The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “My understanding is that people with the right insurance could just walk into a clinic, receive three injections,” said Moss. “Nanotech delivery to cancerous cells.”

  “And this was developed by a company called Phasal Systems?” asked Annesley, Moss confirming the information she had already repeated. “Who developed the cure?” he asked. “Do you know any of the names of the doctors involved?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t—”

  “Did Phasal Systems develop communications systems, too, or were they only active in the medical sector?”

  “Medical, I believe,” said Moss, struggling to recall anything she might have picked up about Phasal Systems while in her IFT, some information she might have absorbed even if on the periphery of her attention. The scientist Brock had spoken with might have had something to do with the cancer cure, she remembered—Imagine a wall made of doors. She remembered Brock had said the scientist had worked for the Naval Research Lab before moving into medical tech. “I think Phasal Systems might have had a connection to the NRL,” she said. “A spin-off company. I think Navy scientists worked on the cancer cure once they left NRL. We didn’t have Ambience, though, or Intelligent Air, if that’s what you’re asking, or any of the environmental nanotech-saturation systems popular in other IFTs. Most people still used cellular phones. But they had cured cancer.”

  “Had they cured every disease?” asked Annesley. “Did Phasal Systems solve disease?”

  She remembered the words of her mother’s nurse. “There was still disease,” said Moss. “My mother’s nurse told me you had to be rich to live forever.”

  The debriefing ended, a flurry of handshakes, Moss realizing that Annesley hadn’t asked certain questions she was accustomed to answering: what year the Terminus had been marked, for instance. It had swung closer, to 2067 in her IFT—but Annesley hadn’t asked. He hadn’t followed up about the CJIS attack either, she realized, or even about her investigation into Patrick Mursult, or about the mutiny. There would be more paperwork, forms to fill out, she knew, and she knew she could be recalled to answer further questions at any time, or to provide clarification on statements she’d made, but the admiral’s focus on the cancer cure surprised her, the focus on Phasal Systems, a company that didn’t even exist in 1997. Her debriefings often concluded with this feeling of anticlimactic uncertainty over how much good she had actually contributed; her reports on future terrorist attacks, future wars, future economic conditions never seemed to amount to much in the way of prevention, many of the events she warned about still occurring. She felt like an American Cassandra when events she warned about came to pass. Her only solace was the belief that there was a bigger political picture the Navy accounted for that she wasn’t privy to—she saw only brushstrokes, never the entire painting.

  “You did well,” O’Connor told her, back at her on-base housing. He wasn’t staying long, but he accepted a cup of coffee, sitting with Moss in the house’s enclosed back porch, the Atlantic a twilight glow beyond the reach of sand.

  “Seven hours with those men,” she said. “Almost eight. I’m exhausted. And I’m never sure what they’re asking, what they’re trying to get at.”

  “NSC has Senate oversight. They have their own concerns, which don’t always line up with ours,” said O’Connor. “Every IFT costs millions of U.S. tax dollars. I understand that the admiral went straight to a dinner meeting with Senator C. C. Charlie about your debriefing. He’ll have a long night ahead.”

  “I’m testifying about Hyldekrugger and Cobb, killers at least, guilty of mutiny on the Libra, and the admiral didn’t seem to care,” said Moss. “These men murdered their commanding officer, and they’re tied to the Terminus. Libra might have brought the Terminus. Annesley hardly asked about Libra, or what Nicole Onyongo told me about Esperance. I was prepared to talk about Nicole.”

  “I know that Annesley cared about Remarque. We all did,” said O’Connor.

  “You knew her?”

  “She was clever. She’d get this look in her eye, and you knew she was already a few steps ahead of you,” said O’Connor, smiling at the memory. “I didn’t know her well. We did some joint training sessions together. I remember stories—she would float the passageways of her department, make rounds, and everyone would be nervous because they knew she could do their jobs better than they could. Very high standards, very exacting. But she was patient. Everyone wanted to be assigned to her ship. Your testimony about her death was very difficult to listen to.”

