Grand Junction (78 page)

“You don’t have the right to be that pessimistic. An old French royalist author once said that despair in politics is the worst kind of idiocy.”

“Politics? You mean Charles Maurras?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about
cosmopolitics
. The War of the Worlds. The one we’re fighting. We can’t allow ourselves to lose. You’re going to finish the manuscript, Milan, and not only are you going to finish it in time, you’re going to write exactly what needs to be written. And do you know why?”

“The famous Law of the Territory, I presume?”

“No. Your own law, Milan. Your pride, well hidden as it is, is all-consuming. I want you to use it. To make an army out of it.”

“My pride?”

“You have always hated it that I regularly beat you at chess. I also remember how witheringly you treated certain university professors who didn’t have your theological or philosophical knowledge. People told me that in Italy you didn’t allow anyone to pontificate on subjects you were an expert in. You have to hate this Thing, Milan. You have to have a burning desire to give it the thrashing of its life. Do you understand me?”

Milan nods slowly, silently.

“But you’re right—it is always the famous Law of the Territory. We’re part of this Territory now—or, rather, as the young bounty hunters say, the Territory is part of us.”

Milan Djordjevic looks at Paul Zarkovsky for long moments, still not speaking. Then, finally, he gives him a faint smile, behind which the Professor glimpses the presence of a will of Bronze. The Law is taking form in their bodies, he thinks.

Yuri stops walking and looks at Link, who is climbing the mesa ahead of him. His guitar is slung across his back, not held there by anything. Yuri has seen this happen several times now; the guitar orbits around the boy’s body in response to his invisible, inaudible, countless commands. It is an extension of his body-mind, but not a prosthetic extension. It is an
internal extension
.

They are a few meters away from the Ark now, twenty at most.

“Link. I’m not going any farther.”

“Are you afraid, Yuri? I know everyone is keeping their distance from the Neomachine, but I don’t know why. It’s illogical.”

“It’s
logical
, Link. The Ark is a singular extrojection of you. You share the Halo. That isn’t the case for us, for we other humans.”

“Come on, Yuri. I promise, you aren’t in any danger.”

“You won’t get me to enter the Halo, I warn you.”

“You’re wrong. You would have a very interesting experience.”

“Very interesting and quite deadly, I imagine.”

“Yuri, the Ark is the Tree of Life. If you respect it, nothing can happen to you. Come on; come with me.”

Yuri looks at Link for a moment, sighs resignedly, and begins climbing again toward the summit of the ridge.

The Ark is there, resplendent, floating forty feet above the ground. It is a globe of matter/light around ten meters in diameter. Two circles of a vibrating substance at once multiple and unique, immutable and yet metamorphosing endlessly at the speed of light, are soldered to each other transversally. This is what the musical instruments, the recording studio, the Territory Radio have become. They turn slowly on themselves in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation. The silvery tubes of the church organ crown them like a mercurial diadem that seems to project a series of nearly invisible waves toward the sky.

Link has entered the Machine’s Halo, his own globe of light preserving its autonomy even as it merges with the larger one.

Yuri is less hesitant to enter the Halo than he is to join Link. The Ark, he knows, will place them in a state close to what pre-Fall humans called
neuroconnection
.

Their brains will be joined, while yet remaining distinct.

But this junction will be enough. Enough for him to know, enough for him to learn and understand.

And that, Yuri can hardly bear more easily than keeping his secret. The truth is as insufferable as lying.

Link stretches out a hand to him in invitation.

“Come, Yuri. Join me in the Halo. Without me you can’t enter, but I want to share the Voyage to Infinity with you.”

Yuri does not answer; he walks slowly toward the globe of light, which is brushing the rocky ground with its radiance.

Infinity. He experienced a kind of human version of it less than an hour ago.

He was facing her.

His heart had exploded, every molecule of his body bursting, his blood drained from him by an invisible pump.

She was more beautiful each time. He was more in love each time. It was as pure as an equation. It was as senseless and stupid as the world itself.

But it was vastly more beautiful. It was the explosion of a star, a diamond sparkling in the depths of night.

