Grand Junction (75 page)

“The Territory is made of secrets. And of secrets betrayed. It’s the Law, as they say.”

“The Territory is the beginning of our world. Utopia. I am the Law of the Territory now, Silverskin. There is no other.”

There is no possible reply to this; power is nothing but a lie creating the truth. That is the Law, too. Even the purple crow now soaring toward the northwest would probably agree.

Besides, it’s true.

Link watches the winged silhouette of the large Territory crow whirl above Bulldozer Park for a few moments before settling atop the vertical exhaust pipe of a very old Kenworth truck. The bird is a creature of habit.

It comes here more and more often these days. It always comes from the south. It is the only living being able to cross the border into the Fortress. It is the only living being able to enter and leave the Territory-within-the-Territory at will.

“It isn’t only attacking the Library, Gabriel.”

“I know, Mother.
Everything
written.”

“Including the bionic programs that serve as DNA pseudocodes for us, you realize?”

The Anome digitalizes the language of living beings and unwrites thought stored in dead memory. Link stares at his mother, feeling a stab of fear. “Are you feeling its effects, Mother?”

Sydia Nova smiles uneasily. “No; not me, Gabriel, but I can see it in the others, in their biological clocks.”

“The others? You mean the astronauts?”

“Yes. One of them doesn’t know it yet, but billions of lines of code will have been erased in a few hours. It’s more random for the other one, happening in pieces.”

“You say they don’t know about it yet—how can you know it, then?”

“I can also read the clock of the other one—the one outside, the one who wants to destroy us.”

“And you read that he is preparing to destroy the two androids from the Ring?”

“No,” answers his mother. “He isn’t preparing to do it; he has already begun doing it.”

Link realizes that nothing can change the situation; it is too late, even for them to return to orbit. The androids will die. They don’t know it. His mother does.

She must know when, down to the very minute.

She knows what no one has the right to know.

Except here, in the Territory.

The Territory, which knows the worst there is. The Territory, which keeps Beauty intact in the face of abomination, and abomination intact in the face of Beauty. The Territory, where secrets grow like weeds. The Territory, where weeds hide the most terrible, most undisclosable secrets.

Welcome to the Territory

Yes, I am the camouflage world that hides the man who lives in its core

Welcome to the Territory

Do not believe in reality look at me, can’t you see it’s not me anymore?

Yuri looks at Link de Nova, an unreadable expression on his face, an expression even he would not have recognized in a mirror.

“Father Newman is baptizing us tomorrow. Chrysler and me.”

“I know; my mother told me. Welcome to the Kingdom, Yuri.”

“
Welcome to the Territory …
I know.”

Yuri’s voice is slightly veiled by an emotion Link has never seen in him before. This will not be a baptism of convenience. Strange as it may seem, the two young bounty hunters have been touched by Grace—and, Link realizes, it didn’t happen in a single, sudden Revelation. It has come slowly, like the gradual and patient effect of acid on metal.

But even the hardest metal, the most solid alloy, the most resistant armor, cannot hold out for long in the face of the infinitely destructive power of truth in action, which is
given freely
.

Yuri holds out a sheet of paper to Link.

“What’s that?”

“‘Welcome to the Territory,’ Link. I’ve written another version of your song. You can also use these new couplets and refrains in your own piece, if you want.”

“A song? You’re writing songs now?”

Yuri does not answer.

Is he writing? Well, he has written these stanzas, in any case.

Is he writing? Something has wanted to exist through these words, through him, during these past weeks.

Link reads the words written on the paper with care, in total silence. He slowly raises his eyes to meet Yuri’s.

“Will it kill you if I give you a compliment?”

“Are you going to make music out of it?”

“It’s like fate,” laughs the boy, showing Yuri his Gibson Les Paul leaning against the hangar wall. “I’m going to write a second version. And just in time, too. I can use it.”

“But all you have left is your guitar!”

