Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Friedrich Ostermann had died at the moment the day was being born in this America he would never see. He died in the very embers of the night, the embers of starfire. He died at the gates of dawn, entering gates more luminous still.

  He died for men he didn’t even know; men that lived on another world, for a library he knew nothing of, for a Territory he would never see—but he had not died in vain. He died getting the Convoy through; he died for the life of the books; he died so that humanity would not be completely reduced to a catalog of numeric organs.

  Yuri wonders for an instant where the strange feeling is coming from, both intellectual and emotional, that is assaulting him.

  There is a paradox here, one that raises up the man they are burying.

  Certainly, he is dead. And yet it is as if he has never been so alive.

  Culture shock happens in all types of situations. Even the most improbable ones can bring it fully into view.

  When the grave is dug, it becomes evident that they have nothing with them to make a decent coffin. The idea of using one of the steel boxes in the back of the truck is ventured by Slade Vernier, who quickly realizes that he would have done better to keep quiet.

  “We have a large, fireproof tarp—white, a little silvery,” Yuri says. “Do you think it would work as a shroud?”

  Brother Francisco asks to see it. The exposed surface of the tarp is indeed metallic gray, but the inside is pale, soft, opalescent.

  “This will be perfect,” he says.

  He goes to the back of the truck and returns with a simple Bible in his hands. He places it between Brother Friedrich’s stiffening fingers and then, from one of the large inside pockets of his long leather cloak, he takes a Celtic-style black steel cross, very plain, with no decoration, and places it at the body’s feet.

  “It came from a monastery in Cornwall that was destroyed shortly after he took his first vows there. He carried it everywhere with him.”

  Stating a simple truth, Campbell says: “He will have carried it with him to the very end.”

  “Let’s wrap him in the shroud, and then we’ll lower him down with ropes.”

  “In which direction?” asks Campbell, innocently.

  Francisco Alpini knits his brow. “What do you mean, in which direction?”

  Campbell shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re from Rome. You work for the Pope. I thought the body had to be pointing toward the Vatican.”

  The man turns pale. Yuri hears the great tension in his voice as he explains: “We are Catholics, Mr. Campbell. Rome is not Mecca; no one expects us to turn toward the Holy See five times a day. Am I making myself clear?”

  Campbell retreats into silence. Yuri attempts an answer. “I don’t know where I heard it, probably in HMV somewhere, but someone told me the first Christians prayed to the rising sun.”

  “That’s quite right. You’re very well educated for a non-convert. But there are no rules on this subject in the Catholic Church. We pray to the setting sun just as often, I can assure you, Mr. McCoy. Christianity isn’t a sun-worshipping religion.”

  Yuri, deep in thought, doesn’t reply.

  Though it was totally off the subject, Campbell has brought up a real problem—an unforeseen one, a problem that requires thought.

  A problem that necessitates telling the truth, creating the living organism that will know how to bring together all the elements required for an authentic synthesis.

  The night. Fire. Stars. The Convoy. Then. The Library. Heavy Metal Valley. Dawn. Maps. Territories. “The” Territory. The Mission. The World. The Territory and its Law of Bronze. It is clearer than all the shadows seen through combat binoculars.

  “I think we should bury him with his head facing west, Mr. Alpini. America is still the West. Here, the East is behind you, the Old World, the past, the Atlantic. What counts isn’t where he came from, but where he went, what he did, and why. He went toward the West like all pioneers; he followed the sun.”

  Yuri is astonished by his own conviction.

  Brother Francisco says simply: “We will do as Mr. McCoy has explained.”

  * * *

  The sun has risen in the east, painting the landscape pale gold. They have just buried the man, his head facing west. The remaining soldier-monk took the black steel cross and planted it firmly on top of the burial mound; the glaring light of daybreak projected the blue shadow of the crucifix onto the fresh earth. Then he recited words in a language that Yuri, like the others, doesn’t know, but that he identifies as Latin, the sacred language of the Catholic Church.

