Grand Junction (23 page)

But instead of continuing to talk in his improvised language from who knows where, he stops almost as soon as he has begun.

He raises his head to look at the man’s face.

He gazes at him for long moments, keeping his hands in place on the man’s head.

Then he says, simply: “It is impossible.”

He pulls his hands away quickly from the head of the man, who tries to babble a few incomprehensible phrases.

Chrysler looks at them, concerned.

“What’s impossible, Link?”

It is logical, terribly logical, thinks Yuri. Machines, even biological ones, are nothing but the unique access point opened to Link de Nova. The
thing
must be aware of it. It is mocking them. Link is alone, or nearly so.

And it, it has the rest. That is, everything.

So it has closed off access to what, in humans, is neither biological nor mechanical.

And against that, Link de Nova’s powers are visibly unable to find an evolutionary solution, to adapt.

The Post-Machine has kept an ace up its sleeve.

They are in real danger.

*   *   *

During the return drive, neither Yuri nor Campbell nor the man from Surveyor Plateau utters a single word. What is there to say?

As agreed, Chrysler injected the guy and the girl with his synthetic scopolamine just before they got into the truck. From then until now, as they are driving the man back to Surveyor Plateau, the programmable drug has selectively erased from his memory all traces of the last six or eight hours. As for the girl, it has all gone strictly according to routine. Campbell knows, of course, that neither of the victims has much more time, and that neither of them can express themselves in a comprehensible way, but still he would never take even the slightest risk. One day, he said about some other victim: “They can still write, have dreams, communicate via signs. There’s hypnosis. There might even be an accidental remission of the amnesia. Someone might torture them until they spill everything, or inject them with some kind of truth serum, or even carry out a neurosurgical autopsy and find traces. My synthetic scopolamine is a programmable drug; it wipes everything clean, like when you reformat a hard drive. We can take care of their bodies, but we have to completely erase their memories.”

We are the Camp Doctors, thinks Yuri.

Chrysler drives robotically, the truck’s speed unchanging, his eyes fixed unmovingly on the headlight-illuminated road.

Yuri is fully aware of his accomplice’s disappointment. He feels the same way.

Link never replied to Chrysler’s impatient questions about the situation of the man from Surveyor Plateau. He simply asked to see the girl from X-15 as soon as possible.

She has passed to another stage during the course of the day. She is inevitably approaching the post-phase, the transformation into a modem, into a pure communication machine using binary language. She doesn’t have much longer.

Link climbed into the rear bed of the truck and gazed for a long time at the dying young girl, this girl drowning in numbers.

He knelt near the stretcher and placed his hands around the head from which the stream of numbers continued to flow endlessly. But this time he didn’t even bother trying to murmur a few words. Indeed, he was speechless.

His hands were violently repelled from Lucie Lebois-Davenport’s skull as if by a sort of magnetic field.

Link’s mouth was wide open on an absolute emptiness, a terrifying silence.

He stared at Chrysler, then at Yuri, a look of true desperation on his face.

Then he leaned toward the young girl without saying anything. He stared at her for another long moment. Yuri saw tears gathering in his eyes, sparkling in the moonlight. Tears that rolled, glittering, down his cheeks, dried by the hot air blowing from the west, as the girl fixed her wide-open eyes on the sky that was no longer the sky, but to which she addressed her litany of numbers, from the earth that was no longer the earth; series of numbers launched toward the cold orbits of the worlds observing the death of this World.

Link de Nova stretched his hand toward her. Eventually he placed his index finger very lightly on her forehead, just brushing the skin, and Yuri saw him make the sign of the cross, a sign that he then repeated on himself in the particular manner of Catholic Christians, the specific order of forehead, navel, left shoulder, right shoulder. Yuri also heard him murmur a few phrases in Latin. He did not understand the meaning of the words, but he knew it was one of the main prayers used by the communities of Heavy Metal Valley.

Link pulled back slowly, and got down wordlessly from the truck bed.

His powers could not touch her. They could not speak to her.

It was then that Yuri realized that Gabriel had just been appealing to a power other than his own.

