Grand Junction (39 page)

“What I want to know is—I don’t know yet, otherwise I wouldn’t be pushing for it. What I expect from you is for you to help me find out what I haven’t found out yet.”

Yuri heard Zarkovsky’s deep sigh; Djordjevic had, until then, remained silent. He opened the door of the bus, allowing them access inside the laboratory.

“By any chance, Mr. Campbell, do you want to pursue any of the
theological
discussions we’ve had on this subject?” Link de Nova’s father had asked.

“Exactly, yes. I can’t tell you why, but before we leave I need to complete the picture; there are holes … you might not fill them all, but I’m asking you to try.”

“Fine,” Djordjevic had said. “I believe Paul Zarkovsky and I are at your disposal. What should we talk about?”

Yuri had shivered, premonition attacking him like a violent chemical reaction.

They “needed” this “information” for “reasons they couldn’t reveal,” said Chrysler.

Which meant that the main, secret objective of his interrogation was what had happened with Link de Nova that night at the Hotel Laika and before that, when the boy’s electric guitar had literally blasted the alphanumeric entity that had taken possession of the old Quebecois Hells Angel.

Campbell had realized that the library was of capital importance. He
had realized that despite all his redoubtable abilities, he needed the Professor and Djordjevic.

“So, Campbell,” Zarkovsky had prodded him. “What is this nebulous problem worrying you so much?”

Campbell had hesitated—Yuri was aware of the tiniest shifts in his friend’s body language, and he had never seen him in such a state before.

“Mr. Campbell,” Djordjevic had repeated in his gentle voice, “what do you wish to talk about?”

The neuromuscular tension in Campbell’s head suggested that he was about to speak. Paralyzed, Yuri had realized that he knew exactly what his colleague intended to say.

“I want you to tell us about the Apocalypse. I want you to tell us about this ‘Scotus.’ I want you to explain the ‘principle of individuation’ to me.”

“Is that all?” the Professor had asked dryly. “Years of theology, condensed into a single evening?”

“Spare me your television-era humor. Tomorrow we’re going to be risking our necks for your library.”

“Mr. Campbell, it will be difficult for us—Professor Zarkovsky is right—to summarize such fundamental, complex concepts for you.”

“I can teach you how to kill men in less than an hour. That is fundamental, and it can be very complex. You can do the same thing and teach me how to save them.”

Of this conversation sandwiched between the Security Council and his evening drift toward Judith Sevigny’s veranda-observatory, Yuri remembers only bits of varying lengths, like random scenes from different movies, the pages of a book scattered to the wind, the sparse notes of a piece of music created by sun, metal, reflections, light.

It has interposed itself like a line of fire between the two terms that now bracket his entire life, from origins to end, from birth to death, from innocence to humanity.

The snippets that remain etched on his memory, without having any specific relation to his own existence, still illuminate the profound mystery of it. They are snippets, but they seem more complete than his whole history as a man in the Territory.

They traverse the limbic zone between the murderous light of that morning and the saturated colors of this evening irradiated by love.

They give a secret meaning to all the other secrets.

They seem able to explain the surprising actions of that very morning and his internal state at the time without ever actually evoking their occurrence.

They are the lost squadrons, the squadrons of words and concepts launched like fleets of kamikazes with no hope of returning.

They are what the men of the Territory can still do that is good, for now.

Like the Professor’s retort to one of Chrysler’s questions concerning the Book of the Apocalypse:

“That is why the biblical appellation of ‘Beast’ only works if we consider that it was very difficult at the time, even impossible, to conceive of a ‘living thing’ like our computers, and later the Metastructure, not to mention androids. What you call ‘the Thing’ doesn’t really work much better, except that we can say that this paradoxically dead-thus-alive entity contains, as a process of deproduction, the Four Beasts described in the Apocalypse. The Four Beasts are the four phases of the Thing. But again, you can’t consider the process from a linear point of view; the Four Beasts are
phases
of the process, which means that they divide and subdivide endlessly.”

