The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  “I woke up in a new location that resembled a barren tundra—a flat, rocky landscape as far as the eye could see, no trees to speak of, and a sad, yellow groundcover in scattered patches. Above it all loomed a frosty gray sky. Somehow, though, I wasn’t cold. A little chilly maybe, but not freezing. The other thing was, there were little clusters of animals everywhere, and my first thought was, This is what happens when you die? That disbelief lasted only a moment, however. As I looked at the animals nearest to me—a heron, a crocodile, and a wildebeest—I felt an overwhelming compulsion to lead them someplace else. I had no idea how I might go about it, or even where I wanted to lead them, but the longer I stood there, the stronger the compulsion grew. So I stood up (I’d been lying down) and I set about herding them the best I could, walking behind the animals, waving my arms, and yelling when it felt appropriate, as they waddled and flapped and trudged their way forward.

  “It was all a bit haphazard, but still we made steady progress, maintaining our loose cohesion as a group and traveling in a more or less consistent direction as we went. After many, many days of this (and I use the term days loosely; it never grew dark, or light for that matter, the terrain bathed instead in constant twilight) I reached a gnarled old tree and knew that I had arrived. I allowed my three animals—the heron, the crocodile, and the wildebeest—to disperse, and then I curled up on the ground and slept.

  “When I awoke, I began the whole process anew, gathering a different group of animals—this time a skunk, a tapir, a chimpanzee, and a tortoise—and setting off resolutely in a new direction, though I had no idea where this course would take us. I did know, though, in some instinctual part of my body, that we were going in the right direction.

  “And so it went, the process repeating itself each time I delivered my latest group of animals. There was some variability to the process. Each group of animals took anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to move, and of course the quantity and species of creatures in my group varied wildly from journey to journey. The one thing that didn’t change, though, was that after I’d left the animals behind, I’d go off by myself and fall asleep. Then when I’d wake up, I’d start over again with another group of animals.

  “From time to time, I ran into other people, and I might give them a nod or even a wave, but that’s where the interaction always ended because we both had animals that we needed to move.

  “And that’s another thing. I’ve been saying, ‘my group of animals,’ like they belonged to me or I was in charge of them, but that wasn’t it at all. I wasn’t some rancher or farmer trying to get his fox and hare and carrots to the market. No. What it was . . . Well, I can’t describe it. I’m not even sure there’s a corollary in this life to that relationship, or if it was even a relationship at all. There was a strong logic underlying the process, though, albeit a very different logic than the one we use here—like a different language. Moving animals was just the exigent thing to do.

  “So that’s what I did for what felt like many years, with no break or significant variation in the general routine.

  “Then one morning I woke up having deposited my latest group of animals at a nearby lake the evening before. I sat up, and a few yards away from me an enormous black bear lay dead on the ground. As soon as I saw it I knew what I needed to do. It wasn’t like a revelation or anything; it was just what the logic of the situation dictated. It was clear to me that I needed to skin this bear and then wrap myself in its hide.

  “I won’t go into too much detail, but obviously I didn’t have a knife so I had to do the whole job with some chipped obsidian I found not too far from the body. It was bloody, sweaty, stinking work, but after some amount of time, I had a peeled bear carcass on one side of me and a more or less intact bearskin on the other. The skin had taken on a faint glow, and I knew I had no time to waste. I shrugged the hide up onto my body. It weighed a ton. I put my arms inside the empty arms, my legs inside the empty legs. I flipped the skin of the head up over my own head. It felt terrible in there and smelled even worse.

  “I’m not sure what prompted this, but once the bearskin was wrapped around me, I felt an intense desire for this to work. Before I could wonder what this even was, my vision went blurry and I passed out. When I woke up, I was hanging from the harness inside this cage.”

  She gestured at the Bulgakov Apparatus, whose barred dome glinted in the high afternoon sun.

  “That’s completely absurd,” said Valenti.

