Grand Junction (37 page)

These men failed; they didn’t follow him.

It’s the Territory that killed you
, he thinks.
I was only its instrument
. He rummages hurriedly in the Toyota’s cab for their weapons and ammunition, including a Nepalese combat dagger with a curved blade in a leather scabbard shoved between the two front seats. He takes everything, stuffs the items into the side bags of his motorbike, then stares for a second at the pickup containing the men who couldn’t measure up to the Territory. Dead or alive, they have to disappear, and fast. And if one of them is still alive, he has to die, just as quickly.

So he empties a full twenty-liter can of gasoline, found in a corner of the pickup’s rear bed, over its entire surface—roof, doors, hood, radiator grille, front tires, and, in great splashes, the interior of the cab and the men themselves. The big black man stirs weakly, muttering a mostly inaudible
complaint; Yuri makes sure to drench him even more completely with the gasoline.

He keeps just enough fuel to top off his motorbike’s tank. He has already chosen the exact spot where everything will disappear. Nothing is left but to enact the Law of the Territory.

It’s perfectly simple.

It will be technical, medical, precise. Campbell would appreciate it. The Rules are being respected, as they should be.

It will be weeks before anyone finds the vehicle and the burned bodies, or longer if they’re devoured by a pack of roving animals in the meantime, or another blizzard or sandstorm covers their resting place with a heavy white carpet.

It’s this kind of thinking that constitutes the perfect nonanimalness of human murder.

Animals have no Law. It would never occur to any of them to camouflage the remains of a feast. Men have Laws. Laws of which the First One is that they are made to be broken. Men follow the Rules. Rules governed by a single Law: The only Rule that counts is the one made by the survivor.

The truck catches fire as it crashes to the bottom of the rocky ravine in a fracas of metal exploding under its own weight. Jets of sparks. The orange and blue pyrotechnics of gasoline in full combustion. Then the explosion of the gas tank. The fire spreads to a few shrubs and some underbrush, but the chances that the flames will grow into a detectable fire are very slim.

All the Rules are being obeyed.

It is the first time Yuri has killed a man, let alone two at once.

The men didn’t see anything, hear anything, sense anything. He acted with the military precision of a cyberdog.

They had followed him after marking him out and, confident of success, they hadn’t even tried to hide themselves from him. They had followed him, but he was the one who trailed them, who led them in every sense of the word. They had had a plan, but it had never occurred to them that their plan would be anticipated.

They had had a plan.

And their plan had killed them.

The telescope is pointed toward the equatorial orbit, taking in the growing activity there.

In the black denseness of the spatial night, the slow ballet of stations and cargo ships coming together and moving apart again resembles a mechanical game suspended in the glaring solar light, unfiltered by any atmosphere, striking like that of a thermonuclear superbomb one hundred and fifty million kilometers away.

They’re still going
, she thinks.
They aren’t stopping
.

Every day. Every hour. It never stops. They are creating superstations, attaching automatic cargo ships to hydroponic production domes, joining satellites to knots of capsules, gathering groups of orbiters.

Why?

She has spent the whole day watching the sky, noting anything remarkable in it, recording on high-definition tapes the visual evidence of this abnormal orbital activity.

Her military-communication microstation has been broadcasting the same message in a loop for days, its parabolic antenna pointed toward that part of the sky from which she can logically expect a response.

For days the message has played over and over in the emptiness, the great emptiness between the stars.

For days only the silence of those same stars, the silence of the same emptiness between them, has replied to her.

For days she has simply been watching.

And then, suddenly, the machine emits a weak sputter, the small screen of its speaker vibrating.

Someone is talking.

Someone is telling her something.

Someone is saying that there are still people in the Ring who don’t want to abandon the Earth.

She doesn’t respond to the male voice from outer space. Mass electromagnetic interference, the rotation of the Earth and the Ring, asychronicities, the barely passable quality of the instruments. She just has time to hear what the man from space says.

There are still people in the Ring who don’t want to abandon the Earth
.

