Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “There’s nothing left of the Mississippi but a muddy little river in the middle of desert and steppes. All they need to do is carefully avoid the obstacle; that won’t be easy for a heavy truck, but we don’t have any choice. They can go around Quebec via the Notre Dame Mountains. Then they go straight down through the Estrie.”

  The sheriff gives a dry, mechanical laugh, like a barrage from a submachine gun. “Right, and they’ll have a nice, calm drive to Montreal and the gangs there. And we’ll find the cargo in a million years, with luck.”

  “No, they can’t follow the river; I told you—go straight down through the Estrie. Then cut across toward the Territory, south of Cowansville, to the Vermont border. That’s far enough away from your neo-Islamists.”

  The sheriff pauses in thought, staring at the huge road map spread out before them on the council-room table without seeing it.

  Campbell one, Langlois zero, thinks Yuri.

  Yuri wanders among the metal masses of HMV. They will spend the night here. Then, the following morning at dawn, the escort will leave to meet the convoy.

  Sainte-Anne-des-Monts will be the rendezvous point, northeast of Rimouski. Langlois had put his finger there on the map.

  Around a thousand kilometers.

  Yuri knows it might as well be the distance between two worlds.

  He walks toward the west of the city, an area he does not know well. FREIGHTLINER AVENUE, reads a sign made of a truck door, the letters inscribed with a welding torch. The sun is setting across from him; it lacquers the immense ocean of metal, plastic, and Plexiglas stretching endlessly in front of him with yellow-orange light.

  Even after the preliminary discussions, the sheriff hadn’t been finished with them. He isn’t the sheriff of Heavy Metal Valley for nothing. He isn’t the Guardian of the Law for nothing. He hasn’t had hundreds of throats cut for nothing.

  “Your personal escort, my dear Professor, in addition to that of the truck, will be doubled with a patrol of my tactical intervention men. My main deputy, Slade Vernier, will be there, and the young French sniper Frank Lecerf. I don’t think I need to add that these conditions are absolutely nonnegotiable.”

  “Neither the Gaspé nor the Estrie are part of your jurisdiction, Sheriff Langlois,” Chrysler had remarked.

  It was then that Yuri had fully realized the strength of the Man of the Law of Bronze.

  He was the Law.

  “This operation goes way beyond the petty administrative problems you keep bringing up, Mr. Campbell. Rest assured that if an investigation or any mission of public order obligates us to go beyond our ‘jurisdiction,’ as you call it, nothing will stop us from doing it—including the laws that existed … before. Might be a good idea for you to take another look at your penal code.”

  Campbell-Langlois: tie game, Yuri had thought.

  Yuri is well aware of the mission’s dangers. He and Campbell had a lot of time to talk earlier in the day. There are two kinds of danger, Chrysler had said: the danger you underestimate, and the danger you overestimate. Danger you see for precisely what it is, is just a problem. A problem implies solutions. Danger involves only risk.

  Solar snowflakes of light fall over the Valley of Heavy Metal. Clouds of dancing meteors burst from the piled structures, will-o’-the-wisp fires whose ephemeral sparks pirouette endlessly above the great cemetery of the twentieth century, rays diffracting in echoes of photons that place each texture in harmony with a singular frequency.

  It is like a symphony, he thinks, remembering the few pieces of that pre-electric music Link de Nova guards so jealously. There are celestial sources, this starlike, glittering, solar joy; crystalline magnificence, the voices of angels in freefall in skies of fire of this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; there are fluid lines, liquid, translucent, intertwining like tree branches whose reflections vibrate in the mirrorlike waters of a Nordic lake—Sibelius was the fellow, wasn’t he? There is the intangible architecture, illuminated by a thousand moons, this silvery, royal texture, this meteor shower. Debussy, he remembers.

  It is absolute beauty falling over the world, the same world in which he killed two men this very morning.

  It is this absolute beauty that seals off all the secrets of this world.

  Now he and Campbell share one more secret—a secret that neither Link de Nova, nor the dog Balthazar, nor Pluto Saint-Clair, nor anyone else knows.

  “Both of them?” Campbell had simply asked.

  “Yes. Both.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I trapped them. I faked running out of gas. I was almost empty anyway. When they checked the tank, they fell for it. I helped myself to a fill-up later.”

  “How did it happen? Be specific.”

  “They looked for me. I was well hidden, not far away. I hid in the back of their pickup, in fact—it was full of clothes, personal items they must have stolen from corpses, boxes full of who knows what, blankets … I could hide easily.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then, I improvised with what I had.”

  “Which was?”

  “The big Taser from the Texas National Guard and a pistol-projection hypodermic.”

  Campbell closed his eyes for a few instants. Yuri knew he was imagining the scene, recreating it mentally, wanting it to come alive from the pieces of information he had.

  “Their truck?” he asked.

  “Pitched it into a ravine. It burned. They burned with it.”

  “They worked for the guy with the red Buick, you said?”

  “Yeah, unless he works for someone else.”

  “You have any thoughts about that?”

  “No, just intuition. He went all around Junkville this morning, and I still can’t figure out why. The pickup started tailing me while I was following him.”