  The sun’s light seems to brighten, as if a new source is being born near it. Yuri doesn’t know why, but in a reflexive gesture he shyly imitates the sign of the cross that Brother Francisco has just made over himself at the conclusion of his prayer, along with the men from HMV. Campbell does the same, hastily, without much conviction.

  Of all of us here, Yuri thinks, only Campbell and I aren’t baptized. But we are the ones who led this mission for the Vatican.

  The Vatican and the Territory.

  And now, Yuri watches uncomprehendingly as the soldier-monk holds out the Italian-made assault rifle that belonged to the man they just buried.

  “When he was dying, Brother Friedrich said to me: ‘Give my gun to the young man who tried to save my life, and who has accompanied me on this final part of my voyage.’ I believe you’re the young man he was speaking of.”

  Yuri observes the scene like a spectator behind a two-way mirror. The night has become day; the starfire has concentrated into a single sun, and the ultraviolet light, now invisible, shines high above the clouds. A gun is being held out to him like a knight’s sword. It is very simple and yet hugely solemn, with the true solemnity of all heavenly moments, these moments where everything else vanishes before ancient rituals believed forgotten but vibrantly alive in the depths of memory.

  Brother Friedrich died so the Convoy could get through, so the Library could reach the Territory unimpeded; he died going west; he died and he left his soldier-monk’s weapon to Yuri, who could not save him.

  We may be the Camp Doctors, thinks Yuri, but outside the Territory we are nothing but the surgeons of Death; we kill much better than we heal.

  The sun casts its light on the mountains, beyond the slopes to the banks of the river, the yellow beams bouncing off the points of the rocks, illuminating the sharp grass on the vast plateaus, exploding in crystals of fire in the leaves of the trees, gilding the bends in the roads that wind through the brush, glittering in the dusty roads with chrome-colored sparkles and on the asphalt road with golden spray. It is one of the most beautiful mornings he has ever seen in his life.

  Yuri takes the gun in his hands carefully; the steel is sharp and cold against his flesh. It is the initial, essential, ultimate moment: the meeting, the adoption, the domestication of the weapon, like the operational appropriation of a new machine, a new prosthesis, a new organ.

  “Thank you,” he says simply.

  And he thinks: This gun guarded the Library; it guarded the Territory’s Convoy; it killed many men. This is only the beginning of its mission; I will keep it safe so that it can finish its work. No one will be able to stop us, it, and me.

  They have just arrived in the Estrie, near Saint-Georges-de-Windsor, when the storm breaks. The sky is blue-violet, like twilight. The night of day, thinks Yuri. Night contained within the day.

  They had to leave the 112, which leads straight to Sherbrooke, in order to avoid the area around Lake Megantic and the New Hampshire border. No question of repeating the scene from a western with the neo-Islamists that lurk there. They had instead taken the 161 to Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens and then turned south, taking the small 216 and then the 249.

  The road has become problematic again. Everyone concentrates on the potholes and deep cracks in the road; everyone works with the machines, with the engines, with pure mechanics; everyone forms a sort of cyborg organism inching forward under the gray-green sky.

&nb
sp; Then, suddenly, it begins falling like a vertical ocean. It has been threatening for more than an hour, this storm; it came very fast from the north, from Labrador, in the baroque splendor of tall mountains of altocumulus clouds, growing blacker and blacker, violet and blue.

  In a single instant, after a few large signaling drops, the storm empties itself onto them in a continuing deluge that creates a wall of water. A wall of water falling from the sky. The whole universe trembles behind a giant lens, blurred by a kaleidoscope of pure crystal.

  The Great Flood must have been terribly beautiful, thinks Yuri.

  They cross the boundary of Asbestos County and Le Val-Saint-François County in the pouring rain. Their vehicles are metal boxes in the grip of the elements as they play their titanic geopolitical game. Streaming windows, flooded roads, the sky in fury.

