Grand Junction (33 page)

In front of him, a row sparsely covered with a layer of gravel runs alongside a line of blue maples, a mutant species that appeared only within the last forty years or so as far as he knows, and there to the south, almost as far as the horizon, glitter the headlights of Yuri and Chrysler’s pickup truck.

If he can find a way this time, Campbell explains, there will be a huge reward. A 1977 Rickenbacker, a 1988 Gibson Flying V, a Guild semihollow
metal guitar from the early 1970s, a Mesa Boogie amplifier, and a Roland RE-501 soundproof echo chamber. They don’t function perfectly, of course, but fixing them would be child’s play for Link.

No—of course, the true problem is the man who possesses these treasures, and is ready to hand them over if he can recover the use of language. He is a problem, like all the others were.

For now, he can easily repair these simple electric machines that are now being attacked in their turn by the Thing. The machines are still within his reach.

But until now the Thing has managed, thanks to this “second mutation,” to widen the gap between itself and him, in a sense that is not biological.

Link is acutely aware of the sharp double-edge of frustration and anger at the center of his attention, his thoughts, his will.

He will not let the Thing get away with this. He will find …

He will find a way. He will find
the
way.

He will find weakness, and he will strike there with all his might.

Yes, he will find it.

Tonight.

Fat bastard of a Nothingness
, he thinks.
I am the mouth, and you are just a boot
.

I will swallow you
.

Among the electrical systems to be repaired besides the victim’s instruments, there are several machines from Deadlink and Vortex Townships, Campbell says. Microprocessor-based machines that are still suffering the consequences of the first mutation, the one in ’63. The trial run.

And then there are the small, simple machines—coffee mills, mini-ovens, radios, batteries, razors, electric lightbulbs, microengines of all types—the sort of thing he sees regularly now. It is all quickly taken care of, as usual.

Link’s thoughts are simple:
It will not come between me and electricity
.

Now, though, comes the real problem, descending from the back of the pickup in Yuri’s arms.

This problem that, whoever the individual involved, proves every time that the Thing
is
managing to come between men and their language.

Link cannot shake the ephemeral suspicion that the two problems are closely connected.

How many times has he experienced this scene over the past two years? How many times has he had the feeling that he isn’t acting, as his father thinks, for the sake of personal gain? He has even saved a few people without receiving anything in return—like the stray adolescent with no family, hardly older than himself, that the two men brought to him one winter night, his entire antileukemia system in arrest; or the young Japanese woman Chrysler knew in a little Ontarian township called LaCrosse Terrain, who had nothing more than a makeshift shelter to live in, whose renal bio-implants had all failed at once, sending her into a hasty physical decline?

Everything has changed in a very short time, with this Third Fall, with the men and women Yuri bring to him in their truck. These humans who are coming face-to-face with their limitations. With their deaths.

The man is standing in front of him, unsteady from the effects of Chrysler’s various injections.

A sort of biker. An old Hells Angel from Montreal, Campbell says. He is from a township located just south of the city of Grand Junction. They have managed to learn that he played in one of the very last Canadian rock groups when he was eighteen or twenty years old. He had managed to preserve several twentieth-century instruments but now, stricken by the alphanumeric devolution, he would sell all the Harley-Davidsons and Gibsons on the planet rather than die like a modem.

Link can’t say where this sensation comes from, this feeling as if all his thoughts are taking shape within him—a dazzling composition, a summary infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

It is very simple, very clear, mysteriously obvious.

Until now he has vainly tried the method successfully tested again and again after the ’63 mutation: applying his hands to the victim’s body, then improvising language, taking possession of the other person’s body more or less briefly and penetrating his brain, giving new sense to all the organs that have become ontologically separate from one another, and then imparting new life to nanorobotic implants and clusters of modified cells.

But that method no longer works at all for the victims of alphanumeric devolution.

And it suddenly seems so logical! How can he hope to fight an entity that attacks language with language itself, human language?

His intuition is so clear, so crystalline. It is all here, right here, surging like a flash of light from the depths of his consciousness.

In fighting human linguistic devolution, neither biological nor mechanical, human language—even glossolalic—is of no use, obviously!

Rather, to combat this symbolic trap—neither biological nor mechanical, but located in the “disjunctive synthesis” of the two—closing in on humanity, on its language, they must use a countertrap that is equally symbolic—neither biological nor mechanical—but that opens up the possibility of language, through electricity,
for machines
. You don’t trap water with water, but with sand. You don’t trap sand with sand, but with trees. You don’t trap light with light, but with a crystal.

One day Yuri told him, laughing, of a rumor they were spreading about a mythical “Anti-Machine” located somewhere in the south of the Territory. It was a decoy, a manipulation, a lie, inasmuch as it had no real value against the biological/mechanical destruction wrought by the first mutation.

But now, with this “intensified inversion,” as Professor Zarkovsky calls it, with this numerization of language, only the electric language of the Machine, only the singular aesthetic tension born of its individuation as
poesis
projecting beyond itself, only the serial chaos of riffs as infinite combinations of the physical, concrete, real uprising of the World of the Machine animated both materially and stylistically by electricity—that is, in a way,
at once specifically and individually
—yes, only the language/ electricity of the machine might be able to …

He has to try. He feels it—yes—there is the weak spot.
He
is the weakness in the Thing’s strategy.

It is the fact that music-making machines are extensions of him. And that he knows their whole language.

