The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  THIRTEEN

  • • •

  As Sertôrian regained consciousness, her first thought was that she could still turn the situation around. Things had taken an unfortunate turn—that couldn’t be denied—but she could still fix this. She opened her eyes and took quick stock of her situation. She lay facedown on the ground at the edge of their campsite, a gag in her mouth, her limbs trussed up behind her, a throbbing pain at the side of her head. The afternoon sun shone down into her face, and she squinted against the light. Yes, things were very bad, but didn’t she have a genius for survival, for pulling her team together when the going got tough?

  Then came the scrape of a shovel cutting through dirt. She craned her neck toward the sound and saw Ava Valenti standing waist deep in a hole in the ground, her face, torso, and arms covered with dirt and still-drying blood. Valenti dug with steady strokes, tossing spadefuls of earth to the side with a short-handled trenching shovel.

  All around them, pieces of the Bulgakov Apparatus lay scattered on the ground, and Ernst de Bronk, clutching a skull-sized rock in his hands, moved methodically through the rubble, smashing to bits any component that could still be functional.

  Not far from the deepening hole in the ground, the woman who looked exactly like Rosa lay splayed in the dirt, her throat gaping open, her threadbare sweater soaked in blood. A wave of bile rose in Sertôrian’s throat, but she fought it back down. The magnitude of this betrayal was greater than she could have imagined. She turned her head away and closed her eyes.

  In the distance she could hear the roar of the Twin Falls, a deceptively soothing undertone to the regular strick of Valenti’s shovel blade cutting through hard earth. As Sertôrian lay there with her eyes held tightly shut, her mind ran not to thoughts of punishment but of repairing the situation, whatever that might mean. Sertôrian recognized she was not blameless in all this, and furthermore blame was beside the point. Survival remained the top priority—survival and returning home so they could resume lives of civilized normalcy. Her team couldn’t just dissolve like this, not this late in the game. They needed to talk things through, and they needed to pull together.

  As best she could with a gag in her mouth, Sertôrian shouted for her crew’s attention. The cries emerged muffled and weak, but Valenti heard them and paused her digging mid-stroke. She looked at Sertôrian for a moment with flat, empty eyes, then looked away and emptied her shovel-load of dirt onto the growing pile next to the hole.

  Sertôrian shouted again, but this time, if either of her shipmates heard her, they gave no sign of it. And so, rather than yelling more, rather than struggling against her ropes, Sertôrian chose to conserve energy for whatever might come next. She lay very still, her cheek pressed into a sharp twig, and tried to control her panicked breathing.

  She watched Valenti dig, and after a while the hole grew deep enough that Valenti was in up to her shoulders. Valenti paused, wiped her forehead, and hoisted herself out of the hole. She glanced at de Bronk still wildly flinging the last bits of the Apparatus into the surrounding forest. Then, tossing aside the shovel, Valenti crouched down at the dead woman’s head and, hooking her own arms under the dead woman’s armpits, dragged her into the open pit.

  Although it was deep, the grave was not very long, and Sertôrian could tell by the way the dead woman’s body folded as it fell into the hole that it would come to rest in an ungainly sitting position, where it would remain awkwardly bunched until the natural processes of decay ran their full course.

  Shovel once again in hand, Valenti recommenced her project, this time in reverse, dropping spadefuls of dirt into the open grave with the steadiness of a grimy metronome. When de Bronk had finished scattering the remnants of the Bulgakov Apparatus, he joined Valenti in her task, kneeling down and pushing in heaps of dirt with his extended arms.

  By the time evening arrived, they had finished, a bulge of dark earth the only testament to their actions. They brushed themselves off, drank some water, and hoisted their already packed rucksacks onto their backs. Valenti removed a long knife from the pocket of her bag—Sertôrian’s knife—and set it on the ground a few meters away from her trussed captain. As she did so, she nodded to Sertôrian and then without a word, Valenti and de Bronk set out at a trot into the darkening forest.