  “All Annesley seemed interested in was nanotech medication, cancer.”

  “Well, you never know what cards Annesley is holding,” said O’Connor. “He might already have other reports about Libra that have been corroborated, or facts that contradict yours. Besides, Nicole Onyongo was never NSC, which makes her legal status somewhat hazy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No one named Onyongo was on Libra,” said O’Connor. “The other names you provided, but not Nicole Onyongo. She wasn’t a sailor. She doesn’t appear anywhere in NSC. She was never in the Navy. NSC believes that Nicole Onyongo was picked up in Libra’s future, which is highly irregular. We can only guess why Remarque would have done such a thing, but there you go. Nicole Onyongo doesn’t exist, not the way you and I do.”

  Moss felt affronted, surprised that Nicole wasn’t born in terra firma. But the strange story about Kenya—Nicole saying that the people of Mombasa had welcomed the crew of Libra, that Nicole had followed Remarque only after her father had intervened on her behalf. Nicole was a stowaway from a world that never was. A ripple of uncertainty passed through Moss. Nicole was a specter, just one of countless shadows cast by Libra.

  “What about the others? You found the other names I gave you? They were on the Libra crew list.”

  “We did—and Hyldekrugger, he’s an interesting case,” said O’Connor.

  “The celestial navigator.”

  “The ship’s CEL-NAV, yes,” said O’Connor. “Vietnam. Studied philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago before NSC. He earned a master’s studying Viking death cults and rituals, a thesis on the pagan symbolism of the Black Sun. I tried to read some of it, but it’s steeped in academic jargon.”

  “The ship made of nails, that’s a Viking myth,” said Moss. “Something to do with the end of the world.”

  “Clean record,” said O’Connor. “But Hyldekrugger has two uncles involved in the ‘sovereign citizens’ movement, and one is serving life for the beating death of a black man. I’m assuming a connection of that type of extremist thinking to the events in your report.”

  “Maybe. Yeah, probably,” said Moss, ruminating on the violence that had swept through Libra, the mutiny, the massacre. “Hyldekrugger and his followers—they killed everyone on the ship,” she said, and they had somehow survived reentry to terra firma; they had somehow returned. Moss had learned so much about the fate of Libra, but other questions grew around the missing ship like mushrooms in the dark.

  “We have warrants for Hyldekrugger, Cobb, Bietak, and Nicole Onyongo,” said O’Connor. “We’ll pick up their trails, arrest these individuals, and question them about Mursult and Libra. I want convictions, but don’t be surprised if they’re offered bargains.”

  “They murdered children,” said Moss. “They’ll murder Marian. She might still be alive. These men might have her—”

  “Shannon, you have to understand, things have changed since you’ve been away.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “The Terminus has been marked at 2024. Less than thirty years from now,” said O’Connor. “Before your debriefing we received word that the John F. Kennedy marked the Terminus at 2024.”

  “Within our lifetime,” said Moss.

  “Within our lifetime, within our children’s lifetime. The last generation is already alive,” said O’Connor.

  “Maybe we can still stop it, maybe if we—”

  “Mayb
e,” said O’Connor, his voice, though, that of someone who’d already accepted a terminal stage. “Annesley is prepared to offer plea bargains to Hyldekrugger and Cobb, and any other conspirators they bring to the table, for information about their involvement in the Terminus, the location of Esperance.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  “And the Navy is greenlighting Operation Saigon,” he said. “Prioritizing which civilians will be included in the evacuation, if it comes to that. Thirty years is too close. NSC is mandated to load ships and launch to Deep Waters within forty-eight hours of the appearance of the White Hole, and they’re worried it might appear now, at any moment. We’ve been pulling agents from lower-priority investigations, reassigning them to Saigon. NSC wants as many of our Cormorant shuttles as we can spare. They’ll requisition them all soon.”

