33

 

Niccoluccio lost track of the amount of time he spent alone afterward. He leaned against the wall, trying to recollect himself. Then he sat facing the corner. Nothing helped him calm the voices raging in his head.

In Sacro Cuore, meditation had come easily. He’d earned that through practice. Here, he couldn’t stop replaying arguments in his head, thinking of the things he should have said or would like to have said. More, there was a song – or snippets, at least, of a music he couldn’t remember – playing, repeating itself deep in his head.

He reached to caress the top of his cheek and winced. He hadn’t had arguments like that back in Sacro Cuore. Some of the novices had been so hot-blooded, but not him. The pain was worse now than in the moment.

The muscles in his arms burned. His pulse still pounded in his throat. He stood and paced, weaving between tables. So much here was alien. He doubted that the tables were just beds, as Habidah had told him. The counters and desks lining the walls were filled with equipment and proboscises whose purposes he didn’t care to guess at. The first time he’d come here, if he hadn’t already trusted Habidah, he would have believed it a torture chamber.

He didn’t know what he was meant to do next. No one had come back for him. He straightened his habit and approached the door. It whispered open.

He felt no more at ease outside. The corridor was cramped, at most twenty feet long. It was a perfectly geometrical cavern. Something hissed. Cold air brushed his scalp.

The nearest door took him to a cell obviously meant to be someone’s living space. It had rumpled sheets over a raised mattress, drawers, and not much else. Aside from the whisper of ventilation, all was quiet.

After another several minutes of poking around doors, he found a ramp leading up. The door at the top opened like all the others. There was nothing beyond except darkness. The air was warmer, humid, tasted of grass and dust and rotted wood. The outdoors.

He stepped out. The door shut behind him, encasing him in darkness.

At length, his eyes adjusted. He stood in a barn. Moonlight edged through cracks in the wall. Decayed rushes covered the floor. Everything was steeped in dust. He half-remembered this from the last time he’d been through.

The barn door squeaked open when he pushed. On the other side, the dust turned to mud. The top of the barn’s roof dripped. His toes dipped in a puddle. The sky was half stars, half moon-silvered clouds.

Stepping outside didn’t leave him any less disoriented. It shouldn’t have been night. He didn’t feel tired. What time had it been at Sacro Cuore when he’d left? He couldn’t remember.

Out here, he heard the music even more clearly. It was all loose notes and odd trilling, like a troupe of musicians tuning their instruments. It repeated, but never exactly the same. He’d started to describe it to Habidah, but something had clamped down on the thought, made him stop.

A dark shadow loomed over the eastern sky, too near to be a cloud. Habidah’s flying beast. The shuttle. Only when he looked closely did he see wan yellow lights underneath. They slanted upward in two parallel lines, from the ground to the shuttle’s belly. They were far dimmer than stars.

He padded to them. Lost in the dark, without perspective, they made him think of a torchlit street seen from far away. This was how the walls of Florence looked at night – a ring of watchfires encircling a sea of shadows and sleepers. He bent, put his hand between the lights. He touched metal. This, then, was the boarding ramp. The lights were guides to keep people from falling.

He stood. He knew little of how Habidah and her companions managed their affairs, but leaving the ramp extended seemed foolhardy. Even if there were no people near, any manner of animal might get in.

A sharp, bright light from the top abruptly shone in his eyes. He held his hand up, but too late to save his night vision. In the painful blur above, he saw a human figure outlined against a square of light. Then the door hissed closed again, and all sight was lost.

A man’s voice asked, “What the hell are you doing? Sneaking aboard?” One of Habidah’s companions. Joao. The one who’d savaged him.

Niccoluccio would have stepped back if he could have seen where he was going. “Forgive me. I didn’t realize I was intruding.”

Joao thumped down the ramp. He obviously didn’t have any trouble seeing where he was going. Niccoluccio shivered when Joao stopped in front of him. But Joao didn’t strike. The other man’s breath was labored. Joao said, “You’re either following me, or you’re sneaking aboard. Which is it?”

“Neither. I was curious and I couldn’t stay inside any longer.”

“You might not even know. If your master had programmed you to go aboard, your conscious mind would make up any excuse it wanted.”

“I’ll leave the shuttle if you’ll talk with me.”

Joao hesitated. “What do you want with me?”

“We’re suffering because of what our masters did to each other.”

Joao let out a long breath. “The amalgamates never did anything to you. They just failed to cure your plague.”

“That’s enough, especially when it would have been so easy for them. You’d hate them too, if you were in my position. They failed to cure us because they want turn us into a servant class.”

