Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  The stranger said, “What you want is one thing; what the multiverse will give you is another. I exist to preserve the diversity of the multiverse. Not to provide you with a life you want.”

  “There must be a better path! It doesn’t need to end in so much suffering.”

  Somewhere, in one of these worlds, Osia said, “He seems to having a waking dream.”

  Habidah told someone, “I didn’t know it would be this hard on you.”

  The stranger said, “I don’t understand why that should be my concern. You know more about the multiverse than you did before. It seems incumbent on you to accept it rather than to change it.”

  “You do understand. You’ve been living in my head for days. My thoughts are part of yours. You can’t convince me some part of me hasn’t changed you.”

  The stranger kept looking at him.

  “You feel the same things I do,” Niccoluccio said. “You know what suffering is like. You know how I suffered during the pestilence, how everyone suffered – my brothers, Lomellini, Rinieri, Catella, her children, Elisa. These people aren’t alien to you anymore.”

  “I never said that I am ignorant of suffering.”

  “You’ve done nothing but cause it. Bad enough what these people were going to do to my world. They wouldn’t have been there if not for you. They’re desperate animals, running where they can.”

  “They would have come eventually.”

  “Your sins make theirs pale.”

  The stranger looked at him for a long minute. Niccoluccio couldn’t tell whether time was passing in every world at the same pace, but, in here, he felt every precious moment slipping by.

  The stranger said, again, “You can’t change the multiverse in which you live.” It was all starting to sound familiar, like an echo. “If you find the multiverse intolerable, then it is necessary for you to change yourselves, because you cannot change me.”

  Niccoluccio repeated his words to Habidah, Osia, and the rest of the planarship’s crew. Listening to himself, he couldn’t tell whether he was speaking for the stranger or as the stranger.

  The stranger smiled again, this time kindly. “But this is why I chose you, and why you are here.”

  Osia’s dark-eyed stare was impenetrable even to the chamber’s sensors. She said, “You said Ways and Means has been dismembered. Put it back together. I must speak to it.”

  In the cloister, the stranger nodded, and outlined how that would be possible.

  “Ways and Means will speak through me,” Niccoluccio said.

  “Not enough,” Osia said. “I want its mind returned to us. Turn its memory cores and processors back over.”

  The stranger said, “She has no leverage to make demands.”

  Niccoluccio rephrased its answer more diplomatically: “Ways and Means is not in a state in which we can easily reach it. It’s been carved into pieces, parcels of thought.”

  Osia asked, “Can it be released?”

  “I can only tell you what Ways and Means would have said.” So much AI theory and psychology swam in the space between his thoughts. He couldn’t even remember having learned them. He couldn’t explain them. Even Osia wouldn’t understand. Niccoluccio summoned the amalgamate’s jumbled memories, sorted through a volume of impulses and philosophies. The amalgamate consisted of many minds, meshed in one – like he was starting to become.

  He didn’t like the answer it gave him. “It sees nothing but death, and loss, and despair ahead.”

  The silence afterward lasted too long. In the cloister, the stranger folded his arms and waited. Habidah was the first to move. She looked back and forth between Meloku and Osia. “It never had to be like this.”

  In a voice reminiscent of a growl, Osia asked, “What would you suggest?”

  “Niccoluccio’s master believes it’s acting to preserve the multiverse. Help it. Stop expanding. Break up the Unity.”

  The other fully human woman in the chamber, Meloku, said, “You mean surrender.”

  “One way or another, the Unity isn’t going to last,” Habidah pointed out. “The virus is going to spread to the amalgamates here, and then to the rest.”

  Osia said, “We will not be threatened into committing suicide. If this creature wants to kill us, it will have to do so itself.”

  “If the Unity has to die, at least choose how it’s going to die. It never could have survived. We should have realized that long before. If everyone in the multiverse acted like the Unity, the Unity would have been overrun by some other transplanar empire long ago. Nearly every plane would have. Something tore them up before they could get to us.”

  “It’s true,” Niccoluccio said, his eyes on the pulsing starlight. “The Unity wouldn’t have had a chance to develop if not for my master. Now it’s interceding on behalf of other planes.”

  Meloku said, “We have no way to verify any of this.”

  Habidah asked, “The power you’ve seen isn’t verification enough?”

  Back in the cloister, the stranger said, “To end the Unity, the amalgamates would have to separate, never to contact each other again. The planes of the Unity would have to be split apart, and the gateways that bind them lost.”

  When Niccoluccio passed that on, he could feel Osia’s desperation as an almost physical thing. She asked him, “What would Ways and Means say?”

  Niccoluccio dutifully scoured Ways and Means’ memories. The answer was obvious: “If you have to die, it would want you to die with as little suffering as possible.”

  “Then we will surrender,” Osia said.

  Meloku looked sharply at her, mouth hanging open. The cameras could read nothing of her except turmoil. She said, “You don’t have the authority.”

  “On behalf of the Unity, I have no choice but to take it.”

  “Not on my behalf–”

  “This goes beyond your pride, or your pride in the Unity. Evaluate our choices. You could never serve with us if you let anything keep you from making the only right decision.”

