Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Cybion I is going to name one Laura Descarville as bishop of the township; we already have an initial group of two or three hundred followers there.”

  “The men of HMV and their fucking machine are moving faster than us,” says Silverskin.

  It is the first time the humans have pulled ahead of the Anome. He guesses that it must be part of a plan.

  The problem is knowing who the idea man, the executor, is—the HMV Machine, or the Anome itself?

  Which of the two is trapping the other? Which of the two is pulling off a master ruse?

  Which of the two will win?

  For Link de Nova, the solution to the problems posed by the double polarities at play in the relationships among tyranny, mutation, politics, theology, and the two humanities that articulate them in their irreconciliable ways obviously do not come from rational reflection anchored in reading, or even in the study of outside phenomena.

  As usual, the answer comes to him as he is deeply asleep. It is like an explosion, so bright that he wakes abruptly though dawn is hours away and all of HMV is plunged in night blackness.

  His Neomachine was created to fight the Thing on the plan of individuation; it immunizes both the biological and the mechanical, and thus protects the symbolic of their disjunction. He knows the machine will be of great use in the launch of his space program, his plan to reconquer the High Frontier.

  But it is totally powerless against the attack happening now, the attack against writing, against books, against libraries. Against the Library.

  He remembers his first instinct when he realized how to fight the devolution of human language. It is not through the organic and language itself that it must happen, but rather through the mechanical. Hence his solving of the problem via electric music.

  How to build the network of correspondences in the face of this an-tiscriptural attack? What is the device? Should they rewrite the threatened texts?

  The work of medieval copying against the destructive power of a Metamachine inverted and integrated into humanity …no, that wouldn’t work. That is not the answer.

  The solution is still lost in the haze of sleep. The flash woke him, but it faded away the moment he opened his eyes. The main problem with consciousness is that it requires constant effort.

  The manuscript.

  The story his father has been trying to write for so long.

  They will fight the devolution of Logos with the Voice, the Word in action—and thus with Music, the electric Song. They will fight the annihilation of writing with the rebirth of writing. It is the only “place” where the interface can split. Because a book is always active, because it is what etches mind onto matter, it is what individuates language in itself, what signs singularity and unity of sense and form.

  “You have to start work on your novel again, Father. It’s the only way to save all your books. Your fiction will be an action. It will protect the scriptural reality of the Library.”

  Milan Djordjevic cannot find the words to answer. He has, thinks Link de Nova, immediately understood what I mean.

  The narration of the origins and of the final end against the disinscription of the future and of memory.

  You have found your place, dear Father, he thinks. Now you know your role and your importance in this war.

  He knows his father lost his first wife and a daughter in the last “historic” war in southern Europe, twelve years ago.

  You’re ready for Armageddon, Father, he cannot stop himself from thinking. You always have been.

  Transluminic. That is the best word to describe the “substance” of the antenna, as they say of transfinite numbers. It is connected to active infinity; it is much more powerful than the numeric devolution based on the Aristotelian precepts of indefiniteness.

  In it, all speeds beyond that of light are so many infinities incorporating endlessly, merging, dividing, and reincorporating again.

  It is the Antenna of cognitive Light; it is the Antenna of the Halo. The Halo that will serve as an active diagram among all lights.

  It will be beautiful. It will be immense. It will be tomorrow.

  Yuri and Campbell stand in the doorway of the now-deserted hangar. They have come on behalf of the sheriff, who must submit to the Council the motion permitting them to select the seventy-two chosen people who will leave for the Ring.

  “Just tell the sheriff that I’m going to start restoring everything to working order tomorrow. It won’t take much more than twenty-four hours. Then we can proceed with the launches.”

  “The sheriff would like to remind you that only a dozen residents of HMV, not including the two androids, have ever experienced a space flight.”

  “That doesn’t matter; the cosmodrome orbiters are totally automated. And if twelve of your volunteers are already experienced space travelers, all you have to do is put one of them in each shuttle as mission chief. As for the ‘chosen’ people, tell the sheriff there won’t be any; they will just be pioneers, because after the cosmodrome launches I have a plan to put the whole community of HMV in orbit.”

  “Link?! What are you talking about?” gasps Campbell.

  “Let me be. Let’s worry about the conventional launches first.”

  “Conventional?” asks Yuri.

  “The propulsion rockets at the cosmodrome.”

  “Yes, I know, but—do you mean that the rest of your plan isn’t based on conventional space technology?”

  The light-haloed boy bursts into laughter. His hangar is empty, all traces gone of his many machines, which are now assembled into the single “object” above Xenon Ridge. There is only sun and sky, whose beauty persists.

  “Nothing you’ve seen before now will be anything like what you’ll see on that day,” answers Link de Nova, simply.

  It is a conclusion like a plane crashing somewhere on the prairie. It is a conclusion like a fireball shooting toward the stars.

  It is beautiful. It is immense. And now it is today.

  It is early morning in the Territory. The cosmodrome is lit with a thousand lights scattered like sodium petals at the tops of the tall pylons surrounding the launch platforms. The launch center is ablaze with light. The hangars are ablaze with light. The huge crawlers carrying the launchers to the ramps are ablaze with light.

