Grand Junction (79 page)

It is now that the Camp Orchestra becomes
absolutely necessary
.

Yuri sings in unison with Link de Nova:
Welcome to the Territory, you enter the zone of the final floor. … Welcome to the Territory, I am the great division without any rest
. And the light zigzags across the false infinity of boxes, it zigzags from one box to the next; light rises up in its path. It reindividuates language with each burst of light; it defies the Anome on its own turf. They are metasonic pirates; they are the Camp Orchestra; they are the rock ’n’ roll of infinities in action; they are electricians of the divine machine. They are not angels, but Yuri knows they are working for them; they are their Territory experts. They are the ones that must stop the Thing; they are the ones that must stop the terminal synthesis of the apocalyptic Beasts; they are the ones that must stop Humanity itself.

Welcome to the Territory, fuckin’ bitch.

Their work as electricians of the divine light does not stop there. At one point Link winks at him and says: “You’re really going to be a member of the Camp Orchestra now. Play the organ.”

And Yuri sees a large plane of light materialize under his fingers, a plane on which three keyboards of varying length are superimposed. Raising his eyes, he can see somewhere above the Halo the tubular, silvery presence of the Great Organ, built of sonic rockets en route to the beyond of the Box-World, a part-mineral, part-vegetable harrow deploying its aerial seeds to infinity.

He does not know where the knowledge comes from; it is truly strange. His hands play on the keyboards, his fingers arranging themselves on the keys to form chords, accompanying Link in tonality changes, strengthening the sonorous density and the percussive intensity, and all of
it serves to transmute Electricity itself. The organ becomes the source of an efflorescence with ramifications as infinite as the metacube within which they oscillate, elementary particles agglomerated in their light.

It is the entire rhizomic, poisoned jungle of the Territory that is deploying all its weaponry here—the one that has been totally destroyed in the “real” world. The one that is being reborn in the slipstream of light.

“See your role, Yuri? You are the Man of the Territory. The Man of Traps. The Man of the Floral Machine. You are the one needed here to fight the neoecology of the Anome.”

“Welcome to the Territory, Link.”

And Link smiles as widely as Yuri has ever seen him smile, as he clutches his Gibson again, and the chords of the riff burst forth in all directions in the very heart of humanity, the very heart of the thought it creates, the very heart of its own metaphorical representation.

The very heart of the Nothingness.

Over the course of the following days, the Ark becomes a cosmogenesis in Action, and Link begins to draw up his plans for the Vessel. It is the work of an engineer of Light, an astronaut of Infinity—the work of an electric boy, a machinist of the Monad, a semantician of the living. It is
his
work.

The Vessel will be powered by the energy of infinity in action. Like the Ark, it will travel inside the infinity it contains. But unlike the Ark, it will also
physically
move at the speed of light in order to bypass, simultaneously, all the speeds infinitely superior to it.

“The Ark is an antenna,” Link tells Yuri. “It is anchored at a precise point on the magnetosphere. The Vessel is based on the same metatechnology as the Ark, but their uses and finalities will be different. And their sizes, too, of course.”

For an entire piece of the Territory will be contained within the halo of the Vessel.

All of Humvee, to start. And the cosmodrome premises. And finally the Hotel Laika. This will be the base trinomial.

It will be as big as a football stadium.

It will be brighter than a supernova.

It will be darker than a black hole.

It will be just barely visible, and yet it will be all one can see.

One morning, Milan Djordjevic emerges from the trailer-library. The air is pure. The sun is rising in a white cloud. Djordjevic fills his lungs with morning oxygen, stretches his muscles, lets his skin shiver in the cool early-morning light.

He has done it. He has finished the book. He has put a period at the end of the last sentence in the manuscript, structured it correctly, ensured that the narrative begins on itself, with the historiography of the Metastructure and the men who still know how to slip through its cracks, the terminal geopolitics of the last men, and the placement of the Territory of Grand Junction as a metaphorical composite of all the plots it contains.

For the first time in weeks, Djordjevic sensed a sudden ceasing of the antiscriptural invasion during the night. After a few corrections, shortly before dawn, he had confirmation of it.

