Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  At the end of forty-eight hours of grueling labor—more than twenty miles, and untold thousands of feet of elevation change, sustained by nothing but some bitter nuts that left the inside of Morag’s mouth feeling as if it had been sandblasted—they’d gained barely five miles across the map.

  For several days after that they made better progress. They were able to follow streams or animal tracks, and the walking would have been almost pleasant, except that to step below the three-thousand-foot contour was to descend into a hell’s army of insects. Day and night, without a minute’s relief, a million miniature demons fell upon them in joyful fury. Black biting flies almost too small to see. Red biting ants as big as the flies should have been. Hornets by the dozen. Mosquitoes by the hundred thousand. And, OK, leeches weren’t insects, but the leeches were hell too.

  Morag thought she’d seen it all, and felt it all, until her left hand was electrocuted, and then swelled to the shape of a cantaloupe, by the bite of a six-inch yellow-and-black centipede. “Nothin’ I can do about that, gurrl,” Lorna said. “What ye need is antihistamines, an’ ice packs, an’ my entire medical kit at this point is a pair o’ tweezers, some liquid bandage, and one not-so-sharp knife. I’m not prepared te cut yer hand off, not jes’ yet.”

  Their clothes and shoes quickly began to fall apart, so that they all looked more and more like Kit. Lorna struggled to keep up, and got an infected blister on her heel. “At least there’s plenty o’ water,” she said cheerfully, as yet another torrent of chill rain came down on them. “And at least, gurrl, ’spite of everything, yer showin’ signs of gettin’ stronger.”

  Morag suspected, correctly, that Lorna had said it only to make her feel better, not because it was true. And yet, physically miserable though she was, she did feel stronger. As they got farther and farther from the home of the I’iwa, her responsibility to them seemed clearer. A mantra ran through her head. It wasn’t anything they’d conveyed to her directly. It was just the essence of what they’d meant:

  We have hidden and waited for a long time, in these caves. But you come at the end of our story. When you leave, there will be almost no time left.

  Aye, she thought, I get that. And the frustration of being stuck in a tropical forest, on foot, with no time left—that was the reason she was able to ignore the hunger, pain, and fatigue. That was the reason she could keep moving.

  CHAPTER 6

  ESPERANZA

  They were like small bugs, trying to make progress through a bowl of rotting salad.

  They’d seen the ocean from a hilltop. It looked invitingly close, and as they walked the last mile or so down an easy, well-worn track, their spirits lifted. But just as they thought they might glimpse water through the thinning trees, they came instead to a line where the lowland forest ceased to be forest and became instead an almost impassable tangle of sticky, stinking debris. Half-uprooted trees were mixed in with mangled branches, giant mats of seaweed, leafless palm trunks, plastic garbage, sand, rocks, fetid ponds, and great snakelike berms of gravelly mud. An industrial-sized red plastic float, dull and scarred, hung from a tree; it might have been a lantern, or a warning. A pale gray flatbed truck stood almost vertical, its front end buried in the mud. Next to it, a goat lay on its back, abdomen huge and shiny. Its matte-black legs pointed skyward like quad antennae on a router.

  They kept moving forward as best they could, climbing and ducking and having to push hanks of wet, slippery vegetation out of their way. A hundred yards in, two corpses lay in a tangle of material twenty feet up a tree, as if nesting. The remains of buildings appeared. The bad smell of the vegetation became lost in the sweeter, muskier stench of decomposing flesh.

  “We have to get out of here,” Morag said, holding a hand to her face. And before the others had had time to reply she turned, looked down, and screamed. She’d stepped on something that was poking out of the mud. It could have been the body of a crab, except that one of the fat, mud-streaked claws that curled up around the end of her foot was wearing a wedding ring.

  “There’s nowhere else to go, gurrl,” Lorna said, moving her aside and holding her by the shoulders while she shuddered and retched. “The whole coast’ll be like this, an’ goin’ back, goin’ inland again, is pointless.”

  “This is a port,” Daniel said. “And ports have boats. That’s how we’re going to find a way out of here.”

