by Tim Wirkus
“Yes,” said Sertôrian.
“The way I imagined it,” the woman continued, “it was a crystal-blue lagoon, deep enough to dive into, with rock shelves at various heights around the water, where we could picnic or nap and then roll right into the water when we got too warm. There would be scenic shafts of light illuminating the grotto from artfully placed holes in the rock ceiling, and fish we could catch to fry up for our dinner. I think I’d stopped short of imagining mermaids who would teach us to breathe underwater, but only barely.”
Sertôrian kicked a rock out of her path and into the river, where it landed with a hollow splash.
“Yeah,” said Sertôrian. “I’d fantasized about building a raft we could float on. And cave paintings—I’d hoped there would be cave paintings.”
“Right,” said the woman. “And then we found it.”
The reality of Ghost Grotto Springs had failed to live up to even a fraction of their expectations. They’d crawled through the hole in the rock that served as the Grotto’s entrance to find a hollow in the cliffside the size of a high-ceilinged bathroom, an ankle-deep puddle of freezing, bubbling water on the ground.
The initial disappointment had been as shocking to Irena as the cold water on her feet. There would be no swimming, no fishing, no handmade rafts. As she’d adjusted to the reality of their discovery, though, Irena had come to recognize the charms of the real-life Ghost Grotto Springs, and the sisters returned frequently after that day, finding a cool respite from the desert heat in the secret stone cavern, eating picnic lunches with their feet in the cold clear water and talking excitedly about what adventures would fill the rest of the day.
“And that’s what death is like?” said Sertôrian.
“Yes,” said the woman, licking her lips with her sharp tongue. “It was not what I expected.”
Sertôrian thought back to their pleasant sojourns in the Grotto.
“But then after the disappointment,” she asked, “you came to enjoy it?”
The woman grimaced and said, “I never stopped being disappointed by what we found in that dingy little cave.”
She looked at Sertôrian with those oddly colored eyes and Sertôrian looked away. The stretch of river beside them glared in the midday sun. Sertôrian veered away from the riverbank, heading for the cover of trees and the leafy shade they’d provide.
“Hang on,” said the woman, reaching out her arm to stop Sertôrian. “Do you hear that?”
Sertôrian turned her head and listened. From the direction of their campsite she heard a series of clangs, followed by the unmistakable sound of wrenching metal.
“The Apparatus,” said Sertôrian.
In a sprint, she set off toward camp, with the woman keeping pace just a few steps behind her. More wrenching screeches filled the air, followed by a silence that was abruptly broken by two people shouting at each other. Sertôrian recognized the voices as belonging to Valenti and de Bronk, and although she couldn’t make out any words, the animalistic intensity of the yells clearly signaled the urgency, the potential for violence in the exchange. Sertôrian knew she would be too late to salvage the Bulgakov Apparatus, but as the shouting grew even more heated she hoped she would make it in time to keep Valenti and de Bronk from killing each other.
Then, just as she neared the campsite, the shouting stopped. Sertôrian trotted, panting, to the edge of the clearing and found it empty. The Bulgakov Apparatus lay in shambles on the ground, but her shipmates were nowhere to be seen. Where had they gone so suddenly? Her skin prickled, her body presaging an unseen danger.
Half a second before Ava Valenti’s improvised blackjack—a woolen sock filled with marble-sized river rocks—made contact with her skull, Sertôrian sniffed out the ruse. But it was too late to defend against the blow. Sertôrian registered a sharp pain at the side of her head, and then darkness.
TWELVE
The ambiguities of the previous chapter threaten to overwhelm me. I had never understood the extent to which my own scholarly affinity for uncertainty relied on the relative stability of my life at any given time. I have no problem embracing ambiguity, I now realize, as long as I am doing so within a larger context of regular, nutritious meals and a warm place to sleep at night, the pleasant companionship of sympathetic colleagues, and the absence of a threat of violent death at the hands of armed government forces. As long as such conditions hold, I’ll sing the praises of dwelling in uncertainty when it comes to the complexities of Sertôrian’s life and teachings, and I’ll decry as cardinal sins the impulse to flatten and oversimplify. I’ll argue with great vigor that we elevate our thinking as we suppress the urge to seek concrete resolutions.
