Grand Junction (74 page)

“Do you think you can defeat the Anome with the help of this energy?”

“It is its ontological enemy, Mother. Matter/antimatter, Light/anti-light.”

“That means that even if your energy is victorious, the world will be destroyed anyway.”

“No, Mother. It means that the world has already been destroyed, and that the Halo is the only force capable of restoring it.”

Yuri is standing beside Campbell, facing Djordjevic and Zarkovsky. The war between the Antenna, the Ark, the Neomachine—whatever its name—and what men in the Territory have recently begun calling the Anome will be a true war of the worlds. It will be a war of ward, the Supreme Mother of all battles. Yuri knows the hour of Armageddon has come. The alarm is resonating from one side of the planet to the other. He knows there will be no quarter on either side. He knows that the disappearance of the Library would mean the end of their world, the end of their war, the end of their freedom.

It is the last library.

Campbell looks at the shelves, crammed with books of all kinds. The windows of the large deluxe trailer have been painted with gray anti-UV coating to ensure the protection of the books against the deleterious effects of sunlight on cellulose. The inside of the vehicle is filled with dim bluish light, slightly silvery, lunar. It is beautiful, very beautiful. And very fragile. The cellulose is protected from UV rays, but printed ink has fallen into the hands of the Devolution.

“A county of two thousand five hundred men; one sheriff; more than twelve thousand books. And on the other side an entire ecology, a World, just as we warned you. Not to mention a desert as big as a continent.”

“David against Goliath. A very old story, my boy.”

“A story that was valid at a time when history still existed, Professor.
Now it isn’t David against Goliath, it is Humanity against the Flood. Except that the Flood is both mineral and symbolic, and it is part of Humanity itself. It is everything—everything except what we expected.”

“That’s because we still don’t know how to read the Scriptures after two thousand years—twice that, if you add the Old Testament,” says Djordjevic.

Campbell does not answer. He is silent and a bit pale. Yuri has noticed his companion’s unusual attitude; their gazes meet for an instant, as they usually do when a piece of heavenly certainty breaks free and falls at their feet.

Yes, thinks Yuri, knowing that Chrysler is thinking the same thing. It’s becoming more and more certain. A secret force is pushing us to adopt the HMV lifestyle—and it is no attempt at social adaptation. It comes from somewhere else, from somewhere deep inside us, from what we are becoming.

We are going to have to have ourselves baptized in our turn.

We are going to become Christians
.

If he had said to himself,
We are going to become extraterrestrials
, the stupefaction born of complete and obvious necessity would not have been any less intense.

But before he can talk to them about it, he must make sure that the Territory-within-the-Territory will be the Fortress they need. They will have to play their role as men of the Territory to the hilt. They will have to let the Law of Bronze become more luminous than the sun. Better to let Professor Zarkovsky and Milan Djordjevic speak. Let them speak so that it will be easier, when the time comes, to impose silence on them.

The Professor begins:

“No biotech firm specializing in the manufacture of androids has ever been able to pierce the mystery of the individuation of their machines, which are no longer machines. They are certainly creatures of the Creature, but they are not simple inanimate objects. They are living, autonomous, free beings—which gives rise to thriving conflicts with radical groups like Flandro. …”

“Individuation would never happen unless it was programmed as such,” continues Djordjevic. “It is not a simulation generated by lines of code. This was fully realized with the fourth-generation androids, but the symptoms were detected in some third-generation androids before that.
Individuation is not programmable because it is more than a program; it is a
plan of singularity
, and this ‘plan’ autoinitiates in a general bootstrap that comes from a process lasting from
in pseudo-utero
conception to birth, and then from birth to death, and which encompasses the simplest sequences of the genetic code as well as the most complex neural configurations. Individuation as a principle is not explicable solely according to the laws of biocellular chemistry or neurocybernetics. It was irritating for the companies’ bionicians, but was viewed favorably by the same firms’ financiers—it meant just that many fewer dollars spent on research and development.”

Zarkovsky takes up the thread again. “But the fact that individuation is not explicable solely by the laws of biochemistry does not mean that other scientific areas of study can’t be used to allow us, at the very least, to glimpse the truth. What no one understood at the time—obviously, there was no Duns Scotus teaching at MIT—was that the principle of individuation has little to do with anything ‘biological.’ It was cosmogenesis, non-Euclidean and non-Aristotelian mathematics, generative linguistics, and quantum physics that were of most use to us. And it is also what the Library showed us—Djordjevic and me—before the Fall. We guessed that the problem posed by the ‘spontaneous’ individuation of the fourth-generation androids and that raised by the final form of the Metastructure were connected. Then, after the Fall, we both understood—separately—that this problem applied even more to the Post-Machine entity.”

“And now that the Post-Machine is changing into a new entity, our only chance is to be brought together, all of us, here, with the Library.”

Campbell lets a few seconds tick by—the time necessary for a sniper to hold his breath before firing the fatal shot. “You don’t understand, I’m afraid.”

“What don’t we understand?”

“The essential thing. Your Library will be gone in a few months. Even Link’s cosmomagnetic Antenna can’t stop this mutation, which is attacking neither humans nor even androids nor language, but their written productions.”

“What do you suggest?”

“It’s neither my place nor Yuri’s to make suggestions, Mr. Djordjevic, but we know that your son came to see you to explain his idea to you, and we think he’s right, as always.”

“A dozen books have already been completely erased; another twenty are beginning to devolve—including some Bibles from the Vatican. Nothing
seems able to resist this mutation, not even the Holy Scriptures. My son’s strategy is the right one, I know, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough time.”

“Your son is the one who can get you the time and help you need. I’m afraid for us it’s the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“Yes. For once we need others to help us. In this particular case, we have no other choice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A baptism,” replies Campbell. “Two, in fact. Immediately, if possible.”

