Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Can you explain that, please?”

  “Ah … yes. An individual is indivis, indivisible; that is his definition, but not what defines his personality, because that is at once infinitely divided and infinitely unique, since as an ‘image of God’ it reflects his properties of First Cause: all in God is infinite, even the smallest of his parts, which are infinite in number. In addition, the ‘Thing,’ the Post-Machine, whatever name it goes by, must constantly seek the means to maximally disincarnate the Multiples, in other words, the individuals that still populate the globe. At the same time it faces two problems that combine to make only one:

  “One, it must paradoxically find the means to incarnate itself—that is, to individuate itself in a single person, even though by nature, when it places itself into an individual unit, it is so that it can—also paradoxically—divide it.

  “Two, it must disincarnate that in which it is incarnate, which creates an irreconcilable contradiction.”

  Yuri glances out a nearby window. In turning his head, he catches for a brief instant the magnetic gaze of Judith Sevigny.

  Its violet glow dances before his eyes even after he trains them straight ahead on the night-blue square of the sky.

  He sighs, murmuring: “The Post-Machine is developing even with its apparent contradictions. For it, paradoxes aren’t problems. They’re solutions.”

  No one answers him.

  That is why we haven’t reached the end of our troubles, he thinks.

  That is why it is absolutely necessary to protect Link de Nova and his powers.

  That is why Sheriff Langlois did well to strengthen his security measures.

  That is why, whatever form it takes, the “war” against the Thing, despite what Professor Zarkovsky thinks, will be the most terrible humanity has ever known, or will ever know.

  Because this time, not only will it have brought the war on itself, as always, but for the very first time, and undoubtedly the last, it will be fighting directly against its own World.

  Yes, to be exact: its own World will bring down on it the worst war of extermination in its entire history.

  At dawn, everyone still in the mobile home falls asleep. Judith Sevigny departed a few minutes earlier; Link de Nova returned to his small personal trailer at the same time. Chrysler curls up in the reclined first-class airplane seat; Professor Zarkovsky sleeps on the camp bed, where he snores like a buzz saw. Sydia Nova and Djordjevic have gone to their small bedroom, separated from the rest of the trailer by a double partition.

  Yuri goes outside for a breath of air. The icy air, the compressed steel heaps glittering like diamonds. The varnished-turquoise sky. The faint glow on the horizon, signaling the imminent arrival of the sun. The persistent memory of two violet eyes in the dimness.

  Everything seems so pure, so full of soft and serene beauty. The light itself seems to want to speak of this beauty, and yet we are in the middle of the Camp. The Camp-World. And we are only the Doctors.

  Yuri looks for a moment at the enormous retaining wall the sheriff erected during the Second Fall. They had moved tons and tons of chassis, reshaping them into this rectangle of pure metal that turned Heavy Metal Valley into a virtually impregnable fortress.

  He remembers a thought that occurred to him during the previous night.

  No. They will not be the armor, the titanium shield protecting Link de Nova from the invisible arrows of the Thing, and by so doing, protecting the rest of humanity.

  Because the Thing seems to come from nowhere, to be nothing but a “nowhere” itself; maybe a single, specific “place” would be able to fight it.

  There is undoubtedly a titanium shield, hidden or exposed, somewhere in the Territory. But for Yuri, as he watches the day break over the Valley of Heavy Metal, it is becoming evident that Wilbur Langlois’ steel castle is the best place to fulfill this role.

  It isn’t enough for Link de Nova to give life back to machines.

  Here, it is the machines that will stand guard over his life.

  19 > ULTRA VIOLET

  When Link wakes up, around noon, he quickly realizes that Chrysler Campbell’s pickup is gone. His father is working with the Professor on the construction of the “laboratory,” not far from Bulldozer Park, where they have taken possession of a long Greyhound autocar that doesn’t run but is perfectly suited to their needs.

  His mother is probably taking a walk, as is her habit, along the retaining wall toward the Ridge.

  And Judith …

  Better to erase her image from his memory.

  He goes straight to his hangar, a bit higher up near Cadillac Avenue.

  There, the music-making machines are waiting for him.

  There, he will surely be able to make the image fade.

  There, his pain might lessen a little.

  He opens the door, which goes up with a groan, and enters the warehouse, where several biophosphorescent lamps light automatically around the room.

  The machines are there, and they truly seem to be waiting for him, eager to be turned on, to see their small diodes blink, impatient to feel the shiver of electric current run through their bodies again.

  Yes—here, he can calmly forget humanity. Especially his own. That is, if he really possesses any.

  Okay. “Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” The song is ready. In two successive nights it has totally come together. Oasis, 1994, maybe the pinnacle of what was known as “rock music” for fifty years.

  Such an obvious riff, so powerfully laid out. The compact mass of guitars, the mixed voice just above the harmonic rumble. The entire soul of electronic music is there. The basics don’t lie in the frantic search for “originality” at any price, but in the development of a specific synthesis of chaos previously abandoned, like in the middle of the ruins of a blitz dropped from a sonorous sky.

