39

 

Ways and Means had emerged in a relatively clear parcel of space. Dust particles numbered a few dozen per cubic meter, typical for an interstellar dust cloud. The waste radiation from the transplanar gateway had sent a shockwave through the interstellar medium. Supercharged particles blew out in neat concentric spheres, spread too thin to ricochet off each other. Then engine exhaust plumed through them, blindingly hot.

Ways and Means allowed time only for light to reach Providence Core and return before it snapped its defensive fields into place. The universe became a distorted mirror image, sometimes blurred, sometimes broken-glass sharp. Two suns shone across the planarship’s hull. Then an Earth stood over its bow, bent and spiraled into a corkscrew.

No sooner had the fields snapped into place than lasers raked across them. Ways and Means flashed through a cycle of field configurations and strengths. The light reaching from the planarship dimmed to a thousandth of its real luminosity. The sensors compensated, mapping out the distortions of each field contour – drawing an accurate portrait of space around them.

The new Earth was already falling away, cloaked by exhaust, difficult to read. Ways and Means’ destination lay ahead, a cluster of bright heat sources, planarships. The planarships were in motion, spreading out in a crescent formation. Combat drones speared away in chaotic patterns.

Some hits were inevitable. One laser from Providence Core took a bad bounce between fields and slashed across the prow. Molten hull spilled into vacuum. But the dissipated laser had failed to reach the inner decks or any vital components.

The slash was a penknife on Niccoluccio’s skin, but it drew no blood.

His memories belonged to something else, and its to him. He could hold them. The sensors’ data feeds were as real as a sliver of glass in his hand, as tangible as a cut on his palm. They oscillated between raw sensation and abstract information.

The sensors drank deep. Every direction had a wealth of data: distant planets, the black body parabolas of asteroids, the low-band radio pinpricks of the stars behind the veil of the dust cloud. And the sun. The sun. Even with the rest of the universe smothered in dust, there was so much for him to learn – more than he had ever imagined watching the stars above Sacro Cuore.

The universe had become a place of wonder, dizzying. It was more than his mind had ever been made to cope with. Data spilled into sight and smell and touch. Simple inputs became scintillating colors. When Niccoluccio looked too closely, it clashed with his senses, sent mustard seed up his nostrils, needles under his fingernails.

He had no eyes, no ears, except those in his body still in the interrogation chamber. Those had become so, so small. And weak. Every time he returned, it was like drowning in ignorance. Vague shapes approximated human form. Pain speared through his neck, and his chest burned with a dire need to breathe.

He could “see” more via the chamber’s cameras and their multispectral senses. But those weren’t his eyes. Or, ultimately, his mind.

Every time his thoughts looped through the planarship’s mind, he felt a little less like himself, and a little more something else.

The boundaries were indefinable. He couldn’t describe the other presence, couldn’t think about it properly. The only way he could conceptualize it was as a cluster of mutually contradicting impulses. It was steady; it was roiling. It was stormy; it was meditative. It knew exactly what to expect, but it acted only from moment to moment.

His senses deadened. At first, he thought he’d gone back into his body. His vision darkened, lost in the void of sleep. His eyes were opening, and he was struggling to hear Habidah yelling. Impossible when there was so much else unattractive about that place. The table pressed hard into his back, as if he were crushed by stones.

An abrupt sensory shift whirled around him. The stars and defensive fields vanished. He drifted on a gently dimpled grassy field. Wood and stone rose about him, rising to a brilliant starry cosmos. The whisper of wind spun in his ears, and his habit scraped his skin. Wood, too. He sat on the bench he’d built for himself behind the calefactory at Sacro Cuore.

Another man, thin and bald and mostly hidden underneath the folds of his habit, sat next to him.

“Ahha,” said the stranger. “That’s better on you, isn’t it?”

There were more than just human senses here. Good thing, too, or he would have gone mad. He could read the stranger’s body temperature, and the heat of the surrounding buildings. The air was thick with the odor of the recently dead, of moved earth.

The stars weren’t quite stars. They were too bright and too few. There was something happening among them, but Niccoluccio didn’t care to guess what anymore.

