Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  He has hardly spared a glance for the three detectives he hired to fill in for James Vegas Orlando—and to find him.

  One of them is named Johnson Belfond; he was recommended by a nasty pimp from Little Congo. His two colleagues are a woman from Junkville, a husky redhead with short, curly hair named Lucie “Wanda” Walker, a professional killer who started her adult life as a gladiatrix in the arenas of Monolith Hills; and an Asian man, a Korean American Belfond found in New Arizona called Lee Kwan Osborne, a former military medic. He was, they say, a specialist in various poisons. “Belfond is a son of a bitch,”the Little Congo pimp had said when he recommended the man. “He has a bunch of freelance regulars that work for him depending on the situation. He’s honest with his associates; he never cheats, so no complications. And he’s absolutely pitiless with the men he hunts down. He used to be a cop, but he spent his weekends as a hired killer for some confederation of criminal bikers. He was arrested two or three years before the Fall but got out quickly, and it didn’t take him long to find work in Junkville.”

  “I think you’ve just given me an exact description of the man I’m looking for,” Silverskin had cheerfully told the procurer.

  * * *

  And now he is waiting for the son of a bitch Belfond to give him a detailed report. The anodized matrix emits a brief red light, indicating that he has lost again. This level of the program is a real puzzle; he can never reconstitute more than half of the structure, whose moving curves he is supposed to jab with his dart.

  “First I need to tell you, Mr. Silverskin, that all our efforts to find Vegas Orlando have been unsuccessful. All we know is that he was supposed to go to the northern part of the Territory with Pluto Saint-Clair. That’s the basic information and it’s still all we’ve been able to learn.”

  “You must admit, that isn’t a very promising start,” remarks Silverskin lazily, emptying the memory of his little console and starting again from zero at the same level.

  “Maybe, Mr. Silverskin, but that leads us to the root of his disappearance.”

  “I’m listening. Try not to be so obscure, if you can manage it.”

  “I’ll be extremely clear, Mr. Silverskin. We have found Pluto Saint-Clair in his house in Midnight Oil.”

  “Very good. What was he doing?”

  “That’s the interesting part. He wasn’t doing anything. He hasn’t gone out for two days, but we were able to watch him inside his Combi-Cube. It was a little odd; he would repeat the same actions several times. He also spent a lot of time sleeping.”

  Silverskin plants his dart in an area of the virtual shape that seems relatively stable. Yes, got that one.

  “What do you want from me, Mr. Belfond? I’m not paying you to count how many hours Pluto Saint-Clair sleeps. I want you to find out from him what happened to Vegas Orlando.”

  “I’m getting there, Mr. Silverskin.”

  “Get there, then. You’re wasting my time.”

  “Fine. We forced his door last night; we had to act fast and you did give us carte blanche. We woke him up and questioned him. We have our methods.”

  “Now you’re piquing my interest a bit. What did Mr. Pluto Saint-Clair tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You couldn’t make him talk?”

  Johnson Belfond takes Silverskin’s meaning immediately; he refuses to let the man believe something so absurd. “I can assure you, Mr. Silverskin, that no human being can resist our methods of interrogation; they’re very sophisticated, I must say. He didn’t resist.”

  “So he died before he could talk. You killed him too fast. Somebody spoke too highly of your talents as a professional.”

  “I’m afraid there is a misunderstanding, Mr. Silverskin. He didn’t resist. He talked to us. He told us everything he could.”

  “Good. And what did the brave Pluto Saint-Clair say, thanks to your sophisticated methods?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nothing. He told us nothing. And—”

  Silverskin cuts him off abruptly. He sits up. The message on his face is clear: I am the Master, and I will teach you what it means for the Master to be angry. “Are you mocking me? Mocking me openly? Do you really believe I’m going to keep paying you to fuck me over while—”

  This time, he is the one who is cut off in mid-sentence. The anger of the Master is replaced by surprise and a sort of incredulity.

  “You need to listen to me carefully, Mr. Silverskin. I am a professional, and I don’t like it when people question the quality of my work. Let me finish, and pay attention, or I will have to consider our contract null and void.”

  A pause.

  Silverskin concentrates for a few seconds on the metastable shape.

  “I’m listening to you, Belfond. Unravel the mystery.”

  “He talked, but he didn’t have anything to say. It’s clear that his memory has been very precisely erased. I asked Lee to do a quick bioanalysis, and he detected the presence of programmable neural software, some kind of synthetic metascopolamine. There were a few trace molecules remaining.”

  “Someone erased his memory? His whole memory?”

  “No. It was a professional job. A very targeted neural deprogramming. Basically, everything concerning Vegas Orlando and everything he had discovered on the boy he told you about, and on the famous Professor, is gone. He didn’t remember anything, even when we injected him with sodium pentothal. So, we moved on to some rather Draconian measures.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He didn’t remember the past, but he had seen our faces, and we had asked him a lot of questions. We generally try to bring up memories, not make them disappear. We don’t use that kind of antimnemonic neural software. So we turned to the good old method.”

