Niccoluccio was oddly pleased that his brother knew the name of his monastery. He had assumed that his father – along with everyone else in the family – had forgotten it. “Your report was right. Would that those travelers had found us. We would have gone with them.”
Dioneo’s paunch sagged below his waist. “How many of them lived to make the journey with you?”
“I was the only one at the end. I left when I realized it.”
“On your own?”
Niccoluccio knew the lie was coming, but he couldn’t hold it back. “It was a long road from Sacro Cuore. I had supplies, but you are the first person I’ve exchanged more than five words with since I left.”
Dioneo couldn’t answer for a moment. He brushed the wetness from the corner of his eye. “Then your coming to us was twice a miracle, brother.”
“Very much,” Niccoluccio said, sincerely. It was the closest he could come to the truth.
Now he couldn’t keep the tears back, either. The two of them wept in earnest, and thanked God for the opportunity to meet again. Dioneo recovered himself in just a minute, though. His voice sounded as if it had never broken. He said, “I had imagined that I was the last of our family in Florence, as well. Our father was the first of us to die.”
Even after Niccoluccio had seen his old home empty, he’d tried to hope that his father was traveling or sheltering in the countryside. The news came as no surprise, but still felt like ice in his stomach. Dioneo told him next of their siblings. “Until you arrived, I had thought Umiliana and myself the only survivors of our generation.” Umiliana had lived outside the city ever since she was married. “I myself lost three of my five living children.”
News of death had become so commonplace that all Niccoluccio could think to ask was, “You have had that many children?”
Dioneo laughed again, boomingly, and shook his head, though there was a trace of anguish in it.
Niccoluccio said, “I didn’t mean– that is, to count your children as–”
“I have two living children now. Let’s leave it at that. I nearly lost my wife as well, but she miraculously recovered. Not nearly so miraculous as your arrival here, I might add. How long are you to stay before going to your next monastery?”
Niccoluccio said, “I have not applied to any other monasteries, and do not believe I will. I don’t feel suited for it after everything I witnessed.”
If Dioneo had had any idea of the gravity of what Niccoluccio had just said, he would have been taken aback. But Dioneo had always lived outside of the church. For him, leaving a monastery was on a par with changing from one job to another. “Then I insist that you stay with myself and my family. You have been alone far too long.”
“I passed our father’s house. It seemed empty. If it has not been sold, I could stay there and not get in your way.”
Something else had changed in his brother, too, that Niccoluccio was only just starting to see. There was a probing edge to his eyes. “I wouldn’t dream of condemning my dear brother to such danger. The pestilence lingers in the homes of the dead. Besides, I wouldn’t get to see you.”
Niccoluccio fought to keep the relief out of his voice. “If I would not be imposing.”
They were interrupted by a sallow clerk. While Dioneo was preoccupied, Niccoluccio looked about the office. Though he’d known his brother worked in governance, he hadn’t imagined anything this large, or that Dioneo would have men serving him. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Another sad tale. The prior I worked for, the vexillifer iustitiae, did not flee the city like his colleagues. He and his heir perished. As his senior officer, I am filling in for him in the meantime, and, if I have my way, permanently.”
The vexillifer iustitiae, the standard-bearer of justice, was one of the Florence’s seven priors, and the only one who didn’t represent one of the city’s districts. He, along with the podesta and the captain of the people, was one of the city’s highest legal authorities. Suddenly the size of the office and the voluminous ledgers made more sense.
When Niccoluccio didn’t answer, Dioneo grinned broadly. “Yes, things have gotten so desperate that the other magistrates are considering even the likes of me.”
All Niccoluccio could think to say was, “It’s an amazing opportunity to elevate the family.”
“What’s left of us. Speaking of, I must introduce you to them.”
Niccoluccio nodded at the ledgers. “Your work comes before me.”
“For now, dear brother, you are my work.” Dioneo put an arm around Niccoluccio’s shoulder before Niccoluccio could ask what he meant.
Dioneo stopped at several offices on the way out to announce that his brother had miraculously returned from his distant monastery. Niccoluccio stood obediently behind him, hands clasped. Their progress seemed interminable, but eventually they reached the plaza.
Dioneo’s home was near. It made their father’s look tiny. It was broad, shaped like a half-oval, and hosted a garden that must have looked spectacular in summer. The doors were shadowed by loggias. Dioneo led him inside. Portraits of Niccoluccio’s father and a man Niccoluccio didn’t recognize flanked the walls.
The next hour blurred into a stream of names and faces. Not only were Dioneo’s wife and two children at home, but so were their five servants. His wife had invited a cousin and her family to supper. Niccoluccio hadn’t met so many people at once since his first day at Sacro Cuore. By the time Niccoluccio sat to supper, he couldn’t remember if Dioneo’s wife’s name was Catella or if that was her cousin. It was all he could do to keep his thoughts centered. Every time he heard a new name, embraced a stranger, it felt like bits of him were flying off. Except for the washing of each others’ feet, the brothers had rarely touched each other. Niccoluccio had to hide a shiver whenever anyone, even Dioneo, touched him.
