He shuts down most of his multifrequency circuits almost at once, unable to deal with the onslaught of audible and inaudible signals of a million different types and from a million different sources.
In the few minutes it takes him to get off the high-speed train, reach the immense main hall via a series of squeaky old escalators, and pass through a teeming galaxy of humanity under the hall’s vast neobyzantine dome toward the lot where the robotaxis are parked, he counts at least twenty-five different languages. He has met or seen thousands of people; seen smiles and smirks, lips tightly pursed or wide open in expressions of expectation, surprise, anger; faces stressed, impatient, neutral, and joyous. He has heard countless sorts of exclamations, laughs, quarrels, and idioms superimposed on one another in a strange Baroque symphony composed of every expletive on Earth.
The first thing he notices is the large number of “body tuners”—devotees of genetic transformation. His implant informs him that Grand Junction has a continent-wide reputation as one of the capitals of the biotech underground. Anything can be found there; anything can be bought. Or sold.
Especially bodies. Human bodies. For reasons the implant leaves unclear, the city and particularly a few of its “hot spots” serve as a refuge for all the body-tuning devotees who lack the means to obtain a true trans-G transformation cure in China or Australia.
If that is the case, they come here and are operated on—for still quite substantial sums—by charlatans and doctors speedily trained in barely approved African medical schools who end most months working for one or another of the local mafias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are more than a few “damaged” among the transgenic population of Grand Junction.
He passes several compact groups of international tourists duly escorted by their guides/bodyguards, noting among the atomized crowd the pointillist presence of “untouchables” in the terminal—the people who are not even allowed to enter the arrival area; they stand scattered and immobile, solitary in the midst of the interminable dance of humans in transit. He notes the recurring presence of genetic monsters among them—this time “naturals,” born of chromosomal mutations caused by various changes in the environment and in man himself. These natural genetic monsters are considered lower than low in Grand Junction; even a body tuner whose seedy operation has been a spectacular failure is considered to be higher on the ladder, because his/her body still has some market value. At the Metabolism and Organ Commodity Exchange, genetic monsters born of this regression of humanity are not even rated as high as slaves—which is to say, objects—since in most cases their deformities render them virtually incapable of performing the smallest task. For a long time, Grand Junction’s human garbage tried to survive in the darkest and most isolated corners of the station, relentlessly hunted by the city’s sanitary police, before being finally shoved to the periphery, where, it is said, they all ultimately disappeared, kidnapped by some gang of renegade doctors or a mafia black-market clinic that quickly harvested whatever parts might be recyclable.
He also meets two very beautiful women. The first is a piquant brunette with green eyes and a Louise Brooks haircut, translucent frontal antennae, and pointed ears like Peter Pan. She loiters coquettishly on the balcony of a small cafeteria filled with newly arrived travelers, selling drinks laced with various meta-amphetamines that are legal in the autonomous Mohawk territory. He comes across the other girl a bit later, their paths crossing as he descends the wide escalators—whose green walls remind him, falsely or not, of an old swimming pool from his childhood—on his way to the enormous exit hall. She is a young blonde, hair knotted in an upturned plume, blue eyes vibrant with bemused intelligence, dressed sportily but with the grace of a woman who can wear anything and look good in it. She bears no obvious outward signs of transgenic modification, but that is meaningless—indeed, Plotkin knows this better than anyone.
Their eyes meet briefly, just for the time it takes for a bird to die of exhaustion in full flight. Then their paths diverge forever, like atoms scattered in outer space.
The city map is a prosthetic extension of his memory, superimposing itself on the concrete reality of the thousands of individuals who converge and diverge here, in a machine without even the slightest remainder of human tissue.
So he knows that the Grand Junction terminal is not the real terminal; not really the end of the road.
The real terminal is the cosmodrome itself. It’s on the other side of the city—actually, the other side of the county. There are direct lines of communication between the arrival station and the departure astroport, but they are only for maintenance, security, or people possessing special puce cards approved by the Municipal Consortium that manages the city and spatial activity.
From the Enterprise train station, where, under immense holograms of the mythic Star Trek vessel as well as an enormous replica of the prototype shuttle with the same name built by the Americans in the late 1970s, the MagLev™ monorail line crosses paths with the old Amtraks of Canadian National, and from the Enterprise aerostation, where the giant zeppelins of the regular transamerican lines hover alongside electric airplanes belonging to this or that genetic-engineering tycoon, thousands of men and women stream each day. Of this teeming mass, very few will reach their true destination—the sharp point of their destiny. The cosmodrome. Cape Gagarin.
For it is not so easy to gain access to this Holy of Holies itself, even with tickets costing 75,000, 125,000, or even 250,000 Pan-Am dollars apiece, according to whether you choose to travel on an old, rebuilt Soyuz with an antique Atlas Centaur shoved up its ass or, even worse, a locally built fireball perched atop a fifty-year-old Japanese H-4, or an ancient American orbital shuttle purchased from NASA and partially refitted, or a Texican airplane-missile hybrid, or a good old Chinese capsule from the twenties coupled to a modern Brazilian launcher.
