Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Thirty-nine years old. Not even forty. And probably less than a week to live.

  After the attack of vomiting comes a terrible migraine, as usual, clamping his skull in its burning grip. A ton of aspirin wouldn’t be enough; it’s useless to hope for anything from classic analgesics, or from anything that can still be found in Junkville. The head pain indicates the beginning of the recurrence of his degenerative disease; the Sony-Motorola implant will probably be good for only three or four more days. And he will probably live only three or four more days after that.

  Lying on his small Japanese futon, he watches his legs and hands shake convulsively, unable to control their frenetic movement. He feels his facial muscles begin to contract in jerks, and he knows—he watched it in the bathroom mirror once—his eyes are rolling back periodically in their sockets, causing him to lose his vision for an instant.

  And all this is only the beginning. The symptoms are only going to get worse, gaining amplitude and intensity, and soon other dysfunctions will appear.

  Finally—and it will doubtless come as a relief—he will die. All this effort absurdly thwarted, all this life reduced to nothing, all this strength of will erased from human memory.

  For two or three years during the time of the Metastructure, more than a decade ago now, James Vegas Orlando was one of the young prodigies of the township of Little Congo. He had been quickly noticed for his sense of business organization and had advised the committee that renovated the Flesh Market district in order to make it a true showroom for the local whores. He had established solid rules with the pimps of Monolith Hills. He was full of ideas, careful to never step in anyone’s flower bed as he ran his business like an old pro. Even better, thanks to him, the pimps of Little Congo had seen their collective prosperity multiply by two or three times in the space of twenty months. It was some sort of record.

  His trajectory within the elite of Junkville’s aristocracy had been like one of the cosmodrome’s rockets. He had quickly become rich, really rich, and was serenely envisaging a home in the city of Grand Junction itself—Monolith Hills, most likely, or even one of the trendy quarters: Novapolis, or Von Braun Heights?

  Then the dream had been shattered, along with the rest of the world.

  The attack passed shortly after noon.

  He is able to think again. He tries to place his thoughts in some sort of order, so they might at least delay the end.

  Of course, there is the rumor. It has been swirling throughout the whole Territory for two years now. It’s the biggest rumor around. It’s THE rumor. But it’s only a rumor, undoubtedly one of those urban legends that appear whenever two or three houses agglomerate anywhere.

  People say all kinds of things. They talk about a child gifted with paranormal powers, and sometimes about an old man, and sometimes even a young woman. They talk about some sort of secret army formed just before the fall of the Metastructure. They talk about an experimental laboratory that has a universal bionic antivirus. They talk about voodoo and magic orchestrated by mediums. They talk about an antimachine created by the Metastructure itself, before or after its death. They talk about an extraterrestrial artifact. They even talk about angels. They have seen it everywhere, in Heavy Metal Valley to begin with, but also in the rest of the territory. They talk of its presence, whatever that means, in Deadlink, Grand Junction, Monolith Hills, Omega Blocks, Junkville, of course, and also the deserted city of the old body tuners of Neon Park, or in some isolated township—Aircrash Circle, or X-15, or Surveyor Plateau, or Grand Funk Railroad …

  It is just a rumor, but it might be his only chance. The rumor has crystallized during the past few months. There are more and more functioning electric machines in the Independent Territory. It is especially obvious that a surprising number of people whose vital systems were infected are being miraculously healed. And it isn’t a temporary remission, either. People are being immunized forever. The people themselves never talk about it. They all talk about some “inexplicable miracle” and other bullshit like that. In the best-case scenario they might slide you some tiny tidbit of information that gives credit to one or another variant of the rumor.

  It has truly attained the status of a legend; soon people will be talking about millions of healings, even though half of the current population of the globe will have died.

  Maybe there is another way.

