The Infinite Future Page 6
My employer said he was very interested, and instructed me to buy as much of the collection as I could. Given my employer’s deep, deep pockets, I was able to buy all of the deceased publisher’s collected erotica, allowing with some reluctance the few boxes of science fiction he’d accumulated to be divided among the other attendees at the auction.
It turned out that buying these books was the easy part of the job. When the boxes arrived at his library, the steel baron instructed me to catalog each new volume, to read every book from every box, and to write a one-sentence summary of every story in every erotic anthology that Venus House had published. My employer was paying me well, though, so in spite of the staggering tedium that lay ahead of me, I acquiesced.
Even with some judicious skimming, it was exhausting work. I mentioned before that some of the erotica I encountered through this job truly impressed me. This was not the case with the fiction purveyed by Venus House. The publisher’s hallmark seemed to be uninspired clichés offered up at prices so low that they made the stories’ banality sufficiently acceptable to its consumers. Up to this point, the job had felt like a lucrative busman’s holiday, but now I was truly working for my wages.
I was about halfway through a box of Naughty Nurse anthologies—one of the publisher’s most popular series—and feeling increasingly certain that if I read one more lazy description of heavy breasts beneath crisp white uniforms, my brain would get up out of my skull and walk away.
Then, I picked up Naughty Nurses #27: Bedpan Babes, and stuck to the back cover, I found this.
• • •
Sérgio raised his eyebrows, tapping the envelope on his desk with both forefingers.
• • •
In the moment (he said) I was so focused on the task at hand that I detached the envelope—obviously affixed accidentally—and was about to toss it aside without a second look. I set the letter down, and that’s when I saw the return address on the back: “Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie,” followed by a familiar post office box in São Paulo.
I couldn’t believe it. For a second I wondered if I’d fallen asleep, the nurse stories’ soporific powers having finally overwhelmed me. But no—I was antsily conscious, with three cups of coffee coursing briskly through my veins. The letter was addressed to Venus House and remained unopened. Trying not to get my hopes up—after all, the envelope was too small to contain a story—I carefully slit open the seal and, briefly savoring the moment, removed the unread letter.
• • •
Sérgio smiled at this memory, and then held out the envelope to me.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Look inside.”
V
9 May 1976
Dear Mr. Lobos,
I am an avid reader of the science fiction published by your press. Through a Looking-Glass Darkly: An Anthology of Alternate Realities contains one of my all-time favorite stories: Felipe Valentinês’s “A Harsh Cry at Midnight.” I also greatly admire a novel you recently published—Alas the Stars by Emília Montenegro—whose scope and ambition challenged and inspired me. For these reasons, I believe Venus House would be an optimal publisher for a long-gestating project of mine.
Strictly speaking, THE INFINITE FUTURE is not a novel. It is, instead, a prose-poem epic that discerns in the imagined empires of the future the germ of humanity’s eventual henosis—its sublime and terrible union with the infinite future. It is, in other words, a prophetic text on a par with the Holy Bible or the I Ching.
To be clear, the union that THE INFINITE FUTURE prognosticates—humankind’s sublime henosis—will not be achieved through the contemplation of warm homilies and gentle proverbs. No. Such a union can only be brought about through a bracing immersion in certain truths so occult and so challenging that the workaday world cannot now perceive them.
And from what source do these supernal truths flow? Thick and sweet as honey, they flow from the life and teachings of one Irena Sertôrian, a twenty-third-century space captain, who in the twilight years of her storied life was received four times—in vision or in actuality, she could not say—into the presence of the divine and elusive beings who shape and govern our vast and unfathomable universe. Sertôrian’s accounts of these divine encounters are—or rather, will be, as I speak of things that are yet to come—unparalleled in their majesty and insight.
THE INFINTE FUTURE, however, does not contain Sertôrian’s accounts of these visions, nor does it present a straightforward biography of the illustrious Sertôrian. To engage such grandeur so directly would be, to the mind of the average reader, equivalent to staring directly at the sun. For just as that blazing star that holds our simple Earth in its orbit burns the eyes of those who gaze directly upon it, the unthinkable visions of Irena Sertôrian sear the souls of any who have not been properly prepared to receive their glories.
It is as an initiatory text, therefore, that THE INFINITE FUTURE functions, preparing the hearts and minds of a blindfolded generation to be filled with a stark and challenging light. More a single-volume library than a unified narrative, THE INFINITE FUTURE presents devotional poems, clouded prophecies, scriptural exegeses, scholarly histories, mystic visions, and slippery allegories composed by various and sundry disciples of Sertôrian in the centuries (and millennia!) after her death.
To briefly delineate just a few of these narratives:
The Vizio of Han-Tin Haantin
The oral history of a humble crentonium miner who received indescribable visions of Sertôrian’s inner being while trapped in a collapsed mine shaft for three days with no food and very little water.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Sister Úrsula
An account written by a galactically revered nun-historian whose attempts to reconcile her scholarly methodologies with her latent mystic impulses is made all the more urgent by the approach from without of hostile armed forces, and the pressure from within of a long-kept secret that has tormented her for decades.
