Grand Junction (67 page)

Immortality is itself the new form of humanity, and it will undoubtedly demand even more sacrifices in the future than those already made.

“I have a new contract to offer you,” he says, simply.

For reasons mysterious even to them, reasons they cannot explain in any rational manner except by the obscure ties of having spilled blood together, it is Yuri and Campbell that the soldier-monk seeks out, to tell them the news.

Yuri and Chrysler are working together on their cabin; Duns Scotus’ books will have to wait until the job is finished, Campbell has forcefully hinted. “He won’t protect us from the double storm that’s going to hit in two or three days.”

“You don’t think so?” Yuri asked, simply.

But, Yuri knows, Duns Scotus cannot protect them from an invasion from the high atmosphere; no one can, not the living and especially not the dead. Duns Scotus cannot shelter them from climatic chaos either, but he will be of great aid in helping them understand what Link is going to have to face. And understanding your enemy goes a long way toward defeating it; it means you have
measured it up
.

There can be no further doubt; the transmutation of the boy indicates that he has made a definitive quantum leap. There may still be a few days of adaptation to go, but the Radio of the Territory, Zoo Station, Grand Dynamite Audio, will soon cede its place to a successor. It, too, is only a prototype, a test bed, an experimental specimen. Yes, Link is adapting to the methodologies of the Thing, and he will shortly leapfrog it. He is proceeding as if in an engineering laboratory, conducting series of tests and then moving on to the next phase without giving the Thing a chance to take back the initiative. It is a military-industrial-psychological complex. After Stalingrad, Kursk. After Kursk, the Don. Stormoviks in chase, panzer killers, Siberian joy, Cossack joy, aerial joy, the joy of the attack. Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the red-light district, welcome to
the Territory, let’s rule the Law at its peak, welcome to the Territory, welcome to the most beautiful game, welcome to the Territory, I see your soul behind a wall of flame.

The words come to him strangely, all alone in a single flare of mental incandescence. It is as if Link de Nova’s and Judith Sevigny’s song no longer belongs to them—or, rather, as if additions can be made without destroying the original. The song “Welcome to the Territory” acts as a signal, the “long sobs of the violins of autumn” of their D-day; it may even become a long Ariadne’s thread, joining together all who add a stanza, a couplet, a refrain, or a verse to it, creating a chain of individuals connected by a unique creation, but where each singularity finds its own place. …

Link de Nova is the orchestra conductor of the maneuver. He manipulates electricity, and this is only the beginning. His field of action will rapidly expand beyond the borders of the Territory; it will come up against the Thing on the whole of the battlefield, the entire Earth; Yuri does not know how, but it is certain. Link has become a pivotal structure around which the neoworld will revolve; he will draw humanity toward its salvation and not its absolute devolution. He alone will be Radio Free Territory, Zoo Station, Grand Dynamite Audio—but he will be broadcast on every frequency in the universe. He will be the living antenna transmitting waves around the globe.

The Territory is taking on the dimensions of a planet—a whole planet that will be familiar with the Law of Bronze.

Everything is turning out for the best on this afternoon, still sunlit between the two celestial walls closing in with the mechanical slowness of stratospheric bulldozers.

Everything is turning out for the best; the cabin will be finished before the storm arrives. Everything is turning out for the best. Link is ready now to confront the Thing in every theater of war. The battle to come will be the most terrible ever to occur in this tormented world; it will surpass by far all those that preceded it. It will contain them all; it will compact them all, like a compressed computer file.

Everything is going well. It will be the Six-second War. In the Seventh second, the Thing’s surrender will be signed in the flash of a supernova, and humanity will be truly safe.

Just then, Francisco Alpini comes toward them, his face drawn and pale, his eyes tired, teary, and bloodshot, his lips flecked with yellowish foam. Lack of sleep? Stress? It is not surprising; he hasn’t slept, has hardly
eaten for at least forty-eight hours. He seems dehydrated, and like he hasn’t seen daylight in some time. Indeed, it has been a long while since he even left his truck.

An alarm beacon begins to blink in Yuri’s mind.
Bad news
, he thinks mechanically.