A recent development has tempered such attitudes.
A spaceship approaches our quiet convent. We know the ship is a large one, capable of transporting dozens of passengers, and their attendant weaponry, over long galactic distances. We also know that if the ship maintains its current rate of speed, it will arrive at our docking station in three days’ time. What we don’t know is who’s inside.
On the one hand, the ship’s sinister bulk may harbor a panoply of Delegarchic soldiers, armed and ready to enact our death sentence.
Conversely, it may contain a relief party led by our six brave sisters, the ones we dispatched for help on the day we received the Delegarchs’ teleprint. The ship might be fully equipped to whisk us away from the convent and on to the next phase of our daring plan to thwart the insidious government factions who currently seek to destroy us.
We have no way of knowing beforehand which it might be, as, following our reception of the fateful teleprint from the office of the Delegarchs, we destroyed every bit of machinery in our communications booth, having learned by calamitous prior experience that such devices may be deftly and secretly employed by our enemies to eavesdrop on our every word.
We lack, therefore, the ability to hail or be hailed by this ship before it docks, and I cannot pretend that one outcome—death or salvation—is as likely as the other. Though a timely rescue by our fellow cenobites certainly lies within the realm of possibility, the odds favor Syndicate troops, who, based on the timing of the Syndics’ threatening teleprint, are due to arrive at any moment.
With this uncertainty looming large, I found myself unable in the previous chapter to do anything more rigorous than copy the words it contains from my dog-eared copy of Household Tales of Our Sertôrian to the pages of this manuscript. To engage any of the vexing questions raised by the arrival of the eerie doppelgänger, or by Sertôrian’s subsequent reaction, required more fortitude than I could muster.
A lifetime of engagement with the Sertôrial canon has taught me that each time I construct an explanatory framework with which to dispatch one question, seven new questions rear their beastly heads in its place. What, then, is the point of trying? Would it not be easier, as so many have done before, to ignore these questions, or better yet, to ignore the tales that generate them, opting instead for narratives that soothe and reassure? To this last question I must answer yes, it would obviously be easier to do so. But would I be any happier than I am right now? Perhaps, but I’m also reminded of an apocryphal account of the origins of Bombal’s Household Tales of Our Sertôrian.
I should note that the genesis of Household Tales lies concealed in a mythic obscurity typical of ancient, sacred texts, and I certainly don’t have the time now to even begin to wade through that swamp of supposition and legend to present you with a concise account of how the book came to be. Although I could, I suppose, present you with the basics.
We find the first surviving external reference to the book in a letter from Catherine of Saturn, that early martyr to the Sertôrial cause whose witty epistles continue to garner admiration even today, and whose proclivity for self-mutilation in the name of enlightenment has thankfully been all but forgotten. Writing to her half brother and fellow believer, Catherine d
erisively refers to a group of disciples on Phoebe I who “spend more time mining brutish thrills from Household Tales of Our Sertôrian than bending themselves in contemplation of the more delicate wonders to be found in the Four Shrouded Visions.” Such opprobrium for Bombal’s book would only grow among self-appointed policers of the faith in the ensuing centuries. Respect for, and interest in, Bombal’s book continued to decline until the recent discovery of the Tau Pakhomius audio reels drastically rehabilitated the tales’ credibility.
But what of the book’s origins? Who was Bombal (first name Greta or Gretjen or, a more remote possibility, Rosalinda)? And how did she come across the tales she so famously compiled? The answers to these questions remain so irreparably mired in legend and hearsay that I can in good conscience only say that we do not know.
With that caveat in mind, we’ll turn now to an account of the book’s origins that, while almost certainly fictional, contains a potency that transcends questions of historic truth.