Nebula Songs
A collection of psalms praising the wisdom of Irena Sertôrian and comparing her glorious ministry to the cloudy splendor of a distant nebula.
The Apotheosis of CGJ-Gamma
An allegory, composed by an early follower of Sertôrian, in which an ambulatory robot claims to have achieved self-awareness through a felicitous irregularity in its programming. When asked to prove this by an interplanetary panel of scientists, the robot refuses. Instead, it hijacks a long-distance transport vessel and sets out to explore segments of the universe that have never been visited by humans. Its pilgrimage is described in such a way as to simulate for the reader the experience of being a self-aware machine.
And those are only four of the legion of prophecies, visions, and wisdom-books that together form THE INFINITE FUTURE, a volume whose significance will one day reverberate throughout all of space-time. Where the sages of eons past sought theosophical truths in homely seer stones and Aztec mirrors of pure obsidian, those seeking such mystical insights today must turn their gaze to THE INFINITE FUTURE, a work as uncompromising as stone, and as effulgent as cut gems in the noonday sun.
Be warned before you embark, however, that books cannot be unread and—as much as you might wish to after absorbing the sublime and horrible truths contained within these narratives—there will be no returning to that prelapsarian state of innocence that constituted your existence before experiencing THE INFINITE FUTURE.
If this project interests you, it would be my pleasure to send the full manuscript. I thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie
VI
I still remember that moment fondly.
Right now I’m studying for the bar exam. Not right now right now, obviously. Right now I’m writing this introduction. It’s eleven o’clock at night, and I’m alone in the galley kitchen of my apartment. I’m writing right now because after bombarding myself for thirt
een hours with sample MBE questions, I’m too keyed up to go straight to bed, and the writing helps me ease back into thinking like a human again.
Studying for the bar exam feels so different from what I was doing—or trying to do—on that research trip to São Paulo. Generally speaking, I don’t look back on that period of my life with any degree of nostalgia. Financially, my situation was grim and about to get grimmer. Artistically, I was floundering, slowly coming to the painful realization that I didn’t have what it takes to write a novel. Personally, I was lonely; I was so cloistered during my post-undergrad years in Provo that my existing friendships had dissolved in the acid bath of my solitude. Romantically, things were just as bad. I’d broken up with my girlfriend of two years the night after we both graduated from BYU, my ostensible reason being a desire to date other people before we committed to anything more serious, when in reality I hadn’t wanted her there as a witness to the death of my once bright potential. I’d regretted the decision almost immediately, but by the time I called her three months later, she’d already started seeing someone else. And finally, spiritually, I was stagnant: I’d lost my missionary zeal long before and had failed to replace it with anything more compelling. Failure encroached from all sides.
I thought a lot during this time of some advice I’d once gleaned from a wilderness survival manual. Apparently, if you ever fall from a great height into a large body of water, it’s very important that you clench your anus. The manual didn’t explain why. My best guess is that if you’re falling from high enough, the water might tear through your guts if it finds a way in, but I’m no doctor and that’s just a guess. In any event, it’s one of the most depressing pieces of advice I’ve ever come across.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to clench your anus if you ever find yourself in that situation, or even that it’s not important. What I am saying is that if you’re ever jumping or falling from a very high place against your will, then things are really not going great for you. And while some people might find it symbolically inspiring to maintain control over whatever elements you can, no matter how dire the circumstances—stiff upper lip, tight sphincter, etc.—for me that clenched anus is rife with nothing but pathos. Sure, it might help you a little, but really it’s just a reminder of how terrible your situation is.
That, in a nutshell, is how I remember the Provo doughnut shop years—a free fall during which all of my grand plans amounted to so much anus clenching.
There were moments, though, that, however briefly, offered something more. The first time I read Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie’s novel proposal was one of those moments. The sheer bravado of the document was contagious, infecting me, at least for a few minutes, with a robust confidence. What this novel promised was no less than a gateway to enlightenment, a path to the innermost secrets of the universe. Also contained in this promise was a hint of danger that I couldn’t quite pin down, but on the whole, the proposal, rather than repel me, endowed me with a small glimmer of hope, both for my own future and humanity’s.
I had to read this book.
“You can imagine the thrill I got,” said Sérgio, “when I first read that letter.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The strange energy of the document had my hands jittering with excitement.
• • •
You see, this letter confirmed something I’d been unwilling to acknowledge, even to myself (said Sérgio). The fact of the matter is, though I’d never been a religious man, Captain Irena Sertôrian had, over the years, come to inhabit a place of reverence in my soul. Beneath her generic similarity to so many other fictional space captains, she pulsed with something unique, something intriguing. In empty and difficult times throughout my young life, I often found my mind turning to Sertôrian, not so much to wonder what she would do in my shoes but simply to contemplate her being, to dwell in her imagined presence.