“I never said I agreed with what the amalgamates are doing. You know what your master is doing to us, but you’re still working for it.”

“You’re still working for yours. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You couldn’t contact your amalgamates below. You wanted to check your shuttle’s independent communication system, use it to warn your masters.”

Joao stood, silent for a moment. He clearly hadn’t expected Niccoluccio to understand so much. He set a firm hand on Niccoluccio’s shoulder and turned him back down the ramp. “Come on.”

Uncertain where they were going, Niccoluccio nevertheless followed. Joao stepped confidently in the dark. Something groaned behind them, and Niccoluccio turned in time to see the little guide lights rise and vanish.

Joao stopped a few feet away from the the barn. He sat. Niccoluccio had to feel around before he realized there was a log. He sat, too, a foot away. Joao didn’t object. Again, he struggled for breath.

Niccoluccio said, “You’re not doing well.”

“It’s like my body weighs three times as much as it used to. Just going out to the shuttle and back, I feel like I’ve been running for an hour. It’s worse now than I’ve ever felt it before. I think it’s killing me a lot faster than Feliks.”

“I’m sincerely sorry.”

“You’re not,” Joao said, with surprising vehemence. “You don’t even understand. You’ve never seen this before me.”

“I’ve seen worse. At Sacro Cuore, my brothers woke screaming from the pain of the buboes. They had fevers higher than I’d ever felt. In their delirium, they imagined themselves in Hell. I couldn’t help them. But I did see it all.”

“This plane doesn’t mean anything,” Joao said. “There are only a few hundred million people here. Do you have any idea how many live in the Unity? The Unity has a population of trillions – and those are just the official, registered citizens, never mind the satellite planes and colonies. Don’t try to put your plane’s suffering beside ours. They aren’t comparable, and it doesn’t justify anything.”

“I wasn’t trying to justify it,” Niccoluccio said. “I was trying to empathize.”

Joao was silent for a long time after that. Niccoluccio could sense him silently fuming. Then he said, “I don’t know if I can believe a single thing you’ve told us. If any part of it is true, it’s the most evil thing I’ve ever heard. Far more likely that this is some kind of trick, though. The amalgamates testing our loyalty, something like that.”

“Even after you’ve seen my master do things your amalgamates never could?”

“The amalgamates have always kept their capabilities hidden from us.”

“They’ve never had your best interests at heart, in other words.”

“What does that matter? It’s better than trying to murder us, like the monster who sent you.”

“It doesn’t believe it’s murdered anyone.”

One of the many things Niccoluccio had relearned over his lifetimes at Sacro Cuore was that silences had their own character. One could be very much unlike the last.

Eventually, Joao snapped, “What?”

“It doesn’t think that anyone has died, or that death is possible.”

“You’re worse than an automaton. You’re insane.”

“My brothers on this plane. I found them again. They’d lost their memories of the plague, but they were still the same people.”

“Your master simulated them. Or implanted them in your memories. They weren’t real.”

Niccoluccio barely squelched his anger. “They were just as real as I was before I stepped through that gateway. They had their own lives and needs separate from mine. They weren’t there just for me.”

“You’d never recognize it if was an illusion.” When Joao spoke again, his voice was softer. “They died months ago. They only existed here, in the past. Your master is just trying to stop you from facing that and from realizing what’s happening to the rest of us.”

“You still don’t understand. You’re thinking in terms of single planes. The multiverse is infinite. You know that somewhere, on some far removed plane, you have a twin. An infinite number of twins. My master lives between the planes, and sees all of them at once. I doubt it ever perceived me as an individual. It sees an infinite array of Niccoluccio Caracciolas, spread out across the planes.”

“Everyone knows there are infinite planes,” Joao said. “We’ve been living all our lives with it, and we still have trouble wrapping our heads around it. I refuse to believe you’ve managed it in a few days.”

“I spent a lifetime studying it at Sacro Cuore. I tried my best to see from the perspective of a creature that sees everything in shades of infinites. If I, an individual, were to die, that wouldn’t make a whit of difference to it. It will always see another Niccoluccio. Another that lived where I died, another older or younger–”

“You’re covering philosophical ground billions of us have gone over and over, ages ago.”

“You may have tried to understand it, but you’re not living it. You all still see yourselves as individuals. When you die, there will always be another you somewhere in the multiverse, identical in every way except in whatever circumstance allowed you to survive. For my master, those other shades of you aren’t abstract.”

