by Tim Wirkus
“I will now explain the rules of liar’s gammon,” it said. “Please turn around.”
Sertôrian turned around. The thick pine tree before her split open lengthwise with a mechanized whir. From within its hollow trunk a small table emerged.
“Please sit down,” said the buzzy voice in her ear.
Sertôrian sat down at the low stool attached to the table.
“In front of you is a regulation gammon field with the game pieces positioned to commence play,” said the voice, and Sertôrian looked over the hexagonal board as the voice explained the rules. By this point in their quest, Sertôrian didn’t even question the premise of this absurd challenge. She was too exhausted, and more than willing to turn their fates over to someone (or something) with a plan—whatever that plan might be. If she needed to learn and master the rules of an archaic board game to save the lives of her crew and herself, then she would learn and master the rules of an archaic board game, no questions asked.
Listening carefully to the voice’s explanation of the game, Sertôrian was heartened by the resemblance that liar’s gammon bore to mag-zhadrez, with a few notable exceptions. Instead of squares, this game utilized a track of interlocking triangles, and instead of standing figurines, it used red or blue tiles, each one’s function and rank inscribed in white on the surface. Bluffing also featured heavily, apparently, as did a wagering component. But Sertôrian could already see that the same strategies that made her so formidable at mag-zhadrez would serve her well here. She had at least a fighting chance of winning. The voice finished its instructions and told Sertôrian that as a visitor she was granted the first move.
She heard a muffled voice from outside her mossy helmet and looked up to see de Bronk waving his arms while Valenti stood by, field knife in hand. Sertôrian had forgotten that they were there, that they had no idea what the buzzy voice in her ear was telling her. Touched by their concern, Sertôrian pointed to the game board, gave her shipmates the hand signal for all systems go, and nodded reassuringly. They nodded hesitantly in return and took a step back.
Turning back to the hexagonal board before her, Sertôrian contemplated her first move. She felt the old, familiar, sickening thrill of a high-stakes battle, fully aware as she thought through the implications of various openings that her decision would make or break their mission. Placing her finger on a red marauder tile, Sertôrian slid it onto triangle G13, an opening move reminiscent of the cantor’s gambit in mag-zhadrez. Almost immediately, her opponent’s blue first-rank constable tile slid—apparently under its own power—onto triangle T13 on the opposite corner of the board. A bold and clever counter.
• • •
I’ll interrupt the narrative at this point because even the most dedicated readers find the ensuing passage impenetrably dull. What follows is an intricate, bone-dry account of the three games Sertôrian played against her invisible opponent. We’re given a move-by-move summary of play with no description of Sertôrian’s emotional state, the reactions of her shipmates, or any details outside the game board. Making matters worse, after the first paragraph, complete sentences are abandoned in favor of a shorthand game notation. For example: RBn to J/Q 36; BBn to J/Q 34; RBn to J/Q 38. And on it goes for pages.
In terms of style, this section of text is unlike anything else in the Sertôrial biographic canon. For this reason, many scholars believe that the Gammon Log, as it’s called, was appropriated from an earlier source, most likely written by one of Sertôrian’s earliest followers or, as some argue, by Sertôrian herself.
That last idea has proven irresistible to generations of scholars, and unfortunately pseudo-scholars, some of whom use the possibility of Sertôrial authorship as a springboard to a more radical thesis, perhaps most coherently (or least incoherently) articulated in Belle Carey’s The Gammon Cipher: An Explosive Secret Revealed. Carey holds that not only did Sertôrian write the Gammon Log, but the meticulous notations also function as a coded message concealing a secret too dangerous to reveal openly. Utilizing the crackpot methodology typical of her ilk, Carey decodes the message using a key derived from the diameters of the planets in the Minoan System, the year in which Sertôrian experienced her First Shrouded Vision, and the text of Sertôrian’s opening statement before the Syndics of Mars. And what dangerous secret does this key reveal? We’re given the following decoded message: ABLE SAW I THE HAPTIC BRIGHT ENSCRIBED ORDER WITHAL. You may ask what this vague, semi-coherent nonsense is supposed to mean. Carey is quick with an interpretation that should, she says, be obvious to us all.
