Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  I will show them the Light.

  The Light when it becomes Fire.

  * * *

  Morning comes.

  The eighth, by Link de Nova’s count.

  Another morning on which people gather around the hangar. It has been five full days since the beginning of the storm. The fifth day of the hybrid neoecology, the fifth day of the world of mud.

  Morning has come.

  The morning of the New Machine.

  The morning of the last free men.

  The morning of the last finite numbers.

  Morning has come. The morning of the transfinite aleph, the morning of light, the morning of the metaliving.

  Link de Nova’s morning has come.

  The morning of the Great Amazement, the transmutation of the Energy into Words, the morning the machine has been surpassed by itself.

  Every man and woman who has come from almost all the communities of Heavy Metal Valley can see, glowing golden in the morning light, what emerges from Link de Nova’s hangar, floating a few meters above the earth, haloed with solar light pulsing from quicksilver veins. The levels of fluidity and viscosity of this matter-that-is-not-matter would thwart any attempt at measuring them—rhes and poises demultiplied in infinite differentials, permanently reversing their asymmetry. Nothing is really stable at the heart of this hyperluminous plasma, which is neither gas nor solid nor liquid nor plasma.

  All of them—Yuri McCoy, Chrysler Campbell, Judith Sevigny, her parents, Sheriff Langlois and all his deputies, the two androids from the Ring, Francisco Alpini, Milan Djordjevic, Professor Zarkovsky, Sydia Nova, Father Newman, Lady van Harpel, the Sommervilles, the dog Balthazar, and dozens of other families, dozens of other couples, dozens of other solitary individuals, and even a large purple crow that has just alighted on the top of a pile of smashed cars—all of them are facing the incomprehensible, the unknowable, the inexplicable, the impossible.

  They are facing the future of the Machine. They are facing the future of Humanity.

  Later, Yuri will ask himself how to describe such an apparition, such an “object,” such a phenomenon.

  It is not natural—but it is not artificial, either. It is, again, the disjunctive synthesis of two species whose operation is infinitely maintained by this globe of active light framing intangible perimeters.

  Object? What object? Where does matter begin? Where does light begin? Where does energy stop? Where does infinity end?

  The first words that come to him are: Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the place where only surreal is a possibility, welcome to the Territory, you face the fact that everything here can be done, welcome to the Territory, welcome to the very last unknown identity, welcome to the Territory, as you see, a new world has just begun.

  There is a sort of poetry in what is happening before their eyes. But what kind of poetry, if not an unknown form, a form not yet created—because what it is saying, describing, evoking, has no recognized existence? Any religious prohibitions notwithstanding, how does one paint God? It does not make any sense; any representation of infinity is impossible by its very nature.

  For that matter, how does one convey what is a notch below God—a phenomenon that incontestably belongs to the order of the divine, the supernatural, or to one of its manifestations here on Earth?

  How does one paint an angel?

  How does one portray the Ark of the Covenant?

  And seeing Link standing at the hangar door, the black Gibson hanging from its strap around his neck, Yuri realizes that you cannot paint God. You cannot describe an angel. You cannot depict the Ark of the Covenant and its Tabernacle.

  But there is a way to make contact with them. Through the Word, of course. But the Word is not necessarily made up of words.

  The Word is the Voice. It is a Song. It is thus a Body. It is music capable of reaching the far-distant stars.

  And this is very precisely what Link has understood. It is what he will now put into practice. It is what he will cast upon the world.

  The cosmic Antenna, the human Monad, the Neomachine; the Ark, as he calls it.

  It is not entirely mechanical, but neither is it entirely biological. It is a multidimensional form of light at different levels of “density;” perhaps even at different levels of speed, of mass; all paradoxes are imaginable. It is holding a strange structure in place: a black double orb, two large circles, one enclosed inside the other at a 90-degree angle, forming a schematic globe, the inside of which is clearly visible in the powerful solar light.

  The studio. The whole studio.

  All the instruments. The guitars, the Dobros, the mandolins, the synthesizers, the samplers, the sequencers, the various keyboards, the electric violins and acoustic cellos, the saxophones and trumpets, the basses, the rhythm boxes, the microphones, the mixing consoles, the recorders, the amplifiers, the speakers, the digital disk readers, the microcomputers, the racks and effects pedals, the headphones, the cables, the electric transformers, the radio transmission station—even the huge church organ is atop the Machine with all its jutting tubes. Everything has become an organic unit, a single meta-instrument that vibrates and pulses, a cardiac ventricle amid the swarming photons. It is glowing with energy, as if the fire-colored halo is taking form in the assembled machines. And Yuri realizes that there is no “as if” about it; he realizes that this is very exactly what is taking place, that this is the precise nature of the process at work.

  It is so beautiful. It is so perfect. It is so simple, he thinks.

  He has understood. He knows what is happening. He knows how Link plans to use it against the Thing. He knows Link has found the way to fight it on the global, planetary, worldwide scale—counterworld against neoworld.

