by Tim Wirkus
But Aylesbury’s scrutiny left Sertôrian unruffled, and doggedly she pursued her strategy of outward assimilation. She lived in the same gray, anonymous housing complex that all her colleagues preferred, drank in the same bars, vacationed at the same dumpy lake resort. Over time, she even grew accustomed to the appearance of the Arch-Kaiser Glenn Harrison’s sneering image on the ubiquitous urban vid-screens, and at some point his face ceased to generate such sharp revulsion in Sertôrian. And when, inevitably, Harrison was violently deposed to make way for a fresher, younger demagogue, she hid from her coworkers any sign of personal satisfaction at having outlasted the tyrant, commenting only on the organizational adjustments that would need to be made in response to the planet’s ostensible new leader.
Sertôrian’s outward behavior, both on the job and off, was so immaculate, so above reproach as to stymie even Aylesbury’s tenacious doubts.
Inwardly, however, Sertôrian’s rage knew no bounds. Early in her tenure with the force, she had procured, through subterfuge and misdirection, the minutes of a meeting conducted just after her capture. The document revealed that the officers present, Ruth Aylesbury among them, had unanimously resolved that if Sertôrian turned down their offer of employment she would be executed on the spot by an assassin concealed within the balcony’s dense foliage, and her body would be incinerated along with the corpses of her two shipmates, Ava Valenti and Ernst de Bronk, who, as the minutes of the meeting further revealed, had both been caught, interrogated, and beheaded the day before Sertôrian’s capture. (For good measure, Sertôrian’s ship, the Circe, had previously been demolished.)
Those present at that meeting were all her coworkers now, and to be forced to cheerfully interact each day with such a cabal of remorseless fiends stoked in Sertôrian a white-hot flame of hatred. In unguarded moments, she daydreamed labyrinthine and bloody revenge plots that baroquely punished those who had killed her crew and who currently held her captive. Because she was a captive, that much was clear. She may have been allowed to leave the building at night, to occupy rooms by herself, to move about the city as her coworkers did, but as she did so, she was under constant surveillance, and whoever was watching her—Aylesbury, most likely—didn’t bother being overly subtle about it. Everywhere she went Sertôrian spotted tiny lenses, pinhead microphones, and clumsy tails, all meant to remind her of the situation’s true nature.
In spite of the rage that simmered within her, Sertôrian understood that revenge had a tendency, even when successful, to destroy the avenger along with her targets, and since Sertôrian still hoped to leave this planet alive, she decided to bide her time until the right opportunity for escape presented itself. This strategy required no small amount of self-control, but if nothing else, her years of wandering the Minoan System had inculcated in her a nearly pathological capacity for patience.
With time, this focus paid off, enabling her to feign a loyalty so convincing that when Aylesbury was tapped to take over as commissioner of Central Command, she appointed Sertôrian her chief lieutenant. And while such a posting did not entirely liberate Sertôrian from the heavy surveillance she had been under since her arrival, it did grant her sufficient operational autonomy to move with some freedom throughout the towering administration building.
In the end, her escape was almost as simple as walking out the front door.
One day, not long after Sertôrian had assumed her new duties as lieutenant commissioner, one of the tactical units confiscated a spaceship from a band of smugglers foolish enough to make a pit stop on Rhadamanthus IX. It was just a little planet hopper, nothing that could get her out of the Minoan System altogether, but it would do the job for now.
The scarcity of vehicles capable of leaving the planet had long been the greatest impediment to Sertôrian’s escape. Only once before had a vessel with such capabilities been so near. Years earlier, the force had confiscated a spaceship even more powerful than this current one, but Sertôrian had been so new to the organization, so hobbled by surveillance, that she hadn’t been able to get anywhere near the craft without arousing the suspicions of her superiors. The ship had been sold through a fence to an influential spice merchant who’d stopped off for supplies on Rhadamanthus IX, and that had been that.
