Retreat

“Pour vous?”

“Whisky, s’il vous plaît."

Nils was the barman and proprietor of the only inn in the village, but unfortunately the best days of Le Table were firmly behind it. The dusty wooden floors creaked underfoot and the rickety stool on which I perched was in dire need of repair. Propping myself up on the ancient mahogany bar seemed almost disrespectful given its age, far in advance of mine. I felt there the combined weight of all those elbows supporting weary arms without complaint, the heavy heads of despair and drunkenness, and the jubilant dancing feet of happier times.

Nils spoke little English, despite it being adopted a century ago as the lingua franca of the State. I admired his lack of conformity in the face of the politicorporate juggernaut that administered this region, along with most of the habitable portion of what was formerly Europe. A faded picture behind the bar depicted a once tall and proud man, his arm around the shoulders of a beautiful wife. Now, he was approaching one-hundred and ten years and his stature had become his burden; he rounded awkwardly at the shoulders and his spine crooked, his gait shuffling and asymmetrical. His wife had died several years earlier — a fall on the hills — but the smudged fingerprint near her face on the photograph, and the heart-shaped locket that dangled from his shirt pocket, suggested he kept some part of her with him still.

His restaurant was rarely busy. What few tourists there were these days were deterred by rumors of increasing civil unrest in drought-stricken Grenoble and beyond. The security access to the park from the microlight station was unusually severe and invasive, especially considering I did little to resemble the famous space explorer of State-wide acclaim, with my unkempt beard, scruffy clothing, and worn hiking pack. That, of course, was the point of these visits to rural Moûtiers, and this place had become a haven of isolation. Somewhere to escape the work, the oppressive bureaucracy, the people, and the aliens who followed me everywhere I now went.

I had discovered this bar years ago with Kesa when we were both graduate students. We found ourselves separated from our group on a light hike one day, not completely unintentionally as the company was unrewarding, and after several hours gentle walking stumbled through the door of Nils’ inn to fresh crusty bread, strong cheese, olives and oil and vinegar, and several bottles of good red wine, all enjoyed on the sunny veranda overlooking the Isère river as it lazily wound its way through the Tarentaise valley. We have come back every year since, even as the increasingly overbearing limits on our freedom of movement made the voyage more difficult and expensive. The river was now dry and dusty owing to the most recent record-breaking drought sweeping the region. My French was rusty, but had improved since my first visit even if my vocabulary was limited to food and wine. Little else was needed. If Nils appreciated our annual pilgrimages, he gave no indication and remained distinctly indifferent to our loyal and years’-long custom.

This time, however, I was here alone. I was due to leave for the Expedition in two weeks’ time and was trying to make the most of a rare weekend off from training, engineering and science briefings, and planetary orientation. The rest of the crew planned to spend it in the company of their families, quartered in the State barracks in London, while I was begrudgingly granted two days of solitude and distance: one of the few benefits afforded to the Chief Science Officer of the State’s most prestigious expeditionary vessel. While nothing in the village had changed much in the past 30 years, the Universe within which it existed had undergone violent shifts as humanity’s perspective on itself and its place in the Grand Story was irrevocably and permanently altered to incorporate the pluralism of complex life that was now known to exist on planets beyond our own. I had helped to uncover this truth during my first, much-lauded expedition onboard the Horizon five years earlier, but I could do little to stem the weeping wound of humanity’s collective existential uncertainty that followed the grim discovery. The story we pieced together from ‘The Hive’ was tragic and not-at-all life-affirming: an eusocial colony-like civilisation of billions on a distant Earth-like planet, destroyed by Malthusian and Machiavellian pressures long before humans were even farming or living in cities, leaving behind only crumbling, incomprehensible ruins. The galaxy beyond Earth was revealed, to the surprise of few, to be as cruel and indifferent as life on Earth had become following the climatic collapse of the late-21st century, and especially now so under the omnipresent and overbearing control of the State. Things were even worse, we are led to believe, outside the borders in the barren hinterlands of central Asia and Africa, or among the collapsing colonies on Mars, riven with piracy and oxygen shortages, and our mission to search out habitable worlds beyond the Solar System was a reflection of our dire need to escape the encroaching desert and, for many, the expanding apparatus of the State. None of that really mattered here though. Here, life was as it always was, despite the droughts and frequent crop failures, and likely as it would always be. Community stopped at the edge of town, well before the sterile security check-points, and the only aliens in sight were those who came from the Big Cities to hike the mountains.