The story goes that Gretjen Bombal, a prosperous zinc merchant from Galatea IV (I must remind you again that none of these details can be confirmed as historically accurate) met one day while walking down a crowded street in her home city, a grizzled old soldier whose penury was evident in the threadbare uniform he wore, a makeshift patch reading “DISCHARGED” sewn over its front pocket, lest anybody mistake him for an active trooper. The old soldier approached Bombal, who had already reached into her satchel to find a few coins she might give to the poor fellow. As she extended a handful of gold kopeks to the soldier, Bombal was surprised to see the old man shake his head.
He told her, “Before you give me anything, you must understand that in doing so you incur a serious obligation to me.”
“No, no,” said Bombal. “I’m giving you this money freely, with no obligations or—”
“I’ll repeat myself,” said the old soldier, “and this time listen carefully. If I accept this money, you incur an obligation to me.”
The old soldier raised his eyebrows significantly.
“What kind of obligation?” said Bombal, withdrawing her hand with the money.
“There is something I must tell you,” said the soldier. “And you must listen and remember.”
Bombal considered the proposition.
“I accept,” she said, and handed the old soldier the golden kopeks. He dropped the money into the trouser pocket of his threadbare uniform and explained that as a much younger man he had fought in a campaign on Bellerophon III with a very old soldier named Astrud Kalfa. One evening after their fellow troopers had fallen asleep, Kalfa, who lay next to him, turned over and quietly announced that she carried a valuable package of secret knowledge inside her elderly brain, knowledge that she needed desperately to pass on.
She told him that many years earlier, when she was a young soldier herself, she had served as the communications technician on one of the few transgalactic transport vessels to have survived the chaotic decades following the Great Aurigan War. During one especially delicate mission, the first officer of the ship had accidentally stumbled across a long-lost Lachesian war hero who had been stuck for decades in the Minoan System and reduced to a shattered wreck of her former self. The first officer brought the woman on board and debriefed her, primarily to discover whether she possessed any knowledge about the planets in the Minoan System that might come in handy during their current mission.
Kalfa acted as the stenoduler during this debriefing, and in the decades since then she had been unable to forget a single one of the harrowing tales the woman had recounted. Kalfa had carried the stories with her for all these years, and now it was time to pass them on to another. And so she spent the entire night relaying to her young comrade the monumental saga of the war hero’s lost years in the Minoan System.
“That war hero, of course,” said the old soldier to Bombal, “was Captain Irena Sertôrian. And that debriefing is the only firsthand account she ever gave of her postwar years of wandering. Kalfa is long dead, the transcribed account long since destroyed, and I alone have carried the saga within myself for too long. Now I’ve grown old and must transmit my knowledge, one episode at a time. So.” The old soldier stood up a little straighter, chest out, and took a deep breath. “Captain Sertôrian and her crew had barely escaped the deadly machinations of the kryonauts when . . .” The old soldier stopped. “You need to write this down,” he said to Bombal.
Bombal rummaged through her satchel until she found her dict-a-pad.
“Good,” said the old soldier, and proceeded to tell the story. Bombal’s stylus fled across the screen, and when the soldier finished, he asked if she’d got everything.
“Yes,” she said, checking her pad.
“Good,” said the soldier again, and walked away.
Only mildly surprised at his departure, Bombal watched for a moment as the old man disappeared into a teeming crowd of pedestrians.
Over the next few days, Bombal thought frequently of the story the poor old man had told her, and each morning on her way to work she watched carefully for the man, half hoping to reencounter him and hear another of his tales. But week after week she saw no sign of the old soldier. No great surprise, given the size of the city she lived in, but still Bombal was disappointed.
Then one day, while waiting for a rocket bus, she heard a bespectacled mecha-fish vendor recounting an experience almost identical to her own. The young man had run across the poor soldier and given him an old coat, and in exchange the soldier had obliged the young man to listen to and record a tale of Irena Sertôrian’s Minoan exploits.
