The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  EIGHT

  I still remember the first time I met Sister Beatriz. I was so young—we both were—and had just entered the postulancy here at the Astral Cenobium of Outer Hyperion. At the welcome mixer in the great-cloister, I had already met and exchanged pleasantries with a handful of fellow postulants, as well as some of the sworn votaries, when a short, angular girl with a little plate of chocolate cake in each hand introduced herself. Her name was Beatriz. I said it was nice to meet her.

  “You have to try this,” she said, giving me one of the little plates of cake. “It’s phenomenal. Here.” She extracted a fork from the pocket of her skirt and handed it to me. “It’s clean, I promise.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pleasantly taken aback by the warm but unoppressive familiarity of this person I’d barely met. I took a bite of cake. It was very good.

  “Phenomenal, right?” said Beatriz, taking a bite from her own plate.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s delicious.”

  For a moment we just stood there, enjoying the cakes together. With the other postulants, I’d felt that first-encounter imperative to keep the energetic small talk at a constant flow. This Beatriz had approached me, though, as if we were already old friends, and so the temporary silence hung comfortably between us as we ate our cake.

  “So what’s your field?” said Beatriz, scraping up the last bits of crumb and frosting with the edge of her fork.

  “History,” I said, hoping her follow-up questions wouldn’t be too specific.

  “Oh!” she said. “Have you read The Phoenix of Empire? I love that one. Or what about The Private Lives of Ancient Martians? Figueira is just so meticulous about recreating what life was like in those early settlements. It’s so vivid but it’s rigorous too. Like that description of their hydroponic suspension gardens? Or the scripts of those early radio programs they produced—the one about the woman on Mars who falls in love with a future version of her next-door neighbor? Unbelievable. It blew me away the first time I read it. Do you like that one?”

  I lied and said I loved both books. At seventeen I brimmed with grand, scholarly ambition, but the reality was that I had read almost nothing. My high school on Argus II had been adequate and I had applied myself to my studies, but farm duties had demanded so much of my attention. I helped my parents with everything: mixing feed, wrangling the calves, cleaning the milking parlor—all of it. To finish my schoolwork each day I stole five minutes here and ten minutes there, completing my chores with as much speed as the task allowed and working out a geometry problem or writing a paragraph for an ethics paper before my parents required my help with the next task. And so, while I completed all of my assigned homework with as much thoroughness as I could manage, I had no time for extracurricular reading or study. Still, I thrived at school and graduated at the top of my class.

  It was on the day of my high school graduation that I learned of the Astral Cenobites’ existence. We are by no means a secret order, only a quiet one, and as a result we tend not to attract much outside interest. Of course that’s changed recently, but at the time I had never heard of the order until at the graduation ball, Ms. Sturgess, my history teacher, pulled me aside to tell me she’d submitted my name for consideration to the order’s postulancy program.

  “You should find out in about a month if you’ve been accepted or not,” she said. “And you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. But I think you should.”

  Ms. Sturgess was one of the few people to whom I’d confided my scholarly ambitions—not even my parents knew—and this vote of confidence in my potential thrilled me. I waited on tenterhooks for the next month, my body performing its duties in the requisite farm chores but my mind completely preoccupied with dreams of becoming a historian. When, a month to the day after graduation, I received a letter admitting me as a postulant, I was dumbstruck with joy. My parents, when I’d explained the situation, were both shocked and proud. No one in our family, they told me, had ever had such an opportunity. I wrote back accepting the position and began my preparations.

  Then reality set in. What did I know, after all, about history? Yes, I had read my high school textbooks with care, had given passionate dinnertime speeches on the importance of understanding our past, and had stayed after class not infrequently to learn more from Ms. Sturgess on whatever topic we had covered that day. But that made me nothing more than a relatively precocious student from a backwater agricultural planet whose standards of education were none too high.

