Grand Junction (76 page)

Now all the Territory’s secrets will fight a merciless war.

Campbell has enlisted the aid of Francisco Alpini, the soldier-monk, and of one of the sheriff’s deputies, a man called Virgil Fermont, who studied electronics in the Canadian army before the Fall. They have worked all afternoon alongside the android Orson Vectro, whose metabolic systems are breaking down, one after the other, with the regularity of a digital sequencer. Little by little, his motor and memory functions are affected; soon they will be reduced to nothing.
Nihil
. Null. Overall reduction of his code to zero. The android is dying slowly, perfectly conscious of what is happening to him. Unlike his companion, who fell into a sort of irreversible coma well before succumbing, he remains aware, totally conscious, while his cellular tissues degenerate, his neurons empty by gigamillions per second, entire sections of DNA are erased in each of his cells. At first, Orson Vectro manages without too much difficulty to initialize the orbiter’s basic programs. But as the hours go by, outside help becomes more and more necessary.

The sun is liquefying in a purple-and-gold line on the horizon. Campbell has finished programming the spacecraft, while Alpini and Fermont busy themselves with the last hardware connections and control procedures. Vectro can express himself only through gestures and borborygmi now. Sky Lumina, strapped into her space suit, is unmoving on the seat beside him, like an anodized mummy.

The orbiter is parked in a warehouse up against the north wall of the
city, near a rare wide-open gate. They hook the vessel to a Dodge Dakota pickup and tow it outside the Fortress; Orson Vectro is losing consciousness more and more often, and for longer and longer periods, and more and more deeply. Campbell programs the last lines of code for the takeoff procedure, then closes the cockpit.

The artificial man looks at him and twitches his mouth in a weak smile; most of his facial muscles and the limbs of his upper body are already completely paralyzed. Campbell understands that he is thanking him, thanking them, all three of them, all of them.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

The simple phrase says it all. The androids are welcome, down here and up there. And they did not come here for nothing. Both of them acted with pure heroism. An unmotivated act, an act even more dangerous here in the Territory.

Orson Vectro’s eyes close again.

Campbell engages the cockpit’s locking mechanism and backs away from the orbiter. In five minutes the countdown will be over and the ship will return to the sky with two artificial humans aboard. Two dead artificial humans.

At his side, Francisco Alpini is standing almost at military attention. Campbell understands the analogy that is probably taking place in the soldier-monk’s mind. His companion also died in an act of total selflessness; for him, the sky was a bit of North America lost in the Appalachian Mountains. The two astronauts are going to be lost in the depths of a celestial America. It seems always to have been waiting for them. Campbell sees the other man whispering a last prayer, almost silently, for the artificial humans. Then, in unison, he and Alpini make the sign of the cross.

He sees the sheriff, Slade Vernier and a few other deputies, and Link and his mother approaching, followed by Father Newman and almost all the members of the Council of Churches. Yuri is behind them, with Paul Zarkovsky and Milan Djordjevic. Judith Sevigny, bringing up the rear, seems huddled in on herself. The people who welcomed the visitors from space have come to salute their departure. They came. They saw. They learned.

And they died because of it.

Judith Sevigny was the first to communicate with them. She was the one who knew how to bring them here, alive. She was the one who shouldn’t have done it.

Campbell can see in her face that she feels responsible for their deaths.

“They measured up,” he says to her simply. “They measured up to the Territory.”

The day fades slowly. The countdown reaches its final seconds. The orbiter’s statoreactor begins pulsing with blue flame; the booster rocket emits a burst of red fire, which condenses into a long orange tail when the vessel takes off, like an airplane at first and then abruptly tipping back to point vertically, turning slowly on its axis.

The whirling dance of the orbital rocket containing the two dead androids seems like an inverted, ascending version of the downward spiral living humanity is experiencing toward the Earth’s new ecology, this World that is like a black hole swallowing itself.

They are leaving dead, but they remained free, thinks Campbell.

The capsule disappearing in the zenith in a trail of fire seems to be sending them a final message:
This might be the last freedom remaining in this world
.

