Grand Junction (73 page)

Yuri watches Judith out of the corner of his eye. Her family was not chosen, just like all the other members of the Council. The sheriff proved intractable on this point, as usual: “The captain and his officers leave last. That has been the Law for hundreds of years, maybe more, and I’m certainly not going to be the one to change it.”

Not only will the sheriff not change the Law but, without a doubt, he will uphold it with all his strength. However, he has authorized the entire Jewish community, including Rabbi Apelbaum, to depart aboard one of the twelve orbiters.

Yuri knows the sheriff is reluctant to break up the county’s communities, its families, its rare institutions—but it would have been absurd to keep the rabbi here, simply as a member of the Council, while sending the other eleven Jews to safety in the Ring. The sheriff will preserve the
county’s diverse humanity, but above all he will maintain its
unity
. In the face of the Law of Bronze, decisions must always be made with the care of one trying to defuse a bomb.

Wilbur Langlois has given priority to families with small children and to a few monastic groups that have existed for years in Humvee and its environs. The seventy-two places filled up very fast indeed.

Yuri looks at Judith, masking his feelings as best he can.

The magnificence of the rockets haloed with light just before takeoff; this same light stretching infinitely between Link, his guitar, and the Antenna. The magnificence of emotion at the rising thrum of the engines; the magnificence of the sky into which the rockets are disappearing. The magnificence of this day. The magnificence of Judith.

He realizes, stunned, just how deeply he is in love with this girl. He would have tied himself to one of the orbiters to follow her into space if she had been among those chosen to go.

Everything changes, all at once. Absolutely everything.

And everything is still changing, at every second. At each second the process is amplified.

Nothing can stop its dazzling progression. No. It is infinite.

Paralyzed by his discovery, Yuri realizes that love in itself is the in-finiteness of all infinities permitting the final phase of any individuation. Without Divine Love there can be no men, but since we are all made in His image we each hold a spark of Logos, and our true singularity can only exist in the truly unique relationship, the one called love, that we establish with another singularity, and that that singularity establishes with us.

The Thing is not based only on the eternal “lack” of false numeric infinity; it cannot escape this impassable limitation that is its principal “ontological lack”: it is, to all appearances, completely deprived of love.

Beauty is alive because it is mortal. It achieves eternity through “death.” Love is made thus; it is what always dies, but never surrenders.

That explains the fundamental ontological impossibility of the devolving Mutation of Humanity. It is planning to become, in one way or another, a sort of organic ecology complementary to the neoecology of
icesand
that is engulfing the globe. Yuri feels it; what is happening now, what has been happening since the First Fall, is only a kind of selective stage. He envisions it; the postmechanical neohumanity will be postlinguistic as well, and one wonders if it will even be truly biological.

It is like a multicephalous
zoon
, a single organism in which all the heads are interfaced in a network to form a collective, global, planetary megabrain. The Metastructure without the Metastructure. No more need of it. Humanity-turned entropic mechanism creates its own devolutions. And it will reign as such, with no machines, no language, no more biological singularities.

Judith Sevigny is so beautiful. The neoworld would be so ugly. Judith Sevigny is mortal. The neoworld would be immortal.

The certainty is anchored in him like an injection with no possible remission.

The rockets take off one after the other, a few minutes apart. They are surrounded by the light shining who-knows-how from the Antenna; then the engines kick in and the vertical push begins. Beauty is on their side; all the machines restored to action promise no backward turn toward the mechanical age. Their technology is infinite; it is cognitive Light, thinks Yuri. Soon the neoecology will cover the whole Earth. The cosmodrome is a surviving oasis—for now, at least. It is the last cosmodrome battling the last World.

Judith is to humanity what these luminous rockets are to this world. She is everything anyone could want, everything anyone could need, everything anyone could dare to desire; she is what turns need into obsession; she is everything that seems unattainable, even as it nestles deeper and deeper within you. Judith, strangely, is two thousand light-years away from him, like a distant star, and yet she is planted forever at the center of his being. This paradox raises a painful question: When will we be able to create the right amount of distance between us? When will we be able to touch each other—our skin, our flesh, our nerves? When will I have the nerve to speak? When will I have the nerve to act? When will I dare to take the greatest risk of my entire life?

