Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
How beautiful it must have been, this world where man and machines lived together, in peacetime and wartime, facing the same dangers in the depths of a jungle or on the peaks of desolate mountains, killing one another only in the animated graphic of a television screen, this world where electrons were free, this world where light permitted one to see the invisible, and to kill without being seen.
How full of hope it must have been, with the century just beginning, and the planetary civil war only in its infancy.
Yes, he says to himself as he crosses the last few meters separating him from the high carbon-carbon pylon of a windmill whose blades cut through the air with an insectlike hum. How good it must have been, how easy, how delicious, to live in a time when men died by their own hands, lived in fear of one another, thought freely with every fiber of their beings.
Now the hand that kills is no longer human, nor is it mechanical. Today, the “other” no longer exists; rather, it is the metastatic proliferation of the “same” that has replaced it. Now there is no prison except humanity itself, free from any attachment.
The towers and launch platforms of the abandoned cosmodrome rise like brown coal totems above the mirrored white sand glowing in the moonlight.
There is nothing left in this world.
Nothing really alive.
Except the
thing
.
The thing that annihilates languages, and whose progression seems to echo the expansion of the desert that stretches to his feet.
In this world, there are no more machines. There are almost no more men. There is nothing but the desert.
The endlessly growing desert.
Silence blankets the star-filled night with a translucent veil that holds everything in a state of infinite suspension. Billions and billions of stars are scattered like gold dust just above the sand-covered cosmodrome, like a terrible and mocking invitation extended to a paraplegic prospector.
The silence does not come from the desert, which now stretches from the city of Grand Junction to the state of New York, and which has engulfed almost the entire Mohawk Territory in the space of a dozen years. The silence does not come from the Earth, even as desolate and abandoned by men as it now is.
The silence falls from the sky. It is the fossil radiation of cosmic song; it is what remains of the postimpact shock wave, and it is all the contained potential from the moment before it. It is an
integral part
of the music, much more than an interruption.
The silence is such—here on Xenon Ridge, as he turns his back to Heavy Metal Valley and gazes at the luminescent waves of sand, swept to and fro by gusts of wind against the launch-control towers—the silence is such, so mineral, so solid, that he feels as if he might take it in his hands like a rock fallen from the moon.
The idea comes to him that silence is matter. And even that only matter is silent. And that only silence is material.
The silence is of an unfathomable depth that superimposes itself on that of the celestial vault; the silence is a structural density capable of physical movement at any time.
The silence is the echo of everything that could not be said, and that might be said.
The silence breathes.
The silence is this breathing. This breathing that whispers in his ears.
This breathing that comes from just behind him.
This breathing that he has just recognized, even before he hears the voice break the silence enshrouding the stars:
“Good evening, Gabriel.”
It is the breathing of a human being. It is the voice of a girl.
The voice of a girl whose beauty could extinguish the sun.
Judith Sevigny has just turned seventeen. Her long, silky black hair sparkles with a million tiny glitters of starlight. She is tall, slender, her feminine curves perfectly made but nearly eclipsed by the extraordinary beauty of her ivory face with its slight amber tint—its eyes, bluer than the heart of a flame; its delicate bones; its oval brow and triangular chin; its fine lines and prominent cheekbones; its straight nose, slightly upturned at the tip; its mouth, whose pink-orange tint needs no cosmetic assistance, designed as it might have been by a Renaissance master. She is like an oasis of beauty that hardly makes sense in a universe completely deprived of both.
He turns as slowly as a stone; as always in her presence, a pair of pliers seems to be gripping and twisting his abdominal organs.
In a soft voice—
too soft
, he thinks—he says: “Judith. What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”
She laughs, and it is like a crystal hurled from the Earth to be lost among the stars.
Her laugh, he thinks, is like no other laugh he has ever heard. This mouth open with the music of thought, these eyes that shine starry blue.
