Grand Junction (52 page)

“Yes, and you don’t find it strange?”

“The real question is, what
isn’t
strange in this world that is becoming more and more foreign to us?”

“I’m talking about what the Professor explained to us about the terms
anti
and
ante
. The thing is an
ante
-Metastructure in that it is turning the world back to before the birth of the Metastructure, and farther back even than that, yet it is coming ‘afterward’; so that also makes it the Post-Metastructure. It is also its inverted image, ‘anti,’ but with all the same dynamics. It is before and after at the same time; ‘anti’—opposite—and identical at once. Don’t you find that odd?”

“There’s another strange numeric coincidence. Zarkovsky told us that the technical birth date of the Metastructure was April 4, 2027, and it was on the anniversary of that date that the update work began. But we also know that the First Fall happened on October 4, 2057, or thirty years and six months after the birth.”

“So?”

“The thirty years probably don’t matter; what counts is that it’s exactly six months between April 4 and October 4. Another six. That’s probably what you missed last time we talked about this.”

Luminous shapes are forming in Yuri’s head.

He does not know if Campbell is right, but intuition is hitting him with its usual violence: The famous “666” of the Devil probably corresponds to a singular operation; even worse, is He initiating an infinite series of sixes? Does it even, maybe, indicate the presence of a group of very specific numbers whose existence they are still unaware of?

Does each six really correspond to a Fall? Is this number a true key to understanding or a simple esoteric diversion?

He realizes that it really doesn’t matter. What counts is that the Thing is acting as if it believes it itself.

Yes, it is acting as if it needs to believe in at least one “thing.” One
single thing
.

It needs to believe in itself.

And, even more, it needs
someone
to believe in it.

With micromechanical attention to detail, stretched out on the early-twentieth-century-style couch, legs bent at a right angle to his waist, he is planting tiny biophosphorescent darts with patience and regularity into an anodized metal matrix resting on a delicate pillow whose crushed velvet is covered with pearl-encrusted silk embroidery, quartz crystals, natural amber beads, and mother-of-pearl sequins. The still-trembling light of the early morning glimmers on the antique gems, the plasma screen, and the hard angles of aerospace aluminum.

He has hardly spared a glance for the three detectives he hired to fill in for James Vegas Orlando—and to find him.

One of them is named Johnson Belfond; he was recommended by a nasty pimp from Little Congo. His two colleagues are a woman from Junkville, a husky redhead with short, curly hair named Lucie “Wanda” Walker, a professional killer who started her adult life as a gladiatrix in the arenas of Monolith Hills; and an Asian man, a Korean American Belfond found in New Arizona called Lee Kwan Osborne, a former military medic. He was, they say, a specialist in various poisons.
“Belfond is a son of a bitch,”
the Little Congo pimp had said when he recommended the man.
“He has a bunch of freelance regulars that work for him depending on the situation. He’s honest with his associates; he never cheats, so no complications. And he’s absolutely pitiless with the men he hunts down. He used to be a cop, but he spent his weekends as a hired killer for some confederation of criminal bikers. He was arrested two or three years before the Fall but got out quickly, and it didn’t take him long to find work in Junkville.”

“I think you’ve just given me an exact description of the man I’m looking for,”
Silverskin had cheerfully told the procurer.

*   *   *

And now he is waiting for the son of a bitch Belfond to give him a detailed report. The anodized matrix emits a brief red light, indicating that he has lost again. This level of the program is a real puzzle; he can never reconstitute more than half of the structure, whose moving curves he is supposed to jab with his dart.

“First I need to tell you, Mr. Silverskin, that all our efforts to find Vegas Orlando have been unsuccessful. All we know is that he was supposed to go to the northern part of the Territory with Pluto Saint-Clair. That’s the basic information and it’s still all we’ve been able to learn.”

“You must admit, that isn’t a very promising start,” remarks Silverskin lazily, emptying the memory of his little console and starting again from zero at the same level.

