Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

Published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018

Quietus is a novel of big ideas. Like many good books about big ideas, the story focuses on small people, the kind of people who seem insufficiently consequential to drive big ideas. In the end, Quietus reminds us, we are all consequential, even if we seem insignificant in the vastness of the multiverse.

The two central characters in Quietus are Niccoluccio, an Italian monk who is questioning his faith during the plague years, and Dr. Habidah Shen, who doesn’t understand Niccoluccio’s need “to forever be watched and judged” by a higher being. Perhaps Habidah doesn’t understand because she is not from Earth. She is from Caldera, a member plane of the Unity, one of countless planes in the multiverse.

Habidah is working for the amalgamates, who emerged from the AI wars as the most powerful minds in the multiverse (or so they believe). They assured their supremacy by developing “neutered” AIs who could not develop beyond a fixed level. Finding humans to be more useful than other sentients, the amalgamates maintain an empire of human civilizations from many universes. From their residences in core worlds and planarships, the amalgamates protect the Unity from threats, including rival transplanar empires, rogue AIs, invasive species, and nonhuman xenophobes.

Habidah is a researcher who leads a team that is studying how humans on Earth are coping with the plague. The research is important because the Unity is suffering its own plague, one that only appears to infect the demiorganics that make it possible to receive datastreams from machine entities. It also only affects transplaner civilizations — those that have the ability to move across the multiverse. Having defeated disease, the Unity no longer knows how to address it. By studying survival strategies adopted by more primitive societies, the Unity hopes to preserve its existence.

Niccolucio’s crisis of faith comes as he buries his Brothers before abandoning the Monastery and returning to his home in Florence, which for political reasons is even more disheartening than the monastery. Niccolucio and Habidah meet before Niccolucio goes to Florence and meet again after he leaves. At some point, they both discover that the amalgamates’ notion of protecting the empire will require the subjugation of a good many human planets.

The novel takes an unexpected turn when about three-quarters of the story has been told. At that point, the stories of Niccolucio and Habidah are joined as Niccolucio’s beliefs about the nature of the universe evolve to something that is beyond his former religious understanding, while Habidah’s beliefs evolve beyond a science-based understanding of how things work.

The story raises philosophical questions about existence while offering alternatives to traditional religious explanations for being. Just as Star Wars fans can choose to think of the Force in religious terms or not, Quietus imagines the existence of a purposeful and powerful intelligence, a “primal force of the cosmos” that might or might not be understood in a religious sense. It lives between the planes, a place that (to Habidah’s understanding) does not and cannot exist. To someone of Niccolucio’s religious background, that force might seem to be a divine power. To someone of Habidah’s scientific background, the force appears to be an entity of vast power that purports to protect the infinite diversity of the planes from undesirable interplanar contact. But if the power between the planes is the cure for the amalgamates’ ambition, the cure might be worse than the disease — at least from the standpoint of the inhabitants who populate the countless worlds that comprise the Unity.

Quietus touches on fundamental issues of individuality and free will. It asks whether death is a meaningful concept if each of us exists in infinite universes, an infinite number of whom will not die when we die, an infinite number of whom have not yet been born. It asks whether it is possible to believe in an unseen, all-powerful being without worshiping it. In some sense, Quietus asks the reader whether it is necessary to rethink the history of philosophy in light of the multiverse theory. Those are the kinds of questions that make science fiction not just fun, but meaningful.

I admire the sophistication and complexity of thought that underlies Quietus, as well as the depth of the characters. I love the message it delivers — the ultimate purpose of a civilization is not to gain power over other civilizations — yet the novel recognizes that the message is one that the powerful do not willingly accept.

On a more superficial level, I enjoyed the story. A good story is an essential component of fiction, and Quietus tells a story that makes humans from Earth and humans from elsewhere both allies and enemies, while asking whether machine intelligence will be the enemy that finally unites human intelligence or the friend that helps humans reach their full potential. Quietus is ultimately a story about manufacturing miracles — not the miracles made by supernatural powers, but the miracles we must devise for ourselves if we are to survive as a species.

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