  Hostilities have only just begun, he thinks, admiring the slow ascension of the flying structure above HMV, and then its majestic curving turn in the direction of Xenon Ridge, where it ends by positioning itself a dozen meters above the line of the crest, not far from a windmill it floods with its luminescence. It is Link with his guitar, connected to a small high-frequency radio transmitter, who controls the Machine’s movements. It is Link who is watching over the Territory now. Link, the Conductor of the Camp Orchestra.

  The Antenna dominates Humvee, and the cosmodrome, and the northern part of Grand Junction. It is nearly facing the Monolith Hills strip. It is in direct contact with the Hotel Laika.

  The Antenna is watching. Soon it will begin transmitting. And when it does transmit, it will not be to twelve thousand transistor radios scattered across the Territory. When it does transmit, this Antenna of the Counter-World, it will be on all frequencies, across the terrestrial magnetic field as if within a network; each human will become the radio receptor of the Grand Dynamite Audio, transmuted into a sonic cruise missile. It will transmit for all of humanity that survives. It will transmit for all the identification numbers awaiting it in the Camp-World.

  41 > TYRANNY AND MUTATION

  “I think the situation is getting beyond our control. What’s been happening for almost ten days now is not normal at all.”

  “Listen, Silverskin, I spent two full weeks in the west of the Territory. I planted several evangelical missions; I named one Edgar Dorset to fill the same position as yours for the county of Grand Funk Railroad. Now the next phase is Deadlink; in view of its importance I should make it a diocese of its own—despite the administrative red tape left over from the Previous World. The rest doesn’t matter to me, for now.”

  “Did you leave him any capsules? That’s not wise. And let me remind you that the remissions are increasing by the thousands.”

  “Silverskin, Dorset will be the bishop of Grand Funk Railroad just like you are the bishop of Junkville; so he will be authorized to distribute the Anome’s capsules. As for the problem you just mentioned, rest assured that it’s a marginal epiphenomenon compared to the Anome’s power.”

  “Several thousand sudden remissions in less than six days without even the use of t
heir fucking radios? Tell me again that nothing abnormal is happening.”

  “Do you know the rhythm of the Anome’s progression in this alphanumeric mutation? In less than six years, nine-tenths of what is left of humanity now will have disappeared. Those that survive will be the ones that have followed the Law of the Anome, the Law I have come to pronounce.”

  “Mr. Cybion, our church is in very early days yet, and I’m afraid the people up in the north of the Territory are already working on a vast conspiracy that—”

  “Silverskin, my first apostle, my first bishop, please don’t worry yourself so much about these little people tinkering with the Metastructure. A surprise is indeed coming, but not one that will help them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m talking about the rumors we are hearing sometimes in the Territory these days about written signs being erased.”

  “Yes, I know, some people from Neo Pepsico told me about it. It must be connected—”

  “Obviously it is connected, Silverskin, because it is part of the same thing. The Anome desires an elite, handpicked few to form its neohumanity; the alphanumeric mutation will take only human organisms. It is just one phase of the process.”

  “What other organisms are you hinting at?”

  “I’m talking about books. The Anome considers them living organisms. It is proceeding with a nullified infinite numerization against them.”

  “Nullified infinite numerization?”

  “Yes. In simpler terms, it is numerizing them infinitely in the vacuum; it is turning them digital, turning them into binary code, but there are no more ones—only zeros, infinitely looped upon themselves.”

  “Books as living organisms?”

  “Of course. For the Anome they are nomad brains—purely scriptural, but brains all the same. And the alphanumeric mutation concerns everything related to cognition and language. Verbal as well as written. You should understand its way of functioning, Mr. Silverskin; the Anome is using the different phases of its transformation of the world as selective tests of those that will belong to neohumanity when the transformation is complete. If it is destroying written language as well as verbal, it is because it plans to modify our methods of communication profoundly. Language will be obsolete under the Anome; we are forming an unindividuated network, and soon we will each be able to know what everyone else is thinking. We will become a global entity. We will be the world, Mr. Silverskin.”

  “And these unexplained remissions? And that fucking Territory Radio? What are we going to do about the HMV men?”

  Alan Cybion I’s laugh pierces the air like a gunshot.

  “We aren’t going to do anything, Silverskin. Nothing. In a few months the Anome will kill half a million people every day all over the world, and the annual growth rate is quasi-exponential; a few spontaneous remissions and ten or twelve thousand radios scattered across the Territory aren’t going to stop the process. Only I and the Anome can save humanity; we are the only way out. Neohumanity will be what can survive the Anome, and the Anome will be what lets it survive.”

  “The Anome will make us survive it?”

  The same laugh, exploding dryly in the air.

  “Yes! It is the mutation and it is the selection; I told you. The simplest evolutionism. It imposes its conditions, to use the language of the Territory.”

  “I see,” replies Silverskin. “It is both the illness and the vaccine, the poison and the antidote.”

  “Exactly,” says Cybion I, flashing a wide smile illuminated by all the shadows in the universe. “Simple evolution, you see. That is why it is a world, the natural biocybernetic network of neohumanity. That is why it is Good and Evil, a coherent duality, and one assigned to a single goal: the survival and transformation of the human race by itself—that is, by the Anome become the new ontological foundation of this humanity. It’s symbiosis, Silverskin. The Anome is multiple by definition; it cannot individuate in us in the form of a singularity, but rather as an interface to itself. It cannot be totally in each one of us because it is demultiplied in each of us, in a generic form. But that is its strength—because in exchange, it offers biological, terrestrial, real immortality.”