  Moss wanted to argue, but fear clenched her, a bolt of panic at the imminence of the White Hole—2024. What would happen when the White Hole appeared? Would billions lift into the air, opened and displayed? Would they run, mindless, or stand staring? Moss felt the helplessness of a child. She felt like she couldn’t comprehend the true scope of the end. She imagined Operation Saigon, Cormorant shuttles launching in waves, the entire NSC fleet at the Black Vale at capacity with soldiers and civilians, mixes of talents and genetics, each ship launched in search of exo-Earths, each ship a seed to grow a new humanity even as humanity perished. She thought of the escaping ships, the abandoned Earth, and grew anxious at the thought of what would be left behind. She felt like she was being asked to leave Marian behind. What was one life set against every life? A despondency churned in her heart, Marian’s life abandoned for the lives of others. But maybe she wasn’t too late. She was sure she wasn’t too late. Her mind rebounded to Marian, how Marian might still be alive, how Marian might still be saved.

  Moss received her discharge papers the following afternoon. She found her pickup in the lot, surprised that her battery wasn’t dead, and had to remind herself that only a few days had passed since she’d parked here. Evergreen air freshener and the reek of prosthetic liners she’d flung behind the passenger seat, just her little red Ford, but the familiar odors and the sensation of sitting behind the wheel comforted her, situated her in her own life after so long an absence. She left Naval Air Station Oceana through the main gates. Returning to terra firma was like stepping into the same river twice: everything the same as when she’d left, but it didn’t feel quite the same to her now. The year 1997 felt hopelessly retrograde in some ways, a recovered past. Returning was like traveling to a poorer foreign country where the fashions and cars, the technology and architecture lagged decades behind.

  An eight-hour drive from Oceana, Moss’s house was northwest of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a ranch seated on four acres of wildflower-strewn lawn. She loved the house, loved the solitude, the single-floor layout amenable to her situation. Only a week’s worth of mail had piled up inside the front-door slot. Moss divided bills from junk mail before changing into pajamas and settling into her leather couch. The VCR had recorded The X-Files in her absence, her hero Scully, a new episode—but she grew anxious when the plot veered into spaceships and nine minutes of missing time. Her telephone rang, and she paused her show, bands of static blur over Scully’s face.

  “We found something,” said Brock.

  “Marian?” she asked.

  “Not Marian. We found the clearing. Nothing there. We brought a K9 and scoured the area for human remains, but there was nothing.”

  Too early, thought Moss. Marian could have been buried at this site at any point between now and 2004, when two men lost in the woods would dig for ginseng but find bones. Something Moss remembered of her father—how he let hose water pour down their front sidewalk and would watch the water branch out in different rivulets, diverging paths, around cracks and stones. Futures were like those forking paths of water. Marian might not ever be left in those woods.

  “We broadened our search,” said Brock, “found one of your rock formations about a half mile north-northwest of your initial location. I posted two men in blinds, told them to enjoy the wildlife for a few days.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Rainey called it in,” said Brock. “He spotted a guy building one of your rock piles.”

  “Did you ID him?”

  “Not a chance. Not at that distance,” said Brock. “But Rainey tracked the actor, found that he drove a black van, a GMC Vandura, early eighties. We spotted the van twice in the area.”

  “What about the plates?” she asked.

  “The van’s registered to someone named Richard Harrier.”

  Harrier, thought Moss, with desperation. “I don’t know that name,” writing out the name on a sheet of scratch paper: Harrier, Richard. “He might know where Marian is.”

  “Shannon, I’ve met you halfway on this,” said Brock. “More than halfway. I need more from you. I need probable cause. More than just your word, or some hunch you’re playing. Otherwise whoever these guys get as their defense attorney will shred us and we’ll squander whatever intelligence led you to target them. We can’t harass someone for building rock piles. What else do you have?”

  “Just stay with me on this,” said Moss, but doubt crept over her. There had been no tangible proof linking these cairns to Marian’s body. “What else do you know about this guy? Richard Harrier?” she asked. “His address? Priors? Anything?”

