Cosmos Incorporated (13 page)

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NEXUS ROAD

He has chosen a moment just after daybreak. The eastern sky is pale pink; the air is already full of the warmth of the day to come. Violet cirrus clouds float high in the atmosphere. Above him, the sky is deepest blue, indigo really, full of the ghostly phantoms of stars, but already it is blurring little by little into the rosy edge of the sunrise.

During the night, Plotkin rented a car from his room, a ten-year-old Ford with a hydrocell motor, all in accordance with current standards.

After his expedition on the strip with the android, he slept all day. Then, at night, he started to think of his plan. His plan to Kill the Mayor of This City.

The android’s presence might prove useful. He seems destined to serve as a scapegoat, a pigeon, a patsy, a pawn—the perfect Lee Harvey Oswald for this business. Plotkin’s plan is a sweeping one: an attack on October 4, the day of the Sputnik Centennial, claimed by a phony abbreviation of the radical Flandro dissident sort. He will operate secretly from the android’s room, leaving DNA traces there that will strengthen the theory of a conspiracy with local human ramifications. He will leave a few clues on Vega 2501’s console—compromising documents here and there, and probably the weapon used in the crime, or maybe the portable organizer he will have used in developing his plan.
Vega 2501,
he thinks.
Vega 2501, the android with the false identity. A lovely career as a political assassin is opening up for you.

At that moment, a sudden impulse moves him to write something on the desk’s digital notepad.

IPSE

VOS

BAPTIZABIT

IN

SPIRITU

SANCTO

ET

IGNI

He stares at the words, written in all capital letters.

Another unconscious impulse, like when he wrote the phrase from the apostle Saint Luke on the wall near the window. What does it mean? Is it a code?

It is Latin, el señor Metatron explains, taken from a text by Origens, a third-century Christian writer. Again, the words are from Saint Luke.

“Baptism by fire?” Plotkin asks the software agent, intrigued.

“An old apocryphal tradition in both Judaism and Christianity. When you are reborn after death, you cross a river of fire that purifies the evil in you.”

Why did he write these words on the desk’s notepad? He knows no Latin whatsoever, and surely isn’t familiar with any third-century Christian writers.

Something.

Something is interfering with his mind.

El señor Metatron detects nothing abnormal in the neurocircuits of the room’s console. Plotkin asked the intelligence agent—who is, in the words of secret-network habitués, an “angel”—to proceed with a complete checkup of his own biocellular implants, with the very latest antivirus protection. Down to the tiniest immune-system nanomachine. It will take hours.

El señor Metatron doesn’t find a thing.

If someone is trying to pirate his neuroinstruction program, or someone—or something—is trying to implant messages
encrypted in Latin
into his brain, they are doing it in a way completely unknown to him, or to one of the best personal security agents in existence anywhere.

A group of Catholic resistance fighters? Or Evangelicals? Hard to believe. There is no way they would possess technology so secret that it leaves no trace detectable by el señor Metatron’s elite sensors. If they did try something, did attempt—for one mysterious reason or another—to control his mind, taking advantage of a moment of weakness in the program during his postamnesiac reconstruction, his guardian angel would have detected their maneuver, at least indirectly, after the fact if not at the time.

Plotkin goes to the window.

The cosmodrome’s launchpads are empty. The stormy sky seems to be moving toward a monstrous abyss, with huge squadrons of altocumulus clouds lumbering like violet zeppelins whose black edges are edged with the city’s lights as they float and whirl in the gusty night sky. On the console’s weather channel, Plotkin reads that winds of at least eighty kilometers an hour will be blowing in from the west for the next forty-eight hours. WorldWeather explains in a communiqué that it was able to deflect part of the winds and the energy of these “super–jet streams” away toward the Great Lakes, but that the weather will still be unstable for the next couple of days.

There are forces at work here. Natural forces, social forces, forces of unknown origin. Forces that just may help him carry out his plan.

His plan to Kill the Mayor of This City.

He decides to leave the hotel.

The car is waiting for him as planned on the North Junction road, at the bottom of the autobridge staircase, facing east toward Vostok and Heavy Metal Valley. A map of the area is affixed to the car’s computer, but Plotkin has no need of it. It is firmly etched on his mind: its graphics, its grid lines, its creases, its holes. The map is an integral part of him now, thanks to el señor Metatron, who appears periodically in a flash of wispy magnetic fire on the passenger seat before disappearing a moment later, as if breathed out and in again by the onboard computer.

The map is part of the land.
The drawing seems to hang in front of his eyes at the same time as the actual streets flash past and the obscure network of all his electromagnetic systems—obvious and hidden—work in tandem to generate the changing images. The road is abandoned, but it is still part of the network. It is still part of the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium of Grand Junction, and part of the county.

They drive east through the hills for about ten kilometers. The road stops abruptly at the bottom of a hill wooded with tall tropical trees whose luxuriant, heavy masses and bunches of wildflowers with large, almost fluorescent green petals are familiar to him, as is the high, silver-tinted grass that undulates gently in the breeze like a vast carpet of velvet.

The road crosses a simple slope, or, rather, a semislope where the asphalt is laid in dashes several hundred meters long on the dusty, ochre-colored ground, then forks to the northeast and south. The sun blazes on bushes of pink and red-orange roses just behind the rocky butte directly in front of him. The sky is painted in slashes of gold, ruby, and flame.

