Grand Junction (8 page)

Pluto was lucky. He should have lost an eye, one that was already replacing a deficient natural organ. Nothing could have been done to stop it.

It is undoubtedly because of this kind of accident, this type of miracle, that the
thing
is attacking again now, and with heretofore unheard-of perversity.

Pluto welcomes him with a thin smile.

The preliminary chitchat is brief, as usual.

Yuri has come on Chrysler’s behalf; they need information about the latest cases happening in Junkville.

“This is a new phenomenon,” Yuri says. “A mutation like the one in ’63.”

Pluto Saint-Clair does not respond; he busies himself making tea in a scavenged samovar.

“Chrysler told me you knew of two cases just today, here in Junkville.”

“That’s right,” the man with the weak artificial eye says laconically.

“We need to collect as much information as possible.”

“Did you say it’s like the first mutation?”

“Yes. For now the phenomenon is mostly under control, but we don’t have enough data. I need to go through Junkville.”

Pluto Saint-Clair allows a dubious smirk to cross his lips.

“There isn’t much to do, Yuri.”

Yuri detests fatalism of any kind in combat—his distant maternal Russian origins, perhaps. No lost battle is ever really lost; it is just paving the way for the next one. “There’s always something to do. What does this monster want, for humanity to lie down in its path like a dog waiting to die?”

“You do know that people anticipated this mutation of the virus?”

“It isn’t a virus,” snaps Yuri.

“People said that, too, when the Metastructure was first starting to break down, but nobody wanted to believe it.”

Yuri sighs deeply. “What people are you talking about? And what does that have to do with us and our ‘little’ problem?”

“It doesn’t interest you to know that these people anticipated what would happen, and that some of them even predicted, detail for detail, the fall of the Metastructure?”

“Psychics?” asks Yuri, curiosity kindling within him.

Pluto’s laugh resonates dryly, like a flame in the blackness.

“Psychics! You’re priceless, Yuri.”

“Who else, then?”

“It isn’t only the so-called psychics that ‘see.’ There are also intellectuals. Scientists. Philosophers.”

“Philosophers? As far as I know, it was the philosophers who conceived the semantic principles of the Metastructure. Wasn’t it the philosophers who built the construction camps in the last century?”

“I’m talking about the
true
thinkers, Yuri; stop being an idiot. And some of those thinkers foresaw what is happening now. That’s the main reason I told Chrysler that one of you needed to come see me as soon as possible.”

“Can you be less vague, Pluto? I have information to gather. About the second mutation. I don’t have any time to waste.”

“To waste time is to learn nothing. Listen to me closely. I know one of these ‘thinkers’ that foresaw the death and the ‘superdeath’ of the Metastructure. Someone who came all the way across North America from Texas to see me.”

“Oh, a desert-loving tourist, eh? Is he still here?”

“Yuri, this man came more than five thousand kilometers, and a quarter of that on foot, because he has important information to give me, and even more important information to gather here in Grand Junction. He’s a professor emeritus. A researcher of great renown. He worked in orbit with one of the best Californian genetics laboratories, and at the time he was part of the consulting team for the Metastructure’s last update before the collapse.”

“Well, bravo to him. At least there’s no risk of another ‘update’ now. Tell me, why should your visit from this ‘professor’ interest me? Especially with what’s happening now?”

“You know, Yuri, I think I know what’s happening with your so-called supplier.”

“What do you mean, ‘so-called’?”

Pluto Saint-Clair gives another brief bark of laughter, dry as an electrical discharge.

“Yuri, I’m not as naïve as you and Chrysler think. I think you’ve got—I don’t know where, or why—access to a biocybernetic interference device capable of locally controlling the effects of the Metastructure’s decomposition. Probably a state-of-the-art weapon, undoubtedly secret, from just before the End of the Machines, that you managed to get your hands on who knows how. That’s all.”

Yuri immediately realizes the advantage this statement gives him: one more rumor to lead indiscreet people farther away from the epicenter of truth, Gabriel Link de Nova. A system. A “machine.” An “Antimachine.” What an excellent idea.