  The Antenna on Xenon Ridge alone is as magnificently brilliant as a star.

  Not far away, a young boy with a Gibson electric guitar runs his fingers up and down the neck of the instrument. The boy is surrounded with a halo of light; the guitar is incorporated into that halo, and so is the Machine. All three of them—the boy, the guitar, and the antenna—are in the midst of reawakening a vanished civilization; all three of them—the non-born human, the electric instrument, and the Machine of light—are in the midst of causing future humanity to be reborn.

  Indeed, the three of them are really only one.

  And the rockets are twelve brilliant warheads with their noses pointed toward the alabaster sky, where a few ghostly stars can be seen in the faint blueness.

  They are the twelve ardent arrows that will pave the way for multitudes, thinks Link.

  They are our first real war machines, thinks Yuri.

  There aren’t enough of them, thinks Campbell.

  They are going to get us out of the Camp-World dominated by the Thing, think the seventy-two occupants of the automated orbiters.

  They are all of this at once.

  Above all, at the moment they are tall silver pipes emitting thick greenish clouds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

  In the launch center, lights leap from one screen to another; all the computers are working; huge maps of the sky are holographically projected on the four corners of the control room; images of the rockets in place on their platforms or en route on their crawlers can be seen on the wall screens. But the huge building is empty, empty of all human presence, as if the ghosts of the operators who worked there forty years ago have secretly come back to work.

  At the top o
f Xenon Ridge, the Antenna has never glowed more brightly; the guitar has never been more supersonic; the boy has never played such riffs, such series of world-explosions.

  Yuri understands the secret that the diagram of the boy-guitar-Neo-machine is drawing: beneath appearances, beneath the world of the total simulacrum that has been put in place like a materialized form of the Nothingness, we are all Antennas. We are all sensors of intensity, of image, of affect, of plan; we are all sensor emitters of ontic energy, of superphysical tensors. Light is the operative becoming of matter. Its photonic future, its cosmogonic future. Its absolutely unitary dimension suggests the incredible possibility of a luminous future for Humanity itself, like the critical and actual convergence of potentialities that are yet incompossible.

  It is what forms the ultimate diagrammatical plan of the Real World. It is the atemporal Future of all cognition.

  It is the future of light; it is the fundamental ontology of the machine. It is the sole power that can stop the progression of the Great Devolution.

  This Light is what, itself uncreated, permits Creation to hold itself within the processive relationship between unity, form, meaning, and difference.

  This Light is us.

  Now, one by one, a few minutes apart, the engines begin to hum.

  This is Reality, thinks Yuri. This is the act. This is the event.

  In the real universe, neither “subjects” nor “objects” have any concrete existence—because reality is what fills the created world with events and actualizations of differentials, with a unitary and metamorphic multiplex of pure intensities, with processes in constant variation; in the real world, only varying and photonic entities remain. Quantum forces. On the other side of this, the universalization of the Simulacrum, the hyperfalse World, this “intrigue” insinuating itself into the Created World, endlessly offers its fundamental schism between subject and object, which permits it to establish its domination, through the terminal setup of a global system of representations whose goal is to reduce chronological singularities in binary series of numbers and invariants. So the Technical World imposes its relinquishment in order to cause individuals to devolve into “human material.” This trend, Yuri knows, has been happening since the beginning of the previous century, the terrible twentieth century, but the wave reached its peak with the arrival of the Metastructure; then, after the paradoxical disappearance of that, it became the wave, and it brought about a global tsunami. A technoplanetary device, but without Technology, without World, without Language.

  The real world is the world of Link de Nova. At this moment the real world is here, condensed in the illuminated cosmodrome. The Real World, this Future-Light of matter, is the warped conspiracy against the conspiracy; it is the conspiracy of Beauty against posthumanity.

  The platforms enveloped in thick gray smoke; the red-orange flare of oxyhydric fire pouring from the bottoms of the rockets; the burning lava ejected at thousands of kilometers per hour. Then the ascension, slow at first and then faster and faster, and the points of fire and metal disappearing into the high atmosphere. It is so beautiful, this ultimate eruption of the Created World.

  Yuri watches Judith out of the corner of his eye. Her family was not chosen, just like all the other members of the Council. The sheriff proved intractable on this point, as usual: “The captain and his officers leave last. That has been the Law for hundreds of years, maybe more, and I’m certainly not going to be the one to change it.”

  Not only will the sheriff not change the Law but, without a doubt, he will uphold it with all his strength. However, he has authorized the entire Jewish community, including Rabbi Apelbaum, to depart aboard one of the twelve orbiters.

  Yuri knows the sheriff is reluctant to break up the county’s communities, its families, its rare institutions—but it would have been absurd to keep the rabbi here, simply as a member of the Council, while sending the other eleven Jews to safety in the Ring. The sheriff will preserve the county’s diverse humanity, but above all he will maintain its unity. In the face of the Law of Bronze, decisions must always be made with the care of one trying to defuse a bomb.