When the girl dies in the early hours of the morning, Yuri and Chrysler can only marvel at the sudden, exponential growth of the evil. Each human case seems, paradoxically, to retain some type of singularity within this process designed by nature to annihilate them all.

She passed to the post-phase during the night. They had just come back from their rendezvous with Link de Nova and unloaded their paraphernalia into the Combi-Cube when they heard emissions coded in pure binary begin to intermingle with the numbered recitation that had, for a while now, increased in speed so much as to be incomprehensible.

Then, within twenty minutes at the most, terminal digitalization had completely overtaken language—meaning her individuated body, Yuri had thought at the time, without really grasping the full implications of his own idea.

As the pale sun slanted its horizontal rays across the landscape of Air-crash Circle, the girl had breathed her last, exhaling a final volley of binary numbers at two mega-octets per second. Campbell had managed to calculate the precise speed of the transfer.

“It has speeded up a lot since the last case,” he had said. “We might say that the
thing
is making constant progress, like the early-century modems.”

“No,” Yuri had said abruptly. “I don’t believe that. I mean, this acceleration is connected to the individuals themselves. The
thing
programs their deaths down to the microsecond, I believe, according to data we don’t know.” This speed and rhythm of transfer is what constitutes their unique singularity, thinks Yuri, unable to express himself clearly to his friend. This speed and rhythm of transfer is what delineates their life and
death. So it is what permits the phenomenon to individuate itself in them, all the way down to their deaths.

“Do you have a preference?” Campbell had asked, standing in front of the immobile, silent body.

“Preference? What do you mean?”

“The necros. You live in Snake Zone; want to call the guys in green?”

Yuri didn’t answer.

He had never felt this way.

He had never felt this way about someone who died. Someone he didn’t even know.

Someone he hadn’t been able to save.

“Chrysler,” he had whispered finally. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“What? What idea?”

“The necro Triads. We shouldn’t sell them this girl’s body.”

“The Snake Zone guys? Would you rather we call Vortex?”

“No. No, Chrysler. None of them. I’m talking about all the Junkville Triads.”

“I hope you’re joking. Except for her linguistic devolution, all her organs are perfect. You and I both saw the test results from yesterday. We’ll get a high price for them.”

“I’m just wondering if the devolution in question isn’t changeable—if it might not jump from one individual to another via organ transplant.”

“You know the
thing
doesn’t work that way. It isn’t a virus. Yuri, what’s going on? What are you saying?”

“We don’t know anything about this ‘second mutation.’ It could have changed its modus operandi, as you call it.”

“Pure and pointless speculation. If it had changed this part of its modus operandi, we would already have heard about it from the Triads. No, no, no, Yuri.”

“It gets worse. You know what they’re saying in Neo Pepsico. That when the organs aren’t suitable for transplant, the Triads discreetly sell them to grocery stores. It’s fast-food meat for cannibals, okay?”

“And now the Junkville gossip. Shit. We’re almost out of gasoline, Yuri; fuel is getting more and more rare in the Territory. Good thing we have the HMV connection, but for that we need cash, like in Reservoir Can, incidentally.”

“The girl is worth more than a few cans of gasoline.”

“Yuri, she’s dead.”

“She deserves better than to be sliced up by the Snake Zone or Vortex Townships butchers.”

“Yuri,” Campbell repeats, irritated,
“She’s dead
. Okay? She’s dead, Yuri. There’s nothing left but her body, around fifty-five kilograms of organs. And that is what has been worth its weight in gold in Junkville for a long time now.”

“I know. I can’t explain it. Her body was, and will be. We shouldn’t cut it up into separate pieces to be used and thrown away. Not this way.”

“Shit, Yuri, you’re talking more and more often like the HMV Christians! I’m going to have to keep you away from Link de Nova!” His laugh is a little ironic, but it holds no anger or sarcasm. It is just a joke to him, a bit of passing madness on his friend’s part.

“It has nothing to do with Link, Chrysler, I swear. It has to do with us.”

“Us? What do we have to do with it? We didn’t kill her! We tried to save her!”

“I know. Please, don’t make me try to explain it.”

“Then, in this case you’ll have to excuse me, but I’m going to make the decision myself.”

“What decision?”