The Professor had then tried to concentrate his attention on the Scottish theologian on the basis of whose writings he and Milan Djordjevic were trying to develop a theoretical response to the challenges posed by the Thing to the Last of Humanity.

Yuri had suddenly realized, stunned by the massive blow of the revelation, that science and metaphysics could in no way be separated, ever, without both losing all reason.

The shock wave would last for days, and maybe even my whole life
, he had said to himself as he listened to the Professor.

“You have to understand what men like Duns Scotus said about the ‘First Principle.’ They often took inspiration from the Kabbalah. For example, the fact that the Unique and Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is the Creator of the World but was not created Himself, and so is not part of the Creation; this God is
metacosmic
. But being of this nature means that he gives rise to all phenomenal causes, even the first ones, and all principles, even the first ones. He is thus strangely connected to the Nothingness. Since he comes before the One, he must be considered as the zero. This, precisely this, is our most common error. And it was also
the one made by the Dominican Saxon Eckhart. Because he does not come
before
the
One;
because it is the whole, simultaneously One and Infinite, numbers that come
after the Aristotelian infinity
, contingent infinity.
It is the infinite whole of transfinite numbers
. And so it is a sort of
anti-zero
, because zero is a number that also corresponds to a whole, the empty whole that is an absolute inversion of infinity. In a way, Duns Scotus perfectly anticipated the mathematics of Cantor and Dedekind, six centuries before them.”

Later, an exegesis by Djordjevic had tried to illuminate the vast shadow areas that surrounded the infinite light of Transfiguration. Yuri had thought it resembled something like poetry.

It was
truer than nature
.

“Duns Scotus was, according to us, a worthy successor to the doctors of the classical Church, such as Basil of Caesarea and Athanasius of Alexandria, who were known for their treatises on the Holy Spirit and the Incarnation of the Word; in other words, on the mystery of the Trinity. Don’t forget, man was made in the image of God. That is important because Christ is God, and so we were made in the image of Christ. Which doesn’t mean, obviously, that we are gods, or ‘Christs.’ But we are Images—material images—that goes without saying. Which means that we are a translation of that divine nature within matter, within the Created World, with all the problems associated with that. But the image is analogical and antagonistic: the nature of Man is obviously completely distinct from that of Christ. But a principle, the principle of individuation, permits us to remain Images of the very process of Divine Creation. For Duns Scotus, this principle makes us unique beings via the relationship—singular each time—that we establish with the Multiple,
through
the Infinite. Just as in Christ, human nature and divine nature are one while remaining absolutely separate and immiscible. It is the same for the ‘individuated’ body of man. This body
is
also a soul. Note that I said
is
, not
has
. That is my Scotist predicate. The individual is infinite by nature because it is act
and
identity, and because it is thus beyond the conflict between One and Many, singular and universal, body and spirit. The soul is not a sort of ‘pilot’ contained inside some ‘intelligent’ part of the body, any more than it is everywhere while being nowhere ‘inside’ the human organism, or any more than it is beside us like a ghost or, like the monopsychists think, inside a sort of exterior entity that thinks through us. For Scotus, who continued
the work of Saint Thomas on the question of the Universals, the soul and the body in man are two infinitely intertwined principles that are really only one, while yet being completely separate. The proof is that the body dies, that the soul is reborn, and that on the Day of Judgment, souls and bodies are called to be reborn and reunited.”

“Monopsychism?” Yuri had asked.

“Yes. An old theory of an Arab Aristotelian, Averroës. In simpler terms, in the debate about nature and the process of creation of the individual, monopsychists claim that it is a ‘separate intellect,’ an autonomous psychic substance, that individuates in humans and gives them their singularity. For them, individual thought is only a particular image of the relationship instituted by this ‘intellect agent’ with consciousness. That is what Professor Zarkovsky and his team stumbled on despite my warnings. They were not responsible for it, though. The basics had been proposed more than twenty years earlier, by the first designers of the Metastructure. But its
update
was the accomplishment of the phenomenon. And its accomplishment meant its death. And its death meant its accomplishment.”

