25

 

Habidah missed her three hours of sleep. Usually, whenever she was on assignment, she forced herself to get them. Her work was stressful enough without fatigue toxins. But her demiorganics said that her mind was too active, her brain chemistry all wrong, for sleep. She brushed off its offers to correct this. She didn’t trust her demiorganics.

She strolled the corridors instead. The field base was so compact that she was doing little more than pacing, but at least the viewwalls gave her the illusion of moving. She paced from the clouds of superhot gas giants into still images of half-meter-tall forests.

When her demiorganics told her she had a call, she nearly jumped. She half-expected Osia, and nearly blocked the signal until she saw that the signal’s origin was in Florence.

“Niccoluccio?” She’d nearly thought Osia had blocked his signals out of spite. She hadn’t heard from him since she’d left Florence. “Are you all right?”

“I’m well enough,” he said. There was something odd in his voice. It didn’t seem to fit him, not perfectly. The distortion vanished with his next few words. She had her satellites run diagnostic programs, but they found no errors. Niccoluccio went on, “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not accustomed to speaking to anyone like this.”

“I can imagine. You’ve coped with an amazing amount so far.” More than she could possibly have expected him to.

Even subvocally, she could hear his strain. “I haven’t had any time to put my thoughts together. I’ve been so busy that I have nothing to repay the kindness you’ve shown me, not yet.”

She leaned against the viewwall’s image of a titanic mercuryfall. After all he’d put up with from her, she couldn’t possibly inflict the past few weeks on him. “The assignment can wait however long you need.”

“The assignment was the reason you saved me, wasn’t it?”

“No. Knowing that you’re well would do me more good.”

Another hesitation. “I should hate to have to disappoint you.”

“You’re not well?”

What a question. Of course he wasn’t.

“Everything is a… a substantial change. Life here moves so quickly. Our bishop died recently. There’s talk of fighting the papacy over his successor. A real fight, with interdictions and excommunications. If I remain where I am, I’ll be excommunicated as well. Every clergyman performing services will be. None of this makes sense. None of this matters. The pestilence killed half of the city, and all we’ve done afterward is just more likely to incur God’s hatred.”

“I wish I could understand everything about how you felt.”

“Would that we could all understand each other. I don’t want to take part in this.”

She saw where he was going. She’d taken him to Florence at his request. He didn’t want to appear ungrateful. “You don’t want to be there.”

“If I asked, would you take me back to your home, where you healed me?”

This must have been what he’d called to ask her. She shook her head, though he couldn’t see. It wasn’t a matter of protecting him from all her knowledge. After Ways and Means carried through its plans, very few people on this plane would be unaware of her and her people. “Maybe, Niccoluccio. Someday. Now would not be a good time.”

“I may ask again soon.”

She swallowed. Her last argument with Feliks resounded in her memory. “If that’s what you truly want, I will consider it.”

He let out a breath. “Thank you. I don’t know if I will yet, but that was what I needed to hear.”

“I need to ask you something in return.”

“I cannot help you infinitesimally as much as you have helped me, but I can try.”

Ever since she’d seen what had become of Caldera, a question had built in her throat, clinging to its sides like dread. “Your life is full of both natural wonders and miracles.” At least he would see it that way. “How do you tell one from the other?”

A pause. “I don’t draw that distinction. The natural world is a wonder of God. The breath of the divine lives in every seed on a tree, every humor in our bodies.”

Habidah tried again: “But not every divine presence carries the same weight, does it? There must be something special, more intentional, about a miracle.”

“No ‘part’ of the divine is different from any other. There are no parts. God is indivisible.”

Habidah restrained the urge to roll her eyes. No matter how much she tried or trained, there were always going to be parts of extraplanar cultures that she failed to internalize. “Think of messages, then. How do you distinguish a message from any other part of the world? A burning bush versus a grain of sand.”

“One would certainly get more of my attention than the other.”

“Exactly. How do you decide between a miracle and a happenstance that, however extraordinary, is not a message from God?”

“You would know in your heart where the message had come from.”

“It’s that part that I’m struggling with.” She could all but hear his consternation. He didn’t know how to respond. She said, “Thank you for the advice, Niccoluccio.”

He said, surprised, “I am humbled to have been of help.”

She cut the signal before she could think of any other way to embarrass herself.

One of the reasons she’d chosen this career to begin with – beyond getting away from home – had been to learn to see her own worlds in a new way. There was no discovery so broadening as learning another culture’s perspective. She may not have internalized Niccoluccio’s perspective, but she had started to understand it. If he had seen what she had, he could only ever have drawn one conclusion.

That conclusion made her feel even smaller than she already did.

