Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “What do you mean, not one thing? Do you mean there are thousands of them? But where?”

  And at the precise instant he asks the question, Yuri realizes the answer like an explosion deep in his brain.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, Yuri. Your ‘Thing’ is carrying on the work of the Metastructure, but a dimension removed. Men disindividuate via the network they themselves form through numeric language.”

  “Network? You’re saying they are interconnected?”

  “Obviously. The ‘Thing’ is not a virus, we know that; but neither is it the external, hidden, mysterious ‘entity’ you’re searching for. Everyone needs to understand what I’m saying: this is an ecology, like the Professor explained. But there again, its evolutionist consequences are the opposite of any ecology.”

  “Explain,” says Campbell, his snakelike curiosity piqued.

  “It’s a mutation. But not a mutation of the Metastructure, like we thought. It is a mutation of Humanity. A devolutive mutation. It isn’t ‘one thing,’ because it can never individuate. I’ve discussed this with my father and the Professor. Conclusion …”

  “It’s okay; I’ve got it.” Yuri’s eyes gleam. “Humans themselves are becoming the Thing.”

  “Almost. But not really. It isn’t ‘one thing,’ but it forms a sort of ‘totality,’ or a perfect simulation of it, in any case. I repeat: Humanity, in a generic devolutive form, IS the Thing. And I believe this numeric devolution isn’t the final stage.”

  “I see,” says Yuri, concealing the shock of certainty as best he can. “It is analogous to the Passion of the Christ.”

  “Absolutely, Yuri. And the internal logic of ‘the Thing’—or Post-Man—which can never be singular in any way—tells it to recycle machines, recycle organisms, recycle language … there will be a next stage, and very soon.”

  “You told me another Fall was impossible. …”

  “The time for ‘Falls’ is past, Yuri. My father had a very hard time admitting it, but now the next stage will be the nailing to the cross. And on Golgotha, it came very quickly after the last ‘Fall.’”

  “A whole library crossed the ocean and then Quebec. You just found a way to counter the numeric devolution,” says Campbell, his face dark.

  “Nothing is lost yet on that front,” says the young man, a bit mysteriously. “We don’t have much time, that’s all.”

  “We don’t have the most important thing,” answers Campbell, icily.

  Spring makes its appearance on this land devastated by death that is not really death, that condemns everything indefinitely to its indefinite regime. Death as digital recycling.

  There has never been as luminous an early April in the Territory, thinks Yuri. Beauty has never come so close to the Beast. And we have never been so close to either of them.

  That day, the sheriff calls a special Council meeting. Yuri and Campbell are very cordially invited. It quickly becomes clear that the sheriff’s Council has become a sort of grand jury, charged with deciding whether or not the county of Heavy Metal Valley will prosecute them for murder. According to the sheriff’s way of thinking, being cordial never means compromising the Law. The Law itself is entitled to the luxury of being cordial. You can always keep a smile on your face as you press the trigger. Yuri knows something about that.

  Before any discussion begins, Langlois forbids any argument based on technical problems of jurisdiction.

  “The Metastructure doesn’t exist anymore; jurisdictions don’t exist anymore, and neither do the Global Bureau, political confederations, or continental governance blocs. I represent the last active police force in the Territory, and I consider the whole thing my de facto natural jurisdiction.”

  It is clear. It needs no reply. It is the Law of Bronze.

  There are some lawyers in the county, but Yuri and Campbell are in mutual agreement that they will defend themselves. There is no time left for procedure and legal bullshit. They’ll take the bull by the horns and it’ll be over before it begins; that jury might as well be a firing squad, Chrysler said. Yuri thinks they are at great risk of ending up in that uncomfortable position anyway, but he also knows they have no choice. They have to lance the abscess, by whatever means necessary. They are the Camp Doctors. They should be able to lance an abscess.

  The Humvee City Council has gathered in its entirety, down to Milan Djordjevic, who maintains an icy silence throughout the proceedings. The sheriff presides, flanked by Slade Vernier on his right and Erwin Slovak on his left, as principal witness and second assistant. The two androids from space have been invited to observe, something they have been doing since their arrival in the Territory. Each day they accompany the patrols around HMV. Each day they walk across the city of heavy metal and all over the county, all the way to the cosmodrome. They learn. They prepare. No one knows for what, exactly.