“Gabriel,” says the voice, still merry with laughter. “I could ask you the same thing.”
He forces a smile. He hardly dares to look her full in the face. He is weaker in her presence than he could ever be with the
thing
from Junkville, he thinks.
“I came to look at the cosmodrome,” he says, only half lying.
“It’s almost three o’clock in the morning. Do your parents know you’re out?”
“No,” he admits. “But I wasn’t planning on crossing the ridge, and besides, I’m going back.” He turns and begins walking north, toward the bottom of the mesa, his pace slow, almost reluctant, until she catches up and falls into step very naturally—too naturally—beside him.
“They’re saying someone came from Junkville to see you last night.”
“Yes,” he says, “it was Yuri.”
“Ah! Has he found a new contract for you?”
He doesn’t reply. Above them, the Milky Way spreads out its veil of stars, and a light, fresh breeze blows from northern Quebec, from what remains of the Arctic.
“What will you have to do this time, Gabriel, repair an antique IBM mainframe or an artificial vagina? A hydrogen battery or a lysergic acid neuro-implant?”
He can hear the dry amusement in her words, barely covered by the soft tones of her voice. She often sounds like that, he muses.
He doesn’t know if he should share with her the secret that Yuri McCoy has just told him. He doesn’t know what to do at all. Should he alert the HMV city council? Sheriff Langlois? Should he tell his parents? What about Father Newman?
Yuri has left him with many more questions than answers.
Right now, he is still in shock. A second mutation of the End of the Machine is in progress—and this time, it could be the last operative phase before the total destruction of all thinking life on Earth.
Maybe Judith Sevigny can handle hearing the truth. Maybe she can help him, or just give him some advice.
But—can he do anything but think?
His heart is beating, as always in her presence, not just faster or harder but more deeply—at least that’s how it seems. It is his entire
being, throbbing in a tachycardiac rhythm that continues as they approach the first automobile carcasses of Heavy Metal Valley.
He decides to keep the truth from her. For now.
“A series of nanogenerator antiviral implants. It should be enough for me to pay for this Drumulator synthesizer and the Flying V I repaired for that Neon Park refugee.”
“No one ever would have guessed that HMV would one day become a museum of twentieth-century electric music,” she says, with her soft, clear laugh.
He only smiles, not really looking at her. They have come within sight of Cadillac Avenue.
“They wouldn’t have imagined that all this music could be recorded in the brain of a single human being, either,” she persists.
The young man keeps the smile plastered on his face, but his heart beats harder, faster, deeper; his whole being feels as if it could explode and engulf the whole galaxy.
Judith stops near a partly repaired Lincoln Navigator luxury van from the turn of the century. He turns abruptly toward her.
The girl with the long hair as dark as night and the eyes as blue as cobalt stars fixes him with all the intensity of her gaze.
“You don’t know how to tell the truth, but you don’t know how to lie, either. Why did Yuri McCoy come to see you last night?”
Fine
, says Gabriel to himself, the young man with the guitar, the young man with the power to heal machines, the young man about to fight a war against the whole world. Fine, just as well to risk everything here under the moon, in this magical moment when the girl’s beauty seems more important than any event taking place in the universe.
Yes, just as well to risk everything, because we have nothing more to lose, except all that we are.
“A second mutation is happening. In Junkville.”
“A second mutation? You mean, like the one in ’63?”
“Sort of. But this one is worse. Much worse.”
“Worse, how?”
“It’s bad, like the end of mankind starting all over again. Bad, like the end of all thinking life on Earth.”
Judith Sevigny stares deeply into his eyes; her gaze is like a concentrated ray of pure blueness, a beam of cold fire that penetrates right to the spot where his entire being vibrates to the mad cadence of his own pounding heartbeat.
Yuri McCoy consults a small, portable microcomputer from the 2010s, a machine decontaminated by the Healing Hand of the young man with the guitar, Gabriel Link de Nova.
