Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “The third man?” repeats Chrysler Campbell, softly.

  “Yes, a man from Junkville. A man I’d seen only once before, but that you know well.”

  Double crash under the invisible weight of the word. The silence is a curtain of flame, a fireball that would melt any metal.

  Chrysler and Yuri stand side by side facing him, the same abrupt understanding mixed with incredulity on their faces, which pale at the same time, even as their gazes intensify coldly.

  “Not Pluto Saint-Clair?”

  Link de Nova looks at his two friends, saying nothing, knowing his silence is more significant than any response.

  Chrysler’s innate practicality allows him to extricate himself from the absolute stillness that has formed all around them.

  “I’m going to take this brave Hells Angel home. Wait for me here, both of you. And then, Link, you will tell us everything, in detail. I’d rather not just take it for granted that this is fucking important.”

  Link doesn’t reply. He knows very well, given today, just how important it is. He even wonders if his visit to the Hotel Laika and tonight’s miracle might not be linked in some way. A dim impression gnaws at him, a distant interior voice of which only a deformed echo is able to reach him, coming through an endlessly long tunnel of granite. And the voice says: Of course the two events are linked. Like all events related to the Metastructure.

  “Pluto Saint-Clair! I’ve been wondering if he was hiding something from us,” sighs Yuri, while Campbell climbs into the pickup’s driver’s seat and the truck’s motor raises its heavy metallic growl.

  “Pluto Saint-Clair knows about the Hotel Laika.”

  “Link, didn’t you understand? This rumor about the strip is a mirage, a mirage hiding the real secret—the one good old Pluto Saint-Clair wants to keep all to himself—that’s all.”

  “That doesn’t matter. He has mapped the places in their entirety and created his own database. Just like you, for the Territory.”

  “A database on an abandoned hotel. Ha!”

  “It hasn’t been abandoned by everyone. You’ll see.”

  “What do you mean? Everyone knows it’s empty, not even a passing refugee … must be the good old cyberdog’s legendary hospitality.”

  Link stares for a moment at Campbell’s truck, now speeding toward the small hills west of the cosmodrome, its headlights turned full south; he imagines the young trafficker, with a passenger who has just awakened to find himself healed of his mysterious illness without any idea of what—if anything—happened to him.

  In the Territory, good and evil, death and life, reality and illusion, healing and distress—all are secrets.

  “There is a ‘presence’ in the hotel. An invisible presence, but one demanding to be seen. A presence very clearly stating that everything started there. The attack was no decoy.”

  “A decoy that cost the life of a rocket and its six occupants, and ultimately put an end to all activity by the cosmodrome.”

  “No, Yuri. Space activities were doomed by the Fall; the attack was a sort of fiction, a diversion, a ‘distraction’ that happened while the real intrigue was unfolding in the hotel, but with a whole different scope and different goals.”

  “Who would have wanted to kill the Metastructure?”

  “You don’t understand—the intrigue didn’t directly involve the Metastructure. Its death, strange as it may seem, was only a side effect, a kind of accident.”

  “I hope you’re joking.”

  “Not at all. The Fall of the Metastructure was the consequence of a group of processes staged within the hotel. According to what Balthazar and Pluto Saint-Clair told me, the death of the Metamachine and my own birth are two inextricably linked phenomena.”

  “What do they know about it?”

  “The hotel. Both of them go regularly to the hotel.”

  “But you weren’t born in the Hotel Laika!”

  “Nobody really knows where I was born. What’s important is not whether I was born in the hotel but the fact that the Metastructure died there, and I have proof. I’ll take you there when Chrysler gets back.”

  Yuri lets out a long sigh, but this time he seems to relax, to ease up. It is a pause, a cease-fire. He is ready to take the terrible truth serum.

  “This is the most intense night in a long time,” he remarks, simply.

  “I think we can safely say it’s only the first in a series.”

  The sky, striped with indigo bands, saturated with stars and moonlight, seems present above them for no other reason than to confirm his suspicion.

  Earlier in the evening, as he talked with the cyborg dog on the top floor of the Hotel Laika, Link had become aware of several abnormal phenomena that seemed, for some reason, as if they added up to only one.

  Ultraviolet radiation streamed from the hotel’s superstructure above them; he could see flying swarms of photons penetrate several open cracks in the hall ceiling.

  Other kinds of rays—infrared, gamma, X—followed them through the emergency door in a service staircase leading to the same upper structure.

  He realized that the hotel was only swathed in darkness to human eyes. In fact, as they climbed from floor to floor he had seen that the darkness was, in fact, filled with light. Light located outside the normal spectrum. Invisible light.

  No electrical systems, even the most rudimentary ones, were operational in the hotel—yet through the grilled-off windows between each capsule he caught glimpses of the strip and its masses of refugees, fully lit by spotlights, batteries, gasoline generators, windmills, photovoltaics, simple braziers … light was not, he saw, dead in Monolith Hills.

  But once you arrived precisely here, on the hotel premises, everything went dark. Men disappeared just like electric light sources. The hotel was like a border—a border between two worlds.