No, even before you obtain this ticket, the price of which is fixed according to a complex reckoning system approved by the UHU, you must often wait for years. Therein lies the guile of the economy that regulates the city. Some people have been waiting since the private cosmodrome opened, when the space industry had not yet been crushed by global terrorism, and when the Amerindian and Russo-American mafias, intelligently located in a transborder territory with lax legal standards, were attracting investors, capital, and research centers in droves. Even before the Windsor International Astroport was completed, more than thirty-five years ago. It might truthfully be said, in fact, that many people died before they were ever able to leave for the High Frontier.
He learns all this as he walks through the aerostation; he learns it while the topological network of the disaster sketches itself in his brain; he learns it as he travels toward the darkest night that has fallen on Earth.
The enormous discrepancy between supply and demand had been amplified by the horrors of the Grand Jihad, its psychological consequences, and the progressive abandonment of “unused” space by bloated government bureaucracies.
There had been some who had tried to survive on makeshift boats, reclamation freighters, unused or pirated offshore platforms in international waters turned into shelters for stateless refugees of ethnic conflict, or even houses floating just off coastlines submerged by rising ocean waters. Others had abandoned the traditional large cities, riddled as they were with every type of civil disorder, for what remained of nature—but this too had soon been corrupted, full of knots of humanity; enormous, metastasizing shantytowns with ever-changing borders; nomadic colonies of Recyclo™ particleboard folding houses swarming like so many ants and devouring trees, earth, and water as they went.
And then there had been those who attempted to take their chances up there in the Ring.
Of course, not everything was entirely ruined here below, because UniWorld would have nothing left to manage if the world ended. But—and Plotkin asked himself if the feeling might possibly be shared by anyone else on the planet—the overall impression was definitely that something had been seriously
fucked up.
Why had the giant cartels left the High Frontier? Only the military and the media sent satellites there now. Only the Global Control Bureau—the UHU militia—maintained a handful of stations in circumterrestrial or circumlunar orbit. True, aerospace companies had ended up developing supersonic planes, then transatmospheric ones that could fly businessmen and tourists from Helsinki to Buenos Aires in an hour, but all large-scale space-colonization projects had been frozen during the war, and never taken up again.
Only a few adventurous souls and mafia associations had persevered.
Space had become a true Far West, a Far Sky, a Frontier that the paltry legal provisions of the UHU Space Development Authority could never hope to regulate. By definition, the Frontier was marginal. It did not move; the margin would remain the margin, and the World was at no risk for change. And one could assume, without too much chance of being mistaken, that the World understood things would remain as they were for a long time to come.
The bureaucrats of the Global Governance Bureau, who were in charge of Unimanity and the institutions of the UHU, lost all interest in any subsequent development in the Ring. The only thing that mattered was that it did not interfere with daily civil and military operations, global telecommunications, or social and climatic control satellites.
It was strange, this feeling that in fact the twenty-first century was the first one in which not only had human history more or less stopped, it had actually begun to move in reverse. The state of the space industry, one hundred years after the launch of Sputnik I, was unequivocally characteristic of the state of everything, and in any case, there was no equivalent to the current atmosphere of decadence in the long history of human empires.
For UniWorld, a few eccentric billionaires and a pack of dingoes trying to shut themselves up inside a pressurized sardine can while continuing to pay taxes to the Universal Fiscal Agency might just as well have wanted to hold transsexual orgies on the moon; they were free citizens, after all, well informed of the dangers involved in any temporary or permanent move outside natural human surroundings. UniWorld disavowed any legal or moral responsibility, and serenely continued to tax them.
Order reigned, all the better for there being none.
Anarchy begins immediately outside the Enterprise aerostation.
He quickly realizes that this is the city’s principal source of wealth, and that it is necessary to maintain the system of waiting and selection, as well as ironfisted control over ticket prices, in order to conserve the dynamic of this chaos, this inexhaustible source of power and money.
For in this state of chaos, as in all others, “freedom” is only a contingency of necessity. He doesn’t yet know where this primal intuition comes from, but it makes his spirit tingle. When disorder is allowed to be society’s guiding principle, the social engine ends by breaking down completely; both the explosive matter that initiates propulsion and the basic structure that maintains coherent operation fall apart. This permits rapid and very substantial gains—people depend on liberty, which is bound to necessity; people depend on voluntary servitude. People depend on desire.
It is volatile fuel to depend on, fuel that makes the world itself volatile too.
So here there is a blazing new motor—or, rather, the perfect appearance of one. It is really a simulacrum, where hundreds of thousands of human shadows move through a lovely cavern that hides the walls of an immense strongbox.
So this is Grand Junction. It sweeps you away in a flood of human desire; it is monistic, pure, terribly active, foaming in thousands of individual droplets and dashing itself against the walls of civilization. It is a huge brothel turned toward the stars. It is a lottery, a circus act that has become a true piece of the World. That has become a society.
