Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  The eye of Heavy Metal Valley.

  “Humvee is full of resources. All you have to do is look around you, Mr. Campbell. And to know how to choose.”

  “Gasoline-powered cars? Are you trading your cars for fuel?”

  The sheriff cracks a sort of smile. It is like the firing pin of a gun being pulled up. “We’ve improved a lot of these vehicles since the Fall. Their communities of origin fell back on the basic designs. We often add hybrid systems, ethanol fuel cells, sometimes hydrogen or deuterium engines, when we can find them.”

  “That gives me a better understanding of how you created your sacred brigade of patrol cars,” says Campbell dryly. “Tell me—aren’t you doing business with Junkville?”

  The sheriff’s face closes a little. “Why the question, Campbell? Are you buying?”

  “There’s been an influx of gasoline-powered and converted cars for the past two years or so into Junkville, Sheriff Langlois. Especially in the rich townships. Vortex, Little Congo, Tin Machine. You’ll even see red Buicks from the very beginning of the century in perfect condition.”

  Oh, shit, thinks Yuri. Chrysler has just hit the nail on the head, as usual. The sheriff himself is trafficking, like everyone in the territory. He’s trafficking for his community, for Heavy Metal Valley. But he’s trafficking.

  Trafficking for the Law.

  Wilbur Langlois shifts his gaze to Yuri. “You know how to get to Djordjevic’s?”

  Yuri nods.

  “So quit wasting time. They’re waiting for you.”

  The odor of high-octane gasoline wafts through the fresh, still evening air. The pipes pump their hectoliters of fuel, emitting groans and sighs from their giant mechanical esophagi.

  Wilbur Langlois observes the scene, immobile as a statue. He is simply monitoring to ensure that the procedure goes smoothly.

  He is monitoring the Law of his city.

  And the Law of the city is monitoring him.

  When they have gathered in the central section of the Winnebago, Chrysler and Yuri take careful stock of the situation according to the same mutual, instinctive impulse, each of them knowing the other is doing the same thing. We work together, with a shared system, thinks Yuri, holding back a smile as he sits down in an old, scavenged armchair with a faded, barely discernable pattern of Scottish tartan on it, worn by several generations of users.

  Milan Djordjevic is there, and his son, Gabriel Link de Nova.

  The mother is there: the baptized android, Sydia Nova.

  Professor Zarkovsky is there.

  And there is a pair of almost-violet eyes, a simple glance from which can melt you like a dirty iceberg on the side of the road.

  Judith Sevigny.

  Goddamn, she’s beautiful, Yuri cannot stop himself from thinking. He turns his head quickly away from her. A little too beautiful, maybe.

  Chrysler maintains the appearance of a living computer, but Yuri’s practiced gaze can pick out dozens of tiny details proving that he, too—despite his glacial irony and his cool, mechanical reason—he too, yes, Chrysler Campbell, the Territory’s premier bounty hunter, is melting like a snowball beneath the extraordinary beauty of this face, this form, this aura.

  She’s barely seventeen years old, Yuri muses. When she’s my age, the man who manages to seduce her will be the happiest one alive. Even if all of humanity vanishes into a global desert, it would be a blessing just to live with her, alone, in the middle of nowhere, anywhere.

  “It’s been a long time since we last saw each other,” says Djordjevic by way of an opening.

  “I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about a bit later. We’ve been working like dogs this month,” Chrysler replies coolly.

  “Working? But you haven’t been here once since—”

  “The end of December. We know, Mr. Djordjevic. We’ll explain ourselves, I told you. But according to your son, you’re the one who wanted to see us.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you’re in luck. We’re here. We’re listening to you.”

  Zarkovsky steps in. His face is worried, Yuri notes, and so is Djordjevic’s. A problem with the library?

  “Around a week ago, Sheriff Langlois held a special Council meeting. A restricted meeting. Only members of his team were invited.”

  “Well, that’s his prerogative, I believe.”

  “He increased security drastically, but didn’t want to tell us why. He talked to us about the gasoline convoy coming in from Alberta, but it seemed like even he didn’t believe it would really happen.”