The narration of the genesis of their own existence—all of them: himself, Link, Link’s adoptive mother, the dog Balthazar, Sheriff Langlois—permitted the central emergence of Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell; it cut off the active principle that ordered the attack against the Library, and made possible new freedoms and new necessities. It caused the literary/ imaginary continuation of the human brain against the immortal disindividuation promised by the Anome.

The morning is clear. The sun gilds the Plexiglas surfaces with crystal.

The Library is safe.

The book exists.

There is still hope.

*   *   *

That same day, they learn that he is going to Grand Funk Railroad. Him. “The Processor of the Anome,” as he insists on calling himself. The brutal repression carried out by Belfond and his death squad did not solve anything in Grand Funk Railroad; quite the opposite. Now the Anome’s local bishop seems to be having more and more difficulty “selling his merchandise,” as the sheriff says. Yuri realizes that their voyage to Utopia was not without effect. For the first time they have taken back the initiative, the control of operations; for the first time, an authentic counterattack has taken place.

The sheriff doesn’t know this, but that doesn’t matter. The sheriff knows the rest. He knows the essential part.

Now he says: “We are going to organize an expedition to maintain order in Grand Funk Railroad. Half of the deputies and a quarter of the militia. I’m declaring the county in a state of siege.”

Yuri thinks:
In the secret Language of the Territory, that means the sheriff is going to bring the Law of Bronze with him. He won’t let anyone get in the way. He won’t let anyone try to change the Law of the Territory. He won’t let anyone get close without permission. He is its Guardian. He won’t let anyone chip away even a fragment of it. He is its Image. He won’t let anyone invade its Sanctuary. He is the Law itself
.

He will not give anyone the right to determine life and death for the Territory’s inhabitants, the subjects under his jurisdiction, the people he has sworn
to serve and protect
.

He will not allow this right to anyone but himself.

That is, to It. The Law. The Law, which is everything he is, everything he has always been, everything he ever will be.

“You are all authorized to open fire at the slightest indication of a threat. And you are required to open fire if this threat becomes manifest, or if there is even the shadow of a doubt. Don’t forget that a knife is a weapon—even a simple fork is a weapon. Don’t forget that a man can kill with his bare hands. And don’t forget that only a dead man can be considered truly removed from combat. And even then he can’t be trusted.”

Yuri allows himself a thin smile. Under his breath he is humming Link’s song, which is now an integral part of his spirit; all his crucial experiences are condensed in it:
Welcome to the Territory, there’s a law you can’t deny, there’s a hole inside your head, the trap is called booby body, Welcome to the Territory, if you don’t know its name, it will be pleased to try you as a new game
.

*   *   *

“I know you’re going to think I’m a nuisance as usual, Sheriff, but I don’t think this is the way to go.”

Silence crashes like an Airbus onto the steppes of the Territory. Yuri thinks: Campbell has been able to gain the respect of the sheriff and all his deputies; he is almost considered one of them now.

“I’m listening, General.”

Campbell ignores the irony. Yuri doesn’t even see him blink; his face betrays nothing. It is even less expressive than an android’s. The human computer is following its program, oblivious to outside accidents.

“Sending sixty men to Grand Funk Railroad won’t accomplish a thing. I have my informers, too, Sheriff. My radio works. For example, I know that Belfond’s special squad is made up of thirty men, but those thirty head up a shock militia of more than six hundred sturdy men in the service of the bishop of Grand Funk—not to mention all the armed forces of the Territory’s neohumanity. The Powder Station Triads have gone over to their side; they are, as they say, armed and dangerous.”

“What do you suggest? A tactical response? Should we have a little bowling party?”

“No. A real chess game. We have to bear down on them with all we’ve got. Two hundred men at the very least, and we leave fifty or sixty to guard the county and serve as backup if needed. Basically, I’m suggesting that we reverse the terms of your equation, Sheriff.”

Langlois measures him up calmly, silently, a faint smile on his lips. “That’s not an order-maintaining operation, it’s a military intervention.”

