Grand Junction (10 page)

If not for these few holdover communities—surviving as best they can inside the high twenty-floor buildings, the population concentrated on the lowest, most accessible, most sandstorm-resistant floors—if not for these scattered groups of half-families and half-humans, Omega Blocks would have been slowly devoured, day after day, tower after tower, district after district, quadrant after quadrant, floor after floor, apartment block after apartment block, by the city-vampire that recycles everything and is separated from its possible prey only by what was once an abandoned section of highway and is now just an eviscerated ramp turning gradually into a sometimes-stormy valley and a few square kilometers of wasteland, parking lots covered with wild grasses and rampant ground ivy, and abandoned hangars inhabited only by pieces of metal skeletons.

Junkville itself is a sort of urban predator. If it had the means to expand over the entire Territory, it would doubtlessly end by absorbing all the other communities and their respective habitats; it would transform all the townships into hills of recyclable garbage. If it had the strength, it would engulf the southwestern part of Quebec, the southeastern part of Ontario, the state of Vermont, and much of New York State as well, and it would finish by imposing its own ecology onto that of the sandy desert from the Midwest and Texas.

Its own ecology—that of an eternally recommencing desert.

Chrysler has agreed to meet him on Omega 13, the district of their childhood. It isn’t routine; nothing is ever systematic with Chrysler, who has broken with a wide range of posturban survival techniques since his earliest youth; a simple, random action, but one that never fails to produce. The double monad rises toward the cobalt dome of the mid-afternoon sky, totalitarian architecture with no more totality, part of a twentieth-century dream lost in the midst of desert-threatened wasteland, two tall columns linked by an umbilicus of translucent fibers through which the light explodes in a volley of golden sparks across the vast concrete surfaces.

To the west, the sun is sinking on the Ontarian frontier, an enormous orange disk sending its immobile rays in all directions, trapped in the ashy sky as if in a crystal still blackened with carbon.

“Did you talk to Pluto?”

“Yes.”

“You saw the two new cases?”

“Yes.”

“You took samples?”

“Yes, obviously.”

“How many did you see in all?”

“The two he told me about: one on the southern face of Midnight Oil, not far from the house of that guy who died the night before, the other in Ultrabox.”

“Pluto told me there might be other cases. In Autostrada, for example.”

“I didn’t find anything there, but Autostrada is next to Snake Zone. I’ll
put my informants there on the case and tonight I’ll go back for another look. What about you?”

“I managed to get four samples from the six new cases in Omega. One of them is already dead—no surprise. Another one disappeared; no one knows what happened to him. He just literally vanished into nature.”

“It isn’t exactly nature.”

“Well, a very good simulation.”

“Listen—with the data from the other time I think we can get to work. We should start right away, I think.”

“No kidding,” says Chrysler thoughtfully. “You think it’s urgent, too?”

“If Link de Nova can’t counter this second mutation, then I think it’s safe to say we’re all,
all
fucked. Even you and me, I’m afraid.”

“You’ve got a plan?”

“Bribes. We’ll need to show Link de Nova a case, and fast. He has to at least test his powers against this new version of the thing. He has to try. Fast.”

“You’re right. Might as well know as soon as possible if we’re all going to die or not. The whole world can organize its own funeral. All rites included, for the first and last time.”

“Chrysler, I don’t know why, but I still think Link de Nova is part of the solution. I still think he’s closely linked to the Metastructure, or rather to its breakdown. They have a lot of common points that neither of them knows much about, or is even aware of. Remember—he was even born on the exact day of the End of the Megamachine.”

“What can he have in common with an entity that is not only mechanical but dead? I’d think you would understand things a little better.”

“It may be dead, but somehow it still exists, if you look at what’s happening—it’s even like it planned this, to ensure its continued evolution. You want to know what I think? It can exist precisely because it died. Its entire life before 2057 was just a gestation period. Its real life began on the day of its death.”

Chrysler is silent for long seconds, then he nods his head southward. “What did Pluto say to you about his guy, the mysterious Professor?”

