Then everything stopped.
The Second American Civil War and the multiple confederations of free states that resulted from it had more or less supplanted the planetary Grand Jihad, which had itself been detonated by the French and European civil wars after a decade and a half of fiery attacks, just as the Balkan conflicts had served as prologues during the century preceding the war of 1914–1918. At the same time, or close to it, like an ultimate historic Larsen effect, the entire Islamic world had been enveloped in a religious and civil war so ferocious that, like a bomb snuffing out the fires of every oil well, it had in a single blow completely exhausted the planetary war that had been raging since the beginning of the century.
That had been the moment when the UHU decided to make its entrance.
Geological diagram: Xenon Ridge is a typical southern Quebecois hill. Formerly covered with trees and bushes, it is now bare of anything but a few scrubby green oaks, dry shrubs, and mutant thistles of astonishing size. Here, geological constraints have resulted in radical adaptation by the local vegetation. Xenon Ridge is in the process of becoming an eroded monolith. Ancient schists cohabitate with the granite pedestal of the Canadian shield; here and there, the terrain is already grooved in places by the harsh winds that ravage the yellow-brown earth, exposing bits of bare, hard rock like human skulls denuded of flesh in a thousand-year-old necropolis discovered by a keen archaeologist.
Plotkin looks out over the low plain; it reminds him of a vast, rocky amphitheater. Far away there are prairies and surviving forests reduced to savannas; farther still, a few islands of greenery have been planted here and there like atolls lost in an ocean of dust.
And in the middle of all this is Heavy Metal Valley. He has read the descriptions, but now he can see it. Feel it.
He understands.
It is a city.
Legally it is part of the county, officially managed by the Consortium. But the general abandonment of expansion projects toward the east twenty years before has turned the zone along Nexus Road into a veritable autonomous territory inside an autonomous territory.
It is like a hole in time, and in society.
A million piled carcasses, ready for the scrap heap, the crusher, or the recovery yards of the various communities that share the plunder.
Plotkin is wearing special contact lenses equipped with a stereoscopy center and a powerful zoom, as well as an optional infrared mode. Legal, made in Chile, and of very good quality, they are part of his essential survival kit.
A million piled carcasses forming high metallic walls, often oxidized, in various states of crumbling disrepair; myriad makes, models, and colors, crisscrossed by an entire network of paths meticulously covered with clinkers. It is a vast maze of metal spiraling outward from its coliseum: an immense expanse of sloping concrete in imitation of the NASCAR racetracks of the Golden Age. Plotkin thanks his intuition for leading him directly to such a high vantage point. He thanks his killer’s instinct for letting him admire the splendid dawn of this day; the azure of the sky is so intense it seems turquoise. He thanks whatever part of him ignored the rest of him to allow him to live this unique, memorable moment.
Heavy Metal Valley. A city within a city. An electric medieval fortress. He distinguishes well-ordered central avenues and smaller side streets that are a bit chaotic, and various rows superimposed on this tangled, discordant, and unimaginable tangle. It is like a slightly smaller copy of Grand Junction itself, but one made of metal, plastic, composite resin, and Plexiglas windows dating from the twentieth century that sparkle in the morning sunlight. Nothing here is newer than 2015 or 2020, in fact. And obviously, he realizes as the hours of watching wear on, the singular economy of this city within a city is based on century-old machines. In view of the derogatory statute of the private closed course granted by the Consortium for the duration of seventy years, the communities of Heavy Metal Valley have the right to burn rubber, gas, trinitrotuol—it doesn’t matter what, he realizes, as long as it makes noise, smoke, and flame—right up to the end of the century.
Or, at least, right up to the end.
The city is also organized according to certain specializations. The basic types—cars, trucks, buses, and heavy and special vehicles (cranes, bulldozers, tanks, etc.) have their own reserved areas. By noon, he has begun to register the existence of a very complex economy, one that is far more sophisticated than simple dealing in used mechanical parts.
