Grand Junction (77 page)

Link travels, he
navigates
, like a cybernetic
kubernator
of the invisible world; the enchanted guitar is his rudder, the Ark his vessel, and he moves infinitely faster than light, so fast that he ends by taking on the process of creation of the Universe itself; he becomes the cruise missile of the Ark, which takes him around the Earth—or, rather, which permits him to circumnavigate it in a simultaneous act without leaving the hangar, the Bunker, the Fortress. He is a train of waves, an oscillatory field; he is the Halo that is encompassing the globe. He is a dance of quarks, a burst of neutrinos; he is this infinite Light that has come to face the anthropological black hole of the End of Man; he is what shields the Territory against the invasion of Utopia; he has come to save the world from the world itself. He is each atom of the Territory; he is all the men that were born and died here, all the men that will be born and die. He is each salvo of the Law.

He is the Halo.

Soon, contradictory elements will clash above the Territory. Soon, thanks to their high energetic potential—
use the enemy’s strength
—the Ark will complete its counterworld; it will integrate the whole of the terrestrial Magnetosphere.

Soon they will move into the final stage: Welcome to the Territory, Part II.

The Magnetosphere, which
contains
all infinities, will become a Cosmogenesis
in actu
, that which
creates
these infinities.

It will truly be a war of the futures. A war between two competing spaces/times. A war between two absolutely irreconciliable natures.

It is Campbell who gives him the news, as quickly as he can. Yuri sees him coming toward the cabin, understanding immediately that something very serious has happened. Something that Campbell himself considers much more important than the attack on his little military library.

“I just saw the sheriff. There’s been a massacre at Grand Funk Railroad.”

“A massacre?”

“More than a hundred and fifty men and women killed in less than an hour. That’s a massacre, wouldn’t you say?”

“What happened?”

“There was a sort of uprising against the Church of the Anome. People who had been healed by Link’s Machine, or by the Territory Radio before that. They rallied around a guy, a former professor from the University of Texas at Austin.”

“Texas? Does the Professor know him?”

“No, there’s at least twenty years between them; they would never have met. The church has a kind of bishop there, and he’s got a small army commanded by—you’ll never guess—that fucking Belfond and his band of shitheads. They’re the ones who headed up the repression operation, a total twentieth-century military police job. I told you Belfond’s a former cop and a real bastard, right? He’s in charge of the Anome’s Ethical Vigilance Mission. They hunted down this Dr. Blake Williamson and his disciples and executed them publicly. That was two days ago.”

“But what had they done?”

“According to the sheriff’s informers, Williamson claimed that the immortality promised by the Anome was a lure to trap people in a permanent closed-circuit organic recycling system. He told them they wouldn’t be individuals anymore, but just interfaces with one another, and that all their organs would be interchangeable within the network because it’s the Anome that maintains ‘individual’ unity there. Conclusion—humanity
will be formed of clones,
totally undifferentiated but all formally different
. He recorded his statements on tape and handed them out—the sheriff was able to recover one of them. Blake Williamson was burned alive after Belfond’s squad killed the others with bullets to the neck. For blasphemy and mortal heresy. The Professor thinks he must have read Duns Scotus too.”

“And what does the sheriff say?”

Campbell laughs. “Langlois thinks the whole Territory is under his jurisidiction. Langlois thinks nobody has the right to commit a massacre in the Territory. Nobody. Except him. To say he isn’t happy would be putting it mildly.”

Yuri realizes that the moment of confrontation has come. Only the elements, now beginning to unleash their stormy fury above them, will provide a few days’ respite from the peace.

That is, from the worst of the wars.

It is laid out in concentric circles, like the waves caused by throwing a stone into a pool of water. You can see what has happened physically, see the concrete traces of the war the Ark has waged against the neoecology of the Anome. The whole Territory was the field for this battle between the elements and infinity.

First circle: HMV County, and particularly the township of Humvee, the City of Heavy Metal. Here a magnetic umbrella has shielded the entire area, down to its protective walls.