He acts, subtly, as if caught in a mistake. He feigns a slight hesitation. And he changes the subject—or, rather, he returns to the initial topic of conversation. “How is it that your friend, this famous ‘professor’ from who knows where, might be able to give us the help we need? Have you signed some sort of contract with him?”

“Don’t make me laugh, Yuri. What’s happening in Junkville is much more serious than it seems, but you don’t seem to understand that. I have information from Omega Blocks; it’s happening there, too.”

“I know about it.”

“Yes, Chrysler told you, of course. But what he knows is only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Listen, Pluto—if you’re trying to make me cry about the fate of the millions of people on this fucked planet who will soon be contaminated,
all you’re doing is wasting even more time. We might as well be watching a retrospective of the Kyoto business, got it?”

“I’d never try to get at your heart, Yuri. That would be an impossible mission, at least for now. I’m just trying to tell you that your system, whatever it is, will most likely reach its limit with this second mutation.”

He needs to defend his position carefully now; that is how anyone would react. You fight for your piece of the pie. And you’re ready to bash someone’s head in to keep it, if you have to. Especially if that someone has guessed even part of the truth. “What makes you think that, Pluto?”

This might be interesting. Why is Pluto Saint-Clair so sure; what led him to this conclusion? He’s no idiot, that’s for sure. It takes a lot more than simple barbarism to survive in Junkville. Yes, this might prove a very fruitful source of information.
What makes you think that, Pluto?

“Listen, Yuri. I’m going to need to see both you and Chrysler as soon as possible. The Professor is a specialist—let’s say a sort of multispecialist. He’s one of the big guns, believe me. He was nominated for the Nobel in ’56, a year before—”

“Okay, Pluto, we’ll come to see the ‘Professor.’ Now, enough jokes. I need information I can use about what’s happening in Junkville.”

“Fine. I have the addresses of the two cases—the first is on the southern face of Midnight Oil; it should be as easy as the last time. The other one is in a west-central area, one of the oldest parts of Junkville. Ultra-box. Know it?”

“A little. It’s just to the north of BlackSky Ridge; I’ve already been there.”

“I’ve had a few hints that make me think there are three or four other cases in the same area. You’d better go look around Autostrada, too, along the old express tracks. There’s been some noise the past few days.”

Yuri struggles to keep the smile on his face. Pluto is at the top of his game, as always. There still isn’t a lot of precision, but the problems have been delineated and he can begin to look somewhere, somewhere within this non-place as changeable as the desert dunes he embraces with the obvious naturalness appropriate to a progressive, unstoppable arrival.

“We don’t know how to diagnose this mutation yet, Pluto. Our
system”
—he tries not to smile—“whatever it is”—he exaggeratedly struggles to keep a straight face—“will need a lot of data. Don’t expect your usual commission. This is all just speculation, okay? Look at it as a research
program.
Search
. We’ll move on to ‘destroy’ once we find out where the enemy is.”

The metaphor seems ridiculous in the face of what by its very nature cannot be located.

Pluto Saint-Clair says nothing for long seconds. Then: “I have some Japanese beer I got in Monolith Hills; you want some?”

“Sure. Thanks. Good thing the AC is working—I’ve never seen it so hot in December.”

Pluto takes the beer out of the freezer and puts two open bottles on the small table in his tiny living room.

“I’ve got weed, too; I grow it behind the Combi. A skunk recipe; C-4 for the brain!”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got to go all the way back across the city on my bike. I’ll settle for the Asahi.”

“No problem. Do you mind if I roll myself one?”

“Pluto, this is your house.”

“Thanks. I need to talk to you seriously. The skunk will help; usually it helps with my inhibitions.”

An ephemeral smile flickers on Pluto’s lips as he pulls his smoking paraphernalia out of a drawer in the table. Two or three minutes later, the characteristic odor of marijuana begins to fill the mobile home of the Midnight Oil informant.

And the informant begins to talk.

“You and Chrysler can try to convince me all you want, but I know your system is somewhere in Heavy Metal Valley or nearby. But that hardly means anything now, because the Professor’s arrival changes everything, and I would really like you to hear me out calmly.”

Yuri raises his bottle in assent.

