Grand Junction (51 page)

“What’s going on?” he asks, actually quite curious to know what has made Judith Sevigny so excited.

The young woman’s face is glowing with ecstasy; she could light up all of HMV at night, thinks Link.

“They’re coming,” she says calmly. “I’ve told my parents and the sheriff already.”

“They’re coming?”

“Yes. They’re going to leave the Ring in exactly three days, depending on atmospheric conditions. They say that they should land somewhere in the Territory five or six hours later.”

“Somewhere in the Territory? I hope they’re joking.”

“What do you mean?”

Link heaves a deep sigh. Judith is unaware of so many things about the Territory, its Law, the people that make sure that Law is obeyed, people she does not respect.

“The Territory is a jungle, Judith. If they land in the wrong spot, their capsule will break into pieces, and the same thing will happen to them. The Junkville Triads will hit the jackpot.”

“But … but what should they do, then?”

“Be more precise in their approach maneuvers. They’ll have to land in HMV.”

“HMV? Right here?”

“Yes, and the best place would be—guess? It would be the cosmodrome itself.”

“The cosmodrome? But that hasn’t functioned for twelve years.”

“There is no cosmodrome in Junkville or in Grand Funk Railroad, but there are plenty of slave merchants and technology traffickers in both places. I’m not saying the cosmodrome will be operational, just that they have to land there. You should send them that message, with the precise GPS coordinates.”

Judith looks at Link de Nova intensely. He avoids her piercing violet gaze, concentrating instead on the landscape outside the vast glass windows of the veranda. Metal, light, Plexiglas.

“What else did they say?” he asks after a moment.

“You won’t believe it. It’s … incredible.”

“That’s a tautological statement, I’d say. What am I not going to believe?”

“The people from the Ring, the ones that want to land in the Territory …”

“Yes?”

“They aren’t men.”

A second of silence.

“So they’re women?”

A crystalline laugh, as cutting as diamond dust.

“There will be one woman, in fact. There are two people in total.”

“So, a man and a woman?”

“No.”

“No? You just told me that—”

“I just told you they aren’t humans, Link. They’re androids.”

He manages to keep his eyes on Judith’s face for a few seconds.

A few seconds. A few consecutive lives.

The fundamental difference between Truth and Beauty lies in the fact that the former is a secret and the second is a mystery.

When they meet, a world and everyone in it can be swallowed up.

Not to mention a man.

Even less a boy of twelve years.

And two millennia too old.

He couldn’t say exactly when the idea occurred to him for the first time. After his last visit to the Hotel Laika, obviously, but it has coalesced since then into a block of pure evidence, with more piling up in sharp fragments every second.

The evidence has come from some observations and the intuition that
guides him, intuition whose source he does not know, but whose intensity he does.

Realizations: the aqualung under the dome was built for a human being, but one of small size; it could be modified slightly, of course, but everything points to the fact that it was fundamentally designed as an exoform for a child or an adolescent.

Like him.

But not like Pluto and his six feet of height.

So Pluto has been trying to observe from the outside what happens in the numeric interface to which the exoform is still connected.

It’s logical. He would do the same thing.

If he was Pluto Saint-Clair.

And if he was six feet tall.

He needs to be sure that the cyberdog won’t follow him. He will have to avoid the sheriff’s patrols and now, as far as he knows, the necro Triads marauding on the strip.

He hardly knows how he will proceed, and he doesn’t know why at all.

Something is pushing him to do it; something is absolutely determined that he will do it.

The problem, and he is excruciatingly aware of it, is that the “something” might well be the Thing itself.

The evidence is piling up even more forcefully. He has to face the danger. He has powers that can counter its own, at least in some ways. He senses that the aqualung in the Hotel Laika is a key that will open the door to the entity’s vital center.

He will have to be careful and well prepared. There is the Library, which might help him to better understand what he must confront. And he has his two friends, the two bounty hunters from the south of the Territory, the two men that dance with the night.