  There are two or three thousand rock pieces whose main riff is, in its rhythmical organization and its harmonic intervals, absolutely the same.

  What counts is the singular energy you project onto this musical matter. What counts is the sound particular to your electric guitar and how this acoustic substance is able to make its mark on the ear that hears it. What counts are the microvariations, the inverted chords, the arpeggios, the changes in keynote, et cetera, that make this impersonal appropriation of the riff possible.

  Rock permits this strange symbiosis between the personal and the impersonal; in this, Link believes, it belongs to a singular form of poetry. The poetry of machines. The poetry of electricity. The poetry of supersonic speed. The poetry of accident. The poetry of catastrophe.

  The poetry of the End of the World, whose coming it announces in violent explosions.

  Electric rock “announces” the Apocalypse; it uses it as its main principle in the very tension of its own staging. In “showing” it, it makes it even more mysterious. In disguising it as a spectacle, it makes it even more monstrous.

  But the deconstruction of the World is already happening, anyway, in all of society.

  So, now: “Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” that pop hymn of the teenagers of the very last World, that ballroom blitz of the 1990s, that stratospheric get it on that propels your entire being toward clouds ready to burst at any instant.

  He remembers what Yuri told him the night before, when they arrived with Campbell.

  It plays in his head, a few words, like a riff contained in a handful of chords.

  Yuri was right—but even he didn’t know just how right.

  He and Chrysler truly are the “Camp Doctors;” of that there is no doubt.

  But he, utterly and conclusively, is all alone—and all alone, he forms the Camp Orchestra.

  The body of his electric guitar curves inward like a sphere inside the hangar, echoing the surface of its polymetallic structures. It is an unimpeachable barrier between him and the world. Acoustic waves fill the vast space like water in a swimming pool. Diodes blink, screens glint, VU meters waver in cadence, needles quiver in their dials. The hangar
is like a world within the world.

  The music seems as if it might be able to hold beauty, naturally ephemeral as it is, on a line of tension stretching into infinity, he thinks. So the music might be able to keep the image of Judith Sevigny constantly alive.

  It does not bring forgetfulness, as he thought until now.

  It brings consciousness, and all its dangers. It brings the idea that even inside the Camp, beauty cannot be completely annihilated. It brings the strange certainty that liberty is not found outside the Camp, because it no longer exists there. The Camp and the World are one now, and both of them are located in the very heart of his machine.

  Now on to “Ultra Violet,” one of U2’s most beautiful songs; the Irish group probably best encapsulates what music produced for three-quarters of a century.

  In discovering their work by means of his mysterious dream “downloads,” and in comparing them to others, he has come to a realization that leaves no room for doubt.

  It was probably not preconceived on the part of these artists, but during all the time he spent exploring the mass of music in his dreams and then translating it when awake through his guitars and synthesizers, the evidence had come to him in droves, like so many stars in the Milky Way.

  This fundamental discovery of the “archetypal” structure of the rock ’n’ roll riff, for example, with its basic harmonic cadences, its pentagonal range inspired by Celtic songs, its sometimes paradoxical manner of bringing together the most angular rhythmic figures with the color of the most tender melodies. The techniques of alternating chords and the dominant between bass and guitar, especially for transitions from couplets to refrains.

  Another achievement that has come to him after several years of practice on different recording and sound-processing machines, illuminating the origin and the end of this music from a surprising angle: after a bit of somewhat risky trial and error, Link has managed to work on multiple tracks in such a way as to copy and splice together the original vocals of Brian Eno, Björk, Goldfrapp, Bauhaus, Lou Reed, or Syd Barrett in order to combine them with arrangements literally inspired by the lieder of Strauss, Mahler, and Brahms. It is with real surprise mingled with profound questioning that he has realized that a number of the vocal melodies that sometimes accompany the sound walls of his electric guitar and the sampled rhythms on his factory soundtracks seem, as if by magic, to fit together and prove almost harder, more violent, icy, with a simple cello or harpsichord or a small chamber orchestra—that is, in the purest a cappella expression.

  If the vocal tracks of a song by Garbage, for example, can be perfectly recreated in the form of a classic lied, where then is the split, the separation, the disconnection?

  “Ultra Violet” is a true gem of this sort. Its apparent simplicity hides several sophisticated traps, particularly in the harmonic sense. But once detected, these traps become jewel boxes for the most perfect diamonds.

  More dangerous yet, Link cannot prevent the lilac eyes of Judith Sevigny from dancing before him—her silhouette, her body. No, even worse, he can do more than see her, hallucinate her in some semi-dreamlike way—he can feel her near him.

  I feel her nearest with music, he thinks, as he attacks the intro.

  There are still other mysteries in this music that has made electricity into its very language. So, how to explain the numerous “premonitions” that prove the existence of songs written in atomic light? The cases are innumerable; it would be impossible to envision anything more than a partial list. Besides, there is little interest in quantifying this secret evidence. An example will suffice to illuminate the whole phenomenon. “Sweet Bird of Truth,” from the album Infected by The The, the British group led by Matt Johnson with Johnny Marr on guitar, describes—with the cold lyricism appropriate to the recounting of a catastrophe—the fatal nosedive of an American warplane and its living cargo of “GI Joes” flying “above the Gulf of Arabia.” It is an urgent warning, says the captain, our altitude is falling, there’s no time for thinking, all hands on deck. ALL HANDS ON DECK.

