Grand Junction (24 page)

That is, for Gabriel Link de Nova, aged twelve years and a few weeks, and two thousand years old, old as dust. That is, for this poor young man who knows how to speak to machines but who can barely hold a conversation with this young woman. That is, for this poor idiot savant who knows how to lay hands on artificial organs but who cannot even imagine putting his hand on her beauty, the beauty of an angel fallen to Earth.

He knocks softly on one of the veranda-observatory’s partitions. Judith turns and sees him. He sees her smile and quickly signal for him to enter. His heartbeat could short-circuit the entire territory, if that were still possible.

He enters the small windowed room. Judith has resumed her position behind the telescope. A soft, somber melody plays quietly on a high-fidelity
machine restored by the powers of Link de Nova. Judith adores watching the sky to music. Gabriel recognizes Gorecki’s third symphony.

Judith seems very intent on her telescope. Gabriel senses that she is looking at something important, maybe something she has never seen before.

“Are you still studying the lunar colonies?” he asks.

“No. For a few days now I’ve been watching what happens in the Ring.”

Link has a strange premonition. Very vague, like a wavering needle pointing at a dim dot of light in an immense sea of darkness, as big as a world.

She’s watching what happens in the Ring
. He doesn’t know what that is yet, but at bottom it doesn’t matter very much. It has been twelve years since all communication between the Earth and its various space colonies was cut. They say the Ring and the lunar stations were preserved from the Fall. They say it is, of course, impossible for anyone to come down from the Ring, unless he doesn’t wish to go back up again.

They say a lot of things. But they know almost nothing.

“What is happening, exactly?” he asks eventually.

Judith tears herself away from the telescope and sits, back straight, across from him. It is an attitude of entirely unconscious provocation; her breasts are naturally high beneath the black sweater where her ebony hair gracefully falls; her waist curves in a perfect wave along her spinal column. Her long legs sketch a double curve in a pair of vintage blue jeans dating from before the Fall. She lights up the room with her beauty more brightly than if a supernova had exploded in the heavens; she projects an aura of sensuality and pure intelligence without the slightest ostentation. It is just her; it is just how she is made.

Which makes it worse, of course.

“That’s just it; I don’t know yet. Movement, a lot of movement. Stations that were isolated before are coming together; others are forming bigger clusters. Do you want to see?”

He does.

He presses his eye to the telescope’s eyepiece and watches the slow ballet of metallic, luminous spheres approximately 450 kilometers above the Earth. Spacecraft co-orbit, form pairs, triads, quartets, complete orchestras. They turn around one another, come together, then break off toward other clusters. He must admit that in the three years Judith has been letting him into her observatory, he has never seen so much activity up there.

The Ring is transforming. And it has something to do with what is happening here, below, on Earth.

“Have you been able to send anything over the shortwave radio? And more importantly, have you received any more messages?” Link points a finger at a large military-green box atop a concrete pilaster not far from the telescope.

“Communications are terribly poor, and it isn’t getting any better with time. I lose contact more and more often, and for longer and longer at a stretch. It’s been three days since the machine sent a looped message, and nothing has come from up there. At least I’m not picking anything up. Anything at all.”

Link is silent. In the space of a few months, with this small military shortwave radio equipped with a GPS module, they had been able to prove to the community of HMV that there were still ways to communicate, even if only briefly, with the Ring. It was excellent news, and brought new hope to many hearts. But the poor quality and rarity of the transmissions quickly cooled people’s enthusiasm. It still seems inconceivable, at any rate, that a space exploration program toward the Ring might be relaunched. It is probably unthinkable that people living in orbit, sheltered from the Fall, would suddenly want to come bury themselves in one of the vast deserts overtaking the Earth, among dead or dying machines.

Rescue expeditions only work if you take someone away from where he was.

They had managed to transmit for ten or fifteen minutes per month on average, with the same amount of time for receiving, and, as Judith had remarked, it tended to be less than that.

The
thing
is not unaware of the transmissions, Link tells himself. Just as it is not unaware of what has been happening in the Ring for the last few days.

Just as, indeed, it is not unaware of anything.

The next morning, Link de Nova is awakened by a noise coming from his parents’ mobile home. Voices. Exclamations of joy and surprise. Laughter. He sits up in bed and recognizes the voice of his father, who must be talking from the metal steps outside the mobile home’s front door to someone still inside. “It leaves tomorrow, or in two days at the most. Sydia, have you thought of a place where we can store all of it?”

Link cannot hear the response clearly, but he recognizes his mother’s voice, her crystalline laugh.

His mother. The android.

She has told him many times how she found him, a baby, under the Deadlink interchange, during the passage through the area of a group of refugees from Canada. It was the day after October 4th, in the early morning.

State-of-the-art androids of that time possessed practically all the biological necessities for reproduction, but a Metastructure directive had suspended the final decryption of the pseudogenetic code. Fourth-generation androids, though endowed with all the necessary genitalia, had thus remained ontologically sterile, and now that the Metastructure is dead there is no longer even the slightest hope that sophisticated technology might “decipher” their bioblocking nanoprocessors. And not a chance that new androids will ever be designed and manufactured on Earth.

The android species, these semiartificial, seminatural creatures made of carbon and silicon, will probably be extinct by the end of this century or the beginning of the next, at the very latest. It will be the most rapid mass biological disappearance ever seen in the entire history of the planet, his mother told him once.

Since then, he has never been able to stop thinking about that terrible factoring: the androids, directly and totally connected to the Metastructure, died very fast and in great numbers during the First Fall. Most of the survivors were eradicated six years later by the Second.