Then, one day, when the time is right, he will enter into the interface with the Thing, with the Post-Metastructure, with what has left a fossil trace of its disappearance under the dome of the Hotel Laika.

He will enter into direct contact with the Enemy.

Yuri looks for a few instants at the old woman who has just opened the metal-plated door of her old apartment on the strip.

Joanna Marquette, Wilbur Langlois’ informant in Monolith Hills. She is neither a former prostitute nor a junkie nor a dealer nor a hired killer nor a Triad informer. She is just a former cosmodrome programmer; she has lived in the city of Grand Junction almost since its foundation, having come from Canada with her parents when she was two or three years old. She knows the city down to the square meter, and she can identify every one of the faces that make up its population.

And what she has to tell them will give them a glimpse of difficult days to come for the whole Territory.

It was Campbell who found her message on a digital answering machine that Link de Nova had repaired and Chrysler had connected to his shortwave radio transmitter-receiver.

They are sharing the work: while Campbell deals with Pluto Saint-Clair’s neural deprogramming, Yuri has come to Monolith Hills to get the necessary information.

The teenagers from New Arizona had been abruptly shoved into the background, but Yuri knows that for Campbell, the background is what determines the foreground. He would not risk forgetting them. They had better leave the Territory very soon, if they don’t want to suffer the same fate as the man with the red Buick.

“Madam Marquette,” says Yuri simply, entering the apartment—which is better protected than a military base from the time when such things still existed.

“Take a seat, Yuri. I’m making tea. I’ll be with you in two minutes.”

The two minutes seem like hours to him, but he feigns insouciance.

The old woman sits down across from him. The Chinese porcelain teapot between them sends gray-white scrolls of steam into the air. She waits a moment. She smiles and glances briefly at Yuri. Then she serves them both. Yuri notices the magnificent silver platter on which the steaming cups are placed. Joanna Marquette has a lot of valuable possessions. She doesn’t just barricade her apartment like a strongbox, Yuri knows; she also carries a small .22-caliber Browning pistol permanently on her person, and under her bed is an old double-barreled hunting rifle, loaded and ready for immediate use. They say that before the Fall, she cleanly blew the head off one of two thieves who tried to force her lock.

She is not a professional killer, which makes her even more unpredictable.

Yuri knows the ritual; it is extremely simple. All he has to do is ask the right questions.

“In your message, you said the phenomenon is growing on the strip. Could you begin by defining the nature of this so-called phenomenon?”

The old woman smiles; her false teeth, still perfectly implanted and immaculately white, appear like an ivory fan.

“The phenomenon you’ve been dealing with since the end of last year, you and your friend from Aircrash Circle.”

Since the end of last year. It is clear, clean, precise. She is talking about—

“The numeric devolution?”

“Call it what you want. In around a week, more than a hundred cases have appeared on the strip. They say there are almost as many in the northern part of the city, near the cosmodrome, and the same goes for the aerogare colonies. A friend told me the phenomenon has spread to Grand Funk Railroad and the American emigrants there, south of Junkville.”

Well, thinks Yuri. It’s really begun now. The whole Territory is affected. Things are on a whole new level.

“People are dying every day,” she says. “And new cases are constantly appearing.”

There is no point in telling Yuri this; he knows it already. Yuri is a Camp Doctor.

Yuri is a man who knows perfectly well just how powerless they are.

Between the moment they left and the moment they came back, the Thing launched an all-out offensive. The time when they could fight the early effects of the numeric devolution has ended before it really began. The time when Link de Nova managed to find a solution, and that the Thing saw only as a preliminary phase, is over, and they must move on to a wide-scale plan, larger than life, on the scale of the entire human population. The Thing has always acted like this; in that, it is the perfect inverted version of the Metastructure, putting double-or triple-repeating systems in place, proceeding with tests and pretests and posttests.
Updates
. More than the Metastructure ever was, it is a World. It has created a sort of
cryptotechnology
that perfectly imitates cybernetic or bionic systems, but only according to a paradoxically inverted paradigm that destroys them as it imposes their own numerical logic.