 

The plague had begun its creeping infiltration of France and the western principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. It hid in bales of hay and cloth and wool or in travelers’ clothes, hopping from rat to flea and back. The satellites watched the infrared emissions of farmsteads and towns cut in half or disappear. The plague left cold and dark in its wake.

Habidah had little trouble navigating the channels of death.

She nestled the shuttle deep in an untamed forest of the western Holy Roman Empire, two kilometers from one of those towns. She marched down the ramp, brushing branches away. Kacienta and Joao trudged silently alongside her. The shadows of the foliage made dappled blotches all over their faces, left their expressions unreadable. They knew better than to ask why she’d taken them here. Leaving the field base gave them a better chance of talking without being overheard.

They walked in silence for too long. Then, as abruptly as if a curtain had been lifted, they stepped out of the forest and into a sun-soaked field. Dry dust billowed into Habidah’s face. She shielded her eyes. About half a kilometer ahead, houses clustered in a semicircle. A pair of oxen flicked their tails against the morning heat. There was no sign of any other animal larger than a dog. That made this the poorest town Habidah had yet visited. The oxen were likely communal, shared between farms.

More than half of the surrounding wheat fields had gone to seed, half-reclaimed by weeds. Satellite records showed that two-thirds of the town’s inhabitants had died. Given their relatively close quarters and the stresses of poverty, Habidah was only surprised they’d gotten off so lightly.

Today was Sunday. Nobody was out working. The survivors were all at church. Habidah marched toward it. She could feel Kacienta and Joao’s unease growing, but neither of them stopped her from stepping inside.

There were no pews. Empty space stretched to the door. Twenty-six people stood at the front. All of them turned to face her.

Habidah inclined her head to the priest whose sermon she had just interrupted. “Good friends, excuse our intrusion.” She explained that she and her siblings were refugees, passing through. Three angry-looking, uniformly bearded and mustachioed men stepped forward. Before they could object to potential plague-carriers coming through, Habidah held up her hands. “Not one of us has ailed in two weeks. We haven’t heard Mass in at least as long. You wouldn’t turn Christians away from the Sacrament?”

The men looked at each other, but no one would tell her no. She led the others to the back, far from the townsfolk. Finally, the men stepped back, though one of them was always watching.

After a great pause, the priest resumed his service. Joao transmitted, “Was this necessary?”

“The amalgamates’ satellites are more sensitive than ours. I wanted to get inside, where they couldn’t lip-read. And I don’t want to transmit anything.”

Kacienta said, “As if the amalgamates would care if we conspire against them. Osia told you their whole plan for this world.”

Habidah said, “They think that, by saving even a tiny fraction of the Unity’s people, they can save the Unity itself. Maybe rebuild and regrow it.”

“They must be more desperate than I thought,” Kacienta said. “The vast majority of the Unity is still alive.” Given the multiplicity of political systems among the Unity, exact counts were tricky, but at least four-fifths of the Unity’s people remained uninfected. The planes Habidah had contacted, Caldera and Providence Core, had been among the hardest struck. “They couldn’t save more than a fraction of a percent of the Unity this way.”

“It doesn’t fit,” Joao agreed. Habidah caught the mourning in his voice. He was still reeling from the betrayal. He didn’t want to believe the amalgamates would abandon his world, just like that.

Habidah had thought more about that. She said, “The amalgamates are nothing if not forward-thinking. I doubt they’re ready to leave all the Unity’s planes behind them. Yet. But they can’t cure the onierophage. They’re running out of ways to try. They have to know they probably won’t. The way their minds work, the way any AI’s mind works, they would start laying their backup plans long before the final evacuation. They don’t – can’t – attach any emotional significance to an act like that. It’s just something they have to do.”

Kacienta said, “And they made us part of their backup plan. Scouting this world as a site to evacuate survivors.”

The men and women up front bowed. Habidah mimicked them. She couldn’t help but notice how old the audience was. There was only one younger than ten. The plague claimed the children first.

Kacienta said, “Amazing that these people manage to stay upright.”

“Many of them didn’t,” Joao said.

Habidah said, “They have no idea where their plague comes from, but they think they do. Listen.” The priest was not reciting Mass in Latin, but speaking in vernacular – expounding upon the evils of humanity, its lusts and petty sins and irreligiousness. The only wonder of the pestilence, he said, was that God had not inflicted it on men sooner. Those up front bowed further.

Kacienta said, “If I had to blame myself for our plague, I’d feel worse, not better.”

“You might think that,” Habidah said. “At least they don’t have to wonder.”

Joao said, “I can’t believe that lying to ourselves would make us feel better.”

Habidah said, “I’m not so sure they don’t have the right idea. About the onierophage.”

Joao and Kacienta were quiet for a while. Then Kacienta said, “Plenty of people think our plague is artificial. An attack from another transplanar empire. An experiment gone wrong. The amalgamates culling us. There’s a reason nobody listens to those people, Habidah.”

