Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  At the center of the Circle of Steel, the Ark is emitting a single bluish point of light with occasional flashes of quicksilver. It’s only a matter of minutes now. Link de Nova’s metabrain will shut down on this Earth to be reborn in the Vessel, which is waiting in orbit. He will leave nothing behind but a transfinite micropoint, the “aleph point” that will continue to watch over the Territory-within-the-Territory, that will allow the ontological border to be preserved, that will permit the Vessel to come back.

  They have fought. They have won. They have kept the Territory and its Law safe. Together. In synchronicity. The two of them.

  The three of them, counting the Ark.

  The Ark, which is getting darker each second, fading little by little into the false night of the last day.

  “It will leave soon,” says Yuri.

  And it does leave. In a last silvery flash, it disappears suddenly from the Ridge. They can just see a ghostly gleam appear and vanish again, above them, at the zenith.

  Yuri looks at Campbell. The Territory has won. They knew how to protect it. They knew how to make sure the Law was respected.

  Link de Nova has become the Vessel of Infinity; now its assembly will be completed in space before the Great Departure.

  They have succeeded. This false night is worth any triumphant dawn.

  Campbell looks at him, and smiles.

  Then he falls to the ground, plunged brutally and deeply into an irreversible coma.

  Yuri spends almost an hour trying to bring his friend back to consciousness. It is no use; the purple crow knows it; it watched the whole battle, every microsecond, every single thing that happened.

  During the second submission, the one Campbell escaped from in extremis thanks to the triangular strangulation move, the violence of the punches he received, their number, their placement near sensitive cephalic areas, all of this—added to the shocks he underwent during the various other exchanges—yes, all of it has finally taken its toll on his cerebral structure.

  Yuri knows it: just a single internal hemorrhage would be enough.

  It is enough. Campbell will be the last man to die by another’s hand.

  Campbell dies with the perfect sense of timing that marked his whole life. He fought, he won, he was there for the departure of the Ark, and then he died, the smile still on his lips.

  Everything is all right.

  They will be Territory Men forever. Dead or alive, they have accomplished the very last mission entrusted by the Law to its Guardians. They will not see the Orbital Ring; they will never join the Vessel of Infinity; they will never know the Third Humanity. They will both remain here, in this bit of the world they have always belonged to, but which belongs to no one. They will watch over the Territory-within-the-Territory. They will watch over the Sanctuary. They will pass the torch to other watchers when the time comes; until then, they will watch unceasingly—and, in any case, the micropoint of singularity will know what to do.

  They will wait here in every sense of the word, here in the Territory, ready for the Second Coming.

  The eighth day, according to the Legend, is called the Morning of the Night.

  The Vessel has left orbit; it is no longer visible from Earth, not even in the astronomic telescope belonging to Judith that Yuri finds in her cabin along with the young woman’s good-bye letter to him, written in response to the text he gave her a few days before the Departure. The letter contains a very simple message. A few words that focus on all the light of infinity, the whole sunlit night of their love. The Legend does not pass on the exact contents of the letter. Like the one Judith took with her on her journey into the Cosmos, this missive will remain secret. The last secret of the Territory.

  Yuri also finds another object, lying on his own bed as if placed there by a human hand. It is Link de Nova’s Gibson guitar, with a mini amplifier, a digital recorder, and a series of tablatures with chords and divisions. It is the last electric guitar in the world. It is with this guitar that he will continue to compose his songs about the Territory. The last rhapsodies. The last rhapsodies on the last world.

  The Anome’s army has retreated, far, very far from the Territory-within-the-Territory and its invisible, deadly border. He is alone. The last man. The last man, alone.

  The Morning of the Night is marked by several “days” of sharp brightness during which the sun makes its appearance and traces its usual path through the sky. But this sun is no brighter than a full moon. It is just a ghostly shadow of itself, a yellowish dot hardly larger than a star. The long, luminous daynight has given way to its dark opposite.

  Yuri realizes that the Vessel altered local Time and Space to depart for Infinity. What he is seeing at this moment are the last instants in the life of the star that shone for billions of years on the Planet of Men. He knows this is a message, not just a simple spatial-temporal illusion. When the Anome withdraws its fingers from this Earth, its white universal sun will return for thousands of years. But its end has already been written, too. The Vessel of Infinity will come back as well. It will come back to bring the News. The News of the Coming.

  Yuri spends the next several days burying all the dead. More than a hundred and fifty men and women. No question of a mass grave. Every one of them has the right to an individual tomb topped with a cross. He gives them that, and in so doing he continues the first cemetery begun during the Day of the Great Silence, at the northern base of the Ridge, in a vast semicircle that surrounds the point of quantum singularity left behind by the Vessel at the summit of the mesa. He finds tools for the job in his cabin—picks, shovels, spades, a magnetic jackhammer—enough to dig a good fifteen graves per day. Up at dawn, his hands in the earth, his feet on the rocks; to bed well after sunset, he hardly sleeps; in the chrome-colored sky, the sun of the aworld moves silently above him and the bodies he is burying. With each grave the uniqueness of the individual he is covering with sand and rocky dirt comes back to him in memory: Slade Vernier and his killing Desert Eagle; Sheriff Langlois, the Man of the Law of Bronze, with his decisive pronunciations; Francisco Alpini, the very last soldier-monk; Erwin Slovak and his predatory intuitions; Scot Montrose, the oldest of the Guardians; Bob Chamberlain, the dutiful patrol officer. All of them, each of them, lived, killed, and died for the Law of the Territory.