Through tortured logic too exhausting to reproduce here, Carey claims that this message reveals that Sertôrian’s entire biography leading up to her appearance before the Syndics of Mars is pure fabrication—a work of fiction composed by Sertôrian herself. This of course raises the question of what Sertôrian did do with her life up to that point if not grow up on Mars, captain a battleship, and wander the Minoan System until returning to the planet of her birth. Never one for modest claims, Carey claims that Sertôrian did nothing before the trial, did not even exist in the sense that we understand it. Invoking sketchy metaphysics, alternate dimensions, and the spontaneous generation of matter, Carey argues that Sertôrian was essentially and literally a self-created entity, a nonhuman organism with incomprehensible powers, and that the fictional biography she composed is simply an extended religious allegory meant to convey occult truths to her more discerning followers.
I certainly agree that there’s much to be learned from the careful study of Sertôrian’s biography, but beyond that I find Carey’s theory to be undiluted nonsense. Despite its vapidity, though, Carey’s argument has gained traction in certain circles, not because of its scholarly rigor or even its plausibility, but because like all conspiracy theories, it is as intriguing as it is improbable. I reproduce it here partly for the sake of curiosity, but largely as a useful contrast against which we can better appreciate the more rigorous and responsible ideas of my fellow scholars.
Because the fact of the matter is, some credible thinkers do argue that Sertôrian is the author of the Gammon Log, though not in the same way that Carey proposes. Their much more reasonable theory holds that the dialogue is not a secret code but a record of events as they transpired. This gammon log might have come directly from Captain Sertôrian’s journal, they argue, her own firsthand account of the events that she witnessed during the wandering years.
As a follower of Sertôrian’s teachings, I sometimes feel the woman herself growing ever more distant the more time I spend with her writings. Her words become so well worn in my mind that they feel infinite—hewn from eternal stone rather than generated from the mind of a living, breathing woman similar in many respects to myself.
Any new bit of language, then, however dry it may be, presents the possibility of a fresh encounter with Sertôrian. Though I have less confidence than some that the Gammon Log was written by Sertôrian, I’m deeply sympathetic to the impulse to search for her there. My greatest motive in conducting this study of the Rhadamanthus IX episode is to generate—for myself and for you—that vital spark necessary to reanimate Sertôrian the person in our minds and in our hearts. Actually doing so, however, proves a challenge indeed.
But we mustn’t lose the thread of this chapter. Perhaps I feel a special affinity with Ava Valenti and Ernst de Bronk at this time, given the nature of my order’s current covert actions. Treachery is such a slippery concept after all, so dependent on the vantage point from which events are viewed, and of course, on who survives to write the definitive history of what transpires. With that in mind, then, we’ll return to Bombal’s narrative. Strange though it may be to describe these passages as the calm before the storm, they do depict some of the trio’s last fully unified moments.
Here, then, is a quick summary of the section I’ve passed over:
Having defeated her electronic opponent, Sertôrian receives her promised reward.
The mossy helmet congratulates her and detaches itself from her head. As it slips to the ground, a brilliant beam of light shoots out from the game board, illuminating a secret chamber between the two churning waterfalls before them. Holding the Green Beacon in front of her, Sertôrian approaches the stone door, which swings smoothly open. Sertôrian sets down the Beacon and enters the chamber.
Now back to Bombal:
• • •
“What do you see?” said de Bronk from outside the doorway.
Sertôrian lit a holo-torch, revealing a little cube of a room with just enough clearance for her to stand upright. The perfectly flat stone walls met at precise ninety-degree angles and the space was unadorned except for a bronze plaque on the wall opposite the door and on the ground beneath it, a suitcase-sized object covered in an oily canvas sheet.
“Captain?” said Valenti. “Everything okay in there?”
