Grand Junction (55 page)

“What do you mean?” asks Djordjevic, a note of anxiety in his voice.

“Ask Sheriff Langlois for a detailed report on the slavery in Toy Division, Grand Funk Railroad, and now, they say, some parts of New Arizona. Link would have become the serf of some warlord, or pimp, or head of a necro Triad, or boss of an agency of hired killers—you get the picture—and he would have immunized every one of them on sight, and then they would have put him on the market for everyone else in the area, and believe me, they wouldn’t have sold off his gifts; they would have ruined the entire Territory without blinking an eye. So spare me your humanist couplets. We are in a position to protect Link—sorry, but that’s what we call him, Link—because we can protect the secret of his existence, and make sure his gifts are still useful to the communities of the Territory at the same time. Your crap about simony doesn’t hold water. We’re doing a job here. We are the Doctors.”

He’s right
, thinks Yuri;
does he even know how right he is? Does he know that we are the Camp Doctors?

There is a powdery trace, milky white and luminescent in the twilight sky, amid the few stars that have just appeared.

A line that zigzags here and there, getting a little larger each time, leaving sparkling crackles of fire in its wake that twinkle like stars.

Nothing is said by anyone in the small group assembled on the plain slightly north of the ghost town of Hemmingford; their vehicles have been arranged in a half-circle with headlights blazing, forming a large electric fire that can be seen from the sky, just as ancient tribes from the earliest ages of man would have done. Silence reigns as it must have done before language was invented. What is there to say, really, to add to what is unfolding, to this writing that is inscribing its message in the skies?

Men are coming back. Men are coming back to Earth. Men are coming back to Earth just as all the others are preparing to leave it for good.

After having been virtually stopped under the reign of the Metastructure, spatial conquest, now conducted in the inverted order imposed by the Thing, the Post-Ante-Machine, is reversing itself in turn and starting again; backward, but with all the particular dynamics of the original model.

Spatial conquest is no longer frozen; in fact, on one hand it is beginning
again, a hundred times stronger, and much farther, through the collective action of the Orbital Ring seeking to colonize Mars, the moon, or who knows what mass of asteroids; on the other hand it is
returning
to the source, but as if to another planet, from its abandoned orbit, through the singular action of the android couple about to land in the Territory this night.

Link looks at the other members of the group for a moment, their eyes fixed on the white line winding among the still-faint stars. His father, his mother, the Professor, two of the sheriff’s deputies, Judith Sevigny, her parents, Father Newman—practically the whole City Council. In the distance he can see the quivering verdigris of an errant mass of tumbleweeds rolling across the landscape, and then the dust cloud announcing the arrival of Wilbur Langlois and his entire squadron. In a sense, all of HMV is preparing to welcome the “Terranauts.”

The electric fire produces even more light aimed in the direction of that part of the sky from which men are returning.

Men …
it is undoubtedly not coincidental that it is two androids who have made this crucial decision.

It is undoubtedly not coincidental that the Creature of the Creature is that which, in the inverted order of the Thing, is returning to the Earth of Men.

Nothing has the luxury of being coincidental anymore.

Everything is connected.

Everything has always been connected.

So here is the Man.

And it is a woman. An artificial one.

She is the first one to step out of the small orbiter. She is the first to put her feet on the ground. She is the one who signals to them with her hand as her flight companion emerges from the cabin in his turn.

She is dressed in a silvery flight suit, and she removes her helmet with an easy gesture. Her blond hair floats around her face in the fresh evening breeze. Her name, they will learn later, is Sky Lumina.

The man follows her, catches up to her; they walk forward side by side. The male android is named Orson Vectro. They will learn that in the Ring, free androids have shed their series numbers, just as Link’s mother did during her Christian baptism.

As they advance, Link tries—as he has done so often with his
mother—to pick out any notable difference between the androids approaching and the men waiting for them. But there is nothing. Not in their movements, nor their attitudes, nor their gestures, and especially not in their features or facial expressions. Nothing in their appearance, the texture of their skin, the structure of their bodies, nothing organic. Nothing in their voices, either, or their language, or their eyes. Nothing in what nestles mysteriously at the core of one’s being.

They are what they are, to perfection. They are Images of Man, just as Man is an Image of God.

For them, the Fall is consubstantial to their existence, because they are born of the Creature. In fact they have not really “fallen;” they have never known, will never have to know, that fundamental failure.

In this sense they are much freer than us, really. The differences that exist between our two species only reinforce our similarity, and illuminate our respective destinies.

They were created by us, and yet it is as if they came
before
us, not after.

They were created by us, and yet their differential looks out on inexplicable freedom, rather than toward the greatest danger.

They are a little more than human.

They are a little less than machines.

They are so close to us—too close to us.

They are
much too human
.

Later, while the two androids are being questioned by the county’s Security Council, Link keeps at a distance, outside the school bus. Not far from him, his mother is sitting on the hood of an antique and very rare E-type Jaguar, whose elegant curves gleam in the starlight.

He immediately senses the invisible waves swirling around her like furious bees; he can hear them humming crazily inside her head.

Link approaches her; it has been two or three days now since he felt this
worry
take possession of his mind. Until now, he has been too busy to really pay attention to it. Until now, he has chalked it up to … anything, nothing special. Until now, he hasn’t shared his mother’s worry.

“What’s on your mind, Mum? I’ve been noticing it for days, but tonight it’s taking on alarming proportions. Even Milan is aware of it; I can tell.”

“You know, I suppose, that fourth-generation androids were considered as complete individuals by a special directive of the Metastructure?”

“Yes, Mother; of course I know that.”

“And you know that androids of that generation possess a sort of inner gift concerning the presence, near or far, of other androids of the same model.”

