Grand Junction (30 page)

“Ultra Violet” is a true gem of this sort. Its apparent simplicity hides several sophisticated traps, particularly in the harmonic sense. But once detected, these traps become jewel boxes for the most perfect diamonds.

More dangerous yet, Link cannot prevent the lilac eyes of Judith Sevigny from dancing before him—her silhouette, her body. No, even worse, he can do more than see her, hallucinate her in some semi-dreamlike way—he can feel her near him.

I feel her nearest with music
, he thinks, as he attacks the intro.

There are still other mysteries in this music that has made electricity into its very language. So, how to explain the numerous “premonitions” that prove the existence of songs written in atomic light? The cases are innumerable; it would be impossible to envision anything more than a partial list. Besides, there is little interest in quantifying this secret evidence. An example will suffice to illuminate the whole phenomenon. “Sweet Bird of Truth,” from the album
Infected
by The The, the British group led by Matt Johnson with Johnny Marr on guitar, describes—with the cold lyricism appropriate to the recounting of a catastrophe—the fatal nosedive of an American warplane and its living cargo of “GI Joes” flying “above the Gulf of Arabia.”
It is an urgent warning
, says the captain,
our altitude is falling, there’s no time for thinking, all hands on deck. ALL HANDS ON DECK
.

The album was released in 1986.

Five years before the First Gulf War.

Another mystery, even more troubling: no one, it seems to Gabriel, at least as far as he knows, has ever pointed out the fact that rock ’n’ roll was born at the end of the Second World War—that is, at the beginning of the
Third. “Search and Destroy,” as the title of a 1973 Stooges song so explicitly said.

The electronic music of the twentieth century appeared in the shadow cast by the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Transistors, vacuum tubes, coils, all the technology that would one day be implanted in simple jazz guitars and radio amplifiers came from the
military
progress made in that era. When the computer appeared, itself born of the Manhattan Project, music was among its first artistic applications. Microcomputers and the Internet, later technologies but still military in origin, were immediately assimilated by the rock industry.

In Vietnam and during the three Gulf Wars, fighting soldiers listened to endless electronic music—rock, blues, country, reggae, rap, and techno, the volume turned low on their headsets. During the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, Africa, central Asia, and then during the Grand Jihad—on the western side, at any rate—and up until the final jolts that followed the Death of the Metastructure, it was to the sound of this music created in the infernal forges of the twentieth century that people had become what they now are.

For the true songwriters of the time, it had rapidly become unthinkable to write about love as they had done before the Great Flash—or about anything else, for that matter.

Instead of stupidly following the advice of a German philosopher of the time—another German!—they had each and all understood that not only was it possible to write after Auschwitz, it had become more necessary than ever.

The Nazi and Communist camps had not been able to silence them. The Camp-World will not be able to, either. Because I am the Camp Orchestra. I am what will give them new life in this Anus Mundi.

Silence is not the answer to a gag placed in the mouth. It is the sad consequence, and the rest is only sophism.

One day, Chrysler told him about an aphorism by George Orwell, an author from the middle of the previous century, whose most famous book had predicted, almost word for word, the world of the Metastructure. This writer had said one day that
the future would resemble a boot eternally crushing a mouth
.

Chrysler had said that a French writer whose name he had forgotten had continued the aphorism, saying:
But there is still a chance for the mouth. It can, if its will is strong enough, devour both the boot and the foot inside it
.

I am the mouth, thinks Link de Nova, and I am starving. The boot had better be on guard.

The night is very black when he emerges from the hangar. His natural optic system automatically increases its perception levels in a gradual transition to artificial luminic amplification. Now the starlight alone is enough for him to see as if in broad daylight—broad daylight tinted sodium yellow; the broad daylight of a highway tunnel; the broad daylight of electronic war.

Why does he decide abruptly not to go home to bed, but to venture once more toward the cosmodrome, toward Sheriff Langlois’ “red zone”?