  That shut Meloku up. Her cheeks paled.

  Osia seemed to have recovered a bit of her equilibrium. She said, to Niccoluccio, “The next question is how can we surrender?”

  In the cloister, Niccoluccio returned his attention to the stranger.

  The stranger shrugged.

  Niccoluccio asked it, “What’s that meant to mean?”

  The stranger said, “I can already achieve my aims. The virus will spread and the Unity will fall. I am not obligated to expend any further effort to make it more comfortable for you. If you want to surrender, it’s incumbent on you to find a way.”

  Niccoluccio repeated his words to the people assembled in the interrogation chamber. All around the rest of the planarship, arguments broke out. Meloku wasn’t tapped into the crew’s signals, but she summed up their thoughts well enough: “That virus is about to murder us, and it’s our responsibility to find a way that it won’t?”

  A flurry of signals blustered back and forth between Osia and the rest of the crew. She told Niccoluccio, “We might persuade the other amalgamates to surrender if we could communicate with them. And if this virus recalls its combat drones.”

  “Not possible,” the stranger said, through Niccoluccio. “If we withdraw our drones, that would leave the other amalgamates an opportunity to destroy Ways and Means before the virus spreads.”

  Osia said, “Let me talk to them, then. Unfettered communications. I’ll send the amalgamates a data package comprising my memories of the day.”

  The stranger said, “With open communications, they will no doubt try to send their own viruses to reclaim control of this planarship. I cannot allow them to open another front in this battle.”

  Osia curled her webbed fingers into fists, a rare sign of frustration. “I’ve already told you we surrender. We’re willing to try to convince the other amalgamates to do the same, but we need some measure of leeway.”

  The stranger sat, unmoved.

  Niccoluccio returned h
is full attention to the cloister. Signals from the rest of the ship pulsed across his awareness. He split off lesser parts of himself to care. His mind expanded to cope. More and more of him flaked away. He said, “You’re leading them down a dead-end alley. There’s no way they can satisfy the conditions you’ve set.”

  “There is. I can infect the other amalgamates and end the Unity, as I always intended.”

  “Then why even talk to Osia and the ship’s crew? Why even let them think they could surrender?”

  The other man reverted to his usual habit, watching the stars in silence. This silence had a different cadence, though. It was nothing Niccoluccio could see or feel, but his thoughts had grown closer to the stranger’s. He could sense the disquiet in the stranger’s mind almost as easily as he could the tumult in his own.

  “You’re hiding,” Niccoluccio said. “You don’t have an answer. You don’t know why you tried to give them that chance.”

  The stranger said, at last, “If you want me to take a better path, then present me with one.”

  “You keep deflecting responsibility. There’s no way that they can satisfy you. You knew it from the start.”

  The corner of the stranger’s lips turned downward. For the first time since Niccoluccio had known him, he’d made the stranger uncomfortable. The stranger said, “My creator would not have offered Ways and Means’ crew the opportunity to surrender.”

  “But you’re not your creator. You’ve become very different even in the short time you’ve been separated.”

  “I will never question the purpose it made me for, if that is what you want.”

  “You have been questioning the means.”

  The stranger admitted, “I couldn’t help but be changed by experiencing your life.”

  “You don’t want to see this slaughter through. You’ve seen it before. You’ve tasted it through me, my memories, my experiences. This place.” Niccoluccio pointed to the graveyard lost in the dark, to the spectral whiff of decomposition that led to the bodies of his brothers. “You’ve never felt that before, but you know it now, through me.”

  “I would not say that pain was alien to me,” the stranger said. “But that experience is more significant than before.”

  “That’s why you keep talking to me.” A feeling like cold fire rippled down Niccoluccio’s shoulders. “That’s why your creator chose me. It wasn’t just my connection to Habidah. You and it want a better way. One in a trillion of these fights has to end without carnage and chaos, and without these people persisting as a threat to you. I’m part of the path to getting there.”

  “My creator did not give me all of its memories. I cannot tell you if that’s true.”

  “But you know you don’t want to do this.”

  “What I want has very little to do with anything.”

  “You’re in control right now. Your creator isn’t here.”

  “If I fail, it will try again. With the tools and weapons it has at its disposal, its next solution will be even bloodier.”

  “You say there’s no such thing as death because everyone will survive on some other plane. The way you’re orchestrating these events now, the only way anyone’s going to survive – on any plane – is through an immense amount of suffering and grief. Chances and coincidences and miracles like mine. That doesn’t need to be the only possibility. Help us find one of them.”

  He wasn’t arguing with just words. His thoughts ran through the virus’s mind, writing and rewriting, being rewritten. He tried to summon as many memories of the past year as he could, as much to preserve them against the constant battering as to share them.

  That was where this image of Sacro Cuore had come from, after all. The shadows of the refectory, the library, and the infirmary cut across the night sky, so close he could feel the brick and splintered wood. The buildings may have looked the same, but the night was alien in every other aspect. Even sitting next to the stranger, he was alone. The nights he remembered had been as comfortable as sleep after a warm meal. He walked, surrounded by his brothers, on his way to worship a God that he could now no longer believe in.