  Again he didn’t know how he knew, but he was right, on both counts. They had stumbled into the outskirts of Vanimo—or what was left of it, because there had been a tsunami after all. Nothing monstrous, nothing out of a movie, just enough to wreck a low-lying coastal town like this; just enough to drown pretty much everyone. There was little left except shattered timbers, plastic trash, and rough concrete blocks with arterial twists of rebar sticking out of them. The smell was like a physical barrier that they had to push against to make progress. And you didn’t even have to look for the bodies—black seabirds were everywhere, hunched over in tight groups, their heads bobbing greedily like pumpjacks in an oil field.

  No food. No usable supplies. On the beach east of town, they found a rusting freighter on its side, hull facing the water, with container boxes and Chinese farm equipment spilled from its decks onto the beach. Another body lay next to one of the containers, face down, almost swallowed by the sand.

  They were avoiding the scene, passing into the trees again on the outskirts of the settlement, when Daniel had a premonition. Or perhaps it was just a sharper, clearer version of an image that had been there already, in the litter on the floor of his mind. He turned, shaded his eyes, and squinted east along the beach. There, half a mile away, perched on some rocks like a model on its stand, was their ticket to Japan.

  The yacht was a thirty-two-foot Catalina pleasure yacht that had seen better days. Once pretty, new, and all white, it had been owned by a retired judge in Seattle, who on a summer afternoon years earlier, in a moment unrecorded by the history books, had sailed it across Elliott Bay to Bainbridge Island, passing within sight of a boy stowing gear on his mother’s record-setting trimaran. After its sale, a quick spray job by shifty new owners had turned it an industrial midgray, a color more suited to a life of stealth in the southern Caribbean drug trade. In and around the Columbian port of Cartagena, in its capacity as a drug mule, it acquired a quilt of cheap, amateur fiberglass patches, each sprayed over in a slightly different shade, and despite the patches, it leaked. There at last it was abandoned, salvaged, and picked up for change by a couple from Venice Beach who had a little money but fancied themselves as dropouts. They ignored its looks, fixed up the important stuff, and used it to see the world.

  Caught at anchor when the big wave came, it had ripped free, stayed more or less afloat, and come to rest at a rakish angle atop the remains of a rough, boulders-and-wire seawall. Pointing inland, with the stern six feet above the bow and the deck at thirty degrees to starboard, it looked as if it was corkscrewing down the face of a wave, pushed relentlessly onward toward the mountains by a quartering sea of rock. Having barely escaped destruction, it was sickly green all over from a new half-inch spray-coat of algae and silt.

  A woman was squatting in the shade under the hull, near two surfboards. She had short sandy hair and terrible sunburn, and she was too skinny for her yellow beach dress. In one hand she held a floppy straw hat; occasionally she used it to brush flies from her face, or from the face of the man who lay on a camping mat next to her. The man was sunburned too, but darker skinned, and naked except for underpants. She looked like a lost tourist. He looked like something that had floated in on the tide.

  “You’re alive,” she said when she saw them—mildly surprised, as if she was more accustomed to the dead. “That’s good. Being alive is good, at least for now. Not that any of that will last much longer, but it’s good for now because the birds and the rats don’t seem all that interested until you’re dead.” She looked vacantly at the sea, then swatted again. “Good thing they’re not like the flies. The flie
s prefer to eat you alive. Did you come from inland?”

  “Yes,” Lorna said. “Are you—?”

  But the woman ignored her and gestured at the boat. “We’ve had it for ten years. Been everywhere, except Antarctica, and Tomás had that on the list too, before we read Anabasis and converted. Ol-CHEM-ok, Di-VEL-em, Xu-QA-ket.” She looked down at the man. “Had Antarctica on the list too. Didn’t you, babes? Before we converted. But now we have more important things to think about. Don’t we?”

  “Are you—” Lorna wasn’t sure whether she was going to say Are you all right? or pick up on the word converted and say Are you Seraphim?

  But the woman ignored her again and kept talking. “Wave came out of nowhere. We’d only just got here from Oz. Mass conversions—you wouldn’t believe what’s happening down there. And the ships. No volcanoes, you see. Hundreds and hundreds of small events—a few families or a hundred people building their own structures, but they’ve been discouraging that. Too many failures when you do that, they say, too many Partials. A waste. When we left, they were planning to transport a million people by ship to Fuji, and Merapi, and Mauna Loa. Even all the way to Tahoma. We’d already been chosen for Fuji, and I wanted to get a berth and go.

