Grand Junction (83 page)

“If I stay here with the others, you and the Travelers can leave. That’s the way it is. Anomanity will want to prevent what is happening. And we will hold it off long enough for the Vessel to be finished. It’s the Law, Judith. The Law of the Territory. This will be its final intervention.”

She says simply: “Come with me, Yuri. Please. If you don’t, I’ll stay, too.”

Yuri answers without thinking for even a fraction of a second. She does not understand.

“Not only would Sheriff Langlois formally prohibit you from doing that, he would have my total support. And the support of everyone else, too, I’m sure. It’s the Law of the Territory, Judith, don’t you understand? This Law that is about to be extinguished, but which has to shine one last time. You have to leave. Now.”

And Yuri looks at her, hypnotized by her beauty, this beauty he is seeing for the very last time, but that will stay with him until his last breath. Maybe he has the right to a second burst, a final spark, after all.

He takes her face between his hands and lets the glittering energy that flowed between their lips the last time they met happen one more time. His fingers tangle for the second and last time in the night-black mass of her hair. Twice is a lot; usually we have the right to only one life. It is as simple as the formation of a star, as simple as the creation of a man, as simple as the destruction of a world.

Love will tear us apart
, he thinks a bit later, as he watches her move slowly toward her family’s mobile home. The Joy Division song inspired the pages written in the envelope he gave her. Only Judith will read it; she will be back here in three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years, maybe more. It will be their secret, shared by them alone, between the two ends of infinity.

Yuri half turns and faces the Ridge and the line of the last Guardians of the Territory. Faces his destiny, faces his origins, faces what he is, for once and for all. What he has always been.

Campbell turns to him, his eyes gleaming like one of the Territory’s poisonous plants. The moment has come.

It is their moment. Theirs alone. The moment they were born to live.

The large purple crow flies over Nexus Road from the direction of the strip. Something is coming; something is happening. More importantly, something has already happened.

The thing it knew would happen sooner or later. The one that will complete the transformation of this world.

Its separation from itself. The end of nature artificialized by Man. The end of all true ecology. The end of the animal species, as well as the human one.

The light has come to take a piece of this world away with it. It is part of the archetypal dream of all crows, all nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, all the psychoconducive beings that serve as interfaces between the world of the dead and the world of the living—those animals that, like it, serve as a bridge between the different modalities of the narrative, the various articulations of a plot.

This bird, which knows nothing of the affairs of men, but which knows everything about them.

A few hours ago, in a powerful armored car that took them from Grand Funk Railroad to Junkville, two men had a long conversation. The purple crow could neither hear nor understand it, but it was the cause of the human migrations the bird has been watching from the rusted-steel-colored sky.

“Are you absolutely sure about this information? You’re aware, I imagine, of its import.”

“I asked Belfond to send some of our Junkville slaves inside the Halo in order to see what’s really happening. The patroller who came through the dome of light on the border has been interrogated by the Ethical Vigilance Mission; his testimony seems consistent, but we’ll know more in a
few hours when Belfond’s men have gotten their human guinea pigs into the area.”

“This opportunity must be seized immediately. They are becoming too powerful; I didn’t anticipate it. We have to eliminate them before it’s too late.”

“I know, Master. The spontaneous remissions are happening insanely fast; seditions like Williamson’s are multiplying, and all our evangelists throughout North America confirm that this is a global phenomenon, not confined to the Territory. Their fucking glowing Machine has gotten way ahead of our plan.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s just a procedural detail for the Anome, you’ll see. Do you know why I was chosen by the principle of neohumanity? I was the last android ever built, and I was born as the Metastructure died. I am its principle, inverted but
intensified
. More importantly, the Anome, this
nonprinciple
, can only achieve existence by incarnating, which is impossible for it by definition—so it chose a biological simulation of a human being to produce its simulation of individuation. Once that was done, nothing was left but to configurate my biochemistry so that my body would produce small capsules containing its simulated principle, a microworld become as perfect as a box. Soon the Anome will find a new way, a much more universal one, to allow everyone access to it. It needed a laboratory; I am that laboratory. Soon I will be a veritable factory. You’ll see, Silverskin; their Machine will eventually reach its limits against the power of neohumanity. Understand this:
very soon, we will all anomize one another.”

“Master, forgive me—but a number of our informers have told us about a net regain of the Territory’s old ecology there, to the north.”

“How can they fight the neoecology? How have they been able to cause the Territory’s poisonous vegetation to be reborn? And, more importantly, why?”

“They do not want the Peace-World. They’re militarists of a sort, I think.”

“The
icesand
and its Desert-Planet will allow a general calming down; the climate will be tempered from one side of the world to the other. Men will live in a vast, organically linked community, in unity like they have never known. Why do they hate us so much? Why do they want to prevent the coming of posthumanity?”

“I told you, Master; they belong to the World of Before; they are
counterrevolutionaries. We should be treating them as such; all we need are the guillotines.”

Cybion I does not answer at first. He is calculating. He is establishing the parameters of the destruction to come.

“We can probably still raise an army of at least ten thousand men, don’t you think? Above all, we can’t repeat the mistake of going at it scattershot like the bishops did. We need a true operational command.”

“All right … if we bring together all the diocese militia and the local surveillance committees, the Episcopal Guards, the men from the Vigilance Mission … let me think … yes, and even more if we go through all the townships, all the way to the city of Grand Junction. The colonies of the Enterprise aerostation and Monolith South are under our control now. We can issue a quick mobilization order.”

“How much time?”

“This kind of logistical problem is beyond me. We’ll put Belfond and his men on it. I think they are the operational command you mentioned.”

