Grand Junction (29 page)

“That’s exactly right, Mr. Campbell, but any ‘concrete’—meaning ‘military’—approach is out of the question in this case. We can’t concretely approach an entity that has no concrete existence. We can’t make ‘war’ against an entity whose objective is to pacify absolutely everything.”

“So what, then?” demands Chrysler, dryly.

“The Scriptures, Mr. Campbell. If the Thing is able to ‘transcribe’ men into numeric data, it is in being able to do the reverse that we will have a chance to put a stop to its plans.”

“The reverse?”

“Once again, the Scriptures, Mr. Campbell. Everything is written there, including and especially what we are experiencing. The End of the World. It’s up to us to know how to ‘transcribe’ what the text tells us.”

“How will that help us fight the Thing?”

“Because we will know what to call it, though it has no name and cannot have one. We will understand its maleficent ‘numeric’ presence, because Numbers are divine creations; we will be able to send it back to its Nothingness, because we will be able to understand its genetic ‘code.’ In short, we will be able to destroy it.”

“So that’s it? Your library?”

“Exactly that, Mr. Campbell.”

Yuri is silent, stupefied, and at the same time excited by the revelation that a library might prove to be a weapon of mass destruction.

It is the most reassuring thought he has had in months.

The discussion continues into the depths of the night, though it is slowed by the crushing weight of fatigue. But the fatigue itself seems to provide a paradoxical boost to attention, concentration, glimmers of hope.

The night is not really made to hide secrets, but to bring the truth to light. One day, Chrysler had told Yuri: “The best way to hide something is to make it visible to the whole world.” A twentieth-century man wrote a story on the subject, “The Purloined Letter”—Edgar Allan Poe. The “vanished” letter was simply in its place on the desk.

The night is the secret of day. And daylight is the best hiding place in the world. Therein is the indication of “intensified inversions” Professor Zarkovsky speaks of. Therein is a mysterious sign concerning the Thing, and what remains of humanity on Earth. Especially them.

The Professor has picked up the thread of a discussion with Chrysler; Yuri forces him to focus on the conversation.

“Let’s go back to the problem posed by the Antichrist, if that’s all right. He, too, like the Metastructure was, is caught in a double ontological constraint. If he comes ‘before’ Christ, who, being God, is eternal, that means that he comes from the Nothingness, and thus that he is also located ‘after,’ meaning in two impossible places, and more than that, two
incompossible
ones.

“But if Christ is the incarnation of the Unique, the Antichrist—who is also his
absolute
opposite, by definition, since Christ is
absolutely
God—operates according to a process of
disincarnation
of the Multiple; it directly attacks the
principle of individuation
, according to our old friend Duns Scotus, also called ‘the Subtle Doctor’; it directly attacks what causes a person not to be an individual, even if their ideas are disconnected, just as humanity is not man.”

“Can you explain that, please?”

“Ah … yes. An individual is
indivis
, indivisible; that is his definition, but not what defines his personality, because that is at once infinitely divided and infinitely unique, since as an ‘image of God’ it reflects his properties of First Cause: all in God is infinite, even the smallest of his parts, which are infinite in number. In addition, the ‘Thing,’ the Post-Machine, whatever name it goes by, must constantly seek the means to maximally disincarnate the Multiples, in other words, the individuals that still populate the globe. At the same time it faces two problems that combine to make only one:

“One, it must paradoxically find the means to incarnate itself—that is, to individuate itself in a single person, even though by nature, when it places itself into an individual unit, it is so that it can—also paradoxically—divide it.

“Two, it must disincarnate that in which it is incarnate, which creates an irreconcilable contradiction.”

Yuri glances out a nearby window. In turning his head, he catches for a brief instant the magnetic gaze of Judith Sevigny.

Its violet glow dances before his eyes even after he trains them straight ahead on the night-blue square of the sky.

He sighs, murmuring: “The Post-Machine is developing even with its apparent contradictions. For it, paradoxes aren’t problems. They’re solutions.”