In a few remote corners of the county, here and there, scattered stretches of
icesand
can be seen amidst the poisonous vegetation that is regaining ground little by little under the Ark’s protection.

Then the Territory begins—or, rather, what is left of it.

Yuri leaves his cabin on the morning after three full days of sand-and-ice storms. He finds an unmonitored path that leads to Nexus Ridge and Link de Nova’s Neomachine, floating in the air. The two mesas form the natural threshold of the principal southern entrance to HMV County. From this height Yuri can see a large stretch of the north of the Territory, the city of Grand Junction, the cosmodrome, the Monolith Hills strip, the thick woods bordering Lake Champlain, and in the distance the length of Nexus Road, almost to Aircrash Circle—far enough, in any case, for the war map to be seen with perfect clarity.

An undulatory field. The farther one gets from HMV, the more the neodesert gains in consistency—in resistance, in thickness, in density, in homogeneity.

And in invasiveness.

Yuri realizes quickly that Link de Nova’s Ark was easily able to protect HMV County, the premises of the Hotel Laika, and the cosmodrome—but that after that the competing armies had violently clashed in the invisible. It is easy to imagine what has become of the south of the Territory, Junkville, Deadlink, and the Ontarian townships.

The Ark is protecting the Territory-within-the-Territory; it is protecting the last Sanctuary of the Law of Bronze. For the rest, it has done what it can against the neoecology—very little, he must admit. It could not prevent the destruction of the Territory’s parasitic flora. It could not prevent the denaturation of the Territory’s nature. It could not prevent the Territory’s unique vegetation from disappearing. Even the hardiest plants were unable to survive such a
transnaturation
. Many trees were uprooted by the winds and are now held to the earth by only the gray-and-bronze gangue enclosing their trunks. Only a few aerial-rhizome plants have managed to survive in this more and more mineral world, islands of photosynthetic life scattered farther and farther apart, condemned to extinction that is less rapid, perhaps, but just as inexorable.

The goldenrod and
Cornus canadensis
are gone, and the red-rooted amaranth, the white lychnis, the buttercups and false wallflowers, the Canadian fleabone, the wild mustard, the
Liatris alba
. There is no more orange hawkweed, no more cowbane, no more hemlock, no more poison sumac. All the
vegetable machinery
in the Territory is gone.

The rising sun is already transforming the landscape into the chrome-colored mud that will eventually cover the terrestrial crust forever. The
icesand
is just one stage of the neoecological change. Rainwater and the constant lukewarm temperatures of this endless day will turn everything to mud, this mud that Yuri is beginning to see appearing in scattered patches all over the
denature
left by the Anome.

One day shortly after the First Fall and the deaths of their respective parents, Chrysler said to Yuri: “Don’t be fooled. The Law of the Territory isn’t the law of the strongest. At most, you might say it’s the law of the cleverest, but that isn’t right.”

“What is right, Chrysler?” the young teenager named Yuri McCoy had asked.

“It’s the law of the most devilish. See the connection? Devilish/ Devil.”

“The law of evil?” Yuri had asked incredulously.

“No, no, you’re mixing it up. Evil isn’t bad. On the contrary, it’s very good. It’s the best sparring partner in the Territory.”

“Evil isn’t bad?”

“Evil is devilish. The Law of the Territory is extremely simple, Yuri; it isn’t the law of the strongest or the cleverest, or even the most
devilish
in the diabolical sense, although that comes closest. The one and only Law of the Territory is the law of the one who survives. The law of the one who survives the trap. The law of the one who survives the Territory itself.”

“Darwinism?” the young Yuri had asked, already interested in biology and anthropology.

“The Territory functions according to an evolutionism just as implacable as Darwin’s, but arising from a completely opposite precept, Yuri. In classical evolutionism, only those that adapt survive. And those that adapt en masse are always the most average individuals. During the Fall, the Territory reversed the paradigm: it caused an ecological law to reign that was based on the idea of a trap—a
machine
in the ecological sense—where, for example, the most harmful plants survive better than the others. Here, Yuri, normal individuals aren’t going to have a chance anymore.”