Yuri makes a tour of the strip. It is true; the situation has radically
changed in the space of a few weeks, since the time they came to the Hotel Laika with Link de Nova.

All the Junkville Triads are milling around the long, dilapidated boulevard, its side streets, and the rows that link them to the city of Grand Junction in the west or to some semibarren township on the banks of Lake Champlain.

The various necro uniforms, the whole medicolegal outfit, the refrigeration kits.

Some of them are randomly searching; others are heading purposefully toward houses or shelters or motel rooms or apartments pinpointed by one or another of their informants.

Business is booming. Yuri can see stretchers, vans, and body bags; pick out the characteristic colors of various uniforms; recognize logos. Several times he passes men in the middle of the boulevard itself babbling endless sequences of binary numbers or speaking with pulverized grammar; there are bodies on the sidewalks, around which groups of necrorecyclers are gathering with the calm celerity of insects programmed for the task. He realizes that this is a sort of repeat of the Second Fall of 2063, with its systematic attack on bionic implants; he speaks for a few moments with a member of a Clockwork Orange Triad, who tells him that for the last ten days or so, the few thousand survivors whose bionic systems had previously remained resistant have been in great danger.

Yuri stops in Von Braun Heights. From there he can see the whole city and the cosmodrome, buried in sand and populated only by errant tumbleweeds. The statue of the father of Saturn V stands near him, a monument in bronze erected to the stars at a time when people still believed mankind had a destiny.

The Thing loves the idea of man having a destiny.

That allows it to present itself as the only one possible, now.

Campbell is truly the man of Numbers. The man of Calculations. The man of the Night. The man of the Digital Night.

When Yuri gets back to Aircrash Circle everything is tidy, impeccable, orderly. It’s
clean
, his friend informs him.

He programmed the metascopolamine and injected it into Pluto Saint-Clair’s pituitary gland. Then he called a trusted informant on Black-Sky Ridge to make sure that Midnight Oil wasn’t under surveillance, and took Pluto back to his home.

“For the final phase I programmed a classic sequence with the continuous removal of his short-term memory. He could walk to the door and open it, get to the couch, lie down and wait for the end of the routine; then I came back here. I took every imaginable precaution and I’m sure I wasn’t followed. And you?”

Yuri gives a simple rundown of the situation. “Almost five hundred people have been contaminated in Grand Junction in the space of a week. Dozens of new cases in New Arizona, same for Grand Funk Railroad. The numeric devolution acts exactly like it did with the ’63 mutation—a random period of onset and then a disciplined attack on large numbers of people. The Triads are going nuts. The epidemic has reached new heights in Junkville during the last two or three days. A guy from Clockwork Orange confirmed it.”

Campbell is the man of Numbers. He calculates. He “computes.” He creates diagrams, reports, lists.

“Do you see the progression?”

“The progression?”

“The mathematical progression. The numeric devolution starts in October, as with every ‘Fall.’ First month, around 0.01 percent of the Territory’s population is affected; that’s thirty people. Second month, 0.02 percent; around sixty. That’s when the rumors start and people begin hearing whispers about the phenomenon. Third month, it doubles again, except that the effect is cumulative and these numbers are added to each other, and it really is like it was in 2063, with a specific dynamic. In mid-February, it visibly decided to double the rhythm again and I bet it will do the same thing in a month, and again the following month. It’s the progression of the progression. A
phase
. It will have contaminated more than one out of every ten people during the summer, and around half its human livestock in the anniversary month of October. It’s very precise, very well planned.”

Campbell knows what he’s talking about. He is the man of Numbers, the man of calculations, the man of plans.

“It’s also attacking bionic systems again.”

“Logic, Yuri. It’s also trying to get to the simplest electrical machines, as Professor Zarkovsky says. Each of the ‘Beasts’ is a phase of the Thing. They don’t happen in a linear sense; they transfigure within one another so that they can eventually form this metastable synthesis, this anti-Metastructure.”