Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  The whole Territory must be aware of it, thinks Yuri.

  Especially the men who have tried to trap them several times, the men who are taking possession of minds and bodies little by little, working out of Junkville. The men who, they say, are working for the Thing, and who have been immunized in return. The men who are, without a possible doubt, their mortal enemies.

  The Law of the Territory: it is at the moment that safety seems surest that you are in the greatest danger.

  The Law of the Territory: it is at the moment of greatest danger that the opportunity for victory presents itself.

  The Law of the Territory: if your attack is going very well, it’s an ambush.

  43 > LADYTRON

  Yuri watches Sydia Nova, Link’s mother, walk toward the wall that rises north of the city. He can’t say why he follows her, but he does, at a distance. One of the last androids still alive on Earth, with the two astronauts from the Ring and the one Link calls the “Anomist,” the artificial creature gathering the people of the Territory around his own healing power. The short northern spring will soon melt directly into summer; temperatures will become suffocatingly hot, and new climatic phenomena will surely arise. New storms. The continuance of the neoecological invasion—maybe even new forms of it. The Devolving Mutation has more than one trick up its sleeve; its production process is based on a sort of absolute fixity interpolated with continual change, annihilating all possibility of real transformation as well as any foundation for anything. The Thing lives on this kind of hybridization; it is its active principle: causing every entity to destroy itself by mingling it with its opposing principle. Absolute conservation of absolute destruction. The word museum, the word cemetery, the word necropolis—none of them do justice to the strength of the Thing. Absolute thanatic power. It already dominates the Camp-World, to which it is promising eternity.

  The sun is a sphere of pure gold above Heavy Metal Valley; the sky is ocean blue. The world is full of Beauty even as it disappears.

  Link’s mother follows the recently reinforced high steel walls; crossing paths with a few sheriff’s deputies preparing to patrol the northern limits of the county, she exchanges a few words with them.

  Heavy Metal Valley sparkles like an immense lake of metal, glittering so brightly that it seems as if it could light up all the nights in the world.

  Yuri has one of his insights, one of the flashes that comes sometimes to electrify his thoughts.

  Of everyone in HMV, Link’s mother is the person most familiar with the mysteries of her son’s origins, the Hotel Laika, and even the end of the Metastructure. Nothing that happens in the Territory surprises her. Her true role is buried deep inside herself; it is possible that she is unaware of it; it is possible that she can do nothing; it is certain that she is both the initial point and the destinal line of Link de Nova—and so of us all.

  Madam android, Madam the artificial lady, Madam Territory, Madam the mother of the boy in the halo, Madam manufactured in space and enclosed, like all of them, in the Camp-World.

  Madam the supermachine that had herself baptized on this Earth.

  She is the true secret of HMV. And now hardly anyone ever leaves HMV, and absolutely no one enters it. Her son may be the one controlling the invisible barrier surrounding the county, but she is the heart of the sanctuary.

  The Fortress will remain closed. The Fortress is preparing to become a counterworld. The Fortress is extending the shadow of justice, of the Law, all across the Territory. The sheriff has totally militarized the organization of his patrols and the two hundred fifty members of the county’s civil defense force. He has closed all the entries to the cosmodrome except for Apollo Drive, and he has prohibited all road traffic on the northern part of the circular boulevard. He has done the same on the Monolith Hills strip, blocking off the whole area near the Hotel Laika. The invisible magnetic line that Link de Nova’s Ark has traced around the valley is now reinforced by a concrete barrier. Armored trucks. Barbed wire intertwining with what remains of the local flora. Minefields. Armed men. Use of deadly weapons authorized.

  Wilbur Langlois has created a Territory-within-the-Territory. He has initiated an open secession. He has erected a security wall between Heavy Metal Valley and the other communities. He has marked a border. He has burned bridges and sunk ships.

  It is a gesture of great hostility, yet one devoid of any ostensible aggressiveness—a little like pressing the rifle of a barrel gently against the forehead of a man who has just fallen into your hands.

  Wilbur Langlois has created a Territory-within-the-Territory. The Law of Bronze will be even more intense here.

  * * *

  Link de Nova’s mother looks him deeply in the eyes, ignoring the golden halo that surrounds him.

  She doesn’t even seem surprised at my transformation, he often thinks. It is as if the whole thing is completely natural to her. As if it is a natural consequence of my birth. But he never asks her any questions on the subject.

  “He knows where we are now.”

  “I know, Mother. But we also know where he is.”

  “That doesn’t matter in the least to us, but it is of great importance to him.”

  Link thinks of the phrase Yuri and Campbell are constantly repeating: Every relationship in the Territory is inevitably asymmetrical. If it weren’t, there would be no more Law.

  “Chrysler Campbell told me the android has appointed himself ‘Pope’ of some sort of church, and that he has converted hundreds and hundreds of humans in the Territory. Apparently he has the ability to provide some kind of chemotherapy, a medicine his body produces that immunizes people.”

  “Your Antenna immunizes them, too, and on a much larger scale now.”

  “Yes, but they don’t know it. The android’s followers, on the other hand, are perfectly aware of the operation as it is happening.”