Campbell has been waiting for him to wake up. The sky is a steel-gray vault, the sun a pale spotlight. The Neo-World promises to be neither sinister nor joyous. Simply indifferent. Undifferentiated everywhere and indifferent to everything. Yuri gives his friend a questioning glance, instantly understanding that something abnormal happened during the night.

“You won’t believe it.”

“Didn’t you tell me once that there’s nothing you can’t believe in the Territory, or else the Territory won’t believe in you anymore?”

“It’s not only the Library from Rome that’s being attacked now.”

“I know, Chrysler. Even the plaques on the windmills are—”

“I’m not talking about the plaques on the windmills. I’m talking about
my
library. The military and police journals that belonged to my father.”

Logical, thinks Yuri. The Anome doesn’t differentiate when it comes to what are, for it, nothing but virtually identical pieces of merchandise. It will erase the label on a box of soap and the complete works of Shakespeare without a qualm.

“Link told me they’re looking at a counterattack with his father. We don’t know if it will work, and I have no idea if it will protect your collection. Last I heard, more than seventy books were affected—and you know the progression isn’t stopping, not to mention the levels of reduction.”

“Three volumes on the Normandy landings were erased in a single night. Plus a few small Canadian army technical manuals. Totally erased. Of course they aren’t as important as the Library, but I care about them. And it’s practically the whole military history of the twentieth century.”

Yuri does not answer. For the Anome, war has no need of history. And history has no need of wars.

“I ‘feel’ it now, too, Yuri. I talked to my mother about it. She thinks the Halo has integrated some of the androids’ basic abilities.”

Yuri has met Link in front of his hangar as they planned the previous evening. A meeting with each other, a meeting with destiny, with the future of the war, with
the war of futures
.

“The question remains, is it really him? Is it really him who killed the two astronauts from the Ring?”

“The real question is, is it him who is serving the Devolution, him who has managed to simulate the individuation of the Anome in himself? And the answer is yes.”

“How could he do it?”

“My mother has talked a great deal with Zarkovsky since the astronauts died; they both think this android was the last one, or one of the last ones, to be manufactured before the Fall.”

“I don’t see the connection. How does that explain why your mother is still alive and the others are dead?”

“Don’t you see? Call it the principle of individuation. Let’s say that the Holy Sacrament of Baptism had a unifying effect on my mother, and at the same time it transformed her into a being in whom the various levels of reality are no longer a constant
hybrid
maintained by the program. She isn’t completely human, but she isn’t completely an android anymore, either.”

“Beyond the natural and the artificial. Of course. And that is what has protected her from the latest Devolution, as it did from the others. She’s been immune from the beginning, like you.”

“Exactly, Yuri.”

“And the other android, the one who has come to convert humanity to the Anome?”

“We believe he was completed at the moment of the Metastructure’s death, and that his unprogrammed process of individuation was ‘pirated’ by the antiprogram of the Metastructure, which destroyed itself.”

“A sort of nothingness incarnate? That’s impossible, you know.”

“He is my antinome, Yuri. I was created, but never born. For him it’s the opposite—he was born, but you might say he was never created.”

“He would be like an analogue of God. He can’t
be.”

“You really have been baptized now; you believe in the Nicene Symbol.”

“You said it, not me. Don’t they say new converts are always the biggest zealots? And I’d rather not even mention Chrysler.”

“Whether it’s ‘possible’ or not doesn’t matter. He isn’t an analogue of God, he is a total inversion of God. It is impossible by definition. But he is, without being. He is not, and yet his nonexistence exists in this world. He is the ultimate Simulacrum. There is a very specific name for that in the Scriptures, you know.”

Yuri does not answer. The sky is illuminated by an aurora borealis that lacquers the clouds of sand and ice whirling in the upper atmosphere with quicksilver. Link has explained to him that the aurora borealis is a consequence of the war the Ark is fighting with the forming neoecology. Tomorrow the elements will strike the Territory again, but they will be sidetracked or partially disrupted by the Neomachine’s magnetic-terrestrial control. The Anome is infinitely persevering. The Ark can fight on all fronts at once. It seems like a battle lost in advance. It seems like what happened on the banks of the Tiber.