  “I recognize that,” said the woman. “But it’s also completely true.”

  Sertôrian, for her part, found in the woman’s account of the afterlife a vast, feral quality that rendered the woman if not more trustworthy then at least more compelling. Her vexing cosmology, her very being, reminded Sertôrian of the vast Martian wilderness of her childhood, a landscape as austerely enticing as it was unpredictable. As a girl, Sertôrian had been unable to resist such a combination, and in her current circumstances she felt herself drawn deeper and deeper into this woman’s story. Though she doubted all of the woman’s claims, Sertôrian felt an intense desire to explore, even for a few minutes, the situation’s treacherous landscape.

  “I’m going to let you out of the Apparatus,” said Sertôrian, “and you’re going to get us off this planet.”

  The woman licked her lips with her pointed tongue, and her pupils gleamed semi-violet—a trick of the light? She practically sprang to the door of the Apparatus, clinging eagerly to its bars.

  Valenti’s body slumped in defeat. She switched off her tape recorder and returned it to her pocket.

  “I realize,” said Valenti to her captain, “that you’re going to do what you want to do no matter what I say, but I can’t, in good conscience, stay silent. That thing in the cage is not your sister—you know that, right?” Sertôrian said nothing. The woman inside the cage grinned, baring her teeth. Valenti continued. “What you’re doing is unleashing havoc on us—I can guarantee that.”

  “Are you finished?” said Sertôrian.

  “I am,” said Valenti. “Do what you’re going to do.” Valenti gave Sertôrian a tired salute and wandered off to join de Bronk at the muddy tarp.

  Inside the Bulgakov Apparatus, the woman took a step back from the door and held her hands clasped respectfully behind her back. Sertôrian undid the hasp that had so thoroughly foxed the Apparatus’s occupant and opened the door.

  Several minutes later, walking along the sandy banks of the wide Inhk-Ohm River, putting more distance between themselves and Sertôrian’s shipmates with each step, the two women fell into a comfortable rhythm, the decisive forward momentum of their pace lending a false sense of purpose to an otherwise aimless, amorphous situation. They had left the camp on the pretext of gathering materials the woman needed to transport the three shipmates away from this troublesome planet. But the moment they had moved out of earshot of Valenti, the woman had turned to Sertôrian and confessed that she did not know how exactly to do what she had promised.

  “So you lied,” said Sertôrian, still walking briskly forward even though such a confession merited an immediate about-face and a return to the safety of camp.

  “No,” said the woman. “Not exactly. I’ll be honest with you, Irena. I know I can get you off this planet; I’m just not sure how yet. It’s like the answer’s on the tip of my tongue; I know that I know it, I just can’t quite access it. Does that make sense? It’s an intuitive knowledge more than anything, so there might be some amount of trial and error.”

  “What are we doing heading into the forest then?” said Sertôrian.

  “I thought a walk might jog my mind,” said the woman.

  “Well?” said Sertôrian.

  “Give me a little more time,” she said.

  Although the Rosa doppelgänger was in no position to make demands, Sertôrian acquiesced and they continued on their stroll along the water’s edge. A blue-green river crab scu
ttled along a sandy patch of the bank. A shadowy trout swam in place in the cool water beneath an outcropping log. Sertôrian’s boots crunched through the marble-sized rocks that proliferated along the edge of the river. The more time she spent with this woman, the more seriously Sertôrian entertained a disturbing possibility:

  What if—and Sertôrian understood the manifold improbabilities contained in this proposition—what if this actually was her sister Rosa? Truly, a device capable of summoning the dead would be a triumph worthy of the Bulgakov Collective’s dazzling reputation. After all, the Collective had promised a device with a power beyond their wildest imaginings. Had years of combat and grim survivalism inured Sertôrian and her shipmates to the possibility of wonders and miracles? Why couldn’t this be her sister?