  “No priors, absolutely clean. Harrier works at a Home Depot in Bridgeport, the vehicle is registered to his Bridgeport address. Married, has three kids—but I had one of our guys trail the van, and it looks like the driver’s been spending time at a house just outside a small town called Buckhannon—”

  “Buckhannon,” said Moss, and when Brock read the address, “Off 151,” her world warped. She ran the kitchen tap, held her hand beneath the warming water until she scalded herself—the pain jolting through her incertitude. She knew the address, Nestor’s address, the house with the black van in Buckhannon was the same house she would sleep in with Nestor nineteen years from now.

  “I’m going,” she said. “I have to see—”

  “Moss, wait—”

  The porch with the wooden rockers, walks along the acres, Nestor, the constellation of freckles over his heart—Why there, why of all places there?

  She threw on jeans, her holster. Imagining Nestor—Maybe Nestor didn’t know, she thought. Nestor’s connection to the house in Buckhannon might not exist yet, might not ever exist. This might all be a coincidence, she thought, a coincidence of houses, like Courtney’s house. Desperate to believe that Nestor was innocent, that right now he might still be innocent, that he might have always been innocent.

  A half-hour drive from Clarksburg to Buckhannon, after midnight. She pushed a hundred on empty rural roads thinking of Marian buried in the woods. Wild thoughts of Nestor, of Nestor kidnapping Marian, of Nestor killing her, of Nestor as he would look years from now, of Nestor here at this house in Buckhannon, here, here. She pulled from 151 into the gravel drive, skidding as she braked. A pear tree grew in the front yard, and there was a hedgerow in front of the porch, but otherwise the house was the same as it would be years from now. Moss left her truck, every fondness for this place curdled. A black van with a red racing stripe was parked near the house. The barn doors were lit with a floodlight set to a motion sensor that had tripped. Around the far side of the barn, a Winnebago without wheels was up on cinder blocks—I’ve seen that before, she thought. The house itself was dark, but the living-room windows pulsed blue with television light. Someone was home.

  Moss pulled her weapon. The van had been left unlocked, and she swung open the rear doors, found blood on the walls and floor, a rumpled plastic tarp and twine. Marian’s blood. Anticipating where to find Marian, she remembered the flimsy side-door lock that Nestor had never bothered to fix. She looked in through the side-door window, but the interior was too dark for her to see, so she braced herself, shouldered the door, a
nd it gave inward with a snap. Loud volume on the television, moaning, the sounds of sex, like an echo of her memories here. Weapon leveled, through into the kitchen, television glare across the linoleum, through into the living room. A naked man sat sprawled on the couch, his head leaned back. A woman was on her knees between his legs sucking him off, her body rippled with cellulite and waves of fat, her hair a brown mess.

  “Federal agent. Get down on the floor,” said Moss. “Get on the fucking floor.”

  The woman yelped and shrieked, clutching her heart. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” flopping forward, breasts flailing, her hands spread in front of her, gripping the carpet. The man skipped up onto the couch like he’d just seen a rat scurry, covering himself with a throw pillow and bawling, body lit by Playboy Channel lesbians. “Jesus, lady, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” The woman’s hair would one day gray like a mop of sooty yarn—Miss Ashleigh, Ashleigh Bietak, Nicole’s mother-in-law.

  “On the fucking floor,” Moss said again, and the man dropped to his knees next to Ashleigh and spread his arms out wide, ass in the air. The living room was the same as Moss had known it—the same mirror hung above the mantel, the painting of the dead Christ hung in the spot it would hang when Nestor would live here. Her confusion and heartbreak screamed like twin sirens in her mind. Marian, she thought, her name an anchor. Moss cuffed the man but only had one set of cuffs so had to leave Ashleigh free.

  “Where is Marian Mursult?” asked Moss. “Miss Ashleigh, where is she?”

  “What is this?” said Ashleigh. “What girl? This is bullshit, is what it is. Fucking, I want my lawyer. Who are you? Where’s your warrant? Fuck this. You can’t be here—”

  “Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Where is she? You, where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” said the man. “These are too tight, these cuffs. I want my clothes. I’m not supposed to be here, I’ve got a wife. Please, I shouldn’t be here. My wife will find out.”