“Maybe, Mr. Silverskin, but that leads us to the root of his disappearance.”

“I’m listening. Try not to be so obscure, if you can manage it.”

“I’ll be extremely clear, Mr. Silverskin. We have found Pluto Saint-Clair in his house in Midnight Oil.”

“Very good. What was he doing?”

“That’s the interesting part. He wasn’t doing anything. He hasn’t gone out for two days, but we were able to watch him inside his Combi-Cube. It was a little odd; he would repeat the same actions several times. He also spent a lot of time sleeping.”

Silverskin plants his dart in an area of the virtual shape that seems relatively stable. Yes, got that one.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Belfond? I’m not paying you to count how many hours Pluto Saint-Clair sleeps. I want you to find out from him what happened to Vegas Orlando.”

“I’m getting there, Mr. Silverskin.”

“Get there, then. You’re wasting my time.”

“Fine. We forced his door last night; we had to act fast and you did give us carte blanche. We woke him up and questioned him. We have our methods.”

“Now you’re piquing my interest a bit. What did Mr. Pluto Saint-Clair tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You couldn’t make him talk?”

Johnson Belfond takes Silverskin’s meaning immediately; he refuses to let the man believe something so absurd. “I can assure you, Mr. Silverskin, that no human being can resist our methods of interrogation; they’re very sophisticated, I must say. He didn’t resist.”

“So he died before he could talk. You killed him too fast. Somebody spoke too highly of your talents as a professional.”

“I’m afraid there is a misunderstanding, Mr. Silverskin. He didn’t resist. He talked to us. He told us everything he could.”

“Good. And what did the brave Pluto Saint-Clair say, thanks to your sophisticated methods?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nothing. He told us nothing. And—”

Silverskin cuts him off abruptly. He sits up. The message on his face is clear:
I am the Master, and I will teach you what it means for the Master to be angry
. “Are you mocking me? Mocking me
openly?
Do you really believe I’m going to keep paying you to fuck me over while—”

This time, he is the one who is cut off in mid-sentence. The anger of the Master is replaced by surprise and a sort of incredulity.

“You need to listen to me carefully, Mr. Silverskin. I am a professional, and I don’t like it when people question the quality of my work. Let me finish, and pay attention, or I will have to consider our contract null and void.”

A pause.

Silverskin concentrates for a few seconds on the metastable shape.

“I’m listening to you, Belfond. Unravel the mystery.”

“He talked, but he didn’t have anything to say. It’s clear that his memory has been very precisely erased. I asked Lee to do a quick bioanalysis, and he detected the presence of programmable neural software, some kind of synthetic metascopolamine. There were a few trace molecules remaining.”

“Someone erased his memory? His whole memory?”

“No. It was a professional job. A very targeted neural deprogramming. Basically, everything concerning Vegas Orlando and everything he had discovered on the boy he told you about, and on the famous Professor, is gone. He didn’t remember anything, even when we injected him with sodium pentothal. So, we moved on to some rather Draconian measures.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t remember the past, but he had seen our faces, and we had
asked him a lot of questions. We generally try to bring up memories, not make them disappear. We don’t use that kind of antimnemonic neural software. So we turned to the good old method.”

Silverskin spoils one of the shape’s contours. The good old method. The oldest method in the world. “What did you do with the body?”

“We left it where it was. Our questioning didn’t leave any traces; we use mostly trafficked neuromodules that work internally. We just injected him with something harmless, but we also put an air bubble in the syringe that caused an almost immediate embolism. Then we took all the materials he was hiding in his storeroom so it would look like a robbery.”

“What kind of materials?”

“That’s the funniest part of the whole thing. They’re half-dead musical instruments. But they might still be of interest to a techno Triad or two in Vortex Townships.”

“No; actually, I’m the one who’s interested in them. Get them to me as soon as possible.”

Those instruments are more than clues. They are true plunder.

Pluto Saint-Clair couldn’t say anything; everything he knew had been erased from his memory. But the objects that could speak for him hadn’t been erased.