  A hotel at the edge of the world. A hotel that had witnessed the gathering of all the genetics that would preside over the End of the World. Yes, it was logical.

  A hotel where, Balthazar said, a man came quite often, looking for who knew what, but something that the bionic dog imagined was mysteriously connected to the Fall.

  “Who is this man?” Link de Nova had asked.

  “You’ll see very soon.”

  “Where is he in the hotel, exactly?”

  “He has two or three usual haunts—a double room in the eastern corner of the eighth floor. A room here on the tenth floor in the west wing. And especially the dome.”

  “The dome?”

  “Yes. The roof structure. The filtration dome. It’s there, just above us. He’s up there.”

  Link had hardly had time to wonder if the mysterious man knew they were there before the cyberdog answered his unspoken question.

  “You’re a lucky boy, Gabriel. I know this hotel like the back of my hand; I’ve been planning tonight for weeks, and you’ve scored yourself a front-row seat. I was waiting for you. I need a human for certain operations. My GPS system doesn’t work in here, unfortunately.”

  “How did you know that—”

  “You can trust a cyberdog’s hunting instinct. You’ve come here three times in six months, and the incidents are getting closer together. Plus, there’s the weather.”

  “Weather?”

  “You haven’t noticed? Every time it’s a full moon, or nearly. But I know it has nothing to do with light; I know your night-vision powers. I was expecting you tonight. The operation has been perfectly planned—trust an old member of the Marine Corps.”

  “Operation?”

  “Yes. Tonight I’m going to trap him.”

  All machines are, etymologically, traps. Therefore, every trap is some type of machine.

  What makes the trap work is the application of a secret technology a language your enemy doesn’t understand, doesn’t know exists, can’t even conceive of its existence.

  A trap is a machine whose language only its creator knows, while it remains a mystery to the future victim.


  A trap is a cognitive differential.

  Here, the entire hotel is the trap. And Balthazar is its designated expert. There is nothing here he doesn’t know about; nothing here can hide for long from the military vision of his amplified eyes—not to mention his other senses.

  Nothing can escape his plans.

  Nothing can escape his territory.

  Not the man in the dome, or anyone else.

  “No electromagnetic systems still function in the hotel, of course. So everything is unlocked—locks, doors, emergency exits, stairway doors, emergency nacelles. But there is still the manual emergency system; three of the four access points to the upper structure can be closed. So—I say ‘we,’ because it is clear that this is an operation only a human hand can carry out, and it will be yours, if you don’t mind,” the old cyberdog had explained.

  “Don’t worry, Balthazar. I’ll do what you tell me. We’ll catch this guy.”

  And so they had trapped the man under the dome.

  They had taken the one service stairway left open, and soon Balthazar indicated, in a low growl, that they would have to maintain absolute radio silence.

  Not another word. The dog was in charge of the operation; Link simply followed along.

  It was a world where dogs gave orders to humans. A world where dogs could live to be thirty-five years old and survive two or three wars, while men older than seventy-five died en masse because their transgenic rejuvenation nanogenerators suddenly gave out.

  The world he was born into.

  He still didn’t know to what extent.

  What was this?

  A sort of nesting structure.

  The vast polygon-shaped space of the dome.

  And in the middle was a white cube, gray with dust and time.

  Massive amounts of invisible rays were shooting from it.

  An opening in one of the cube’s faces allowed him to see the dark presence of another box inside the box.

  An entirely black box.

  It was from the black box that the rays were emanating, in every sense.

  The dog watched Link in silence. He understood.

  The man was in the black box.

  It was this cube-within-a-cube that held the secret of Grand Junction.

  At that moment, the dog’s thirty-five years of training, of combat, of survival, took over. A Marine dog, Link de Nova had thought as he watched him prepare himself calmly for the final assault, standing near the opening of the gray cube. A dog that had been trained to kill, yes, but also to stay alive under any conditions.

  A dog that had been trained to fight like a soldier and that had learned, through solitude, to act like a spy, a cop, a creature of the night.

  The man in the black box doesn’t have a chance, Link had thought, and Balthazar had sprung, silent as a torpedo.

  And the man didn’t have the slightest chance. He saw nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing.

  When Link entered the cube, ducking under an old vinyl flap, the dog was standing with his back turned, speaking to a prone silhouette at the other end of the room:

  “You are in a protected, code-orange zone of the city of Grand Junction, a sector temporarily placed under the functional control of the office of the sheriff of the county of HMV. Are you aware that you have violated a Territory law?”

  Link stood at the cube’s dark entry, watching the scene with a mixture of curiosity and fascination.

  The man on the floor was wearing an enormous pair of tomographic positron binoculars that covered the entire upper half of his face. Link recognized them; they were part of a lot of high-tech objects Yuri and Campbell had brought to him for repair almost two years earlier.

  The black cube was empty. Almost empty.

  Link noted the presence of a few small computer devices around the room, unconnected to one another or anything else. They looked like the vestiges of a machine that used to be there.

  And next to the man with the binoculars, there was … this machine?