“The choice. The choice of necro Triad. I’m going to call the guys from Clockwork Orange County; they’re competing with Vortex now, which will let me cultivate my contacts there. And you can relax, since I’m not calling the Snake Zone guys.”

Yuri can find no words in reply. He feels so weak, so fragile in the face of his friend’s cold, mechanical will; he feels so close to the girl lying on the stretcher that he feels as if he is dead, but—intense astonishment pulsing in waves through his brain—at the bottom of this well of nothingness engulfing him, he can see a light.

Distant, perhaps, but a million suns are making the bonfire.

The response he might have given Campbell is in this furnace; it is in this fire that all the answers to all their questions can be found.

Campbell stows the body in a refrigerated box operated by a deuterium battery Link de Nova restored for them. It is a real medicolegal conservation box. The necro Triads know Yuri and Campbell as an occasional supply source, always at the cutting edge of technology.

For a few instants, Yuri envisions a sepulcher for the girl from X-15, a tomb like those he sees sometimes in that part of Heavy Metal Valley that has become a cemetery, among the automobile carcasses. A dignified,
easily seen tomb; a trace of what she was. She, as a unique being. A singular
place
.

Link de Nova murmured a rite earlier that belonged in a baptism or some sacrament—Yuri isn’t sure—in the back of the pickup truck. The girl should be buried here, where she died, in Aircrash Circle, instead of disappearing into the immense system of permanent recycling that is the city of Junkville.

Yuri remains silent all the rest of that day, conducting his own batteries of tests and leaving Chrysler to take the body in its refrigerated box to the township of Clockwork Orange.

The thing is feeding on us in every sense of the word
, he cannot stop himself from thinking.

Judith Sevigny is perhaps even a notch above beautiful. What should he call it? Sublime? Her simple presence flies splendidly in the hideous face of all the filth on this planet that is no longer anything but an experimental survival camp. It is a source of pure water that flows amid all the putrid garbage on the globe, immaculate, luminous, surreal. All by itself, it contradicts the very existence of this world. Her beauty, he thinks to himself, isn’t really human; it isn’t entirely of the animal world, but neither does it belong in the smoky universe of ghosts. She is as beautiful as the stars she is looking at; as beautiful as a landscape frozen in the rosy ice of dawn; as beautiful as the Grand Canyon; as beautiful as a whole ocean; as beautiful as a storm engulfing the world; as beautiful as a desert; as beautiful as the fall of an asteroid; as beautiful as a simple ray of light.

It is almost a miracle, he muses to himself; such beauty, contained in just a human body. As conscious as she must be of it, she takes great pains not to show it. And that is interior beauty, the true form of intelligence.

And Judith, he knows, is at seventeen years old one of the most intelligent and tactful women in the community.

He considers himself a pure and simple idiot next to her, an idiot who has been offered a mysterious gift in compensation.

His hands moist and his heart pumping like a turbo-engine as always, he moves toward the small veranda where he knows she will be.

Her secret garden.

Her “garage.”

Her night.

*   *   *

Her night, her “garage,” is the sky, of course.

The small house she has had installed at one end of her antique Dodge Caravan has a roof made of extremely transparent composite that possesses a polycarbon nanogrid built for maximum absorption of the effects of refraction. It also opens, using a system made of sliders and toothed wheels operated by a small electric motor.

And just under the roof, there is the telescope.

The astronomical telescope. Pointed toward a quadrant of the sky. And under the sky, under the composite roof, under the eye of the telescope, there is Judith Sevigny. Above her is the black and infinite sky, the myriads of glittering stars, the liquid silver halo of the starlight.

He can see her silhouette through the transparent walls of the veranda, bathed in the remaining dim light of the moon, which has just disappeared behind the horizon.

The low light makes her even more beautiful, more enticing. He feels a sudden erection press against the crotch of his worn fatigues. Cold sweat trickles down the back of his neck, though it must be at least 100 degrees outside. When he sees her, everything blurs inside him as if whipped up by an internal tornado, a vortex of paradoxical sensations, an infinity of variations on his own identity, the cosmos as a constantly reinvented singularity. To see her is to capture rays from the World of Beauty, a world not at all like the one in which they really live.