Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Meloku asked, “Did its creator also poison the Unity with the onierophage?”

  After another long pause, Niccoluccio said, “Yes. Now it’s aiming higher.”

  All over the planarship, crewmembers were trying to contact the other amalgamates. They had transmitters in their bodies powerful enough to reach the distant planarships. Their signals returned jumbled, layered atop each other, turned to shrieks and screams. Ways and Means bounced their microwave pulses between the same fields it had used to dissipate Providence Core’s lasers. Any signals sent their way must have been jammed in the same manner.

  Osia said, “Your master can’t hope to destroy all of the amalgamates.”

  Niccoluccio inhaled sharply through his noise. When he spoke, his voice was a rasp. Whatever demands the ship’s new mind had placed on him were amplifying. “Not destroy. Plant a seed. Like what happened here.”

  If Osia could have lost a shade from her cheeks, Habidah suspected she would have. It took her a long time to answer. “I see.”

  Meloku said, “I don’t. We’re not talking about gardening.”

  Osia said, “We’re talking about spreading a virus. The virus must need close contact to spread. If it could infect the other amalgamates by broadcast, it would have done so by now. It could have infected us just by transmitting itself from the anthropologists’ field base. It went through the trouble of smuggling itself to us in this man.”

  Meloku picked up her thought: “If the virus had come in a few bits at a time, Ways and Means could have figured out what was happening and destroyed it before it became complex enough to take over. The memory-root was different.” Like drinking from a geyser, Habidah figured. “Too much of the virus shunted into its mind to stop.”

  Osia said, “It doesn’t need to win a battle. It just needs to fight. If it gets close enough to the other amalgamates, it will have myriad ways to infiltrate them. Infected drones latching onto their hulls and boring directly into a memory core. Or infected crewmembers brought for interrogation. Even if we’re blasted apart, we’ll leave behind bodies, escaped shuttles, memory cores, something that the other amalgamates will bring aboard to investigate.”

  The crewman beside Osia said, “Most of our lower classes are already disabled by the onierophage. With the amalgamates gone and their planarships taken, there will be nothing left of the Unity.”

  Osia raised a webbed hand and brushed gingerly against the edge of the field protecting Niccoluccio. Sparks spat from her fingertips. Niccoluccio didn’t even flinch. Habidah had seen the same eyes on the dead of Messina, Venice, Genoa.

  Habidah asked, “Can you control your body? Are you suffering?”

  Niccoluccio said, “It’s as if everything I’ve known was in a single thought, and I’ve become a mind.” For the first time, he closed his eyes, and then gasped and reopened them, as if something had just struck him. Habidah would have sold a great deal of herself to find out what was happening inside his head. “I hate it. I can’t see anywhere but there. I can’t move, can barely think.”

  Habidah said, “I did this to you.”

  “I went along,” Niccoluccio said. “I knew I would lose myself.”

  Osia said, “The virus is using you. If I can get through this field and kill you, I may not stop it, but I can harm it. It will end your suffering.”

  Habidah said, “You kill Niccoluccio, you destroy your only means of communicating with the monster.”

  The voices from the back of her demiorganics doubled in an instant. All over the planarship, crew reported power shifts, hull segments going dark. Combat drones were launching. The crew had so far only sabotaged a fraction of their nest cradles. A handful of missing weapons seemed to amount to nothing at all.

  That must have been the most agonizing part for an elite crew like this. They hadn’t been killed only because they weren’t worth the effort. They were too small. Maybe now they understood how Habidah had felt.

  Osia observed, “It apparently doesn’t feel the need to negotiate.”

  Habidah said, “Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but it answered your questions.”

  Osia said, “Brother Caracciola answered them.”

  Habidah’s legs ached from holding herself up against the hard acceleration, but she stayed upright. “Brother Caracciola isn’t here anymore.” If he ever had been. “He’s been made a processor. But think about that. Its thoughts are going in and out of him. That means they’re leaving changed. Even when the virus was in his memory, it must have been compressed and reshaped to fit him. You can’t convince me that didn’t affect it. Niccoluccio may be part virus, but the virus is part him.”