Then the Professor had picked up the thread, imperturbably.

“The entity acts at all levels of reading/writing in the World. It works in machines and human beings, and it is continuing to extend its reign of ‘hyperactive’ nihilism, except that it is also keeping it up in an ecological sense.”

“Nihilism?”

“Negation of the Created World. All the ideologies that eventually created the Pseudo-World of the Metastructure came from this denial, this ontological refusal, this impossibility of affirmation, this
bitterness
, according to the philosopher Nietzsche—whose works, Milan tells me, Link has begun reading. He was also the one who, with reason, compared nihilism to an ever-growing desert. Except that it isn’t a metaphor anymore. The American desert has already crossed the Ohio border; its front line is now thirty kilometers inside the southern part of Pennsylvania. The problem is that I say
now
, even though this desert is one of the fastest-growing geological phenomena I’ve ever heard of. When I stayed on the Ohio border waiting for Pluto’s taxi, I could see it advancing daily, but it was as we crossed Pennsylvania that we really realized the extent of it. Entire areas that were hard ground less than a week before had been swallowed
by sand. In compiling various visual data—observation of the progression of the frontal line of dunes, approximate wind speed—I concluded that this front line was advancing at the terrible speed of one kilometer per day. That is huge. It’s thirty kilometers a month. Three hundred sixty a year.”

And now Yuri, while he spends long moments observing the young girl in the glowing light of the setting sun bathing the glass walls of her veranda, Yuri, while he realizes, with the violence of erupting reality, the incredible, supernatural beauty of this girl, Yuri, terribly and joyously alone, realizes that this day, which has marked his life forever, this day, the last before their odyssey to the Gaspé Peninsula, this day, which began with a double murder accomplished with the naturalness of one of the territory’s poisonous plants, this day of traps and plans, is ending with the unanticipated splendor of what cannot be foreseen by any plan, what can be trapped by nothing, even by itself.

He realizes, dazed by the implications of his discovery, that love is the greatest of all traps.

It is the trap that traps the traps of the world.

And it gives him a glimpse into the only area of resistance possible to the postmechanical entity, to what the Professor and Djordjevic call the Antichrist.

This, as they explained to him, should be perceived according to several perspectives.

It can rise up in a cataclysmic, global, ecological way, as the Thing has done.

It can, more simply, come alive in common human creatures, like the two men he had to kill this morning. Or like himself, maybe, at the same instant.

But an “entity,” its perfect antinome, continues in spite of everything to exist, to resist, to subsist.

The Beast will have to reckon with natural prodigies like Judith Sevigny. And supernatural prodigies like Link de Nova. And it will have to reckon with simple humans, acting on motives that the Thing, the Beast, the Post-Machine, whatever you call it, undoubtedly cannot comprehend.

It could never imagine that a man like Chrysler Campbell would take such a sudden and intense interest in the durability of an academic medieval library.

It could never imagine that a simple ray of light falling on the face of a very young woman adjusting her astronomical telescope would provoke
an authentic cataclysm in a consciousness that is still young, but that has just tasted the eternal oldness of death.

It could never suspect—the Beast, the Thing, the Post-Machine—that Beauty would always be able to appear as an authentic mystery, and that this mystery would always rise above it, because the very infiniteness of the Thing is this false Aristotelian infiniteness, numerical and quantitative, while what motivates Link de Nova and his paranormal gifts just as much as Judith Sevigny and her simple singular existence, is situated in this transfinite space, there where nothing can be added, there where quantitative infinity is exceeded from the outset, to cede its place to true infinity.

The Beast, of course, because of Beauty itself, will always try to couple monstrously with it; it will try to take on its traits, the unique characteristics of its being, but its maneuver is destined for failure; it can create only a ridiculous mask of the sublime, a pretty false-front of splendor. Instead of infinity, it can create only numbers.