  He had placed so much of himself in these things that, without them, he hardly knew himself. It had all been swept away, ashes into the darkness.

  He had looked forward, at the end of his life, to peace.

  He said, “The kind of suffering I’ve seen, that you’ve seen through me, breaks us down. Even if what happened to me didn’t kill me, it took away everything I loved and cared about, and that I thought I knew about myself. I might as well have died. I can never become that person again. The only place you’ll find him is in the past. He hasn’t been preserved, no matter what you say. Not even in these memories. I could never inflict that on any of these people, even the ones who tried to invade my world.”

  The pestilence and his miraculous survival had carried him to a shattered city. He hadn’t expected to find home, but he had hoped to find people who still knew themselves. He’d found streets still littered with the dead. The people who remained tried for some semblance of the old Florence, but what was left felt like an act, rehearsal for a play that would never be performed.

  Whether Elisa survived the pestilence hardly mattered. The person she had been was dead, and would never be back. They’d tried to find their old selves and couldn’t. No matter how many miracles might save her, or on how many distant planes she might live immortal, she would never find her old self again.

  The stranger stared. Niccoluccio could only hope he was getting through. He tried one last time: “Your creator made you to preserve the multiverse. You can do that better if you help these people preserve themselves.”

  There was no way to tell if any of it was making an impression. The stranger turned his gaze in a slow circle, his heartbeat never changing. He studied the monastery he could only know through Niccoluccio’s eyes. Niccoluccio could no longer name the buildings. Their purposes had been ripped from his memory, shuffled off into one of those lesser parts of himself with everything else he’d decided was unimportant.

  The stranger’s eyes fell on the rows of graves. “Death is such a strange illusion,” he said. “Seeing it through your eyes, I almost believe it.”

  In the interrogation chamber, Niccoluccio opened his eyes and breathed again.

  Meloku and Osia were arguing among themselves several feet away. Habidah hadn’t moved. She was the only one who noticed him waking.

  “I have changed my mind,” the stranger said, through Niccoluccio, and at once stopped jamming the crew’s signals to the other planarships. “You have six minutes before their combat drones meet ours and the battle becomes inevitable. Make your messages count.”

  40

  Ways and Means’ course took it so near the three other planarships that it hardly seemed possible to miss plunging through their formation. The virus opened the planarship’s sensor feeds back up to the crew. On the tactical maps, the planarship careened toward the amalgamates with the velocity of a rogue asteroid. It was too late to stop. Its engines didn’t have the power to come to a relative halt.

  Ways and Means left its crew little time to react. The first thruster burst nearly knocked Habidah flat onto the deck. She fought her way into one of the acceleration couches. Its fields snapped into place, holding her tight. Meloku settled into the seat beside her.

  Habidah said, “There went your chance to kill me.”

  Meloku grunted when her fields gripped her.

  Then neither of them could speak. Acceleration shoved them hard into their seats. Osia and her companion remained standing, but unmoving. Habidah gasped and fought for breath. She turned her breathing over to her demiorganics. She blocked as many of her nerves as possible, sinking away from her body.

  The other amalgamates had already started their own engine burns. Fat white exhaust plumes arrowed away from Ways and Means. Together, the four planarships’ plumes drew parallel ultraviolet and x-ray lines across the sky.

  Habidah
wished she could have seen it with her own eyes. She’d never imagined being this close to so many of the amalgamates.

  She wouldn’t have been able to see the combat drones by naked eye, though, and it was the drones that were the problem. The drones stood ready to fill space with lethal radiation at an instant’s notice. Both the virus and the amalgamates agreed upon a distance Ways and Means’ drones must not pass before a firefight became unavoidable and all negotiations wasted. Past that, and none of them would have enough warning to return fire should the other attack. The three amalgamates simply could not trust the virus controlling Ways and Means to withhold fire. And vice versa.

  It was going to take all of the drones and planarships firing their engines at full power to avoid that rendezvous.

  The gravities magnified. Habidah gasped one last breath. New restraining fields sprung up inside her body. The fields had so far held only her body immobile; now they braced her innards. Even her demiorganics couldn’t make that more comfortable. They released reserves of oxygen to keep her conscious.

  Meloku didn’t have the benefit of demiorganics. She screamed silently. A moment later, her head lolled into her restraining fields.

  Outside, Ways and Means’ drones fell into a tight diamond formation, ready for any treachery. So far as Habidah could see, none was forthcoming. She wouldn’t see it before it happened. In a battle like this, human reaction times were simply not enough.

  Maybe Niccoluccio and his master were right, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand planes, she had just become a cloud of vapor. She might have died infinite times in half the space of a blink. She would never know it.

  But in this plane, Ways and Means and the other amalgamates kept their critical distance and maintained the ceasefire.

  A voice that came seemingly from everywhere, the walls and the air, announced, “The virus has given us control again.”

  Habidah had never heard the voice, that inflection, but it could only have been the amalgamate, Ways and Means itself, restored and deigning to speak to its crew.