Grand Junction (35 page)

“Sir, entering an orange zone is a misdemeanor anywhere in the Territory. Even the most recently arrived refugee knows that.”

The dog’s muzzle worked for a few moments, then he added:

“It’s funny—I don’t know, but I think I’ve smelled your odor before, in Heavy Metal Valley, though I hadn’t made the olfactory connection then. Who are you?”

The man sighed, disconnecting the various attachments from his binoculars. “The boy knows me. He saw me once, in Bulldozer Park …”

The binoculars were lowered.

“… with his two buddies from Junkville.”

“Oh, yes; that’s it. It was in Bulldozer Park that I registered your olfactory imprint. And you’re a friend of Chrysler Campbell and Yuri McCoy?”

“I’ve been one of their informants for years. It was through me that Professor Zarkovsky came here.”

“He’s telling the truth, Balthazar. His name is Pluto Saint-Clair, I think. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. And you must be the person they come to see regularly to have machines healed, aren’t you?”

In a fraction of a second, Link realized that the secret of his existence was now well known.

This man knew, or he had guessed.

He was dangerous.

Chrysler had said to him once, “Never hesitate to take advantage of fear. Fear is a language. A language that kills thought. A language that kills will.”

“I’m sure you know what Chrysler Campbell does to the people who benefit from my abilities. Remember, he would do much worse to anyone who said a word about it.”

Later, the man replaced his binoculars, and they resumed the conversation.

Three creatures of the night in the middle of the night. Three creatures on the edge of the world, in darkness filled with light only they can see, each by his own method, each with his machine.

This time, they went straight to the heart of the problem. The dog cut right to the bone.

“I’m not asking how you knew her, but I want to know, very exactly, what she told you, Mr. Pluto Saint-Clair.”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain. Just before the Fall she was hiding in the north of the strip; she had managed to escape the hell of Solar System. She chose her own clients, her own motels, her schedule, et cetera. The Laika was one of her favorites. The manager was easily corrupted; she did what she wanted here. She was the one who told me a strange incident had happened in the hotel, and that she was almost positive it had led to the death of the Metastructure.”

“What happened in the hotel?”

“She didn’t want to tell me. She said I wouldn’t believe it. She just talked about beings of light.”

Balthazar was quiet. Link noted his prolonged silence.

“But she also told me things … that Gabriel should know.”

“What things?” barked the dog.

“That old hooker assured me you knew a lot about it, Mr. Dog from the Sheriff’s Office, and I’m tempted to believe you’re hiding a lot as well. She told me that the phenomenon that killed the Metastructure had also created a very young child. A child that was adopted by an android, a female android who found him under the abandoned interchange at Dead-link. Is that clear enough?”

Oh yes
, thought Link de Nova, paralyzed. It was all clear, in this artificial light bathing the three living beings, human or not.

It was clear that he knew many things.

Too many things.

*   *   *

“I’ve been mapping this fucking hotel for weeks, especially the part here under the dome. I’ve analyzed every cubic centimeter. Tonight, using an interface I monkeyed with a bit, I managed to see what is really inside the iron lung.”

“And what is that?”

“Nothing. But I knew that already. What really interested me tonight was the interface in the wall.”

“Why?”

“Whatever killed the Metastructure came from this exoform, and then was swallowed up into the network by this high-speed interface.”

“How do you know?”

Pluto Saint-Clair cracked a smile of pure pride. “Because I saw it. Because it’s still there. Like a fossil. Even a digital machine like the Metastructure leaves a trace of its passage, especially with a catastrophic death. A digital trace, but a trace. If you look closely at the inside of the iron lung, you’ll understand.”

Link and Balthazar looked at each other, then at Pluto Saint-Clair, then at the iron lung, and finally at the little gleaming plaque on the wall to which the cord was connected.

“I’ll go first,” Balthazar said.

Link did not reply. He knew whatever he said wouldn’t matter.