  Chrysler and Yuri look at each other from the corners of their eyes. The sheriff knows. His informant in Monolith Hills did her work. But Wilbur Langlois had decided to keep the information secret.

  Yuri and Chrysler realize that they anticipated the sheriff’s reaction perfectly.

  They calculated it.

  They guessed it.

  They preempted the sheriff on his own turf.

  “Listen,” says Chrysler, “Sheriff Langlois’ regulations don’t interest me very much. We didn’t come all the way across the Territory for a lecture on HMV civil code. So please, let’s get to the point.”

  “A month ago, Gabriel”—Zarkovsky gestures toward the young man with his chin—“told us you have crucial information about the postmortem mutation of the Metastructure. We think the sheriff knows about at least some of it as well. And we think it’s time for us to stop being treated like children.”

  “You want me to speak frankly to you, Professor? Despite your great knowledge, you are like children here. You are the ones who are in desperate need of information here, not us. Even Mr. Djordjevic has left Heavy Metal Valley very rarely. We’re the Territory specialists here.”

  “I recognize that, but I must say that we—Djordjevic and myself—are specialists in what Gabriel has told us you call the ‘Thing.’”

  “You designed the Metastructure, yes, but the Thing is not the Metastructure.”

  “That’s true, but it comes from it. We are in a very good position to understand what’s currently happening.”

  “If you’re so advanced, why do you need to bring a library all the way across the Atlantic?”

  “You don’t know anything about the library.”

  “And you don’t seem to know anything about the North Atlantic. I don’t see at all how the library is going to help us fight the Thing, but I’m ready to be convinced.”

  “We already talked about this, at Pluto Saint-Clair’s house, a month ago. How can I explain to you the content of those books when you don’t have even the slightest reference point to go on?”

  “Stop taking us for idiots,” growls Yuri, to his own great surprise. “Maybe we have only vague knowledge of Christian mysticism, but—believe it or not—we are capable of understanding what is explained to us.”

  There is a moment’s hesitation. Yuri can almost hear the wheels turning furiously in the others’ brains.

  “Okay. Fine,” says Zarkovsky, a touch of sarcasm in his voice. “You want a taste of a biblical parable? How about the fact that the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, heralded by the Four Horsemen, spawned each other according to—fittingly—devilish laws, created to invest Evil with a quality forbidden to it by nature.”

  “What quality?” asks Chrysler.

  “The beasts reproduce by destroying each other. Call it the autophagy of Evil. Evil is the inversion of the divine Tetragram,” puts in Djordjevic, in his soft, almost feminine voice. “So it is impossible; it is pure nothingness. It is through man that it achieves its paradoxical existence, because it is by believing in it that man gives it its impulsion in the world, because man has the divinely ordained choice to open up to light and spirit or to turn toward shadow and corruption. But Evil is also finite; it cannot be infinite, because only God can be that. To get around this problem, as we see with the Metastructure, it loops back indefinitely on itself. But let’s get back to our four Beasts. Back, for a moment, to eschatology! T
he first Beast can be considered the grandmother, the original template. We can think of the entire twentieth century as a complete summarization of a long descent.”

  “Okay,” sighs Campbell. “First Beast, twentieth century.”

  “The Control Metastructure was tested for the first time on April 4, 2027, after a dozen years of intensive research.” The Professor takes up the thread again. “Its introduction on the market was announced two years later, after some final modifications. In 2030, it was installed as coordinator of United Nations agencies. In 2032, when the Second American Civil War had just begun, it invoked an emergency prerogative to transform the United Nations into a decision-making body of which it was the ‘planner.’ That was done in January of the following year, and thus UHU was created. It lasted barely a quarter of a century. The second Beast, then, is the Metastructure. It comes from and goes back to the twentieth century. The third Beast is the disappearance of the Metastructure, its own death. In view of its configuration as a Machine-World, its death was immensely active, and its breakdown killed a large part of the human race. And now, since ’63, we have been seeing what succeeded it. The fourth Beast. The postmortem phase, the transmutative one. Its ‘superdeath.’ This metavirus that is a World, a whole World that is substituting itself for what humanity has lived in until now.”

