Grand Junction (12 page)

It even occurred to him recently that he might still have a chance to become an old man. A chance not to die young. A chance not to die before his time. A chance to die before the World does.

A chance to die like men have died for millions of years.

The western sky is indigo. The sun has set behind the purplish humps of the Ontarian hills. Like the light from a fluorescent bulb about to flicker out, a vast, wavering bronze shadow extends into the heart of the stagnant mid-cirrus clouds at the zenith, where the first pale stars are appearing, where the cosmos is the color of tempered steel, where no one can go any longer.

To the south, Yuri can see the nocturnal vibration—like a black swarm gathering on the dark horizon—of the sandstorm now crossing the southern border of the former state of New York. Chrysler Campbell, behind the wheel of the antique hybrid-motor pickup, whistles a tuneless, nameless melody; he seems reflective, as usual. A calm smile hovers about his lips, and his every move is made with the relaxed precision
of a machine, his thoughts hidden from the outside world, and even from himself.

Chrysler has always played the role of the older brother Yuri never had. For him, thinking is, by its very nature, an intrinsically dangerous act.
If what you think doesn’t lead you to take a risk, even a small one, than better to abstain
, he has often said from Yuri’s earliest youth. Always think against yourself. Always think that the true danger is not to confront it.

After years of acquaintance, Yuri has eventually come to realize that thought, according to Chrysler, is a form of silent war, and is utterly without mercy.

Yuri knows that Chrysler killed a man one day during the First Fall, shortly after the deaths of his parents—of their parents—when the guy, an old pedophile suddenly liberated from neurochemical control, had tried to molest him in a dried-out field north of Omega Blocks. Yuri even saw the body; Chrysler had shown it to him, stretched out prone in a dead, thorny bush uprooted from soil ravaged by the summer storm that had just rampaged through the Territory. The glassy eyes, bulging toward the gray sky of that rainy day, were forever fixed in Yuri’s memory as if by a photochemical developing bath. The body showed the marks of several hematomas around the face; one of the eyes was nothing more than a purplish blue mass; the other was filled with blood. The nose appeared to have been broken and the dislocated jaw hung at a bizarre angle toward the base of the neck, where several bloody teeth lay scattered. Other than that, though, nothing. No trace of a mortal knife wound or a hole made by a bullet or other projectile, or of trauma caused by a blunt object. Not even the characteristic signs of strangulation.

Yuri saw only Chrysler’s hands, puffy and stained with reddish fluid gleaming like oil in the rain.

On that day, Yuri had just turned eleven years old. He understood then, for the first time, that to kill a man, brutal strength, vice, and the experience of age are not unequivocal conditions.

Against the organic prudence of age stands the
mechanical
madness of youth.

Against the ignominy of vice and human perversion stands the cold violence of true inhumanity.

Against brute force stand combat techniques.

Chrysler Campbell had been initiated into the mixed martial arts by an old master of Pride, a free-combat organization that had peaked in popularity at the very beginning of the century.

Brazilian jujitsu, Thai boxing, Okinawan karate, Russian sambo, drop-boxing, and several techniques derived from Korean tae kwon do form the basic ingredients of this ultraviolent fighting, where every type of blow and hold are permitted, even recommended.

His instructor was a former Russian army lieutenant who had risen to prominence around 2015 via a meteoric career in the great arenas of Tokyo under the strict eye of his own master, Fedor Emilianenko, the former heavyweight champion of the discipline and a former Soviet military officer himself, and more recently an elite wrestling instructor. When the Metastructure fell, the old Russian instructor had for more than thirty years been running a small mixed-martial-arts school on Surveyor Plateau, training many of the gladiators who fought in the arenas of Monolith Hills. Chrysler had already become one of his top students. Then the man died, as did almost all of his pupils.

Chrysler Campbell remained.

He retained what he had learned.

The art of killing a man with a single punch.

Night has fallen on the coal black peak of Midnight Oil. It seems to descend on the township as if seeking its primordial niche. It is a moonless, heavy night, very black, with only a few stars. It is a perfect night for the Post-World.