Lot’s wife wasn’t among the first ones to turn, but that hadn’t kept her from being turned into a pillar of salt.

They saw it.

Yes. It was Her.

A fossil trace. Pluto Saint-Clair was right about that. But She was there.

They could see her in the hole. They could perceive her.

They could make her out by her active absence, like a black hole. It was a sort of world-box, but one that contained all
worlds from the inside
.

It was the astonishingly alive trace of the death of the Metastructure.

It indicated a sort of paradoxical “presence” that developed in the same process as its annihilation, and that now, without being truly visible, was located in a dimension made barely perceptible by the senses. It had no form, no color, no sense, no substance—but nevertheless it existed; it possessed its own identity.

It was Her.

The Thing.

It was there.

Or rather, it had been there.

And now it was everywhere.

It had come from a simple hotel, and now it was turning the whole world into its habitat.

It had come from a humanoid exoform, and now it was entering into all men.

It had come from this cube-within-a-cube—it had come from this black box open to infinity—and now it was turning every brain into an indivisible box that enclosed the self inside a process of
undefined
division.

It had been here; it had passed through here. It was born here.

It was born here, at the exact place and time the Metastructure died.

And I was born with it
.

I was born with the death of the World
.

He has been following the red Buick all morning. It wasn’t preplanned; he came across it in Junkville, and that had been enough. It is the First Rule of the Territory: missing your chance means you lose.

Chrysler had gone to see a new informer among the population of American refugees in New Arizona; Yuri was out on his motorcycle, making a tour as far as Champlain Banks. After a night like the previous one, he deserved half a day of rest. He had passed Tin Machine, and there was the car. The Buick.

The red Buick of the man looking for the Professor. The red Buick of the man who had been spying on them in Carbon City. The red Buick of the man who is snooping around far too close to their secret. The red Buick of the man whose path he is crossing much too often.

There wasn’t even a conscious decision. The walk around Lake Champlain was immediately forgotten, and the moving red glitter of the Buick became, in a split second, the sole focus of his interest. The man had broken one of the Territory’s unspoken laws. He was poking his nose into something that didn’t involve him.

Who are you? What do you want? Who are you looking for? Why?

Yuri is already imagining the barrage of questions that will be aimed at the man when he is alone between him and Chrysler. He imagines the man’s face as he stares down the barrel of the Sig Sauer P226 or the equally welcoming Beretta M92. He imagines the guy’s head after Chrysler has unloaded the first round of shot into that face.

Oh yes, he’ll talk.

He obviously has a lot of interesting stories to tell.

Chrysler will know how to stimulate the narrative flow.

*   *   *

Around ten o’clock the Buick, which has been parked for almost an hour in Neo Pepsico, starts north again and drives up one of the hills of the rich township of Little Congo.

Yuri consults his notes.

Nothing, except that during this morning the guy has crossed the whole city and seen more than a dozen people.

In Vortex Townships he met up with an old hooker Yuri had finally managed to place: Ariane Gallagher, an old habitué of Flesh Market, undoubtedly one of the guy’s ex-employees. In the same district, a little farther south, the man had talked with a group of young losers who sometimes worked as informants for the necro Triads.

In Carbon City, he had seen two old homosexuals who shared a Combi-Cube—Rondeau and Marston, professional blabbermouths. Nothing that happened in Junkville is unknown to them; people say they know when you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak.

East of Toy Division the man spoke briefly with a few barely postpubescent whores, and at greater length with a trio of young pimps who, it is said, will rent themselves out for a quick, well-executed hired killing here and there.

Then, in Neo Pepsico, the man met up with a bunch of people Yuri couldn’t place—except for the last one, an old cop for the municipality of Grand Junction, one Johnson Belfond, who has a reputation as one of the most pompous blowhards in the whole Territory.

All in all, it is a list of the crème de la crème of the city’s dregs, like a dinner menu from Hell, as if the Buick’s owner is getting ready to cook the worst kind of feast.

He must have started his day in Tin Machine, where Yuri ran across him. That part of his doings is still a mystery.