  Silverskin spoils one of the shape’s contours. The good old method. The oldest method in the world. “What did you do with the body?”

  “We left it where it was. Our questioning didn’t leave any traces; we use mostly trafficked neuromodules that work internally. We just injected him with something harmless, but we also put an air bubble in the syringe that caused an almost immediate embolism. Then we took all the materials he was hiding in his storeroom so it would look like a robbery.”

  “What kind of materials?”

  “That’s the funniest part of the whole thing. They’re half-dead musical instruments. But they might still be of interest to a techno Triad or two in Vortex Townships.”

  “No; actually, I’m the one who’s interested in them. Get them to me as soon as possible.”

  Those instruments are more than clues. They are true plunder.

  Pluto Saint-Clair couldn’t say anything; everything he knew had been erased from his memory. But the objects that could speak for him hadn’t been erased.

  Those instruments are a key. A key that might open the door leading to the boy and the Professor.

  A key that might open the door to immortality.

  Silverskin has no way of knowing it, and even if he did it would have great difficulty in penetrating his mind and his immediate field of application, but as Belfond and his two accomplices depart for their next area of operations, one of the huge purplish-feathered crows native to the Territory is taking off from a nearby concrete post into the monochrome blue sky, dry and already filled with the hot sunshine of an early spring.

  It soars in a wide circle above Little Congo and then flies north, rising high into the warm morning air. It crosses a large part of the Territory, gliding above isolated townships and gray-blue hordes of tumbleweeds, until it reaches a series of wooded hills where it knows every inch of the terrain and, in particular, the strange human residences cobbled together from debris left long ago by the huge metal bird.

  It finds some small prey along the way, field mice and shrews on the plains and savannas, the small hummingbirds that live in the subtropical areas, various snakes that thrive in the arid tundra. All of this is easily available to one who can make use o
f the third dimension.

  It is one of the Territory’s birds of prey; it is a diurnal predator. In its world, the day is much more dangerous than the night—because, like men, it is because it is essentially omnivorous that it is a killer more intelligent than a simple meat eater. It is when one knows how to distinguish differences that one can make choices. And it is in making choices that one can tell truth from illusion, the primed trap from the inoffensive object, life from death. For such an animal, a daytime bird of prey, it is a very simple form, elementary but indisputable, of true freedom.

  It was such a bird that heralded, without realizing it, the arrival of a new world. Don’t they say that Viking navigators used birds to determine the proximity of land?

  The crow settles among the high branches of an old maple above a vast carpet of wild oats, chaparral, snakeweed, dandelions, and reeds, a few meters away from a patched-up section of the great metal bird that crashed here once. The instruments of men and nature seem made to come together.

  It calls out instinctively, its whole bird-of-prey self full of the radiant day to come, the huge blue sky and the round golden sun. Its cry of animal joy echoes throughout the surrounding woods and reaches the composite shelter near which it is perched.

  The sound wave vibrates two pairs of human eardrums.

  A voice rings out of an open window:

  “There are more hunters on the project than we thought, Yuri; that’s all.”

  Another voice sounds:

  “But why did they kill him?”

  The first voice answers:

  “He couldn’t tell them anything, so they made sure he couldn’t talk to anyone ever again.”

  The second voice again:

  “You’re sure your informer is reliable? I mean, are you 100 percent sure about him?”

  The first voice is metallic, armored with certainty:

  “He wouldn’t have come to Aircrash Circle without a good reason, Yuri. Pluto Saint-Clair is dead and you need to get that through your head. It also means—make sure you remember this—that you were right.”

  The second voice asks, after a few beats of silence:

  “Right? Right about what?”

  And the first voice, with even more iron in it than before, answers:

  “Right about Vegas Orlando. He wasn’t the real commander, the head of the network. Someone was using him; someone was trying to find out our secrets. And after he disappeared, that person attempted to get the answers from Pluto.”

  To which the second voice replies:

  “Yes. But we erased his neurons. He’s dead because of us.”

  This time there is a note of finality to the first voice, brooking no argument:

  “No, Yuri; you’re wrong. Pluto is dead because of himself. And the guy from Little Congo killed him. That Jade Silverskin, who we need to find as fast as we can. Before he finds us.”

  The crow calls out again in the clear air of the Territory. If it knew how to speak the language of men, it would make an excellent spy—and undoubtedly a double or even triple agent.

  If it knew the language of men, this Territory bird of prey would be able to shout that a large-scale catastrophe is brewing here, one that will affect all of humanity, one that will shake the very foundations of the Earth.

  “It’s happened,” Campbell says, coming into the cabin. “The first cases are hitting Aircrash Circle. There must not be a square meter of the Territory untouched anymore.”

  “I know,” says Yuri. “While you were gone the necros from Snake Zone passed through with two bodies.”

  “I stocked up on ammunition at Powder Station; we were almost out. They took almost everything I had of the stuff from the battlefield. The weapons traffickers had never seen so much at once.”