  If the Bulgakov Apparatus was a trap, as Valenti argued, then what would be this Rosa creature’s function? To kill them all? If so, then why hadn’t she done it already? She was, Sertôrian realized, leading her farther and farther away from Valenti and de Bronk, but if her plan was to lure them off one by one and murder them, then the Bulgakov Apparatus was one of the least efficient weapons ever created. Given the legendary prowess of the Collective, this seemed unlikely.

  “This isn’t permanent, by the way,” said the woman, interrupting Sertôrian’s train of thought. “I don’t know exactly how long I have, or what will happen when the time runs out, but I don’t get to stay forever.”

  Sertôrian resented this added pressure.

  The woman licked her lips.

  “If you were in my position,” said Sertôrian, “would you trust someone who claimed to be your dead sister?”

  “No,” said the woman. “That’s the thing—the reasonable position is to distrust me, and I understand that. I promise you, though, it’s really me.”

  Sertôrian took a deep breath, fully aware that there’d be no coming back from what she was about to say.

  “This is what we’re going to do,” said Sertôrian, her tone as businesslike as she could manage. “For the next few minutes, I’m going to play along with you, and I’m going to pretend that you’re Rosa.”

  “Excellent,” said the woman. “I feel like we’re—”

  “But I want to be perfectly clear,” said Sertôrian. “I do not believe that you’re actually my sister. I don’t know who or what you are, but I do know that I miss my sister. I miss her very much. So. Rosa.” Sertôrian paused, not meeting the other woman’s eyes. “Rosa, it’s nice to see you.”

  And with that, an alchemical reaction took place in Sertôrian’s mind, transforming the situation from yet another wretched postwar misadventure to a not-unpleasant echo of her childhood on Mars. All of the ingredients had been there: a trek through a forbidding wilderness, a tinge of danger in the air, and Rosa, or at least a near approximation of her. But not until Sertôrian addressed the woman as her sister did the transmutation take effect.

  Her thoughts returned to a Mars decades in the past, the Mars of her youth.

  So much had happened since then, so much had changed, that when Sertôrian thought about her life on the Red Planet, it was like she was remembering the life of a stranger. In the intervening years, she’d lost nearly all access to that younger version of herself so that her memories of that time had taken on a distant, third-person quality.

  Throughout their early years in the small town of Novo Lobato, the two Sertôrian girls had constituted a strange, isolated nation of two whose customs were inscrutable, and whose boundaries were impassable to all non-natives. The girls’ parents—tenacious descendants of the convicts and political prisoners who’d been forced to settle this arid planet in its earlier days as a penal colony—were well respected in the community. Their mother, a space traffic controller, spent most of her waking hours fifteen miles from town in a tiny booth atop a lofty tower, monitoring rocket flights into and out of their Martian province. Maria Sertôrian staffed the little booth almost single-handedly, reprieved only by a night controller whose shifts granted Maria just enough time to catch a few hours of sleep before returning to the tower semi-rested.

  Oskar Sertôrian, the girls’ father, worked as a field medic for Red Planet Mineral, a mining company whose surveyors and diggers suffered regular bodily harm while operating the heavy, skittish machinery that located and extracted an assortment of valuable minerals from the depths of nearby Mt. Krummholz. He set broken bones, stitched lacerated flesh, and, when necessary, signed death certificates for those workers who’d died on the job.

  Both careers, vital and difficult as they were, lent the Sertôrian parents a moderate prestige within the town.

  For their part, the two girls—Rosa and Irena—were not disliked, and indeed there was much to admire about them. They were polite, responsible, self-sufficient, and bright. By all these measures, they should have been warmly regarded by all who knew them. Behind the girls’ good manners, however, lurked a subtle but perceptible indifference to the affairs of anyone outside their sisterhood.

  To outsiders, this insularity manifested itself in quick, intense glances exchanged between the sisters—who bore a striking resemblance to each other—in accidental allusions to elaborate private mythologies, and most of all, in the sisters’ overwhelming preference for one another’s company above all else, which led them to regularly reject the warmly extended invitations of classmates to birthday parties and sleepovers. Though they could not reasonably fault the sisters for their closeness, it rubbed many townspeople the wrong way.

