30

 

In an instant, the noise and light and shaking ceased everywhere but inside Habidah’s head.

The wall monitors were dead. Shadow spun about her. A light streamed through the still-open door, shrouded in cascading dust. The ceiling nearest the gateway had crumpled and split.

What they’d just witnessed should have been impossible – and what little of it was possible should have killed them. The dust fell onto her cheeks, into her eyes and mouth. Coughing, she tried to push onto her knees. The spinning floor wouldn’t allow her. She needed to get over to Joao and Kacienta. Her head kept getting away from her. A firm hand grasped her shoulder.

Someone was holding her head. Her reflexes were so deadened that she couldn’t strike at whoever it was. She spun, and ended up grasping her captor for support. He helped her to her feet.

Niccoluccio. He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.

She could step where he steered. He half-carried, half-supported her toward Kacienta, and then lifted her, too. He staggered, but somehow managed their weight well enough to hobble toward the door. Habidah glanced back at Joao. He lay limp but breathing.

The lights in the corridor still worked. She got a better look at Niccoluccio. He looked no older than a minute ago, but he’d changed. Somehow he’d put on weight. His cheeks were a healthy red. He wore the same monk’s habit, but it was freshly laundered. His tonsure must have been shaved again, because it was far neater than it had been a minute ago.

She was reminded of the differences between the signal she’d received from the bugs in his system, and the one she’d bounced off the satellites. It was almost as if he wasn’t the same person, but a facsimile, the little differences the too-obvious clues of a poorly composed mystery.

Niccoluccio helped Habidah and Kacienta to seated positions against the far wall. “I didn’t want any of that to happen,” he said. “I would have stopped it if I could.”

Habidah didn’t have the strength to answer. She focused instead on climbing to her feet, using the wall as leverage. Niccoluccio returned to the communications chamber. He came back far dustier, with Joao supported on his shoulder. He helped Joao slump beside Kacienta.

Signals from Habidah’s demiorganics were starting to make sense again. In infrared and other spectra, he seemed an unaugmented human, perfectly normal for the plane. Joao was more alarming. His body temperature was half a degree too cool. His breath had gone thready, like Feliks in Genoa.

Kacienta sat with her back against the wall and her knees bunched to her chest. She said, “I don’t know how you got inside our heads, but–”

“It wasn’t me,” Niccoluccio said.

“–we won’t play any part in whatever you’re trying to do to us, to this plane–”

“Kacienta,” Habidah said. “If he’s inside our heads, he’s already won.”

With effort, Joao forced himself to his feet. Niccoluccio tried to help him up. Joao shrugged it off. Without a word, Joao hobbled down the hall, into another room.

Kacienta nodded at Habidah. She told Niccoluccio, “You’ve been in her head since you met her. That’s why she couldn’t stop thinking about you. Why she always had to go so far out of her way for you.”

Habidah glanced between them. Every muscle in her throat wanted to tell Kacienta that she was wrong, that her decisions had been her own – but, of course, if she had been compromised, she would believe that. She couldn’t trust her memories. Her experiences were no longer any guide to reality.

Niccoluccio looked at them sadly. “We’re not so difficult to manipulate that we need our reason stripped away. All it took was a few words whispered at the right times…” He shrugged.

Kacienta asked, “Who are you working for?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know who it is.”

Habidah’s skin felt like ice.

She looked to the half-jarred door, and then back at Niccoluccio. She felt like she was seeing him with new eyes. She asked, “How long have you known?”

“Years. On this side of the gateway, though, not that long.”

From the other end of the hall, Joao said, “No question we’ve asked either of you has gone anywhere before.”

He had returned holding a slender, silver tube. It was one of the field base’s firearms, meant for emergency defense. It was capable of annihilating all three of them at once, leaving only ash and a whisper. Joao aimed the weapon at levelly at Niccoluccio.

Joao said, “I don’t know if this will help, if you’re in all of our heads or just Habidah’s, but I’m going to do everything I can to stop you.”

Niccoluccio said, “You don’t even know what I’m here to do.”

“You and she can talk about it all you like in more secure quarters,” Joao said. Habidah’s stomach lurched when he waved the weapon at her, too. “I doubt it’s going to do any more good than it has before. But I know I don’t want to hear you anymore.”

 

“More secure quarters” turned out to be Feliks’ office. Joao led Niccoluccio and Habidah in at gunpoint. When he left, Habidah didn’t need to check the door to know that it was sealed.

This time, it was Niccoluccio’s turn to walk unsteadily. His hands shook as if he’d only just realized what he’d done. He fell into a chair beside Feliks’ desk.

Habidah’s body was back under her control. The only sign of trauma left was a racing pulse. Her demiorganics had recorded the whole incident. Something had spiked electrical white noise into her nerves, disrupting her motor cortex, overwhelming her senses and pain receptors. She doubted it was a coincidence that she’d gotten the worst of it only when she’d been in a position to stop Niccoluccio.

The office was loaded with a number of discreet sensors. Images of Niccoluccio’s skeleton and circulatory system streamed through her visual cortex. Data flowed into her memory.

In most respects, this Niccoluccio was the same man who’d been here not half an hour ago. His fingerprints were identical. Same with microscar tissues, retinas, brain activity patterns, every subtle pigment in his hair and skin. Even the map of his veins matched in ways that would be impossible to mimic. Habidah doubted even the amalgamates could reproduce a body so precisely.

But there was more.