“I know it isn’t a secret from anyone in the territory that HMV sheltered forbidden Christian communities during the reign of the Metastructure. Everyone also knows they stayed here and grew after that.”

“Right. Everyone knows that.”

“Okay, so what would you think about the fact that people know about it on the other side of the world, even though almost all means of communication have been destroyed?”

“The other side of the world?”

“Yes. Europe. Italy, to be exact.”

“Italy?”

“Yep, Rome. But there’s something even more important.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Pluto?
Rome
?”

“It appears that … some parts of the city partially resisted the implosion of the Metastructure, maybe not as well as Grand Junction, thanks to your ‘system,’ but they say that a few computer networks are still operational. And that isn’t all. There’s something even more important. Much more important.”

“More important than working computers? What, exactly?”

“That’s where I want you to become involved. You and Chrysler. In the biggest secret.”

“Oh, please; come on—no bad spy films, I’m begging you.”

“The Professor is a very old acquaintance of mine, but he has a true friend in the territory, a sort of colleague. He told me he spent years following him after the fall of the Metastructure, and every time he was too late—the man had already moved away. This was mostly happening in Europe. The final jolts of the Grand Jihad were more violent there than anywhere else.”

“I—”

“Let me finish. I don’t know where exactly this friend of the Professor’s is, but he lives in Grand Junction. The Professor himself told me so; he got here the day before yesterday, and I found him a rental capsule thanks to a buddy—on BlackSky Ridge, actually. So the Professor’s friend will soon be receiving a delivery from Europe, and the Professor has asked me to oversee the security of the merchandise once it arrives in Quebec and then in the Independent Territory. Obviously its presence in Junkville must be kept top secret.”

Obviously, thinks Yuri. What better place than Junkville to keep a secret? “Merchandise?”

“The kind of merchandise I specialize in. Except that this doesn’t have to do with the kinds of instruction manuals and technical documents I usually send your way.”

“Instruction manuals? You’re going to receive a delivery of instruction manuals?”

This is undreamed-of. Half of the small fortune he and Chrysler have amassed over the past two years came from the resale of instruction manuals and technical documentation removed during exchanges between the Healing Hand and the happy possessor of these manuals that permit the giving of new life, even if only for a few hours, to machines. And especially the relearning of how they function. The memorization of the techniques in the hope of one day, maybe, being able to reproduce it. An
instruction manual is often worth much more than the machine about which it was originally written.

“I told you it wasn’t about that, Yuri.”

“What, then? What is it about?”

Pluto seems to be carefully thinking over his response. He inhales a deep lungful of psychotropic smoke and breathes it out in a long gray-green serpent that twines around Yuri, who does nothing to dispel its ectoplasmic presence.

“The best way I can put it is that it is about instruction manuals for instruction manuals.”

The man is around forty-five years old and lives in a collapsible house that is relatively large for its type. According to his neighbors he is one of the American refugees who fled the Midwest and its expanding deserts for Junkville about a year and a half earlier, just before the first huge simoons spread there from Indiana and Ohio and from what had long been the vast Canadian prairie, where the desert steppe had already conquered most of Ontario. He arrived in Junkville just ahead of the desert. He arrived with the sand at his heels.

And the man is standing in front of him now, near the small window set into one of the walls of his collapsible house. He is expressionless, hands hanging listlessly at his sides, eyes bulging and bloodshot with exhaustion, open mouth producing long sequences of sounds.

He is pronouncing sentences that no doubt make sense in his brain, but which reach the outside world as a garbled torrent of syllables.

The phonemes of each phrase are there, but they have been deprived of their linguistic unity and scattered randomly together with other errant phonemes to form words that mean nothing at all.

Sometimes, series of consonants or vowels, repeated identically, are heard in the semantic bric-a-brac, harbingers of the next phase that is now soon to come. Tomorrow, or in two days at the most, the man will recite only alphabetical sequences, like the case Yuri saw with Chrysler in Omega 17. Calmly, Yuri checks the well-ordered contents of his special Medikit, made by Gabriel Link de Nova into a specialized, handheld weapon against the “thing” born of the Metastructure’s death. Everything is ready for biological sampling. Nothing remains but to obtain the sick man’s consent.