The sheriff’s men and the members of the Council have taken up strategic positions in the launch center, from where they can follow the progress of the transatmospheric and then orbital flight of the twelve capsules. The rockets will link flawlessly to the cluster from which the two Ring astronauts came.

The Mission has been accomplished. Seventy-two men have rejoined the Orbital Ring.

The cosmodrome is alive again. Beauty still has a chance, Yuri thinks. And Beauty is giving him a chance in return.

Judith is at his side, a few meters away at most, two thousand light-years
at least, but it is as if the halo of light has engulfed the two of them. The last rocket disappears slowly in the pale blue zenith. Judith’s gaze follows it, an almost-ecstatic expression on her face. Yuri cannot take his eyes from her profile, lit by the sharp light of dawn, and he takes advantage of the slight movements of her head to register every detail of her features: the stray black curl of hair touching her lips, the crystalline turquoise glitter of her royal-blue eyes, the ivory whiteness of her skin, the occasional rise of her breasts under her sweater as she breathes. The slightest detail singularizes her, he thinks, as if to overcome emotion with reason—or perhaps it is simply the reflex of a man of the Territory. He remembers the words of Duns Scotus:
“Everything, in man, is individuated.”
Beauty rises up when its emergence matches that of the world allowing it to exist, he thinks, creating an event that is the singularity of singularities.

Beauty—unique, true, unmatched—is an infinitely active condensation of love.

They have succeeded. Link just launched the very last space program on the planet of men. For two full hours, Beauty illuminated the Earth with its light and the stars with its fire. For two full hours, the cosmodrome spurred the beauty of the last machines toward the sky, where they can live in freedom in the service of men.

The whole Territory must be aware of it, thinks Yuri.

Especially the men who have tried to trap them several times, the men who are taking possession of minds and bodies little by little, working out of Junkville. The men who, they say, are working for the Thing, and who have been immunized in return. The men who are, without a possible doubt, their mortal enemies.

The Law of the Territory: it is at the moment that safety seems surest that you are in the greatest danger.

The Law of the Territory: it is at the moment of greatest danger that the opportunity for victory presents itself.

The Law of the Territory:
if your attack is going very well, it’s an ambush
.

Yuri watches Sydia Nova, Link’s mother, walk toward the wall that rises north of the city. He can’t say why he follows her, but he does, at a distance. One of the last androids still alive on Earth, with the two astronauts from the Ring and the one Link calls the “Anomist,” the artificial creature gathering the people of the Territory around his own healing power. The short northern spring will soon melt directly into summer; temperatures will become suffocatingly hot, and new climatic phenomena will surely arise. New storms. The continuance of the neoecological invasion—maybe even new forms of it. The Devolving Mutation has more than one trick up its sleeve; its production process is based on a sort of absolute fixity interpolated with continual change, annihilating all possibility of real transformation as well as any foundation for anything. The Thing lives on this kind of hybridization; it is its active principle: causing every entity to destroy itself by mingling it with its opposing principle. Absolute conservation of absolute destruction. The word
museum
, the word
cemetery
, the word
necropolis
—none of them do justice to the strength of the Thing. Absolute thanatic power. It already dominates the Camp-World, to which it is promising eternity.

The sun is a sphere of pure gold above Heavy Metal Valley; the sky is ocean blue. The world is full of Beauty even as it disappears.

Link’s mother follows the recently reinforced high steel walls; crossing paths with a few sheriff’s deputies preparing to patrol the northern limits of the county, she exchanges a few words with them.

Heavy Metal Valley sparkles like an immense lake of metal, glittering so brightly that it seems as if it could light up all the nights in the world.

Yuri has one of his insights, one of the flashes that comes sometimes to electrify his thoughts.