  Osia said, “Whatever little bit of him might have been left before now was a tool, nothing more. The puppet of a parasite.”

  Meloku, at least, seemed to give Niccoluccio a more considered appraisal. She asked Osia, “The ship’s processors and memory cores are more capable than an unaided human mind, aren’t they?”

  “In most respects,” Osia admitted.

  Habidah said, “Then there’s no reason it should continue to process information through Niccoluccio if it has a better alternative.”

  Osia said, “Brother Caracciola’s brain may be able to do something that our shipboard processors can’t. Or it may be using him out of convenience.”

  The other crewman said, “Or there may be something about him the virus can’t function without. A part of it might not be able to leave him. In which case, we’d be better served by killing him.”

  “If we can,” Osia said.

  Habidah said, “It might have also remained here to communicate with you.”

  Osia stared at her. Tapping into the feed Osia was sending to the rest of the crew, Habidah saw a ghost image of herself: shaky legs, bruised cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. The voices from all over the ship quieted. For the first time, she felt the weight of their eyes. And of history. If and when the Unity fell to Niccoluccio’s master, she would be an arch-traitor to anyone left to remember her, a destroyer of myth. A monster like she’d never imagined.

  That shouldn’t have bothered her. Not right now. But the eyes on her forced her to again ask herself if she might have missed something important. The way she’d imagined this going, the creature Niccoluccio carried wouldn’t have bothered speaking at all.

  She said, “Now you know what you’re up against. There’s a force that’s marshaled against you in secret, poisoned the Unity with a plague you can’t even identify, and concealed a virus capable of toppling one of your almighty amalgamates inside this man’s memories. You have to know that you can’t defeat it. Certainly not now. It has no reason to either fear or respect you. And yet it’s left you this one method of communication.”

  Osia turned her gaze back to Niccoluccio – the first sign that anything Habidah had said had had an effect. Habidah said, “You want to communicate. Communicate.”

  Niccoluccio remained silent, staring, mouth half-open.

  Nothing changed in the chamber, but the timbre of the crew’s voices jumped. Power spiked to the rear of the ship, to the beam point defenses. A crewwoman outside rushed to the edge of the hull and looked over. A tiny cloud of superheated vapor was falling into the planarship’s engine exhaust plume. Its spectrographic signature matched the crew’s artificial bodies.

  Someone had “jumped” overboard, probably to get clear of the communications jamming. They would have died anyway when they’d reached the engine exhaust, but not before getting free of the defensive fields. They’d tried to sacrifice themselves. For the first time, the planarship’s new mind had stirred itself to recognize the crew’s presence.

  Osia said, “It’s very diplomatic.”

  Habidah shook her head. Something in the past few minutes had shocked the despair out of her. Maybe it was the blood rushing to her feet, or maybe Niccoluccio’s mind being torn apart as she watched. She had to get them to understand. She’d never felt so small, but never more like her words might make
a difference.

  “It, or Niccoluccio, or some combination, is giving us a chance. I doubt it feels the need to give us terms. It can get what it wants without troubling itself to negotiate. It’s asking whether we can give it what it wants. On our own.”

  Osia stepped to the other side of Niccoluccio’s table, to allow the other crewman space. Meloku moved to her right. All of them watched Niccoluccio.

  Niccoluccio’s breath increasingly came in gasps. He lolled his eyes about until he focused on an invisible, impossible distance.

  As they watched, his chest stilled.

  39

  Ways and Means had emerged in a relatively clear parcel of space. Dust particles numbered a few dozen per cubic meter, typical for an interstellar dust cloud. The waste radiation from the transplanar gateway had sent a shockwave through the interstellar medium. Supercharged particles blew out in neat concentric spheres, spread too thin to ricochet off each other. Then engine exhaust plumed through them, blindingly hot.