  “But there was trouble in Sydney—I mean, there was trouble between the Seraphim and the others already, but then a split between the official Seraphim and all these ‘converts’ showing up and claiming they’d been at Ararat—claiming the Seraphim leaders aren’t relevant anymore. There was fighting over who should control the ships.”

  “So you didn’t—”

  “Tomás said we should avoid it all, and get to Fuji alone, in our own boat. ‘Silent and alone with the ocean,’ he said, ‘just the two of us, babes, preparing our minds for eternity.’ It sounded romantic, I guess. So we left the others, and collected supplies like it was any other sailing trip. Went back to his family’s house in Wollongong, and they’d all gone, just left everything and walked out the door, the way people who’ve made the commitment do, without even a note. We knew what it meant, and it was encouraging, really, helped us feel we were doing the right thing. Terrible to see all those abandoned children, just wandering in the streets, but what can you do? Their minds just aren’t ready, you know.

  “Well anyway, we lugged food and gear to the boat, and got out of there. Sydney to Brisbane, easy. Brisbane to Port Moresby, calm as a duck pond. All an adventure, at that point, oh yes, until we hit a storm in the Solomon Sea. Three days and nights without sleep, and I’m terrified we’ll drown, and I’m thinking, Christ on a crutch, what if I just gave up eternal life because I listened to him? I hated him then, for a bit. ‘Think what you’ve made me throw away,’ I said, ‘you and your silly crap about doing it on our own.’ He was frightened too, I think. He said: ‘If you want to live long enough to see Fuji, if you want eternity, shut up and focus on sailing the boat.’ Which was fair enough. So anyway, we were looking forward to a rest by the time we got here. ‘Japan next, mi amante,’ he said. ‘Our final destination. Our next stop is our last stop. Fujisan!’”

  She brushed another fly from the man’s face and pointed to the surfboards. “Vanimo has a reputation for good breaks. We’d always had it on our list. So Tomás said, hey, why don’t we have one last go, you know? Couple of days? He was making it up to me. I was shocked, like, shouldn’t we be focused on the important thing, which is getting ourselves to Fuji? But it was that kind of attitude I fell in love with in the first place, so I said yeah, sure, why not? We rented a couple of boards in town, had one day’s decent surfing. Next morning, I was still asleep. I think he must have gone up on deck to pee. When I heard my name, I knew it was bad because he was yelling in Spanish. ‘Esperanza. Una ola grandísima. Sube aquí rápido.’”

  She paused, as if someone had interrupted her and she’d lost her train of thought. “My name’s Hope. He calls me Esperanza.” She made a helpless gesture at the figure on the camping mat by her side. “This is Tomás, did I say that already? Both his legs are broken. He nearly drowned, and he’s developed a stomach thing, giardia maybe? Shitting water three times an hour. They’re saying it was Mauna Loa, is that right? The radio’s screwy so I don’t know anything, not with the satellites down.”

  Lorna knelt close to her and spoke softly, trying to calm her. “Can you explain to us what’s going on, Hope? Why are the satellites down? We’ve been in the forest for a long time.”

  “Zachary Ash—”

  “The new Seraphim leader?”

  Hope looked at her as if she was an idiot. “He said, we’re about to shut off the noise of civilization forever. No more distraction from the truth! Anyway, the point is, we’re both alive still, and when Tomás gets better, we still have a chance. ‘Rápido, rápido,’ he said. I got up on deck just in time to see the wave break over the headland. ‘Gigante’ is right. It wasn’t as big down here, only fifteen feet maybe. But so fast! Watching it come was like falling off a cliff. We were tied to the jetty. Nothing we could—nothing we could—do you have any medicine?”

  “We used our last Band-Aid an’ our last happy pills a week ago. But I’m a nurse, so let me take a wee peek more an’ see if there’s owt I can do fer yer man.”

  Tomás was sheathed in sweat and trembling. Lorna checked his pulse, passed her expert hands over his body, and took a long close look at his lower legs, putting her face so close to his shins that it looked as if she was sniffing them. Meanwhile Daniel used a loose line to swing himself up onto the deck, and looked over the boat. “You were supposed to be taking a ship, from Sydney?”