  There is his connection with that girl, that Irish-Haitian ex-whore he had had working on Monolith twelve or thirteen years ago, in Flesh Market. Ariane Gallagher. One of his former neighbors in Little Congo, now living in Clockwork Orange County a little to the north. She heard him talking about a guy who knew someone, a person who just arrived in the territory and who, they say, is one of the men who worked on the last version of the Metastructure.

  One of his old friends says she knows someone who knows someone. A third-degree connection in the best light. The usual way of things in Junkville. But it might be a beginning, which is much better than nothing. And it is all he has. Where does she live again? Oh yes—in Vortex Townships, above Ultrabox, just before Autostrada. That’s northwest of the city. Ariane Gallagher has managed to avoid the downward spiral that generally awaits the old whores of Flesh Market; she could easily have ended up living in a Recyclo particleboard box in Toy Division or on New Arizona, where the refugees from the American Midwest huddle, where life is worth less than sand. She probably found some old guy to hustle, meeting his needs during his final days, and she came out of it pretty well. Vortex Townships isn’t so bad. It isn’t too far from Little Congo, in fact. Not too far from survival. He might be able to make it there in his old gasoline-powered Buick …

  So this is Vortex Townships, the only area anywhere near as high-tech as Junkville. It consists of a long line of structures built of specialized technological junk, mostly or completely mechanical but from electronic systems, requiring some programming and thus no longer functioning anywhere in the world. These hills were settled at about the same time as the others, but Vortex Townships quickly found its niche, its unique specificity. Before the fall of the Metastructure and the death of the machines, Vortex Townships served as a hub for almost all the techno trafficking in the southern part of the Independent Territory.

  There’s nothing better to be found there now than old, just barely functioning televisions and radios, cassette players from the twentieth century, gear-driven watches, hydraulic pumps, gasoline engines, bottles of propane gas, plumbing fixtures, and toothed keys.

  The only traffic happening there now, really, is that of the necro Triads, who recover all the bodies found in public areas and even private homes in order to harvest their natural, possibly profitable, organs. The Triads of Vortex Townships are the best organized in the entire territory; they compete easily with the small organizations of Big Bag Recyclo or Snake Zone.

  Here, the human body is still used for something. Here nothing is lost, only transformed. Even death. Especially death.

  Here, everything has some use. Everything is recycled.

  Ariane Gallagher looks exactly like what she is—an old prostitute. She looks like what this city has become, like what the entire territory of Grand Junction has become.

  Like what the world has become.

  There is no need for preliminary small talk with a whore. Not even for conversation. And he doesn’t have one second to lose.

  But on the other hand, he knows she is like him—business before anything—and that she would not believe he had come halfway across the city to exchange reminiscences about Flesh Market. He can attack directly. He can say everything he has come to say. He can reveal his secret.

  “One of my old implants just broke down. I have a contact—I won’t tell you his name—who told me you might be able to help me. That you know someone.”

  The old hooker permits herself the luxury of two or three seconds of suspense. “Yes. I know someone. A landlord. He owns a capsule building on BlackSky Ridge.”

  “Okay, gre
at. He’s the one?”

  “No. I won’t tell you his name, either. My friend knows another guy very well, somewhere else in the city. I won’t tell you his name, either.”

  Three degrees, including his contact in Clockwork Orange. Three degrees of separation, thinks James Vegas Orlando. Where is the man I’m looking for?

  “The man told my friend more than once that he was waiting for someone. Someone important. He kept using those words. This stranger arrived around two days ago, my friend told me. He’s the man you need to see. He might be able to heal you, and maybe others. At least that’s what the man thinks who knows my friend at BlackSky Ridge.”

  Ah, okay, thinks James Vegas. So it’s four degrees of separation.

  “Great,” he says. “BlackSky Ridge, you said? A capsule building?”

  “Yes, on the site of an old motel in Monolith Hills. You can’t miss it—it has a sign with the UManHome logo. They’re orange.”

  “I’ll find it,” he says. “The usual price?”