  Silverskin does not answer. Their church can already count several thousand believers in Junkville, and Cybion I has gone himself to evangelize in the Ontarian townships. He can provide hundreds of “anomic” capsules per day. “My body is a machine producing the Anome; that is virtually its reason for being,”the android said one day, laughing, this android who is at once the sacred Pope of the Anomian church and the King of what he calls Utopia, this neoworld already superimposing itself on the Territory and its environs, and soon enough on the rest of the world.

  Utopia, the World of the Anome, Utopia, the placeless World, the World without history or geography, the equalized World, the World of perfect ecology. The world where man is nature itself.

  The day of Silverskin’s sacrament, Cybion I made him the following proposal: “The Anome wants no hierarchy and no verticality except a few levels of function in the Church, such as yours. You will all be equal in the Anomian network; I am the only ‘direct’ agent of its manifestation, but I, too, am nothing but a vector, an intermediary. I am what is permitting the Anome to become Humanity and Humanity to become the Anome, precisely because I am not quite human, but just enough so to be able to carry their two principles. I, too, am dual by nature, you see.”

  Silverskin contemplates the township of Little Congo spread out around his mobile home; a purple crow is soaring northwest in the sky. He follows its calm and sinuous flight with his eyes all the way to the western limits of the city; he can see to Autostrada and Carbon City, to Vortex Townships, and even as far as New Arizona. He can see the world as it was left by the double storm; the mud of sand and snow stretches everywhere, beyond the visible horizon; it gleams with a dull gray-bronze tint, covering the landscape with its uniform frost. He can see the kingdom they are beginning to establish on Earth.

  If anything, or anyone, is capable of following the evolution of the war being waged on the hidden side of the world, the dark side of the Earth, it is the purple crow that has just left the heights of Little Congo to return north, from where it came after watching the strange, glowing bird fly over the metal city. Birds’ brains are equipped with a gyroscopic neural device that permits them to “sense” the presence and exact location of the magnetic conduction lines that irrigate the planet; it is thanks to this sixth sense that they can cross oceans and entire continents, even hemispheres, without deviating even a centimeter off course.

  The purple crow of the Territory is an old predator, clever and fast. Instinctively, it follows the fluctuations of the force fields in the Earth’s crust; it harnesses the two opposing energies tracing their rival diagrams in the invisible world underground, where only creatures of the sky can go, where evolution and catastrophe are planned, where the electricity of the poles lives, doubly polarized energy from the heart-in-fusion of the Earth.

  The two forces are in fact completely inverted in a systematic way; even the purple crow understands this in its own manner: a force is rising from the blackest depths, becoming visible little by little in the form of this new nature to which the predatory bird, it knows, must adapt. The other force comes from the aerial spheres of Light and has crept into the rhizomic shadows in order to subvert the opposing process; very probably, the bird will have to adapt to this, too.

  The visible and the invisible, in both senses of the words, are meeting here, in the Territory over which the crow is flying.

  The Territory is an interface—or so Yuri McCoy, one of the men who lives in the metal city for which the crow is heading, would say.

  The Territory is the writing surface of two antinomic processes; it is an Interworld. The crow could not understand these concepts even if it understood the words. But it would approve of them.

  Because that is very precisely what it sees, as it soars toward the cosmodrome.r />
  It is a sheriff’s deputy named Fernand Claymore, who works as Bob Chamberlain’s partner, who discovers the first clue as he returns from patrolling Apollo Drive near the cosmodrome. The necro Triads are still busy on the Monolith Hills strip and around the old Enterprise aerostation; despite the emissions of the Territory Radio and the launch of Link de Nova’s new machine, the expansion of the Third Fall is still happening, a non-viral epidemic, more invisible and more lethal than any microscopic bacteria. Thousands of bodies are piling up in the cold-storage chambers of the Triads; thousands of bodies are clogging the streets; thousands of bodies are awaiting the arrival of the necro cleaners as they lie decomposing in their cabins and makeshift shelters.

  And Fernand Claymore, discovering this clue, does not really understand what he is seeing; in any case, he makes no connection just then between this local microevent, just a bit bizarre, and the progressing extermination of humanity. He cannot make the connection. It is a secret relationship of which the world itself knows nothing.

  “You mean someone thought they’d have a little fun erasing the writing on the windmill sign? Why?” asks Bob Chamberlain as they head back toward the city, their duty accomplished.

  “I don’t know, Bob,” answers Claymore, pensively. “It’s funny; I wouldn’t say the signs were erased.”

  “What do you mean? How else could they do it—they’re titanium-composite signs.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I—I should have shown you the thing. The sign was totally smooth, completely blank. It wasn’t like someone had just scrubbed out the writing.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The sign looked as if it had just come from the factory, brand-new, before the final embossing, before the inscription of warnings or street names. Like nothing had ever been printed on it.”