  “Which means?”

  “He went to see someone very important in Little Congo. I didn’t have the time to find out exactly where, but I thought the guy with the Buick might well be working for him.”

  “Doing what?”

  “The guy I saw this morning was nothing like the physical wreck from the first time. He’s found some kind of remedy. Temporary, undoubtedly, but effective. Or maybe I should say, someone sold him a remedy. And in exchange, he’s searching all over Junkville and the areas around it. As of this morning he had at least twelve people on the trail.”

  “What trail? What is he looking for?”

  “I’m not sure, but what happened this morning suggests a conclusion or two. They’re looking for us. Us. Because they know we’re the only ones that can lead them to the Professor.”

  “The Professor.”

  “Yes, it all makes sense; why else were they spying on us from the top of Carbon City? Why did they follow us to Deadlink North?”

  “And you think those guys were following you to force you to take them to the Professor?”

  “Yes, or to my house, or here to Aircrash Circle. You know the plan; they wanted me to break down, or panic.”

  “I understand. And it was the breakdown that got them.”

  “Right.”

  “You did very well, Yuri,” said Campbell, as if he were talking about the repair of a section of pipe.

  Then, calmly, just to be sure that all the Rules had been respected:

  “You’re sure you killed both of them? They’re both dead, right?”

  Yuri didn’t reply. His friend could read in his eyes the truth of just how definitely he had killed them both, just how definitely they were both dead.

  In the corner of one green eye lingered the light of that day’s young morning, the last one for those two men who had made the mistake of surviving.

  There is metal. There is Plexiglas. There is light.

  There is the great orange disk that has just engulfed the horizon, and the long line of violet clouds trailing it.

  There is the light of the evening, with the fresh breeze blowing from the northwest.

  And there is the light of th
is morning, etched forever on his memory.

  There is metal, Plexiglas, the sun disappearing slowly behind the Earth.

  There is light, metal, and he.

  And he, walking in this ocean of metal-light, is trying to find meaning in what he did a few hours earlier, a thousand years earlier, when he rose up behind the two men like a devil from his lair.

  There is the light above him, the bright light of murder.

  And there is its manifestation, its real, terrible presence, the scene forever imprinted like a photograph in the darkroom of his brain.

  And there, a little to his right and to the north, there is a bright golden flash, a vast, translucent cube shining on all sides, wide surfaces of glass composite that gleam, luminescent, at the same frequency as the metal of twilight.

  And the light is not only as bright as that of this morning; it confirms the reign of the technical silence of manipulation, of traps, of death. It sings. It sings out loud.

  The light is singing. And as he approaches the source of the light-metal-sound, he can make out more and more clearly just what the great light is singing.

  It is singing: We love you.

  There are some extraordinary moments in existence when everything seems to work together, to illuminate your consciousness like a flash of lightning. Everything converges, everything crystallizes, and finally, everything detonates. It is a process that belongs to the particular chemistry of explosives. Heat, dynamic instability, spark of ignition—nothing remains but for a microelement to come and insert itself into the structure and … a block of buildings is wiped from the map.

  None of these moments can resemble the others. Any others.

  Each time, the configuration of events is unique in giving rise to the singular monad that can, every time, contain all the possibilities.

  It only takes a little—nothing at all—to partially open a world, to swallow up a consciousness, for a person to lose or find himself.

  Light, metal, Plexiglas.

  Light, textures, reflections.

  Light, matter, air.

  Light, a young woman, a young man.

  Light, music, a voice.

  We love you.

  We love you.

  We loooooove you. …

  Just now, it seems utterly ridiculous to him.

  He killed two men in cold blood only this morning, and now he is confronted with the angst of an adolescent boy.

  He is confronted with the same angst as the adolescent. Link de Nova.

  It has become clear, luminous, blinding, that they are both caught up by the same emotion—or, more exactly, by the same radiant source of that emotion. Its active, living center.

  Judith Sevigny.

  From where he is, the backseat of an antique Subaru station wagon, he can see the cube of glass, on the veranda, with its parabolic antenna and powerful astronomical telescope, both pointed toward the same part of the sky.

  An amateur observatory. Judith Sevigny is watching the stars. The stars must certainly give him to her.

  He can see the young girl in lively discussion with the teenage boy, but no sound reaches his ears except the song, played on continuous loop, its refrain echoing over and over: We Loooooove You. …

  We love you.

  He realizes, as if melted where he stands by an intense source of heat, that Judith Sevigny is terribly beautiful; it is almost enough to make him weep.

  He realizes that Link de Nova is in love with the girl, and that he is doing all he can to hide it from her—awkwardly, as far as he can tell from his long-distance analysis of the boy’s body language.

  He realizes that the sunlight of the last hours has made all the creatures peopling this universe even more splendid. Metal, plastic, Plexiglas. Light, matter, air.

  And Judith Sevigny.

  He realizes that the glow of twilight is connected to that of this morning, when he killed two men more icily than a machine. We Loooooove You, repeats the old electric-rock refrain.