  Yuri holds back a smile. Except for the “biblical parables,” he knows all of this. He has known it since his meeting with Link de Nova. He knows more than this, in fact. A lot more.

  “But I want to be sure you understand this essential element,” continues the Professor. “Djordjevic made me aware of it thirteen years ago. The Apocalypse, just like Genesis and the rest of the Bible, cannot be read through a rationalist magnifying glass—meaning, as a story that follows a linear chronology. The Scriptures do not only describe; they act, they interact with Man, and with Creation. Neither can we consider the ‘events’ they relate as isolated points on a unidirectional time line. Or, more exactly, this line exists; this linear narration exists, but among a multitude of surplices, a multiplex of dimensions, a ‘hypersphere’ that contains the World and is thus always at work, just as it reproduces itself in the causal chain as determined and determining isolates. This linear chronology is at best a diagonal road. The Beasts of the Apocalypse and the Antichrist are not only present in each period of History, they are present at the heart of our existence. Simply, special ‘impulsions’ take place wherein the forces of Evil coalesce and take true root in the real world, on the scale of nations, or empires, or what has succeeded them since. We are experiencing a new ‘genitive’ convergence of the Antichrist, but this time it seems that it is being announced as such, as the final one from an eschatological point of view, the one that will lead to the destruction of Humanity, but also to its salvation through the coming of Christ.

  “This final impulsion will recapitulate all the history that came before it—I mean the history recounted by the Scriptures. There will be Genesis and Apocalypse, Revelation and Darkening, all at once. You will see that we haven’t had the last of our surprises. You will see that everything is going to turn around, several times yet.”

  Yuri looks attentively at Zarkovsky. Hasn’t he come to similar conclusions, all by himself?

  “Good. Very good, we admit it. How can these events be at once simultaneous and in linear progression in time?” asks Chrysler, as if pushed beyond any defensive logical position.

  “First, you have to accept that everything in the Bible is interlaced according to the divine code,” Djordjevic answers. “Which means, for example, that we can find the same signs at several levels of reality. Thus the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse are constantly to be seen by man, but at different levels of perception.”

  “Exactly,” agrees Zarkovsky. “So, on the historical scale, we have the following procession: First ‘Gnostic-Islamic’ Antichrist, in the form of Multiduplicities, false Prophets of the One God, from Marcion to Muhammad. Second ‘modernist’ Antichrist, transformation of History into neo-Messianism. Reform, Bourgeoisie, Revolutions, Atheism, Totalitarianism. Man-God without God. Third ‘postmodernist’ Antichrist, one might even say ‘posthistoric’—the Metastructure. Biopolitical demiurge, inverted uniqueness based on the general atomization of all transcendence.

  “The fourth Beast, unknown, ‘hidden’ and thus ‘revealed,’ is the devolutionary summarization of the first three. This is the current entity. What you so picturesquely call the ‘Post-Machine,’ according to Gabriel. …

  “At the same time, on the genetic scale of the Metastructure itself, we see the procession repeat itself: The Metastructure as the first Beast. Its death, the ‘Fall,’ as the second Beast. The postmortem mutation of ’63 as the third Beast. Now we have only to await the fourth.”

  Yuri and Chrysler share a glance, a spark of pure complicity.

  Zarkovsky is truly unaware of what is most important.

  “It’s useless to wait. It’s already here, Professor. And that’s what the sheriff didn’t want to tell you about—and what we came here to discuss.”

  Chrysler speaks these words as casually as if he is talking about the weather, but in his eyes Yuri can see the brilliance of an exploding world.