  “The usual price. I don’t like to change my habits.”

  5 > OUTLANDOS D’AMOUR

  The light falls in heavy rays on the face of Wilbur Langlois, illuminating the angular bones of his face in a play of halogen gold and dusty shadow. His black eyes shine like coals lit up by subterranean tungsten; the light makes him even more nocturnal, it brings something out of his being, the millennia of savagery buried in his genetic memory and a bare half-century of civilization—and then a few years of decivilization. It exposes the darkness he is made of, and makes it darker still.

  The light streaming in from outside the dark-blue-tinted anti-UV Plexiglas, the solar dimness accentuating the hard planes of his face carved by the artificial light, gives him the look of a robot ready for his turn in a game of chess.

  Here in Heavy Metal Valley, he knows he is protecting a sort of sanctuary. It certainly wasn’t his job originally; more than twenty years earlier, the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium of the Territory of Grand Junction, the owner of the cosmodrome, offered him the position of sheriff in this zone that was then in full expansion, built barely a dozen kilometers to the northwest of the launchpad, around a community of “greasers,” those irrepressible amateur lovers of gasoline-powered vehicles whose presence was just barely tolerated by the UHU. He brought order, justice, and law to them. He brought power and its counterpart, freedom. Of all the residents of the Territory, those who lived in HMV had suffered the least from the attacks of the Metastructure as it broke down.

  He had eventually told himself at the time that it was probably due to the Christian communities whose presence he accepted, putting himself outside the law with regard to Grand Junction’s Mohawk authorities and the faceless police of Human UniWorld. He had turned from a Protector of Social Law into a Resistor of World Order, and yet at the time, it had been like a revelation; he had continued his job as sheriff, even amplifying it somewhat; he had remained the armed hand of Justice while welcoming these refugees from the Invisible onto his soil. When, after the end of the Metamachine-World, the wars and guerrilla fighting of all types had broken out again everywhere on the planet in a final struggle for the honor of History, he had organized the city’s defense against the renegades coming from various holdover Islamic emirates, from Ontario, from Illinois, and from certain parts of Quebec. He had become head of the City Council; then, one fine day, he had decided to have himself baptized by Father Newman.

  He is now a sheriff in the Post-World, harder than flint, with the inflexibility of a soldier of lost civilizations.

  Shortly after his baptism, Milan Djordjevic and his companion—the android former prostitute who had discovered the baby under the Dead-link interchange—the two adoptive parents of little Gabriel Link de Nova, had come to see him, and they had brought the little boy with them.

  And they had explained to him what was really happening.

  Wilbur Langlois had held to HMV’s democratic procedure. The City Council had met; its members were brought up to date, and the most absolute secrecy decreed concerning Gabriel’s powers. Wilbur Langlois had done everything he could during the years since then to ensure that the secret remained as well protected as if it were sealed in a strongbox welded shut with an oxyhydric torch.

  But the World is full of holes now. Nothing can keep the truth from coming out, like lava erupting from a volcano. Nothing can change the fact that the only materiality in this world now comes from lying and its confrere, betrayal.

  For Wilbur Langlois, it means a single imperative: immediate reinforcement of security procedures.

  Wilbur Langlois. A Mohawk. A mixed-blood, in fact, originally from southern Quebec. A barely human block of stone. A man who is usually laconic, and who at first seems slow and awkward, but who, they say, can hit an old one-dollar coin with a .223-caliber bullet from more than fifty meters away. And that he can do the same thing to a human skull at the same distance, without a twinge of guilt.

  Link is facing him. He is nervous.

  Wilbur Langlois looks at him without kindness. He stands straight, but without any sign of tension. With him, it is calmness that indicates anger; quietude points the compass needle toward the “danger” pole. It is ice that signals the presence of flame.

  Here, he is the Guardian. The Man of the Law.

  What remains of it.

  And he is utterly pitiless.

  “We made a deal. It’s called a contract.”

