Grand Junction (19 page)

And there it is, thinks Yuri. Zarkovsky will have to type it all down, tell it all again, explain it all again.

But this time the Professor wouldn’t be dealing with Chrysler Campbell, the human computer. This time he would be having the conversation with Sheriff Wilbur Langlois, the man of the Law of Bronze, the man who acts to ensure that secrets are kept—kept, sometimes, in the graves of people who know too much.

*   *   *

If HMV County is the natural sanctuary of Wilbur Langlois, for the rest of the Territory’s residents, and especially those of the city of Grand Junction, this role has fallen to the cosmodrome itself.

This was very quickly established as a given, a tacit agreement, a certainty, a sort of “patriotism.” A Faith. First, after the Fall of the Metastructure, in ’58 and ’59, several barely organized looters often ransacked the Territory in an attempt to attack the cosmodrome facilities. Security officers, supported by what remained of the police forces—specifically, Langlois himself and his small squadron of patrol cars—had exterminated the few operating bands of renegades.

It was later, during the mutation of the “virus” six years later, when the city of Grand Junction had already been emptied of half its population, that the true problems started.

The Territory had until then been subdivided into five counties: Langlois’ own, Heavy Metal Valley, occupied the north-central part. Champlain Banks, long a desert, stretched to the east along the Vermont border, from Quebec to the old city of Neon Park. The central west, the northwest, and the whole south-central portion of the Territory were contained in the county of Grand Junction, the largest and most heavily populated of all of them. To the southwest was the county of Junkville, which now included the township of Deadlink. To the west, in Ontario, and farther south, the county of Grand Funk Railroad was established, through which the old railroad tracks of Canadian National intersected the magnetic-suspension line built in 2025. But of all the counties, only HMV continued to operate in a politically functional manner. Langlois was the last sheriff in the Territory. The last bulwark of liberty against chaos. He was the last legal killer in a place where the only law was that there were no laws. The authority in charge of the cosmodrome, the Metropolitan Consortium of Grand Junction, and its holding firm, Cosmos, Inc., no longer existed, like most of the planet’s industries and institutions. Organized gangs, hordes of bandits from who knew where, and post-Islamist raiders from Ontario—all had tried anew to overtake the cosmodrome facilities. Groups of armed men ransacked launchpad number three, at the bottom of Monolith Hills; others went after launchpad number two. The rocket-assembly hangars were hermetically sealed with magnetic locks; they were not connected to the network and thus remained intact. The buildings were constructed to withstand an explosion
of ten kilotons of TNT. But the communications center was easily taken by a few bands seeking to grab the hundreds of computers, radar surveillance equipment, spectrographs, radio antennae, contaminated and inoperable as they were, with no real idea of what they might do with this booty but with a certainty that in these troubled times they would at least be gaining something, even if it was virtual.

So the surviving communities of Grand Junction had taken up the initiative again, and Wilbur put all his forces—a little more than twenty men armed with a true arsenal—at their disposition. For entire days, bloody battles raged all around and inside the cosmodrome, beyond Apollo Drive, on Skylab Avenue and the exposed slopes of Monolith Hills.

By the final dawn of a week of combat, the militants of Grand Junction and Sheriff Langlois were able to gaze on the numerous human remains of their victory. On the side of the forces defending the cosmodrome, more than two hundred men and women had been killed, and twice that number wounded, of which at least two hundred would die in the coming days.

The looters from Ontario, along with the Islamists working for some residual emirate and the professional gangsters fighting for their own game, had lost almost five hundred men. The hundred wounded and the prisoners, some few dozen of them, were finished off on Langlois’ orders. He instructed that the heads be cut off and put on pikes, then placed atop the peaks of the hills west of the city.

The cosmodrome was never attacked again.

Langlois had also been inspired by the methods used by Grand Junction’s surviving communities, even though half of what remained after the Fall of ’57 had slowly disappeared since then.

He shouldered new responsibilities. Not only must he protect Heavy Metal Valley but now he was obliged to watch over the cosmodrome as well.

He organized a small brigade of vigilantes in HMV. They formed a reserve force for patrols in order to expand their scope of action, and to organize in combat groups instantly during a possible attack.