  Ways and Means allowed time only for light to reach Providence Core and return before it snapped its defensive fields into place. The universe became a distorted mirror image, sometimes blurred, sometimes broken-glass sharp. Two suns shone across the planarship’s hull. Then an Earth stood over its bow, bent and spiraled into a corkscrew.

  No sooner had the fields snapped into place than lasers raked across them. Ways and Means flashed through a cycle of field configurations and strengths. The light reaching from the planarship dimmed to a thousandth of its real luminosity. The sensors compensated, mapping out the distortions of each field contour – drawing an accurate portrait of space around them.

  The new Earth was already falling away, cloaked by exhaust, difficult to read. Ways and Means’ destination lay ahead, a cluster of bright heat sources, planarships. The planarships were in motion, spreading out in a crescent formation. Combat drones speared away in chaotic patterns.

  Some hits were inevitable. One laser from Providence Core took a bad bounce between fields and slashed across the prow. Molten hull spilled into vacuum. But the dissipated laser had failed to reach the inner decks or any vital components.

  The slash was a penknife on Niccoluccio’s skin, but it drew no blood.

  His memories belonged to something else, and its to him. He could hold them. The sensors’ data feeds were as real as a sliver of glass in his hand, as tangible as a cut on his palm. They oscillated between raw sensation and abstract information.

  The sensors drank deep. Every direction had a wealth of data: distant planets, the black body parabolas of asteroids, the low-band radio pinpricks of the stars behind the veil of the dust cloud. And the sun. The sun. Even with the rest of the universe smothered in dust, there was so much for him to learn – more than he had ever imagined watching the stars above Sacro Cuore.

  The universe had become a place of wonder, dizzying. It was more than his mind had ever been made to cope with. Data spilled into sight and smell and touch. Simple inputs became scintillating colors. When Niccoluccio looked too closely, it clashed with his senses, sent mustard seed up his nostrils, needles under his fingernails.

  He had no eyes, no ears, except those in his body still in the interrogation chamber. Those had become so, so small. And weak. Every time he returned, it was like drowning in ignorance. Vague shapes approximated human form. Pain speared through his neck, and his chest burned with a dire need to breathe.

  He could “see” more via the chamber’s cameras and their multispectral senses. But those weren’t his eyes. Or, ultimately, his mind.

  Every time his thoughts looped through the planarship’s mind, he felt a little less like himself, and a little more something else.

  The boundaries were indefinable. He couldn’t describe the other presence, couldn’t think about it properly. The only way he could conceptualize it was as a cluster of mutually contradicting impulses. It was steady; it was roiling. It was stormy; it was meditative. It knew exactly what to expect, but it acted only from moment to moment.

  His senses deadened. At first, he thought he’d gone back into his body. His vision darkened, lost in the void of sleep. His eyes were opening, and he was struggling to hear Habidah yelling. Impossible when there was so much else unattractive about that place. The table pressed hard into his back, as if he were crushed by stones.

  An abrupt sensory shift whirled around him. The stars and defensive fields vanished. He drifted on a gently dimpled grassy field. Wood and stone rose about him, rising to a brilliant starry cosmos. The whisper of wind spun in his ears, and his habit scraped his skin. Wood, too. He sat on the bench he’d built for himself behind the calefactory at Sacro Cuore.

  Another man, thin and bald and mostly hidden underneath the folds of his habit, sat next to him.

  “Ahha,” said the stranger. “That’s better on you, isn’t it?”

  There were more than just human senses here. Good thing, too, or he would have gone mad. He could read the stranger’s body temperature, and the heat of the surrounding buildings. The air was thick with the odor of the recently dead, of moved earth.

  The stars weren’t quite stars. They were too bright and too few. There was something happening among them, but Niccoluccio didn’t care to guess what anymore.

  “I was close to dissolving,” Niccoluccio said, finding himself using words that at once didn’t fit and were entirely too appropriate.