  A bird, perhaps the same one Sertôrian had heard the night before, trilled a melancholy reveille. Taking a deep breath, Sertôrian began to squirm across the ground toward the knife that Valenti had left behind. It was slow going. Moving even a centimeter required an ungainly combination of shimmies and heaves that dangerously sapped her already waning strength. Pebbles and twigs scraped her cheeks and jabbed through her worn clothing. Her feet and hands tingled with pain from being raised up behind her for so long, and her stomach twisted with pain, as she hadn’t eaten since the night before.

  Sertôrian well knew, however, that focusing on her discomfort would get her nowhere. So she jerked her body forward across the ground, centimeter by grueling centimeter. When she reached the knife, darkness had arrived in full force. The blade glinted in the starlight. Sertôrian sidled up next to the knife and with the last of her strength began rocking her body from side to side. After a few rocks, she gained enough momentum to flop onto her side, her bound hands just centimeters from the knife. She scooted backward until her fingers touched the handle. She grasped the knife and, moving clumsily but with purpose, positioned the blade against the rope that bound her. From there it was a sweaty half hour of grunting, sawing at the ropes, fumbling the knife, picking it back up, sawing, dropping, picking back up, until her hands were free. She untied the rest of the rope and then lay there waiting as the blood came coursing painfully back into her limbs.

  As soon as it had, she stood up, stiffly, and started walking in the direction that her two mutinous shipmates had gone. She stole a sidelong glance at the dark mound of dirt to her left, but that wasn’t something she could think about now. Right now she needed to catch up with Valenti and de Bronk, and she needed to salvage this wretched situation they’d all created for themselves. She started to run, but her adrenaline couldn’t compensate for the toll taken by the physical and emotional traumas of the past twenty-four hours. She hadn’t eaten in a day, hadn’t had any water in nearly as long, and had just spent hours tied up on the ground. Before she even reached the trees, her head grew fuzzy and she collapsed once again into darkness.

  Hazy confusion consumed her for what could have been hours or even days. She was aware of movement, of new, unfamiliar voices, but where her troubled sleep ended and her semiconsciousness began, she couldn’t tell.

  After some time, though, the haze cleared, and she woke up in what looked like a clean, inexpensive hotel room. The décor was bland and accommodating—lots of warmish, neutral colors, an inoffensive print of a field of flowers hanging on the wall opposite her bed—and everything was very clean. She was very clean, for that matter. Somebody had bathed her and dressed her in a pair of soft cotton pajamas. She currently lay beneath a blue quilt in a wide, comfortable bed. She propped the pillows behind her and sat up.

  She had a dim recollection of a delirious night’s sleep back at the Twin Falls, followed at dawn by the sound of engines and shouting, and then a bumpy flight spent tightly restrained. How long ago had that been? She needed to find Valenti and de Bronk, and to do so she had to get out of here, wherever here was.

  Pushing the quilt aside—when was the last time she’d slept in a bed?—she swung her feet onto the floor. As she stood up, she realized she must have eaten or been fed during those lost hours. She felt stable and revitalized, and as she walked to the room’s single, curtained window, a dim memory of hot soup and warm bread flickered at the back of her mind. Pulling open the window’s heavy curtains, she looked down at a neatly landscaped park below. Her room was several stories up, and based on the human figures she saw inside the high-fenced enclosures and glassed-in habitats below, s
he surmised that what lay before her was the Arch-Kaiser’s infamous zoo—stocked not with animals but with people, primarily the Arch-Kaiser’s political enemies but also with individuals who possessed some remarkable physical attribute: great beauty or ugliness, a striking physique, and so on. That meant she currently occupied the zoo administration building.

  He’d caught her then—the Arch-Kaiser had tracked them down. She wondered how long it would be before she’d have to meet with Harrison to receive her death sentence.

  She closed the curtains, and as she did so a woman’s voice addressed her through a speaker in the wall, which Sertôrian had failed to notice. Above the speaker was the small, glinting lens of a security camera.