Dioneo soon departed to find a better point to end his work. Niccoluccio was left in a labyrinth of strangers. He couldn’t hear a word of the conversation. It flittered through the air, insubstantial. He heard himself responding. He and the other brothers broke rules whenever they so much as whispered at each other during communal meals. Niccoluccio couldn’t focus on either the conversation or the too-oily, too-rich rice pasta. His thoughts were as long-lived as a fog of breath.
By rights, he ought to have been more comfortable here than he had with Habidah and her companions. In an odd way, their very alienness had helped. They were so far removed from him that the only way they could connect was through the basic nature that united all humans. Niccoluccio had been lost and suffering, and Habidah had wanted to help. It was the same innocent manner that three year-olds related to the people around them.
Here, things were far from innocent. Niccoluccio abstained from the meat pies offered to him. He offered his servers an apologetic smile, but nothing else. He tried to hide his dismay at the gowns and jewelry the women (even his eleven year-old niece!) wore. They, in turn, didn’t disguise their disdain at his habit. It was freshly laundered, at least. It had been cleaned while he’d slept in Habidah’s home, though he didn’t care to think about how.
When Dioneo returned, Niccoluccio said, “Surely you didn’t finish your work so early.”
Dioneo was grinning. He wrapped his arm over Niccoluccio’s shoulders. “I haven’t even started it. I’ve visited the clergymen at the cathedral chapter, telling them about the miracle of your survival.”
“It wasn’t…” Niccoluccio started, and stopped himself.
“Wasn’t a miracle?” Dioneo finished.
“Of course it was a miracle,” Niccoluccio said. “Just one I would rather not speak of widely.”
“That is too bad for you, dear brother. My friend at the cathedral, Ambrogiuolo Olivi, wants to meet you. I have made an appointment for you in the morning.”
The way Dioneo spoke the name made Niccoluccio think he was expected to recognize it. “Who? Why?”
“You’ve seen how much of a toll the pestilence has taken.
You weren’t here when it was at its worst. The corpse wagons flowed like a river. It hasn’t ended. Even now, people are only starting to return. They fear that the pestilence could return at any instant. People need a hero, a survivor to admire. A miracle to show that the world has not ended.”
Niccoluccio had already shaken his head several times by the time his brother finished. Dioneo, hand still over his shoulder, led him from the table before he could find his voice. “Ambrogiuolo is a powerful man in the cathedral chapter. He can do a lot for the family. You’ll see when you meet him. You do want to do more here than just live at my home, don’t you? Be active. Contribute.”
Niccoluccio stopped. He had become acutely aware how much his brother had accomplished while he was away. All he’d brought back from his twelve years as a monk was a conviction that he was no longer suited for it. Even at his most pious, he’d never felt so small. Perhaps that meant his piety had never been so sincere after all.
He was at the mercy of his own petty ego. And yet: “I will not be a hero. Let alone a saint.”
“Then don’t be, but the appointment is already made. See him. Tell the truth about what happened. Preach the glory of God in that way.”
Prior Lomellini had often preached that the world outside the monastery was a tempest, replete with evil and temptation, and that a man could not help but be caught up by it even when he knew better. Niccoluccio opened his mouth, throat dry, but he could not bring himself to say no to his brother. Not yet.
15
Habidah had hardly returned to her acceleration couch when her demiorganics jolted with an urgent message from Joao. She inwardly groaned. She braced herself for another scolding.
He sent, “All of our satellites’ sensors are flipping the fuck out. Something’s happening up there.”
Another jolt, this time adrenaline. Though demiorganic transmission didn’t capture emotional cadences, she heard his panic. “In orbit?” she asked.
“Disruptions all over the thermosphere.” Raw data poured through Habidah. She needed a moment to make sense of it. The satellites her team had placed in orbit were intended to study the surface, and had very few instruments looking elsewhere. Those lateral sensors could only pick up a jumbled and incomplete swamp of fluctuating energies, spatial rifts. Most were centered in equilateral orbital bands of varying altitudes, but others had appeared over the poles.
Joao said, “Somebody’s opening a dozen, two dozen, transplanar gateways up there.”
Each was about three meters in diameter. The power needed to open that many large gateways was beyond the capabilities of most industrialized worlds. By comparison, the field base’s communications gateway was less than a micrometer wide, just large enough to transmit information.
“Open our gateway,” she said. “Send an emergency message to the university. This world is being invaded by a transplanar power. We need immediate multiple-site evacuation. There’s no time to get everyone to the field base.” The first thing an invading power would do was target extraplanar interlopers. They could have seconds. Her first impulse was to find Niccoluccio and get him off this world, but that would be placing him in even more danger. The missile targeting her could be on its way even now.
Joao reported, “Our gateway just opened on its own.”
Her heart juddered. “What?”
Their gateway was hard-linked to their university. If nobody at her field base had opened it, that meant somebody from her university had. “We’re receiving a signal from Felicity Core,” Joao said, in wonder.
Habidah settled into her couch, pulse still racing. She knew who she would be speaking to before she answered. “Send it to me.”
