Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Is that all?”

  “No. That’s when I really screwed up. He asked me a couple of harmless questions.”

  “There’s no such thing as a harmless question in Junkville,” Chrysler snaps.

  “I know that,” retorts Pluto Saint-Clair, piqued. “So he asked me two or three questions. Where my friend was from, why he was coming, who he was. And the worst part is that I answered him.”

  Chrysler’s silence might as well be a string of curses. Finally, he speaks. “And you answered him precisely, I hope? Gave him all the details?” His voice is like ice.

  “No, but I did mention the ’56 Nobel Prize, and the fact that the Professor worked on the last version of the Metastructure. I realized my mistake too late.”

  There is another brief silence, but they can almost hear the swear words erupting from Chrysler Campbell’s tightly closed lips.

  “And you live in Junkville, Pluto? I hope you realize that you’ve broken the cardinal rule of any security system.”

  Pluto doesn’t answer. It’s as clear to him as it is to the rest of them.

  As they cross the semiarid plains stretching north of Omega Blocks, Yuri concentrates for a moment on the vast spaces covered with the Territory’s neoecological vegetation, now predominantly weeds of all kinds: prickly whitish phragmites; Canadian dogwood whose tough branches look like bunches of charred veins; various types of thistles recognizable by the colors of their flowers and the precise structures of their serrated petals—Flodman’s thistles, Russian thistles, field thistles, marsh thistles, prairie thistles, Canadian thistles, nonfeathery thistles, unbent thistles, common thistles. Greenish carnivorous ambrosia and mugwort, whose aggressive pollen causes dermatitis and hay fever; false quillwort, with its alternating wavy and sharp-edged leaves, so brilliantly green they appear lacquered, covered with forked bristles whose narrow, branching stalks end in dense bunches of flowers with yellow petals and orange seeds; young stems of Canadian goldenrod with their three-pointed leaves, spreaders of tormenting allergies, whose inflorescence forms pyramidal clouds of intense yellow-green; the high, dense columns of various types of euphorbia, whose bushy branches reach up to three feet in height; clumps of chick-weed and starflowers whose stems grow in tangled knots while their blossom-filled branches bear compact bunches of whitish berries; the purple-streaked branches and small white flowers of the highly poisonous water hemlock; Centaurea pratensis—meadow knapweed—with its spiny purplish blue flowers; blackberry brambles with long bearded stems; wild roses and hawthorn with small pink-and-white blossoms; poison sumac with its skin-irritating secretions; Saint-John’s-wort, its towering sturdy stalks topped with bunches of bright yellow flowers; milkweeds with tall, spiny stems and purplish blossoms; viperines with large blue-and-violet flowers and bristly leaves like fangs; various bindweeds whose green tendrils wind like snakes around neighboring plants or the trunks of accessible trees while their cardioid leaves and small short-stemmed flowers grow in wispy bunches at the end of their multibranched stalks and cover the ground with a carpet of rough growth. All the soil thus populated by hardy and sometimes toxic plants, this parasitic vegetation of neonature, is often swept by errant, barbed-wire-like tumbleweeds and serves as a natural nest for colonies of wasps and hornets, mosquitoes and black flies, horseflies, dragonflies, deerflies, army ants, termites, tarantulas, huge garden spiders and enormous centipedes, worms and slugs—an entire armada of crawling and flying insects. It is the most beautiful ecology in the world, the deadliest, the most vibrant.

  Yuri turns again in his seat to look out the rear window at the wide, dusty road that has become the principal north-south route in the Territory during the past twelve years of intensely speeded-up desertification. He glances at the large exterior rearview mirror.

  “Chrysler,” he says in his mildest tone, “I think it would be a good idea for us to take our ‘special route.’”

  Campbell hasn’t spoken for long moments, maintaining his habitual, calmly ironic smile in the face of the world’s chaos. He and Yuri might as well be discussing the territory’s applied weather, the storm beginning to break over Junkville. “The code-red route, Yuri?” he asks, as if inquiring about the location of some obscure intersection.