  “Captain Sertôrian,” said the voice. “So glad to see you up and about. You gave us quite a scare when we found you. We worried we were too late.”

  “Too late for what?” said Sertôrian.

  “To rescue you, of course,” said the voice.

  Why would the Arch-Kaiser send people to rescue her? Sertôrian looked directly into the lens of the camera.

  “Who am I talking to?” she said.

  “Where are my manners?” said the voice. “Ruth Aylesbury, at your service.”

  A strategically unhelpful answer.

  “What am I doing here?” said Sertôrian.

  “Yes, of course. You must have so many questions,” said Aylesbury. “There’s a shower in your bathroom, if you’d like to use it, and a fresh set of clothes in your closet. Why don’t you get dressed—at your leisure, of course—and when you’re ready one of your guards will escort you up to the roof of the garden. You and I will have lunch together—I’ll put in an order with the cafeteria—and I’ll explain everything.”

  “One of my guards?” said Sertôrian.

  “Yes,” said Aylesbury. “You have two of them stationed at your door. It’s for your own protection, I assure you.”

  “You can dismiss them,” said Sertôrian. “I’d prefer it that way.”

  “I’ll see you at lunch as soon as you’re ready,” said Aylesbury, ignoring the question outright.

  So that was how it was going to be.

  While she bathed and dressed, Sertôrian strategized. If these people, whoever they were—Harrison’s secret police?—had found her, they had most likely found Valenti and de Bronk as well. Which meant her shipmates were probably right here in the same building with her. The first step would be to establish contact. Then, once they opened a line of communication, they could start scheming. They’d escaped before from facilities more secure than this one, and they could do it again.

  Sertôrian suspected that this Aylesbury’s cheery affect concealed a much more calculating disposition than she let on, which would make intelligence gathering a tricky endeavor. Tricky but not impossible.

  As soon as she was dressed, a pair of armed guards entered the room.

  “Ready?” said the first one.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They led her down a forking series of hallways, up several flights of stairs, and onto a balcony arboretum at the top of the building. A compact woman in a crisp khaki uniform waited at a metal picnic table. When she saw Sertôrian and the guards, she rose with a smile.

  “Ruth Aylesbury,” said the woman.

  Her brownish hair, in a tidy pageboy, framed a face that, through a studied blandness, rendered any inner secrets completely inaccessible to the world at large. At the moment, her wide smile conveyed a low-wattage warmth that might lead lesser adversaries to lower their defenses.

  “Irena Sertôrian,” said Sertôrian, shaking the woman’s hand. “But it seems like you already knew that.”

  “Oh yes,” said Aylesbury. “And I’m so looking forward to chatting with you.”

  Sertôrian suspected that any questions she posed at this time—What happened to my shipmates? Where am I? Does the Arch-Kaiser know about this?—would be deflected with a screen of inane pleasantries, so she merely returned the compliment and took a seat across from her.

  The guards left the two women alone.

  “I normally don’t talk business on an empty stomach,” said Aylesbury, “but I’d hate to keep you in suspense much longer. I imagine there’s a lot you’d like to know.”

  Sertôrian gave a slight nod.

  “Yes, well,” said Aylesbury. “Where to start?”

  She furrowed her brow, appearing to give the matter genuine thought. Sertôrian took the opportunity to examine her surroundings. Potted trees filled the balcony: birches, oaks, yews, willows, rowans, and alders. The shade from their leafy branches created a chilly twilight in the space even in the heat of the day.

  Beyond the balcony, through the leaves of the potted trees, Sertôrian could just make out the carefully ordered landscaping of the Arch-Kaiser’s zoo down below. Groups of visitors, appearing tiny from this height, wandered from habitat to habitat, pausing from time to time to gaze at their jailed compatriots.

  Aylesbury lifted her head and Sertôrian returned her attention to the smartly uniformed woman across the table.

  “I suppose I’ll just come out with it,” said Aylesbury. “We’d like to offer you a job.”

  This was not what Sertôrian had been expecting, was so far beyond the realm of anticipated possibilities, in fact, that her guard went down completely and out came a genuinely confused, “Hold on. What?”