  “Oh yes. There are dozens and dozens of them. Hopefully they were mostly well out at sea when this—this—”

  “Maybe we can clean up your boat and help you two get out of here, Hope. All the way to Japan, even.”

  “Are you trying to get there too? To Fujisan? You look too young. Young people don’t usually, you know—their minds aren’t ready or something. Are you sure you’ve fully prepared? Ek-DAH-mon, Ke-OL-xu—

  It was a test. Luckily an easy one. “Dze-UT-dze, Ma-JEM-vo,” Morag added quickly, and then: “A friend of ours is already there. He told us to come. Can you tell us anything else about what’s happening? Have there been other events?”

  “No one’s had much news,” she said. “But that’s good, isn’t it? No news means it’s easier to concentrate on what matters. Doesn’t it, Tomás?” And she began to sing softly to him, rhythmically, as you might calm a child with a lullaby:

  “Yi-MIN-da, Cho-EY-ut, Ir-XIM-na, Jop-GOH-je.”

  The boat was filthy, inside even more than out. But it was in better shape than it looked, and Daniel could feel in his bones how calming it was not to have to speculate so much, not to have to think, because he was focused on a practical task. It was easy to be grateful for the things that mattered, once he’d digested the fact that the engine and electronics were beyond repair. The rudder and compass worked. There was a nice set of low-tech laminated-paper charts. The winches and other fittings were fixable. The mast was intact. And the sails, especially, were a bit of luck: almost pristine, because Tomás had replaced them that year and they’d been furled or stowed when the wave hit.

  Daniel got help from Lorna and Kit, some from Morag, and less from Hope. With some whispered advice from Tomás—who had a high fever and was moving in and out of communication like a bad phone connection—it took only two days to make the half-wrecked boat into an ugly-but-plausible sailing vessel again.

  “Still stinks,” Daniel said. “I think it always will.”

  Tomás was looking better that day. His cracked lips reminded Daniel of something unpleasant he’d seen before and couldn’t bring to mind, but at least they flexed at the corners into a hint of a smile: “Don’t worry about the engine,” he said. “Diesel power is for tourists. If the hull’s good, she’ll float. If the sails and the rudder are good, she’ll take us anywhere. What’s the date today?”

  Daniel told him, and Tomás consulted some i
nner nautical table. “Highest tide this month is tomorrow at first light. If you don’t float her then, we’re probably staying here until the bugs are finished with us. Block and tackle in the hold—”

  “Found them.”

  “Fix the rope to the rocks nearest the water—”

  “Done.”

  “Check the rudder to make sure—”

  “The rudder’s fine.”

  Tomás smiled again. “You’ve been around boats.”

  “A bit, yeah. My mother, Iona Maclean, she used to race trimarans, and she—”

  Tomás went into a spasmodic, painful-looking coughing fit, then stared at Daniel as if he’d grown two heads. “Say this again please?”

  “That my mom used to race trimarans?”

  He shook his head. “Name. Her name.”

  “Iona Maclean.”

  He coughed again. “You’re telling me your mother was”—cough—“Esperanza, did you hear that? This guy says his mother”—wheeze—

  “Is that the woman in the race you were talking about?” she said.

  “TransLan Multi-Hull. De este a oeste y de oeste a este. La ganó dos años seguidos.”

  “She only did west-to-east once,” Daniel said. “But yeah.”

  “Woman is a legend. I saw her once in Auckland. Your mother—are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you sailed with her?”

  “Sure. She taught me.”

  “Incredible. She still racing?”

  “No.”

  That evening, as the sun was sinking, Daniel cut the fin off one of the surfboards, got Kit to help him shift Tomás onto the board, and used a hoist to get him onto the deck. Then he walked around the boat one more time, pretending to check things he’d already checked; really he was just meditating on the still-fogged condition of his own mind. All the old skills were still there in the toolbox. But there was a fight going on, in his subconscious, about whether he should or shouldn’t feel confident. Could this boat, and his sailing skills, really deliver them safely to a point two and a half thousand miles north across the Philippine Sea? Why could he see them arriving, and see a shipwreck?