  “I’ll explain. It’s a bit complicated, but you’ll get the hang of it. We have detailed bioanalyses of ninety cases from our initial list, which contains around a hundred and twenty. Of these ninety cases, eighteen are already dead; so there are only seventy-two cases still living in which we have a complete dynamic map of the process. But a dozen more of these hundred and twenty cases, for whom we only have information about onset or partial data, have also died. The nine cases analyzed today belong to a second list of thirty-five recently reported cases. In total we have noted exactly one hundred fifty-six cases in the whole southern part of the territory. This is how we operate: Cases are reported by one of our expert sources, with at least one cross-check. Then the cases are located, preferably down to the exact address, and preliminary contact made. If possible, we do a first analysis. Then, cases analyzed, all of them that wish to let us operate. We have pinpointed four phases of the phenomenon and a sort of ‘post-phase’ that isn’t yet death, but its planning, or some manifestation close to it. The hardest thing has been to model the evolutionary dynamic of the process. With the cases recently reported but which actually existed before, and those that really belong to a new ‘strain’—the quantum calculator Link repaired for us has come in handy, believe me—we believe we can now confirm that the number of individuals infected is doubling or tripling every month.”

  The Professor jerks violently upright in his chair. “But—good God, what are you talking about? We don’t understand a single word you’re saying!”

  Yuri can tell the Professor means what he says. The faces of Djordjevic, Link, Judith Sevigny, and even the baptized android show nothing but consternation and astonishment, and pure incomprehension.

  We really talk like Camp Doctors, he thinks. We give statistics, data, numbers, and ratios even before simply explaining what is happening. Even before talking about what is happening to people.

  Chrysler is silent, his face pale, features frozen as if there is a blizzard raging inside him. He has just been stopped cold in his élan as never before.

  Yuri takes a deep breath. “There is a postmortem ‘second mutation’ in progress, Professor. A little like the one in 2063, except that this one attacks neither the mechanical nor the biological.”

  “What, then?” asks Zarkovsky, raising an eyebrow.

  “It attacks the symbolic, Professor. It attacks human language.”

  There are many events that are, by nature, unforeseeable, and against which we are more or less powerless. Rarer are those that are foreseeable but for which prior knowledge changes none of the consequences. Events about which absolutely nothing can be done.

  Events that are perfectly foreseeable—perhaps even planned—and thus unavoidable.

  Which is exactly what
happens during this evening of January 25, a date that none of those present in the mobile home will ever be able to forget.

  True alliances are not necessarily made; it is even the contrary, with exaggerated manifestations of feeling, ostentatious effusions of friendship, serious and sententious words, dramatic and hieratic attitudes, or vulgar protestations of friendship. Alliances are not born over glasses of vintage champagne or a case of top-quality beer.

  They are forged by fire. In steel. In words. In the sharing of the deepest secrets.

  They are forged because the furnace is hot, whether you have planned it or not; their coals are incandescent, glowing from red to white, and everything is leading to the gaping maw that melts iron.

  Yuri’s simple words it attacks human language cause this sort of accident. The ontological accident. The collision. The aircrash. The circle. The furnace. The fire that melts iron.

  That sentence causes the event. And like any event, it rises up out of the silence and then returns instantly to it.

  Nothing more is said for long moments.

  It is the silence that seals the word. It is the starting point, the pivotal one, of everything they are, and everything they will become.

  Everyone. Each of them, in his own way.

  None of them can escape what we are starting, Yuri thinks. We will be part of the experience to the very end. No one can get out now. Now it’s too late. Now we have all gone over to the other side. Now all of us, here—we know.

  The sentence gives rise to other sentences. Chrysler is finally able to pick up the thread of his narrative, colder than a medicolegal report. He describes the various phases of the process. He describes the “post-phase,” when the patient can no longer emit anything but digital noise, vomiting out his own substance in numeric form. He describes the strange postmortem “anti-phase,” when, though the physical body is decomposed in some part, any part, a digital reconfiguration of this same body “takes shape,” but in the form of diagrams, codes, and numbers in what was the primordial habitat of the victim. They have seen it many times. All the tests, all the biopsies, analyses, statistics, and even some video recordings are available at their house in Aircrash Circle. Then Yuri speaks about the parallel “Thing” that is now attacking even the simplest electric machines. The phenomenon seems, for the moment, to be much smaller in scope than the “alphanumeric mutation,” but the two processes are correlated in time and space.