Sertôrian couldn’t look away from the canvas-covered object on the ground.
“It’s fine,” she said. “You two can come on in.”
Valenti and de Bronk passed through the doorway, commenting on how dry the air was inside the chamber. When they saw the plaque and the object on the floor, though, they fell silent.
“Is this it?” said de Bronk in a whisper.
The room did have an ineffably sacred feel to it—still and cool and ancient.
“What does the plaque say?” said Valenti.
“I haven’t read it yet,” said Sertôrian, unease tingling through her extremities. Like de Bronk, she spoke in a whisper, though she couldn’t say why.
“I think we should read it,” said de Bronk.
“Yes,” said Sertôrian, and the three shipmates stepped forward with reverential caution until they could make out the letters on the plaque, which read as follows:
TO THE FINDER OF THIS VAULT,
Congratulations. Through your bravery, wisdom, and perseverance, you’ve successfully navigated the path we laid before you. This in itself is a laudable achievement, but your reward, if we can rightly call it that, is far more than just satisfaction for a job well done.
The machine beneath this plaque will change the course of human history. Possessing a power that far surpasses any of our previous creations, it represents both our highest achievement and our deepest weakness. Nobler people than we would have destroyed it immediately. Sad experience has taught us that the craven powers of the world possess a preternatural ability for turning our inventions—each one created with the aim of bettering the situation of humankind—to their own bloodthirsty purposes. Through our own lack of foresight we have become unwitting accomplices to some of the Three Empires’ most ruthless deeds.
In developing the device that sits concealed before you, we had hoped to subvert or even overthrow the tenacious power of the Empires, but we’ve realized too late this machine’s awful potential for misuse. Common sense dictates we destroy the machine, but vanity—or perhaps a grain of optimism—has led us to preserve our creation. And so, fully acknowledging that there’s no restitution for what we’ve already done, we’ve hidden our greatest achievement here in this chamber, hoping that it might be discovered in a nobler time, by a nobler people who will have the courage to put it to a noble purpose.
May wisdom guide you as you move forward.
Sincerely,
The Bulgakov Collective
Sertôrian took a step back.
It was too much to take in all at once. De Bronk had tears streaming down his wrinkled face, and he wiped unashamedly at his running nose with a crumpled handkerchief. Valenti regarded the plaque with an appraising eye, searching for the telltale sign that would reveal it as a hoax. Sertôrian herself still hadn’t discounted the possibility that this whole enterprise was actually an elaborate and malicious prank. Nonetheless, ever since she’d had those vivid dreams in the Declo Forest, she’d been more willing to entertain the notion that they were being guided by the artful machinations of the legendary Bulgakov Collective, the organization that had, among other things, pioneered the web of technologies that had made it possible to transform non-Earth planets into habitable spaces for humans.
She read over the plaque again, and though she found its message a bit too melodramatic, her gut told her it was genuine. And if the plaque was genuine, then the canvas-covered object below it would have to be the Bulgakov Apparatus.
Sertôrian’s stomach flipped.
The Bulgakov Apparatus.
Her first impulse was to walk away—to seal up this chamber with the Green Beacon inside and find an exit strategy that didn’t involve handing over the massively powerful Bulgakov Apparatus to an erratic thug like the Arch-Kaiser Glenn Harrison. She hadn’t until now really thought through the implications of their assignment, as she hadn’t believed in the Apparatus’s existence. She’d not worried, then, about what Harrison might do if he got his hands on the device, because she hadn’t thought they would find it. But now here they were, gathered around a canvas-draped box that could very well be the most powerful technology the galaxy had ever seen.
Did they have to hand it over to the Arch-Kaiser, though? After all, if it was the Bulgakov Apparatus they’d just discovered, couldn’t they harness its legendary power—whatever that might be—to get themselves off this planet? If even a fraction of the rumors surrounding the Apparatus turned out to be true, not even the Arch-Kaiser and his secret police could stand in the way of whoever wielded this technology.