I nursed that whisky for an hour or so, moving it around the thick-bottomed tumbler and admiring the legs as they descended slowly to join the remaining liquor, tracing out chaotic, bifurcating patterns as they did so. No one path alike, each irreproducible route determined seemingly at random. Slight fluctuations in the initial conditions — tiny imperfections in the glass or in the density of the fluid, variations in temperature, or the irregularity of my repetitive swilling — resulted in a near-infinite number of possible outcomes. I knew that this would always be the case, whether here or on the alien worlds to which I must venture, and I took comfort in the uniformity of the universal laws of shaping and movement. In many subtle and unlooked-for ways, the machinations of the Universe can thus be revealed to us.

Or, so it should be, and always had been up to that point. But now something was broken. As I gazed, I realised the route of the remaining liquor, only a warm mouthful pooling in the bottom of the tumbler, seemed ingrained somehow in the crystal despite its near flawless surface, the liquid flowing consistently against my will and even that of gravity. Still it traced a branching fractal, not especially beautiful or complex, but again and again and again it followed that same path no matter how many times I swirled and twisted the heavy glass, and after repeated attempts the sight and thought of this aberration shook me, and I was filled with panic and fear.

Meanwhile, Nils ambled seemingly without direction between the few occupied tables, pouring the last of the wine and noisily clearing empty plates. The clattering of a heavy knife falling to the floor rang out, and this finally broke me away from the repetitive activity that transfixed and terrified me. I didn’t notice the restaurant emptying of people as I had my back to the dining room, but before long I glanced around to find that it was just the two of us. I felt no sense of overstaying my welcome despite his insouciance, and also felt hesitant to leave just yet. On the other side of the bar, several feet from me, Nils came to rest and we both paused for a while without making eye contact.

After sharing a few minutes of silence, I drained the glass of the mysterious whisky and figured that the burning in my mind was just mirroring the burning in my throat. One too many generous helpings of scotch, the likely answer. Nils leaned tiredly on the bar with outstretched arms, and, as if to affirm my belief in the constancy of physics, the slow pendulous action of the locket that dangled from his shirt pocket caught my eye and calmed my nerves. I swiveled off my stool and, after emptying my pockets, headed clumsily and drunkenly towards the heavy wooden door. Turning back to the empty bar as I grasped the thick handle and pulled the door open, I was surprised and astonished to hear Nils say:

“The way forward is ever-branching, but the same route only repeats in memory.”

Slowly but purposefully enunciated with great concentration, the words fell on only my ears and to an audience of empty chairs and sparse tables, and their weight bore down on me. Nils’s gaze met mine with a fleeting empathy, transcending the gulf of years, language, and history that separated us. I stood at the threshold, my back to the cold night air of the Alps and one hand still on the door handle, without words of appropriate gravitas to meet his. Nils shrugged and gave a dismissive wave before flinging a dirty dishcloth over his shoulder and shuffling off in the direction of the kitchen.

I shut the door behind me, expecting to be greeted by a moonless but cool Alpine darkness. Instead, I fell to my knees, suffocating, and suddenly blinded by incandescent orange light and freezing gale. I realised I had no idea where I was, how I got there or what became of the bar and Nils and my whisky. A crippled landing shuttle smoked in a fire-rimmed crater behind me, and distant alarms blared as debris tumbled from the dazzling sky above. I held a helmet with cracked visor limply in my trembling hands and blood fell from them in chaotic patterns onto the dry, alien sand.