But here, here in Little Congo among the kings of Junkville, who is the contact of the man in the Buick? Who is his sous chef in Hell?

And why?

If Yuri was the wind blowing through the region, he would be able to float invisibly up to the peak of the butte, brush the aluminum surface of the luxury mobile home, and enter it through a half-open window. He would be able to see, to listen, to understand.

Two men. One of them is the fellow with the red Buick. And his partner in conversation has a digitally rebuilt face, a body amplified with transgenic cosmetics. Functionally androgynous. The man-woman from Neon Park.

If he was a breeze, he could just be there. He could touch them, feel their skin, dry their sweat, take on their presence, mingle with their odors, guess their most secret thoughts.

Two men, face-to-face, seated in comfortable armchairs of Italian design from the early part of the century—they must have cost a small fortune at the time, and today they are worth the price of half a township.

Two men who have sealed a pact. Two men who have set their own rules. Two men separated by everything, but brought back together by a vital principle.

“Very expensive. How does this antiviral nanogenerator work?”

“It works perfectly, Mr. Silverskin. Not a problem in a month.”

“That was my minimum guarantee, Vegas. If it had broken down any sooner I would have been much more generous.”

“It might have been worth more. … I don’t have more than a liter of gasoline left, and I have to drive a lot to finish your assignment. I’m making the rounds of Junkville several times a week.”

“Don’t worry about that. If you need a few gallons from Reservoir Can I’ll take care of it. I won’t leave you short of gas for the investigation. About that—I hope you’ve got good news for me.”

A sigh. The exchange of two gazes that come from opposite poles of the same planet. The planet of betrayal, the planet of lying monkeys, the planet where human flesh is bought and sold, certainly—but one of them is playing the dominant role here, and the other one is the dominated. We’ve regressed to tribes of animals.

“I put ten more people on the case this morning. There were already almost that many scouring Junkville and its environs to find these two young guys. I couldn’t see them too well because of the sandstorm, but we caught the other one, the big guy in black from Midnight Oil.”

“I know. You told me two weeks ago.”

“We won’t leave a stone unturned, Mr. Silverskin. We’re following him and making note of all his movements.”

“Anything new there?”

“Not really; he keeps going regularly to the north of the Territory, to the Monolith Hills strip. He also visits an area near Neon Park. We know
he has some connection to the Professor, but we still don’t know where, how, or when the tie was established.”

“Neon Park … that’s in the east-central part of the Territory. It’s totally deserted and slightly radioactive. It used to be a high-tech area. A much more likely place, if you ask me, to hide what we’re looking for.”

“We don’t really know what we’re looking for, Mr. Silverskin; remember that.”

“You should get your hands on these two guys with the pickup right away, Vegas.”

“I’m sure I’ll have some news for you soon, Mr. Silverskin. I don’t know exactly what they’re making, or where they’re from, but someone will have seen them somewhere in the Territory and remembered them, and what they do, and even where they live.”

“I don’t think these men are from Junkville.”

“It’s possible, but they seem to know the city extremely well.”

“These guys are a lot more important than your fellow from Midnight Oil. I’m sure they’re sort of bodyguards for the Professor. His personal escort. If you find them, you find him. Simple as that.”

If Yuri was a gust of wind, even one carrying all the fragrances of Junkville, he would immediately know that even the most adroit conspirators make mistakes. He would know that a man who lives by fear is its primary potential target. He would know that the mistake is even greater in that it hides the essential truth.

He would be able to count the seconds of silence before the man with the red Buick begins speaking again.

“You haven’t ever really explained to me, even when you first sent me on the hunt for the nanogenerator, why the Professor interests you so much.”

“For the same reason as you, Vegas.”

“But I don’t have a reason to chase him anymore—you’ve given me an entirely new biosystem—”

“Vegas, I already told you—all I know how to do is delay failure for a little while. I can’t guarantee anything beyond a few weeks. The Professor probably knows that.”