Grand Junction (60 page)

Now we are acting in broad daylight. The day of the Camp Doctors.

The sheriff and his convoy return at the end of the afternoon with another six thousand various types of radios in their pickups. They conducted the swap at the usual place, on the border between Autostrada and Vortex. The exchange took place with the speed of a dialogue between predators. There is an excellent reason for this. The union head has warned the sheriff that:

“We’ve collected absolutely all there is to collect. There can’t be even a World War One–era Pathé-Marconi left in the Territory; we’ve been all the way to New Arizona. We can’t come up with any more, Sheriff Langlois; we’re sorry. These are the last six thousand radios in the Territory.”

The Triad guys have no reason to lie; at the worst, they might have tried to renegotiate. They have swept the Territory clean. They started with their own areas, from Vortex Townships to Clockwork Orange, from Big Bag Recyclo to Tin Machine, from Snake Zone to Carbon City. Then they widened their circles of investigation, like the birds of prey they are.

They have all of them. They now have
all
the radios in the Territory.

Twelve thousand radios, muses Yuri. Radio Free Territory. Territory of the free radios.

Twelve thousand radios; around one for every thirty inhabitants. That should be enough.

It’s funny; the Territory has the same number of books as it does radio receivers, all of them portable machines destined to
write in you
.

Yuri watches the sheriff and his deputies unloading the thousands of small devices on the central esplanade of Bulldozer Park.

Campbell joins him in silence, sitting down beside him.

He has something important to tell me
, thinks Yuri.
He seems worried—but everything is going fantastically isn’t it?

He mentions, casually, that operations are proceeding well.

“That’s just it; I don’t like it. The Thing has never let itself be defeated so easily. Never forget the rule of the Territory:
If your attack goes perfectly, it’s an ambush.”

Vernier, Slovak, Chamberlain, Lecerf, Schutzberg, and La Varende, as well as the Scot Montrose and the Colombian Villalobos, a half dozen other deputies, and the soldier-monk Francisco Alpini, are sorting the radios according to their “species”—that is, their technological generation. Soldiers creating Land Art in a place where the land is nothing now but a general simulation.

Yuri sees Milan Djordjevic, Professor Zarkovsky, the two androids from the Ring, and even Link de Nova’s mother, accompanied by her old friend Lady van Harpel, the geomancer, gathering at the edge of the tarmac, waiting for the radio station to use Link as its biological antenna.

Because that is what is happening, they have discovered together—the Professor, Milan Djordjevic, Yuri, Campbell, and even Judith Sevigny, who arrives surrounded by her dazzling aura of superhuman beauty.

It was the beings from the Ring who first perfectly verbalized the concept:

“It must be due to a very profound mutation in his genetic code. Up there in the Ring, we know that DNA is a sort of antenna.”

“An antenna?” the Professor had asked.

“Yes. That was part of the research prohibited by the Metastructure for reasons of ‘ethical vigilance.’ You couldn’t access it during your own investigations, I imagine.”

“And Link could be an antenna?”

“Yes. His DNA, or rather his metacode, what some people called
‘junk DNA’ before the Fall, around 97 percent of the human genome, is configured at the time of birth according to its ultimate schema. Link is an electromagnetic transmitter-receiver, and even better, he can assemble and reassemble quarks and other elementary particles.”

“Except that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, at least not exactly. Not yet, anyway,” the female android had added.

So let’s go, listen to that fuckin’ noise baby, listen to that beat. The radios click on, one after the other, as Radio Free Territory, Zoo Station, transmits on its frequency, the frequency of Grand Dynamite Audio, 1001 MHz, and Link de Nova stretches his hands toward the little machines lined up in large groups in front of him.

Link de Nova, the biological antenna. The living man/machine interface.

They all start to work, one by one, block by block, by “species” and by “individual;” with a deep electrical hum, one of his latest digitally recorded pieces resonates across the Bulldozer Park tarmac:

WELCOME TO THE TERRITORY: Welcome to the Territory, you enter the zone of the final floor, welcome to my home, baby, its name is the Brave New World, welcome to the Territory, we are not dead anymore, welcome to the dome, my friend, do not search for any window, any door.