No rational reason. An impulse. A desire. A need. A will.

No explanation except that the cosmodrome is there. That it has been there for decades. That it will no doubt be there eternally. No explanation other than the night and the colluding sonorous saturation of his mind, his whole body, this electricity that has refused to die for hours, making sleep impossible, as it so often does, until the early hours of the morning.

This electricity that wants to act. This electricity that compels the human to walk, supplying the engine that takes him to this place where, for more than forty years, Earth and Sky have been linked.

This electricity that sees through the shadows, this electricity that uses his dreams to revive century-old music, this electricity the Thing wants to make into a “thing” of its own.

This electricity that is he.

Nearly surprised by one of the sheriff’s patrols, he spends almost half an hour flat on his stomach, hiding behind a small bank of hawthorn shrubs, waiting for the two cops to finish their inspection of the site. They are on equal footing with him in their ability to see in the dark. Shortly after the Second Fall, the sheriff managed to collect a store of Chinese-made combat binoculars, and they are invariably used now by the night patrols. But for these humans, the binoculars are technology—they are external prostheses—they add to their bodies, superimposing themselves on their vision.

For Link, on the other hand, the phenomenon is entirely “natural”—at least, biological—this amplified night vision is a simple extension of his
sense of sight, integrated as a cellular system inside his optic nerve. The night is programmed in his brain.

That makes a huge difference. Enough of one so that the sheriff’s men, even with their state-of-the-art binoculars, don’t see him—but he sees them, never losing sight of them for even a fraction of a second.

Quietly, he descends the sandy slope to the first concrete esplanades that mark the cosmodrome’s entry.

Everything is so calm here.

Everything seems so calm, even though the sight of the launch platforms causes an instant vision of pipes ejecting their fire and the fracas that goes along with that.

Everything seems so calm, even more so because this image is accompanied by the certainty that it will never happen again.

He is seized with the desire to retrace his route of the previous year, during the summer of ’69. Apollo Drive, Gemini Drive, North Junction Road, the northern end of the strip.

And the hotel.

The hotel where he met Balthazar, the sheriff’s dog.

That deserted hotel.

That hotel rumored to be connected to the Death of the Metastructure.

That hotel already waiting for him, at the top of the row, with all its orange capsules.

This time, Link stops for only an instant under the entry arch leading to the vast divider strip that surrounds the building. No hesitation. Rather, the inexplicable sensation of finding himself on the edge of a sacred place, a synagogue, an invisible sanctuary.

His naturally amplified eyes discern each detail that enters his field of vision—textures, colors, structures, shapes, surfaces, gaps, shadows, light; all is recreated within his optic nerve, in a cross-hatching of artificial shades.

He walks, slowly, toward the building’s entry door.

The hotel is swathed in the most complete blackness. Scavengers have removed nearly half the capsules, but all the others have remained, empty, and the hotel’s interior spaces seem abandoned as well.

It is rare in the Territory; so much space, offering so much well-protected
shelter from bad weather, containing still-operating machinery, yet utterly untouched.

He enters the hall. With a single glance, he takes in the deserted front desk to his left. An arched opening in the vast wall to his right opens directly onto a patio covered by a composite roof with programmable transparence.

He can see the corridors leading to the elevators. He sees the numbered orange doors and those of the service stairways, marked by their steel gray color and the lack of numbers, with just the indication of their cardinal location: west, south, north, east.

He takes a few steps toward the patio, pausing for a few instants in front of the huge empty space. A few scattered chairs, two overturned tables, some broken dishes on the floor—this, he sees, was a community dining room.

There can be hardly any usable objects left in the hotel, he thinks as he leaves the patio. The capsules that weren’t taken away by scavengers have probably been systematically robbed, down to the last coat hanger, the last faucet handle, the last doorknob.

The entry hall yawns before him.

He is facing the front desk.

And the dog.

There is a good minute of silence, a full minute of mutual observation, a minute that holds all the time in the universe.