This time was different. Sertôrian could move more or less unrestricted, and so the moment she heard of the spaceship’s presence in the building’s aircraft hangar, she knew this was her chance.
She thought back, as she sometimes did, to those delirious moments when she’d first learned of the deaths of Valenti and de Bronk. She’d initially felt a dizzy unburdening—for the first time in decades she was responsible for no one but herself. She was finally unconstrained, finally unfettered. It hadn’t taken long, however, for that relief to be replaced by a sense of failure more stinging than any she had ever experienced, a sense of failure commingled with grief, resentment, and fury. In the long run, only the fury had survived, filling Sertôrian until all that remained of her—she often felt—was raw, corrosive rage.
As she plotted the details of her imminent escape, then, her body shook, not with worry but with anger.
She waited until lunchtime to make her move. As she walked with a group of colleagues down the stairs to the cafeteria, Sertôrian said she’d forgotten something in her office and would catch up with them in a minute. Once separated from the group she moved quickly, veering down one empty hallway and then another. Heart pounding, Sertôrian found the hangar guarded by Cobb and Harris, two officers who had worked under Sertôrian on numerous tactical operations.
“Afternoon,” said Sertôrian.
“Lieutenant Commissioner,” said Cobb and Harris in unison.
Looking discreetly past them and behind several rows of aerowagons, she saw the spaceship—her means of delivery.
She said, “I’m taking an aerowagon out to meet an informant,” which was just barely close enough to plausible to get her through the door.
“Very good, Lieutenant Commissioner,” said Cobb and flipped the switch to open the runway exit portal.
“As you were,” said Sertôrian.
Cobb and Harris saluted Sertôrian, and as she walked away they resumed their conversation. Sertôrian walked straight to the spaceship and climbed the ladder into its open cockpit.
It wasn’t until the ship was lifting off the ground that Cobb and Harris, alerted by the sound of an engine more powerful than that of an aerowagon, noticed something amiss. They turned to watch the spaceship flying out the exit portal, and the last Sertôrian saw of them was their baffled faces trying to make sense of her unexpected departure.
As the ship passed through the planet’s atmosphere and into the darkness of outer space, Sertôrian could feel seven years’ worth of tightly compressed anger begin a strange metamorphosis, one that would stretch over many decades before producing in Sertôrian’s heart an emotional state as potent as it was numinous. At the moment, though, what Sertôrian mainly felt was relief.
Consulting the onboard navigation system, she set a course for Daedalus IX, one of the few planets in the Minoan System that she had not yet visited. Autopilot engaged, she leaned back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. The instrument panel chirped pleasantly, confirming the vessel’s course, and Sertôrian spared one backward look through the rear porthole at the shrinking sphere that had been her prison for more than seven years.
On her first day of work with the secret police, Sertôrian had found a small cedar box sitting on top of her desk. Next to it had been a slip of paper reading, simply, “Your shipmates.” Sertôrian had looked inside the box at the cinders and ash and recognized the gesture for the threat that it was. The box had earned a permanent spot on her bedside table, where it would be the last thing she saw every night before falling into a tense and dreamless sleep.
Now, in the cockpit of the stolen planet hopper, she pulled the same cedar box from her canvas rucksack. With
the ship still on autopilot, Sertôrian shook the contents of the box into the waste disposal chute and, commending the ashes to the cosmic emptiness around her, pushed the red eject button. Through the side porthole, Sertôrian watched the remnants of her once formidable crew drift into the vacuum of space, a fleeting constellation of dust. Her thoughts turned, as they often had in recent times, to the woman she had left buried near the Twin Falls seven years earlier. By now the woman’s face would surely have been rendered unrecognizable through the ineluctable process of decomposition, a small mercy that instilled a dubious comfort in Sertôrian’s heart.
She returned to the pilot’s seat.
Unbeknownst to Sertôrian, a gory and long-running feud between the planet’s two most ruthless families awaited her on Daedalus IV. She would, yet again, be kidnapped and tortured. She would be humiliated and threatened. She would be pressed into service as a spy for one infernally clever family and then the other. She would kill and nearly be killed.
