First circle: HMV County, and particularly the township of Humvee, the City of Heavy Metal. Here a magnetic umbrella has shielded the entire area, down to its protective walls.
In a few remote corners of the county, here and there, scattered stretches of icesand can be seen amidst the poisonous vegetation that is regaining ground little by little under the Ark’s protection.
Then the Territory begins—or, rather, what is left of it.
Yuri leaves his cabin on the morning after three full days of sand-and-ice storms. He finds an unmonitored path that leads to Nexus Ridge and Link de Nova’s Neomachine, floating in the air. The two mesas form the natural threshold of the principal southern entrance to HMV County. From this height Yuri can see a large stretch of the north of the Territory, the city of Grand Junction, the cosmodrome, the Monolith Hills strip, the thick woods bordering Lake Champlain, and in the distance the length of Nexus Road, almost to Aircrash Circle—far enough, in any case, for the war map to be seen with perfect clarity.
An undulatory field. The farther one gets from HMV, the more the neodesert gains in consistency—in resistance, in thickness, in density, in homogeneity.
And in invasiveness.
Yuri realizes quickly that Link de Nova’s Ark was easily able to protect HMV County, the premises of the Hotel Laika, and the cosmodrome—but that after that the competing armies had violently clashed in the invisible. It is easy to imagine what has become of the south of the Territory, Junkville, Deadlink, and the Ontarian townships.
The Ark is protecting the Territory-within-the-Territory; it is protecting the last Sanctuary of the Law of Bronze. For the rest, it has done what it can against the neoecology—very little, he must admit. It could not prevent the destruction of the Territory’s parasitic flora. It could not prevent the denaturation of the Territory’s nature. It could not prevent the Territory’s unique vegetation from disappearing. Even the hardiest plants were unable to survive such a transnaturation. Many trees were uprooted by the winds and are now held to the earth by only the gray-and-bronze gangue enclosing their trunks. Only a few aerial-rhizome plants have managed to survive in this more and more mineral world, islands of photosynthetic life scattered farther and farther apart, condemned to extinction that is less rapid, perhaps, but just as inexorable.
The goldenrod and Cornus canadensis are gone, and the red-rooted amaranth, the white lychnis, the buttercups and false wallflowers, the Canadian fleabone, the wild mustard, the Liatris alba. There is no more orange hawkweed, no more cowbane, no more hemlock, no more poison sumac. All the vegetable machinery in the Territory is gone.
The rising sun is already transforming the landscape into the chrome-colored mud that will eventually cover the terrestrial crust forever. The icesand is just one stage of the neoecological change. Rainwater and the constant lukewarm temperatures of this endless day will turn everything to mud, this mud that Yuri is beginning to see appearing in scattered patches all over the denature left by the Anome.
One day shortly after the First Fall and the deaths of their respective parents, Chrysler said to Yuri: “Don’t be fooled. The Law of the Territory isn’t the law of the strongest. At most, you might say it’s the law of the cleverest, but that isn’t right.”
“What is right, Chrysler?” the young teenager named Yuri McCoy had asked.
“It’s the law of the most devilish. See the connection? Devilish/ Devil.”
“The law of evil?” Yuri had asked incredulously.
“No, no, you’re mixing it up. Evil isn’t bad. On the contrary, it’s very good. It’s the best sparring partner in the Territory.”
“Evil isn’t bad?”
“Evil is devilish. The Law of the Territory is extremely simple, Yuri; it isn’t the law of the strongest or the cleverest, or even the most devilish in the diabolical sense, although that comes closest. The one and only Law of the Territory is the law of the one who survives. The law of the one who survives the trap. The law of the one who survives the Territory itself.”
“Darwinism?” the young Yuri had asked, already interested in biology and anthropology.
“The Territory functions according to an evolutionism just as implacable as Darwin’s, but arising from a completely opposite precept, Yuri. In classical evolutionism, only those that adapt survive. And those that adapt en masse are always the most average individuals. During the Fall, the Territory reversed the paradigm: it caused an ecological law to reign that was based on the idea of a trap—a machine in the ecological sense—where, for example, the most harmful plants survive better than the others. Here, Yuri, normal individuals aren’t going to have a chance anymore.”
And that is what has happened. Chrysler Campbell has survived because he is the human computer, for whom improvisations are, more than anything else, ultrarapid algorithms. A man capable of calculating the death of another man like someone else would solve an equation. Yuri, too, has survived; he is the one who can always sense the invisible presence of death; he has made a nocturnal companion of it. For him, intuition is the Territory trap, speaking to him.
The weakest ones, men and women, were enslaved in the prostitution centers and gladiatorial arenas of Junkville, Monolith South, and Grand Funk Railroad. Those who revolted were killed, but most of them adapted and submitted to the Law of the Triads, the tribal chiefs who were in a position to share the pie.
But there were still independent traffickers, sharpshooters, freelancers, bounty hunters, hired killers, private detectives. Sheriff Langlois and his men. Those who made war in places where the average man could not survive.