  “Red. Completely red,” Yuri replies, keeping his voice casual.

  Still, he notices an odd shiver run through his friend’s body, and knows that his friend has not failed to take the hint, even if he is unaware of anything more specific than that.

  Row 299. They are somewhere near Neon Park now, not far from the shores of Lake Champlain. The “code red” special route is tortuous. It runs northeast of Deadlink, then dips southeast toward Aircrash Circle, passing through a desolate landscape of naked rocks and clumps of vegetation surviving with difficulty in the midst of a bare steppe scattered with a few acres of wild grass and thorny perennials, vestiges of what was once, before the Fall, lush subtropical flora.

  Now it has all been subjugated by the desert. The desert that has already forced men to adapt their lives to its dictates.

  “The storm must be over Junkville by now. We can go to yellow alert,” observes Yuri.

  “Yes. We’ll take the diagonal roads and get back to the north-south route. We need to catch the storm.”

  Yuri glances at Chrysler out of the corner of his eye. Yes. His friend knows that the man in the red car, who has been following them since Junkville, was forced to execute a speedy turnaround in order to avoid getting lost in some barren part of the Territory. It has been more than ten minutes since Yuri saw the red spot in the rearview mirror or the window, appearing and disappearing in the treacherous terrain.

  They use the “special route” to lose possible pursuers in the labyrinth of rows and roads he and Chrysler know by heart, to exhaust their fuel supplies and their patience, and to make it impossible for them to follow their prey.

  As a passive, defensive weapon, it has proved its usefulness more than once.

  By the time Chrysler pulls the truck into the aluminum shelter his father built years ago, the wind is gusting at almost a hundred kilometers per hour. Chrysler takes a portable biophosphorescent lantern from the wall and switches it on, filling the metal shed with yellowish light.

  From a tin armoire, he takes a small steel ladder equipped with a pneumatic jack and automated rollers. Then, opening a trapdoor at his feet, he lowers the ladder slowly into the ground.

  The lantern’s yellow light casts long, wavering shadows on the aluminum walls and titanium-composite beams of the underground structure. Chrysler’s father was always a prudent man—one might even say paranoid. It was he who built the little hut with its underground passage, he who stockpiled the weapons here that Chrysler has been hoarding since his childhood to go along with the Ruger Mini-14 rifle hidden in the main house; there is the SAR-7 assault rifle from the turn of the century, the Californian copy of the redoubtable Russian army AK-47, the German-made H&K MP5 tommy gun, the nine-millimeter automatic pistol, the hands-free Remington semiautomatic shotgun, and the 7615 patrol air rifle once used by police tactical units with a magazine copied from that of an AR-15, capable of ten or twelve rounds and fitted with a small Nikon scope, housed in a .223 Remington. There are also two French-made belts of defensive shattering grenades, several blinding grenades made in China, and a bunch of flash missiles and smoke bombs of various origins. There are the two military antiques in perfect working order: a Waffen-SS Luger P08 and a 1945 Russian Tokarev, which may well have faced off against each other during the Battle of Berlin. And in addition to all this, there are enough munitions to support a weeks-long siege, safely packed in their fir boxes and long hidden in this subterranean crawl space. A veritable arsenal. One day Chrysler had told Yuri, only half joking, that the two of them alone could probably compete with the arms traffickers at Powder Station.

  “They’ve been in the shit since the First Fall,” he had said, “with their fucking magnetic rifles and stores of ‘intelligent’ micromun
itions.”

  Evidently his father, though he worked for the cosmodrome, had had very little trust in the technological innovations of the 2010s and 2020s.

  Evidently he hadn’t believed it could last.

  The world had proved him right. And in so doing, it had consigned him to the grave.

  The four men climb down into the dark, narrow depths of the subterranean passage, Yuri first, Chrysler last.

  The storm howls more fiercely every minute. Jets of sand strike the walls in a long and deafening barrage. Less-solid structures sway periodically in the gale-force wind. Noises of all sorts—cracks, creaks, whistles, scratches—assault their ears continuously as they gather in the tiny single-room space.

