Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  If everything goes well, thinks Yuri, we’ll all be dead before the rest of the world’s working coffeemakers give out.

  The rain, concentrated in a violent squall, lashes against the pickup. The heavy Ford Super Duty can barely move, slipping and skidding on the surface of the sloppy mud serving as a road. Its back end fitted with two pairs of tires on each side, it rears up at each acceleration like a wild mechanical horse, just barely controllable. The windshield is literally covered with a vibrating pond that the wipers can never quite clear. As if contained within a globe of water, they can no longer even see the outline of the peak of Surveyor Plateau, which they have just left behind them.

  The Atlantic storm currently striking the Northeast seems like nothing less than an oceanic cyclone.

  The rain has rapidly transformed paths, trails, rows, and even the main road into muddy expanses they would never be able to navigate without the pickup and its Triton V8 engine. The snow that piled up during the huge three-day blizzard hasn’t yet had the time to melt. With the help of this new deluge from the sky, it is saturating the already-spongy ground until all the road will end liquid, lumpy, muddy, and totally impassable.

  The day is ending. They finished their planned route perfectly; the storm didn’t come early enough to ruin their agenda. They will even be home on time.

  They skimmed all the small townships in the south of the Territory and to the limits of Grand Junction in a large circular arc spanning from the Vermont border to the low Ontarian plains. Now their “map” includes almost the whole “territory.” Their central storage units are filled with databases, statistics, diagrams, long lists of figures, codes, and equations.

  Our storage units are like small-scale versions of what the Thing does to humans after they die, thinks Yuri, only a little troubled by the revelation.

  They arrive in view of Aircrash Circle just after nine o’clock. The bulk of the storm is now over Quebec and the state of New York, but moving rapidly toward the Territory. The rain transforms abruptly into a driving downpour a few seconds before Campbell pulls the pickup into his garage. A giant fork of lightning splits the sky horizontally in a colossal electric-blue filament, followed by the thundering detonation of an entire celestial artillery. The rain falls in roaring sheets. It will probably last the whole night. Now there is nothing left to do but wait, wait for the elements to finish with this part of the terrestrial globe. Wait for the night-ocean to end, as they waited for the end of the night-desert, and then the end of the night-blizzard.

  There will surely be flooding and mud slides in every county, every township. After the sand, snow. After the snow, rain. And after all that, mud.

  It is coming from everywhere, in every possible form. Deserts, blizzard, ocean. Every day the Territory is more and more like a guard tower under siege from all directions.

  “Did you notice?” Yuri asks Chrysler later, during the night, over the incessant noise of the rain hammering against the roof of their cabin.

  “Notice what?”

  “The procession of numbers. The intervals between the different ‘Falls’: ’57, death of the Metamachine; ’63, first postmortem mutation; ’69, second mutation. Six years each time.”

  “So what? We know it’s systematic.”

  “If we count the end of the Metastructure as the point of origin, we have three sixes—maybe. But it’s actually also possible that the third is yet to come.”

  “The third what? The third six?”

  “Six six six, Chrysler. In the Bible, that’s the Devil’s Number. The number of the Antichrist.”

  Chrysler says nothing for a long moment. Then he asks: “So that means we have until winter ’75-’76 until a third postmortem mutation takes place? A Fourth Fall?”

  “No, there won’t be a Fourth Fall. The Thing is copying divine acts. I talked to Link de Nova about it. Christ, in climbing Golgotha, fell three times before he was cast to the ground and nailed to the cross.”

  “The Thing is copying the crucifixion of Christ?”

  “I think that’s exactly what the final stage will be—how it will invert the process of nailing the Man-God to the cross. In the meantime, it is copying—or worse, parodying—his Calvary.”

  “But if your calculations are correct, it will still be six years before the next wave?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore; we’ve seen that the transition phases are tending to be superimposed on one another. Six years from now might be the time when the Thing has completely finished its work.”

  Another long silence from Chrysler, like an inaudible counterpoint to the noise of the deluge raining down on the earth.

  “Do you really think Djordjevic’s library will help us?”

  Yuri looks out the Airbus window set in the door at the landscape of Aircrash Circle, disappearing behind a watery cloud, practically reduced to a gaseous state in the midst of the gusts that whirl like waves of showering meteors.

  “Djordjevic and the Professor wouldn’t bring this library thousands of kilometers for nothing. It will help us, Chrysler.”

  “But do you think it will be enough, Yuri? That’s what I’m asking you.”