He converted to Christianity just as Rome was reduced to cinders, as the Vatican was wiped from the map, as he killed a dozen men in the knowledge that he would have to kill more—many more, probably.

He has converted to Christianity just as the Antichrist is tightening its grip on the world.

It couldn’t have happened any later; he couldn’t be any more adrift, any more off his game. He couldn’t be any closer to the edge of the abyss. There couldn’t be a more dangerous trap. He couldn’t be any closer to the truth, and thus closer to death. He couldn’t be any more in compliance with the Law of the Territory.

In the hangar, a young man holding a guitar connected to a filament of fire stands in his own halo, his own globe of light, a luminous fractal of the ever-transforming world in which he lives.

Music is resonating in the hangar from out of nowhere—or, rather, from the Ark-Orchestra-Studio to which the boy is connected through the invisible face of Light. It fills the entire space with its fluxes and densities. It fills the hangar as if it could devour a world.

The Music is the Logos of electric machines; it is their Word.
Through it, machines have access to language and singularity, to difference and identity. Link has known this for a long time now. This original Gibson Les Paul is more than an enchanted machine; it is a machine that enchants, that
chants;
it is the
instrumentum
that interjects the song of the Word into the Great Monad traversed by terrestrial electromagnetism and into the Individual Monads that people it. This Gibson Les Paul is an energetic materialization of his own mind and his own body; it is the interface between him and the Ark, the control center; it is what communicates with the unknowable, with the infinite. It is what enables communication with all infinities, all unknowables.

It can do the impossible—and, better yet, the unimaginable—precisely because the boy in the Halo imagines it so.

He imagines reality.

The diagrams are internal/external; they are drawing themselves in him now, agitating the Halo with series of waves in every sense. They are an integral part of the continuum.

And the Gibson Les Paul incorporates these diagrams, turning them into plans, compositions of sound, flux and tension, density and intensity, flashes of light, beaches and oceans, abysses and stratospheres—a whole acoustic meteorology that seems to exist only to prove that another world than that of the monodesic neoecology is not only possible but absolutely necessary.

In the Ark, this universe accelerator that feeds on entire worlds, plans are instantly converted into acts, into real infinities. Plans surmount the barrier of Light; they become maps that define territories, and then they become worlds that arise from the singularity, and then they become numbers that attain meaning. They become the moment when Light and Matter, Technology and Spirit, Body and Language are one while yet remaining utterly distinct.

The Music is waves. The only speed greater than that of light is within the infinity of the Music. It is a form of Electricity, whether produced by it or not.

The Music is the secret face of silence. It keeps the Mystery away from indiscreet gazes, where silence usually points the way.

The Music is the sumptuous camouflage of the Word. It is undulatory from its origins to its end. It is electroacoustic, whether one pinches a cord made of animal tissue with the finger or presses a button on a computer
keyboard. It shows what is obvious, the better to hide its existence. The cord’s vibration is, in fact, the only oscillatory phenomenon provoking the propagation of an acoustic shock wave in the surrounding area. An electric impedance, even a weak one, is instantaneously produced at the precise moment of the initial pulsation. The same is true for percussion, stricken-string, and even wind instruments—it hardly matters, in the end. Every
instrumentum
is an organum. There is no wave that is not electric.

So now that the climatic pseudowar is about to rage anew above the Territory in order to attain ecological equalization, the hangar has once more become the Bunker of the Fortress.
Welcome to the Territory, Part II
.

Yuri’s writing is a series of poetic electrifications of the reality of the Camp-World; in it, the Law of the Territory has become an illustration of the only order possible. Grand Junction is the pivotal axis around which the entire universe revolves. And the Neomachine, without moving even a centimeter, permits it to travel throughout the Territory, throughout Utopia, this neoworld born of a simulation, forming in the real world.