Grand Junction (25 page)

When he had been obligated to leave Trieste, a hunted man in extremis, a few months before the Fall, as the neo-Islamist assault on the city reached its zenith, his library was already nearly to Rome.

He had put his twelve thousand books before his own life.

The only problem is that he also put them before the lives of his wife and daughter.

When the sky splits in two that day, splits into vast monochrome sections torn by the storm, metal-clad gray-blue meteors falling in a shower to the Earth, the frigid wind blows in from the northwest, from what remains of the Arctic. What remains is still sufficient, when conditions permit, to create one-hundred-kilometer-per-hour blizzards from Quebec to Nova Scotia.

Temperatures fell sharply during the night; it is far below zero now. Even in January, this is unusual. The storm turned rapidly into a “powder factory,” a storm of whirling snow that swept the Territory like a polar armada.

The desert. The blizzard. South, west, north, east. A force seems to be coalescing all its energy against the Territory.

Yuri, who has been tormented by this thought several times already, thumbs through a book on cellular biochemistry while Chrysler oils his guns.

Neither books nor guns will be much help to us now, Yuri thinks. The
thing
is coming from somewhere, even if that somewhere is very close to the Nothingness. It is a sort of copy of it; it exists as such, maybe as a kind of
negative
form, a place from where the thing is planning its proliferation. It wants a body, certainly; it wants a world, all right—but it comes from somewhere; it possesses a niche. It lives within something, its primordial habitat, temporary though it might be. And, probably because it has left the Nothingness for this primordial habitat, it has developed a taste for it; now it wants something better. Something more. It wants to be a world. It wants to be the very body of Humanity.

No—neither books, even those that Djordjevic is having sent from Europe, nor guns, even the ones Chrysler takes such meticulous care of—no,
none of it can really stand in the way of the
thing
. The
thing
that is becoming the World.

Yuri’s book lies unheeded in his lap for long minutes.

The conclusion is undeniable. If the
thing
is becoming the World, if it is transforming the former Earth into a Post-World dedicated to the Post-Machine in ontological principle, only an
anti-thing
would be capable of stopping it.

This
anti-thing
must then, by definition, be
human
. And at the same time it must, in its absolute entirety, be an
Anti-World
.

Even Link de Nova, thinks Yuri, falls short of that mark.

We all fall very short of the mark
.

We are all grains of sand, and It is the storm. We are snowflakes, and It is the blizzard
.

The
thing
should not be underestimated. It definitely deserves the initial capital letter that he sees in his mind when he thinks about it.

It has no name, but It devours all names. It has no substance, and It transforms into numbers what used to be the substance of the human bodies whose language It has digitalized.

It is as powerful as a whole World.

They are all as weak as insects in the face of it.

This kind of blizzard might last for days. The last one he can remember happened during the year following the death of the Metastructure.

Snowdrifts measuring up to two meters in height are massing all over the territory, covering the desert and its sand dunes, piling up on the arid plains and savannas covered with
Cornus canadensis
, sumac, orange hawkweed, phragmites, viperine and white snakewort, a constellation of frozen drifts and vast snowy tundras leaving only rare clumps frozen in place, the trees that survived the drought suddenly repainted with a layer of frost.

Even more than last month’s sandstorm, the blizzard will take its share of victims from the Territory. Certainly several dozen homeless, and poorly protected families in their fragile and unsanitary makeshift huts.

The snow and the sand come together here, in the Territory, in a sooty union. The snow will be quickly blackened by the coal on the hills of southern Junkville, and when it melts it will form lakes of silica in vast expanses
of mud. The
thing
has truly started a process; the events are linking together with the icy causal logic of machinery.

The blizzard didn’t happen by chance.

The Professor just arrived.

And the library is coming, too.

The “second mutation” that transforms men into numeric data has gained speed exponentially over the past few days, reached proportions that have brought even Chrysler Campbell out of his habitual reserve.

The blizzard didn’t happen by chance. It didn’t come alone. The Thing is preparing for an attack of enormous magnitude.

The blizzard is a sign.

Now they are at war against the World as it is. Their visible enemies are countless, above all in the geological scheme, because it is this World that the Thing wants to transform into its own habitat.

But the Thing itself will most likely remain invisible. It will act on those pieces of the World that it has directly brought into its own service, for its “personal” use. It will remain out of public view, behind the scenes, under the table, backstage, watching its work play out.

The image is striking; it is so redoubtable, so meaningful, so blinding, so utterly devoid of illusion.

These “pieces of the world” that the Thing will manipulate like a theater director into serving it will not, of course, be trees, or combustion engines, or quartz watches, or adjustable wrenches.

They will be men.

Simple human beings.

Like him, and Chrysler.

Like any of the Territory’s inhabitants.

The blizzard is a sign. It is saying that winter will never end again, even under the hottest sun. The desert itself is a terrestrial blizzard.

The blizzard is a sign, Yuri tells himself again.

A sign that everything has been turned upside down, and will be again.

A sign that we haven’t seen anything yet.

The blizzard fills the earth and the sky for three full days, with intermittent brief periods of relative calm.

On the morning of the fourth day, the silence wakes Yuri even before Campbell is up.