No one answers him.

That is why we haven’t reached the end of our troubles, he thinks.

That is why it is absolutely necessary to protect Link de Nova and his powers.

That is why Sheriff Langlois did well to strengthen his security measures.

That is why, whatever form it takes, the “war” against the Thing, despite what Professor Zarkovsky thinks, will be the most terrible humanity has ever known, or will ever know.

Because this time, not only will it have brought the war on itself, as always, but for the very first time, and undoubtedly the last, it will be fighting directly against its own World.

Yes, to be exact: its own World will bring down on it the worst war of extermination in its entire history.

At dawn, everyone still in the mobile home falls asleep. Judith Sevigny departed a few minutes earlier; Link de Nova returned to his small personal trailer at the same time. Chrysler curls up in the reclined first-class airplane seat; Professor Zarkovsky sleeps on the camp bed, where he snores like a buzz saw. Sydia Nova and Djordjevic have gone to their small bedroom, separated from the rest of the trailer by a double partition.

Yuri goes outside for a breath of air. The icy air, the compressed steel heaps glittering like diamonds. The varnished-turquoise sky. The faint glow on the horizon, signaling the imminent arrival of the sun. The persistent memory of two violet eyes in the dimness.

Everything seems so pure, so full of soft and serene beauty. The light itself seems to want to speak of this beauty, and yet we are in the middle of the Camp. The Camp-World. And we are only the Doctors.

Yuri looks for a moment at the enormous retaining wall the sheriff erected during the Second Fall. They had moved tons and tons of chassis, reshaping them into this rectangle of pure metal that turned Heavy Metal Valley into a virtually impregnable fortress.

He remembers a thought that occurred to him during the previous night.

No. They will not be the armor, the titanium shield protecting Link de Nova from the invisible arrows of the Thing, and by so doing, protecting the rest of humanity.

Because the Thing seems to come from nowhere, to be nothing but a “nowhere” itself; maybe a single, specific “place” would be able to fight it.

There is undoubtedly a titanium shield, hidden or exposed, somewhere in the Territory. But for Yuri, as he watches the day break over the Valley of Heavy Metal, it is becoming evident that Wilbur Langlois’ steel castle is the best place to fulfill this role.

It isn’t enough for Link de Nova to give life back to machines.

Here, it is the machines that will stand guard over
his
life.

When Link wakes up, around noon, he quickly realizes that Chrysler Campbell’s pickup is gone. His father is working with the Professor on the construction of the “laboratory,” not far from Bulldozer Park, where they have taken possession of a long Greyhound autocar that doesn’t run but is perfectly suited to their needs.

His mother is probably taking a walk, as is her habit, along the retaining wall toward the Ridge.

And Judith …

Better to erase her image from his memory.

He goes straight to his hangar, a bit higher up near Cadillac Avenue.

There, the music-making machines are waiting for him.

There, he will surely be able to make the image fade.

There, his pain might lessen a little.

He opens the door, which goes up with a groan, and enters the warehouse, where several biophosphorescent lamps light automatically around the room.

The machines are there, and they truly seem to be waiting for him, eager to be turned on, to see their small diodes blink, impatient to feel the shiver of electric current run through their bodies again.

Yes—here, he can calmly forget humanity. Especially his own. That is, if he really possesses any.

Okay. “Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” The song is ready. In two successive nights it has totally come together. Oasis, 1994, maybe the pinnacle of what was known as “rock music” for fifty years.

Such an obvious riff, so powerfully laid out. The compact mass of guitars,
the mixed voice just above the harmonic rumble. The entire soul of electronic music is there. The basics don’t lie in the frantic search for “originality” at any price, but in the development of a specific synthesis of chaos previously abandoned, like in the middle of the ruins of a blitz dropped from a sonorous sky.

There are two or three thousand rock pieces whose main riff is, in its rhythmical organization and its harmonic intervals, absolutely the same.