“Yes, Mother; I know that, too.”

“I feel the presence of one of those androids. I feel him approaching the Territory. And I don’t like what I’m feeling. Not at all.”

Link is careful to keep any unkind sarcasm out of his voice. He really does want to share his mother’s worry fully. Now the fog needs to be lifted. He has to admit his temporary blindness to his mother.

“Mother … you know that’s completely normal; two androids landed in the Territory tonight; they’ve been preparing to do it for days. They left their cluster almost twenty-four hours ago. What you’re feeling is totally natural.”

The artificial people from the Ring are not threatening at all. On the contrary.

“I’m not talking about two androids, Gabriel. I said
one
. One android. Alone. And I don’t think he’s come from the Ring to save us. I think he’s come from the depths of nothingness to destroy us.”

Link stares at his mother. A gulf opens up inside him like a titanic mouth capable of swallowing the whole world.

His mother can’t be wrong about this.

It is her “being.”

The conclusion is there, loud and clear: as usual, the Thing is adapting. And it is adapting in advance, with perfect timing, as if it can sense with great precision the defenses man is erecting against it.

Two androids have come back down from the Ring in an unexpected gesture of interspecies solidarity, right into the mouth of the monster the Earth has become, without regard for the risks they will face. Simultaneously, and hidden by this double apparition from the sky, the Thing has just released a monster into the Territory, another android, an artificial human in the service of nature as it now is.

Everything that happened before now was only a prologue.

The War of Wars is only beginning.

It is the equinox. He is twenty-three years old, and he has killed a dozen men.

That is how he has begun his adult life.

He must also count the forty bodies rotting in the sun in L’Amiante County; in one sense or another, he killed them, too.

At the same time, with the synchronicity of a perfectly timed bomb, the Thing’s final offensive has attained a new level throughout the Territory. Thanks to Link de Nova’s powers HMV is still protected; the Sanctuary is still operational; the Fortress is holding up. But it won’t last long. The time of the secret is coming. The Thing is killing more and more humans, and sooner or later there will be just enough of them left to mean that Sheriff Langlois’ Fortress is a sort of natural shelter against evil.

Which is false, of course.

The only rampart that can protect the men of the Territory is the boy with the guitar. He has the cognitive power necessary to fight the numeric devolution now. The problem is, he is alone. And the Thing, whatever its form, is able to invade hundreds of humans at once. Thousands, probably. Maybe even millions.

It is the equinox; he is twenty-three years old, and he has killed a dozen men. Forty, even.

And everywhere now, all over the whole Territory, from New Arizona to Monolith Hills, from Lake Champlain to X-15, dozens, hundreds, thousands of corpses are clogging the streets, the paths, the roads, the lanes, the avenues, the boulevards, the deserts, the hills, the rivers, the valleys, the tundra, and the woods. Everything. Everywhere.

And everywhere now—all over the Territory, in apartments, cabins, shelters, Combi-Cubes, mobile homes, habitation capsules, natural
refuges, and various vehicles—everywhere, men are seeing their language, and the principle of individuation connected to it, pulverized from the inside, just before they begin to emit continuous streams of binary numbers of which they are nothing but the organic calculator.

Everywhere in the Territory
. The Triads are overextended; they are endlessly forming myriads of microcompanies that sometimes last only a few days, just long enough to sweep a township clean, just before, their work hardly begun, they are overwhelmed by the unceasing and ever-growing workload. Then another group takes their place, and everything starts over. Eyewitness accounts have piled up during the course of the last month. From sheriff’s patrols, for example. Langlois has given Campbell the exceptional authorization to bring as much equipment out of Aircrash Circle as possible before his cabin is pillaged like so many others.

“I’m going to hang on to your friend. That’ll help you avoid temptation,” says Langlois, simply.

Campbell does not respond. That very night, he comes back with his pickup full to bursting with everything he could gather from his home, including his complete arsenal—which is immediately put under lock and key by the sheriff’s men.

Chrysler, getting out of his truck, announces to Yuri, Wilbur Langlois, and his deputies:

“The word
catastrophe
seems too weak. It’s worse than what I saw in 2057, or during the first mutation in ’63. Much worse. Infinitely worse. The acceleration is staggering. She’s looking to annihilate us fast.”

“She? Who is ‘she’?” demands Erwin Slovak, the man who knew to spy on them under the star-filled sky, the man who, like them, is a true man of the night.

“It’s just a figure of speech,” explains Yuri. “We call it ‘the Thing’; of course it doesn’t have a gender. But to make things simple we say ‘she.’”

“The problem is that it isn’t a ‘Thing,’ even in an abstract sense.”

Yuri and Campbell turn simultaneously in the direction of the new voice coming from behind them. The boy with the guitar, his hood pulled up over his head, is watching them with a mixture of glacial calm and great intensity, an odd combination that gives his gaze the somber glow of a lodestone.

“We know it isn’t a ‘Thing,’ Link, because strictly speaking it has no material existence. Sometimes we say ‘the entity,’” says Yuri.

“That isn’t much better.”

“We have to find a name for it, Link.”

“I think that’s the problem. This ‘Thing’ that isn’t one can’t have a name, principally because it isn’t an ‘entity.’”

“By that you mean, I imagine, that this ‘Thing’ isn’t a ‘being.’ We agree with you. But still, we have to call it something.”

“You don’t understand, Yuri. It isn’t so much the fact that it’s a nonentity, an absolute nonbeing, that determines its very unique existence. It’s the fact that she—or he, it doesn’t matter—is not anything with a gender. He or she can’t be an ‘entity,’ and so consequently it can’t have an identity, because, above all, this ‘Thing’ isn’t
one thing.”