At the same time as the flash took possession of him, he sensed the shadow descending. The shadow of terrible doubt, one of the terrible intuitive messages that Death-in-action sent him so often. In the language of the Territory. The language of secrecy. The language of the invisible. The flash said:
It’s now or never
. The shadow said:
It’s already too late
.

He approached her. She did not move. Their eyes met.

Strangely, it was the dark doubt, more than the intense light from which it came, that made him act, that made him speak, that made him put his actions into words and his words into actions.

“You shouldn’t be here. But I shouldn’t, either, I know.”

“Indeed.”

“Why are you breaking the sheriff’s rules?”

“You’re not breaking them?”

“Why did you come to the ridge, in other words?”

Their gazes riveted, soldered, nailed to each other. A faint smile.

“I followed you.”

Yuri swallows a pound of stones. “Followed?”

His voice is oddly broken, as if he were speaking from a distant space station.

“Yes.”

Just that.
Yes
. Three letters. There is a long silence between the space station and the earth base. He is two thousand light-years away from Judith. He has never been so close to her.

But he could be closer still.

Yes, closer.

Much farther away than that.

Crystal clarity in epigenesis at the center of his being. He understands, thunderstruck, that love can exist only through an infinite distance between two beings; that it is this immeasurable distance that permits the true junction, the Grand Junction, that of Infinity in action, that of two true singularities.

He realizes that this is it, that their skin is about to touch, their nerves to kindle, their lips to meet, in a millennia-old gesture.

A gesture that has just been born.

Link says simply:

“I knew it. Please don’t worry. I noticed a while ago that she was always watching you. Very discreetly, of course. Our destinies were never meant to cross. I have never been truly human. I’m here for a mission of which I am not even in command.”

“Like the soldier-monk from the Vatican?”

“He is the one that resembles me the most in that way. I obey a law that takes precedence even over that of the Territory. Now we are going to connect with the Infinite in act, and we will be able to travel within a humanity disindividuated by its own Devolution; we are going to travel within its secret world.”

“What secret world?”

“Utopia. This world is two-sided; everything is dual with the Anome. The neoecology we are seeing at work is the visible face of its underground world. That’s where we’re going.”

And Yuri realizes that Link is suggesting nothing less than that they descend together into the depths of Hades.

He will not let Link out of his sight. He is a Man of the Territory. He was trained by Chrysler Campbell. Charon himself had better beware.

“Don’t expect to find anything known or heard of before. We are traveling to the processive face of the ultimate Simulacrum. We are traveling to Infinity. But we are going inside the Nothingness in act.”

“Let’s roll, Link.”

And he makes the mistake of his life. The only one. The worst one. The one that will save him.

He cannot be absolutely certain of the moment when he makes a pact with the Ark. He cannot be certain of the extent to which the pact is inalterable. He cannot know that touching a fingertip to Infinity has consequences of the same scope.

He cannot know that, in man, two infinities cannot cohabitate. He does not know the sacrifice he is making.

Link smiles at him and says:
It’s rolling
.

And the light is. It
is
, with all its being. Infinite.

He is disintegrated by this Light, but instantly reborn in another form.

He too is surrounded by a halo within an entire cosmos made of various forms of light, more or less dense, more or less rapid, of all chromatic variations, all wavelengths.

Link is facing him, surrounded by his own globe of light.

“Your individuation is rejoining its principle. Don’t worry.”

“Where are we?”

“From one point of view we’re in the Ark. From another, we’re at the other end of the universe. And from a third, the one that matters, we are in the process of integrating the hidden face of Utopia.”

“What will happen?”

“The infinite globe will disappear. We will have only our halos to protect us.”

“Protect us from what?”

“Protect us from that.”

And that really is
that
. The Thing. The creationary Thing. The numeric reification of the individual. It is not quite the Nothingness, but it is far from being any kind of world. It is an intermediate, limbic state that
resembles a virtual version of the neoecology that the Thing is inflicting on the World.

Yuri realizes that they are in the heart of the
metaphysical
machine of the new humanity. The one wishing to become an organic network. He realizes that the Ark, with its infinite speeds, is a machine permitting access to all successive worlds—including the world of concepts, of ideas. Including the world of thought in act.

“We are not in any particular brain, Yuri; we are inside the act of human thought itself. We are face-to-face with the principle that is going to disindividuate Humanity for the benefit of its successor, Anomanity. What we called Unimanity in the era of the Metastructure was only a poor thumbnail sketch. This is the Thing, life-size.”