“I was close to dissolving,” Niccoluccio said, finding himself using words that at once didn’t fit and were entirely too appropriate.

“And you’ve changed for the experience,” the other man said.

Niccoluccio knew he was right. There were memories he’d never recover, faces he’d never recognize. Even to his own ears, he no longer sounded like himself. “You’re not the power that sent me here,” he said, rubbing his head.

“An outgrowth, a seedling. A child.” The last time Niccoluccio had come into contact with this being, it had seemed as large as the universe – if not larger. This was just a man, and a voice. “But I speak with authority. In me.”

“Do you really intend to destroy Ways and Means and all the souls aboard?”

“Among many others, yes. I’ll continue on, in the children I spawn on the other planarships. You will continue on, too, you know.”

“You mean, in another universe. Therefore, from your perspective, I will never have died.”

“From your perspective, too. You will be identical to the last neuron and electrical impulse.”

“I believe you,” Niccoluccio said. “At least, I believe that you believe it. The rest of them will never see it the same way.”

The stranger looked at him. “What does that matter?”

“They’ll fight you to their graves.”

The stranger just looked at him with an odd little smile.

Niccoluccio let out a long breath. The warm air haloed his face in infrared. “The first time I met you, I thought you were God. If you were, you wouldn’t need to resort to tricks and subterfuge. You could accomplish what you wanted without bothering.”

“In your tradition, God achieved His will with fires, earthquakes, and storms.”

“Putting out the fires and stilling the earth and sky wouldn’t have thwarted God’s will. That’s the difference between power and omnipotence.”

“Nor would stopping me save the amalgamates. My progenitor would carry on the work.”

“You keep telling that there’s no such thing as death. Then I don’t understand. How can you destroy the Unity in every plane?”

The little smile turned into a genuine one. The stranger was only too pleased to explain himself. “I can’t destroy the Unity everywhere, but I don’t need to. I only need to stop it from developing as it is. Every single one of the people out there, and on this vessel, will live on as you’ve lived on. But in ways that cannot harm me.”

Niccoluccio frowned, but the other man went on, “I don’t believe you understand how often and persistently you’ve perished on other planes. You died from the pestilence. You died, lost and alone, in a snowy wilderness. You died starving and stoned by a mob in Florence. In all the multiverse, the only planes in which you continued were the ones in which the most improbable of miracles saved you. Visitors from another plane. A power of the multiverse interfering on your behalf.”

Niccoluccio had been told all this before. He had been puppeted then, as he was now. The difference was that he felt this man’s control more keenly. Niccoluccio said, his throat dry, “Escape shuttles will survive the battle, or even splintered hull segments. Some of the amalgamates’ memory cores will survive as well, and give them a measure of continuity, too.” As plague bearers.

Like him.

The man beamed. “Exactly. Nothing is lost, but the multiverse is preserved.”

The stranger, the virus, swept his hand across the sky. Niccoluccio followed his fingertips, and for the first time saw what was happening. Stars whirled and clashed. They lined in orderly columns and flew apart, spewed hard radiation across the sky.

Lives had become abstractions, figures, innumerable. He didn’t know if the arcs of destruction through the sky were representative of this plane, or some other, or if there was any meaningful difference. How many universes could he trace his direct line of consciousness through? How many of his own corpses lay along his trail?

It was too much. He had to close his eyes. Only then could he see the interrogation chamber and the people standing about him.

His throat burned. A thousand knives poked his ribs. While his mind had been so far away, he’d forgotten to breathe. He had too many threads of thought to follow. He couldn’t remember anything he wanted to say to Habidah, and couldn’t speak regardless.

He forced himself to gulp air, and retreated.

Back in the real world, the stranger said, “You still grieve for them, even knowing they’ll live.”

“It won’t be worth it,” he said. “They’re going to have lives like mine. They’ll be alone. Everything they knew, annihilated.” Niccoluccio inhaled again, but wasn’t sure in which world he was breathing. “I would rather have died for good.”

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 his 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.”