  He stays for a whole day beside the body of Chrysler Campbell as it lies beside its grave.

  They talk for a long time. They remember all the not-so-long-ago days of their respective childhoods and adolescences, so recent, hardly an eternity. They talk about the growth of their friendship amid the ruins, during the End of Mankind. They exchange a few specialist points of view on firearms, motor vehicles, Territory traps. Yuri brings up Link de Nova, and even says a few words about Judith. They talk for a long time about what they didn’t know, what they will never know. They are silent for longer still.

  In the space of ten days, the former county of HMV has become a necropolis. The necropolis of the Guardians of the Territory. And Yuri has become its guardian. He will watch over the dead, over the poisonous flora, and over the few manufactured vestiges of what this piece of the world was, when there was still a world.

  October has begun, and it rains without stopping for weeks. The thin drizzle formed of slush and silica sometimes falls in pellets of hail, but except for a few variable jumps in intensity, the icesand-rain remains the same, perfectly constant, everywhere, for everyone. Except in the Sanctuary, protected by the Aleph, which receives only a few trailing wisps of cloud, peripheral hailstones, isolated elements.

  Above what was once called the Independent Territory of Grand Junction, a large purple crow glides, an old bird native to the area, that has seen many things during its lifetime. Along with packs of wolves and wild dogs, it is the last living being to have seen the World of Before, the world before the neoecology of the icesand. It is even old enough to have seen the World of Before the World of Before. It has seen everything it is possible to see with regard to the end o
f a species called Man.

  The bird comes often to visit Yuri, who has been living alone in his cabin for months. The bird brings him silent news of the outside world. Anomanity now extends in an unbroken stretch from one end to the other of the globe. Humanity possesses nothing now but a single body; it speaks only a single language—a nonlanguage, in fact—the simple flux of undifferentiated organic information; it lives in a totally unified world, remade in its image. Here, in the Territory, and most probably in the whole of the American Northeast, he is the last man. He is protected by the transfinite point hidden in the Ridge, and by these purple crows that seem to want to outlive the neoecology of the Anome at all costs. The Territory-within-the-Territory is in itself a sort of Noah’s Ark. The crows, and also the wolves, the lynxes, the deer, the foxes, and eventually the caribou come slowly, to repopulate the Sanctuary. The poisonous vegetation is growing everywhere once more; Yuri can again admire what once brought death, and what will inevitably cause death in the future to anyone who does not understand Territory flora. Its beauty is nothing if not more intense. This beauty that will survive him.

  Everything will be all right.

  Ω > KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

  A man will rise/A man will fall/From the sheer face of love/ Like a fly from a wall/It’s no secret at all/Oh yeah, it’s no secret that the stars are falling from the sky/The universe exploding ’cause of one man’s lie/Look, I gotta go, yeah I’m running outta change/There’s a lot of things if I could I’d rearrange.

  —U2, “THE FLY.”

  One day, Yuri McCoy dies. It is a very calm morning, much brighter than the norm, that meteorological homogeneity that now reigns completely over each stratum of the atmosphere. It is a morning of pale silvery glitter touched with gold and rose—the most beautiful morning, perhaps, that he has ever seen. A purple crow glides above the Sanctuary. That is what the Legend will say, in any case. The Legend will also say that he senses his old female companion from the Territory coming back toward him after decades of absence, and that he spends his last days preparing comfortably for the great voyage. Of course he knows that she doesn’t exist. Death is nothing but an invention of men, used as a point for absolute, symbolic responsibility from the day one of them, the first one, realized that the man he had just killed disappeared from the timeline—because killing is precisely that, an abrupt ontological slash in the flux of memory and futures. Killing defines itself; it is the opposite of the creative Word, its shadow cast over the land of men.

  * * *

  Death was probably born with language. Symbols were needed, to facilitate the recording of this mysterious disappearance of the life flow to somewhere else. The first written languages were neither financial nor alchemical nor astronomical.

  They were symbols written for the dead.

  Death does not exist; it is only the simulacrum left by the organic flesh of the body, while the hidden luminous structure passes to another quantum level entirely. Death does not exist, and yet it reigned over humanity for millennia. Death does not exist, and yet the immortality now possessed by neohumanity resembles its permanent placement in the world.