All of the cabin’s forward-facing monitors blinked off, replaced by a composite image of Osia. The borders between the monitors fractured her image like stained glass. She stood with her arms folded over her chest, double-jointed fingers bent backwards.
Habidah asked, “What the hell is the meaning of this?”
“An intelligence operation unrelated to your activities,” Osia answered. “I apologize for the lack of warning, but you had no reason to know. We’re depositing satellites, nothing else. This won’t disrupt your assignment. In fact, we need your reports to continue coming in. Our satellites can’t collect the kind of social and political information that you and your team have been gathering.”
The light leakage from gateways that size would be naked-eye visible in the night sky. “You’ve already disrupted our mission. Get those satellites out of here.”
Osia locked her gaze on Habidah’s. Then she looked somewhere to her side. “If you’ll excuse me, we’re in pursuit of other objectives at the moment.”
Her image vanished.
Habidah tried to get her back, but the communications gateway had closed. She slapped her couch’s armrest. It was too cushy to be satisfying.
Osia had been acting when she’d pretended she was being called from off camera. Prosthetics like her had far more advanced communications technologies. They didn’t need to talk aloud, except to ordinary humans like herself.
She told Joao, “Get everyone ready for pickup and flight to the field base. Maybe we’ll be heading home. I don’t know. We need to figure out what’s going on.”
Her harness snaked over her shoulders, tugged tight. All of the paranoia that had dogged her since Osia’s last call crashed through her all at once. It went without saying that none of this was right. Worse, maybe nothing had ever been right. This whole assignment had suddenly taken on an air of fraud.
She tried to scavenge as much information about the intruders as she could, but her satellites’ sensors, even reoriented, couldn’t make out much. The gateways had closed. The objects that had fallen through were too small to hold man-sized creatures. The largest was only half a meter long. There were somewhere between thirty and forty of them. She didn’t have good enough coverage to get an exact count. So far they’d done nothing but squat in orbit, occasionally belching EM static that was either a scan or a signal. If not for the gateways, Habidah’s satellites might never have detected them.
The engines shoved her into her seat. The sun had nearly risen. She only had minutes to get away before the shuttle’s camouflage fields lost the cover of darkness.
Her pulse skipped a measure when her gaze skipped across a monitor looking back at Florence.
Her team had last gathered in the conference room scarcely a day ago. Having all of them back was like a recurring nightmare. Feliks and Joao were even in the same costumes. Meloku was here in person this time, dressed as a wealthy Frenchwoman, with several rings, a necklace, and a lacy headdress.
Joao hugged his arms to his chest. Like last time, he and Kacienta had focused all of their attention on her. This time, they were looking to her for direction. Only Feliks remained detached.
Joao started off by going over everything he’d learned. “They’re stealthed, just like our satellites. Light-absorbent hulls, no reflective solar paneling. Nobody’s going to look up and see them now.”
Habidah said, “They care about concealing themselves from the natives. Why?” The amalgamates had never cared about interfering with civilizations on other planes before.
Meloku said, “They care for now. Tomorrow they could drop all pretenses.”
Habidah asked, “But, again, why? What could it possibly matter to them?”
Joao ventured, “What if they’re not here for the locals? They could be hunting an extraplanar target. A fugitive. They did tell you ‘intelligence operation.’”
Habidah said, “They didn’t bother to shield themselves against high-technology observation. Anyone from a culture capable of transplanar travel would detect them as easily as we did. The only thing they’re protected against is visual observation.”
Feliks said, “So they’re concerned with the locals. Not us. Not extraplanar fugitives. Certainly not another planar empire, and that’s about the only thing I can think of that would explain an intru
sion like this.”
Kacienta asked, “Could there be some… I don’t know, some natural resource here?”
Meloku said, “Again, if that’s all it was, they wouldn’t bother to shield their satellites.”
Habidah resisted the impulse to lay her head on the table. “What could this place have that the amalgamates – or anyone in the Unity – could possibly want?” Again, her thoughts tended toward Niccoluccio. She had to force them away.
After a moment, Feliks answered, “Labor.”
Meloku said, “Don’t be barbaric. The amalgamates have access to a million more efficient forms of automated labor. If they wanted labor, they could seed a world with self-replicating worker drones. In a month, they’d have a population equal to this world.”
Osia had said she needed her team to keep providing her with “social and political information.” To the best of Habidah’s knowledge, neither she nor her team had concerned themselves with this plane’s politics other than to the extent that it influenced its peoples’ reaction to the plague.
Feliks said, “The real question here is not why they’re doing this. It’s what do we do about it.”
Habidah asked, “What can we do?”
She was sure Osia and the amalgamates were listening to every word. They had the means. The field base’s NAI answered to them. They hadn’t stopped her team from talking about them because they had no reason to. They had nothing to fear from anyone here.
Joao said, “We can pack up and go home. Or we can keep working.”
Kacienta asked, “Can we go home? The field base hardly has enough power to open up a micrometer communications gateway. We’re dependent on the university for transport. That means the amalgamates.”
Meloku said, “The amalgamates don’t care enough about us to trap us here. We’re too small.”
Quietus Page 16