  Part of this exclusivity was a function of geography. Due to their mother’s vocation, the family lived just outside town, as near as possible to the colossal observation tower. As a result, the sisters spent all of their free time playing in the vast surrounding wilderness—a red, rocky desert known as Veloq’s Sand-Barrens, after an early settler who had perished there. Together, they scrambled over rock piles, played hide-and-seek among towering hoodoos, and carried picnic dinners up sloping peaks, where the setting of the distant sun served as a backdrop for their shared evening meal. In the eyes of the townspeople, the eccentric austerity of the Sand-Barrens rubbed off on the sisters, clinging to them like the region’s inescapable red dust.

  When, several years later, Irena left home to attend spaceflight school, leaving behind her parents, and more significantly, Rosa, she had no idea that her departure would sever that girlhood bond forever. The sisters had been so inseparable, so intertwined for so long, that Irena couldn’t imagine their relationship being any different. But in the end, all it took to break that connection was physical distance. There was no shouted confrontation, no bubbling resentment, no bitter falling-out. Instead, the two sisters merely lost touch with each other, bit by bit.

  They wrote letters at first while Irena was at spaceflight school, but neither sister was much at letter writing, so gradually the letters stopped. They still saw each other on the occasional holiday when Sertôrian visited home, but their lives had already begun to follow such separate trajectories that as time went by they had less to talk about, and while a vestige of that childhood affection always remained, there came a point when the two sisters had no idea what to do with each other—Irena the hotshot interstellar space captain, Rosa the small-town schoolteacher. Each sister had become as mysterious to the other as their sororal unit had been to the townspeople of Novo Lobato during their growing-up years.

  So, yes, this machine-produced entity, this fleshy memento of her dead sister currently walking next to Sertôrian along the banks of the Inhk-Ohm River, did feel like a stranger. But so had the indisputably authentic Rosa the last time Irena had seen her at their mother’s funeral a few years before the war. And when news of Rosa’s own death had reached Sertôrian not long before she and her crew had been flung into the Minoan System, she’d felt a strange emptiness, followed by the uncomfortable realization that Rosa had already been lost to her for decades.

  This whol
e situation, then, presented an irresolvable tangle of logical and emotional complications. Sertôrian had no idea where to begin, so she continued her charade of taking this Rosa doppelgänger at her word.

  “What you said back at the campsite,” said Sertôrian as she and the woman clambered over a fallen tree that blocked their path. “About the afterlife—herding animals and all that. Was it true?”

  “In a way,” said the woman, brushing bits of muddy bark from her hand. “Not literally, though—not by any means. The reality of it is much stranger, but what I said about the animals—that sums up the way I felt about the situation there. It was the best I could do at the spur of the moment.”

  Her eyes gleamed violet in the midday sun.

  “Now that you’ve had a little more time to think about it then,” said Sertôrian, “how would you describe it?”

  They reached a small waterfall and the terrain along the riverbank grew steeper and rockier. Picking her way downhill, Sertôrian couldn’t help but steal glances at her companion’s familiar and uncanny face, resolute and not unhappy, her pointed tongue emerging intermittently to wet her cracking lips.

  “Do you remember the first time we hiked into Ghost Grotto Springs?” asked the woman once they’d reached more level ground.

  “The first time?” said Sertôrian. “Absolutely.”

  Ghost Grotto Springs was a legendary feature of Veloq’s Sand-Barrens, an enchanting, watery nook so difficult to find that many assumed it didn’t actually exist. It had taken the sisters an entire summer of systematic exploration—gridded maps, a homemade sextant—to find the Springs, but they’d done it.

  “Well,” said the woman, “do you remember how, without really realizing it, we built the place up in our minds so much that by the end of the summer we expected—or I did, at least—some mythic, tropical oasis?”