The news is indeed not good; Yuri can see it plainly. Especially from the point of view of the Italian monk, who is planning to depart from Halifax in June on a Nova Scotian ocean liner bound for northern Spain. Francisco Alpini may not have planned it, but it is clear that he will always be a soldier-monk—but a soldier-monk of the Territory.

No, the news is really not good.

“Rome has fallen. The Vatican could only hold out for twenty-four more hours after that. The last soldiers, the Venetians and Lombards, sacrificed themselves. Every member of my Order.”

Yuri can sense the desolation, the infinite regret, the profound sorrow in this man who could not defend what he swore to defend with his very life; he can sense the unknowable sadness of this soldier who has missed his own death, missed everything he spent decades—a lifetime—preparing himself for.

Never again will he see the Roman arcades of the Viale Vaticano, never again the bridges stretching across the Tiber, never again the secret doors through which to enter the Eternal City, which is no more.

He was able to pick up snatches of distress calls coming from the whole region on their old shortwave radio; it might be better if the thing hadn’t worked, muses Yuri. He spent whole days and nights listening live to the destruction of the Holy City. He must have passed agonizing hours trying in vain to make himself heard in the last Circle of Hell.

The Vatican has fallen. Rome is in ruins. The Holy Pontiff and all the high dignitaries of the Church have been crucified, shot, decapitated, hung, and burned alive; the priests, the monks and nuns have been hunted down and killed, and the common people massacred or taken into the most brutal kind of slavery. Half the city is in flames. The one and only Fall of Rome itself has happened at last.

“French neo-Islamists?” asks Campbell.

“French, German, Belgian, Balkan, Turkish, Arab—not to mention all the renegade and schismatic armies—anarchists, Nazis, Communists, neo-Cathars, neo-Pagans, neo-Manichaeans, neo-Nestorians, neo-Gnostics, heretics of every sort …”

Campbell looks the soldier-monk straight in the eyes. “I am well
aware that this news is extremely painful for you, Mr. Alpini, but now let’s look at the situation objectively. This is the last gasp of this era in history. Now they will all kill one another, like the miserable fuckers in Maine and New Brunswick, and they’ll do it systematically while the Thing continues its work—just as systematically. All they’ve won is a quicker death than the rest; they will leave smoking ruins in their wake. Fine. But like the fifth-century Vandals, no one will find even a trace of their bones in the desert, the desert they are serving as an advance guard. The Thing is just using them as temporary recyclable materials, as it always does.”

“You don’t understand. It doesn’t really matter who dies and who lives, in the usual meaning of the words. The First Rome has fallen; it has fallen exactly two millennia after the Temple of Solomon. That means that there is absolutely nothing left that can stop the coming of the Antichrist.”

“The Antichrist didn’t wait for the Vatican to fall before coming among us, Mr. Alpini. He’s been at work around here for quite a while already.”

“The Vatican was the last Fortress of the Holy Spirit. Now, whatever form he takes, the Antichrist will reign supreme.”

Yuri and Campbell do not answer. Neither of them wishes to engage in a useless polemic with this soldier-monk, traumatized as he is by the destruction of his civilization.

But they both know that there is a point in the world where resistance can still organize; they both know there is another Fortress, and they both know who its Guardian is. They know very well that the two things are closely connected.

“The First Rome has fallen,” says Yuri simply. “That means, maybe, that another one is ready to be built.”

“Before we think about founding a City,” remarks Campbell the next day, “I’m afraid we’ll have to learn to live hidden, underground. In caves, like in prehistoric times. Or in catacombs—like the first Christians.”

Yuri replies simply that the Fall—the physical fall—of the Vatican corresponds perfectly to the planning of events since the Fall—the numeric fall—of the Metastructure. Under the latter’s reign, religions were completely privatized; that was its solution, however incomplete, to the Grand Jihad, and it had, thanks to much private funding, spurred the creation of personal churches and familial religions. Then the Metastructure
had fallen. And twelve years later, the last holy city in the world has been ravaged by armies responding to the call of all the religious wars in history. From the universal privatization of all spirituality, we have moved to the posthistoric collectivization of God. The progression is noteworthy.