They are rebuilding vehicles.
They are remaking them completely.
And they are not content simply to build identical copies, though they do; often, they rebuild vehicles from different wrecks, creating new machines entirely, such as their own vision of the gasoline-powered automobile of the twentieth century, a time most of them are not even old enough to remember.
As the sun glides between banks of storm clouds, Plotkin discerns the repetition of one detail among the hundreds of subtle variations in the high piles of smashed cars—a recurring motif glinting all around an old school bus. In metal, in Plexiglas, in various plastics—everywhere, discreetly gleaming on the rearview mirrors of some cars and on metal plaques soldered to the chassis, as with the school bus.
Crosses.
Christian crosses.
There is nothing ostentatious. No really visible monument. No high symbol dominating the track. No figurines representing Jesus, though he sees a sort of crucifix inside the bus, planted in the windshield, the driver’s area transformed into an altar.
Catholics? Secret Christians seeking refuge inside independent territory?
He orders his contact lenses to magnify his view fifty times, the better to see the vehicles upon vehicles where, half hidden in the masses, UHU-prohibited Christian symbols can be discerned. Some grilles have been redesigned to hold stained-glass rose windows, Celtic crosses, Maltese crosses, Lorraine crosses, Orthodox crosses…nothing that catches the eye at first glance, especially from afar.
Bingo.
Illegals.
Catholics.
Plotkin once again thanks his Order killer’s instinct for having brought him here.
If a group of anti-UHU Catholic dissidents are living here, and if they are conducting various secret sabotage or recruitment operations, then they must be behind the malfunctions of his instructional neuroprogram and the messages coded in Latin. A young Catholic hacker, a genius, living smack in the middle of Heavy Metal Valley?
In his head, the words Heavy Metal Valley flash scarlet.
If there is an unknown force looking to compete with el señor Metatron, the problem must be resolved immediately.
Yet, there is something—a flicker of good in the bad—like a glimmer of light in the shadows. He can easily imagine using all these forces against one another, to his own advantage.
Hopefully as part of his mission to Kill the Mayor of This City.
Past noon, a high trail of powder rises above Monolith Hills. A Texican rocket with a reusable Chinese capsule from the twenties and seven passengers is leaving for the Ring. A long strand of pale gold streams from its tailpipe. The white smoke from its boosters dissipates slowly in the sky in ethereal twists. After their ejection, nothing can be seen but a huge golden star glowing with radiation that is absorbed little by little by the gases in the ionosphere.
The atmosphere is growing more magnetic by the second. A storm is brewing. Obviously, the rocket took off at the last possible moment. The sky is ominously purple on the horizon, near Ontario. It is time to go back.
El señor Metatron, he is informed, visited a number of personal information systems of this city within a city while he stood watching from the overlook. He detected nothing really suspicious; most of the machines contained a number of legal irregularities, but nothing to validate Plotkin’s theory of a young Catholic hacker lost in the valley.
Around six thousand people live here full-time, to which are added almost three thousand seasonal regulars and approximately two thousand travelers and tra
nsients at any given time. Altogether, the valley holds about twelve thousand people. Twelve thousand people for one million vehicles—probably, interjects el señor Metatron, more like one and a half million. That means a little more than a thousand vehicles per person.
Heavy Metal Valley must be considered differently now than Plotkin thought of it when he first set out for Nexus Road.
It isn’t the strip. It isn’t Ottawa Village.
It isn’t the upper-class neighborhood of Centaur City or the downtown of Korolev Plaza.
It isn’t the cosmodrome, or the Enterprise aerostation.
Nor is it Junkville.
It isn’t any of those things, not even a monstrous mix of them.
It is something else. It is rich in things that are now worthless.
Everything seems turned toward the past, toward a disappeared era with high crystal towers, a morning from the first year of the century, and yet he sees it like the heartbeat of a future, a future that wants to be. It is as beautiful as the fading of a rocket into the azure midday sky.