A desert night, mirroring the desert night that is engulfing the Earth.

Pluto Saint-Clair looks closely at the man sitting across from him as he lights a long joint of homegrown tobacco.

Professor Paul Zarkovsky. Twenty-two years have passed since Saint-Clair earned his degree at MIT under the man’s doctoral supervision. He hasn’t changed, this Russian-American specializing in transfinite numbers who conceived the final version of the Metastructure—
the final
one in a real sense, the one that led to the death of the Machine-World—or, rather, to the strange state of postmortem survival in which it continues to annihilate humanity.

This man, Pluto knows, is of vital importance, much more vital even than he can imagine. He hasn’t come here by chance. The End of the Metastructure is closely tied to the Territory of Grand Junction. Rumors to that effect are constantly swirling around the entire American Northeast.

And Pluto knows a crucial fact: one of the many rumors is true—or, at least, it comes closest to touching the vast coldness of the truth. Pluto knows a
secret
. An old, educated, former prostitute from Deadlink, Canadian by birth, who used to work in Monolith Hills, had told him the secret one day, shortly before her death during the Second Fall. He is the only one who knows it now, and, more importantly, the only one who has grasped what it implies.

This is why he has done everything in his power to ensure that the
Professor’s journey across North America will go as smoothly as possible. This is why he has sent messages of every kind. This is why he has chartered a taxi and driver from Clockwork Orange, one specializing in desert crossings, to bring him all the way here to Ohio.

The man is even taller than Pluto, with astonishingly steady pale blue eyes and thinning blond hair. His wispy beard is steel gray. He must be sixty years old now. He is the Professor.

He has crossed more than four thousand kilometers of desert to get here. He walked more than five hundred miles through the Great Lakes region.

The man hasn’t changed, really. A specialist in transfinite numbers and the genetic codes of retroviruses. A mountain climber. An experimental hiker. A lover of Polish vodka, French literature, and English football.

A man who could, back in the day, beat a computer at chess.

A man who has crossed North America to meet up with another man—another man who is awaiting a delivery of books. Thousands of books.

Pluto Saint-Clair looks at the Professor, who looks back at him calmly, without blinking. It is undoubtedly time to bring a little humanity back to this world filled with darkness and desert. To begin the conversation with the pleasantries of a warm welcome. To refuse to allow the night-desert falling on Earth to dictate the conditions of that welcome. To create the semblance of an impression that they are still living in a World.

“I hope the BlackSky Ridge capsules are to your liking, Professor.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about that, Pluto. What counts for me, as you know, is to find Djordjevic as fast as possible.”

Pluto Saint-Clair frowns; his search has produced nothing. He is thinking more and more about putting Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell on the case. “I’ll track him down, Professor; don’t worry. He must have changed his identity.”

“No, the last time I heard anything about him was when I had just come back from all those years in Europe, and they told me he was still living under that name. He didn’t have any reason to change it, especially after the End of the Metastructure.”

“Where is the last place you heard he was living?”

“I met one of his friends in Mexico, an academician who spent a lot of time with him during his years in Italy. He told me Djordjevic was in Texas—Corpus Christi, specifically—already half flooded by the rise of
sea level after the automatic dikes broke down. I went there and searched the city and the areas around it with a fine-tooth comb for months; then I decided to follow a very vague trail that led me to Canada, and you. That’s how I managed to contact you, later, with the help of the Missouri refugees.”

“We’ll find him,” says Pluto, in an unintentionally sinister tone.

“How big is it here, Pluto?”

“Here? Where do you mean? Junkville, or the whole Mohawk Territory?”

“The Territory. What’s the area?”

“Around seventy kilometers north to south, from Quebec to New York; a little more from east to west, from Ontario to the Vermont border. Not that any of those names mean anything anymore.”

“Population?”

“As you know, Professor, we don’t have statistics anymore.”

“Give me an approximate figure—how big? Just so I can have an idea.”