In the Territory everything is mechanical, even death. They know this. If death cannot escape this anthropological given, what can be said for simple ghosts of the living?

Everything fits perfectly with the double storm that is now arriving, turning the sky dirty-black above the ocean and shadowing the northern sky with its powdery whiteness.

Campbell guesses, intuitively, that the physical Fall of the Vatican is only the latest manifestation that the phenomenon of the Thing, the Post-Humanity, has caused since the digital Fall of the Metastructure.
The last gasp of this era in history
, he said. Though for different reasons, and different activities that are no less significant, Campbell, like Link de Nova, does not need to read the books in the Library.

Campbell learns very fast; he is the human computer; he has received the education of a predator—and as such, he is the Territory. He does not need to understand it; it is the Territory that must try to understand Chrysler Campbell. Link de Nova is the Library; he has been absorbing its teachings since the day of its arrival in HMV. Likewise, Campbell is the Territory; he has been absorbing it since his earliest youth. For him, it is an open book. The comparison is glaringly obvious. In that, thinks Yuri, Link and Campbell are alike—they are truly what they are becoming; they are maps taking on the dimensions of an entire territory, the scope of a world. And, Yuri realizes, Campbell has changed greatly since leaving Aircrash Circle—and especially since the night at the Hotel Laika. Even more than he changed after the venture in the Gaspé. Much more. Infinitely more.

The Territory is Campbell’s halo.

Judith Sevigny comes to see them that morning as they are putting the finishing touches on the outside of the house; they will begin work on the roof in the afternoon, and by the following day they will be ready for the double storm. Just in time.

Judith is a storm in herself, muses Yuri as she approaches, contemplating the beauty of her hair, black as the ultraviolet night, and her violet
eyes like meteoric crystals. And, he adds to himself, barely daring even to think the words: the light of the supernatural is Link’s halo. The Territory is Chrysler’s halo. And Judith Sevigny is mine.

She has come just to see them, urgently, to notify them of the changes that are taking place: for three days now, since the night at the Hotel Laika, Link has not left his hangar; he has sealed himself inside it hermetically, cutting off all communication with the outside world.

“He does that sometimes,” says Yuri. “It’s nothing unusual.”

“Nothing unusual? If the transformation of a human being into an entity that has totally integrated the principal of the Metastructure—even though it was annihilated long ago—
and
the turning of that human being into a sort of cosmic antenna is normal to you, then I bow down before you.”

“Link was never human, Judith. Admit it. He has just become what he always was; we have nothing to do with his transmutation. It has to happen, that’s all.”

Judith looks at him coldly. His confidence falters a little.
You may be a Territory man, Yuri McCoy
, she is thinking,
but you’re not a Post-World man yet
. “Ah? All right, then; I guess the news from the Ring
has
to arrive, too,
that’s all.”

“What news?”

“The expansion of the Third Fall, the alphanumeric devolution. It’s affecting all the continents now, homothetically; it used the Territory as a testing ground. I’ve heard that there are only around two and a half billion people left on Earth, is that right?”

“That’s a very optimistic number,” answers Yuri. “According to our estimations, barely 30 percent of humanity could have survived the successive Falls up to this point. There aren’t even two billion left—and it’s probably much less,” he finishes gloomily.

“The ‘Fall’ can only get worse. According to the observers in the Ring and their surveillance drones, if the rhythm follows its current upward curve, there will be around fifty million more deaths between now and the end of the year, and it will double next year—and so on.”

A half billion human beings in less than four years of work. If the progression continues at this rate, it won’t even take the Thing two more years to finish the job. The Thing’s own arithmetic is ontologically seamless; there will have been barely six years between the last “Fall” and the “Crucifixion,” the final extermination of the human race. There will undoubtedly be several variables caused by its fundamental inability to produce
series of divisions with a zero sum, but it will destroy through attrition. It will simply act so as to conserve a store of “living” humans indefinitely, recycling them, because that is its function. A few million individuals should be quite sufficient.