  Wilbur Langlois has given priority to families with small children and to a few monastic groups that have existed for years in Humvee and its environs. The seventy-two places filled up very fast indeed.

  Yuri looks at Judith, masking his feelings as best he can.

  The magnificence of the rockets haloed with light just before takeoff; this same light stretching infinitely between Link, his guitar, and the Antenna. The magnificence of emotion at the rising thrum of the engines; the magnificence of the sky into which the rockets are disappearing. The magnificence of this day. The magnificence of Judith.

  He realizes, stunned, just how deeply he is in love with this girl. He would have tied himself to one of the orbiters to follow her into space if she had been among those chosen to go.

  Everything changes, all at once. Absolutely everything.

  And everything is still changing, at every second. At each second the process is amplified.

  Nothing can stop its dazzling progression. No. It is infinite.

  Paralyzed by his discovery, Yuri realizes that love in itself is the in-finiteness of all infinities permitting the final phase of any individuation. Without Divine Love there can be no men, but since we are all made in His image we each hold a spark of Logos, and our true singularity can only exist in the truly unique relationship, the one called love, that we establish with another singularity, and that that singularity establishes with us.

  The Thing is not based only on the eternal “lack” of false numeric infinity; it cannot escape this impassable limitation that is its principal “ontological lack”: it is, to all appearances, completely deprived of love.

  Beauty is alive because it is mortal. It achieves eternity through “death.” Love is made thus; it is what always dies, but never surrenders.

  That explains the fundamental ontological impossibility of the devolving Mutation of Humanity. It is planning to become, in one way or another, a sort of organic ecology complementary to the neoecology of icesand that is engulfing the globe. Yuri feels it; what is happening now, what has been happening since the First Fall, is only a kind of selective stage. He envisions it; the postmechanical neohumanity will be postlinguistic as well, and one wonders if it will even be truly biological.

  It is like a multicephalous zoon, a single organism in which all the heads are interfaced in a network to form a collective, global, planetary megabrain. The Metastructure without the Metastructure. No more need of it. Humanity-turned entropic mechanism creates its own devolutions. And it will reign as such, with no machines, no language, no more biological singularities.

  Judith Sevigny is so beautiful. The neoworld would be so ugly. Judith Sevigny is mortal. The neoworld would be immortal.

  The certainty is anchored in him like an injection with no possible remission.

  The rockets take off one after the other, a few minutes apart. They are surrounded by the light shining who-knows-how from the Antenna; then the engines kick in and the vertical push begins. Beauty is on their side; all the machines restored to action promise no backward turn toward the mechanical age. Their technology is infinite; it is cognitive Light, thinks Yuri. Soon the neoecology will cover the whole Earth. The cosmodrome is a surviving oasis—for now, at least. It is the last cosmodrome battling the last World.

  Judith is to humanity what these luminous rockets are to this world. She is everything anyone could want, everything anyone could need, everything anyone could dare to desire; she is what turns need into obsession; she is everything that seems unattainable, even as it nestles deeper and deeper within you. Judith, strangely, is two thousand light-years away from him, like a distant star, and yet she is planted forever at the center of his being. This paradox raises a painful question: When will we be able to create the right amount of distance between us? When will we be able to touch each other—our skin, our flesh, our nerve
s? When will I have the nerve to speak? When will I have the nerve to act? When will I dare to take the greatest risk of my entire life?

  The sheriff’s men and the members of the Council have taken up strategic positions in the launch center, from where they can follow the progress of the transatmospheric and then orbital flight of the twelve capsules. The rockets will link flawlessly to the cluster from which the two Ring astronauts came.

  The Mission has been accomplished. Seventy-two men have rejoined the Orbital Ring.

  The cosmodrome is alive again. Beauty still has a chance, Yuri thinks. And Beauty is giving him a chance in return.

  Judith is at his side, a few meters away at most, two thousand light-years at least, but it is as if the halo of light has engulfed the two of them. The last rocket disappears slowly in the pale blue zenith. Judith’s gaze follows it, an almost-ecstatic expression on her face. Yuri cannot take his eyes from her profile, lit by the sharp light of dawn, and he takes advantage of the slight movements of her head to register every detail of her features: the stray black curl of hair touching her lips, the crystalline turquoise glitter of her royal-blue eyes, the ivory whiteness of her skin, the occasional rise of her breasts under her sweater as she breathes. The slightest detail singularizes her, he thinks, as if to overcome emotion with reason—or perhaps it is simply the reflex of a man of the Territory. He remembers the words of Duns Scotus: “Everything, in man, is individuated.” Beauty rises up when its emergence matches that of the world allowing it to exist, he thinks, creating an event that is the singularity of singularities.

  Beauty—unique, true, unmatched—is an infinitely active condensation of love.

  They have succeeded. Link just launched the very last space program on the planet of men. For two full hours, Beauty illuminated the Earth with its light and the stars with its fire. For two full hours, the cosmodrome spurred the beauty of the last machines toward the sky, where they can live in freedom in the service of men.