12

 

For the first few hours, it was easy to move without thinking. All Habidah had to do was what came naturally. The medical patches did the rest.

The shuttle’s spotlights and the roar of its unbaffled thrusters had scared the wolves away. She found the man lying unbreathing, in shock from blood loss. She’d planted a medical patch on his chest to restart his heart, and another to regulate his breathing. A third flooded him with enough adrenaline and endorphins to convince his brain to keep going. Dermal spray stemmed the bleeding.

Given rest and warmth, a healthy man could have convalesced without intervention other than a transfusion, but this man was far from healthy. She cradled him in her arms and hauled him into the shuttle. Now it was her turn to flood her system with endorphins. Even with muscular enhancements, she’d never built herself to carry other people. By the time she got him strapped in, she’d had to block the pain receptors from torn muscles.

The monk – and it didn’t take long to discover that he was a monk, once he came to some semblance of consciousness and started babbling – was unnaturally gaunt and bony. No wonder those wolves had thought him viable prey. He had no coat. Given the freezing rain the satellites said was coming over the horizon, he would certainly have frozen to death.

It was plain just from looking at him that he needed more help than a lift to the nearest town. His blood pressure was too light to feel his pulse. The medical patches supersaturated his blood with oxygen. Soon, though, he’d need a transfusion.

She ordered the shuttle to head to the field base.

Feliks would notice. A landing or two might have gone unremarked upon, but not this. Kacienta was at the field base, too, and Habidah couldn’t hide from her. It would have been undignified to even try.

Now that she’d made the fatal choice, she might as well own it. She called Kacienta. “I’m bringing back an injured guest. Be standing by with the blood synthesis and transfusion kit when I arrive. B positive.”

She cut the transmission before Kacienta could ask.

The monk stirred. He squinted through his endorphin and painkiller-induced delirium. His gaze traveled around before locking on the monitors. “A miracle.”

“Suppose it is,” Habidah said, for lack of a better answer. There was no way that the monk, or frankly anyone on this plane, would attribute his rescue to worldly causes. She wondered how far to let him go along imagining this was divine intervention.

It would be better for him to know some of the truth. “It may be a miracle, but I’m certainly not.”

The monk tried to focus on her. “Who sent you?”

“Nobody. My leaders will be upset when they find out I’ve done this.”

He seemed a little smaller. “Did you come from Heaven or from Hell?”

“I’m from a farm south of Lyon,” she said, and that did a good job of shutting him up for a moment. “That’s where my, ah… wagon is taking you now.”

“Quite a journey,” he said, after a moment.

“It’s a fast wagon.”

She was nearly there already. The field base’s landing beacon shone above the horizon. The monk moaned as the shuttle dropped. At least he had eaten so little that he had nothing to throw up.

The shuttle landed with a jarring clunk, prompting another gasp. “Nothing’s gone wrong,” she said. Rather than startle him by allowing the shuttle to undo his safety harness, she tugged it loose for him. He hitched his arm over her shoulder. “The road’s a little rough this time of year.”

He said nothing, though of course he would have been an idiot if he’d believed her. Habidah took his whole weight on her shoulder. She pulled him through the ventral corridor and down the boarding ramp. A wall of freezing air greeted them. The monk’s gaze lolled up. He gaped at the shuttle’s silhouette. She pushed his head downward before he could believe what he’d seen.

He looked around the wide, moonlit plain. He slurred, “We were near a forest,” though he didn’t seem very agitated by this fact. He just wanted to let her know.

She ground her teeth and dragged him. He tried to walk, but could only manage one or two steps before slumping into her. She had to kick the farmhouse doors ajar. The ramp entrance, at least, opened automatically. Light flooded the walk down.

Kacienta was hurrying up to meet them. Habidah hadn’t seen her face-to-face in months. She, too, was a small woman, and squatter, with long, dark brown hair and skin a shade too dark to be native to the region. At least she was in costume, hair hidden under a wimple. Her lips tightened. She hoisted the monk’s other arm over her shoulder.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” she hissed. Habidah pretended she didn’t hear.

The moment she reached the bottom of the ramp, the monk gasped. Too late, Habidah noticed the viewwalls were on, and projecting scenes of a vast, sandy-walled cavern. Sun globes cast sharp shadows across the kilometer-wide walls. A carpet of patchy green farmland clung to the distant floor like moss. Skyscraper-sized tunnels wormholed the walls. Habidah felt like a microbe lost in a sponge. This was Kacienta’s home plane, Arbor.