It is a sort of warning; the words are both strange and welcoming, like the placards posted at city gates in the ancient, mythic Far West. The sense of caution mingles naturally with this “second sense” that is not one. This sense that is apparently identical, but with the infinitesimal distance of irony, thrown in the very face of the Thing. This Thing that has no face.

We are the Human League taking up arms against devolutionary Post-Humanity. We are the deputies of the sheriff-Territory, the bodyguards of the Library. We are the principle of individuation that will fight with all its strength against the mass phenomenon of substance and concept.

Nominalism
. He asked for numerous explanations of it from Djordjevic and the Professor as they spent days carefully arranging their thousands of books on the metal shelves the Italian soldier-monk built for them.

He has begun to read. A little randomly, but motivated by dazzling intuition. This English theologian’s
principle of individuation
, which the two men won’t stop talking about.
The Treatise of God as First Principle
. A certain
Saint Bonaventure and his weighty speculations on the Trinity and, later, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s
Against Averroës
and a book by a Monsieur Étienne Gilson on the subject of a very ancient Christian master named Saint Bernard and his notion of
oneness
. The reading seems disorderly and he knows it, but he also knows that the chaos is preliminary to a terrible explosion.

He is like a radio, brought suddenly back to life by a nonhuman Link de Nova, or rather by the written traces of these few humans who, like Link, fought against the schism between Revelation and Science centuries ago.

The first point, Djordjevic told him, for Duns Scotus and for Saint Bonaventure, is the connection of concept, as the product of intelligence, with sensible experience, via the intermediary of our organs of perception, which is the fundamental doctrine of Aristotle’s knowledge, not to mention the Teachings of the Scriptures, Revelations, and thus the Nature of the human spirit made in the image of God. For Scotus, who openly drew inspiration from Saint Bonaventure, the relationship between man and the Absolute rests on Freedom, on gratuitousness—on, in a word, Grace, which cannot be rationally inferred, according to Aristotle’s scale of categories, all the way to his “Primary Engine.”

“‘I say that our science, theology, is not subordinate to any other, even though its subject, the Infinite Being, is in a sense included in the subject of the philosophy, which is of the Being in general; it receives no principle from it.’ That is from the Prologue of the
Ordinatio,”
Djordjevic said, handing him the book. “Never forget that for Scotus, God Himself, the infinite, one
and
triune, was an
absolutely singular
and
singularly absolute
being.

“Modern rationalism was born at that time, when people began to return to the concepts of Aristotle by an already-somewhat-nominalist Arab-Islamist detour, though Scotus continued to claim ‘Saint Paul,
our
Philosopher.’ It was this type of conception that Scotus fought with all his energy, in the same vein as Saint Thomas Aquinas, who reached the goal of mechanizing the human spirit and then the antimechanical inversion we have known since the Fall.”

Of course
, thinks Yuri.

How could they split knowledge and beauty, the truth of its emergence, its
physicality?
Didn’t they realize what they were doing, what they were bequeathing to the men of the future? How could they deny the Universals under the pretext that Scotus had succeeded in containing the
infinite nature of the individual, and the anti-Aristotelian possibility of making the singular an authentic subject of knowledge? In the Prologue of the
Ordinatio
, he finds the concepts that seem to him the basis for everything at work in the world.

WELCOME TO THE TERRITORY: I am the silver star shining on the Kevlar chest, I am the iron law right above you in the skies, I am the last good day and I am the passed good-bye, I am the great division without any rest.

The nominalists, who reclaimed a number of the concepts of Averroës and the monopsychists, engendered—perhaps without knowing it—the thriving reign of the Technical World, having fallaciously and inversely deduced from Scotus’s theories that any knowledge of the Universals was impossible, and that only the knowledge of individual entities existed.