Those instruments are a key. A key that might open the door leading to the boy and the Professor.

A key that might open the door to immortality.

Silverskin has no way of knowing it, and even if he did it would have great difficulty in penetrating his mind and his immediate field of application, but as Belfond and his two accomplices depart for their next area of operations, one of the huge purplish-feathered crows native to the Territory is taking off from a nearby concrete post into the monochrome blue sky, dry and already filled with the hot sunshine of an early spring.

It soars in a wide circle above Little Congo and then flies north, rising high into the warm morning air. It crosses a large part of the Territory, gliding above isolated townships and gray-blue hordes of tumbleweeds, until it reaches a series of wooded hills where it knows every inch of the terrain and, in particular, the strange human residences cobbled together from debris left long ago by the huge metal bird.

It finds some small prey along the way, field mice and shrews on the plains and savannas, the small hummingbirds that live in the subtropical
areas, various snakes that thrive in the arid tundra. All of this is easily available to one who can make use of the third dimension.

It is one of the Territory’s birds of prey; it is a diurnal predator. In its world, the day is much more dangerous than the night—because, like men, it is because it is essentially omnivorous that it is a killer more intelligent than a simple meat eater. It is when one knows how to distinguish differences that one can make choices. And it is in making choices that one can tell truth from illusion, the primed trap from the inoffensive object, life from death. For such an animal, a daytime bird of prey, it is a very simple form, elementary but indisputable, of true freedom.

It was such a bird that heralded, without realizing it, the arrival of a new world. Don’t they say that Viking navigators used birds to determine the proximity of land?

The crow settles among the high branches of an old maple above a vast carpet of wild oats, chaparral, snakeweed, dandelions, and reeds, a few meters away from a patched-up section of the great metal bird that crashed here once. The instruments of men and nature seem made to come together.

It calls out instinctively, its whole bird-of-prey self full of the radiant day to come, the huge blue sky and the round golden sun. Its cry of animal joy echoes throughout the surrounding woods and reaches the composite shelter near which it is perched.

The sound wave vibrates two pairs of human eardrums.

A voice rings out of an open window:

“There are more hunters on the project than we thought, Yuri; that’s all.”

Another voice sounds:

“But why did they kill him?”

The first voice answers:

“He couldn’t tell them anything, so they made sure he couldn’t talk to anyone ever again.”

The second voice again:

“You’re sure your informer is reliable? I mean, are you 100 percent sure about him?”

The first voice is metallic, armored with certainty:

“He wouldn’t have come to Aircrash Circle without a good reason, Yuri. Pluto Saint-Clair is dead and you need to get that through your head. It also means—make sure you remember this—that you were right.”

The second voice asks, after a few beats of silence:

“Right? Right about what?”

And the first voice, with even more iron in it than before, answers:

“Right about Vegas Orlando. He wasn’t the real commander, the head of the network. Someone was using him; someone was trying to find out our secrets. And after he disappeared, that person attempted to get the answers from Pluto.”

To which the second voice replies:

“Yes. But we erased his neurons. He’s dead because of us.”

This time there is a note of finality to the first voice, brooking no argument:

“No, Yuri; you’re wrong. Pluto is dead because of himself. And the guy from Little Congo killed him. That Jade Silverskin, who we need to find as fast as we can. Before he finds us.”

The crow calls out again in the clear air of the Territory. If it knew how to speak the language of men, it would make an excellent spy—and undoubtedly a double or even triple agent.

If it knew the language of men, this Territory bird of prey would be able to shout that a large-scale catastrophe is brewing here, one that will affect all of humanity, one that will shake the very foundations of the Earth.

“It’s happened,” Campbell says, coming into the cabin. “The first cases are hitting Aircrash Circle. There must not be a square meter of the Territory untouched anymore.”

“I know,” says Yuri. “While you were gone the necros from Snake Zone passed through with two bodies.”