They say there are still a few groups and individual survivors here and there, but everyone knows—even in this place where knowledge has all but disappeared—that there is something worse than the fate of the last humans on this Earth of the Post-Machine. There is the fate of the first posthumanity, created by the previous one. There is the fate of the Creature of the Creature.

“Just before the First Fall,” his mother had told him, “there must have been more than a million androids of all generations functioning. I believe around one-hundredth of them lived permanently in orbit; they must have survived the Cataclysm. As for the others, down here, the ratio is the same—around ten thousand of us survived. One thousand, maybe. One percent of the global population, at the most.”

“You survived too, Mama,” he had said at the time. “You’re part of the one percent.”

His mother had not replied; she had merely gazed at him, her eyes full
of tenderness. Even though he knew she wasn’t his biological mother any more than his father was his father, through this kind of simple thing—a regard, a gesture, not even a word—the reality, more strange than painful, had eventually been erased, or had at least become nothing more than a bit of mechanical information among the other basic mechanisms in his mind.

This woman is his mother. And she is one of the few androids still living.

This man is his father. And he is one of the last men to possess a library.

The rest doesn’t matter.

Or so he believes.

Zarkovsky looks at Djordjevic’s young son with undisguised interest. Gabriel Link de Nova, adopted son of a doctor of theology and a fourth-generation female android. Discovered in a box on the morning after the Cataclysm, aged eight days even though he had been born the night before, at the exact time of the Fall. A living paradox.

He had heard the story from the mouth of Djordjevic himself. He had had a hard time believing it at first, but the boy’s father had shown him indubitable proof.

The young man returns the Professor’s gaze unblinkingly. A
bit of hardness in his soul
, thinks Zarkovsky. So much the better. The Post-Metastructure won’t exactly be a party.

Since the evening before, when Gabriel Link de Nova’s parents explained to him exactly what he would be finding here in this “sanctuary,” a question has not stopped tormenting him, like a red-hot iron plunged into flesh grown soft with certainty.

Right now the boy undoubtedly has certain predispositions, but couldn’t one try to implement a specific training program, one that would make his powers even more efficient?

Can he imagine a way to optimize his gifts—for example, by extending their topological reach? For the moment, Gabriel represents only a microlocal response to the Thing-World. What can they do so that he might act on if not a global scale—which is of course out of the question—at least a regional one, or something of that size?

Zarkovsky has no idea whether he might one day be able to provide replies to these questions, but in the meantime there is no doubt that the young man holds his fair share of both mystery and discovery. He illuminates
at the same time as he obscures; he has many responses at the same time as he raises problematic, unfathomable uncertainties.

For example, the brief exchange that just took place between them:

“If you can stimulate general remission in machines and modified humans, it’s clear that you cannot continue to act as if this were a simple small business, you and your friends. We talked about it with your father yesterday, and he is in agreement with me on this point.”

“I know,” Link responded dryly. “And you … there are so many things you don’t know. As for my father, whom I would hate to offend and in spite of all the respect I have for him, he is still unaware of many things as well.”

“Your father is having a library sent from Italy that will help us to complete our knowledge and to—”

“You don’t understand—either that, or you aren’t listening to me.” Link de Nova cut him off abruptly. “I know about the library. I said, you and my father don’t know very much. And, as it happens, my friends do.”

“What do you want to say, my boy?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Link saw his father turn pale. He knew Gabriel was never wrong—and, moreover, that he never lied. Except in the case of his nocturnal wanderings, his visits to the beautiful Judith. But not in this type of discussion. Not about anything having to do with his two friends from Junkville. Not where the entity that threatened them all was concerned.

“I don’t want to say anything to
you
, but I think you would do well to have a serious talk with my two friends.
Very
serious. A series of incidents is happening in the Territory. Things only they are qualified to talk to you about.”

He had the impression that he had already said too much. But he added: “Things are also happening in the Ring, and I think it’s all connected.”

But neither Yuri nor Campbell was aware of this last bit of information. He had better wait, he thought, and talk to them in person.

Fixing the Professor’s gaze with his own, he fell silent.

The man stared at him like a scientist who had just discovered a new species of beetle, or orchid, or meteoritic quartz.

Zarkovsky knows, now, how very right he was to come here, to cross the entire mid-American desert to reach this “sanctuary.”

Here, it seems as if they are in the eye of the hurricane. He can’t explain why, but he is beginning to think that this place, this Territory, this cosmodrome, has a particular relationship, not with the Metastructure, which he already knows, but with its end, with what people call the “Fall.”

He is beginning to realize that close ties will bind—do bind—already bind—the library that is about to leave Europe and the singular existence of Link de Nova in the very place it will arrive.

The bonds are not immediately apparent. What, in this world, can pride itself on being apparent as well as so important? What is apparent in this world is not even nothingness, like black holes, which are visible as “hollows” via the destruction they wreak on all matter, all light. What is apparent is only appearance.

What is apparent bears such a close resemblance to what it is supposed to hide! It is a perfect copy, in fact. The desert, for example. One might say that it was created “in the image of the Post-Metastructure,” just as Man was made in the image of God.

Djordjevic’s library contains many secrets—but secrets that are not sealed in some forgotten dungeon or behind the smoke and mirrors of a
Da Vinci Code
, or concealed by some other perfumed mystic catering to the tastes of people who read cultural supplements, the ones responsible for the glory days of this vanished art that used to be called “literature.” The secrets are contained in books that are neither prohibited nor lost, even if some of them might, in a pinch, be considered rarities.

They are secret books because it has been more than a century since anyone read them.

There was no need for a directive from the Metastructure; no public prohibition was ever issued, except maybe in the Islamic emirates, where, after all, even a blank cassette tape would be burned in the streets.

Djordjevic’s books simply did not interest twenty-first-century society. And they probably held very little fascination in previous years either.