  Yuri can see nothing more out the plastic-composite fuselage windows than a dark cloud of particles dancing with crazily kinetic energy. It must be what an electromagnetic storm in space is like, he muses to himself, thinking—he doesn’t know why—of the sky obscured by the passing storm, but also by the End of the World. Thinking of the sky, cut off from the Earth, and of the several hundred thousand men and women still living in the Ring. Living in freedom. With their machines.

  For decades, the Territory provided a sort of exit door to anyone and everyone who wished to try living without the totalitarian presence of the Metastructure, in the Orbital Ring. Just before the Fall, more than a million people were living in the Ring, but nine-tenths of them were lowly temporary workers or seasonal technical specialists, or simply travelers in transit. The Machine-World had tolerated the Ring’s presence while keeping a tight hold on research funds for its expansion and for space exploration (or so Chrysler Campbell says his father told him). During the Fall, most of the temporary workers managed to make it back to Earth in spite of numerous accidents. They soon regretted their success.

  The desert that has come now to threaten the Territory with its absolutely undeniable physical presence is like a meteorological copy of the thing that is killing machines and men. The desert is acting like a geophysical clone of the Post-Machine.

  Together, the two phenomena might be able to destroy the world—but is it possible that their efforts are concentrated on the annihilation of the Territory?

  On the annihilation of Gabriel Link de Nova, and the small circle of people who have gathered around him in a last protective stand?

  Is the desert, to some degree, part of the thing’s plan?

  It is at once inconceivable and terribly, utterly logical.

  12 > GANG OF FOUR

  Four men. A makeshift shelter. A sandstorm.

  Four men. A territory. A nameless, borderless thing.

  Four men. A secret. A young man at the heart of that secret.

  Four men. Their secrets. Their hopes, their dreams, their past, their present, their future.

  And the wind that is striking and shaking everything in this world.

  And the sand that cuts and tears anything onto which the wind hurls it.

  And the shrieking black-and-purple sky, thundering, roaring like thousands of invisible rotors.

  Only the silence intrudes. Chrysler makes tea in his samovar. Pluto Saint-Clair has settled in an armchair in the southwest corner of the Combi-Cube, where a portion of the A380’s fuselage has been soldered.

  The Professor sits in an antique leather armchair almost a century old, not far from the small athletic-training area. Yuri is in that part of the single room that is kept for his particular use, near the entry door taken from the crashed Airbus, furnished with his camp bed, a rotating office chair, and the analytic materials in their locked metal boxes.

  When Pluto Saint-Clair opened the door of his Combi-Cube to them this morning in Midnight Oil, Yuri and Chrysler had greeted him with well-rehearsed, calm smiles firmly in place on their faces.

  “The Professor is here. He’s waiting for you.”

  “I would hope so. We didn’t get up at the crack of dawn so we could watch the sunrise,” Chrysler had retorted.

  “I’ll explain everything. We need to move the Professor off BlackSky Ridge as fast as possible, but first we should talk. Come in.”

  Yuri had followed Chrysler into Pluto Saint-Clair’s large one-room dwelling. They were there. The zero hour. The moment of truth. Meeting, finally, this man from Texas who participated in the development of the Metastructure.

  Both Yuri and Chrysler knew—and each was aware of the other’s knowledge—that they were establishing a connection between the origin and the end, between the old man who designed the last version of the Machine-World on one hand, and the young man who heals machines, bionic implants, and modified organisms on the other. The young man with the guitar, who alone seems able to resist the entity born of the very death of the Professor’s Metamachine.

  “Paul Zarkovsky,” Pluto introduced the man, a bit awkwardly. The three men faced one another in the center of the room.

  “Chrysler Campbell. This is my associate, Yuri McCoy. We’re very happy to meet you, Professor Zarkovsky,” the Aircrash Circle trafficker said smoothly.

