The Infinite Future Read online

  “That’s my advice,” she said with a shrug. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  “I also have to say,” she said, “you seem a lot smarter than the other grant recipients I deal with. I don’t know if you actually are a smart person, but you’ve got one of those competent faces. That’ll get you a lot further in the world than you might think.” She turned the juice glass in her hands. “What I’m saying is you can do better than this.” She waved her hand in a little circle that dismissed everything inside my apartment. “Ditch the writing. Ditch the translation. Put that competent face to better use.”

  “Like breaking into people’s houses,” I said as snidely as possible, hoping that a thick layer of sarcasm might conceal the delight I felt at being praised by someone I barely knew. I wasn’t even sure if it was a true compliment, what she’d just said, but even her acknowledgment of the appearance of potential in my person exhilarated me. She also wasn’t wrong about how I’d been spending my time. What good, after all, was fiction writing? What good was translating? What kind of freedom had either of those pursuits ever given me?

  I caught myself, though, before this line of thinking carried me too far from whatever sense of principle I still possessed. Here I was lapping up praise from someone who made her living preying on the desperation of others.

  “It’s a stepping-stone,” said Voorhes in response to my jab. “The CAC is very well connected.”

  “I’d never heard of them before I got the grant,” I said, still fighting back envy for the life she led.

  “Exactly,” said Voorhes, and drained the rest of the orange juice from her glass.

  Ten minutes after she left, my hands started shaking and I couldn’t sit still. I’d been so caught up in the strangeness of the situation while Voorhes was in my apartment that the magnitude of the intrusion hadn’t fully registered. While she’d been cataloging my things, her nonchalance had had a more or less placating effect on me—if she wasn’t bothered by the situation, why should I be? Now that she was gone, though, that same lack of effect felt much more dangerous. Was she some kind of sociopath? Should I fear for my physical safety? Was it still okay to sleep here? Voorhes knew how to get through the door without my permission; once inside, what other nefarious deeds was she willing to commit with those gloved hands of hers?

  I moved my desk in front of the door, and thus barricaded in, my next impulse was to hide the purple binder full of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie’s stories. Its monetary value was virtually nonexistent, but at the moment it was my most valuable possession. I realized that hiding the binder was an exercise in futility—if for some reason the CAC wanted to find it, they would—but I had to take some action. I owned two cookbooks at the time: The Joy of Cooking, and Skillet Dinners for One, a thirty-year-old volume that I had picked up for fifty cents at a thrift store a few months earlier. Skillet Dinners for One was published in three-ring binder format, which would serve my purposes perfectly. I pulled open its rings, removed the recipes, and replaced them with the photocopied pages from the purple binder. I then returned the modified Skillet Dinners to its spot on the counter next to The Joy of Cooking, where it had at least a small chance of avoiding detection.

  Although I had abandoned, once and for all, writing fiction of my own, I’d gotten a lot of satisfaction over the past several weeks from translating Salgado-MacKenzie’s stories. More than anything else, translating reminded me of doing a crossword puzzle. I spent plenty of time frustrated, straining to find the best word or phrase in English to approximate something from the Portuguese, but when I did, when I landed on a fitting gloss, it was like deciphering one of Will Shortz’s foxiest crossword clues—an epiphanic of course followed by a rush of satisfaction.

  The best part of the process, though, was spending so much time with the stories themselves. I hadn’t pegged Salgado-MacKenzie as a writer whose work rewarded such close attention, but the more carefully I read his stories, the more I enjoyed and admired them.

  I was especially taken with his ongoing portrayal of Captain Irena Sertôrian, especially the way in which each new story added another wrinkle to her ever-shifting persona, a mutable characterization that should have felt sloppy, but instead compelled me, drawing me deeper and deeper into the fictional universe that Sertôrian occupied. I still remember some of those stories very well, even all these years later.

  For example, there’s this one where Sertôrian encounters the Church of the Blessed Excreta, a persecuted religious group that has taken refuge on Qyunah, a fringe Minoan desert planet. Basically, these people worship human feces, which is why they’re so reviled, and at first, Sertôrian finds them pretty off-putting as well, because frankly, given their beliefs, who wouldn’t? The more time she spends with the members of this church, though, the more she respects them, and is even drawn to their tenets.

  One thing in their favor is that the members of the church are actually very clean, because in outward practice, they don’t treat their feces any differently than non-church members might. Sanitation-wise, they have toilets and sewers and everything else, because part of their religion is that feces must be respected. It’s not totally accurate to say that excrement is their god, but they do view feces as a potent and far-reaching force in the universe. In support of this belief, the church points out that feces must be carefully managed; otherwise it can lay waste to entire civilizations as a carrier of illness and disease. And on a more personal level, feces play a salvational role as the vehicle by which excesses and impurities are removed from the body.

  In light of these two irrefutable truths, then, the Church of the Blessed Excreta follows a complex liturgy that allows them, as a community of believers, to publicly acknowledge and celebrate their subservience to human waste. Each evening, they meet in small groups to sing hymns in praise of healthy digestion, and once every twelve days, they meet in larger groups to conduct a ceremony known simply as the Journey, in which a church member is selected by lottery to walk blindfolded through an elaborate hedge maze meant to symbolize the upper and lower intestines, while the rest of the congregation looks on from raised bleachers.