Like Habidah’s world, much of Arbor was underground, but the similarities ended there. Kacienta hadn’t grown up in warrens and bunkers but in vast caverns like worlds, each ten or more kilometers in diameter, with their own climates and microecologies. They exported genengineered fungi and fauna to the rest of the Unity. It was as cosmopolitan, if not as high-technology, as Providence Core, Joao’s home. Kacienta was accustomed to dealing with outsiders – and seemed to have a low tolerance for all of them. She glared at the monk.

Habidah ordered the illusion off. The corridor became flat, claustrophobic gray walls. The monk shook his head and winced.

The double doors to Feliks’ office slid open of their own accord. The monk started. When they were through them, he glanced around her shoulder as if to see who might have opened them.

Habidah tried not to show her relief when she saw that Feliks had disposed of his plague corpses. She laid the monk atop the first of the three white examination beds. Kacienta had rolled the blood synthesis kit out of storage. It sat on a cart, broad, gray-and-black, rectangular, about the size of a head. Thin tubes dangled out its side, drawing organic sludge from feedlines plugged into the wall. The device clicked and ticked like a pair of knitting needles.

Kacienta picked up a fat, needle-tipped tube. The monk tried to struggle off the bed, but Habidah held his arm steady. He looked at the ceiling, and didn’t fight the second and third needles. With the mélange of painkillers swimming in his system, Habidah doubted he would have noticed if he hadn’t been looking. She held his arm regardless. His flesh was cold.

“I put tranquilizers in the feed,” Kacienta sent. She transmitted rather than spoke to keep the monk from understanding.

She hadn’t said a single word to the monk. The monk seemed perplexed by the room’s lights. He raised his free hand, palm out, as if to feel for heat.

Kacienta could monitor him. Habidah didn’t want to watch him fade away. Gradually, Habidah let go. She told him, “I’m going to step out for just a moment and let your friends know where you are. I’ll be back.”

The monk, still holding up his hand, said nothing. Habidah wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

As she stepped through the doors, the monk told her, “Niccoluccio Caracciola.”

She halted on the other side, and looked back. Somehow he’d found the strength to crane his head. He was staring at her with quiet, taut desperation.

“Habidah Shen,” she managed to say before the doors shut.

 

The monk spent three days regaining his health, fading in and out of a drug-induced coma. Finally, Habidah took him off his tranquilizers and let him wake. She spoke to him as he stirred so he would have a voice to listen to.

She brought him food and warm milk from the kitchen. He drank quietly and said little. He looked about the walls of Feliks’ office, mesmerized by its clean, simple shapes. Finally, he turned to her, visibly trying his best to absorb what she was saying. It was obviously too much for him. He smiled, confused.

When Habidah had to leave, she made sure to lock him in.

Feliks remotely supervised his convalescence while finishing up in Genoa. He hadn’t said anything to Habidah – yet. Habidah hadn’t answered his one call. Considering how quickly he and NAI usually patched up most injuries, three days had been a very long recovery period. The bites and blood loss had only been Niccoluccio’s most superficial problems. He’d been hypothermic. He’d been starved over the past few days, and eaten poorly for longer. She could count his ribs. His arms and legs were just as bony.

One important medical test came back negative right away. There was no trace of the plague bacillus. That was the only thing she couldn’t cure.

She sat in the conference room with Joao and Kacienta, watching Niccoluccio through the cameras. He was picking at the patch on the side of his neck. Habidah had told him not to, but he still did when he thought she wasn’t watching. The patch had adhered so firmly that he would have had better luck removing his ear.

Kacienta said, “We should have kept him on tranquilizers.”

Habidah hadn’t yet figured out what had made Kacienta choose extraplanar anthropology, except perhaps as a stepping stone to another field. This was only her third field assignment. She was the team’s data analyst, meaning she spent large chunks of her time cloistered here, compiling reports. That seemed to suit her.

Joao said, “It doesn’t matter. He already saw everything in that room before you two put him under.”

Joao had arrived a day ago. Feliks, too, was on his way. His shuttle had just landed. Only Meloku had refused to return. She participated remotely. When she spoke, her voice was even cooler than usual. “He might have assumed that he had been dreaming or hallucinating.”

Kacienta said, “If too many of the locals know we’re here, they’ll certainly change their collective response to the plague. It will contaminate our work.”

Joao said, “Whatever. It’s not the point. If we think he might get out and say something that would interfere with the survey, we can drop him off in Australia. The point is that this is a completely unnecessary, and risky, entanglement. We didn’t come here to help these people. We came to help us. Any time and effort we don’t spend on our mission comes at the expense of millions of people back home.”