  Yuri contemplates for a moment the weapons that Campbell has carefully lined up against one of the Combi-Cube’s wall panels. They gleam blue-green in the light of the small phosphorescent lamp.

  “It is necessary, Chrysler. Necessary. It’s true that it will undoubtedly not be enough.”

  “What will be enough, then?”

  “I know you’re going to laugh at me for this, but I think it depends on us.”

  “Us? You mean, you and me?”

  “Maybe, in the end. But I was thinking of all of us. All humans. And to start with, all the humans in the Territory.”

  “You want to launch a Crusade against the Thing?”

  “No. I want Link de Nova to do more than take care of the isolated cases we bring him one by one.”

  “Shit, Yuri, you know very well that the sheriff himself is making sure the operation is carried out that way.”

  “Yes. But he’s going to change his mind, under pressure from Djordjevic and the Professor. You know it. These are revolutionary times. We, too, need to pass into another phase.”

  “But what? You want Link de Nova to immunize every person in the territory?”

  “That’s what the Professor’s trying to convince Djordjevic of, as far as I know. They want to try to fight the entity globally, not just locally, or even microlocally, as they say.”

  “That’s actually a really good idea. Except that we have no idea of how the Thing is moving forward.”

  “Right—and even if we did, it still wouldn’t be enough. The Thing is very … clever, to put it mildly, Chrysler.”

  “So?”

  “Link de Nova changes his modus operandi, and so does the thing. We need to prepare ourselves for the worst.”

  “The worst? What could that be?”

  “No way to know.”

  “Well, then, if you please, explain to me how we prepare for an event we can know nothing about.”

  “By preparing ourselves to face what can’t be known. By preparing ourselves to not know anything about what is going to happen to us.”

  “So, to prepare ourselves for nothing.”

  “Yes,” says Yuri, “exactly. We would do best to prepare ourselves for nothing. That’s the best way to be ready. Ready for anything.”

  21 > ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK

  Rock seems, by definition, to be the music of the machine. Not only because this particular sort of arm is made with the necessary assistance of this or that machine, but more because the machine as such, as a potential world, and thus in all its possible forms, uses this or that riff, this or that sound, this or that rhythm, this or that harmony, for its own existence.

  Rock gives existence to the machine, through music. Existence, meaning individuality that goes beyond its simple specific identity as a thing, even an electrically “an
imated” one.

  It gives it a voice. It gives it language. Infinite tautness between sense and form, sign and substance, matter and spirit.

  It gives it the means—how did the Professor put it?—oh yes, to become a coevolutionary, regulatory, ecological process.

  Thanks to rock, electricity becomes the central aesthetic meaning of the machine and no longer just the current that permits it to function. This is the essential point.

  Rock gives electricity the possibility to be Creation and not just Creature, to become orchestra/meaning/sound, the Kingdom of Man, and not just an instrument, a mechanism, a worker ant. Electricity animates machines as much in the electrophysical sense as the most purely symbolic. Rock is the electricity-language of the Machine. It turns electricity into poetry articulated amid the proper structure of sonorous language, which it permits machines to enunciate, and all of the meaningful propositions coming from this physiology, not just in purely mechanical terms but as a series of archetypal aesthetic configurations, can perhaps after all be justly called “clichés.” Wasn’t it the poet Baudelaire who said once that genius was the invention of cliché?

  Thanks to rock, machines have a soul, an electric soul, just as they have a body, an electric body, and organs, electric organs—guitars, amplifiers, basses, effects modules and pedals, synthesizers, sequencers, and rhythm boxes. And human voices.

  Because the human voice is the most sophisticated of all machines. Its neural electricity alone is projected in the sounds of the deepest breath, there where the motor impedance is born, in the organic harp of the larynx.

  Thanks to electric music, machines become “undivided” in their turn, both unique as singularities capable of expressing the particular sonority of an individual, and specific, that is, “universal,” enunciating their own substance, their “core,” their “color”—in short, all of the qualities that are found, unchanged, from one model to another. Their singular existence arises from this articulation, this “double fold.”

  Why does this thought come while he is trying mentally to reproduce the terrible general tautness, rhythmic and melodic, of “Red,” from King Crimson’s album of the same name, as it came to him last night in his sleep?

  Since the long night spent in the Hotel Laika, a sort of breach has opened in the veil masking the world of his illusions.

  He saw what he shouldn’t have seen.

  He heard what should never be heard.

  He understood what it would have been better not to understand.

  He hasn’t been able to talk to anyone about it. He shares this secret with the sheriff’s bionic dog.

  And with the man who knows the secret of the hotel.