Encouraging
, she thinks.

But it gives sudden, precise meaning to all the orbital maneuvers she has been watching for so many weeks.

There are still people in the Ring who don’t want to abandon the Earth
.

That means that all the others intend to abandon it for good.

“They didn’t even tell you their name?”

Link is standing in Judith’s little observatory, having just taken his eye away from the telescope’s eyepiece. The sky is very black above them, the stars in the Milky Way and the metallic points of the Ring burning like meteors about to crash into the Earth.

He has just come back from the Hotel Laika, where he took his two friends from Junkville, and where they learned the secret of the place. He has just healed a man stricken by the Third Fall. He has just thwarted the entity that intends to make each man into its numeric residence.

“They communicate with a mixture of voice and teletext; the interference doesn’t allow long exchanges. All I know is that their old Israeli three-seater is called
Tchekna
, or something like that.”

Link manages to keep his eyes fixed on the young woman for a few seconds. Judith appears surrounded by an ultraviolet glow; his innate night-vision bioprogram makes her into a sort of creature of light standing on the translucent surface of the veranda. Link forces himself to turn his gaze away, to hide from her the damned thudding of his heart. Nothing is happening. Everything is 100 percent normal. Everything is fine. Don’t think. Keep talking like nothing is wrong.

“Why did they tell you they didn’t want to abandon the Earth?”

Judith measures him coolly with her violet eyes. “Can’t you guess?”

“It has something to do with that mess up there, right?”

“Link … if they’re making the effort to tell us they won’t abandon us, you can draw a logical conclusion from it, can’t you?”

Judith Sevigny is as hard as a diamond. She doesn’t even realize what she is doing to the poor piece of glass named Gabriel Link de Nova.

Link tries to hold her lilac gaze. He feels as if he is literally melting on the inside. His voice is low, cracked, barely audible:

“Do you know where and when the people in the Ring are planning to leave?”

Judith gives him a smile that completes the process of internal liquefaction.

“That’s one of the questions the microstation has been transmitting on loop since last night,” she answers.

Link is quiet for a long moment. Violent feelings are swirling inside him in opposing directions. Good News is mingling with Bad, forming a dual Gemini, a horrible twinning that surges out of this magnificent golden night like a maleficent, unexpected constellation.

He has succeeded in vanquishing the Thing, in stopping its “Third Fall,” with music, with sonorous electricity, with a machine endowed with language. With the language of the individual, with the very process of individuation, with the infinite univocity of which he is a witness, with the
voice-electricity-music-sense
of the one who plays, as well as the one who listens.

And at the same time, the men who survived all of it in the Ring are making the decision to leave orbit for an unknown destination.

The moon? Mars?

Far away from Earth, in any case.

Far away from what is left of Earth.

Far away from the Thing.

Far away from all of us.

The Council is planning to meet at five o’clock in the afternoon. As far as he knows, Campbell refused the initial meeting time of noon because of things he is working on that cannot be delayed. But they will be there at five.

Link goes back to see Judith in her observatory. He slept badly. A black shadow, blacker than any known darkness, infiltrated his sleep, covering the horizon of his dreams.

Judith is still watching the sky, waiting for a response from the Ring, waiting to hear again the voice of the astronaut who doesn’t want to abandon the Earth.

“They sent me a compressed audio file in their last message.”

“An audio file?”

“Yes. I got some information and a song.”

“A song?”

“They told me I would understand.”

Through one of the veranda’s glass walls, Link sees Sheriff Langlois talking to his main deputy, Slade Vernier, as they walk toward Bulldozer Park. Toward the school bus that is the city hall. Toward the rendezvous point.

It is a Security Council. Only accredited members of the county general staff are invited. Neither he nor Judith can participate. Nor can his mother, or the parents of the young girl, or the Sommervilles. Only the sheriff, Vernier, Professor Zarkovsky, Link’s father, and Father Newman are authorized to be there, and of course Yuri and Campbell. It was Sheriff Langlois who made the decision. Security Councils are his responsibility alone. It is one of the intangible Laws of Heavy Metal Valley.

