Grand Junction (70 page)

It is so beautiful. It is so perfect. It is so simple, he thinks.

He has understood. He knows what is happening. He knows how Link plans to use it against the Thing. He knows Link has found the way to fight it on the global, planetary,
worldwide
scale—counterworld against neoworld.

Hostilities have only just begun, he thinks, admiring the slow ascension of the flying structure above HMV, and then its majestic curving turn in the direction of Xenon Ridge, where it ends by positioning itself a dozen meters above the line of the crest, not far from a windmill it floods with its luminescence. It is Link with his guitar, connected to a small high-frequency radio transmitter, who controls the Machine’s movements. It is Link who is watching over the Territory now. Link, the Conductor of the Camp Orchestra.

The Antenna dominates Humvee, and the cosmodrome, and the northern part of Grand Junction. It is nearly facing the Monolith Hills strip. It is in direct contact with the Hotel Laika.

The Antenna is watching. Soon it will begin transmitting. And when it does transmit, it will not be to twelve thousand transistor radios scattered across the Territory. When it does transmit, this Antenna of the Counter-World, it will be on all frequencies, across the terrestrial magnetic field as if within a network; each human will become the radio receptor of the Grand Dynamite Audio, transmuted into a sonic cruise missile. It will transmit for all of humanity that survives. It will transmit for all the identification numbers awaiting it in the Camp-World.

“I think the situation is getting beyond our control. What’s been happening for almost ten days now is not normal at all.”

“Listen, Silverskin, I spent two full weeks in the west of the Territory. I planted several evangelical missions; I named one Edgar Dorset to fill the same position as yours for the county of Grand Funk Railroad. Now the next phase is Deadlink; in view of its importance I should make it a diocese of its own—despite the administrative red tape left over from the Previous World. The rest doesn’t matter to me, for now.”

“Did you leave him any capsules? That’s not wise. And let me remind you that the remissions are increasing by the thousands.”

“Silverskin, Dorset will be the bishop of Grand Funk Railroad just like you are the bishop of Junkville; so he will be authorized to distribute the Anome’s capsules. As for the problem you just mentioned, rest assured that it’s a marginal epiphenomenon compared to the Anome’s power.”

“Several thousand sudden remissions in less than six days without even the use of their fucking radios? Tell me again that nothing abnormal is happening.”

“Do you know the rhythm of the Anome’s progression in this alphanumeric mutation? In less than six years, nine-tenths of what is left of humanity now will have disappeared. Those that survive will be the ones that have followed the Law of the Anome, the Law I have come to pronounce.”

“Mr. Cybion, our church is in very early days yet, and I’m afraid the people up in the north of the Territory are already working on a vast conspiracy that—”

“Silverskin, my first apostle, my first bishop, please don’t worry yourself
so much about these little people tinkering with the Metastructure. A surprise is indeed coming, but not one that will help them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m talking about the rumors we are hearing sometimes in the Territory these days about written signs being erased.”

“Yes, I know, some people from Neo Pepsico told me about it. It must be connected—”

“Obviously it is connected, Silverskin, because it is part of the same thing. The Anome desires an elite, handpicked few to form its neohumanity; the alphanumeric mutation will take only human organisms. It is just one phase of the process.”

“What other organisms are you hinting at?”

“I’m talking about books. The Anome considers them living organisms. It is proceeding with a nullified infinite numerization against them.”

“Nullified infinite numerization?”

“Yes. In simpler terms, it is numerizing them infinitely in the vacuum; it is turning them digital, turning them into binary code, but there are no more ones—only zeros, infinitely looped upon themselves.”

“Books as living organisms?”

“Of course. For the Anome they are nomad brains—purely scriptural, but brains all the same. And the alphanumeric mutation concerns everything related to cognition and language. Verbal as well as written. You should understand its way of functioning, Mr. Silverskin; the Anome is using the different phases of its transformation of the world as selective tests of those that will belong to neohumanity when the transformation is complete. If it is destroying written language as well as verbal, it is because it plans to modify our methods of communication profoundly. Language will be obsolete under the Anome; we are forming an unindividuated network, and soon we will each be able to know what everyone else is thinking. We will become a global entity.
We will be the world
, Mr. Silverskin.”