  It does not exist, but Yuri can smile at it. It is nothing, in the end, but a mundane optical illusion hiding the existence of another Vessel to Infinity. When his body is reborn, on the day of the Last Judgment, he will see Judith again, and all the Men of the Territory. All the Men of all the Territories.

  In five or thirty thousand years—a few months, from her point of view as a Traveler in Infinity—Judith might find a few whitened bones in the sand, the last vestiges of what was once the body of animated flesh bearing the name Yuri McCoy.

  Then, one day, she will die in her turn.

  They will end by being reunited. The Grand Junction will take place where it is supposed to. Where everything is unified in the light of all infinities.

  He has watched over the Territory for more than forty years. He has watched over the manuscript of its origins, and he has written the sequel, the story he has lived, and even the story of what will succeed him—that is, his prediction of the times to come. The manuscripts are stacked in his cabin, neatly stowed in munitions boxes, at the bottom of the crater. One day, a nonanomized man will pass through here. A man or a woman. He or she will continue the writing. He or she will die in his or her turn. Then another man, or another woman, will come. When the Library of the Vessel comes back, it will find its own image here; it will find what it sired in the brains of the few free men left on Earth.

  Among the few books from the Library he keeps in his shelter, one text has often kept him company during the nights and days, the distant echo of a lost language-world; in Protasis and Apodosis, one Pierre Klossowski said this: “Writing books goes back to telling the story of a voyage that will evoke the places visited. One can go there and yet not recognize the places according to my description. Others will describe them and they will not be the same places for all that. Whoever can discover in himself these same places makes my own description useless. My true ambition is only to find the right friends to occupy these same places, which will bring me the certainty that these places exist by themselves, and then I will stop writing. Because my friends and I will be the inhabitants of this place—we will make a habit of it.”

  Not only could Yuri have written these words himself, but clearly he has lived them.

  The transfinite point has secretly illuminated the Ridge since the day of the Great Transmigration. It is the Antenna. The other end of the supercord called Link de Nova, this Body-Vessel that will travel to the limits of space and time. Thanks to him, one day, the members of the Third Humanity will be able to come back to Earth, and to make the Territory the place of his Second Coming.

  Anomanity, that parahumanity, that second and dual humanity, will probably reign for centuries, perhaps millennia. But Yuri knows that there will always be a handful of free men, scattered across the globe, and that some of them will pass through here one day.

  The Homo anomians cannot get close to the place without suffering immediate death; it has always been that way. It is a taboo zone par excellence, the only place on Earth forbidden to them, where the desert of mud has made no inroads, where their organic network–immortality cannot incarnate. It is simple, in the end. Nothing escapes the Territory.

  The Legend continues to live. Men are brought here by it. Men and women who reject the conditions dictated by neohumanity. They are rare. As far as one can tell when researching this part of the Territory, sometimes decades, even centuries, pass between two successive visits. But that does not keep the Legend from continuing to live. It does not keep the manuscripts from piling up in the munitions boxes, one after another. It does not ever keep the writing from taking the risk of existence.

  The Legend says that one day, a long, long time after the mutant humanity has drowned in its own numeric mass, the man named Yuri McCoy puts his affairs in order so as to leave the Territory in the best possible condition for his potential successor. And it is said that his successor does the same thing when the time comes. And the one who succeeds the successor. And so on.

  Until me. I, who am the last keeper of the Legend. I, who do not know where I come from, but who have always known that I will end my days here. I, who am writing this story in the same cabin where Yuri McCoy lived, where the last men died so that the Third Humanity could depart for Infinity to prepare for the Coming of the End of Days. I am a Territory Man, too. I am the one who is writing, the one who is taking up the Legend to send it to another singularity, to another eye that will capture and record it, another voice that will transmit-illuminate it. I, who will die soon, in my turn, who will continue to write until my last breath; I, who have lived with them all this time, who have accompanied them secretly, these Men and these Women of the Territory; I, who have loved them though they didn’t know me, who have written them without knowing them.

  Yuri McCoy dies. He has been the last man in the Territory for a very l
ong time. His memories go back to the time when Humanity still existed on this planet. Yuri McCoy dies. The poisonous plants of the Territory will serve as his burial shroud, in the brilliant variety of the multiform microjungles here, surrounded by the Desert-World.

  Yuri McCoy dies. He instantly joins with the Infinite.

  It is in writing these lines that I realize just how alive he is.

  Just how completely he has conquered death.

  Just how truly he is immortal.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MAURICE G. DANTEC was born in France in 1959. A former advertising executive and songwriter for a French punk-rock group, Dantec is a shameless lover of science fiction, crime novels, and metaphysics. He is the author of Red Siren, which won France’s Prix de l’Imaginaire. He is also the author of Villa Vortex, Babylon Babies (now a major motion picture from Fox under the title Babylon A.D.), and Theatre of Operations, a series of journal essays. He lives in Montreal.

  Grand Junction is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Éditions Albin Michel

  Translation copyright © 2009 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon

  is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in French as Grande Jonction by Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, France, in 2006.