  Outwardly, Sertôrian keeps her distance from these proceedings, but when her crew finishes its repairs of their ship, the Circe, it’s with some reluctance that she leaves behind the planet of the Church of the Blessed Excreta. As she’s walking away, one of the church members pulls her aside and presents her with a medallion of the ceremonial hedge maze. Tears in her eyes, Sertôrian slips the medallion into a pocket over her heart and says that she’ll always remember it, always keep it close.

  And it’s her reaction that sticks with me, her affinity with the cult’s tenets, which the story never really explains. The point is that it paints Sertôrian as being open to the mystical, a characterization that then gets contrasted in another story I remember well, one where Sertôrian is portrayed at her most analytical.

  Basically, in this other story, Sertôrian and her crew fall into the clutches of a malevolent and hyperintelligent prospector, and in order to escape Muhnaan, the old mining planet where he’s holding them captive, Sertôrian has to solve a series of complex riddles.

  What’s tricky, though, is that these riddles sound more like rambling anecdotes than tightly constructed puzzles, so Sertôrian has no idea which details to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. The prospector is just sitting there in his rocking chair telling a seemingly interminable story about three sisters who traveled by mule through one of the planet’s deepest canyons, when he pauses his account, looks at Sertôrian, and says, Now tell me, which sister was tallest, which sister was ill, and which sister spoke only in lies?

  Sertôrian is flabbergasted by this question, and tells the prospector that there’s no way to determine the answers to those questions based on the meandering story he’s just told her. He insists, though, that all the information was there, and sh
e just needs to put together the right pieces.

  Eventually, she does. It’s a Sherlockian performance on the part of both Sertôrian and Salgado-MacKenzie, requiring the intrepid space captain to recall that a certain brand of tobacco carried by the sisters was produced exclusively by the Tropian Empire for a brief period in the years leading up to the Great Aurigan War. Once she summons that bit of trivia, though, the rest of the pieces click into place and Sertôrian is able to correctly identify which sister was tallest, which sister was ill, and which sister spoke only in lies.

  The prospector is stunned by her success, and presents her with two more riddles, each one more rambling than the last. Each time, though, Sertôrian is able to solve the puzzle, which infuriates the prospector. He’d been certain he could outsmart Sertôrian, and his rage at Sertôrian’s triumph leads to an amazing set piece—the story’s climax—in which Sertôrian and the prospector track each other through a labyrinthine, crystal-walled mining tunnel that is slowly filling with water.

  Anyway, translating these stories excited me, scratching my creative itch in a way that fiction writing no longer could. I read dozens of Portuguese-language Wikipedia articles on space travel, astronomy, and science fiction so I could get a feel for the register of the language Salgado-MacKenzie used, whether it was more colloquial, more technical, or a maddening blend of the two. I spent money I didn’t have on a multivolume Portuguese dictionary that traced the history of each word it defined. And I could lose myself for hours constructing elaborate charts that tracked how, in each instance, I’d translated a word or phrase commonly used by Salgado-MacKenzie. Ela sentiu saudades de Marte, for example, became She longed for Mars in one story and She felt a warm nostalgia for Mars in another. This wasn’t sloppiness, though. Each variant made sense to me in the context of the story that contained it, a phenomenon that further illuminated for me the enchanting elusiveness of language.

  In addition to finding joy in the technical aspects of translating, I’d begun to discern in Irena Sertôrian something of the mystical power that Sérgio had described to me back in São Paulo. It was nothing dramatic, not like I was experiencing visions or deep, transcendent emotions. But when I thought of Irena Sertôrian as I translated the stories (something about how she fit within and reacted to the odd machinations of Salgado-MacKenzie’s plots) I did feel a kind of low-grade joy—again, with a hint of danger—pulsing through my body. Of course, I told myself that the only reason I was experiencing anything unusual was because I was expecting to experience something unusual, primed as I’d been by Sérgio’s wild account of his own relationship with these texts. Regardless of its source, though, this strange joy drove my translation work, pushing me through story after story in pursuit of whatever secret spark animated Irena Sertôrian.

  It’s a testament, then, to the CAC’s sinister powers that they ruined translation for me too. Christine Voorhes’s visit to my apartment shook me up enough that when I sat down that night to translate, I couldn’t do it. The story was a good one too—Sertôrian gets captured by a vengeful theater troop that forces her to watch a tedious staged reenactment of her alleged war crimes—but I couldn’t move, couldn’t open the multivolume dictionary to check a definition, couldn’t uncap my ballpoint pen, couldn’t turn the gears in my brain that processed the Portuguese source text. All I could do was think about Voorhes’s visit and what the CAC’s next move might be.

  If they were trying to mess with my mind, they were doing a great job. After the break-in, a fear enveloped me, dank as the air inside a forgotten terrarium. I would get home from work, push my desk in front of my apartment door, and then spend an hour or two trying to translate a new Salgado-MacKenzie story before giving up and going to bed, where I’d sleep for twelve hours in a welcome stupor. The enthusiasm I’d generated over the previous weeks was rotting away to nothing.