  Yuri smiles very slightly. There must still be thousands and thousands of shell casings on that mountain in L’Amiante County.

  Thousands of shell casings, and forty bodies rotting in the sun.

  “The latest compilation of data is processing. Do we have confirmation for tonight?” asks Yuri, his mind once again connected to the machines of daily life.

  “Everything’s been in order since early this morning. Don’t worry; everything is under control. We should be there for the sunset. Link will tell the sheriff. Simple as that.”

  “I hope our data is usable, Chrysler. I hope we didn’t do all this work for nothing.”

  “It will be usable, Yuri, and no work is ever done for nothing; that’s a fundamental law in any society, any situation. Even slaves don’t work for free, because they work for their lives.”

  “For the Thing, slavery is a superior condition of life, because it’s better to be human furniture than simply fuel for the fire. I’m not sure, though, that it would be in favor of unionized freedom, Chrysler.”

  “It’s wrong. We are the Territory Union. And to make a sort of historical comparison, I’m afraid that for it we will be Soviet revolutionaries!”

  “No,” says Yuri, who knows the history of his family’s mother country very well. “It’s more like the Thing is the Supreme Soviet, with the Territory as its Gulag, and we are nothing but dissidents—alone and unarmed.”

  “You really think we’re going to lose?” asks Campbell with a shade of anxiety in his voice.

  “No,” says Yuri again. “The Supreme Soviet ended up in the sewers of history, and the unarmed dissidents won.”

  Campbell knits his brow. “Oh, yes—a little like aikido. Use your enemy’s strength against him.”

  “No. The Thing contains its own principle of destruction; it just keeps it hidden. There is no strength to turn against it. The Thing is not ‘strength’; it’s the exact opposite. It is a hole, an active vacuum that sucks up anything human, the biological and the mechanical, and even the symbolic.”

  “Why does it do that? If we knew that, it would answer a lot of our questions. Does it feed on us, do you think?”

  “Yes, but not in the classical sense, not in the animal sense. The Thing is an entirely digital entity, much more than the Metastructure ever was; it acts like a machine in some ways—or, rather, like a program.”

  “A program?”

  “Yes. It is reprogramming the world. It’s not that we feed it, so much as that we have become replacement parts for the world it is building from what it can scavenge of the former world. It doesn’t feed on us; it does what everyone in Junkville does. It recycles us.”

  Maybe the world will end by resembling a giant replica of Junkville, the city where nothing is created or destroyed, but where everything is constantly transforming.

  In fact, thinks Yuri, since it is still acting according to the basic plan of inversion and ontic intensification, we should probably try to imagine not only a planetary version of Junkville but an inverted version, a negative version.

  What could that be? What image to give it? Where to start?

  Because everything would be infinitely recyclable, everything would equalize. Maybe that’s what the desert is: the future topology of the world; equalizing horizontality, monodesic, unidimensional. And in the middle of the desert—what? Nothing? Nothing human?

  The Thing needs us. It will recycle us indefinitely, in order to have basic livestock available to it with which to make its digital sacrifice.

  Destruction itself is only one phase of recycling.

  That means that this destruction, even carried out on a huge scale as now seems to be the case, is only a stage—worse, only a preliminary stage.

  This destruction, or rather this huge recycling, is the harbinger of a change. A much worse change.

  What could be worse than the packaging of human beings in the form of recyclable material? To answer that question would be to answer the one posed earlier by Campbell: Why is the Thing doing all this?

  And, surprised by such clarity, Yuri takes only a few seconds to come face-to-face with the blinding crystal of truth:

  If the Thing is doing this, it is because it must
do it. Just as we breathe or drink water. If the Thing is doing this, it is because it can’t do anything else. It is its “soul.”

  Toward the end of the day, the crow detects new movement near the human shelter from its treetop perch. The humans are spending their time expanding their activities; they are like phenomena bent on disturbing the natural order of things, like particles of pure chaos launched across the cosmos, and they don’t even seem to realize it.

  Birds like the crow know the whole Territory and the men that live here, and die here.

  But birds like the crow are not bent on disturbing the natural order of things. They subsist on the natural order of things. They are the radical plan that plunges its rhizomes deep into the earth and stretches its canopy high into the clouds, higher than any bird can go.

  Humans act, and they affect the world around them. They do what they were made to do.

  So the diurnal bird of prey of the Territory, integrated into the very heart of this ever-expanding neonature, also does what it was made to do. The sun is setting, and its instinct, the complex machinery that affects its entire metabolism, commands it to spread its wings and take flight again. Full south this time, toward its original position.

  It soars above the Territory again as orange light touches the landscape in slanting rays. Again it passes over townships, woods, tundra, and savannas until it reaches the great city of coal and plastic. It crosses the old highway and heads immediately for the concrete posts at the summit of the butte, studded with metal boxes, where humans live.

  The butte where, too, humans act and affect the world around them.

  In life, there are situations that closely resemble gambits.