The bugs she had placed in him had gone missing. His muscle and body fat percentages had changed radically. Niccoluccio had become a well-fed man apparently accustomed to heavy labor. The muscles appeared entirely natural, growing in the usual ugly lumps and knots and badly healed tissues. He had shreds of grass in his clothes and a lingering odor of sheep manure. Analysis of his breath and stomach suggested that his most recent meal had been bread and milk, though she knew for certain that he hadn’t eaten in days. His hair had grown and been cut repeatedly. His skin not only had all its old scars, large and small, but also several new ones. The cadence of his voice had changed subtly; he had more of a rural Italian lilt.

Yet, in spite of all of these signs of time passing, he had not aged. No deterioration of eyesight, reflexes, or metabolism. He didn’t have a single gray hair.

“I know what you’re trying to figure out,” Niccoluccio said, as though he could see the sensor scans. “I can just tell you. This body isn’t mine. At least it didn’t used to be. It was built from scratch, molecule by molecule, after my old body was torn apart.”

She stared. The fact that Niccoluccio even knew the word molecule was yet more evidence to say that he wasn’t the same man. If what he said was true, then Niccoluccio, the Niccoluccio she had known, had died when he’d stepped into that gateway.

He said, “I was taken apart and put back together. But I’m still the same man you found and saved. The body is only a host for the soul.”

It was every transplanar anthropologist’s duty to understand and appreciate the prevailing beliefs on the planes they visited. But that didn’t mean Habidah had to believe the same things Niccoluccio did – or, in this instance, even respect them.

She said, “There is no soul. Your mind, your brain, is a physical object. There is nothing else. If someone or something disassembled your body, then they did the same thing to your mind. That was everything you were. You’re not the same person you used to be.”

Niccoluccio said, “I feel every bit the same.”

“You would, if you’d been constructed to feel that way.” Niccoluccio frowned. “You know things you shouldn’t. Your thoughts have been changed in ways you could never recognize. You could even have been made to believe what’s changed has always been a part of you.”

“I spent a great deal of time away from here. All of the things I know about you, and your people, I learned at Sacro Cuore. I was there for years. Lifetimes.” He shifted. “Even after all of it, I still have trouble believing it. There was so much of it. And so different from what I grew up with.”

There was no point in plunging into his fiction. “You were given memories of learning. You were given a body that matched what you believed you experienced after you stepped through the gateway. No time passed here.”

“It passed for me. It was real.”

“How do you know that?”

“The same way you know who you are.”

Habidah gave up. She didn’t want to tell him that she wasn’t confident in her own memories, either. “What did this to you? The amalgamates?” Even as she asked, she couldn’t believe that. The amalgamates had never revealed that they’d possessed technologies capable of rebuilding a person so completely. If they had, eradicating the Unity’s plague would have been as simple as wishing it gone.

Niccoluccio surprised her by saying, “I don’t know.”

“I was sure you were going to say that it was God.”

“God is a mystery to me. He’s more of a mystery now that I know more about the planes.” Niccoluccio held up his left arm, and brushed his fingers over his skin. “What happened to me is a mystery as well.”

“You’re not even going to question why you’re here?”

“I know why I’m here.”

Habidah waited.

Niccoluccio met her gaze evenly. For the longest time, he didn’t say anything. He looked away first. “I don’t believe this is something I should simply announce all at once. In Sacro Cuore, it took me years to understand.”

Habidah blew air through her teeth, and turned back to the desk. If he wouldn’t be of any help, she had other avenues of investigation to pursue.

Joao may have made her a prisoner, but he hadn’t tried to – couldn’t – block her computer access. NAI still didn’t answer, but its lower-level programs continued to function. She’d only been locked out of the controls to the office door. She turned her attention to the communications chamber. Few sensors remained in working order, but their records of the moments before the incident showed a sequence of impossibilities.

The gateway had opened on its own. It hadn’t been projected from another plane, or anywhere else. The aperture had seemed normal at first: micrometer-width, sized for communications. The sensors recorded a pinprick of light, too small to be seen by even augmented human eyes.

Then it had inexplicably started widening.

The field base’s generators reported that their power output hadn’t changed at all. At the same time, the power received by the gateway apparatus had increased tenfold. It kept going up. Somewhere between the generators and the gateway, an enormous amount of energy had flooded into the system.

Habidah turned her attention to the gateway. All gateways had a destination. Pictures of the aperture in multiple spectra flooded into her. Visual, infrared, ultraviolet, radio, and even gamma – all a hot mess. Every gateway she’d seen before had offered some hint of its destination. Atmosphere leaking through, stray radio signals, muted colors.

Here, she found chaos. This was unlike any gateway she’d seen or heard of. It didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

The amalgamates were the only powers she could think of that could accomplish anything remotely similar to what she’d seen. Ways and Means remained in high orbit. If it was setting her up again, then there was no harm in calling it. If there was another power at work – then the amalgamates were the only creatures she knew of who could do something about it.

And yet she hesitated to call them.

She pulled up the field base’s communications records. NAI sent status updates back to their university on a regular basis. The last had been two days ago. The next was scheduled for tomorrow. Assuming that NAI didn’t fake those status updates, she had at least that long before the amalgamates noticed something awry. If Ways and Means hadn’t noticed anything already.

Ways and Means continued to send shuttles, none headed in their direction. It hadn’t directed any of its visible scanners or satellites to focus on the field base. It was simply carrying on with its subjugation of this plane.

And that left Habidah with more of a dilemma. She didn’t want to speak with Osia or Ways and Means again, let alone alert them to this.

She needed to learn more before she made up her mind.

She said, “If you can’t tell me everything at once, why don’t you start with whatever you can?”