It is Link de Nova who finally breaks the ice.

“It seems we’re destined to keep running into each other in this hotel, at night.”

“You don’t know how right you are,” replies Balthazar.

“I imagine we both have excellent reasons for coming here regularly.”

“You don’t know how right you are,” the dog repeats.

“Would you believe that I know why this place is important to you?”

“Only if you would believe the same of me.”

“You worked here before the Fall,” says Link de Nova, feeling like he has just played a very important card.

“I worked here
during
the Fall, my young friend. I was in the vicinity when the attack against the cosmodrome took place.”

Link hesitates. What to say? How to avoid letting on just how much
he
doesn’t
know? “People are saying things about this hotel, and the attack. You must be aware of that.”

“If I had to track down and quash all the rumors in the Territory, I’d drop dead of exhaustion within twenty-four hours.”

“Fine, but why come back here so often, even though the place is totally abandoned?”

The bionic dog looks at Gabriel with eyes black as two pieces of burning coal in a circle of powder. “Precisely because the place
isn’t
totally abandoned.”

Link doesn’t blink. He continues to watch the cyberdog as calmly as if his heart wasn’t beating double time—though he doesn’t even know why.

“What do you mean?” he asks in a murmur.

“Want to see?”

The dog offers him a canine smile as an invitation, a microdiode implanted in his forehead flashing incessantly from red to green and back again.

On the upper floors of the Hotel Laika, the night has gone ultraviolet. Tangles of barbed wire fence off the universe outside the visible spectrum, luminescence in constant variations of intensity, specks of photoelectricity become perceptible like so many handfuls of sand thrown into the space in front of him.

Ultraviolet, that viral darkness that penetrates structures just as it does the depths of masses of target cells. Ultraviolet, the residual light that falls from the stars. Ultraviolet, the silhouette of the cyborg dog trotting in front of him. Ultraviolet, all the numbered doors that stretch endlessly along the corridors.

Ultraviolet, his own hands that push open the emergency-exit doors on each floor as they climb the service staircases.

Ultraviolet, his own memory, a photosensitive tablet revealing a world he does not know, but which—he doesn’t know where his absolute certainty comes from—knows him intimately.

“Does the electricity not work at all in this hotel?”

Ten floors on foot is no small feat, but the questioning continues.

Balthazar, walking a little in front of him, turns his head for a second in Link’s direction. “We can both see perfectly in the dark, so what does it matter?”

“It was just a question. Not even a phosphorescent lightbulb?”

Link is strangely reminded of the previous night, with Yuri and Chrysler, and the dead electric machines from Surveyor Plateau.

Tenth floor. The top floor. He pushes open the security door and finds himself in a hallway with the dog.

Balthazar sits on his haunches and stares at Link, his eyes night-black points in the ultraviolet night.

“Gabriel,” he says in his pseudohuman voice, “I don’t believe in chance.”

“I don’t either,” says Link de Nova, laughing. “But maybe not for the same reasons.”

“The reasons don’t matter. It means that you don’t believe in it, or, let’s say, in its causal importance to a ‘series of accidents.’”

“Why, Balthazar. I didn’t know dogs were so keen on academics and mathematics.”

“I’m a little more than a dog, Gabriel. But dogs themselves don’t believe in chance.”

“Why are you so insistent about that?”

Link senses that they are in a place where the most profound darkness may lead to the brightest light.

“What do you know about this place?”

“The hotel? Not much, truthfully. Now I know you worked here until the day of the Fall, and—”

“No. I never said that.”

“What? I—”

“I told you I worked here before and
during
the Fall. I continued to monitor the hotel for weeks, including after the death of its manager.”

Okay, says Link de Nova to himself. The dog kept watch over the area for the whole last part of 2057, and maybe after that. He probably killed a lot of looters. Maybe he even sabotaged the electrical system himself. That would have made the hotel’s reputation, right there.