A ray of light is penetrating the cabin through one of the Airbus windows
and hits the adjacent wall, where there are two large “first-class” seats scavenged from among the plane crash debris. Chrysler is sleeping deeply on one of them, which has been pulled into a reclining position.

Yuri sees a square of intense blue out each window.

The weather is magnificent. The day promises to be mild and very bright.

The memory of the blizzard will recede, without disappearing altogether. It will remain like a memory of death, like a harbinger, like a grimacing mask in the collective dreams of what remains of the Territory’s humanity. It is becoming more and more like a game, a strategy, a trap. It is becoming more and more like a secret war.

After dressing he goes out onto the front steps and gets his first glimpse of the extent and magnitude of the damage left by the three-day blizzard.

In Aircrash Circle alone, two huts that had already suffered from the previous month’s huge storm are gone, wiped from the map, leaving nothing but scattered debris and corpses. One body is missing, that of a little girl eight years old. Five other cabins that had barely survived the sandstorm have now been reduced to ruins; one of the inhabitants is dead, crushed by a support structure. There are numerous wounded, some of them undoubtedly in critical condition.

Yuri makes a tour of the area to evaluate the damage and offer help, the Medikit on his back.

The snow, still immaculately white, glitters with a million silvery sparkles in the pale morning light. The sand, yellow as brass, contained the icy explosion with its dune ramparts and the large horizontal shields of the arid steppes.

Yuri remembers his intuition about the geological progression of the process. Not only are snow and sand mingling before mixing with the coal and garbage of Junkville but soon temperatures will return to normal and spring, with its average 30 degrees centigrade, will appear without a pause.

The polymorphous mud created by the mixture of all these deserts will suddenly swallow up the dried-out valleys and the few surviving rivers, likely provoking a series of floods that will engulf the entire Territory.

Everything above ground level will be immediately submerged; the rest will be carried away by landslides.

Snowdrifts are piling up against the sand dunes now, but soon their
copulation, and their mingling with the coal dust and recycled garbage of Junkville, will produce a substance that is neither solid nor liquid, neither compressed nor powdery, neither black nor white nor yellow nor purple nor gray.

A material without stable substance or color, a material that will undoubtedly form the substratum and shape that the Thing gives to its New Human World.

Sand and snow, silica and ice, have common properties, thinks Yuri, observing the bicolored landscape that stretches on either side of the road.

Silica and ice cut like tiny natural shurikens. Snow, too, is composed of “grains,” and when conditions permit it can, like sand, reach that semi-liquid state that causes it to rush down mountain slopes at three hundred kilometers an hour.

“I counted thirty-five new cases just before the storm. Thirty-five on top of all the others. There are seventeen in Deadlink, according to my source. We’re entering an explosive phase.”

“How many in total at the moment?” asks Yuri, mechanically.

An enormous, icy snowdrift rears up alongside the road next to him, shining like a diamond meteorite in the sun, still nickel-brilliant in some places, already blackened and dirty in others.

“With the new list we’re at more than a hundred and fifty cases now. We’ve analyzed seventy-two of them.”

“When you say seventy-two, do you mean the cases we’ve been able to follow from beginning to end through the entire process?”

The road curves right, toward the white disk of the sun. Deadlink is only a few kilometers away now.

“No, we’ve only monitored twenty-eight of them in detail, stage by stage. And then another twenty partially, through several stages, and twenty more where we could only establish one biomap, usually the final one.”

“How many dead that we know of? A quarter of them?”

“As of right now, if you go back to our first contact, yeah, that’s about right. Thirty of the cases we only heard about are already dead. And when I talk about our seventy-two analyzed cases, I’m not including the eighteen that have died. We were at ninety not too long ago. It’s been a rocky January.”

Now the road is winding toward the Deadlink plateau. He can see the
huge concrete star of the abandoned interchange and the long gray line of the uncompleted portion of the highway.

Deadlink is a township that extends the whole length of this abandoned highway for six or seven kilometers.

The “core” of the system, the uncompleted interchange, thrusts its steel-and-concrete struts skyward near a rocky butte at the bottom of which snakes the trace of a long-dried-out valley. It is the paradoxical off-center center of Deadlink, a linear city that resembles an immense serpent twisting north to south, with the sharp tresses of its star-shaped Gorgon’s head pointing toward each cardinal point.

The highway was, for the most part, built on a system of concrete pillars due to the marshy nature of the terrain in certain places. Planting stilts with integrated jacks had been less expensive than draining and drying the swamps—at the time. If they had waited just a little, the desert would have offered its unremitting services for free.

Masses of refugees had settled on these ten square kilometers and reproduced the natural hierarchy at its most primordial. The elite and their direct servants lived on firm ground, concrete, on high. The various lower strata lived either under the highway (for the intermediate castes) or at the far ends of land vaguely linked to the expressway in one way or another (for the lowest classes).

Twenty-five thousand people. It had rapidly become the most populated township in the Territory, with the exception of the “historic” cities of Grand Junction and Junkville. A human conglomerate where, like everywhere, but with even greater frenzy, everything could be sold, bought, traded, or stolen. A horizontal megamarket, a bazaar crammed onto a piece of Recyclo concrete, a long line of survival supermarkets where men and merchandise alike were arranged according to the particular layout of the highway.