carbuncular shadows like beehives encrusted the next surface. They were shorter and stouter than the towers, but somehow more menacing. They made him think of warts, or buboes. The shuttle descended toward them.

  With another kick from the thrusters, the shuttle rotated. The cabin spun around him. The towers hung sideways. Then they became fat stalactites on a cavern ceiling. The engine noise ceased, along with the semblance of gravity.

  It was finally too much. He ripped his eyes off the monitors, focused on the bulkheads. It didn’t help. He doubled over into his safety harness and retched. And then again.

  By the time he was finished throwing up, he felt no better. His face was flushed and bloated. Sinewy globules of vomit floated in front of him. His nostrils were clogged, and all he could smell and taste were sour acid juices.

  As the shock wore off, he became aware of a deep hum. A cool breeze brushed his legs. The globules gradually fell toward vents in the deck

  Habidah looked as calm as she ever had. He knew the machines in her body cared for her in situations like this, but he couldn’t imagine anyone being comfortable here. She said, “Your master obviously doesn’t care for your comfort or wellbeing if it hasn’t prepared you for this. It could have easily rebuilt you to tolerate this.”

  The nodules surrounded the shuttle. One eclipsed the Earth. That cut all the light from the monitors but for the halo of greenish atmosphere. He and Habidah were left with only the cabin lights. He heard a hiss ahead. A steady press of deceleration held him against his harness.

  They had entered the beast.

  Afte
r an uncomfortable minute, dull orange seeped across the monitors. It revealed nothing bar a polished brass surface “underneath” the shuttle. It was so mirror-perfect that it was impossible to tell if the shuttle was moving. The space above appeared in gradients of gold, equally unblemished. It could have been an eternity, another sky.

  As that sky continued to brighten, another kick pushed him into his harness. Dark spots appeared ahead, distant but approaching astonishingly fast. Buildings, black and lumpen and ugly, dimpled the brassy horizon. The thrusters jarred him again. Something mechanical shuddered under the deck. Unfolding legs, he remembered.

  With a thump and final cessation of movement, the shuttle settled to the surface. It had landed several hundred feet from the buildings.

  Habidah’s harness released of its own accord. Floating, she pushed herself toward Niccoluccio’s couch and stopped herself by grabbing its edge. Niccoluccio couldn’t understand how she moved so fluently. Taking her at her word, she’d only experienced this twice before.

  His harness snapped free. At once, he was floating – falling – free of the couch. He scrambled, but his foot’s brief contact with the couch only gave him a spin. Habidah seized his arm and steadied him.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “You got yourself here. Anything you do now can only make it worse.”

  He nodded, but couldn’t speak.

  Habidah hauled him like a sack of grain. She tugged him toward the cabin hatch, out to the shuttle’s ventral corridor. His breath caught when he saw the boarding ramp peeling open. A cool, dry breeze carried in.

  Habidah held onto the ramp to guide them “down,” but there were no visible handholds on the outside. Niccoluccio took in the distanceless gold expanse around them. It was even brighter now – a perfect, cloudless day on an alien world. The far walls could have been a mile away, or thirty.

  He feared Habidah would launch into the void with her first step, but her boots stuck to the surface. The ground held her seemingly on its own.

  Still in Habidah’s grip, Niccoluccio experimentally planted a foot on the surface beneath them. It held, although not so firmly that he wouldn’t be able to pull it away again. A second foot steadied his balance, but Habidah kept a painful grip on his arm.