  Which is also, in large part, the secret of his own existence.

  The day is, above all, that of the ship’s arrival in Halifax. It is the morning of February second.

  Finally. It’s here. The library is in America. It crossed the Atlantic without too many problems, except that its ship had had to deal with the violent storm that had risen behind it as it passed southwest of Greenland—at least, that is how his father put things at the small, informal meeting they hold around noon.

  His father is very nervous. His mother is doing her best to calm his anxiety with the help of Professor Zarkovsky.

  “Paul, your friend from Junkville guaranteed the perfect safety of the men escorting the cargo during its time in Quebec, right?”

  “Don’t do that, Milan. He knows his work, and he knows the Territory. I know he found the right men for the job; I met them.”

  “Oh?” Djordjevic asks. “What makes you so sure?”

  Zarkovsky chuckles.

  “You met them too, Milan. And they satisfied you on all points.”

  Link shivers in his corner without anyone taking any notice of him. He has already guessed. Incredible connections are forming relentlessly in his head.

  Djordjevic knits his eyebrows, two black bars above a pair of black eyes that seem able to consume everything that passes within his field of vision.

  “The two bounty hunters? The ones that traffic with Gabriel? You’re crazy if you trust men like that.”

  Link intervenes, timidly.

  “Father, if I may—these men are honest; they don’t just ‘traffic,’ as you say; they help people not to die. I also know they are in the process of compiling an enormous database for you and the Professor on the cases that are of interest to us—this ‘second mutation’ in the Territory.”

  “My dear son, I don’t doubt their skills. It’s their ability to stay honest, as you call it, around the equivalent of an archaeological treasure.”

  Link sighs. His father isn’t really living in the now; his needle has stayed stuck before the Fall. He can’t yet admit that his twelve or thirteen thousand books, even the most precious ones, don’t have any real value outside the archives of the Vatican.

  Through one of the mobile home’s large windows, Link catches a glimpse of the sun, which is casting moving, glittering stars on all the surrounding metal and Plexiglas surfaces, creating a silent, golden, blinding, pyrotechnical, unceasing storm of light bouncing gold like grains of sand off the towers and piles of automobiles.

  “Father, what no one has the courage to tell you is that these books have great intrinsic value, but here in the Territory they possess no value other than the price of paper by the kilo or the ton. Do you understand? No one’s going to risk his life to steal them. And neither Yuri McCoy nor Chrysler Campbell has any interest in causing this operation to fail. Yuri has told me that they, too, are very curious to know what this famous transatlantic library really contains, and they know that can’t happen without you.”

  “Milan,” says the Professor, “I can’t urge you strongly enough to listen to your son. These two men are trustworthy. They know the Territory and the south of Quebec by heart. We need them to guide the papal escort and the truck here.”

  Milan doesn’t reply; it is almost as if he has lost interest in the problem altogether.

  He looks at his son, eyebrows still drawn together, black eyes shining with low intensity.

  “You told me they’re planning to come back tonight for one of your ‘experiments,’ right?”

  “They aren’t experiments, Father, as you well know. I’m trying to take care of people, to repair their machines, and in exchange I ask only for an addition to my collection of musical instruments.”

  “I told you, you can’t keep going with this. Even if your mother sees things differently. This scandal has to stop. Simony. Outrage. I’ve already spoken to the sheriff about it. You’re lucky that fucking Wilbur Langlois has a head harder than granite—but I’m not going to give up; I’ll show him.”

  “Father, why are you still living in the past? The alphanumeric contamination is gaining ground every day. That’s why they’re coming tonight. We have to find a real strategy. Fast. You’re going to have to realize that my little ‘experiments,’ as you call them, have allowed me to learn a huge amount about the Thing threatening us. I don’t mean ‘learn’ in the usual sense—it isn’t my abstract, logical brain—it has more to do with pure intuitive memory, almost dreamlike. But what I can tell you, Father, and Balthazar himself has confirmed it, is that I ‘sense the Thing’ as if I were a hunting dog!”

  Professor Zarkovsky looks at Link with singular intensity. “Have you never suspected, young man, that this might be an ability you share with the Thing?”

  The night sky is streaked with long, creamy striations whose curves gleam in the starlight, the final rear guard of the ocean storm. Altocirrus clouds in high-altitude escadrilles pursued by Moon Flak. It creates ultraviolet lines in a sky exploding with stars.

  Link is at another of the habitual meeting places. This time, due to the sodden terrain and damaged roads left by the storm, he has asked Campbell to come to the place closest to HMV.