HMV became a fortress. Located on a plateau slightly above both the cosmodrome and southern Quebec, it had the advantage of height.

And one day Wilbur Langlois said to himself:
These Christians fight like soldiers
.

He asked to be baptized by one of the priests living in HMV.

*   *   *

All this was told to Yuri by Chrysler Campbell, who knows one of the sheriff’s assistants, whose father participated in several battles against the first waves of looters just before dying of a broken-down implant.

Yuri comes back to the present with a start, to the anthracite tarmac lit by the double illumination of the electric starlight cast by the sodium streetlamp and the hydrogen light of the sun, and to the Professor replying to Wilbur Langlois’ endless questions.

Apparently, the boy with the guitar is the least well informed of them all. But Yuri, who has known him for years, knows that this does not make him useless—rather, it is quite the opposite. Certainly he doesn’t possess the masses of data that form what men sometimes call, pompously, “hard information.” For example, he hasn’t had access to any of the biotests, or samples, or scanner analyses Yuri and Chrysler have collected in the Territory through the years. But all he has to do is place his hands on a machine and speak to it, in a language only he knows and understands, and suddenly everything,
everything
, is transformed.

He is untrained, thinks Yuri, observing his slender silhouette with its head a little too large, perhaps, wavering on that long, thin frame. He is the one keeping watch here; he is the invisible Guardian, the Guardian of the starlight, the Guardian of the Sanctuary. He is the luminous shadow of Wilbur Langlois, the visible Guardian, the Guardian of severed heads, the Guardian of the Valley of Heavy Metal. It is Gabriel who watches over the gates of dawn, while the sheriff monitors the access roads to the rocky peaks.

Chrysler Campbell is a child of the Territory. To catch him, you have to kill him. To kill him, you have to catch him.

“If Pluto Saint-Clair can’t stay here we’ll take him to Junkville. Yuri and I have work waiting for us in the west of the Territory. We’ll leave Professor Zarkovsky to get settled, and you and we can keep talking.”

Chrysler plants his blue gaze deeply, like a weapon, into Link de Nova’s. Yuri decodes the message:
We have a lot to talk about. We’ll come back, Link. Keep your mouth shut while we’re gone
.

“Sirs,” says Paul Zarkovsky a bit formally, still marked by his academic university manners. “I’m obliged to you. I’m extremely conscious of the fact that it was you who brought me here.”

“You’re perfectly right to thank us, Professor,” says Yuri. “We’ll see you again soon. Believe me, we know you haven’t yet told us everything,
despite your promise. And it just might be that we still have a few stories to tell you, too. Stories that you will find very interesting, you and Mr. Djordjevic. The Territory’s Legends are Truths that the world hides here. It’s a local saying.”

Yuri can see that he has piqued the curiosity of the two men. And he can also see that what they are still hiding is related to what they have to do in the west of the Territory. And that it in turn is connected to the “second mutation,” to the total numeric exchange between the men and the Post-Metastructure. It is connected to what they alone know. It is connected to their secret.

He sees that Chrysler still knows himself to be ahead in the game.

The sheriff seems satisfied with the situation. He will open his doors to Djordjevic’s professor friend. He will close them to the Professor’s friend from Junkville.

He’s making sure procedure is respected, thinks Yuri. Nothing more.

He’s ensuring that people remain subject to the Law. Nothing more.

The Law of Heavy Metal Valley.

The Law of Wilbur Langlois.

Nora Network welcomes them into her trailer as usual. Without real friendliness, or warmth, or even a trace of anything other than material interest; no sign of any feelings of friendship or recognition or even simple mild cronyism. Nothing like that ever comes from the mouth or emanates from the presence of this old shrew who has built a reputation over the past four decades as a professional creator of rumors, as quick to invent them as to discredit them, and as capable of starting them as of putting a stop to them. She knows, with an exactitude unequaled in the Territory, how to gather true information and to separate the incidental from the important—that is, the profitable. She has been a porn actress, a television sitcom host, a journalist specializing in human interest stories; she launched a magazine for transsexuals in Canada; she was a press attaché for an Indo-Californian film studio. She founded her own multi-sexual entertainment company, launched a line of transgenic cosmetics, speculated in real estate. She was even assistant to the director of the Committee to Reelect the Democratic Governor in Oregon, a few months before the beginning of the Second American Civil War.