  The storm is slowing them down, certainly, but it is also keeping away most of the large paramilitary groups active in the east. Reconnaissance squads like the one they faced the previous night are keeping to the shelter of their camps. The Territory Convoy continues driving endlessly. It will get through.

  The elements are on their side—black night, blue day, stars, sun, stormy morning, crimson night.

  The Convoy will get through. It will ride out this storm as it has done with all the obstacles encountered so far, natural or human. The Convoy does not seem to belong completely to this planet; a bit like an extraterrestrial object, it has come to play with this world and the men that inhabit it. It has literally acted like a machine, like a trap.

  No, muses Yuri, it doesn’t belong to this world at all. The Convoy came from the Vatican to reach the Territory. It came to the edge of the world.

  Their moving trinomial draws its power, on the other hand, only from the few humans driving it. The Convoy is not only the heavy military truck and the two pickups; it is the six men—the five men, he corrects himself—the five living men and the dead one that have kept it safe. It is the fateful conjunction of a few men and a few machines. A few hunters and a few traps. And the elements.

  The day is dark; the sky is starless, and yet an ardent fire smolders within the clouds.

  Water. Sky. Earth. Fire.

  The quaternary convergence of catastrophes. The crucifixion of the world. The cardinal conjunction: water is submerging the earth, falling from the sky; it contains fire, and the shadows are full of light.

  The Territory Convoy will not let itself be stopped by the flood, or by anything else, not even the end of this world. It is an integral part of the end of this world; it is an integral part of the flood; it is the heavy metal that is an integral part of the highest clouds.

  The Territory has moved, with its Law of Bronze; it, and nobody else, went to seek this library at the very tip of the Gaspé, and it killed all those men.

  They are the Territory; the Territory is them. The Convoy is the de-territorialization of the Law.

  Water falls from the sky like an endless liquid meteor shower; the drowned landscape appears in vaporous fractals behind the fluid walls.

  The Ford pickup is only a hundred meters in front of them now; it is regularly being hit by waves that slide down from the high plateaus, gorged with mud and plant detritus of all sorts: broken branches, fallen trunks, mixed leaves, uprooted brush, and shrubs in bunches. The vehicle is shaken and pushed; it slides, hydroplaning constantly on the liquid surface of the road; it swerves, drives through several meters of an inundated hole before regaining slightly firmer ground.

  Vernier did not finish off forty men for nothing. He is not going to let himself be dominated by a simple storm. Water from the sky, fire in the clouds, submerged earth—this is his realm, his domain. This is the world in which he knows how to live.

  Water. Sky. Earth. Fire.

  As if something is determined to test them at all costs. Something that is trying to make a selection.

  They have to get through. They have crossed the mountains, avoided two brigades of a thousand men each, repulsed a band of Islamist fighters. They have made the night and the starlight their surest allies. Beauty is on their side, to vanquish the Beast, and it has demonstrated that the latter can have no fiercer enemy. Because Beauty is a weapon of mass destruction. Death does not respect the Beast; it uses it. But Death can do nothing to Beauty; indeed, in some cases, Beauty overwhelms Death itself.

  It is enough, to not know how to serve it but to dare to enter its service.

  They will get through. They are getting through. Nothing can keep them from getting through.

  The storm will not stop them. Actually, thinks Yuri, they should really think of it as a sign of welcome, of hope. Of collusion.

  The sky is angry, but its anger is protecting us. The Law of Bronze reigns in the upper atmosphere. The sky and the Territory are bound in an invisible knot. The Law is that knot. When it decides to show itself to the eyes of men, they die.

  The storm is talking to us, and it is saying: If your heavy metal reaches the Territory again, it will be because you are worthy of it.

  * * *

  Lightning flashes in the depths of the night-black sky.

  It is the fire of the nocturnal day. The fire of the starless sky. Fire from the clouds. Fire born of air and water.