Rapidly, letting his neuro-implants gather a few more bits of information as he navigates the different floors of Enterprise, he realizes that a “ticket to ride,” as they say here, for an orbital flight is worthless in itself, even at the price of a quarter of a million on a high-security launcher. It is not for one of these that all these people have waited years, some until they died, crammed into capsule motels and collapsible shantytowns, luxury hotels and casinos, squalid streets and neoclassical villas; it is not for one of these that they are ready to steal, kill, humiliate, be humiliated, cheat, corrupt, lie, hate, love. It is for a document made of cloned recyclable cellulose, courtesy of UniGlobal Recyclo™, a piece of yellow paper called the Golden Track.
The Golden Track is an official document duly stamped by the UHU—which of course keeps a copy of the number—that authorizes you to be a permanent resident in the Orbital Ring, and to apply for a flight to one of the lunar stations or Martian colonies that was lucky enough to gain autonomy during the Grand Jihad. The Golden Track lets you rent or buy, in cash, lease, or rent to own—with the amount and type of transaction clearly stated—a UHU-approved habitation module of one type or another, before you are assigned to one or another of the colonies of orbital stations grouped in star-shaped clusters that make up the Orbring, the Orbital Ring. Without this UHU-approved piece of paper, there is no point in leaving for the Ring; no one will be there waiting for you, and you will be automatically reshuffled into the waiting crowd. You must go through the entire corrupt bureaucratic, technocratic process before you can even hope to obtain one of these yellow slips; and if you want to make sure you have even a slight chance to get one, it is in your best interest to pre-buy your place right away. The waiting list is very, very long, you see, and that is how Grand Junction prospers so easily, by fixing ticket prices while interminably drawing out the process of getting one of these passports to the sky.
To the pioneers waiting to leave for outer space, for one private cosmodrome or another, this bright yellow paper with blue printing on it is also known as a claim.
The language spoken in Grand Junction is often translated into dozens of dialects from all over the world, but its basis is Anglo-Saxon, the lingua franca of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first (after that, various bits of Chinese slang had entered the mix). In this language particular to the Cosmograd terminal, there are expressions from the frontier mythology of the mid-nineteenth century—that time of steam locomotives and Colt Single Action guns, and cowboys and Indians. The conquerors and the conquered.
All around him, as he makes his way through the milling crowd at the aerostation exit, between vast concrete-composite pillars made to resemble Minoan columns, the name of that bright yellow paper with blue printing resonates in almost every language on Earth: the Golden Track. The Sentier d’Or. The Pista de Oro.
For Plotkin, the fact that Grand Junction had been able to flourish on “federal indigenous territory”—an Amerindian reserve covering the equivalent of several counties, and straddling the American-Canadian border, no less—was in no way the result of mere chance.
As he picks his way toward the robotaxi station, little by little the tableau comes together. Through the light evening fog, he thinks that he can make out the wavering bunches of city lights. He has an odd feeling that he has not yet been told everything about himself or about this world. He knows, somehow, that this is only the beginning.
He knows that he is going to like Grand Junction enough to be able to kill its mayor without the slightest twinge of guilt.
You must pray as if everything depends on God, and act as if everything depends on us.
The words were those of Bossuet, a French Catholic author from the Great Century; some attributed them to Ignatius Loyola. Why had the instruction program revealed them to him? Why were they contained at all in a clandestine neuro-implant? Why had he remembered them only now?
It was an amusing enigma, like the face of a woman seen in an aerostation crowd. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with his present situation: the robotaxi gliding toward the city; the wide circular avenue running around the periphery of the county in three main branches, each bearing the name of one of the myth
ical early American space conquests. To the west, Mercury Drive. To the north, the vast curve of Apollo Drive. To the east, Gemini Drive, where he finds himself at the moment, a vast ribbon of concrete regularly dotted with tunnels. The drive is, he notes, a good way to see various parts of the city, lit in successive sequences by the Toyota robotaxi’s orange sodium lights. As they pass the head of Von Braun Heights, he catches glimpses of the cosmodrome itself, with its hangars and its three takeoff runways, one of which is currently awaiting the arrival of a rebuilt Russian Protron resting on its crawler, a sort of giant rover, moving toward the pad from its warehouse at two kilometers per hour.
The second platform is empty at the moment, though he can see the movements of human activity on it, and vehicles, and flashing lights—perhaps there has just been a takeoff? On the third and farthest platform, a replica of a twentieth-century American shuttle points its black muzzle toward the sky, mounted bravely atop the bomb of hydrogen and liquid oxygen that is the enormous fuel tank, wreathed in plumes of greenish smoke that waver in the glare of the spotlights.
“Monolith Hills,” he had told the robotaxi’s verbal interface as he slid into the violet vinyl backseat, with its myriad tiny rips from which protruded nubs of piss yellow foam.
His neuroprogram had informed him of the exact address only a few seconds earlier, while he stood with his hand pressed to the taxi door’s keypad decoder. The Toyota was orange, the color of the Grand-C-Cabs company, and an old Pink Floyd song, “Interstellar Overdrive,” had started up along with the engine. Excellent choice, but it was a remake, not the original; a cover by a robotized Japanese chamber music quartet.
He had been surprised to discover this knowledge within himself, unaided by the instruction program. Was it part of his original personality?
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