“That he wants to see both of us as soon as possible. I think this Professor knows someone in Grand Junction. But I have the impression that Pluto doesn’t really know what’s going on; like his friend from Texas is deliberately keeping that part of the truth from him, for reasons of prudence or I don’t know what.”

“Really? Pluto has talked to me about this guy a lot over the past few months, but I think he told you more in one meeting than he told me in six or seven.”

“He needs us, but he doesn’t want to admit it.”

“Who, Pluto?”

“Yes. I think he believes we might be able to find what Professor Mysterious is looking for.”

“And what is Professor Mysterious looking for?”

“As far as I understood it, he’s looking for a man. Here, in Grand Junction. And I’m guessing that this man lives in one of the places where we are among the privileged few to be able to enter freely. And to get out again.”

“Are you talking about HMV?”

“Yes. The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems.”

“Goddamn, could this professor know about the existence of Link de Nova?”

“No, I doubt it. The man in question—let’s call him the Professor’s friend—lives in HMV, I think, and he is waiting for a delivery, with the Professor’s complicity and Pluto’s, too—and you know Pluto’s specialty.”

“A delivery? Wait—his
specialty?
Technical documents?”

“The Professor’s friend is expecting
a delivery of books
. Real ones. Thousands of them. Maybe even tens of thousands. Pluto didn’t know exactly. A whole library, he said.”

“Shit,” says Chrysler Campbell in astonishment.
“Books
. Fucking books.”

“Thousands
of books, Chrysler. We must have the right to a piece of the pie. We’ll take what we need.”

“When is this library supposed to arrive?”

“Four or five weeks, I think. The beginning of February. They’ll have to cross the North Atlantic in the middle of winter in a diesel-powered boat from the last century.”

“And Pluto will need us to escort the Professor through the Territory of Grand Junction, am I right?”

“Yep, that’s about the size of it.”

“Who is this Professor?”

“I don’t know his name. Pluto kept things strictly anonymous. But he crossed the whole middle of the former USA—from Texas!—to come here. I think this library is extremely important, and worth payment of a lot more than boxes of instruction manuals.”

“What do you mean?”

“This guy, this Professor, participated in the last Metastructure update program, two or three years before it destroyed itself.”

This time Chrysler Campbell doesn’t answer. This crucial piece of information, coming as it does after all the others, acts as a sort of miraculous keystone. Suddenly, the whole painstakingly built edifice, until now lacking its final form, comes into existence, into possibility, into reality.

“Professor Mysterious” was a Metastructure specialist twelve or thirteen years earlier, just before its autocontamination. A terrible silent question has taken form in Chrysler Campbell’s head. And Yuri, as is so often the case, senses it like a ghostly invisible wave passing between their two brains.

“Yes, that’s it. The Professor seems to think that their final ‘update’ could have been the cause of the End of the Metastructure; that is undoubtedly the reason for his coming here. He’s been looking for the right man to take delivery of the European library for years, Pluto told me. The shit hit the fan in Europe a long time ago.”

“Did you say Europe? Where, exactly?”

“That’s the most interesting part, if you ask me.”

“Where, Yuri?”

“I could only get snippets of information out of Pluto before I had to go to Midnight Oil South, but he talked about Italy, and seemed very tense when he talked about it. He didn’t give me any more detail than that.”

“Italy?”

“Rome. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since he told me. I’ve come to a conclusion that seems very plausible to me; I did some research on the microcomputer Link fixed for me. There’s a huge general encyclopedia in the hard drive.”

“Okay, Yuri. Italy. So what?”

“Some libraries there survived the Grand Jihad and the fresh conflicts that erupted after the Fall of the Metastructure.”

“And?”

“I can only think of one place in the world that would have the means to preserve dozens, even hundreds of thousands, of books, and to send an entire cargo of them across the Atlantic and the American Northeast—to where? To Grand Junction, a poor lost corner of the world between Canada and what used to be the state of New York, which just happens to
have a few surviving Christian communities and one young man who can put life back into machines. Are you following me?”

A light seems to go on in Chrysler Campbell’s head, like the gestating bubble of a universe demanding with irresistible force to be born then and there.