He connects the Gibson to the Mesa Boogie. Jack input. Volume turned down almost to nothing, a distant stridence indicating the potential Larsen effect. At first he simply lets his hands rest on the body of the guitar, on the flesh of the machine, with the organic electricity pulsing near the strings. He understands the meaning of each act as he does it. He no longer needs to touch “human” bodies that are being symbolically deconstructed; he can capture, through simple contact between his body and that of the guitar, and with the aid of his hyperdeveloped intuition, the notes, the sounds, the riffs, the rhythms, the harmonies, the
texts
whose substance is, by nature, the enemy of the anti-substance of the Thing.

The electric language of the infinitely individuated machine against the numeric mechanization of the language of indefinitely divided humans.
Yes, that seems to correspond with the concepts his father has been talking to Professor Zarkovsky about.
“Without music, life would be a mistake,” said
a nineteenth-century author he only just discovered.

To which he now mentally adds:
without life, music would be a concept
.

I am the Camp Orchestra. You can kill all of us one after the other, but you can’t kill music, because the Orchestra is not made only of living beings who play, it is also made of all those who died playing.

He needs no physical contact, because the physical will be undulatory, electroacoustic supertension operating in the interface space that connects their two brains; he does not need to use glossolalia, because the texts exist, the words exist, the Word exists, and he is inextricably linked to the very form of the electric fireballs of which he is the halo—the visible trace of the eternal relationship between meaning and symbol.

The hardest one to convince of the reality of his remission ends up being the biker himself—but, as Campbell whispers to him: “Fortunately, the programmable scopolamine will begin to take effect in less than an hour. When I drop him at his house, he’ll thank me for the lift, wondering what bar we met in. And tomorrow morning he won’t remember a thing.”

To which Yuri McCoy retorts: “We, on the other hand, had better not forget anything at all.”

This, it turns out, is the day of the great convergence of catastrophes. The day of darkest secrets, the night of illuminated mysteries.

A day and a night like no other. A day and a night that seem to have been planned long ago, in some bunker now scattered with the sands of time.

Everything seems to have led here, doesn’t it? To his last visit to the Hotel Laika, to his meeting with the man from Junkville, who knows one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Territory.

To this very night when, finally, after months of fruitless research, the solution has appeared to him—sudden, brilliant, and pitiless toward all their previous theories, all their presuppositions, all their conclusions, like the precipitous discovery of a new chemical compound.

When he has at last managed to “empty” a man of the digital nothingness invading him.

When, with a simple succession of chords and the soft singing of an old Steppenwolf song, “Born to Be Wild”—practically a hymn to the Hells Angels—he has managed to penetrate a man’s neural “black box,” to unlock it and permit the man to resume, undivided, his own process of individuation, cut off by the Thing in its quest to create a monolithic “indivisible” of which the infinite division, paradoxically, is carried out only numerically.

Link knows he is utilizing the concepts of John Duns Scotus, the successor of Saint Thomas Aquinas according to his father and the Professor, who for days have spoken of little other than Scotus and the imminent arrival of the library with all its books, including those of this English Franciscan who developed a theology that alone can, according to them, explain and block the expansion of the Post-Machine. They are concepts
that Link understands with a sort of natural ease that surprises no one more than himself—not so much the fact that he is able without difficulty to assimilate the ideas of late-thirteenth-century authors, but the much more troubling fact that these thirteenth-century men are able to speak to him across a distance of almost eight hundred years, about his own condition and about the current state of the world.

Yes—this is definitely a day for the conjunction of active principles, a day for two complementary parts of a critical mass to be put in place. The detonator is ready; soon the intense brilliance of a whole sun’s worth of light will come to irradiate what certainties are left to them.

The convergence of catastrophes. The final human experiment.

The Territory. The library. The Professor. Link and his powers. Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell. The talking dog. The Thing. The secret of the Hotel Laika.

His own secret. The secret that has to do with him. The secret he doesn’t know.

Every secret is a clandestine tomb where the truth rests, buried alive for its own protection.

Every secret is a cemetery filled with all those who died for it, or against it.

Every secret is a treaty, signed with darkest night and sealed with the most blinding light there is.

Every secret is a game. Every secret is a weapon. Every secret is a trap. Every secret is a law. Every secret is an act of justice.

That is why, since the dawn of time, true alliances are mystical—why any association of humans coming together to resist one sort of despotism or another form, de facto, a “secret society.”

It isn’t easy for Link, especially so shortly after the extraordinary experience they have just had. He is still holding the Gibson Flying V in front of his stomach, still strumming the Steppenwolf riff in a semidazed state.

Chrysler has quickly grasped the incredible return to normal of the Hells Angel from Electra Glide. After mastering his astonishment, he asks the man to sit in the pickup’s backseat. He attaches several nanomodule connections to the man’s body and arranges a scanner around his head, then administers a series of injections.

Meanwhile, Link approaches Yuri and says, his voice scratchy as steel wool: “I need to talk to you. Urgently.”

“I don’t think there’s anything to add, Link. The Camp Orchestra performed brilliantly tonight!”

“It—it’s important, Yuri.”

The redheaded man laughs. “You just found a way to stop the second mutation in a few seconds! You saved the world! You’re right—it is important.”

“It has to do with the Thing, Yuri, but it’s something else.”

“Something else?”

“Somewhere
else, actually.”

“What are you talking about, Link?”

“It’s somewhere else. A place in Monolith Hills. This place is connected to the end of the Metastructure, and—”

“Oh no, Link, don’t tell me you’re falling for the oldest rumor in the Territory.”

Chrysler Campbell emerges from the truck holding a WiFi micropad connected to his biological operations center, with long columns of numbers scrolling across the screen. Link wonders for an instant just what the data might be, now that the man has been healed. How different might it be from the codes of the human beings who are already dead or dying?

“It’s not a rumor. I went there.”

“You went where?” asks Campbell, his eyes on the small screen with its moving diagrams and lists of numbers.