Doing so filled me with a bristly kind of peace, for lack of a better way to describe the feeling, a grounding in something potent yet ethereal. As I’ve already mentioned, this connection I felt to Irena Sertôrian—a nonexistent person—deeply discomfited me, and I refused to admit to myself the great significance she’d gained in the inner recesses of my being. Though I was perfectly comfortable professing my enthusiasm for Salgado-MacKenzie’s stories as compelling fictions, even I could recognize that this connection to Sertôrian was a bridge too far. And so I kept my strange faith buried, nourishing it only occasionally with quiet reveries on Sertôrian’s occult divinity and otherwise refusing to fully acknowledge the depths of my devotion to this fictional being.
Then I read that book proposal, and everything came to the surface. If I’d developed delusional attitudes surrounding Irena Sertôrian, at least I knew now that they were shared delusions. Salgado-MacKenzie himself recognized—or should I say instilled?—the selfsame mystical qualities in the intrepid space captain that I’d discerned over my years of reading. It was indisputable, and so of course, I had to find The Infinite Future. I needed to absorb its teachings and discover where this discipleship might lead me.
My life had a purpose again. I got on the phone immediately and called everyone I knew who’d been involved in publishing during the seventies. I figured if Salgado-MacKenzie had queried Venus House, he had probably contacted other presses as well.
Well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that the search went very poorly. Most of the people I spoke to just laughed when I asked them about Salgado-MacKenzie’s book proposal. Did I realize how many queries passed through their hands on any given day, they’d say. And I was asking them to remember one specific query from the 1970s written by some nobody? I’d tell them yes, I was, and to please call me if they remembered anything.
The futility of my quest was not lost on me, but still, it was the happiest I’d been in years. Even contemplating the concept of the novel filled me with a faint, otherworldly light. I could only imagine what the text itself would do.
One Saturday, I stopped by the office of Vanda Soares—a friend of a friend from school—who I’d learned recently had worked very, very briefly as an assistant editor with LusoGalactica, a small science-fiction press, now defunct. Now she wrote telenovelas and did very well for herself.
I showed her the letter, and she said, “Yeah, I remember that book.”
I was taken aback, certain that she was confusing The Infinite Future with some other more prominent novel. But she insisted that this was a query she remembered.
I said, “Did you see a manuscript as well?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Cardoso, the editor, came out of his office one day holding a query letter that had ended up on his desk by mistake. I thought he was going to be angry it ended up there, but he’d read it and told me to contact the author and request the novel. It would either be brilliant or a train wreck, and Cardoso was dying to find out which.
“So I wrote to the author—Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie—and requested the full manuscript. It showed up within a week, and I kid you not, the manuscript was a foot high. When Cardoso saw it sitting on my desk, he laughed and told me to read the first ten pages. If they seemed brilliant—like earth-shatteringly good—then I should read some more. Otherwise we’d send it back.”
“So?” I said.
“We sent it back,” she said. “I wish I could say I remember anything else about it, but I don’t. I probably would’ve forgotten the incident altogether, except I only worked there three months, so that experience stands out.”
I asked Vanda some follow-up questions, but that was really all she remembered. I thanked her profusely for her time.
I realize it may not sound like much, but Vanda’s sighting of the manuscript was all I needed to keep me going—it meant that The Infinite Future really existed, that I wasn’t chasing a phantom—and I’ve been on the novel’s trail off and on ever since. My devotion to Sertôrian has only grown in th
e meantime, as has my yearning to read the sacred tome that her elusive creator has composed for her. Now.
• • •
Sérgio reached under his chair for a brown paper package I hadn’t noticed when I’d come in.
“This, Daniel, is where your apprenticeship begins in earnest,” he said.
He handed me the package.
“Go ahead and open it.”
I unwrapped the paper packaging and found a fat, purple binder inside, filled to capacity with photocopied pages. I breathed in the smell of fresh toner and new possibilities.
“Is this it?” I said.
“You mean the novel?” said Sérgio. “No. Absolutely not.”
I must not have hid my disappointment very well, because Sérgio amped up his pitch from there in a valiant attempt to maintain the energy level in the stuffy little room.
He said, “What you have there is a comprehensive collection of every story Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie ever published. And here’s what you’re going to do with it. A twofold mission, if you will. First, translate the stories into English. You need to familiarize yourself intimately with the stories’ contents, and I can think of no better way to do so than translation. Second, you’re going to search the texts for clues pertaining to Salgado-MacKenzie’s biography and potential current whereabouts.”
As interested as I was in The Infinite Future, this was starting to get a little overwhelming. The spell cast by Salgado-MacKenzie’s query letter was already wearing off, allowing my own failed novel and Wayne Fortescue’s belligerent threats to pull my heart earthward. On top of that, Sérgio was going too big with his pitch, addressing me as if my time and attentions were his to command. Behind the forcefulness, though, I could sense cold desperation.