Link remembers the pact he made with Chrysler and Yuri the night before, after he told them the story of his adventure in the Hotel Laika and then drove them there.

“We won’t tell anyone about this, or about the fact that your ‘musical medicine’ was successfully tested tonight,” Campbell had said. “We’ll keep going like before;
total secrecy
, okay? Concerning the Laika, the dog will keep silent as he has done until now. And as for Pluto Saint-Clair, tomorrow I’ll make very sure he understands that silence is gold, and chitchat is lead. Confidential defense, everyone understand?”

But Judith is letting him watch what happens in the Ring; she has shown him the tapes and let him listen to her recordings of the voices from space.

She is sharing her secret with him.

He knows that all true loyalty has a counterpart of betrayal. He knows that the truth only survives, sometimes, through manipulation. He knows that most secrets have no purpose except to hide other, deeper ones.

So he looks at the beautiful young woman with the violet eyes. He manages to keep his cardiac rhythm somewhat normal. He even curves his lips in the approximation of a smile.

Then he says he has to tell her something.

Something important.

Important for all of them.

*   *   *

“The Gaspé Peninsula? Why not Newfoundland? Or James Bay while we’re at it?”

Campbell’s voice is slightly ironic, but he remains serious, his face grave. It is his bad-day attitude.

The sheriff is his usual self. The match started in the first second, obviously, Yuri muses to himself.

“Shut up. I doubt you know the exact situation in the Atlantic Provinces.”

A sigh of exasperation from Campbell. This is going to be a good game, thinks Yuri.

“Fine; listen, Sheriff, I probably know more than you do about it. I have informants all the way to Vermont, and—”

“They’re coming from Maine. And New Brunswick. Bands of neo-Islamists, renegades from various pre-Fall militias, Quebec-independence partisans, pro-American annexists, Canadian federalist-unionists—and they’re all fighting for control of the extreme northeast. And they’re looting, stealing, killing, extorting, without giving any of it a second thought.”

“I know all of that, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, but what you don’t seem to know is that Islamist groups have infiltrated all the way to the Chaudière-Appalaches and New Hampshire. They’ve been seen near Lake Megantic. And there are also those renegades from the old unionist army that hold the center of New Brunswick now. That’s why I ordered them to about-face.”

“About-face?”

“Yes, back to the Nova Scotia border. It’s out of the question for this cargo to fall right into a pirate’s nest.”

“But you want them to pass through the Acadian north—the Gaspé Peninsula?”

“Yep. Then they’ll go directly south, following the Saint Lawrence.”

“They’ll run straight into the dock haunters in the port of Quebec.”

“Shipyard thieves don’t bother road traffic, Campbell. And Quebec is on the other side of the river.”

“You’re wrong on the first point, Sheriff, and you also seem to be unaware of the fact that Quebec is directly connected to the other bank by the Laporte Bridge. That surely isn’t a priority, but if you think the truck can get through any of the cities in the area without attracting any attention or passing any checkpoints, it’s been too long since you left the Territory.”

“Listen to me carefully, Campbell. They won’t pass through the center of New Brunswick. Maine is out of the question. And they must avoid the extreme southwestern tip of Quebec. Do you have another solution to suggest other than having them cross the estuary or go up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico?”

“There’s nothing left of the Mississippi but a muddy little river in the middle of desert and steppes. All they need to do is carefully avoid the obstacle; that won’t be easy for a heavy truck, but we don’t have any choice. They can go around Quebec via the Notre Dame Mountains. Then they go straight down through the Estrie.”

The sheriff gives a dry, mechanical laugh, like a barrage from a submachine gun. “Right, and they’ll have a nice, calm drive to Montreal and the gangs there. And we’ll find the cargo in a million years, with luck.”

“No, they can’t follow the river; I told you—go
straight down
through the Estrie. Then cut across toward the Territory, south of Cowansville, to the Vermont border. That’s far enough away from your neo-Islamists.”