  Representatives of HMV’s Christian communities are there, and the rabbi. Even Balthazar, the cyberdog, is seated near the sheriff.

  So Campbell takes the bull by the horns, and puts them in front of the firing squad. The Law of Bronze against its blacksmiths, thinks Yuri.

  “You cannot deny that you cut this man down in cold blood.”

  “First let me draw your attention to the fact that Deputy Erwin Slovak himself admitted that he came within two hundred meters of the scene. His night binoculars allowed him to see what was happening, but he claims he couldn’t make out the details. But the devil is in the details, especially in this particular case.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that this man was part of a gang of killers from Junkville, working for another man who we have traced—someone discreet, powerful, and dangerous. Someone who represented a direct threat to Link de Nova and Pluto Saint-Clair, as subsequent events proved. And I want to be very clear about this: he represented a threat to every community in Heavy Metal Valley.”

  “Don’t try to act like the saviors of the county, Mr. Campbell,” says the sheriff. “The county can act on its own behalf perfectly well.”

  The Law of Bronze, thinks Yuri. The Law of the Territory. It is the Territory that protects men, and not the reverse.

  “I’m not acting like a savior or anything else, Sheriff; I’m no actor. This man is responsible, or partly responsible, for the death of Pluto Saint-Clair. He and his accomplices were planning to kidnap Link de Nova and the Professor and force them to work for their group. Do you think that’s enough of an argument in our favor?”

  “It doesn’t authorize you to kill in cold blood.”

  “No? Well, then, since ‘technical problems of jurisdiction’ don’t count anymore, indict Slade Vernier for war crimes. You’ll be indicting yourself at the same time, for the atrocities committed during the attack on the cosmodrome. The formula doesn’t work.”

  Silence fills the police trailer, and the acrid stench of half-forgotten crimes, deaths buried in the ash of memory, corpses past but not decomposed.

  They are all there, the living and the dead.

  “Did you kill in cold blood, yes or no?”

  It is Judith Sevigny’s father who has asked the question. The head of HMV’s Catholic community. And Reverend Sommerville, who occupies the same hierarchical post for Anglicans and Protestants, nods his head vigorously in agreement.

  “We absolutely must discriminate between legitimate defense and calculated assassination.”

  Rabbi Apelbaum, who represents the last twelve Jews in the Territory, does not speak, but everything about his demeanor suggests that he is in full support of his counterpart’s words. And the Greek Libyan Georges Dimitrios, a survivor of the Quebecois civil wars, nods in the affirmative as well, fixing Campbell with his single black eye.

  We’ve got both Testaments against us; this isn’t going to be easy, thinks Yuri.

  He watches Campbell keep the slightly carnivorous smile on his face. He is calculating, computing, selecting the best response. Campbell, the human computer.

 
“If you will allow it, honorable members of the Council, I would say it falls somewhere in the middle.”

  “There is no middle when it comes to legitimate defense and murder,” Father Newman replies dryly.

  Father Newman represents the collected Christian communities in the county. Protestants, Anglicans, Orthodox, and Catholics have elected and reelected him to this post for more than twelve years. He was part of the very first group of dissidents sheltered by Langlois in his Sanctuary of metal, before the Fall. He is an old man of great authority, knowledge, and wisdom. He is a priest, a Franciscan. But Yuri knows that Saint Francis himself couldn’t stop Chrysler Campbell. Especially when it comes to manipulating information as if it were a simple genome. Especially when it comes to inventing the truth—that is, the appearances it is capable of taking on.

  “You’re wrong, Father. The middle consists of the fact that, on one hand, I was psychologically ready to kill at the slightest suspicious move, and maybe even without a valid reason, because of what he had tried to do to Link and to Pluto Saint-Clair—who was killed later, let me remind you—and that, on the other hand, in a factual sense, the poor guy had the bad idea to make a suspicious move.”