  He realizes that the rays bathing the horizon are the image of his own conscience in this moment, this second that seems to stretch into infinity.

  He realizes—light, matter, air, plastic, Plexiglas—that beauty is entering him like a terribly addictive drug.

  He realizes, very simply, that he, too, is falling in love with Judith Sevigny.

  He realizes that he is only a man. He realizes that catastrophes are made to occur in a series.

  He realizes that he is alive.

  25 > BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

  As dawn points its pale muzzle toward the universe, Yuri sees that the sky changed during the night.

  A misty veil covers the firmament, completely erasing the stars that can normally be seen at this time of the morning.

  To the south, he can see a dark blue line on the horizon. A wave of ink, topped with dots of bronze.

  A new storm, he thinks immediately. A new storm rising on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

  The world certainly isn’t going to stop for them.

  On the northern horizon is a blue-white cloud. Another huge blizzard is descending across northern Quebec from the Arctic. It will reach the territory in two or three days.

  At the same time as the sandstorm coming from the south.

  The Territory will be caught in a vice between the two storms, between the howl of the wind and that of the sand, between the worlds of silica and ice.

  And at that same moment, they should be in view of their goal.

  They should be in view of the truck and its containers.

  They should be in view of the library.

  He can’t bring himself to believe it is a coincidence.

  On the previous evening, after Sheriff Langlois, Slade Vernier, and Father Newman had withdrawn from the council room, Campbell had literally attached himself to the duo of Milan Djordjevic and Professor Zarkovsky.

  He had gone with them, without even asking permission of any sort, to their “laboratory,” a bus filled with unsorted machines of all kinds and origins, intended for various uses.

  His presence, hard as flint, was sufficient to make any explanation unnecessary.

  He doesn’t need a note from his parents, Mr. Professor, Yuri had thought.

  “We leave tomorrow morning to fetch your library, a thousand kilometers from here. I hope you’ll provide us with some additional information.”

  Mechanically, Yuri had followed two or three steps behind them. In his mind he was still somewhere near Neon Park that morning, killing two men in the cab of their truck.

  “What kind of information?” the Professor had asked.

  “Am I not speaking English? Additional information. Information about the Metastructure, its end, what you call its ‘super-death,’ what we call the ‘Post-Machine.’ The Thing.”

  “But what exactly do you want to know? I really think I’ve told you everything, Campbell. What more do you expect from me?”

  “What I want to know is—I don’t know yet, otherwise I wouldn’t be pushing for it. What I expect from you is for you to help me find out what I haven’t found out yet.”

  Yuri heard Zarkovsky’s deep sigh; Djordjevic had, until then, remained silent. He opened the door of the bus, allowing them access inside the laboratory.

  “By any chance, Mr. Campbell, do you want to pursue any of the theological discussions we’ve had on this subject?” Link de Nova’s father had asked.

  “Exactly, yes. I can’t tell you why, but before we leave I need to complete the picture; there are holes … you might not fill them all, but I’m asking you to try.”

  “Fine,” Djordjevic had said. “I believe Paul Zarkovsky and I are at your disposal. What should we talk about?”

  Yuri had shivered, premonition attacking him like a violent chemical reaction.

  They “needed” this “information” for “reasons they couldn’t reveal,” said Chrysler.

  Which meant that the main, secret objective of his interrogation was what had h
appened with Link de Nova that night at the Hotel Laika and before that, when the boy’s electric guitar had literally blasted the alphanumeric entity that had taken possession of the old Quebecois Hells Angel.

  Campbell had realized that the library was of capital importance. He had realized that despite all his redoubtable abilities, he needed the Professor and Djordjevic.

  “So, Campbell,” Zarkovsky had prodded him. “What is this nebulous problem worrying you so much?”

  Campbell had hesitated—Yuri was aware of the tiniest shifts in his friend’s body language, and he had never seen him in such a state before.

  “Mr. Campbell,” Djordjevic had repeated in his gentle voice, “what do you wish to talk about?”

  The neuromuscular tension in Campbell’s head suggested that he was about to speak. Paralyzed, Yuri had realized that he knew exactly what his colleague intended to say.

  “I want you to tell us about the Apocalypse. I want you to tell us about this ‘Scotus.’ I want you to explain the ‘principle of individuation’ to me.”

  “Is that all?” the Professor had asked dryly. “Years of theology, condensed into a single evening?”

  “Spare me your television-era humor. Tomorrow we’re going to be risking our necks for your library.”

  “Mr. Campbell, it will be difficult for us—Professor Zarkovsky is right—to summarize such fundamental, complex concepts for you.”

  “I can teach you how to kill men in less than an hour. That is fundamental, and it can be very complex. You can do the same thing and teach me how to save them.”

  Of this conversation sandwiched between the Security Council and his evening drift toward Judith Sevigny’s veranda-observatory, Yuri remembers only bits of varying lengths, like random scenes from different movies, the pages of a book scattered to the wind, the sparse notes of a piece of music created by sun, metal, reflections, light.

  It has interposed itself like a line of fire between the two terms that now bracket his entire life, from origins to end, from birth to death, from innocence to humanity.