And if the object before them was not the Bulgakov Apparatus, if it was instead one of the many pseudo-Apparati that still littered the galaxy, then they could deliver the useless machine in good conscience to the Arch-Kaiser, declare their mission accomplished, and bid Rhadamanthus IX a not so fond farewell.
The only thing to do was test the device.
She laid out her rationale to Valenti and de Bronk.
De Bronk said, “Captain, I don’t know how else to say this, but I don’t think any of us are worthy to activate the Apparatus.” He ran a hand through his sparse white hair. “It’s all right there on the plaque—they wanted people with nobility to use it, and I’m not sure that’s us. It’s not me anyway.” He looked at the canvas-draped bundle on the floor. “I say we leave it alone and find another way off this planet.”
This was not what Sertôrian had been hoping to hear.
“Valenti?” she said.
The star-guard looked from the canvas-covered object to her expectant captain.
“De Bronk is right,” said Valenti. “I mean, he’s wrong—we don’t know for sure that this is the Bulgakov Apparatus—but he’s right that we should leave it alone. We have no idea what this thing is, which means we have no idea what it might do if we switch it on. Regardless of whether or not it’s the Apparatus, it still might be incredibly dangerous. It could be nothing more sophisticated than a bomb, but it would still kill us all. And even if it does nothing, if it is a pseudo-Apparatus, how do you think that will go over with the Arch-Kaiser? Do you think he’ll still give us our ship back like we’ve just done him a big favor? I don’t think so. We need to pretend like we never saw this thing and start working on a plan B.”
Valenti and de Bronk both moved toward the door. Sertôrian looked at the canvas-shrouded object on the floor and felt a twinge of resentment toward her shipmates. She couldn’t fault their reasoning. Leaving the device behind was certainly the prudent course of action, no doubt about it. But couldn’t Valenti and de Bronk feel the seductive pull of the unknown? If they walked away now, wouldn’t they be tormented forever by the fact that all that had stood between them and the solution to a centuries-old mystery had been an overdeveloped sense of caution and a dirty canvas sheet?
“This is a big decision,” she said. “We need to sleep on it.”
Valenti and de Bronk exchanged one of the worried glances that had been passing between them so often
lately.
“Captain,” said Valenti, “I think the sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“I agree,” said de Bronk.
“I wasn’t asking for a vote,” said Sertôrian. “We’ll set up camp nearby.”
So without further ceremony, they extinguished the holo-torch and exited the stone chamber. Sertôrian removed the blinking Green Beacon from its slot in the rock face and the door slammed shut behind them.
That night at their camp, Sertôrian didn’t sleep. Wrapped in her blanket, lying on her back, she listened to the slow, steady breathing of Valenti and de Bronk—the young officer’s breathy wheeze and the old man’s slight snore. Somewhere in the distance, a nocturnal bird whistled a melancholy tune. The night grew colder and darker, and Sertôrian worked to justify the decision she’d already made.
For one thing, the plaque’s admonition to leave the Apparatus hidden for a nobler people in a nobler time rested on flawed reasoning. The truth was, a people in a nobler time wouldn’t need something like the Bulgakov Apparatus, whatever it did. The people who needed it most were alive right now, caught in the midst of galactic turmoil, victims of the Three Empires’ violent death throes. It would be irresponsible, Sertôrian reasoned, not to investigate if the Apparatus could be the means of changing billions of human lives for the better.
Lurking in the shadowy recesses of Sertôrian’s mind, though, was a different impulse. She felt a metaphysical duty to examine the Apparatus, although she couldn’t quite say to whom or to what she felt obliged. All she knew was that the imperative had an indescribable rightness to it, a burning necessity.
A light breeze swayed the towering pines surrounding their campsite.
Sertôrian knew what she had to do. De Bronk and Valenti were deeply asleep by this point, oblivious, she hoped, to the waking world. Still, she moved as quietly as possible. She carefully slipped on her boots and crept off into the night, taking the Beacon with her.