And that is what has happened. Chrysler Campbell has survived because he is the human computer, for whom improvisations are, more than anything else, ultrarapid algorithms. A man capable of calculating the death of another man like someone else would solve an equation. Yuri, too, has survived; he is the one who can always sense the invisible presence of death; he has made a nocturnal companion of it. For him, intuition is the Territory trap, speaking to him.

The weakest ones, men and women, were enslaved in the prostitution centers and gladiatorial arenas of Junkville, Monolith South, and Grand Funk Railroad. Those who revolted were killed, but most of them
adapted
and submitted to the Law of the Triads, the tribal chiefs who were in a position to share the pie.

But there were still independent traffickers, sharpshooters, freelancers, bounty hunters, hired killers, private detectives. Sheriff Langlois and his men. Those who made war in places where the average man could not survive.

Now, though, the neoecology has returned to equalize everything, to put classical Darwinian adaptation back in the hands of the average man, the average world. It is a notch above the Metastructure’s wildest dreams:
overall homogenization. The expansion of the desert toward the north exhausts the desert. The extension through blizzards of the Arctic toward the south is exhausting what remains of ice floes and glaciers. It is above the Territory that their respective depletions have come together. And this double depletion has manifested itself in a mingling of one with the other. It is not a desert of sand or a desert of ice that is finally covering the territory, but their
hybrid
, to form the world of mud, the formless world, the world of eternally recommencing overall depletion.

Yet the Territory could have been the perfect experimental habitat for a true Third Humanity—the first destroyed by the Flood, the second by the Metamachine—whose glorious destiny would have been to pave the way for the real Second Coming, thinks Yuri to himself, full of strange nostalgia for a world that will never be. Instead of this
absolutely necessary
future, as Spinoza would have called it, there is the Devolution of Humanity wished for, desired, and provoked by itself, after first having slowly committed suicide, fitting itself up for a terminal Darwinian solution, that of adaptation to nothing, of its transformation into a collective, nonindividated organ, a multiorganism made of millions of clones that are
effectively indifferentiated yet formally distinct
.

Oh yes, the man burned alive by the Anome’s militia definitely read Duns Scotus, just as the Professor believes. Duns Scotus and undoubtedly several others. He read a handful of Christian authors and he died for it.

Suddenly, Yuri senses that he is being watched.

His sixth sense is not to be doubted. You don’t doubt something that was created by the Law of the Territory.

He keeps walking until he can make a complete half-turn on himself without alerting his observer.
To see, you must not be seen. …

He is definitely being watched.

All the dazzling intelligence he is continuously proving to himself and others is suddenly gone.

He is being watched. He is at the center of someone’s attention.

He is nothing but a common rock orbiting—and being consumed by—her solar beauty.

Paul Zarkovsky has never seen Milan Djordjevic cry. He feels lost, awkward. He feels useless.

“Milan,” he says brokenly. “I know you’re doing the best you can.”

Djordjevic doesn’t answer; he stares unseeingly out the window at the landscape surrounding the trailer-library.

Paul Zarkovsky knows the full extent of the damage. More than two hundred works attacked in one fell swoop. Twice as many as they have already lost, totally or partially, in the last month. One book out of every forty now, including some very early printed books. And that isn’t counting the various Bibles in different stages of complete annihilation. The storm only amplified the phenomenon.

Zarkovsky guesses that the latest attack can give them an idea of the rhythm the destruction to come will follow. Certainly there are reasons to be seriously alarmed; certainly there are reasons to break down in tears—especially if you know the fate of the Library is in your hands. If you know it is only through your writing that the
unwriting
can be stopped.

“Djordjevic, pull yourself together. We’re at war. Total war. How is your manuscript coming?”

“I’m getting there, Paul; I’m getting there. I’m condensing the three earlier versions into one, and it’s really taking shape, but it’s as if the Thing can guess what I’m doing, as if it is picking up speed in order to beat me. In the end, it might be all I can do to write the manuscript that
could have
stopped the antiscriptural attack.”