Link’s laugh is a spiral of light rising in the dry summer air. Yuri realizes, astonished, that the globe of light is a perfectly integrated reality for him, no longer eliciting any surprise. Link, the Halo-Child: his identity has become indivisible from this transmutation; it is its sudden disappearance that would cause shock and fear now.

“The guitar is the baton I use to conduct the Camp Orchestra—which is now a war machine hovering above Xenon Ridge. The Neomachine is also a recording studio and radio station; it factorizes all the technologies that make it up. The Ark is the Territory Radio multiplied by the Production Studio, which is all multiplied by transfinite Electricity.”

“Transfinite?”

“Electricity is the energetic manifestation of Logos; it is the invisible face of Light, the infinite ‘individuation’ of it. Always remember this:
‘Through faith, we understand that worlds are formed by the word of God, so that what we see comes from what is not visible.’
Saint Paul in his letter to the Hebrews, 11:3. Your help will be invaluable, I think. My mother says the Agent of the Thing is planning a huge offensive against all of us.”

“The Ark can’t protect us at all?”

“The Mutation has moved into another dimension—it is attacking writing, as you know. The news about the Library isn’t good. But the Neomachine can’t do anything against this specific phase of the devolution. It is still working perfectly against all the others, though, and it becomes more efficient by the hour.”

Yuri thinks: The devolution striking humanity and machines can only be stopped by a singular process of individuation of the Machine that only Link could produce. His successive machines have been able to defeat the devolutionary Mutation in all its forms.

Except one. The antiscriptural devolution that is attacking books—or, more precisely, written language, its external inscription—can only be stopped by the production of a single book.

A book that can tell the story of everything that has happened here, everything that has happened and everything that will happen.

*   *   *

“That’s it, Yuri. The Orbital Ring started its migration last night. Judith told me; she watched the first departures.”

Yuri raises his eyes instinctively to the sky. In a few days the artificial stars of the Ring will disappear from their nighttime view. Space’s humanity is headed for the planet Mars along with masses of asteroids and moon rocks and the stores of oxygen, carbon, and metals orbiting slowly around their enormous clusters of rockets and orbiters.

This time, it really is the end of human History, the
omega
point. Earth is left alone, humanity delivered back to itself in every sense of the term.

“What will happen if the Thing destroys the Library?”

“My father hasn’t stopped writing for more than a week now; he gathered up all his old manuscripts and shut himself up in his little study. Even the Professor doesn’t dare bother him.”

“Do you really think his manuscript will stop the antiscriptural devolution?”

“The Library’s, at least. I know his manuscript contains it, in potential. That manuscript is like a symbolic ‘Territory’ capable of protecting the creatures that live in it—and the books that serve its development. The books we have brought here.”

“And the androids from the Ring?” asks Yuri.

When only silence greets the question, when he sees the well-known dark shadow fall across the face of the boy with the enchanted guitar, when he hears his breathing stop for an instant, Yuri cannot say a word.

He raises his eyes skyward, reflexively.

The zenith has taken on the tint of tarnished silver. To the south, the black-and-bronze shadow of a sandstorm is rising again. To the north, the virginal whiteness of a great blizzard has already engulfed half the sky.

If we want to save this world, our only chance is to destroy it.

Chrysler Campbell has seen many, many men die before his eyes. Often they have died by his hand. More often still they fall to the Territory ground, touched by this invisible Mithridates who kills with its presence alone.

He has seen many men die. Women, too. And children.

This is the first time he has been present at the death throes of an android.

It is the female, Sky Lumina. She cannot last more than another hour; maybe two, if she is particularly unlucky.

Massive unwriting of lines of DNA pseudocode. General breakdown of vital functions. Organic devolution via the erasing of biogenerative nanoblocks. Loss of memory, linguistic functions, senses of sight, hearing, touch, and balance. Accelerated degeneration of cellular tissues. Systematic extermination of nerve cells. Overall failure of integrated bionic systems. Virulent attack of lymphocytes and erythrocytes. Metabolic malfunctions of all types.