“Right. Do it as soon as possible. Immediately.”

Silverskin understands.

They have to destroy them. All of them.

Now.

This is how, the Legend will say, more than fifteen thousand men and women are assembled on the vast stretches of universal mud that separate Junkville from the buildings of Omega Blocks. Messengers roam the Territory in all directions, announcing the general conscription order against Enemies of Anomanity.

An entire army is on the march. It stretches the entire length of Nexus Road, a long central artery that goes all the way to HMV County.

It is during this march, they say, that the thousands and thousands of men witness a phenomenon that fills them with such holy terror that their officers can control them only through the use of execution squads.

According to their positions in the long column or in the flanks climbing the slopes through the surviving woods, the men armed for the very last war notice varying details—but from the eyewitness accounts the Legend will be pieced together, a summary of what happens on this day and the days that follow it.

The star resting on the Earth has never shone so brightly.

It has never emitted so many visible and invisible wavelengths of light. They say it even transmits on acoustic frequencies never before heard.

The globe of light has never seemed as dangerous as it does at this moment when it has become utterly harmless.

But harmlessness is perhaps the very last ruse of the Territory and its Law.

Because everything is disrupted around the Halo. The visible and invisible universes come together to produce an extraordinary event, one that the Legend will call
the Construction of the Vessel
.

The first day, in the nomenclature of the Legend, is called the Day of the Halo. The second is the Day of Diagrams. They say that during these Last Days of the World, the Halo emits a whole spectrum of incredible sounds; they say that no single individual hears the same thing. As for the Anomians, no one knows. They are unknowable. They are no longer singular.

Now the Construction of the Vessel will become part of the great battle of which it is the cause. Some witnesses will say that it is like a sort of permanent entanglement of
The Iliad
with
The Odyssey
, and vice versa. The Legend will make no attempt to follow the unanswerable logic that prevails during these days, these last days of the human world. The final story can only be the interpolation of all the stories told before it, before its final, amphibolic crystallization of the two founding fictions of the World of Before the Fall of the Machine. And it all happens before the hallucinating eyes of the entire Anomian army.

It happens like an event that cannot be described, because it is all of space, and time, and energy—and so it is all representation—that is affected by this “anti–black hole,” this vortex connected to infinity, this “white fountain” conceived by the turn-of-the-century astrophysicists, who already knew that if a black hole swallows absolutely everything in the subcontinuum of hidden dimensions, the opposite phenomenon will inevitably happen somewhere else in space and time.

And it happens here.

The Construction of the Light-Vessel
.

The anomized men are forced to believe their senses, though what they are seeing defies all possible understanding.

The cosmodrome facilities rise, whirling, above the sand; they float in a luminous structure at the heart of the blazing fire emitted by the Ark of Xenon Ridge. They are changing form—or, rather, they are forms that
change their internal structures, buildings folding back like gloves, revealing operations rooms with immense diagrams attached to their internal walls like a chart-plastered membrane covering their internal organs. The platforms become cube-shaped tanks that join together into a compound structure orbiting around itself. The crawlers reconfigure themselves into gemlike spheroids that vibrate, lighter than air, within their own halo. The windmills change into assemblages of propellers spinning faster than light. Nothing terrestrial remains. Nothing known remains. Nothing knowable remains.

Other witnesses see the city of Heavy Metal detach from the ground in a single structure of matter and light along with the piece of earth and rock on which it was built, leaving behind it a vast crater glimmering with ultraviolet rays.

The vanguard watches, reduced to motionless fascination, as the Hotel Laika is swallowed up in a tall fire-colored spiral, causing the whole portion of ground on which it was standing to collapse with a puff of black dust into a cavernous pit. Its tubular structures, its habitation capsules, its protective dome assemble into a long dragoon of hypermatter that joins the launch platforms and buildings hovering above the Territory.

The entire mass now moves slowly toward the Ridge, where the Ark is nothing but a pulsation of pure light, a constantly changing supernova, a star fallen to Earth and preparing to leave it again. And there is no longer an invisible line between the Anomes and the Event, no more separating ontological threshold.

The line has become visible now. It is a simple line of men.

They say the very last of all humanity’s wars lasts only a few frenzied days. The Legend is very precise on this subject. It records the names. It records the acts. It records the deaths.

This is the last of all battles, and it is also the image of the very first one. It condenses them all, in fact, and each one of them, too. It condenses all the moments when the strength of numbers directly confronts the language of power.

It is the rule of all battles, and has been since the dawn of time—for the conflict to be actualized, the battle begun, there must be inequality from the start. Numerical inequality, in the first place, and the technical or tactical inequality it causes. David against Goliath, Thermopylae, Alesia,
the Catalaunian Fields, Saint-Jean d’Acre, Agincourt, Valmy, Austerlitz, Gettysburg, D-day, Stalingrad, and all the other great massacres were based on an
asymmetrical
balance of power: numbers against tactics.

What counts is the side toward which the scales will tip. If the enemy outnumbers you, only the science of war has a chance of saving you. If your numbers are greater, pray that your enemy is not strategically expert.

Campbell looks at Yuri: there are a lot of them.

They watch the troops approaching down Nexus Road and the wide boulevards leading to the north of the city of Grand Junction. Masses of men. Well armed. Well coordinated. Well commanded. Well trained. And very determined.

Masses.

This won’t be like the Notre Dame Mountains.

“Just a few more for us to kill, that’s all,” he says, cocking his AK-101.

The Legend will say that when the battle begins, at dawn on the third day of the Construction of the Vessel, it happens above the Territory, inside a luminous sphere implacably dedicated to its own genesis, and the blood of the last men is spilled on what is not even their world any longer.