  “How was an android able to become the Thing?”

  “He isn’t the Thing, Mother; he is the only ‘place,’ slightly but not fully organic, in which It can interface with humanity. He allows it to simulate individuation, and in exchange an organic component of his body provides people with immunity. It’s very well thought-out. Don’t forget that the Thing is an inverted mutation of all species.”

  “This android isn’t a member of any species.”

  “Exactly, Mother; that’s what allows him to be a vector for this new human speciation. He’s like me in that way. We are identical and totally opposite at the same time.”

  “He doesn’t come from the Nothingness; it is the Nothingness that comes from him. Think about the nature of the immortality he’s offering to neohumans: they will conquer the World and dominate the Earth, but they will lose the heavens—in both senses of the word.”

  “I know, Mother. You have to understand the nature of the Halo. It surrounds me—but not as an external energy source; I’m the one that emits it and captures it. I am an antenna myself, Mother. And the Halo is just the visible manifestation of an ‘ecstasy’ of matter. This Light is cognitive. It is the perceptible form of a transfinite electricity that travels at a speed infinitely faster than that of light. To fight the devolutionary posthuman of the Post-Technical world, we have to reinvent a true science of man, perceived as a bioundulation of nature.”

  “Do you think you can defeat the Anome with the help of this energy?”

  “It is its ontological enemy, Mother. Matter/antimatter, Light/anti-light.”

  “That means that even if your energy is victorious, the world will be destroyed anyway.”

  “No, Mother. It means that the world has already been destroyed, and that the Halo is the only force capable of restoring it.”

  Yuri is standing beside Campbell, facing Djordjevic and Zarkovsky. The war between the Antenna, the Ark, the Neomachine—whatever its name—and what men in the Territory have recently begun calling the Anome will be a true war of the worlds. It will be a war of ward, the Supreme Mother of all battles. Yuri knows the hou
r of Armageddon has come. The alarm is resonating from one side of the planet to the other. He knows there will be no quarter on either side. He knows that the disappearance of the Library would mean the end of their world, the end of their war, the end of their freedom.

  It is the last library.

  Campbell looks at the shelves, crammed with books of all kinds. The windows of the large deluxe trailer have been painted with gray anti-UV coating to ensure the protection of the books against the deleterious effects of sunlight on cellulose. The inside of the vehicle is filled with dim bluish light, slightly silvery, lunar. It is beautiful, very beautiful. And very fragile. The cellulose is protected from UV rays, but printed ink has fallen into the hands of the Devolution.

  “A county of two thousand five hundred men; one sheriff; more than twelve thousand books. And on the other side an entire ecology, a World, just as we warned you. Not to mention a desert as big as a continent.”

  “David against Goliath. A very old story, my boy.”

  “A story that was valid at a time when history still existed, Professor. Now it isn’t David against Goliath, it is Humanity against the Flood. Except that the Flood is both mineral and symbolic, and it is part of Humanity itself. It is everything—everything except what we expected.”

  “That’s because we still don’t know how to read the Scriptures after two thousand years—twice that, if you add the Old Testament,” says Djordjevic.

  Campbell does not answer. He is silent and a bit pale. Yuri has noticed his companion’s unusual attitude; their gazes meet for an instant, as they usually do when a piece of heavenly certainty breaks free and falls at their feet.

  Yes, thinks Yuri, knowing that Chrysler is thinking the same thing. It’s becoming more and more certain. A secret force is pushing us to adopt the HMV lifestyle—and it is no attempt at social adaptation. It comes from somewhere else, from somewhere deep inside us, from what we are becoming.

  We are going to have to have ourselves baptized in our turn.

  We are going to become Christians.

  If he had said to himself, We are going to become extraterrestrials, the stupefaction born of complete and obvious necessity would not have been any less intense.

  But before he can talk to them about it, he must make sure that the Territory-within-the-Territory will be the Fortress they need. They will have to play their role as men of the Territory to the hilt. They will have to let the Law of Bronze become more luminous than the sun. Better to let Professor Zarkovsky and Milan Djordjevic speak. Let them speak so that it will be easier, when the time comes, to impose silence on them.

  The Professor begins:

  “No biotech firm specializing in the manufacture of androids has ever been able to pierce the mystery of the individuation of their machines, which are no longer machines. They are certainly creatures of the Creature, but they are not simple inanimate objects. They are living, autonomous, free beings—which gives rise to thriving conflicts with radical groups like Flandro. …”

  “Individuation would never happen unless it was programmed as such,” continues Djordjevic. “It is not a simulation generated by lines of code. This was fully realized with the fourth-generation androids, but the symptoms were detected in some third-generation androids before that. Individuation is not programmable because it is more than a program; it is a plan of singularity, and this ‘plan’ autoinitiates in a general bootstrap that comes from a process lasting from in pseudo-utero conception to birth, and then from birth to death, and which encompasses the simplest sequences of the genetic code as well as the most complex neural configurations. Individuation as a principle is not explicable solely according to the laws of biocellular chemistry or neurocybernetics. It was irritating for the companies’ bionicians, but was viewed favorably by the same firms’ financiers—it meant just that many fewer dollars spent on research and development.”