  He parked his quad-cycle at the edge of a small clearing in one of the rare surviving wooded areas west of the c
osmodrome, on the border of the counties of Grand Junction and Heavy Metal Valley. The area is filled with wild grasses; his Suzuki’s wheels are lost amid the masses of reeds, sharp-leaved weeds, and night-flowering catchfly.

  There, to the east, between two rocky hills, he can make out the metallic structures of some parts of the cosmodrome—platforms, launch towers, a series of pylons and their large radar antennae, and the mobile shadows of tumbleweeds blowing across the tarmac in all directions.

  Here, all around him, is the scenery typical of the northwestern part of the Territory.

  Sparse clumps of pines, birches, cedars, acacias. Masses of underbrush—blackberry brambles, bindweed, chaparral, pink and white hawthorn, thistles, wild grass, Cornus canadensis, knifeweed, euphorbia, white lychnis, wild oats, and Liatris alba in soil that is alkaline in some places and marshy in others. He gazes for long moments at the mutant neovegetation mingling with the perennials and self-propagating plants that run rampant in the Territory, spreading via seeds, spores, suckers, rhizomes, buds, stems, branches, nonbranches, hollows, and knots, with pedunculated sheaths or scales and leaves of all colors—gray, purple, green, blue, and yellow; with parallel or intertwined veins; caulinary, alternating, opposed, sessile, pointed, smooth, prickly, whole, hairy; composed of petioled leaves, in rosettes, in leafy buds, halberd-leaved, with needlelike or round petals, parallel stalks rising up and diverging at angles, buds in dense globes in the crooks of the stems, divided into terminal and lateral lobes, or whose lower faces are covered with a pubescent down; with oblong bristles and smooth upper faces; flowering bracts rounded at their pointed tips, wormlike tendrils at the base of their stems or scattered along the lengths; umbels with finely fragmented involucres of bracts ending in bunches at the tips of the stalks, rough or smooth leaf stems, their sheaths jagged like fish bones; some with bristles, panicles separated into husks protecting the flowers; plump stems, narrow ones, bristled, spiny, veined; ribbed or membranous ligules, smooth seed pods and those covered with sharp bristles, four-sided at their bases, rising on their angled stems or attached to floral stalks, compressed, strong, overlapping, and forming a tight raceme; floral ears and reniform seeds, warty, protuberant, oblong, angular, smooth, reticulated, exposing their yellow, brown, black, white, or gray kernels, straight rows of capsules along floral stems forming pyramidal panicles; carpels in disks, rounded and smooth or rough and thin, tall floral suckers, upright, compact, sometimes glandulous; the white stickiness of milkweed, wild chicory, and euphorbia, distributed throughout the entire structure of the plant by fleshy rhizomes from which new branches spring, the numerous fertile flowering pods of the lush, poisonous vegetation whose venomous stamens lurk just above the ground; the various green tints of the sap of chlorophyll-absorbing plants, the heavier, beige nutrients, anemochoral plants releasing their spores as high as the treetops—poisons are the life of the Territory; poisons are the secret ecology of life; poisons are the natural signs of the Law, as are the various defensive secretions like tannins, ethylene, and the terpenoid substances that the wild plants employ against parasite insects, the nausea-inducing fragrances indicating the presence of wild hemlock, extremely poisonous, sometimes called snake-weed or stinkweed, with its swiveling roots, sometimes branched, atop a stalk rising six or seven feet in height, covered in purple spots and studded with fine-toothed leaves whose veins end in a colorless point contrasting with its bunches of white flowers in large open umbels, small bracts at their bases where the seeds of mericarpel fruits are covered with spines from base to tip; the oily, yellowish gleam of the rhizomic suckers of cicutoxin, as dangerous to animals and men as it is to many other plants; druces of all shapes and volumes, petals of all forms and colors, often divided; unified sepals forming an inflated, veined tube, where calyxes persist in the elongated and spiny lobes, the network expands, floral and semantic; he recognizes species, categories, varieties—grasses, Caryophyllaceae, Amarantaceae, Polygonaceae, Umbelliferae, Asclepiadaceae, composites, Hypericaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Ranunculaceae, Cruciferae. The miniscule jungle of the Territory. Its hidden jungle. The invasion of subterranean rhizome and photosynthesis from the sky—hardy perennials and harmful plants now represent more than half of the surviving wild vegetation. They are to the forest what the last men are to civilization. What remains is evil by nature, but even what is evil cannot resist the slow, all-consuming expansion of the desert.