To make a long story short, Bombal discovered that the old soldier had disseminated dozens of tales among the people of the city, enjoining each one to remember what he had told them. Intrigued by the poor old man’s project, Bombal began tracking down the other people the old soldier had encountered and collecting the tales he had given them. Soon the project consumed every free minute she had, and truth be told, her dedication to her zinc trading slipped little by little until the project overtook her life. Doggedly pursuing the tales, Bombal worked tirelessly for decades until she was satisfied she had found all of the poor old soldier’s stories. With her great undertaking thus accomplished, Bombal compiled the accounts into a single volume that we now know as Household Tales of Our Sertôrian.
You might ask what potency I find in such a fanciful little tale, and I would agree that on the whole it resembles so many others of its ilk in its preponderance of banal and wishful thinking. But every time I reencounter the story, one distinct moment slides between my ribs like a warm knife. The initial exchange between Bombal and the old soldier is often written off as an erratum, an accidental piece of narrative illogic generated and perpetuated over the centuries by the vagaries of folkloric transmission. It makes no sense, goes the reasoning, that Bombal’s act of charity would put her in the old man’s debt.
In considering that charge, I return to the question I posed earlier in this chapter: Given the current turbulence of my situation, would I not be happier if I set aside Bombal’s thorny tale and instead passed my remaining time contemplating simpler, less jagged stories? Like the old man in the apocryphal account of the origins of Household Tales, the Rhadamanthus IX account makes ever-increasing demands on its reader, requiring more and more and more of the audience’s attention. Other tales seem far more generous to their readers. Sertôrian’s Travels, for instance, or The Life and Voyages of Irena Sertôrian contain story after story whose narrative logic conforms exactly to the values Sertôrian’s later teachings seem to espouse.
In one such tale, Sertôrian’s selfless act of kindness to a scarred, pus-ridden hermit ensures the safety of her crew. When a marauding band of aristocratic assassins attacks Sertôrian and her shipmates, the hermit turns out to be in possession of a weaponized level-nine pulse shield that keeps the assassins at bay.
In another story, Sertôrian�
��s refusal to betray her comrades melts the heart of the bionic despot who holds them captive, and they are released from his magma dungeon with the despot’s well-wishes and a month’s supply of food and fuel.
These flattened, reassuring tales ask so little of their audience and appear to give so much in return: comfort, peace, and inspiration. But such candyfloss fails to provide the soul with the sustenance it needs to withstand the tireless slugs and sucker punches of lived experience. Conversely, my decades-long career spent sparring with difficult religious texts has cultivated in me a tenacity that I never would have developed reading more comforting tales.
Furthermore, to attempt to resolve every vexing question posed by Bombal’s account is to forget that resolution is a minor species of death. I should cherish my struggle with these theological knots, knots whose sublime multiplicity intimates planes of existence beyond my ability to comprehend.
I grapple with uncertainties, and so I live.
Of course, that is nonsense. A shot from a trooper’s blast-gun will kill me as dead as anything, regardless of what complex questions enliven my mind. This monograph, into which I poured so much early hope, will not save my life. And yet I race to complete it, and in so doing I treasure the ambiguities with which I have an increasingly ambiguous relationship, ambiguity spawning ambiguity, contaminating everything it touches with dark, shimmering uncertainty until the whole universe teeters on the brink of being one thing, or possibly another.
There does exist an arena in which I can no longer allow ambiguity to reign supreme. I have held too fast for too long to certain secret feelings whose revelation would forever alter, for better or for worse, a dear and treasured friendship. By withholding such feelings I have dwelled for decades in possibility, free to imagine consequences either happy or much less so if these sentiments were ever revealed. In the past I’ve found freedom in that ambiguity, but now the cold finality of death approaches (or might approach). If I continue to keep these feelings to myself, the great multitude of potentialities will vanish with my dying breath. The time has come to evict my secret from its ramshackle house of too many windows and too many doors.