“I thought you understood that this is war, Sheriff.”

Even as he says the words, Campbell reads in Wilbur Langlois’ eyes that he understands it perfectly; he is the Man of the Law of Bronze, the man who decides death.

And the Law of Bronze is the spinal column of the ruse; it is the visible face of the trap; it is a machine, and thus it absorbs everything that can serve its expansion. It adapts very fast. So fast that one might say it is adaptation itself.

So the sheriff adapts.

“Fine. All squad chiefs, rendezvous in the bus for a new briefing immediately. Overall change of procedure. We’re going to look at another expedition.”

There is perhaps a gleam of signaling light, just a furtive flicker on objects and shadows.

Perhaps a bit of gold and quicksilver vaporizing in the air, in an intangible powder made of ephemeral glimmers.

Perhaps the Halo is there after all, just before the voice. The voice that says:

“You are right to want to change plans, Sheriff Langlois, but neither yours nor Chrysler Campbell’s has a chance of working. There is only one force capable of measuring up to the Anome and its agents, and you know it.”

Everyone turns in a single movement toward the source of the voice, the source of the Halo, the source of the truth.

Link is creating reality
, thinks Campbell.

He is reality
.

That, they say, is how the Legend is born. Just two vehicles will descend from Heavy Metal Valley toward the extreme southwest of the Territory, to the limits of Ontario and the state of New York.

Two vehicles and eight men, including an adolescent boy living in a globe of light that contains all possible infinities. Two vehicles: Campbell’s Ford Super Duty pickup—which he is driving—and an enormous Dodge Ram 3500 driven by the sheriff himself. Eight men: the Halo-Child and his seven mercenaries. Two vehicles, a transfinite child, seven men, and seven guns.

A Halo-Child and the seven black angels who are his human barricade, his shield of Bronze, the armed Law, the Law of the Territory. Yuri McCoy; Chrysler Campbell; Sheriff Langlois; Frank Lecerf, the young French sharpshooter; Erwin Slovak, the man who always knows
where things are happening;
Scot Montrose, the former Canadian intelligence officer from southern Ontario, who knows this part of the Territory very well; and Francisco Alpini, the soldier-monk from the Vatican who had absolutely insisted on joining the expedition. These are the men who will be remembered in the Legend.

They cross the seventy kilometers between HMV and the city of Grand Funk Railroad practically in a straight shot. For Link de Nova, it is a first. For the sheriff and his men, it is the extreme limit of their known domain. For Yuri and Campbell, it is just a township like all the others.

Except that the Antichrist has chosen it as a temporary residence.

They see packs of stray dogs, foxes, lynxes, deer, some caribou, and
hordes of wolves and Canadian wildcats that have come down from the north; it is as if the last animals in the Territory are accompanying them on their mission. They also notice a flock of large purple crows soaring in the tarnished chrome-colored sky, veiling the alabaster-glazed sun. Yuri senses the incident several minutes before it happens. His intuition. Animals from the north. The group they form. The bonds that exist. The invisible networks of the Territory.

It is Link, in the backseat, who suddenly points a finger at a four-footed animal silhouette trotting rapidly along the road.

Balthazar. The Hotel Laika’s bionic dog. The sheriff’s dog. The dog who can speak, who does not follow the pure animal instinct of the Territory’s other canines. Yuri realizes that he is simply going where they are going, by his own means, asking nothing of anyone.

Balthazar has a very particular relationship with the Halo-Child. The Hotel Laika is their junction point. They share the secret of Link’s birth. They belong to an earlier story.

Campbell stops the pickup on the side of the road and invites the dog to jump into the truck bed.

A Halo-Boy and his guitar, seven armed men, and a cyborg dog. A new diagram has been drawn; it seems complete now. Seven killers, a child-supermachine, and a nearly human dog. There are not even ten of them. They are not even all human. They are going to face an army. Worse—a mob. The Legend is about to be born.

The world is collapsing in on itself; they are facing the black hole it has become. In the distance, Campbell sees the city born of the junction of a storage depot and the old Canadian National line with the elevated structure of the magnetic aerotrain.