  I became convinced that I would flounder at the Cenobium, and I came close to turning down the offer I’d already accepted with an explanation that I just wasn’t qualified. Ms. Sturgess talked me down from this ledge with a kind letter outlining what she saw as my scholarly virtues. I would, she allowed, find the order challenging, but she was certain that, given my work ethic and my tenacity, I would thrive under pressure. As my departure date approached, I squared my shoulders and resolved to become the student my history teacher thought I could be.

  I know now that Beatriz, and not I, was the anomaly among the postulants. The Astral Cenobites accept applicants based primarily on their eagerness to learn and their willingness to consecrate their studies to the objectives of the Order. Preexisting expertise is not necessary, and therefore most postulants have yet to receive any significant training in their presumptive fields. But I didn’t know that then. I felt quite the imposter and reasoned that it wouldn’t do to let on to the others. Especially not to this Beatriz, who epitomized the sophisticated young scholar I wanted to be.

  Eager to change the subject away from history, then, I asked about Beatriz’s field.

  “I study vortemathics,” she said.

  “Vortemathics,” I said neutrally.

  “Yes,” she said. “Have you heard of it?”

  I hadn’t, and knew I couldn’t bluff past my ignorance.

  “No,” I said, ashamed.

  “It’s okay,” she said, taking my empty plate from me and dropping it with her own into a garbage bag proffered by one of our fellow postulants. “Nobody’s heard of it. Hardly anyone at least. It’s a new discipline that some of the sisters at the Appoline Institute have pioneered. Basically what it is is an attempt to map out the general contours of reality using a combination of preexisting disciplines, like philosophy and mathematics, as well as some new methodologies that involve very precise, very high-caliber instruments that can measure certain emotions and feelings, or at least that’s what their inventors claim. It’s essentially about exploring what happens at the intersection of the subjective and the objective. Does that make sense?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  By this point, the other postulants were trickling out of the great-cloister to find the breakout groups that constituted the next part of our orientation day. Beatriz showed no sign of wrapping things up, which made me feel oddly flattered.

  “You’re right,” said Beatriz. “That’s not very helpful.” She pinched her lower lip. “Maybe think of it this way,” she said after a moment’s consideration. “Do you know how to poach an egg?”

  “I can fry an egg,” I said. “Or boil one.”

  “But you’ve at least eaten a poached egg before, right?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  I wondered if Beatriz was trying to intimidate me, to establish from day one her unassailable superiority. If so, she was doing a marvelous job.

  In due time I would understand that intimidation wasn’t her goal, that Beatriz had, and has, no interest in such games, and that her social style grows out of a persistent and usually flawed assumption that her comrades are as quick thinking, as perceptive, and as well read as she is.

  “Well, this is how you poach an egg,” she said, pivoting around so that we both faced an imaginary stovetop. “You fill a saucepan with about two centimeters of water, add a pinch of salt and a dash of vinegar, and you put that on a burner s
et to medium. While that’s heating up, you crack your egg into a teacup. Once your water comes to a boil, you stir it around with a whisk until a whirlpool forms. Got that so far?”

  “Yes,” I said, listening as carefully as I knew how.

  “Okay,” she said. “So, you keep the whirlpool going with the whisk in your one hand, and then with your free hand you pick up the teacup and drop the egg into the center of the whirlpool. And be sure to drop it gently. Then what you do, you keep the whirlpool going until the egg just starts to set, because the vortex at the center is what’s keeping the egg from feathering out into the water. Then, once the egg starts to set, you cover the pan, turn off the heat, and wait for exactly three minutes. Finally you uncover the pan and pull the egg out immediately with a slotted spoon.” She smiled. “Did you get all that?”

  “Yes,” I said, already entranced by her apparent cosmopolitanism.

  “Good,” she said. “Now this oversimplifies everything, but it should start to give you an idea of how vortemathics works. The egg is truth. I mean, it’s actually much more complex than that—what is truth, even?—but we’re keeping things simple. So the point of the whole process is to make the egg, or truth, consumable or comprehensible for people. Again, I’m really simplifying here, so I apologize.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said a little too quickly.