They are floating, motionless, inside an immense black box made of millions of identical boxes stacked into four walls as high as mountains. This ghostly cube is a world, Yuri realizes. But it barely exists; it is not really concrete, not really alive, not really a world. It is hardly real, but it is as big as a universe. It is as big as a man. It is as big as Man.

“Before the Fall—I mean before my creation—I produced a similar neurouniverse. It was incorporated by the Metastructure at the moment of its death, and the Post-Machine, the devolutionary mutation that succeeded it, enlarged it to the size of a world. Our world.”

“Before your creation?”

“I
was
before
being;
that is why I was not born. That must be part of the narrative my father has to write in order to stop the destruction of the Library. Before the Fall, I was created from the
intensified inversion
of a spectral being that lived in the aqualung under the hotel dome. A series of phenomena allowed me to leave this neurouniverse I was living enclosed in, and to appear in the world; but at the same time, the Metastructure collapsed, and my birth counterproduced
this
—and, consequently, humanity wishes to connect to it permanently; that is, to itself, but without any more real mechanical or organic singularity. My hypersingularity is causing the destruction of human singularities by humanity itself.”

Yuri contemplates the dizzying heights above them, and the bottomless cubic abyss under their feet. The four walls of the immense box in which they are floating, quivering gently, reveal nothing but the endless repetition of the same motif.

Boxes. Black boxes all the way to infinity.

“The Thing is trying to copy God down to the smallest detail, Yuri. Never successfully, of course. It has created this black megabox in an attempt
to imitate God’s principal tool of actualization, an angel called Metatron. When I was the Child-in-the-Box under the dome in the Hotel Laika, I didn’t really know what I was doing; I had not yet been created. It knows what it is doing, but it lies. It is only a simulation; never forget that.”

“But what can we do, Link?”

“Can’t you see?”

“No; I’m sorry, all I see is a ghostly universe without any substantial reality, formed of an infinite fractal repetition.”

“That’s true, Yuri, all true; the Anome can only achieve existence through the humans who become what it is, and, in fact, who are what they become—their own devolution. But for them to become it, they have to want it. And for them to want it, they can’t have even the tiniest bit of desire left in them.”

“What can we do against that?”

“Reinitialize a source of true desire. Reinitialize a Voice. Reinitialize a singular form of music. Understand?”

“Here? The Territory Radio?”

“Yes, Yuri. I have my own antenna with me—the good old Gibson. And that might have only limited reach, but I am going to disturb this organization with the Supreme Office itself.”

“The Supreme Office?”

“Electricity-Logos. The machine become performer, become poetry, become thought.
Welcome to the Territory
, Yuri,
Part II
. I told you your version would be useful.”

So the electricity
is
. Logos, voice, word, song. The riff is a chain of solid waves in the spectral field of stacked black boxes. It is light-matter-energy; it is sense-form-beauty; it is an oscillatory field flashing in the false infinity of the Metaphysics of posthumanity.

Right into the head
, thinks Yuri.
Empty the gun right into the head
.

But the Thing has no head, as it is seeking a form of general acephalization. All the electricity in action can do is pursue, but on a much larger scale, a cosmopolitical scale, which the Ark has been able to do from the moment of its creation. It illuminates the millions and millions of black boxes from the inside, so many personalities enslaved by one or another of the Anome’s Devolutions. On each of these “coffins,” where the principle of singular individuation of the human beings touched by the mutation
is withering away, Yuri can see a funerary plaque where long series of binary numbers are etched. Lines of ones and zeros that summarize the organism in numeric functions, that transform the life into numbers, that identify the individual as the ensemble of its numbers. Yuri realizes in a blinding flash of light that each plaque is connected to all the others via the infinite numeric series they form altogether. The boxes bring together all the numbers of the Aristotelian series, down to the last whole number, which gives the whole its false unity, its false infinity. The Great Number of Humanity is there. One can interpolate all the numbers, all the ones and zeros that make it up, the form, the sense; but the actuality of its existence will not change an iota. The Great Number is the Great Number, however its digits are arranged. The Great Number is neohumanity in action.