  “A job,” repeated Aylesbury. “We’ve recently had a position open up—head of Tactical Operations—and we think you’d be a perfect fit.”

  Sertôrian didn’t even know where to start with this proposal.

  “So you’re asking me to work for the Arch-Kaiser?” she said after a moment, working on the assumption that Aylesbury was part of Harrison’s secret police force.

  “Oh no,” said Aylesbury. “Not the Arch-Kaiser. No. I’m asking you to work for us.”

  This clarified nothing. A breeze rustled the leaves of a nearby alder.

  Sertôrian said, “And who would the us be, in this case?”

  “Yes, right,” said Aylesbury. “I suppose that’s not entirely clear to you at the moment. The Arch-Kaiser, as you’re well aware, has a secret police force at his beck and call. You met them when you first arrived on Rhadamanthus IX.”

  “Yes I did,” said Sertôrian, recalling the thorough torture they had administered to her and her shipmates.

  “Thing of it is, there’s nothing secret about them. Everyone on the planet knows they exist, knows what they look like, knows what they do. So they’re not really a secret police force, are they?”

  “I guess not,” said Sertôrian.

  “No,” said Aylesbury. “That’s where we come in. We’re the truly secret police. Not even the Arch-Kaiser is aware of our existence.” She folded her arms with satisfaction. “With me so far?”

  “Not completely,” said Sertôrian, still disoriented by the unexpected job offer. “What use are you to the Arch-Kaiser if he doesn’t know you exist?”

  “An excellent question,” said Aylesbury. “And the answer is, no use at all. The Arch-Kaiser Glenn Harrison, however, is of great use to us. You see, our friend the Arch-Kaiser only thinks he runs this planet. In point of fact, our secret police force predates Mr. Harrison’s rule by decades. As we’ve done with his predecessors, we allow Harrison certain powers so he can maintain the illusion of his sovereignty. But the reality is, we’re the ones running the show.”

  “And the Arch-Kaiser is just a distraction,” said Sertôrian.

  “Precisely,” said Aylesbury. “And Glenn Harrison has proven an especially effective one. Such megalomania is a rare thing, and more valuable to us than he could ever know. He’s temperamentally incapable of imagining power greater than his own, and so we exert very little effort to hide ourselves from him. And his eccentricities—his zoo, his penchant for outrageous di
sguises, his obsession with the occult—command the attention of the planet’s citizenry. They can’t keep their eyes off him, and so, without even knowing it, he provides the majority of the camouflage we need to hide from the common people.” Aylesbury chuckled and shook her head. “This latest venture is a perfect example. What was it he sent you to look for? The Tablets of Metempsychosis? The Book of Futures Past?”

  “It was the Bulgakov Apparatus,” said Sertôrian.

  “That’s right,” said Aylesbury with another broad grin. “The Bulgakov Apparatus. Believe it or not, when he develops his little fixations on these fairy tales and legends, he becomes absolutely convinced they’re real.”

  Sertôrian raised her eyebrows in faux disbelief.

  “I’m sure he expected you to actually come back with the Bulgakov Apparatus,” said Aylesbury, “as absurd as that may seem.”

  Sertôrian took this in like a punch to the gut. So Aylesbury had no idea the Apparatus was real. Was being the operative word.

  The door to the arboretum swung open.

  “Ah,” said Aylesbury. “Lunch.”

  A guard had stepped through the glass door holding two plastic cafeteria trays laden with food. Sertôrian was thankful for the distraction. She doubted her face could conceal her outrage at Aylesbury’s flippant dismissal of the Bulgakov Apparatus, the discovery of which had cost Sertôrian nearly everything. She tamped down her fury, tamped down thoughts of her mutinous shipmates, of the dead woman she had left behind. She tried not to imagine the crawling insects and the gritty dirt finding their way into that tender, gaping gash in the woman’s throat. It hadn’t been Rosa—Sertôrian had to remember that—only a cunning replica.