  The four of them had then sat down, and long seconds of silence passed during which Yuri and Chrysler calmly—that is, with all sensors in high gear—contemplated the man that Pluto Saint-Clair had been waiting months for, the man who, perhaps, in association with Link de Nova, might be able to vanquish the thing and its second mutation, the horror transforming men into modems and leaving nothing of them but a vast catalogue of binary-language organs.

  They had stayed that way, unmoving, in Pluto’s Combi-Cube, just as they now sit immobile around the steaming tea that Campbell has just set down on his camping table—prudently welded to the floor of the hybrid cabin—as the storm reaches its maximum ferocity outside. The anemometer is attached to the roof, but Chrysler has managed to cobble together a functional extension reaching inside the Combi-Cube, a small electromechanical dial with teetering numbers that allows him to read with precision the wind speeds in real time.

  “One hundred seventeen kilometers an hour. It’s stabilizing,” he says, after consulting the device.

  He says nothing more. The silence takes over again, as does the din of the storm.

  A similar silence fell during the first seconds of their meeting that morning in Pluto Saint-Clair’s home.

  Chrysler had regarded the Professor with his usual cold intensity.

  He was going to take his usual no-anesthetic approach, Yuri thought.

  “Okay. I think nobody here wants to lose any more time than necessary. So I’ll get right to the point, Mr. Zarkovsky.”

  “That was my purpose in coming here as well, Mr. Campbell.”

  “But you haven’t yet achieved your purpose, as far as I can tell. And that’s precisely why we’re here. Let’s lay all our cards out on the table. We know about the library coming from Italy, and we’ve agreed to ensure its safety while it’s in Quebec—under certain conditions, of course, that we’ll get to later. But what’s more important, especially here in the Territory, is that you need information. And it so happens that we do, too.”

  “Are you talking about an exchange? A ‘deal’? Is that it?”

  “No, Professor Zarkovsky. Not exactly; not in the sense that you mean it.”

  “In what sense, then?”

  “It’s simple, as you’ll see. First, you’re going to tell us everything we need to hear, so that we know precisely what we can tell you.”

  “That doesn’t sound very fair to me,” Pluto Saint-Clair had remarked.

  “There’s only one fair thing in this world, Pluto, and that’s death. Which is becoming the world as we speak. Total equality from cradle to grave, which will soon be the same thing. So spare me your humanist couplets, please.”

  “In any case, I don’t think I really have a choice,” the Professor said fatalistically, shooting Chrysler a blank gaze.

  “You’re wrong, Mr. Zarkovsky. There is always a choice. Certainly between living and dying; perhaps less today than yesterday, but also the choice
between betrayal and loyalty, between safety and risk, between defending yourself and letting yourself bleed. The choice between dying for nothing or dying for a reason.”

  “Very well,” said the Professor, with a sigh. “What do you want to know?”

  “I told you. It’s very simple. Everything. We want to know everything.”

  The Professor drew in a long breath and closed his eyes for a few moments, leaning heavily against the back of his chair.

  “Everything” is obviously going to be a whole lot, Yuri had said to himself.

  Chrysler knew exactly what he wanted to know, and in what order he wanted to know it. He had written out a sort of preliminary list, using the information Pluto and Yuri already had. Now he wanted to put names and places on the paper, too, as well as the relationships between them.

  At the same time, there was the Territory of Grand Junction—the reality, the place that was their ally, and there was the map of this territory. But the map was incomplete. Specifically, it was lacking the “place of origin” of the true storm, the invisible one, the silent one, the one darkening not only the sky but the Earth itself as well. It was lacking exactly what the Professor from southern Texas had come to bring them. The map of the Invisible.

  “You’ll begin by telling us about your true duties within the organization that updated the Metamachine. You’ll tell us about this ‘final version’ you helped design.”

  Chrysler had delineated, in a few words, the first phase of the operation. It was a commandment pronounced without the slightest apparent authority—Yuri knew his acolyte well. He was simply stating the request as fact, as if it had already been fulfilled.

  So the Professor began recounting the final days of the Metastructure, the final days of the World-Machine. The final days of the Human Empire.