She has lived her entire life by gossip, rumor, maneuvering, manipulation, dissimulation, fraud, and swindles of all types. She used up three husbands during her long career; before the End of the World, she collected three comfortable life insurance settlements. She is old, and she has survived the two Falls. She knows a lot of people. She knows a lot of things. She knows a lot of connections between things and people.

She is probably their number-one informer in the territory.

“Too bad she lives in this shitty township on the Ontarian border,” Chrysler says. “If she lived in Junkville we’d each have a dozen red Buicks, like that guy in Carbon City.”

The path leading to Ontario is a heavily forested trail just barely deserving of the name. Fortunately, Chrysler’s father’s survivalist leanings allowed him to leave his son with the know-how to best situations like this—the know-how, and, just as importantly, the Ford F-350. The paranoid ones are always right. Murphy’s Law was created for them, as was the world, and even what destroys it. If the worst is possible, then it has every chance of happening. To this might be added that if the worst appears impossible, don’t believe it. It’s a ruse.

The sun has risen high in a deep-chrome sky.

They left Pluto Saint-Clair at the bottom of Midnight Oil. The man hardly seemed affected by Sheriff Langlois’ categorical refusal to deviate from his rules. Actually, he seemed more preoccupied by something else, something unknown. He had appeared worried all through the return trip, during which he had not unclenched his teeth.

Yuri had recognized the signs of intense reflection. Their informer doesn’t have Chrysler’s brilliant intuitive intelligence. He mulls over problems indefinitely, like a mole burrowing ceaselessly until it finds the exit, the way to open air. Right now the mole is digging, Yuri thinks as Chrysler drives westward. It’s digging for the long haul.

But what is it digging
for
?

It is a little later when the idea surges to life in his mind, like an invisible machine suddenly freed from its shackles. His intelligence is neither the quasi-morbid turnover of Pluto Saint-Clair’s nor the intuitively logical flash of Chrysler Campbell’s; it is a hybrid of the two, or rather a third form. It is like someone writes a scenario in his mind, as if someone scatters the separate pieces of a great human puzzle across the whole Territory; it is as if someone writes the outline of a possible story inside his brain, and everything—each part of the whole, the whole itself—everything is terribly anchored in reality. That is, in the secret that hides reality. This discovery makes him shudder silently, while the yellow disk of the sun floods the street with blinding light, refracting in clouds of stars in the Plexiglas windshield, and in the distance he sees the angular height of Surveyor Plateau, a bluish mass backlit by a halo of golden dust. A cavalcade of tumbleweeds catches the rays with twisted branches as it whirls by at the side of the road.

*   *   *

“What’s wrong, Chrysler? You don’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea of visiting Nora Network. Not that I blame you. She’s a nasty old bat.”

“We don’t know if we’re immune, Yuri. Link de Nova and his powers have allowed us to save our bio-implants and our artificial organs; we know they can’t be touched by the
thing
, but what’s happening now is something … something else entirely. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since yesterday.”

“You know that the entity born of the Metastructure’s death isn’t transmittable from human to human like a virus. That’s what helped us understand that it isn’t a virus. I don’t think we’re risking anything by continuing our investigation, Chrysler.”

“Do you believe what Professor Zarkovsky says? This story about the Language-World?”

“I don’t know. But we know it isn’t a virus. And he knows it, too. There aren’t too many of us who do.”

“If it isn’t a virus, or even a form of the ‘metavirus’ like we thought, how will Link de Nova be able to do anything?”

“We know it isn’t a virus. Its modus operandi has changed. It no longer attacks the biological or the mechanical, but their symbolic juncture. So I don’t think Link de Nova’s powers will act like antiviral software—without which it can’t function, like everything else. We have to conclude that it is acting directly on the Post-Machine—that’s the only term that really applies. And so both of them will change their modi operandi, their strategies. This is a war.”