  The album was released in 1986.

  Five years before the First Gulf War.

  Another mystery, even more troubling: no one, it seems to Gabriel, at least as far as he knows, has ever pointed out the fact that rock ’n’ roll was born at the end of the Second World War—that is, at the beginning of the Third. “Search and Destroy,” as the title of a 1973 Stooges song so explicitly said.

  The electronic music of the twentieth century appeared in the shadow cast by the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Transistors, vacuum tubes, coils, all the technology that would one day be implanted in simple jazz guitars and radio amplifiers came from the military progress made in that era. When the computer appeared, itself born of the Manhattan Project, music was among its first artistic applications. Microcomputers and the Internet, later technologies but still military in origin, were immediately assimilated by the rock industry.

  In Vietnam and during the three Gulf Wars, fighting soldiers listened to endless electronic music—rock, blues, country, reggae, rap, and techno, the volume turned low on their headsets. During the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, Africa, central Asia, and then during the Grand Jihad—on the western side, at any rate—and up until the final jolts that followed the Death of the Metastructure, it was to the sound of this music created in the infernal forges of the twentieth century that people had become what they now are.

  For the true songwriters of the time, it had rapidly become unthinkable to write about love as they had done before the Great Flash—or about anything else, for that matter.

  Instead of stupidly following the advice of a German philosopher of the time—another German!—they had each and all understood that not only was it possible to write after Auschwitz, it had become more necessary than ever.

  The Nazi and Communist camps had not been able to silence them. The Camp-World will not be able to, either. Because I am the Camp Orchestra. I am what will give them new life in this Anus Mundi.

  Silence is not the answer to a gag placed in the mouth. It is the sad consequence, and the rest is only sophism.

  One day, Chrysler told him about an aphorism by George Orwell, an author from the middle of the previous century, whose most famous book had predicted, almost word for word, the world of the Metastructure. This writer had said one day that the future would resemble a boot eternally crushing a mouth.

  Chrysler had said that a French writer whose name he had forgotten had continued the aphorism, saying: But there is still a chance for the mouth. It can, if its will is strong enough, devour both the boot and the foot inside it.

  I am the mouth, thinks Link de Nova, and I am starving. The boot had better be on guard.

  The night is very black when he emerges from the hangar. His natural optic system automatically increases its perception levels in a gradual transition to artificial luminic amplification. Now the starlight alone is enough for him to see as if in broad daylight—broad daylight tinted sodium yellow; the broad daylight of a highway tunnel; the broad daylight of electronic war.

  Why does he decide abruptly not to go home to bed, but to venture once more toward the cosmodrome, toward Sheriff Langlois’ “red zone”?

  No rational reason. An impulse. A desire. A need. A will.

  No explanation except that the cosmodrome is there. That it has been there for decades. That it will no doubt be there eternally. No explanation other than the night and the colluding sonorous saturation of his mind, his whole body, this electricity that has refused to die for hours, making sleep impossible, as it so often does, until the early hours of the morning.

  This electricity that wants to act. This electricity that compels the human to walk, supplying the engine that takes him to this place where, for more than forty years, Earth and Sky have been linked.

  This electricity that sees through the shadows, this electricity that uses his dreams to revive century-old music, this electricity the Thing wants to make into a “thing” of its
own.

  This electricity that is he.

  Nearly surprised by one of the sheriff’s patrols, he spends almost half an hour flat on his stomach, hiding behind a small bank of hawthorn shrubs, waiting for the two cops to finish their inspection of the site. They are on equal footing with him in their ability to see in the dark. Shortly after the Second Fall, the sheriff managed to collect a store of Chinese-made combat binoculars, and they are invariably used now by the night patrols. But for these humans, the binoculars are technology—they are external prostheses—they add to their bodies, superimposing themselves on their vision.

  For Link, on the other hand, the phenomenon is entirely “natural”—at least, biological—this amplified night vision is a simple extension of his sense of sight, integrated as a cellular system inside his optic nerve. The night is programmed in his brain.

  That makes a huge difference. Enough of one so that the sheriff’s men, even with their state-of-the-art binoculars, don’t see him—but he sees them, never losing sight of them for even a fraction of a second.

  Quietly, he descends the sandy slope to the first concrete esplanades that mark the cosmodrome’s entry.

  Everything is so calm here.

  Everything seems so calm, even though the sight of the launch platforms causes an instant vision of pipes ejecting their fire and the fracas that goes along with that.

  Everything seems so calm, even more so because this image is accompanied by the certainty that it will never happen again.

  He is seized with the desire to retrace his route of the previous year, during the summer of ’69. Apollo Drive, Gemini Drive, North Junction Road, the northern end of the strip.