Yuri is one of the few people privileged enough to be able to enter into contact with Link de Nova, to know his identity. Even to know of his existence.
When the rumor reached the people still living within the city of Grand Junction two winters ago, then Omega Blocks a few months later and thus, almost immediately, Junkville itself, Sheriff Langlois and the HMV city council put some strict rules in place. They now patrolled, armed, around the periphery of their sanctuary. Only three people were authorized to serve as contacts between Link de Nova and the territory’s residents. The rumors grew. People said everything and anything, then the complete opposite. Sheriff Langlois saw an unparalleled opportunity to cover his tracks. He spread, or caused to be spread, various false rumors of his own. In the end, most everyone had accepted the idea that, in fact, the man who could heal machines did not live in Heavy Metal Valley.
Yuri is one of the three official contacts. He is in charge of the southern area of the Territory: Junkville, mainly. The second contact, one Chrysler Campbell, handles Omega Blocks, which he shares with Yuri, and several sectors located to the north, like the new boomtown of Dead-link, which sprang up under the abandoned interchange in the space of two or three years. The last contact, a woman, a former cosmodrome navigation systems engineer, still lives in Grand Junction itself, in what remains of Monolith Hills.
Yuri and Chrysler see each other periodically to decide how to proceed with Omega Blocks, but they have met the woman from Monolith
Hills only once or twice. They are far from forming a cohesive group, a true association, a gang, much less any sort of mafia. They are a microconglomerate of freelancers, that’s all. Small private entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs who sell survival to the highest bidder.
The new process of linguistic devolution Yuri was able to diagnose thanks to Chrysler Campbell’s presence of mind, this anthropogenic mutation that attacks human language without introducing any viral agent into the brain cells, this new “disease” born of the breakdown of the Control Metastructure, undoubtedly represents an unprecedented opportunity.
For almost two years now, his activities as a middleman linking the young man who heals machines and the people whose biocontained components are failing have basically allowed him to survive, given his commissions in merchandise and cash during the exchange, merchandise that he can then sell at an extremely high price on one of the region’s multiple black markets.
The only problem is that Link knows how to heal machines. There is nothing to indicate he might be able to perform the same action for a living organism.
During the night following his visit to Heavy Metal Valley, Yuri couldn’t sleep a wink. He had only dozed off at the first pale gleam of the winter dawn.
What is really brewing with this
new terminal breakdown
of the Metastructure, this inexplicable paradox? Even though it is dead, even though the NeuroNet MegaNetwork hasn’t existed for twelve years, and even though Grand Junction, by the grace of the miraculous powers possessed by the young man with the guitar, is one of the rare places on the planet where an electronic machine still has a chance of functioning normally?
What new source of capital is immortal death going to bring him this time?
He identifies the noise as soon as he hears it behind him, on the other side of the bed he has just stretched out upon, his eyes heavy with sleep.
The telephone. More precisely, the radio-telephone. A khaki-green thingamajig with a black circular Bakelite dial for the composition of numbers and a toothed wheel for selecting frequencies.
A military antique a century old—from the Vietnam War, or so the
wealthy old so-and-so seeking the quick repair of his anticancer implant said. He has collected three of them.
Yuri kept one, gave the second to Gabriel, and the third to Chrysler. This way they were able to communicate with a speed half the humans in Grand Junction or anywhere else had not known in a long time, and could hardly even imagine now.
With machines a century old.
It’s almost funny.
He picks up the receiver.
It’s Chrysler, calling on one of the contraption’s preselected military frequencies.
When Chrysler calls, it always means a new prospect. It means business. It means immediate action.
“Chrysler?”
“The very same,” replies a voice that seems metal-coated and choppy with white noise. “Who else?”
“I saw Link de Nova last night. I talked to him about our business.”
“Oh, yeah? He’s going to have to work another miracle, and fast.”
“I know. It’s probably impossible, but he’s the only one with any chance at all.”