  “All right,” said Beatriz. “So if the egg is truth, in this instance the heat under the pan represents traditional philosophy. You know—Plato, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Samovanti, Taghut. And the pan, the thing that’s holding this all together, is mathematics. Which leaves the water. The water is what vortemathics brings to the process. Oh, and it’s only when it’s spinning. The water, I mean. That little contained whirlpool is vortemathics. Does that make sense?”

  “Well,” I said, feeling a bit spun around myself.

  She said, “It’s okay if it doesn’t. Like I said, vortemathics is really hard to explain and I’m still pretty new at it. I could loan you A Short Introduction to Vortemathics, though. It explains everything much better than I can.”

  I was already learning to treat, as Beatriz did, the considerable voids in my education not as flaws in my character but rather as exciting journeys yet to be taken. I’ve learned much over the years from Beatriz’s complete transparency regarding the holes and limitations in her own knowledge, as well as her habit of eagerly seeking illumination from the expertise and experience of others.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’d like that.”

  All of the other postulants had moved on now to their breakout groups, leaving the two of us alone in the great-cloister. Beatriz seemed not to notice.

  “But what about history?” she said. “What period are you interested in?”

  I mustered a half-coherent answer about the inception of the Imperial Space Age, a genuine interest of mine, albeit one I knew little about beyond its treatment in my high school history book. Beatriz, in a manner both endearing and intimidating, hung on my every word, asking thoughtful questions about the influence of cryptodiplomacy and the role played by the threat of nuclear war.

  We were interrupted finally by one of the older cenobites telling us we needed to move along, and quickly. As we made our way to our separate breakout groups, Beatriz said we’d have to pick this conversation up later. She’d see me at lunch? I said she would and she waved a cheery goodbye. So began our friendship.

  On our picnic a few days ago, I recounted this memory to Sister Beatriz as we idled next to the broad picture window overlooking Persephone III.

  “Do you remember that?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said, wiping the corners of her mouth with a napkin.

  We had finished our egg sandwiches, our pickled beets, our rind of cheese, and our fruit salad, and were sipping some earthy cashew wine that Sister Constance had bottled the previous fall. Bracing myself for the inevitable sadness that overtakes me after a hearty lunch, I looked out at the pink-and-green surface of Persephone III. Sister Beatriz, meanwhile, produced a casqada from the laundry bag that served as our picnic basket and began plucking out a halting tune on the instrument’s seven strings.

  The cashew wine, rather than render me more maudlin, dulled my afternoon sorrow, inviting a tentative contentment to sidle up next to the ache in my heart. Sister Beatriz’s pluckings, meanwhile, grew more fluent as her fingers loosened, and soon a near-festive atmosphere permeated the observatory. I tapped my fingers in time with the music, a catchy dance tune I recognized from my girlhood. Swallowing the last of the wine from my mug, I lay on my back and closed my eyes. I could almost forget that death lurked just at the edge of this happy tableau.

  We spent the better part of that afternoon with the sweeping vista of Persephone III beside us, reminiscing about our brash misadventures as youthful postulants. In recalling our exploits, we wondered at that maddening combination, endemic to the young, of guilelessness and bravado.

  Perhaps in an attempt to recapture that spirit, we spent the next two days shirking our duties and, while strolling the lesser-trafficked stairways and cloisters of the Cenobium, making grand plans for the future. We would tour the far-flung outposts of our Order, sampling their libraries and striking up new friendships with our fellow cenobites. We would cultivate a warmer sense of community here at the convent. We would take our scholarly fields by storm.

  We mentioned nothing of the Syndicate forces’ imminent arrival.

  I’ve since returned to my writing, as you can see. After three days spent in pure diversion, Sister Beatriz and I both found ourselves yearning for the tethering influence of our unfinished projects. So we will balance our flights of fancy with a few hours a day spent in our respective studies, laboring at our respective projects. The urge, I have found, to spend my final days examining the Rhadamanthus IX episode ultimately proves too strong.