  Three days into this unpleasantness, I got an email that broke the spell. It was not from Wayne Fortescue. It was from Sérgio Antunes, and its subject line said, “I’ve found him.”

  VIII

  Daniel,

  I hope this message finds you well and that you’ll forgive me for dispensing with further pleasantries. I have pressing matters to discuss with you.

  About a month ago, I was reviewing a list I’d made of every fictional place name mentioned in Salgado-MacKenzie’s work. I’d analyzed this list before, searching for anagrams, cryptograms, any hidden message that might serve as a clue to the author’s identity. In the past, these analyses have yielded nothing, but this time I stumbled upon something intriguing.

  On a whim, I decided to read each place name aloud, but to do so using American English pronunciations. As I did, I rewrote the names to reflect these pronunciations, using more conventional, simplified English spellings so that, for instance, Ahyonaa (the horrifying city of wax where Sertôrian and her crew battle a horde of murderous sculptors) became Iona, and Gnampuh (a swampy military outpost) became Nampa, and so on, with all of the names from the list. I then cross-searched those transliterated names against lists of cities in the states of Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Idaho. (You might remember that one of the editors I spoke to reported a rumor that Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie hailed from the United States, specifically from a state beginning with the letter I.)

  To my great excitement, I found several close matches between my re-transcribed list of fictional cities and a list of actual cities in the state of Idaho. No other state—I searched all fifty—yielded even a fraction of the matches that Idaho did. The Gem State, it seems, figured prominently in Salgado-MacKenzie’s imagination.

  But why? I was careful at this point not to jump to any conclusions. His reliance on Idaho city names as sources for science fictional locales could mean that he was born in Idaho, or lived there. But it could also be a private joke, or a purely random selection, or, I’m willing to admit, a complete misreading on my part. In and of itself, this connection was compelling but inconclusive.

  Around the same time, though, I was pursuing another, unrelated line of inquiry—searching for a story by the Strugatsky brothers that I’d heard great things about but never read. I don’t read Russian, and this particular story has never been translated into Portuguese or Spanish. I also couldn’t find it in any of the English-language collections of their short fiction, so I started asking around to see if anyone else had stumbled across a translation of it anywhere. A friend told me he thought he remembered reading it in a Cold War–era anthology of Soviet science fiction published in the States called Faint Constellations. All he could recall about the book was the Strugatsky story, and the anthology’s flag-waving introduction, which derided the very stories the book contained as indisputable specimens of Soviet inferiority.

  This anthology wasn’t easy to find, but I eventually tracked down a copy at a library in Porto Alegre and placed an interlibrary loan request. When the book arrived, I was very pleased to find the Strugatsky story I’d been looking for. Even more exciting, though, was the inclusion at the end of the anthology of three short stories written by Latin American writers. In an introduction to this final section, the anthologist explained that all Latin American countries, whether they’d admit it or not, harbored Soviet sympathies and an ardent desire for the kind of one-world socialist government that threatened the very foundations of democracy. Arising as they did, then, from such febrile aspirations, the three Latin American stories included in the anthology could never measure up to the work produced by their saner North American counterparts. The reader would be well advised to note their patent inferiority and learn from their authors’ mistakes, both ideological and aesthetic.

  As fascinated as I was by these sentiments, I was more excited by the stories themselves, or rather, by one story in particular penned by—you may have already guessed—our own Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. It was one I’d read before (“All Quiet, All Dark”), so the treasure here was not the story itself but rather its
presence in the anthology. Here was a bevy of new leads—a publisher, an editor, a translator—all of whom may have had contact with Salgado-MacKenzie himself!

  The first two leads proved fruitless. I could find no record of Faint Constellations’ publisher—Eagle’s Landing Press—anywhere I searched. More frustrating still, the book’s editor and introduction writer (probably the same person) had chosen to remain anonymous, thus cutting off another promising avenue of pursuit. Fortunately, the anthology did credit its translators with a small-print byline at the end of each story, and so it was that at the end of “All Quiet, All Dark” I found the name V. H. Kimball.

  Fully expecting to be stymied yet again, I was delighted to learn that V. H. Kimball not only exists in the public record but also remains an active and prolific translator. I emailed her through the publisher of her most recent translation (The End of Days, a novel by Josefa Navarro, a contemporary Spanish writer), and asked if she was the same V. H. Kimball who had translated Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie’s “All Quiet, All Dark” for Faint Constellations: A Collection of Soviet Science Fiction.

  Three days later I received a response. I am, said her brief email. What can I do for you?

  I explained my interest in Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and asked what she could tell me about the anthology’s publisher, or about its editor, or better still, about the reclusive author himself—had she had any contact with the man? Her reply began as follows:

  Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie was either a raving crank or one of the greatest minds of his generation, and the fact that I never got to find out which haunts me to this day.

  Daniel, I could barely contain my excitement. I reread that first line twice, just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me, before I continued reading:

  It was a messy little incident, fraught with betrayal, shame, and typewritten manifestos, but before I get too far ahead of myself, let me answer your questions in the order you posed them.