Joao said, “But those other selves aren’t me.”

“Why would they need to be? Those of you that survived wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. They still embody all the things that make you you.”

“Your religion is wedded to the idea of a soul. Souls that are unique, indestructible, and nontransferable.”

“There’s a lot about what I used to believe that I question now,” Niccoluccio said. “Three times, my life has been saved by bizarre chances. I should have died of the pestilence, but I escaped. Habidah rescued me when I was freezing to death in the forest. In Florence, an outside power impersonated me and called Habidah to save me when I wouldn’t have on my own. I imagine that, on a trillion other planes, I died in those places. But I’m here, too.”

“That’s one hell of a stretch,” Joao said, but he sounded less certain.

“I don’t know that I see the multiverse the same way my master does,” Niccoluccio admitted. “But I’m trying to learn.”

“If your master killed me right now, you wouldn’t think it had done anything wrong.”

“As far as it’s concerned, it hasn’t killed anyone. It’s attacked your amalgamates’ base of power, their people. It still sees everyone who’s died living in some other part of the multiverse.” He had held Brother Rinieri’s hand when Rinieri died. He held it again on the other side of the gateway.

Joao stood again, more deliberately. Niccoluccio watched Joao’s shadow move against the stars. “Now we know how your master thinks. All that’s left is to figure out what it’s planning for us.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Let me guess – you have faith the rest is going to work itself out.”

“I wish I did,” Niccoluccio said. “But I don’t worship my master.”

Joao trod off into the darkness. After a few moments, the gaps in the walls of the barn lit abruptly. Darkness followed.

Niccoluccio remained on the log for a moment, and then stood and followed. He stumbled around the darkness of the barn, searching for the ramp downward. For a moment, he feared that Joao had locked him outside. The door opened just as he stumbled through it.

His eyes had almost adjusted by the time he reached the bottom. He glanced at the doors lining the corridor. The second door led him into a small dining room, not dissimilar to the refectory but a tenth its scale. Two round tables sat side by side. Niccoluccio couldn’t guess at the purposes of the individual pieces of equipment lining the far counter. The other of Habidah’s associates, Kacienta, ate alone at the farther table. When she saw him, she looked down at her plate.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he said. When she didn’t answer, he took another step closer. “I was hoping to take a minute to explain–”

She set her hands on the side of her plate, as if about to pick it up. Or throw it. She looked up. Niccoluccio had never seen so baleful an expression since the wolves.

He held up his hands and backed out the way he had come.

He had just started to think about where to go next when the door at the far end of the corridor opened. Habidah stepped out, looking right at him. Niccoluccio realized that she had been watching him all along. Joao would have ensured that their conversation wouldn’t remain private.

She waved him over. She grabbed his forearm and pulled him through the door. The room on the other side was too dim to see. It must have been Habidah’s quarters. It smelled like her. It was as small and cramped as the last he’d seen, but the sheets on the bed were ruffled and someone had shoved clothes into the corner.

Habidah sat him on her mattress. “They won’t hear us. I’ve shut off the microphones in my quarters.”

“You heard everything I told Joao.”

She nodded. “Kacienta, too. Those two have made up their minds. You’re not going to convince them of anything.”

He nodded. “Have you made up your mind?”

“I can’t believe anything you or your master tell us. The stakes are too high, and there’s no way to verify anything you’ve said. It would be too easy to trick us.”

Niccoluccio looked to the wall. “I understand.”

She hesitated, as a person looking over a precipice. “But I don’t want to be associated with the amalgamates any longer.” He looked at her, but the dim light kept him from seeing much. She said, “Their plans for this plane have to be stopped.”

“Yes. Whatever else happens, I don’t want your amalgamates here. That’s one decision I’m confident is my own.”

“And you still don’t know anything about this message you have to deliver. Only that you have to be close.”

“If I knew anything, could tell you anything, besides what I said, I would tell you.” Her, of all people. He had never had so dear a hope but that she believed that.

She looked to the floor, seeing nothing. Niccoluccio knew that expression. She was somewhere else, steeling herself to step over the edge. She said, “This is too enormous for creatures like us. We’re too easily controlled. The powers at play are too far beyond us. If there’s one thing I believe we can change, it’s the fate of your plane. The amalgamates haven’t gotten their roots into it yet.”

“You’ll help me, then?”

“I will.” For as outwardly calm as she appeared, she couldn’t hide the tightness in her voice. She was in freefall. “And we’re going to do it alone.”

He reached for her hand, to offer that little bit of comfort, but she pulled it away.