But for now, there was only the quiet calm of a single person in a tiny vessel drifting through the dark and starry immensity of space. Hands tightly gripping the ship’s yoke, Captain Irena Sertôrian savored the unfathomable stillness, drawing the moment into herself like a drowning sailor taking her last breath.
AFTERWORD
This started out as an acknowledgments page, but as I was running through the list of people to thank, I realized there are a couple more things I need to tell you.
In late October 2016 I got a phone call from Tim Wirkus, an old college acquaintance of mine. I’d met up with him about a year and a half earlier after he read from his first novel at a local bookstore. It would be an overstatement to say we’d had a full-blown artistic rivalry at BYU—I was never that interested in the stuff Tim wrote—but there had been a palpably competitive undercurrent to every interaction we’d ever had. The first time we met, for instance, and discovered we’d both served missions in São Paulo, Tim spent the entire conversation trying to one-up me, to prove that he’d served in more interesting, more dangerous, more picturesque parts of the city than I had.
“Did you ever meet a witch?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“I did,” he said, and I could see him notching up a point on the mental scorecard he’d been keeping since he’d introduced himself. I should have called him out on his exoticization of the city and its people, but at the time I lacked the language to do so, and anyway he didn’t seem worth the trouble.
Ensuing interactions followed a similar template, with one or the other of us casually bringing up a recently won university writing contest or an obscure online publication, and the other one scrambling to top it. We mostly avoided each other, though, with Tim keeping to his weird clique of Secret History wannabe writing center nerds, and me sheltering myself in the branches of my lofty principles.
I’d been interested to discover, though, that he’d recently published a novel, and I wanted to see what he had to say about it. As we talked after the reading, I told him about The Infinite Future and sent him a copy. Given our history, I suppose it’s odd that I trusted Tim to help me get the book published. But it turns out that rivalry engenders an intimacy all its own.
Initially, that trust seemed to pay off. He finished the manuscript by the next afternoon and emailed to say he loved it, and would do everything he could to find a publisher. This was followed by a long stretch of radio silence during which I assumed Tim had deliberately forgotten about the book, just the kind of passive-aggressive move I should have expected from the guy.
A year and a half later, though, I was raking leaves in the backyard of my new house when I got a call from my mediocre old bête noir.
“Hey there, Danny boy,” said Tim, his voice dripping with forced congeniality. “Guess who’s about to make your day?”
“Is it you?” I said, unable to fully purge the annoyance from my voice.
“You got it,” said Tim, and then told me he’d found a small but reputable science-fiction press that wanted to bring out The Infinite Future.
“Wow,” I said, leaning on my rake and smiling into my phone in spite of the announcement’s source.
“Yeah,” said Tim. “You’re welcome.”
I ignored this and allowed the good news to sink in. It was like a ray of light through the clouds of that dreary autumn day.
“This is so exciting,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Tim. “Should be a fun little book!”
A sudden wind scattered the small pile of leaves I’d been gathering before Tim called, and the accompanying sharp chill through my wool jacket snuffed out the flame of my growing enthusiasm. Actually, no, it wasn’t the wind. It was Tim’s description of The Infinite Future that stopped me short, the diminutive he’d attached to the book rankling me like a deliberate flick to the ear.
“Well, I mean, it’s not a little book,” I said, not even trying to hide my irritation.
“No, it’s definitely got some meat on its bones,” said Tim, still not getting it. “I didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.”
“They’re not ruffled,” I said, although they were. “I’m just surprised you described the book as little.”
“Yeah, as a term of endearment,” said Tim. “And it is a fun little book, so relax.”
I tightened my grip on the handle of my rake.
“But you wouldn’t call War and Peace a fun little book,” I said. “Right? I mean, you wouldn’t say that about, I don’t know, Ulysses.”
“Probably not,” said Tim, his voice betraying an incipient boredom with the direction our conversation was taking.