Habidah kept her eyes on the monitor. There wasn’t much to say in her defense. She wasn’t particularly worried about this one man changing the world. Kacienta was overestimating the influence of a lone monk. Niccoluccio was all but powerless. He had no friends to return to. Satellites confirmed that the monastery Niccoluccio named had been completely abandoned.

Niccoluccio gave up his attempt to peel off the medical patch. He felt back and forth the smooth contours of his bed. She smiled briefly. It was like watching a puppy explore a new home.

Joao said, “This is endangering everything we’re doing. There are only five of us. We can’t spend our energy helping these people. If we did, we’d run out of resources long before we accomplished what we came here to do.”

The door whisked open. Feliks entered, still in Genoan costume. Habidah swallowed. She’d been dreading this. He paused to lean on the edge of the table. After glancing at her, he focused on Joao. He’d been listening in. “Do you think that, because Dr Shen helped this one man, we’re now going to instantly abandon our mission and spend all of our time helping the locals?”

“That’s where I’m afraid this is going to lead, yes.”

“You must have learned about the slippery slope fallacy sometime in those expensive Core World schools.”

“Even the time we’re spending here, talking about ‘this one man,’ is too much.”

“You were scheduled to be on your way back from Siena regardless, yes?”

“Yes, to get ready for my next assignment, not fret over this.”

Feliks walked to the end of the table and sat. Habidah watched him until he turned his eyes to her. She looked away. She’d been waiting for his scolding. Apparently, if it was forthcoming, it would only happen in private. That felt almost worse.

Habidah told Joao, “You said there were only five of us. Now there are six.”

Joao swiveled his chair to face Habidah. “Excuse me?”

“I did what I did. I’m not making excuses for it.” Nor would she ever take it back. “But it’s already done. Can’t any of you see the opportunities he presents?”

Meloku said, “Opportunities to keep sabotaging our project.”

Habidah let that pass. She traced circles on the table. “Our resources have always been stretched thin. We can only cover a few of the plague sites, and then briefly. Meloku, you told me that we need to study a place before and after the plague strikes. What if we had a correspondent who could? Someone with a native perspective.”

Feliks watched her carefully. “Do you think he’d be agreeable to that?”

“He’s certainly not hostile. He thinks I was sent by God whether I’m aware I was or not.” She nodded at the screen. Niccoluccio was muttering a prayer under his breath. NAI’s lip-reading software scrawled the lines of a psalm underneath his image. “He wants to learn.”

The past few times she’d visited, Niccoluccio had overflowed with questions. He’d wanted to know where he was, why he’d been healed, why she’d chosen him. He was much more interested in why than how. He’d never asked how her medical machines functioned.

He’d chosen the right questions. Those were the ones she could actually begin to answer. She’d avoided specifics, but told the truth.

She’d told him that she and her team were foreigners from a very distant land, and that they’d come to Europe to learn about its peoples. They had amazing tools, tools so advanced that they seemed as magic to Niccoluccio. She didn’t intend to use them to harm anyone. She had used them to save him.

Niccoluccio had asked if Habidah was an ambassador from Prester John. Prester John was a native rumor, a mythical Christian king in the far east, crusading against the infidel. Habidah had just smiled and shaken her head.

She’d expected him to ask, eventually, if she was Christian. The question never came. He seemed to already know the answer. For a monk, he was more open-minded than she’d expected. He seemed to want to like her. If that meant closing his mind to certain problems, then he would.

Joao’s nose wrinkled as he watched Niccoluccio. “He might help. If he’s interested. If he likes what he sees of us. If he doesn’t try to expose us. If he doesn’t catch the plague and die. If you don’t have to spend more time babysitting him than you do working on your surveys. If he even knows what information is valuable to us. If he even goes somewhere useful. And even if that’s all true, you still had no right to put us in this position, or a native in an environment completely alien to him.”

“I firmly believe he would rather be here than where he was.”

Kacienta said, “You’ve endangered the whole project. I have no choice but to send a report about this back home.”

“Seconded,” Joao said. “It’s going right in our next transmission.”

“Fine,” Habidah said. “Does that mean we’re done here?”

Silence followed. She took that to mean the meeting was finished. She stood. “Now, unless you’d like to help, you should get to your next assignments.”

She walked out of the room before anyone answered.

She expected Feliks, at least, to come after her. No one followed. She breathed out. That had been more difficult than she expected. But so long as the university hadn’t recalled her, she was still in charge. She didn’t have to defend her decisions. She just had to make them.

Of course, how long she would remain in charge remained an open question.

When she entered Feliks’ office, Niccoluccio stood at once. He bowed deeply. For the past day, he’d been treating her like an honored ambassador. Habidah inclined her head in return. She sat on one of the desk chairs.