  Link doesn’t reply. He shrinks in on himself slightly, barely looking at the sheriff in his midnight blue uniform, his silvery badges, his Canadian Mounted Police–style gray hat. And his steely black eyes, harder than bullets about to be fired.

  “Everything has to go by me, at least everything important. And even what’s unimportant,” Langlois continues.

  Link huddles in on himself even more tightly. The whole City Council is there. And even Judith.

  “And it seems to me that this information is of the very highest importance.”

  Link de Nova does not speak. He looks in turn at each of the members of the Council, sitting here in their excuse for a city hall, this old Quebecois school bus found one day, full of dead children, south of the river.

  “And so someone has betrayed my trust, and, even worse, taken unwise risks.”

  The voice holds the almost indifferent calm of an assassin ready to deliver the deathblow.

  “So you can easily imagine that I am not happy at all.”

  Link watches the members of the Council.

  They don’t look very happy, either.

  “I wanted to talk to you about it as soon as possible. Right now we’re only dealing with rumors.”

  “I’m sick of this, Gabriel. We agreed that I would be kept updated about each visit, especially the important ones. Your friend hasn’t been to see me.”

  “We don’t know yet what this is really about, Sheriff Langlois, or even what to do, or how; I assure you, that’s why I talked to Judith about it.”

  “Yeah,” grumbles the sheriff, “that’s the best thing you’ve done, because she told her parents right away. And her parents, as you know, are Council members.”

  Again, Link looks out of the corner of his eye at each of the men and women sitting around the table in the center of the remodeled school bus and taking up almost its entire length.

  He recognizes Judith’s parents, sitting on either side of the young woman, and their friends the Sommervilles, an evangelical pastor and his wife. Father Newman is there, too, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the deacon. And there is Lady van Harpel, his mother’s best friend, who moved to Deadlink two years ago when masses of refugees overtook the small valley where she had been parking her mobile home.

  And then there is the sheriff. The block of granite. The Man of Classical Law. He is accompanied by his first adjunct, a solid fellow from Alberta called Slade Orange Vernier.

  And to top it all off, at the other end of the table, facing the sheriff, who is presiding over the assembl
y, is Link’s own father, Milan Djordjevic.

  His father, who is looking at him with his clear eyes, two opalescent pearls that fix him with an indecipherable mixture of compassion and hardness.

  His father, who is not very happy, either, but who knows that Link is doing what he can, with his scanty childish resources, to survive on his own.

  His father, who knows he is afraid. Of his own powers as much as of what they must fight.

  His father, who knows he is exactly right to be afraid.

  “Are these isolated cases, or are we looking at an epidemic in progress? Or the threat of one?”

  “Like I told you, Sheriff, we don’t know anything yet. My friend told me about two cases that both happened last week. If it started in October there have definitely been others. But how many, is the big question.”

  “A question we need to answer as soon as possible.”

  “My friends are looking, Sheriff. You know as well as I do that what they look for, they find.”

  Langlois’ black gaze plunges into Link’s own. The fact that he is only twelve years old means nothing, Link knows. In Heavy Metal Valley, you stop being a child after the first twenty-four hours of your life.

  “It would be in your interest to keep me informed and to respect procedures, Gabriel.”

  A heavy silence falls like a leaden sky over the school bus and the Council table. Langlois’ last remark is one that needs no additional commentary.

  Then the sheriff inclines his head in Milan Djordjevic’s direction, at the other end of the table.

  “And now we will move on to the second subject that involves us. Or rather … that involves Mr. Djordjevic.”

  Link watches his father with unfeigned curiosity. The man’s face is imperturbable; a very slight smile plays at the corners of his mouth.

  “The confirmation is valid, Sheriff,” Milan Djordjevic says. “The Vatican’s holographic seal has been identified.”

  Sheriff Langlois says nothing. Clearly, the ball is in Link’s father’s camp.