When affecting artificial humans, the Devolution synthesizes all the preceding mutations into a single phase. What is formally distinct in man, as various realities subsisting as a unit in one individual, is only one reality for androids. Writing, language, biology, symbolic, organic, mechanical—all is hybridized in them, and held together only by their original written programming. Even their mysterious individuation, their ability to self-singularize, is inseparable from the rest. If men are indivisible and thus divide all other realities, androids are infinitely divided, and it is their
reality
—the program—that maintains their unity.

Sky Lumina will die.

Her companion, kneeling by her side, knows perfectly well that he is next on the list. He knows it might begin at any second. He knows neither of them will ever see the Ring again. They will die here, on the Earth of the last men. This Earth to which they don’t belong, but which has done everything to claim them.

Orson Vectro turns toward Campbell. He has never seen an android cry. He didn’t even know it was possible.

“We came here hoping to help you. But we need your help now.”

Campbell looks at Paul Zarkovsky; the soldier-monk; Sheriff Langlois and his deputies, Slade Vernier, Erwin Slovak, Bob Chamberlain—all unmoving, tense, silent, reduced to inaction by this force that comes from the
inside
no matter what creature it touches.

“Mr. Vectro, I’m afraid I have to tell you that we’re completely powerless against this Devolution.”

“I know,” replies the android. “It isn’t your fault. But that’s not what I’m asking you.”

“No? What, then?”

“The Ring has just begun its Great Migration. We didn’t want to abandon the Earth, but we don’t belong to it.”

For a moment, Campbell contemplates the unimaginable.

“You want to try to return to the Ring while there is still time?”

Orson Vectro forces a thin smile. “We’ll be dead long before that, Mr. Campbell. And we don’t wish to join the Great Migration.”

“I don’t understand.”

The artificial man fixes his golden eyes steadily on Campbell’s. “Our orbiters are automated. After they are programmed, their launch is done purely by routine.”

“You said yourself that you wouldn’t have time to get back to the Ring. The launch may be done by routine, but how will you execute a complex orbital approach maneuver?”

“No, I said we wouldn’t have time to get back to the Ring
alive
. And I didn’t say anything about an approach maneuver.”

And Campbell understands. He looks at Sky Lumina’s body, wracked with frenetic movement, her glassy eyes, the foam of saliva on her lips, the blackish spots of various necroses spreading within her. She is lucky. She won’t even last an hour.

Their capsule will be launched into orbit, and then a programmed rocket burn will send the machine into deep space.

It will be their flying coffin, their stellar funerary procession, their heavenly tomb.

They do not belong to the Ring, nor to Earth. They do not belong to Man, nor to the Thing that is replacing it.

They belong to infinity. Sending them back home is the least he can do.

“Transluminary, Yuri. The Ark contains all frequencies, infinitely higher than that of the Light inside the Halo, which is only the visible manifestation of its true nature. Don’t forget that the Halo functions by counterimitating the simulated universe of the Thing. It moves from level to level exponentially, forming a monad, rewriting the principle of individuation directly in the human brain via a magnetic-encephalic introjection of all the infinity it contains. Within a few days, the Ark will have completely superimposed itself on Earth’s entire magnetic field. Then I can move on to the final stage of the program.”

“The final stage?”

“I told you once that the rockets launched from the cosmodrome only represented the preliminary phase of putting all Territory men and women wishing to escape the Anome into orbit.”

“Link, the androids’ orbiter is taking off tonight, but with two corpses on board. It’s the last space engine existing in the Territory, and most probably in the whole world.”

“I never mentioned rockets or orbiters, did I? I’m talking about ‘unconventional technology.’ Do you follow me? Should I explain further?”

“The Ark?”

“In the literal sense. The Ark will be a spacecraft—the spacecraft of the World, which will break away from the Neo-World of the Anome.”

Yuri closes his eyes for an instant, which seems to last an eternity.

Link’s words have taken form in his mind. His brilliant intuition has thrown a ray of light on the mystery—and the mystery has swallowed it.

And what he has glimpsed is unknowable. If he tried to describe it to someone now, no word in his vocabulary would be sufficient to do the job.