“Well … just before the Fall, at its peak, the Territory had around a million people, half of them in Grand Junction alone. Today I’d estimate the total number at a little more than two hundred and fifty thousand, including the refugees from the Midwest. A third of them live in Grand Junction itself, in Monolith Hills—in the old technological areas or the Enterprise aerostation.”

“And here, in Junkville?”

“Junkville? Well, in its boom days in the 2050s, there were about a hundred and fifty thousand. Today, I’d say maybe fifty thousand. Including the waves of refugees.”

“I see. Perfect isotopy of phenomenon, whatever its location.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s a little complicated to sum up. Let’s say that the Metastructure, since its death, has been acting … shall we say … according to a process of
infinite division
. Some of us think it is actually imitating … God.”

“Imitating God?”

“Yes. Basically, the procedure consists of constantly dividing in half whatever is left after the previous operation. Except that in the case of the Metastructure, there is a small problem. It always has something left over; its series of divisions can’t be perfect, ever. And that’s logical. Ontologically logical.”

“Ontologically. What does that mean?”

“The Metastructure, or rather the entity that succeeded it, is caught
in what we call a system of double constraint. On one hand, it must destroy humanity. On the other hand, it must destroy humanity. Are you following me?”

“Not at all—but I remember you were already playing around with paradoxes at MIT.”

“This isn’t a paradox in itself. It is the ‘double bind’ of the post-Metastructure: it must destroy humanity, but it must do so indefinitely. It must erase all traces of Man, but its own survival depends on this erasure. So it has to act in such a way that there are always enough humans to perpetuate its efforts at annihilation, all the while dividing this human population in two. So it needs these humans just as it must destroy them; they are indestructible in a way, but they serve the thing as indefinitely recyclable base materials.”

“And that’s why you’ve come all this way from southern Texas?”

“Listen, Pluto, I need to see Djordjevic as soon as possible. I can’t explain it to you all over again. Just agree with me that the death of the Metastructure was only the beginning, okay?”

“Okay, Professor.”

Pluto Saint-Clair remembers what Yuri McCoy told him during his recent visit—a piece of information very similar to the one Paul Zarkovsky has just shared. Only the point of view is different. If he combines the two, he might be able to see the truth—learn the Secret of the Territory. “Professor, I need to warn you first. The Territory of Grand Junction, especially Junkville, has its own laws. It’s a dangerous place if you aren’t familiar with them. We’ll need to call on specialized informants, I’m afraid, and here information is very expensive. More expensive than a working machine. We need to stay on our toes and not commit any faux pas during the investigation. I’m saying ‘we,’ but it would be best if you left the BlackSky Ridge capsule park as little as possible.”

“What exactly are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know,
exactly
. Which makes me worry even more.”

“Listen, Pluto, I didn’t want to talk to you about this. I didn’t want to worry you. But I went out this morning … for a little walk …”

Pluto Saint-Clair knits his brow. “Did something happen to you?”

“No, nothing—but it could have. It barely missed us.”

“Us?
Who are you talking about? Djordjevic?”

“No, no, not at all. The landlord, I mean. He warned me when I got back.”

“Warned you about what?”

“A man came to BlackSky Ridge. He went to the capsule park and asked to see me. The landlord told him I’d gone out, and the man left without saying another word.”

Pluto feels a cold prickle of fear trickle down his spine. A man came to see the Professor. A man who knows he lives on BlackSky, in a UMan-Home capsule. A man. But what man? “Do you have a description of him?”

“The landlord might be able to give us one. I didn’t think of it at the time—you know, I was tired out from the long trip. I went back to my capsule and slept for the whole afternoon.”

“Has there been any news of this man since then?”

“None, Pluto. I asked the landlord to keep you informed if he comes again when I’m not there.”

“Well done.”

“Yes, I guess. … How do you think a stranger knew where to find me?”

Pluto Saint-Clair cannot repress a reflexive shudder. “In Junkville, news spreads fast. You shouldn’t stay on BlackSky Ridge.”