He returns to North Junction a little before one o’clock in the afternoon. The sun is just a pale yellow disk in the sky now, behind the storm clouds that whip at nearly a hundred kilometers per hour across the heavens like enormous gray metallic flying saucers veined with purple and charged with electric energy.
There is a light to the west, and another farther north.
There, in the direction of Ontario, the sky is turning into a high blue-black wall, as if an enormous wave of Chinese ink is rising to blot out the western horizon.
Clearly, WorldWeather has decided to spare the megalopolises of the Great Lakes—where a lot of voters reside—and to refrain from shunting the winds and energy of the super–jet stream toward Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota. Grand Junction will soon benefit from its status as an “autonomous territory.”
The first drops of rain splatter on the car’s windshield as the Hotel Laika comes into view. He leaves the rented Ford Nissan to autopilot itself back downtown and ducks under the metal-tube arch as the rain pounds steadily harder; an enormous flash of blue lightning crashes down on the horizon just then, sounding like some creature ready to devour the world. He strides quickly over the center divider leading to the hotel entrance as the monsoon grows even more violent and ducks into the lobby at the same moment as another peal of thunder strikes, closer this time. Shooting a final glance at the pouring rain assaulting the strip, he goes to the counter, finds it empty, and walks another few meters to the vast portico of white stucco that opens onto the central patio and its dome of translucent pink resin. Mechanically, he looks inside.
And sees her.
> SYDIA SEXYDOLL
It is the android-whore. He recognizes her immediately—even before el señor Metatron, that cunning little blue-orange flame surrounded by tiny sparkles, appears between him and the patio. His guardian angel warns him to be careful. “It was all right for the android from space, but for heaven’s sake, not the Monolith Hills whore,” the pseudo-intelligent creature begs.
“She might be useful,” Plotkin replies in a whisper. “All of them, all five you told me about, might be useful to us. It doesn’t really matter if they see me or cross paths with me. Actually, it might help to implicate them that much more in the authorities’ eyes during the investigation. We’re lucky—we don’t just have one Lee Harvey Oswald. We have a bounty to choose from.”
He isn’t an Order killer for nothing. Intelligent agents have a reputation for being by-the-book, scrupulous sticklers. As a personal security metaprogram, it is el señor Metatron’s job to watch over him; his zealous attitude is understandable. But though prudence is the mother of safety, as they say, an excess of safety can prove the worst imprudence. No, he needs to act quickly, like he did with Vega 2501 at the Next Frontier Bar.
The girl is at the farthest end of the cafeteria, standing in front of a table where a cup of coffee steams gently, and staring out the programmable window toward the valley, the city, and the technological zones of the northern suburbs. She is looking in the direction of the cosmodrome.
He chooses a table near hers but not too near, goes to the buffet, and serves himself calmly before sitting down.
She is around twelve meters from him. She hasn’t turned since he came into the cafeteria. She didn’t move one iota as he served himself at the buffet, sat down, and began to eat.
From where he is sitting, he can see that the cosmodrome, hidden behind an odd sort of white, drifting fog, is barely visible. The fog is truly strange: Mobile, like white pinpoints moving and covering the city little by little, coming from the north, from the direction of Montreal. White spots falling from the sky and floating lightly in the changing wind, sometimes almost horizontally. Snow.
The storm blowing in from the southwest had encountered a strong and probably unexpected current of cold air coming straight from the Canadian Arctic. In the space of just a few minutes, one of the most surprising climatic vagaries of the forty-second parallel occurs before his eyes: the quasitropical storm out of Dakota and Manitoba turns into a veritable blizzard. Between the time he got back into the rented Ford on Xenon Ridge and the moment he left it at the unfinished intersection of North Junction with the strip, the temperature dropped almost fifteen degrees. Ten minutes later, it has fallen below zero.