Of everyone in HMV, Link’s mother is the person most familiar with the mysteries of her son’s origins, the Hotel Laika, and even the end of the Metastructure. Nothing that happens in the Territory surprises her. Her true role is buried deep inside herself; it is possible that she is unaware of it; it is possible that she can do nothing; it is certain that she is both the initial point and the destinal line of Link de Nova—and so of us all.

Madam android, Madam the artificial lady, Madam Territory, Madam the mother of the boy in the halo, Madam manufactured in space and enclosed, like all of them, in the Camp-World.

Madam the supermachine that had herself baptized on this Earth.

She is the true secret of HMV. And now hardly anyone ever leaves HMV, and absolutely no one enters it. Her son may be the one controlling the invisible barrier surrounding the county, but she is the heart of the sanctuary.

The Fortress will remain closed. The Fortress is preparing to become a counterworld. The Fortress is extending the shadow of justice, of the Law, all across the Territory. The sheriff has totally militarized the organization of his patrols and the two hundred fifty members of the county’s civil defense force. He has closed all the entries to the cosmodrome except for Apollo Drive, and he has prohibited all road traffic on the northern part of the circular boulevard. He has done the same on the Monolith Hills strip, blocking off the whole area near the Hotel Laika. The invisible magnetic line that Link de Nova’s Ark has traced around the valley is now reinforced by a concrete barrier. Armored trucks. Barbed wire intertwining with what remains of the local flora. Minefields. Armed men.
Use of deadly weapons authorized
.

Wilbur Langlois has created a Territory-within-the-Territory. He has initiated an open secession. He has erected a security wall between Heavy Metal Valley and the other communities. He has marked a border. He has burned bridges and sunk ships.

It is a gesture of great hostility, yet one devoid of any ostensible aggressiveness—a little like pressing the rifle of a barrel gently against the forehead of a man who has just fallen into your hands.

Wilbur Langlois has created a Territory-within-the-Territory. The Law of Bronze will be even more intense here.

*   *   *

Link de Nova’s mother looks him deeply in the eyes, ignoring the golden halo that surrounds him.

She doesn’t even seem surprised at my transformation
, he often thinks.
It is as if the whole thing is completely natural to her. As if it is a natural consequence of my birth
. But he never asks her any questions on the subject.

“He knows where we are now.”

“I know, Mother. But we also know where he is.”

“That doesn’t matter in the least to us, but it is of great importance to him.”

Link thinks of the phrase Yuri and Campbell are constantly repeating:
Every relationship in the Territory is inevitably asymmetrical. If it weren’t, there would be no more Law
.

“Chrysler Campbell told me the android has appointed himself ‘Pope’ of some sort of church, and that he has converted hundreds and hundreds of humans in the Territory. Apparently he has the ability to provide some kind of chemotherapy, a medicine his body produces that immunizes people.”

“Your Antenna immunizes them, too, and on a much larger scale now.”

“Yes, but they don’t know it. The android’s followers, on the other hand, are perfectly aware of the operation as it is happening.”

“How was an android able to become the Thing?”

“He isn’t the Thing, Mother; he is the only ‘place,’ slightly but not fully organic, in which It can interface with humanity. He allows it to simulate individuation, and in exchange an organic component of his body provides people with immunity. It’s very well thought-out. Don’t forget that the Thing is an inverted mutation of all species.”

“This android isn’t a member of any species.”

“Exactly, Mother; that’s what allows him to be a vector for this new human speciation. He’s like me in that way. We are identical and totally opposite at the same time.”

“He doesn’t come from the Nothingness; it is the Nothingness that comes from him. Think about the nature of the immortality he’s offering to neohumans: they will conquer the World and dominate the Earth, but they will lose the heavens—in both senses of the word.”

“I know, Mother. You have to understand the nature of the Halo. It
surrounds me—but not as an external energy source; I’m the one that emits it and captures it. I am an antenna myself, Mother. And the Halo is just the visible manifestation of an ‘ecstasy’ of matter. This Light is cognitive. It is the perceptible form of a
transfinite electricity
that travels at a speed
infinitely
faster than that of light. To fight the devolutionary posthuman of the Post-Technical world, we have to reinvent a true science of man, perceived as a bioundulation of nature.”