  In all forms. Of all intensities. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal. Rectangular. Zigzag. Single and in bunches. Monolinear and in luminous rhizomes, diffracting in multiple branches or roaring with an infinity of ephemeral microexplosions, filling the sky with immense conjunctions of high-voltage electricity or showering it with a rain of electricity as brief as it is sparkling, the flashes shooting their titanic arrows across the universe.

  And the thunder in heavy percussion that punctuates each flash of light, and the water of the celestial ocean whose waves are rolling across the earth, and the men who drive in their metal machines. And the road itself, disappearing rapidly in front of them in a maelstrom of mingled elements.

  The flashes do not light the diurnal night sky of the storm. The flashes do not light. They illuminate.

  They consume the air in their path. They dig craters in the earth, where they fight with one another; they start fires with the speed of a laser beam after they cross the water without the slightest diffraction.

  When a flash illuminates a landscape that way, it does not make it easier to see, because what you can discern has nothing to do with nature in its “normal” state. The fire from the flash creates considerable interference in the field of observation. These flashes are no longer simply photons emitted by the microscope and becoming part of the Heisenberg principle; they are megavolts of electricity that freeze everything in their explosive light, firstly your optic nerve. A landscape lit by a volley of flashes is as little recognizable as one drowning in the light of an atomic bomb.

  Light changes the world without even touching it, thinks Yuri.

  Light is still the most dangerous phenomenon of all.

  Because the truth is often such a singular landscape, revealed for an instant by the flying electricity of a flash of lightning.

  Like lightning, the truth does not light; it illuminates. It obliges you to accept being blinded in order to see it.

  “We’re coming to Saint-Grégoire-de-Greenlay,” says Campbell. “We need to go west, by Kingsbury, to pick up 243 again, and go through Racine and then Waterloo. Then we’ll take the 215 to Brome Lake; we should get away from Sherbrooke as soon as possible.”

  The road map is spread out on his knees; his technical language breaks the silence, otherwise punctuated only by cracks of thunder.

  Yuri continues to gaze attentively at the celestial storm and the lightning flashes that accompany it; he fiddles mechanically with the gun he got from the soldier-monk.

  The flashes, the fire of the diurnal night, and the water from the sky are our allies. The storm is our ally.

  We are the Territory Convoy.

  We are what is left of humanity on Earth.

  We are as dangerous as th
e lightning flash of truth.

  29 > GET READY

  Lashed with rain, the hills of Little Congo look like tall, ghostly waves, dark, drowning in liquid light.

  From the top of the butte, his mobile home overlooks the whole area, all the way to the former highway and even beyond the dry savannas of Omega Blocks. The rain has been falling continuously since morning; a violent storm is breaking over southeastern Quebec. The storm is crashing in waves against the side of the butte, and given its intensity this will likely continue into the night.

  The problem with this global ecological crisis, this blurring of the seasons coupled with the catastrophic conjunction of the elements, is that it slows everything down. Jade Silverskin is part of the generation that grew up with the Metastructure. He was a child when the cult of speed was at its apogee. The time when you could connect your brain to the NeuroNet in a few nanoseconds. The time when you could change your sex in thirty minutes, and your entire body in the space of a week. The time when it took less than eight hours on an antipodal plane to cross from pole to pole. The time when it took a split second to wipe a city from the map, and a few thousandths of a second for a hyperkinetic missile to reach its target.

  It was the Golden Age of the Metastructure. No more need for progress in the strict sense; progress formed the very mesh of the world—so well, in fact, that it had frozen, immobilized in a perpetual and circular dynamic. Speed itself had become the gyratory center of humanity, to the extent that once the general kinetics necessary and sufficient for humans to live in Great Universal Peace had been attained, the Metastructure had known how to keep itself from any possible exceeding of that limit. The Metastructure had been intelligent enough to give men prosperity, efficiency, security, and even a good dose of knowledge, but it had also been prudent enough to not give them freedom, science, or the risk of thought. It had known how to preserve humanity in a stasis of quasi-universal happiness for a quarter of a century.

  With the Metastructure gone, speed had no longer been the center of the world; it had moved farther and farther into the margin.