Suddenly, what made “Socrates” not only “a man” but “that particular man,” that indivisible singularity—what Scotus called “haecceity,” from the Latin
haec
, “that particular thing”—making each thing different from all others, became the simple definition of parameters of a “material reality,” but one rendered “intelligible,” as Aristotle had seen it, by the organs of sensorial perception. The being Socrates instantaneously lost all unitary principles. He became an infinitely divided indivisible.

The point was:
There is nothing
truly
distinct about Socrates that makes him a man, but there is something
formally
distinct. Consequently, Humanity is not a
distinct reality
of the men who incarnate it in themselves, who individuate it. But there is a
formally distinct reality,
what Scotus called “formalitas,” which permits us to establish without any possibility of doubt the belonging of Socrates to the human race
. The distinction may have been subtle, but it was fundamental.

Because Scotus thus put ontology back into the perspective of a
predominance of will
, in the Christian sense of charity and
in actu
knowledge. He permitted it to be reformulated according to a unity-meaning-act axis that preserved metaphysical uniqueness at the same time as the reality of the multiplicities of the world. The formal difference, the
formalitas
, was precisely what constituted the formal unity of individuals; it coordinated meaning, unity,
and
difference; it was a principle found in the mathematical theory of graphs, permitting the preservation of unity in any multiplicity.

For Scotus, the singular was not an unknowable “in itself” in the manner of the Kantian “thing in itself,” because it was
intelligible by nature
. By which, he claimed, our knowledge is an ontic dynamic in the direction of always singularized characteristics that themselves “marked”—according to Scotus—the indivisible singularity, at once indivisible and infinite, of the beings themselves that bear these characteristics in unique versions.

Welcome to the Territory, baby

Welcome to where Mankind is ending

Welcome to the Territory baby

I’ve waited for you since the beginning
.

All human singularities connected to the fire of the ultraviolet stars, to the horizon of sand and ice, humanity conceived as an infinity of variations of the Unique, the World as a globe of brilliant light of which the human body is the filament; the sky, the earth, the waters—all is illuminated.

Everything in an individual
, said Duns Scotus,
is individuated, and thus infinite
. It is this infinity that “marks” its singularity. And it is because it is undivided that it is the ultimate abstractor, that it divides all the rest: genera, species, forms, matter, substances. Yet Scotus knew how to avoid the error: individuality and indivisibility do not completely match; or, rather, there is a “rapport of relationship” between them, based on two types of differences. To start: a genus can be divided into its parts, species, which are generically identical. A species, in its turn, divides into its parts, individuals, which are specifically identical, but it is impossible to divide an individual into subjective parts—that is, into numerically identical parts having the same individuality as the individual. Yet this “indivision” can be broken down into various “physical” constituents: substance, matter, activity, form, mass. Thus, while being ontologically one, an individual contains
different realities
, and it is impossible to disassociate in him what comes from human nature and what is singular, particular,
personal
to him. Scotus shined a light on the place where the being is intelligible, on
the point of disjunctive synthesis between two singularities:
that of God, and that of concrete beings, that of these ultimate differentiators. The singular is not totally knowable in itself; a blurred area, a “mystery,” blocks the process of cognition at a certain stage, but it is precisely on this mystery that the individual is based, and it is in being located at the level of singularity that a
being becomes intelligible. For Scotus, the singularity of God
was
His infinity.

What individuates in man is thus nothing other than the always singular and always unique, and thus infinite, image of God.

Welcome to the Territory, don’t expect any first chance

Welcome to my home, baby, stay cool, play dead, get ready

Welcome to the Territory, the earth is black like a Clockwork Orange

Welcome to my home, baby, you will sing your electric body
.

Everything is so beautiful in this end of the world; he realizes that everything,
by nature
, is illuminated; there is no “accident” in light, which is neither material nor immaterial, but a synthetic state between existence and nonexistence; photons have no mass, and yet they act and are subject like other bodies to the laws of gravity, as Einstein demonstrated around 1900. Light is an eminent paradox that harks to all those who are at work in the Incarnation. Light is an active, performing metaphor; it is the visible manifestation of the Word.