He immediately understands that this will be more difficult than the encounter with the android out to cruise the strip. “Clients” can chat despite superficial differences. Client and product, though—that is something else.
So he settles for a long, patient observation session.
She is an android of the very latest generation, no doubt about it—from a rear or even a three-quarter view, she is utterly indistinguishable from a human being. She breathes, moves, even stands still just like a human.
As with her “male” counterpart, Vega 2501, it is only the microdetails, which only a trained eye like Plotkin’s can see, that mark this perfectly humanoid entity out as a nonhuman, a machine manufactured in orbit by Venux Corp, the global leader in sexed androids.
During all this time, el señor Metatron scans the network, all the way up to the mainframes of the Ring, to find out more about this “girl.”
This is the time. Without a doubt. This is the time.
He feels strangely anxious just before speaking the banal opening phrase. The words are clumsy on his lips, as if his teeth are made of glass. He pushes the feeling away with a single thrust and says, loudly but not too loudly:
“The cosmodrome is lovely, isn’t it?”
There is no trap more subtle than the truth. There is no trick more dangerous than authenticity.
The phrase, chosen after much reflection and the rejection of dozens of others, is simple—and, more importantly, it is true.
Completely true.
Plotkin too, in the core of his being, is beginning to feel singularly fascinated by Grand Junction, and especially by Cape Gagarin, where both the damned of the Earth and the richest dandies seek their assumption into orbit, into the chaotic, aristocratic, subproletariat of the Ring.
He too has stood at the window of Capsule 108, day and night, and watched the ballet of the rovers and technicians around the launchpads.
And so he too can utter a banality such as The cosmodrome is lovely, isn’t it? with an authenticity all the more miraculous because he is living it himself.
And the truth is a trap so subtle that it functions inexplicably, whatever form it takes as a single incident. And the truth is so profoundly a total creation, an art, an apogee of artificiality, that in this way, like a gleaming rocket in the sky, it becomes free and closes in on its prey like a splendid carnivorous plant intoxicating an insect with its digestive juices, rendering it so drunk that it is unaware of its own annihilation in the midst of hybridic beauty.
He lures Sydia Sexydoll Nova 280 into his trap.
He quickly knows that he has done well, that his solid certaint
y, as well as his professional assassin’s intuition, are good and that he was right to follow them, and that he must continue to follow them by seeing and introducing himself to all five “special residents” detected in the hotel by el señor Metatron—even if, by doing so, he incurs the displeasure of the solitary little flame sulking at the other end of the room. The impression rapidly swallows up “life,” his “life” or what he calls his life, and this swallowing up is not closing it in—rather, it is opening it up wide, uncoiling it, unfolding it like a fruit peeled down to the core; even if the ribbon of his existence has more holes than whole places, more shadow than light, more goal than memory.
All at once, he knows that the trap of unassailable truth works. They find themselves side by side in front of the picture window.
On Platform 3, an Atlas Centaur modified with a “clipper” capsule, a reusable Russian vessel from the 2010s, is being readied for launch. Six people leave tonight for the colony of New Providence, somewhere in the Ring.
Just as quickly, after a conversation he consciously keeps very random—no premeditation, ever—they are seated across from each other at the table where her cup of coffee is no longer steaming.
Whatever his original personality was, whatever the various synthetic identities planted in his cortex by the Order’s neuroengineers, his killer’s instinct—his instinct as a man with an objective, of this body here and now—is shaping, each day, more and more, his real-time “personality.” It is most likely one of the most secret components of the plan, one of the most clandestine mafia techniques used to reshape his brain, isn’t it? Maybe there is nothing wrong at all with the instruction software. Maybe even the coded phrases and mystical messages have nothing to do with what he has until now thought of as accidental interruptions of the neuroprogram. Perhaps the two phenomena aren’t even linked at all. Maybe the instruction program has just lost its usefulness.
Cosmos Incorporated Page 14