  “That’s not what Erwin Slovak told us,” remarks the sheriff.

  “Slovak couldn’t see anything, not from two hundred meters away, or even one hundred. That cretin with the red Buick wanted to arrange the kidnapping of Link de Nova and Pluto Saint-Clair in order to get to the Professor. If he had succeeded, Mr. Sheriff, sir, you wouldn’t be able to do a thing to save your Territory.”

  “I’m tougher than you think. And you haven’t answered the question.”

  “I know exactly what I’m talking about. Tough or not, if they’d gotten their hands on Link de Nova, it would have been all over, whether you want to believe that or not. And I did answer the question—I had made up my mind to kill at the slightest suspicious move, and, as I said, he made a suspicious move.”

  “What kind of move? Did he try to scratch his nose?”

  Irony is easy, thinks Yuri. It won’t stop the human computer.

  “Scratching his nose—or any other part of his body—wouldn’t have been a mistake. He stuck his hand into his pocket. That was a mistake.”

  Well done; simple, very plausible. And practically invisible at two hundred or even one hundred meters’ distance, even for a man with light-amplification binoculars.

  “You hadn’t searched him already?”

  “There was still a slight risk. I didn’t want to chance it.”

  “Was he armed?”

  Yuri watches the human computer start processing again. Calculate, command, arrange, choose. A second, no longer. The time it takes to draw a breath. A perfectly fluid, invisible process. It isn’t so much hiding what you think matters, Campbell has often said to him, it’s hiding that you think. “Don’t think” is another of his maxims. Tell the story that could be true. Or, rather, let it tell itself.

  “Yes. I found a small needle-shooting pistol with a rotating self-loader, well hidden. He would have killed Yuri and me, and taken Link de Nova and Pluto Saint-Clair to Junkville at gunpoint, where they would have been put into the hands of the gang. Should I draw you a picture?”

  Langlois is not the type of man to be easily swayed; he is a real cop, the Man of the Law of Bronze. “What did you do with the weapon?”

  Which clearly means: Give us some concrete proof of your version of the facts.

  But if the sheriff is the Man of the Law of Bronze, a sort of bulldozer who has survived more than his share of mechanical bullfights, Campbell is the human computer—a machine who has beaten all human opponents at chess.

  “It’s somewhere in the arsenal you’ve just confiscated, Sheriff. Your men can find it easily.”

  Campbell, the calculator of destinies. He has owned that particular weapon for years, and this is why he insisted on fetching his equipment and arsenal from his cabin in Aircrash Circle. He foresaw the grand jury session. He made preparations in the utmost secrecy, not even telling Yuri. He read the sheriff—all of them—perfectly.

  A full-out lie, meeting the truth head-on. Clean, well aimed, expertly fired; a bull’s-eye, with all the truths and half-lies surrounding it. It shines splendidly, incontrovertible evidence.

  Later, after the “grand jury” has ruled on the impossibility of prosecuting a case against them, Yuri catches Wilbur Langlois’ gaze as he comes out of the police trailer. His expression is not that of a conquered man; on the contrary, he seems to be holding back a smile of joy.

  Yuri catches up with Campbell a short distance away and whispers: “The sheriff didn’t really want to accuse us of murder; he didn’t want to hear the truth, either. He just wanted us to prove that we were at his level. That not only did we kill that son of a bitch, but that we knew how to get out of it in front of the Council—how to lie with just enough veracity to create a truth. He wanted to know if we’re truly worthy of being Guardians of the Territory. He wanted to know if we could kill a man in cold blood, and then lie and camouflage the murder as an act of legitimate defense. He wanted to know how far we’re willing to go to protect Link de Nova.”

  “I hope he understands now that we’re willing to go all the way to the end. I hope he understands that no one can stop us. Not even him.”

  * * *

  The woman from space looks at Campbell and says to him: “We think you’re the ones that can best help us understand what’s going on here. The sheriff’s men are too used to it; they rarely leave their own county.”