  NINE

  Just three years after her appearance before the Syndics of Mars, Irena Sertôrian delivered a short sermon to a group of early followers at the Palladium of Novo Pernambuco. Many of her teachings from this period have been collected into what we now know as The Shadow Doctrines, and though they lack the full majesty of her late-period thinking, these sermons hint at the theological heights she would later ascend to. The Palladium Sermon, as it’s called, is no different. Sertôrian begins this discourse with the claim that “just as nature abhors a vacuum, our minds abhor a mystery.” After exploring that claim at length, Sertôrian arrives at her conclusion. If I might take a chronological liberty here, I’d like to cite those final thoughts to set the stage for the events awaiting Sertôrian on Rhadamanthus IX decades before the speech was given: “A prohibition and a mystery are one and the same—a locked room whose inscrutable door beckons us closer. Human curiosity impels us to open it, and the enlightenment we find inside—if it’s truly worth our while—will invariably devastate us.”

  The Rhadamanthus IX narrative shares with the Palladium Sermon a preoccupation with enlightenment and transgression, authority and dissent, and like the Palladium Sermon, it yields no easy answers to the reader seeking a blandly inspiring portrait of Sertôrian and her thinking. When examined with a discerning eye and a strong stomach, however, this narrative can productively illuminate uncomfortable yet vital dimensions of Sertôrian’s life and teachings. Disconcerting as these revelations may be for a devout follower of Sertôrian, a better understanding of our beloved and holy sibyl will only aid us in following her precepts.

  As we rejoin Bombal’s narrative, then, consider carefully, with open mind and open heart, the destruction that unfolds:

  • • •

  Fully assembled, the Bulgakov Apparatus resembled nothing so much as a domed birdcage, but with dimensions best suited not to a parakeet or a canary but a human being. Heavy straps hung from the top of the cage to form what looked like a harness, and the cage’s flat plastic base was filled with tiny
holes like a showerhead’s. Between the metal bars, a gauzy, jellyfish-like material glistened in the morning sun. A close inspection of the device revealed no on-off switch, no levers, no instrument panel of any sort.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said de Bronk, circling the device, his wrinkled face twisted in perplexity. “Was there a remote control box that we overlooked?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Valenti.

  A breeze rustled the jellyfish membrane, flapping it against the cage’s metal bars. There had to be a way to activate the Apparatus, but none of the three shipmates could find one. They tried waving the Green Beacon at it, tried issuing voice commands. They even tried kicking the base to knock some loose component into action.

  Then Sertôrian noticed the door, hardly distinguishable from the rest of the cage structure yet large enough to allow a full-grown adult to enter the Apparatus. A closer look revealed a delicate hasp flush against a metal bar. Sertôrian unfastened it and opened the door. As she did so, the hanging harness descended to ground level. Sertôrian took a step toward the open doorway.

  “Captain, before you go in there,” said Valenti.

  “Yes?” said Sertôrian, turning away from the Apparatus. She wasn’t having second thoughts exactly, but the magnitude of the situation was becoming increasingly apparent. She was willing at this point to wait just a moment before committing herself to the Apparatus in all its formidable potentiality. It couldn’t hurt, after all, to listen to what her junior officer had to say.

  “Let’s say this is the Bulgakov Apparatus,” said Valenti, who remained skeptical. “What if it’s a trap?”

  “They wouldn’t—” began de Bronk.

  “Let her finish,” said Sertôrian.

  “Just think about it for a second,” said Valenti. “The Bulgakov Collective hated the way the Three Empires kept repurposing their inventions—that’s why they split up, right? Well, what if they wanted this invention to be repurposed? Not repurposed exactly, but what if it was designed all along to be used by the Empires? What if it’s designed to destroy whoever uses it?” Valenti shook her head. “We just need to walk away.”