  A sort of aqualung. A humanoid exoform. Link could see a large bundle of cables that formed an umbilical cord, neurospinal in this case, connecting the aqualung to an interface in the wall.

  He could also see a device the man with the binoculars had managed to place between the aqualung and his binoculars—a box with pulsing diodes.

  Had he been trying to see inside the machine?

  Then Link realized that the man had begun to speak.

  “Keep your cool, dog from the office of the sheriff of HMV, sir. It isn’t a crime to investigate the origins of the entity that succeeded the Metastructure, as far as I know.”

  “Sir, entering an orange zone is a misdemeanor anywhere in the Territory. Even the most recently arrived refugee knows that.”

  The dog’s muzzle worked for a few moments, then he added:

  “It’s funny—I don’t know, but I think I’ve smelled your odor before, in Heavy Metal Valley, though I hadn’t made the olfactory connection then. Who are you?”

  The man sighed, disconnecting the various attachments from his binoculars. “The boy knows me. He saw me once, in Bulldozer Park …”

  The binoculars were lowered.

  “… with his two buddies from Junkville.”

  “Oh, yes; that’s it. It was in Bulldozer Park that I registered your olfactory imprint. And you’re a friend of Chrysler Campbell and Yuri McCoy?”

  “I’ve been one of their informants for years. It was through me that Professor Zarkovsky came here.”

  “He’s telling the truth, Balthazar. His name is Pluto Saint-Clair, I think. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. And you must be the person they come to see regularly to have machines healed, aren’t you?”

  In a fraction of a second, Link realized that the secret of his existence was now well known.

  This man knew, or he had guessed.

  He was dangerous.

  Chrysler had said to him once, “Never hesitate to take advantage of fear. Fear is a language. A language that kills thought. A language that kills will.”

  “I’m sure you know what Chrysler Campbell does to the people who benefit from my abilities. Remember, he would do much worse to anyone who said a word about it.”

  Later, the man replaced his binoculars, and they resumed the conversation.

  Three creatures of the night in the middle of the night. Three creatures on the edge of the world, in darkness filled with light only they can see, each by his own method, each with his machine.

  This time, they went straight to the heart of the problem. The dog cut right to the bone.

  “I’m not asking how you knew her, but I want to know, very exactly, what she told you, Mr. Pluto Saint-Clair.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to explain. Just before the Fall she was hiding in the north of the strip; she had managed to escape the hell of Solar System. She chose her own clients, her own motels, her schedule, et cetera. The Laika was one of her favorites. The manager was easily corrupted; she did what she wanted here. She was the one who told me a strange incident had happened in the hotel, and that she was almost positive it had led to the death of the Metastructure.”

  “What happened in the hotel?”

  “She didn’t want to tell me. She said I wouldn’t believe it. She just talked about beings of light.”

  Balthazar was quiet. Link noted his prolonged silence.

  “But she also told me things … that Gabriel should know.”

  “What things?” barked the dog.

  “That old hooker assured me you knew a lot about it, Mr. Dog from the Sheriff’s Office, and I’m tempted to believe you’re hiding a lot as well. She told me that the phenomenon that killed the Metastructure had also created a very young child. A child that was adopted by an android, a female android who found him under the abandoned interchange at Dead-link. Is that clear enough?”

  Oh yes, thought Link de Nova, paralyzed. It was all clear, in this artificial light bathing the three
living beings, human or not.

  It was clear that he knew many things.

  Too many things.

  * * *

  “I’ve been mapping this fucking hotel for weeks, especially the part here under the dome. I’ve analyzed every cubic centimeter. Tonight, using an interface I monkeyed with a bit, I managed to see what is really inside the iron lung.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Nothing. But I knew that already. What really interested me tonight was the interface in the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “Whatever killed the Metastructure came from this exoform, and then was swallowed up into the network by this high-speed interface.”

  “How do you know?”

  Pluto Saint-Clair cracked a smile of pure pride. “Because I saw it. Because it’s still there. Like a fossil. Even a digital machine like the Metastructure leaves a trace of its passage, especially with a catastrophic death. A digital trace, but a trace. If you look closely at the inside of the iron lung, you’ll understand.”

  Link and Balthazar looked at each other, then at Pluto Saint-Clair, then at the iron lung, and finally at the little gleaming plaque on the wall to which the cord was connected.

  “I’ll go first,” Balthazar said.

  Link did not reply. He knew whatever he said wouldn’t matter.

  Lot’s wife wasn’t among the first ones to turn, but that hadn’t kept her from being turned into a pillar of salt.

  They saw it.

  Yes. It was Her.

  A fossil trace. Pluto Saint-Clair was right about that. But She was there.

  They could see her in the hole. They could perceive her.

  They could make her out by her active absence, like a black hole. It was a sort of world-box, but one that contained all worlds from the inside.

  It was the astonishingly alive trace of the death of the Metastructure.

  It indicated a sort of paradoxical “presence” that developed in the same process as its annihilation, and that now, without being truly visible, was located in a dimension made barely perceptible by the senses. It had no form, no color, no sense, no substance—but nevertheless it existed; it possessed its own identity.