Djordjevic looks at Campbell and Yuri in turn. Territory men. Young killers. Young killers who fought for the Library, who are fighting for life, and who will fight to the death to save his son, Link de Nova.

“Your problems are just beginning, young men. I’ll go find Father Newman,” he answers, simply.

Welcome to the Territory

Welcome to the stealth bomber of the invisible truth

Welcome to the Territory

You will enter the sanctuary of the most dangerous truce
.

Our problems began at birth, thinks Yuri. They are the Territory; they are what we are.

They are what has permitted us to survive and resist until now. They are what has led us to make this request. They are what is still leading us to take the greatest risk.

They are the only freedom we have left.

Since the previous night, the sky has been an immense silvery dome embracing the whole Territory with its aerial shield. Clouds have come from all directions; they are accumulating with the unpredictable patience of the elements above the last men, their homes, their crimes, their hopes.

“Twelve rockets. Twelve rockets in two hours. Even in the era of the Metastructure that never happened, Master Cybion.”

“Smoke and mirrors, Mr. Silverskin, I assure you. They restored the cosmodrome to working order—well and good—but I promise it will make no difference in the end. They have a launchpad, yes, but nothing left to launch.”

“What it really means is that their fucking machine is operating at 100 percent. That it is capable of repairing sophisticated technology—not to mention the spontaneous remissions it is causing by the thousands.”

“We are causing healings, too. The difference is that members of the church are guaranteed immortality. That’s a bonus that will skyrocket in value very fast.”

“I have very trustworthy informants who tell me the remissions caused by the machine go far beyond the Territory. Belfond met a guy from West Virginia who told him about whole series of true miracles.”

Cybion I smiles.

“Silverskin, the only true miracle is the one the Anome can bestow on humanity. As for the remissions their machine is causing, you should think about how much that will serve our interests.”

“How?”

“The simple law of competition. The necro Triads are beginning to hurt for work in the Territory. Add it up: Our evangelists are distributing hundreds of the Anome’s capsules every day now. People are making the
connection fast. When the ones healed by their machine realize that ours have also been healed,
plus
given the gift of immortality,
and
that they are part of a global community of permanent recycling, they will come to us. Not dying is good.
Never
dying is even better.”

Silverskin watches the purple crow circling his mobile home. For some time now the bird has been living on one of the pylons atop the butte. Silverskin has gotten used to its presence. The bird comes and goes regularly between Junkville and the northern parts of the Territory. Silverskin wonders for an instant if it ever flies to Heavy Metal Valley, if it has gotten close to the luminous machine, if it is aware of the militarization of the county’s border by the sheriff—more than two hundred heavily armed men, according to Belfond—and if it has glimpsed any special relationship between the boy with extraordinary powers and the emergence of this unknown technology. If it has seen the Professor. If it has detected the presence of two or three androids.

Cybion I, however, is preoccupied with things much closer to the ground.

“You’ve got to tell Belfond that he absolutely has to get inside their fucking county.”

“Belfond is our best man, Master. If he tells me no one can get in, that means an entire army couldn’t do it.”

“I need confirmation.”

“Confirmation of what?”

“There is a strange quantum correlation happening between me and the other androids, a divergence I can’t understand. And I detest unanswered questions. Especially when they have to do with artificial humans.”

Silverskin knows that Cybion I has no desire whatsoever for the destruction of humanity; he simply wants it to be “interfaced,” for its own good, with the Anome.

On the other hand, he does intend the definitive extermination of the last androids of his own species, however many of them might be left.

We always hate those most similar to us. It is one of the oldest human laws, and it is apparently shared by artificial men.

“What has you so worried, Master?”

“I am detecting a very powerful intensity differential in this correlation. It functions almost normally with two of the androids, the ones I’ve identified as coming from the Orbital Ring.”

“From the Ring? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure, though I still can’t explain it. But they aren’t the
ones causing the problem—it’s the third one. I can’t identify it; I don’t know if it is a male, female, or androgynous model. It’s still very difficult for me to locate. It sometimes disappears from my field of perception, and when I can find it, it is only a vague silhouette, nothing concrete, no usable information. I want to know what’s going on.”

“You don’t know the sheriff’s men. Belfond will never be able to get in. We might as well send him directly to Lake Champlain to drown himself.”

“I have to know, Silverskin. Don’t forget that the last mutation, the alphanumeric devolution, is double-edged; it also destroys everything that is written. And androids are designed and built with lines of code.”

“I know all of that very well, Master; that is why all artificial humans will die, in the Name of the universal Anome.”

“That is how they are
intended
to die. But there is a sort of obstacle blocking the mutation, blocking it from individuating in them—especially the third one, the unidentified one. I can sense perfectly well that the antiscriptural attack is having no effect on that one.”

“It’s their fucking magnetic machine, Master Cybion. Until we destroy it, there’s nothing we can do—especially including getting into HMV.”

When Cybion I smiles, it is as if he is exhaling an invisible toxic cloud.

“I don’t think Belfond can learn anything there. Is it worth it to risk the life of one of our best men when we don’t even know what we’re looking for? Don’t forget that I sent him and his whole team to help the bishop of Grand Funk Railroad put down a rebellion there. That seems much more important to me—begging your pardon, Master.”

“Rebellions are easily quashed. They’re only men. I will have to destroy the last androids on Earth myself, and this entity is preventing me from doing it.”

“What entity? Their machine?”

“No, that’s what I don’t understand. It doesn’t seem related at all. There is a mystery here, and no mystery can be impenetrable for the Anome. In the world of the Anome everything will be transparent. Secrecy will be prohibited; all mysteries will be forbidden. I cannot really begin my work for the Anome as long as this caliber of secret exists in the Territory.”