  Campbell takes in the woman’s height, her blond hair and very pale skin, the slightly up-tilted black eyes suggesting Eurasian cloning genealogy—her whole form, with its somewhat androgynous carriage. Yuri, in turn, watches her companion: reserved, compactly built, muscular, short, naturally steel-gray hair, tawny eyes, dusky skin tanned coppery by the high-orbit sun.

  Their complete series names are Sky Lumina O-124 and Orson-Vectro Karel 5727. They talk little, but ask many questions. And there are many more that they don’t ask.

  Not yet, anyway. They are looking. Looking to understand. But to understand what? The Law of the Territory?

  Farther away, near Milan Djordjevic’s and Paul Zarkovsky’s laboratory, Francisco Alpini is lovingly turning the second trailer into an acceptable library. The hammer striking nails, saws cutting metal or Plexiglas, sending up circular sprays of sparks, welding torches soldering steel in an oxyhydric blue gleam, wrenches and screwdrivers squeaking in rusty screws—the machine symphony of Heavy Metal Valley resonates from one pile of crushed metal to the next.

  Yuri sees Slade Vernier silently delivering a box of tools to the soldier-monk.

  He sees Erwin Slovak chatting, relaxed, near the midnight-blue bus, with the sheriff and a group of deputies—Frank Lecerf, the French sniper; Alex La Varende, an ex-cop from the Quebec Bureau of Investigation, originally from Abitibi; Scot Montrose, a veteran of Canadian intelligence; Antonio Villalobos, who earned his badge with the Colombian special police; Jane Delorette, a former member of the Ottawa SWAT; Patrick Doyle, a Nova Scotian and ex-GRC lieutenant whose career as a detective spanned Canada before the Fall; Mary-Ann Beaulieu, a cop from the old police department of the city of Montreal; and several others he knows slightly or not at all.

  Killers in the service of the Law. Killers in the service of the Territory. Killers in uniform.

  The most dangerous kind of all.

  He sees the four representatives of the prohibited religious communities speaking joyfully with Father Newman, as they head away from the police station, down Pontiac Alley.

  He sees Milan Djordjevic deep in serious discussion with the Professor as they move toward their laboratory-in-construction.

  He sees the mother of Link de Nova walking with the old witch from Deadlink, Lady van Harpel, down Cadillac Avenue.

  He sees Campbell, sizing up the androids from the Ring.

  He sees himself, a fragmented form in a
rearview mirror smashed in some lateral collision.

  Something is taking shape.

  A community.

  Undoubtedly the last one worthy of the name in the Territory.

  That is to say, not just a simple organic mass of individuals but a specific metamachine, a monad, a shared space-time. A possible world.

  It stands as the still-fragile promise of true hope.

  Hope that not only will the “Thing”—which according to Link de Nova has become Humanity itself—fail at self-destructing through the humans that form it but, more importantly, that the humans who survive its undertaking will outlive Humanity itself.

  “We really know only one radius that spans the Territory, including Heavy Metal Valley, which will no doubt take you weeks to learn, and weeks more to understand.”

  “Can you act as our guides? There isn’t much time.”

  “Yuri and I are assigned to a residence until further notice—for ‘security reasons,’ or so the sheriff says, even though we aren’t being officially prosecuted for murder. But I can tell you that there’s no point anymore in running all over the Territory to understand what’s happening. Young Link is right about that, just like his father and the Professor. This is a war between thought and the Thing that wants to destroy it. It is by thinking that we have a chance to defeat this post-human mutation.”

  Yuri is shocked. What? No deal?

  “But I need to get out of HMV County. I absolutely have to save my cabin in Aircrash Circle. I’ve heard from Bob Chamberlain, who just got back from that area, that things aren’t good there; the looters will soon be at work, if they aren’t already.”

  “What do you want us to do?” asks the woman from space.

  Ah, okay, thinks Yuri, reassured. So there is a deal, an exchange, a negotiation.

  “I want you to help me convince Sheriff Langlois to give me safe passage. You would come with me and help me, and in exchange I will show you the hidden side of the Territory, where HMV cops can’t go. The dark side of the Earth.”