“And these unexplained remissions? And that fucking Territory Radio? What are we going to do about the HMV men?”

Alan Cybion I’s laugh pierces the air like a gunshot.

“We aren’t going to do anything, Silverskin. Nothing. In a few months the Anome will kill half a million people every day all over the world, and the annual growth rate is quasi-exponential; a few spontaneous remissions and ten or twelve thousand radios scattered across the Territory aren’t going to stop the process. Only I and the Anome can save humanity; we
are the only way out. Neohumanity will be what can survive the Anome, and the Anome will be what lets it survive.”

“The Anome will make us survive it?”

The same laugh, exploding dryly in the air.

“Yes! It is the mutation and it is the selection; I told you. The simplest evolutionism. It imposes its conditions, to use the language of the Territory.”

“I see,” replies Silverskin. “It is both the illness and the vaccine, the poison and the antidote.”

“Exactly,” says Cybion I, flashing a wide smile illuminated by all the shadows in the universe. “Simple evolution, you see. That is why it is a world, the natural biocybernetic network of neohumanity. That is why it is Good
and
Evil, a coherent duality, and one assigned to a single goal: the survival and transformation of the human race by itself—that is, by the Anome become the new ontological foundation of this humanity. It’s symbiosis, Silverskin. The Anome is multiple by definition; it cannot individuate in us in the form of a singularity, but rather as an interface to itself. It cannot be totally in each one of us because it is demultiplied in each of us, in a generic form. But that is its strength—because in exchange, it offers biological, terrestrial, real immortality.”

Silverskin does not answer. Their church can already count several thousand believers in Junkville, and Cybion I has gone himself to evangelize in the Ontarian townships. He can provide hundreds of “anomic” capsules per day.
“My body is a machine producing the Anome; that is virtually its reason for being,”the
android said one day, laughing, this android who is at once the sacred Pope of the Anomian church and the King of what he calls Utopia, this neoworld already superimposing itself on the Territory and its environs, and soon enough on the rest of the world.

Utopia, the World of the Anome, Utopia, the placeless World, the World without history or geography, the equalized World, the World of perfect ecology. The world where man is nature itself.

The day of Silverskin’s sacrament, Cybion I made him the following proposal:
“The Anome wants no hierarchy and no verticality except a few levels of function in the Church, such as yours. You will all be equal in the Anomian network; I am the only ‘direct’ agent of its manifestation, but I, too, am nothing but a vector, an intermediary. I am what is permitting the Anome to become Humanity and Humanity to become the Anome, precisely because I am not quite human, but just enough so to be able to carry their two principles. I, too, am dual by nature, you see.”

Silverskin contemplates the township of Little Congo spread out around his mobile home; a purple crow is soaring northwest in the sky. He follows its calm and sinuous flight with his eyes all the way to the western limits of the city; he can see to Autostrada and Carbon City, to Vortex Townships, and even as far as New Arizona. He can see the world as it was left by the double storm; the mud of sand and snow stretches everywhere, beyond the visible horizon; it gleams with a dull gray-bronze tint, covering the landscape with its uniform frost. He can see the kingdom they are beginning to establish on Earth.

If anything, or anyone, is capable of following the evolution of the war being waged on the hidden side of the world, the dark side of the Earth, it is the purple crow that has just left the heights of Little Congo to return north, from where it came after watching the strange, glowing bird fly over the metal city. Birds’ brains are equipped with a gyroscopic neural device that permits them to “sense” the presence and exact location of the magnetic conduction lines that irrigate the planet; it is thanks to this sixth sense that they can cross oceans and entire continents, even hemispheres, without deviating even a centimeter off course.