Joao said, “If it were an attack, whoever’s responsible would aim at the amalgamates, not us. We’re nothing. The amalgamates are the Unity. The Unity would collapse without them.”

Habidah said, “The amalgamates certainly seem to think we’re important. That’s what their whole operation is about.”

Joao said, “In all of the planes we’ve ever visited, we’ve never found a sign of any empire large or advanced enough to threaten ours.” Those burgeoning empires it had run into had been quickly subsumed, swallowed, incorporated.

Habidah asked, “Ever wonder if the only reason the Unity hasn’t found another large empire is because something happened to them?”

Kacienta said, “I’m sure someone has. We’re hardly the only people who’ve thought about it.”

“We’ve been thinking about our plague too conventionally. Quarantines. Disease control. Evacuee camps.” She nodded at the priest. “These people see their plague in moral terms, religious terms.”

Joao asked, “You think God is punishing the Unity?”

“Not their God. A god.”

“That’s not anything I would have ever thought to hear you say.”

“It’s worth considering. The Unity has explored about every option except what these people think about every day – that there’s a very large, supremely powerful force that disapproves of what the Unity is doing.”

“These people are wrong,” Joao said. “They can fear God all they want, but it’s not going to give their immune systems the power to fight off the plague bacilli, or burn the rat fleas out of their clothes. They’d stop that nonsense at once if they knew.”

The priest pointed at each of his audience in turn. Habidah waited until his attention had moved on before saying, “The onierophage feels like a disease, and acts a little like a disease, so we try to fight it like a disease. It’s only when we look deep down that we see it’s something inexplicable. Maybe it’s a mimic. A predator trying to seem like something else.”

Joao said, “That doesn’t mean that it isn’t natural.”

“It attacks only people with demiorganics. It bypasses every quarantine. Now we know that nobody who’s been outside the Unity for five years has been infected. It’s starting to sound like somebody’s making a clear distinction between who’s a part of the Unity and who’s not.”

Kacienta asked, “If you’re right, what does that mean for us? All of this is so far above us that it almost doesn’t matter.”

“It means that the amalgamates’ project is going to fail. The exiles are coming back to the Unity. No matter how deep the quarantine, they’re going to be infected just like everyone else.”

Looking at their faces, she could tell she wasn’t going to persuade them. They were too accustomed to thinking of the onierophage as she had, as a temporal problem. She said, “It also means we need to get out of the Unity. Leaving might be the only way to save ourselves, if it’s not too late already.”

They couldn’t speak for singing as the service progressed through the psalms and into the wine and the Host. Habidah and her colleagues had to step to the front. The congregants sidled clear of them. Joao curled his nose as he chewed the Host, but only with his back to the audience.

“I’m with you on that last part, at least,” Kacienta said under her breath. “I don’t want to ever go back to the Unity.”

Joao muttered, “The amalgamates wouldn’t let us go home after what we’ve seen.”

Kacienta said, “I can’t send mail to my family. We’re exiles already. Might as well make it official, find a new home. We wouldn’t be the first.”

Joao said, “The problem is that we can’t leave. We only have a microwidth communications gateway. Ways and Means controls every other way off this world.”

Habidah admitted, “It’s all an academic argument right now.” But she was an academic. Hashing this stuff out early might as well have been in her department oath. “I brought you here because I needed to know that we’re together on this. If there’s any opportunity to leave, I’m going to take it. I’m counting on your help.”

“And the people of this plane?” Kacienta asked. “Your friend, the monk?”

“We can’t do anything for these people,” Habidah said, though part of her was already making plans for Niccoluccio.

When the service ended, the first thing any of the locals did was to look back at the strangers. They were no longer welcome. Habidah led Joao and Kacienta out.

She glanced at the sky. Her demiorganics tracked several satellites overhead. If the amalgamates had infiltrated her demiorganics, they’d heard everything anyway, but she’d done what she could. Her best hope was that they didn’t care enough.

Niccoluccio’s voice interrupted the walk back: “Habidah, everything’s on fire.”

Habidah stopped in mid stride. Niccoluccio’s voice sounded broken, strangely emotionless in transmission. His efforts to speak were constantly interrupted, cut off. “Help… need he… Right now.”

“Say again?” Habidah subvocalized.

“There’s a fire… the church is… I need to run.” Niccoluccio sounded like a man in shock. “Help us right now.”

A bad chill spiked down Habidah’s back. “We’re on our way. Stay calm, and tell me what’s happening.”

No answer.

Habidah glanced back at Joao and Kacienta. Without waiting to explain, she broke into a run. Not until she was halfway back to the shuttle did she think to check to make sure they were following. For now, they were.