“And I’m not saying that, quality-wise, The Infinite Future is necessarily on a par with War and Peace or Ulysses,” I continued, “but in terms of its scope, it just feels evocative of so much more. It’s like the tip of an enormous iceberg, you know?”
While I waited for Tim’s response, I watched the dead leaves scuttling across my yard on the growing wind. What had seemed so self-evident to me about Salgado-MacKenzie’s fragmentary work had apparently not manifested itself to Tim.
“How so?” he said finally. Was he even listening anymore?
“You read my introduction, right?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So you know that The Infinite Future was originally intended to be a mega-novel with a page count in the thousands,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Tim.
“So?” I said. “Doesn’t reading the existing manuscript feel so tantalizing to you? Like the little we have of what was intended just serves to emphasize how big the unrealized possibilities are?”
There was another pause on the line.
“Like I said,” said Tim. “I really like the book, and I’m very excited that more people are going to be able to read it.”
I ignored his condescending dodge and told him that every time I’d read The Infinite Future it had summoned the ghost version of its as-yet-unrealized self, inspiring a complicated awe that for me was the essential heart of the book.
“Yeah, that’s pretty interesting, Danny,” said Tim, and I could almost hear his thumb reaching over to end the call. He again offered his congratulations and said he had to go. He had a doctor’s appointment in just a few minutes. Recognizing a brushoff when I heard one, I thanked him and hung up the phone. Looking around my yard, I saw that the wind had already undone a whole morning’s worth of work. Letting my rake fall to the ground, I went inside and switched on Side 3 by the Raspberries, then lay down on my new living room couch feeling indignant and a little embarrassed.
On an intellectual level I could recognize that Tim had just given me some very good news, but emotionally all that had registered was that maddening diminutive he’d attached to The Infinite Future—a “fun little book.” Really? Was that all it was? Hoping to transform my zigzagging anxiety into som
ething more celebratory, I decided to share the news with the only people who might be able to share my reaction.
• • •
Because it wasn’t feasible for the three of us to meet in person, I was thrilled when Sérgio and Harriet both agreed to participate in a video chat the next afternoon. It had been seven years since I’d seen either of them, and while I’d exchanged a handful of emails with Sérgio during my time in law school, I hadn’t heard a single thing from Harriet.
Well, I guess that’s not completely true. The intervening years had been especially newsworthy for Mormonism, from Church leadership intensely opposing the legalization of gay marriage to The Book of Mormon musical to Mitt Romney’s presidential bid to the excommunication of a prominent women’s rights activist. Reportage had abounded in national papers, and it was rare to read an article or a think piece without seeing a quote from Harriet Kimball. Her take on The Book of Mormon musical, for instance: “Funny enough, but not nearly as well researched as it pretends to be.” Or here’s this doozy from that New Yorker piece on mid-twentieth-century Mormon historians: “Look at all the backlash against Juanita Brooks for The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Church leadership didn’t dispute its factuality, but there were still members of the Quorum of the Twelve who wanted Brooks excommunicated, because the massacre just wasn’t something that was openly discussed. Compare that to Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, which, behind closed doors, even the Church president agreed was filled with dubious suppositions, doctrinal errors, and minor heresies. McConkie was a rising star, though, so nobody said one word about their problems with the book. McConkie’s reputation was protected, and Brooks’s was not, which just goes to show you that some Mormons are more equal than others.”
The combination of her thorough expertise in Mormon history and culture, and her idiosyncratic relationship with the Church—you were never sure whether her perspective would be staunchly apologist or just as ardently critical—made her a great source. That much I had to admit, though like any member of a touchy subculture, I resented the way in which these articles portrayed their interviewees’ opinions, however subtly, as being either universally typical of Mormon thinking or completely unique. I knew that this phenomenon wasn’t Harriet’s fault, though, at least not entirely, and that the articles were probably richer for her having commented. Not everyone I knew was willing to cut her that kind of slack, though.