The purple crow of the Territory is an old predator, clever and fast. Instinctively, it follows the fluctuations of the force fields in the Earth’s crust; it harnesses the two opposing energies tracing their rival diagrams in the invisible world underground, where only creatures of the sky can go, where evolution and catastrophe are planned, where the electricity of the poles lives, doubly polarized energy from the heart-in-fusion of the Earth.

The two forces are in fact completely inverted in a systematic way; even the purple crow understands this in its own manner: a force is rising from the blackest depths, becoming visible little by little in the form of this new nature to which the predatory bird, it knows, must adapt. The other force comes from the aerial spheres of Light and has crept into the rhizomic shadows in order to subvert the opposing process; very probably, the bird will have to adapt to this, too.

The visible and the invisible, in both senses of the words, are meeting here, in the Territory over which the crow is flying.

The Territory is an interface—or so Yuri McCoy, one of the men who lives in the metal city for which the crow is heading, would say.

The Territory is the writing surface of two antinomic processes; it is
an Interworld. The crow could not understand these concepts even if it understood the words. But it would approve of them.

Because that is very precisely what it sees, as it soars toward the cosmodrome.

It is a sheriff’s deputy named Fernand Claymore, who works as Bob Chamberlain’s partner, who discovers the first clue as he returns from patrolling Apollo Drive near the cosmodrome. The necro Triads are still busy on the Monolith Hills strip and around the old Enterprise aerostation; despite the emissions of the Territory Radio and the launch of Link de Nova’s new machine, the expansion of the Third Fall is still happening, a non-viral epidemic, more invisible and more lethal than any microscopic bacteria. Thousands of bodies are piling up in the cold-storage chambers of the Triads; thousands of bodies are clogging the streets; thousands of bodies are awaiting the arrival of the necro cleaners as they lie decomposing in their cabins and makeshift shelters.

And Fernand Claymore, discovering this clue, does not really understand what he is seeing; in any case, he makes no connection just then between this local microevent, just a bit bizarre, and the progressing extermination of humanity. He cannot make the connection. It is a secret relationship of which the world itself knows nothing.

“You mean someone thought they’d have a little fun erasing the writing on the windmill sign? Why?” asks Bob Chamberlain as they head back toward the city, their duty accomplished.

“I don’t know, Bob,” answers Claymore, pensively. “It’s funny; I wouldn’t say the signs were erased.”

“What do you mean? How else could they do it—they’re titanium-composite signs.”

“Yeah, that’s what I—I should have shown you the thing. The sign was totally smooth, completely blank. It wasn’t like someone had just scrubbed out the writing.”

“What are you saying?”

“The sign looked as if it had just come from the factory, brand-new, before the final embossing, before the inscription of warnings or street names. Like nothing had ever been printed on it.”

*   *   *

The purple crow settles into a glide and then flies higher to clear Xenon Ridge. It soars over the windmills turning silently on the mesas like so many totem poles guarding the valley. And there is the luminous object floating above the rocky butte dominating the city of Grand Junction. The purple crow understands that the magnetic waves it can see coursing under the earth are connected to the poles, of course, but they are also linked to this machine that the humans in the metal city have built. Its presence completes the diagram: these earthly electric lines are the same as the ones that run through the Van Halen Belt at the edge of the atmosphere, where no bird can go, but from which they draw a large part of their driving energy and their sense of navigation. The other force, the one running like a dark rhizome beneath the surface of the Earth, is not really the same as the one birds have known for millions of years.

The subterranean force resembles a magnetic field, but it is not the earthly electromagnetic one. It has branches like underground roots, but it is not a plant. Its dark density is like the blackest coal, but it is not a mineral. The purple crow lacks the cognitive ability to identify it. It understands difference. It understands evidence. It understands the frontal collision between two worlds, and of that the purple Territory crow does not know what to think. Its predator’s brain has difficulty even grasping the idea of
two
worlds. But it cannot perceive as an abstraction what its senses permit it to see. Animals that do not rely on their senses rarely survive more than two or three days.