She’d remained in costume these past few days to help him stay comfortable. He remained standing, formal but not stiff. It took an effort to extract the bitterness of the meeting from her voice. She made herself smile. “How do you feel this morning?”

“Irritated under my neck.” He pointed to the patch under his chin, not touching as if to show how good a boy he’d been by not picking at it. “Otherwise, I can walk and not feel as if my legs are on fire, or that my head is on the end of a twenty-foot pole.”

“Good. That means you’ll be ready to go soon.”

He shifted. “It may surprise you to hear this, but I’m sorry to hear that.”

“We’ve left you in here so long I expected that you would think of this as a prison cell.”

“I am accustomed to living in cells.”

She smiled, and this time didn’t have to force it. “Of course.”

“I don’t wish to further impose on you, not without finding some way to repay you for your hospitality.” He hesitated. “But I don’t wish to leave. I have told you about my monastery.”

“We wouldn’t send you back there.”

Niccoluccio let out a long breath, though he’d been holding it for days. “Thank you. If I may, I have more questions for you.”

Habidah nodded, bracing herself.

“You and your companions didn’t just come here to learn about us, did you?”

“No. We also came here because of the pestilence.” It was always a struggle to know just how much to tell him. “The pest is annihilating our people as much as yours. We traveled here to learn about it, or at least how to better cope with it.”

The mention of the plague seemed to strike Niccoluccio as a physical blow. “I’m afraid you will not learn much from me. I’m not suited for life outside a monastery. If it hadn’t been for you, the pestilence would have killed me as surely as if I had actually contracted it.”

“You lost more than most people ever have or will, and you’re still coherent and talking.”

“I do not feel very coherent when I think about it.”

She pursed her lips. He’d had some kind of breakdown in the forest, true. She would have expected him to have another here, but he’d remained intact. Few like him could have done the same. “Would you prefer that we take you to another monastery?”

Niccoluccio shook his head without speaking.

Habidah asked, “Do you want to tell me why?”

“I do not believe I am worthy of my vows.”

She hadn’t expected that, but she didn’t pursue the subject. “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

“The only place in Christendom I could call home is Florence. My father still lives there. He may or may not allow me into his home.”

“We’ve been to many cities in Italy, but not Florence. Not yet. I’d love to take you there and see it.”

Niccoluccio hesitated, winding himself up to say something. “Madam, I would rather do anything that I could to repay your kindness. You have treated me with more hospitality than I ever deserved. I could not in good conscience leave without doing something in return.”

Habidah had to restrain herself from smiling again. His life was almost as much a mystery to her as hers was to him, but he was certainly disarming. Charming, almost.

She stood. “I was hoping that you might be able to help us learn about Florence. There’s a lot that we would like to know.”

He furrowed his brow. “Help as a… ah, a spy?”

“No. We’re not concerned with governance or diplomacy or anything to do with your army. We only want to know how average Florentines have coped with the pestilence.”

She offered him her hand. He stared at it without moving. She’d nearly forgotten how long it must have been since he’d had any contact with a woman. She said, “If you don’t mean to live in a monastery again, you need to learn how to act like it.”

After a pause, he accepted her hand, and she pulled him to his feet.

He said, “It is my blessing to serve.”

 

Habidah gave Niccoluccio a brief tour. If he was going to be their agent, she owed him at least that much. She showed him their kitchen and dining room, and the communications chamber. She explained that the base had been hidden to avoid frightening or harming anybody. He nodded and listened without understanding, and only truly came alive again when she demonstrated a viewwall.

She projected a map of Europe to show him where they were. He startled. Once he got control of his wits, she tried to explain how to read it. He reached out, tried and failed to touch the map, which was projected to appear half a meter underneath the wall’s surface. By the time she led him back to Feliks’ office, his head was spinning with information she knew it would take him weeks and months to digest.

The next day, while she applied a fresh medical patch over the rapidly healing bite scar on his back, he remarked, “Since I was fourteen, I wanted to join a monastery.” Lucky for him, he couldn’t see the gnarled, bark-like tissue. “I thought it would be much easier.”

She may have convinced him that she wasn’t an angel or agent of God, but that didn’t stop him from treating her like one. Or, at least, like something more than a stranger.

She asked, “So what happened when you were fourteen?”

He let the question soak for a long moment. He didn’t seem to mind her touch. Habidah didn’t need to have researched much about monastic living to know how odd that was for a monk. She was a woman. One more way he didn’t treat her like an ordinary person.

“I confessed to my tutor what I had done,” he said. “I fell in love like most young men do. And young women.” He swallowed. “We chose to express it in ways none of us should have. With people we shouldn’t have. We were slaves to our lusts.”