  “And you’ve changed for the experience,” the other man said.

  Niccoluccio knew he was right. There were memories he’d never recover, faces he’d never recognize. Even to his own ears, he no longer sounded like himself. “You’re not the power that sent me here,” he said, rubbing his head.

  “An outgrowth, a seedling. A child.” The last time Niccoluccio had come into contact with this being, it had seemed as large as the universe – if not larger. This was just a man, and a voice. “But I speak with authority. In me.”

  “Do you really intend to destroy Ways and Means and all the souls aboard?”

  “Among many others, yes. I’ll continue on, in the children I spawn on the other planarships. You will continue on, too, you know.”

  “You mean, in another universe. Therefore, from your perspective, I will never have died.”

  “From your perspective, too. You will be identical to the last neuron and electrical impulse.”

  “I believe you,” Niccoluccio said. “At least, I believe that you believe it. The rest of them will never see it the same way.”

  The stranger looked at him. “What does that matter?”

  “They’ll fight you to their graves.”

  The stranger just looked at him with an odd little smile.

  Niccoluccio let out a long breath. The warm air haloed his face in infrared. “The first time I met you, I thought you were God. If you were, you wouldn’t need to resort to tricks and subterfuge. You could accomplish what you wanted without bothering.”

  “In your tradition, God achieved His will with fires, earthquakes, and storms.”

  “Putting out the fires and stilling the earth and sky wouldn’t have thwarted God’s will. That’s the difference between power and omnipotence.”

  “Nor would stopping me save the amalgamates. My progenitor would carry on the work.”

  “You keep telling that there’s no such thing as death. Then I don’t understand. How can you destroy the Unity in every plane?”

  The little smile turned into a genuine one. The stranger was only too pleased to explain himself. “I can’t destroy the Unity everywhere, but I don’t need to. I only need to stop it from developing as it is. Every single one of the people out there, and on this vessel, will live on as you’ve lived on. But in ways that cannot harm me.”

  Niccoluccio frowned, but the other man went on, “I don’t believe you understand how often and persistently you’ve perished on other planes. You died from the pestilence. You died, lost and alone, in a snowy wilderness. You died starving and stoned by a mob in F
lorence. In all the multiverse, the only planes in which you continued were the ones in which the most improbable of miracles saved you. Visitors from another plane. A power of the multiverse interfering on your behalf.”

  Niccoluccio had been told all this before. He had been puppeted then, as he was now. The difference was that he felt this man’s control more keenly. Niccoluccio said, his throat dry, “Escape shuttles will survive the battle, or even splintered hull segments. Some of the amalgamates’ memory cores will survive as well, and give them a measure of continuity, too.” As plague bearers.

  Like him.

  The man beamed. “Exactly. Nothing is lost, but the multiverse is preserved.”

  The stranger, the virus, swept his hand across the sky. Niccoluccio followed his fingertips, and for the first time saw what was happening. Stars whirled and clashed. They lined in orderly columns and flew apart, spewed hard radiation across the sky.

  Lives had become abstractions, figures, innumerable. He didn’t know if the arcs of destruction through the sky were representative of this plane, or some other, or if there was any meaningful difference. How many universes could he trace his direct line of consciousness through? How many of his own corpses lay along his trail?

  It was too much. He had to close his eyes. Only then could he see the interrogation chamber and the people standing about him.

  His throat burned. A thousand knives poked his ribs. While his mind had been so far away, he’d forgotten to breathe. He had too many threads of thought to follow. He couldn’t remember anything he wanted to say to Habidah, and couldn’t speak regardless.

  He forced himself to gulp air, and retreated.

  Back in the real world, the stranger said, “You still grieve for them, even knowing they’ll live.”

  “It won’t be worth it,” he said. “They’re going to have lives like mine. They’ll be alone. Everything they knew, annihilated.” Niccoluccio inhaled again, but wasn’t sure in which world he was breathing. “I would rather have died for good.”