Now, though, the neoecology has returned to equalize everything, to put classical Darwinian adaptation back in the hands of the average man, the average world. It is a notch above the Metastructure’s wildest dreams: overall homogenization. The expansion of the desert toward the north exhausts the desert. The extension through blizzards of the Arctic toward the south is exhausting what remains of ice floes and glaciers. It is above the Territory that their respective depletions have come together. And this double depletion has manifested itself in a mingling of one with the other. It is not a desert of sand or a desert of ice that is finally covering the territory, but their hybrid, to form the world of mud, the formless world, the world of eternally recommencing overall depletion.
Yet the Territory could have been the perfect experimental habitat for a true Third Humanity—the first destroyed by the Flood, the second by the Metamachine—whose glorious destiny would have been to pave the way for the real Second Coming, thinks Yuri to himself, full of strange nostalgia for a world that will never be. Instead of this absolutely necessary future, as Spinoza would have called it, there is the Devolution of Humanity wished for, desired, and provoked by itself, after first having slowly committed suicide, fitting itself up for a terminal Darwinian solution, that of adaptation to nothing, of its transformation into a collective, nonindividated organ, a multiorganism made of millions of clones that are effectively indifferentiated yet formally distinct.
Oh yes, the man burned alive by the Anome’s militia definitely read Duns Scotus, just as the Professor believes. Duns Scotus and undoubtedly several others. He read a handful of Christian authors and he died for it.
Suddenly, Yuri senses that he is being watched.
His sixth sense is not to be doubted. You don’t doubt something that was created by the Law of the Territory.
He keeps walking until he can make a complete half-turn on himself without alerting his observer. To see, you must not be seen. …
He is definitely being watched.
All the dazzling intelligence he is continuously proving to himself and others is suddenly gone.
He is being watched. He is at the center of someone’s attention.
He is nothing but a common rock orbiting—and being consumed by—her solar beauty.
Paul Zarkovsky has never seen Milan Djordjevic cry. He feels lost, awkward. He feels useless.
“Milan,�
�� he says brokenly. “I know you’re doing the best you can.”
Djordjevic doesn’t answer; he stares unseeingly out the window at the landscape surrounding the trailer-library.
Paul Zarkovsky knows the full extent of the damage. More than two hundred works attacked in one fell swoop. Twice as many as they have already lost, totally or partially, in the last month. One book out of every forty now, including some very early printed books. And that isn’t counting the various Bibles in different stages of complete annihilation. The storm only amplified the phenomenon.
Zarkovsky guesses that the latest attack can give them an idea of the rhythm the destruction to come will follow. Certainly there are reasons to be seriously alarmed; certainly there are reasons to break down in tears—especially if you know the fate of the Library is in your hands. If you know it is only through your writing that the unwriting can be stopped.
“Djordjevic, pull yourself together. We’re at war. Total war. How is your manuscript coming?”
“I’m getting there, Paul; I’m getting there. I’m condensing the three earlier versions into one, and it’s really taking shape, but it’s as if the Thing can guess what I’m doing, as if it is picking up speed in order to beat me. In the end, it might be all I can do to write the manuscript that could have stopped the antiscriptural attack.”
“You don’t have the right to be that pessimistic. An old French royalist author once said that despair in politics is the worst kind of idiocy.”
“Politics? You mean Charles Maurras?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about cosmopolitics. The War of the Worlds. The one we’re fighting. We can’t allow ourselves to lose. You’re going to finish the manuscript, Milan, and not only are you going to finish it in time, you’re going to write exactly what needs to be written. And do you know why?”
“The famous Law of the Territory, I presume?”
“No. Your own law, Milan. Your pride, well hidden as it is, is all-consuming. I want you to use it. To make an army out of it.”
“My pride?”
“You have always hated it that I regularly beat you at chess. I also remember how witheringly you treated certain university professors who didn’t have your theological or philosophical knowledge. People told me that in Italy you didn’t allow anyone to pontificate on subjects you were an expert in. You have to hate this Thing, Milan. You have to have a burning desire to give it the thrashing of its life. Do you understand me?”
Milan nods slowly, silently.
“But you’re right—it is always the famous Law of the Territory. We’re part of this Territory now—or, rather, as the young bounty hunters say, the Territory is part of us.”
Milan Djordjevic looks at Paul Zarkovsky for long moments, still not speaking. Then, finally, he gives him a faint smile, behind which the Professor glimpses the presence of a will of Bronze. The Law is taking form in their bodies, he thinks.
Yuri stops walking and looks at Link, who is climbing the mesa ahead of him. His guitar is slung across his back, not held there by anything. Yuri has seen this happen several times now; the guitar orbits around the boy’s body in response to his invisible, inaudible, countless commands. It is an extension of his body-mind, but not a prosthetic extension. It is an internal extension.
They are a few meters away from the Ark now, twenty at most.
“Link. I’m not going any farther.”
“Are you afraid, Yuri? I know everyone is keeping their distance from the Neomachine, but I don’t know why. It’s illogical.”
“It’s logical, Link. The Ark is a singular extrojection of you. You share the Halo. That isn’t the case for us, for we other humans.”