From what Habidah knew about monastic life, chastity was its most prized virtue, no less so among monks than nuns. The way he struggled for words made her suspect he hadn’t spoken of it in some time. He’d probably never confessed it to his brothers.

So why had he confessed it to her?

She watched him carefully while she compressed the replacement patch. He breathed in as if about to speak, and then stopped. After several false starts, he said, “At the time, I thought I had too large a heart.”

“In the country I come from, many men and women act like you did without shame.”

He didn’t seem to hear. “I never wanted to be so in thrall to myself again. My tutor encouraged me to join a monastery.”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard her, she realized. Her experience with the locals had led her to expect a heap of judgment and chastisement for what she’d just said. But that was entirely absent in Niccoluccio. The only person he cared to judge was himself.

He said, “I still feel a great deal of lust in my heart. And I am afraid to die.”

“Is that why you don’t want to be taken to another monastery?”

His only answer was: “These are the things I’ve come to realize about myself.”

She was more than an angel or agent of God, she realized. She’d become his confessor. When she’d taken him in, the last thing she had ever expected of him was unremitting trust.

She trusted him, too. She had to be mindful of the power imbalance between them, certainly – under no circumstances could he be a threat to her. But that wasn’t all of it. They were so far outside each others’ experiences that neither of them had any reason to harm the other. And Habidah had demonstrated her good will from the start.

“I used to think that I was a good anthropologist,” she said.

“A what?” he asked.

“A traveler,” she said. “A professional outsider. I’m going to get in a lot of trouble for what I’ve done. And I don’t think I can do this for much longer.”

He didn’t seem to know what to say, not any more than she did. When she finished sealing the medical patch, he set his hand on hers. She let it stay there for a while before slipping away.

 

That night, in her quarters, she checked to make sure that Niccoluccio was sleeping before laying down. With perfect timing, her demiorganics jolted her a moment before she was about to fall asleep. She sat straight up when she read the message’s tags.

The communications gateway was open. She was receiving a call from Felicity Core.

She hadn’t expected her transgression to go so high up. She’d never been to Felicity Core, but understood that it was much like Joao’s home plane, or any of the other Core Worlds: dead gray seas, lifeless rock landscapes punctured by cloudscrapers, and pitch-dark skies. All of the Core Worlds swam through interstellar dust clouds that blocked the light of the outside universe. Their only stars were constellations of the amalgamates’ fortress-stations and planarships.

Someone or something very close to the amalgamates was calling.

Her room’s rear viewwall fuzzed on. Her demiorganics didn’t adjust her eyes fast enough. By the time she lowered her hand, a woman with solid black skin stood beside her desk.

The stranger had no hair or clothing. Her chest was flat and her pelvis was bare. Only the curve of her hips made her feminine. Her skin reflected light like plastic. A tiny, decorative nostril-less nose perched atop line-thin silver lips. Her eyes were the only thing that looked human. They were mottled brown.

Habidah swallowed. She’d never spoken with a prosthetic before. Not many people earned the privilege of transferring their minds into wholly demiorganic bodies. All who had were, in some way or another, servants of the amalgamates.

“Ms Shen. We’ve been reviewing your team’s reports with interest. The last one in particular caught our attention.”

“Doctor Shen. Thank you.”

So those lips were capable of smiling. “Very well, Dr Shen. My name is Osia. I won’t do you the disservice of pretending that you don’t know what I’m calling about.”

“I wasn’t aware what I’d done would concern anyone outside the university.”

“I’m working with your university in this matter.”

The woman stood in front of a bone-white background. Habidah checked the call’s location tag. She hid a jolt of surprise. Osia was calling from one of the amalgamates’ strongholds: the planarship Ways and Means, in high orbit above Felicity Core. The planarship was named after the amalgamate it hosted.

“The amalgamates take an acute interest in anything that might affect the politics of our response to the plague. I volunteered to serve your university.”

“Does that mean they’re having you call to fire me?”

“Ways and Means would like to ask you not to interfere with the locals again. It understands that this is a difficult assignment, but would prefer your efforts focused on your job. Otherwise, the arrangements you’ve made with the monk are retroactively approved.”

Habidah blinked. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

Osia arched the skin above her eye, as if daring her to disagree. “That’s all.”

When Habidah didn’t respond, Osia’s image whisked into nothingness.

Habidah couldn’t sleep for hours. Nothing about that had been right. She’d never spoken to anyone so close to the amalgamates before.

Osia’s presence had been just as much a message as anything she’d said. It felt like a threat. Only Habidah had no idea what she was being threatened into doing – or not doing.