What counts is the singular energy you project onto this musical matter. What counts is the sound particular to your electric guitar and how this acoustic substance is able to make its mark on the ear that hears it. What counts are the microvariations, the inverted chords, the arpeggios, the changes in keynote, et cetera, that make this impersonal appropriation of the riff possible.

Rock permits this strange symbiosis between the personal and the impersonal; in this, Link believes, it belongs to a singular form of poetry. The poetry of machines. The poetry of electricity. The poetry of supersonic speed. The poetry of accident. The poetry of catastrophe.

The poetry of the End of the World, whose coming it announces in violent explosions.

Electric rock “announces” the Apocalypse; it uses it as its main principle in the very tension of its own staging. In “showing” it, it makes it even more mysterious. In disguising it as a spectacle, it makes it even more monstrous.

But the deconstruction of the World is already happening, anyway, in all of society.

So, now: “Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” that pop hymn of the teenagers of the very last World, that
ballroom blitz
of the 1990s, that stratospheric
get it on
that propels your entire being toward clouds ready to burst at any instant.

He remembers what Yuri told him the night before, when they arrived with Campbell.

It plays in his head, a few words, like a riff contained in a handful of chords.

Yuri was right—but even he didn’t know just how right.

He and Chrysler truly are the “Camp Doctors;” of that there is no doubt.

But he, utterly and conclusively, is all alone—and all alone, he forms the
Camp Orchestra
.

The body of his electric guitar curves inward like a sphere inside the hangar, echoing the surface of its polymetallic structures. It is an unimpeachable
barrier between him and the world. Acoustic waves fill the vast space like water in a swimming pool. Diodes blink, screens glint, VU meters waver in cadence, needles quiver in their dials. The hangar is like a world within the world.

The music seems as if it might be able to hold beauty, naturally ephemeral as it is, on a line of tension stretching into infinity, he thinks. So the music might be able to keep the image of Judith Sevigny constantly alive.

It does not bring forgetfulness, as he thought until now.

It brings consciousness, and all its dangers. It brings the idea that even inside the Camp, beauty cannot be completely annihilated. It brings the strange certainty that liberty is not found
outside
the Camp, because it no longer exists there. The Camp and the World are one now, and both of them are located in the very heart of his machine.

Now on to “Ultra Violet,” one of U2’s most beautiful songs; the Irish group probably best encapsulates what music produced for three-quarters of a century.

In discovering their work by means of his mysterious dream “downloads,” and in comparing them to others, he has come to a realization that leaves no room for doubt.

It was probably not preconceived on the part of these artists, but during all the time he spent exploring the mass of music in his dreams and then translating it when awake through his guitars and synthesizers, the evidence had come to him in droves, like so many stars in the Milky Way.

This fundamental discovery of the “archetypal” structure of the rock ’n’ roll riff, for example, with its basic harmonic cadences, its pentagonal range inspired by Celtic songs, its sometimes paradoxical manner of bringing together the most angular rhythmic figures with the color of the most tender melodies. The techniques of alternating chords and the dominant between bass and guitar, especially for transitions from couplets to refrains.

Another achievement that has come to him after several years of practice on different recording and sound-processing machines, illuminating the origin and the end of this music from a surprising angle: after a bit of somewhat risky trial and error, Link has managed to work on multiple tracks in such a way as to copy and splice together the original vocals of Brian Eno, Björk, Goldfrapp, Bauhaus, Lou Reed, or Syd Barrett in order to combine them with arrangements literally inspired by the lieder of Strauss, Mahler, and Brahms. It is with real surprise mingled with profound
questioning that he has realized that a number of the vocal melodies that sometimes accompany the sound walls of his electric guitar and the sampled rhythms on his factory soundtracks seem, as if by magic, to fit together and prove almost harder, more violent, icy, with a simple cello or harpsichord or a small chamber orchestra—that is, in the purest a cappella expression.

If the vocal tracks of a song by Garbage, for example, can be perfectly recreated in the form of a classic lied, where then is the split, the separation, the disconnection?