“Come on, Yuri. I promise, you aren’t in any danger.”
“You won’t get me to enter the Halo, I warn you.”
“You’re wrong. You would have a very interesting experience.”
“Very interesting and quite deadly, I imagine.”
“Yuri, the Ark is the Tree of Life. If you respect it, nothing can happen to you. Come on; come with me.”
Yuri looks at Link for a moment, sighs resignedly, and begins climbing again toward the summit of the ridge.
The Ark is there, resplendent, floating forty feet above the ground. It is a globe of matter/light around ten meters in diameter. Two circles of a vibrating substance at once multiple and unique, immutable and yet metamorphosing endlessly at the speed of light, are soldered to each other transversally. This is what the musical instruments, the recording studio, the Territory Radio have become. They turn slowly on themselves in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation. The silvery tubes of the church organ crown them like a mercurial diadem that seems to project a series of nearly invisible waves toward the sky.
Link has entered the Machine’s Halo, his own globe of light preserving its autonomy even as it merges with the larger one.
Yuri is less hesitant to enter the Halo than he is to join Link. The Ark, he knows, will place them in a state close to what pre-Fall humans called neuroconnection.
Their brains will be joined, while yet remaining distinct.
But this junction will be enough. Enough for him to know, enough for him to learn and understand.
And that, Yuri can hardly bear more easily than keeping his secret. The truth is as insufferable as lying.
Link stretches out a hand to him in invitation.
“Come, Yuri. Join me in the Halo. Without me you can’t enter, but I want to share the Voyage to Infinity with you.”
Yuri does not answer; he walks slowly toward the globe of light, which is brushing the rocky ground with its radiance.
Infinity. He experienced a kind of human version of it less than an hour ago.
He was facing her.
His heart had exploded, every molecule of his body bursting, his blood drained from him by an invisible pump.
She was more beautiful each time. He was more in love each time. It was as pure as an equation. It was as senseless and stupid as the world itself.
But it was vastly more beautiful. It was the explosion of a star, a diamond sparkling in the depths of night.
At the same time as the flash took possession of him, he sensed the shadow descending. The shadow of terrible doubt, one of the terrible intuitive messages that Death-in-action sent him so often. In the language of the Territory. The language of secrecy. The language of the invisible. The flash said: It’s now or never. The shadow said: It’s already too late.
He approached her. She did not move. Their eyes met.
Strangely, it was the dark doubt, more than the intense light from which it came, that made him act, that made him speak, that made him put his actions into words and his words into actions.
“You shouldn’t be here. But I shouldn’t, either, I know.”
“Indeed.”
“Why are you breaking the sheriff’s rules?”
“You’re not breaking them?”
“Why did you come to the ridge, in other words?”
Their gazes riveted, soldered, nailed to each other. A faint smile.
“I followed you.”
Yuri swallows a pound of stones. “Followed?”
His voice is oddly broken, as if he were speaking from a distant space station.
“Yes.”
Just that. Yes. Three letters. There is a long silence between the space station and the earth base. He is two thousand light-years away from Judith. He has never been so close to her.
But he could be closer still.
Yes, closer.
Much farther away than that.
Crystal clarity in epigenesis at the center of his being. He understands, thunderstruck, that love can exist only through an infinite distance between two beings; that it is this immeasurable distance that permits the true junction, the Grand Junction, that of Infinity in action, that of two true singularities.
He realizes that this is it, that their skin is about to touch, their nerves to kindle, th
eir lips to meet, in a millennia-old gesture.
A gesture that has just been born.
Link says simply:
“I knew it. Please don’t worry. I noticed a while ago that she was always watching you. Very discreetly, of course. Our destinies were never meant to cross. I have never been truly human. I’m here for a mission of which I am not even in command.”
“Like the soldier-monk from the Vatican?”
“He is the one that resembles me the most in that way. I obey a law that takes precedence even over that of the Territory. Now we are going to connect with the Infinite in act, and we will be able to travel within a humanity disindividuated by its own Devolution; we are going to travel within its secret world.”
“What secret world?”
“Utopia. This world is two-sided; everything is dual with the Anome. The neoecology we are seeing at work is the visible face of its underground world. That’s where we’re going.”
And Yuri realizes that Link is suggesting nothing less than that they descend together into the depths of Hades.
He will not let Link out of his sight. He is a Man of the Territory. He was trained by Chrysler Campbell. Charon himself had better beware.
“Don’t expect to find anything known or heard of before. We are traveling to the processive face of the ultimate Simulacrum. We are traveling to Infinity. But we are going inside the Nothingness in act.”
“Let’s roll, Link.”
And he makes the mistake of his life. The only one. The worst one. The one that will save him.
He cannot be absolutely certain of the moment when he makes a pact with the Ark. He cannot be certain of the extent to which the pact is inalterable. He cannot know that touching a fingertip to Infinity has consequences of the same scope.
He cannot know that, in man, two infinities cannot cohabitate. He does not know the sacrifice he is making.
Grand Junction Page 60