  Zarkovsky takes up the thread again. “But the fact that individuation is not explicable solely by the laws of biochemistry does not mean that other scientific areas of study can’t be used to allow us, at the very least, to glimpse the truth. What no one understood at the time—obviously, there was no Duns Scotus teaching at MIT—was that the principle of individuation has little to do with anything ‘biological.’ It was cosmogenesis, non-Euclidean and non-Aristotelian mathematics, generative linguistics, and quantum physics that were of most use to us. And it is also what the Library showed us—Djordjevic and me—before the Fall. We guessed that the problem posed by the ‘spontaneous’ individuation of the fourth-generation androids and that raised by the final form of the Metastructure were connected. Then, after the Fall, we both understood—separately—that this problem applied even more to the Post-Machine entity.”

  “And now that the Post-Machine is changing into a new entity, our only chance is to be brought together, all of us, here, with the Library.”

  Campbell lets a few seconds tick by—the time necessary for a sniper to hold his breath before firing the fatal shot. “You don’t understand, I’m afraid.”

  “What don’t we understand?”

  “The essential thing. Your Library will be gone in a few months. Even Link’s cosmomagnetic Antenna can’t stop this mutation, which is attacking neither humans nor even androids nor language, but their written productions.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “It’s neither my place nor Yuri’s to make suggestions, Mr. Djordjevic, but we know that your son came to see you to explain his idea to you, and we think he’s right, as always.”

  “A dozen books have already been completely erased; another twenty are beginning to devolve—including some Bibles from the Vatican. Nothing seems able to resist this mutation, not even the Holy Scriptures. My son’s strategy is the right one, I know, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough time.”

  “Your son is the one who can get you the time and help you need. I’m afraid for us it’s the opposite.”

  “The opposite?”

  “Yes. For once we need others to help us. In this particular case, we have no other choice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A baptism,” replies Campbell. “Two, in fact. Immediately, if possible.”

  Djordjevic looks at Campbell and Yuri in turn. Territory men. Young killers. Young killers who fought for the Library, who are fighting for life, and who will fight to the death to save his son, Link de Nova.

  “Your problems are just beginning, young men. I’ll go find Father Newman,” he answers, simply.

  Welcome to the Territory

  Welcome to the stealth bomber of the invisible truth

  Welcome to the Territory

  You will enter the sanctuary of the most dangerous truce.

  Our problems began at birth, thinks Yuri. They are the Territory; they are what we are.

  They are what has permitted us to survive and resist until now. They are what has led us to make this request. They are what is still leading us to take the greatest risk.

  They are the only freedom we have left.

  44 > THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

  Since the previous night, the sky has been an immense silvery dome embracing the whole Territory with its aerial shield. Clouds have come from all directions; they are accumulating with the unpredictable patience of the elements above the last men, their homes, their crimes, their hopes.

  “Twelve rockets. Twelve rockets in two hours. Even in the era of the Metastructure that never happened, Master Cybion.”

  “Smoke and mirrors, Mr. Silverskin, I assure you. They restored the cosmodrome to working order—well and good—but I promise it will make no difference in the end. They have a launchpad, yes, but nothing left to launch.”

  “What it really means is that their fucking machine is operating at 100 percent. That it is capable of repairing sophisticated technology—not to mention the spontaneous remissions it is causing by the thousands.”

  “We are causing healings, too. The difference
is that members of the church are guaranteed immortality. That’s a bonus that will skyrocket in value very fast.”

  “I have very trustworthy informants who tell me the remissions caused by the machine go far beyond the Territory. Belfond met a guy from West Virginia who told him about whole series of true miracles.”

  Cybion I smiles.

  “Silverskin, the only true miracle is the one the Anome can bestow on humanity. As for the remissions their machine is causing, you should think about how much that will serve our interests.”

  “How?”

  “The simple law of competition. The necro Triads are beginning to hurt for work in the Territory. Add it up: Our evangelists are distributing hundreds of the Anome’s capsules every day now. People are making the connection fast. When the ones healed by their machine realize that ours have also been healed, plus given the gift of immortality, and that they are part of a global community of permanent recycling, they will come to us. Not dying is good. Never dying is even better.”

  Silverskin watches the purple crow circling his mobile home. For some time now the bird has been living on one of the pylons atop the butte. Silverskin has gotten used to its presence. The bird comes and goes regularly between Junkville and the northern parts of the Territory. Silverskin wonders for an instant if it ever flies to Heavy Metal Valley, if it has gotten close to the luminous machine, if it is aware of the militarization of the county’s border by the sheriff—more than two hundred heavily armed men, according to Belfond—and if it has glimpsed any special relationship between the boy with extraordinary powers and the emergence of this unknown technology. If it has seen the Professor. If it has detected the presence of two or three androids.

  Cybion I, however, is preoccupied with things much closer to the ground.

  “You’ve got to tell Belfond that he absolutely has to get inside their fucking county.”