HEAVY METAL VALLEY, XENON RIDGE: NEXUS ROAD NORTH.

NOVA EXPRESS CROSSROAD, NEON PARK, OMEGA BLOCKS, JUNKVILLE: NEXUS ROAD SOUTH.

He turns north automatically, part robot, part human.

In front of him, the map spreads its wings of diagrams, its linear filigree. Xenon Ridge is eight kilometers high and overlooks the valley. It is an ideal observation point.

To reach it, he must leave the main slope of Nexus Road and take a lateral road—something that hardly even deserves to be called a path, actually—pompously named Xenon Road, which veers to the northwest and climbs sharply toward the summit of a mesa half denuded by the erosion of winds coming from the steppes of the Midwest, one of these southern Canadian maple-treed and wooded hills that are rapidly succumbing to global climatic chaos. From there, one overlooks the valley and Nexus Road leading from it. He notes the linguistic change; he must be just on the American-Canadian border, or very near it. “Rows” have changed to “rangs” and the signage is now bilingual, as is the onboard computer.

Historical diagram: This area has been around for twenty-five years, emerging when underground private astrobusiness was still booming despite—or perhaps because of—the Grand Jihad. The city of Grand Junction had grown considerably and already covered the equivalent, or nearly, of the entire county. The Municipal Metropolitan Consortium, which included the city proper of Grand Junction and all its emerging or fully developed peripheries, like the Leonov Alley strip and even Junkville, was thus created. They had decided to open a road from Gemini Drive toward the north of Monolith Hills, intending to go even beyond that to the eastern limits of the autonomous Mohawk territory near Lake Champlain. That was how North Junction came to be. Then Nexus Road, and then the access road with its autobridge to the strip.

Then everything stopped.

The Second American Civil War and the multiple confederations of free states that resulted from it had more or less supplanted the planetary Grand Jihad, which had itself been detonated by the French and European civil wars after a decade and a half of fiery attacks, just as the Balkan conflicts had served as prologues during the century preceding the war of 1914–1918. At the same time, or close to it, like an ultimate historic Larsen effect, the entire Islamic world had been enveloped in a religious and civil war so ferocious that, like a bomb snuffing out the fires of every oil well, it had in a single blow completely exhausted the planetary war that had been raging since the beginning of the century.

That had been the moment when the UHU decided to make its entrance.

Geological diagram: Xenon Ridge is a typical southern Quebecois hill. Formerly covered with trees and bushes, it is now bare of anything but a few scrubby green oaks, dry shrubs, and mutant thistles of astonishing size. Here, geological constraints have resulted in radical adaptation by the local vegetation. Xenon Ridge is in the process of becoming an eroded monolith. Ancient schists cohabitate with the granite pedestal of the Canadian shield; here and there, the terrain is already grooved in places by the harsh winds that ravage the yellow-brown earth, exposing bits of bare, hard rock like human skulls denuded of flesh in a thousand-year-old necropolis discovered by a keen archaeologist.

Plotkin looks out over the low plain; it reminds him of a vast, rocky amphitheater. Far away there are prairies and surviving forests reduced to savannas; farther still, a few islands of greenery have been planted here and there like atolls lost in an ocean of dust.

And in the middle of all this is Heavy Metal Valley. He has read the descriptions, but now he can see it. Feel it.

He understands.

It is a city.

Legally it is part of the county, officially managed by the Consortium. But the general abandonment of expansion projects toward the east twenty years before has turned the zone along Nexus Road into a veritable
autonomous territory inside an autonomous territory.

It is like a hole in time, and in society.

A million piled carcasses, ready for the scrap heap, the crusher, or the recovery yards of the various communities that share the plunder.

Plotkin is wearing special contact lenses equipped with a stereoscopy center and a powerful zoom, as well as an optional infrared mode. Legal, made in Chile, and of very good quality, they are part of his essential survival kit.

A million piled carcasses forming high metallic walls, often oxidized, in various states of crumbling disrepair; myriad makes, models, and colors, crisscrossed by an entire network of paths meticulously covered with clinkers. It is a vast maze of metal spiraling outward from its coliseum: an immense expanse of sloping concrete in imitation of the NASCAR racetracks of the Golden Age. Plotkin thanks his intuition for leading him directly to such a high vantage point. He thanks his killer’s instinct for letting him admire the splendid dawn of this day; the azure of the sky is so intense it seems turquoise. He thanks whatever part of him ignored the
rest
of him to allow him to live this unique, memorable moment.

Heavy Metal Valley. A city within a city. An electric medieval fortress. He distinguishes well-ordered central avenues and smaller side streets that are a bit chaotic, and various rows superimposed on this tangled, discordant, and unimaginable tangle. It is like a slightly smaller copy of Grand Junction itself, but one made of metal, plastic, composite resin, and Plexiglas windows dating from the twentieth century that sparkle in the morning sunlight. Nothing here is newer than 2015 or 2020, in fact. And obviously, he realizes as the hours of watching wear on, the singular economy of this city within a city is based on century-old machines. In view of the derogatory statute of the private closed course granted by the Consortium for the duration of seventy years, the communities of Heavy Metal Valley have the right to burn rubber, gas, trinitrotuol—it doesn’t matter what, he realizes, as long as it makes noise, smoke, and flame—right up to the end of the century.