“Oh yes,” Campbell says coldly. “I follow you. I understand perfectly well that we’re about to have a lot of trouble on our hands. I have to show you something. The future.”

Like every other quadrant in Omega Blocks, this one is composed of two districts, two twin towers facing each other above a vast rectangle of Recyclo concrete, the middle of which contains a small eucalyptus garden long since dried out by the desert wind.

District 1 is located at the southwestern tip of Omega Blocks; from it, the large hole of the border highway and the cement townships of Autostrada can be seen.

The man that died this morning lived here, on the sixth floor, in apartment 6.

They walk with rapid steps across the sandy floor of the lobby, their footsteps echoing in the enormous concrete cube.

The sand is like a liquid—it seeks to infiltrate every place it possibly can, and when confronted with a mass it cannot flow into or around, it piles up like reservoir water against a dam. Thus here, as well as at the edges of the deserts and all throughout Mohawk Territory, the dunes are gathering around obstacles both natural and artificial—buttes, mesas, buildings, ruins, and garbage and slag heaps.

Junkville is half encircled by waves of sand, like a dusty sea whose tides are dictated by the Midwestern simoons.

Moreover, the desert is a veritable topological-combat strategist. Not only does it advance forward, pushed by the dominant winds, but it executes “flea jumps” during storms or when it is caught up in a rising current. It settles dozens, even hundreds, of kilometers away from its original resting place, and sometimes, when the local conditions are right, it masses in place to form a sort of anti-oasis, a beachhead of moving sand in a semiarid region heretofore protected from the ocean of silica. Thus the Territory of Grand Junction, like the entire ex–state of New York, is dotted with microdeserts that form the front line of an army of sand moving in from northern Ohio.

There is an analogy to be made between this storm of sand from southern Pennsylvania and what is happening, invisibly, in the Territory, he tells himself. The storm causes the desert to advance a few meters more into the state of New York; it deploys miniature armadas of silica throughout the Territory, continuing its scouting work, breaking the battlefield down into a collection of microdeserts that will eventually, little by little, attach themselves to one another like semisolid lakes connected by other lakes of sand deposited by an aerial tsunami in passing.

Death, in Grand Junction as in the rest of the world, strikes in a manner similar to that of these desert storms. It is a sort of front that advances and destroys, slowly but surely, all human life in its path. And it also has its “parachutists,” which take up positions at the rear, attacking where it is most unexpected, and in ways impossible to predict.

Death is analogous, now, to this endlessly expanding desert. Death has become a strategist; no longer content with piling up corpses on the field of battle, it conducts operations down to the smallest detail. Generalissimo Muerte. Feldmarschall Tod. Major General Death.

Here in Omega Blocks, the configuration of space possesses its own specificity, as does each zone in the Territory. In order to withstand tornadoes and storms, the inhabitants of this region have abandoned the top floors, where all the windows are now broken, the apartment blocks saturated with sand flying in from all directions. To avoid problems related to the proximity of peripheral dunes or sand whirled into flurries by “naturally” created wind tunnels occurring between the buildings in their monoclonal verticality, various local clans have bought up the lower and middle floors—entire buildings between floors 4 or 5 and floors 12 or 13.

Death is astonishingly similar to the desert in an especially formal way, Yuri thinks. Not because it “destroys life”—all life forms, including man, adapt very well to their ecology—but the death of the Metastructure, that global evolution system turned global devolution system, seems itself like a
completed
form of the desert. Like a liquid, it is penetrating every orifice of this reality already largely eaten away by the catastrophic End of the machines, de-mechanized though it has become a co-mechanical prosthesis of the World. Like a solid, it can amass its forces in static waves suddenly freed by some purely internal dynamic. It is becoming its own phenomenon; it is the consequence of nothing other than itself. It no longer attacks the mechanical or the biological, but rather that which maintains an ontological tension between the two—language itself. It is
neither a computer virus nor its “natural” equivalent, and yet it acts with the combined strength of such entities; it is liquid and solid; it is invisible and renders language blind; it is silent and turns mechanical chatter into the only horizon available to what remains of human thought on this planet.