Grand Junction (50 page)

The night is ultrared.

The man cheated. He cheated well; very well, even. His betrayal held inestimable value because it contained all the light of the truth.

And the truth is that he knew too much to stay alive, knew too many people to stay alive, and he could say too much about them to stay alive. And he had run up against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, to stay alive.

The Law of the Territory is intractable when it comes to these types of questions of
savoir-vivre
.

The gun blast has sealed the terminal silence of the night. Pluto Saint-Clair’s head is lowered; Yuri can see the ceaseless trembling of his form.
The night has penetrated him; the language of fear has taken possession of his body
.

The boy sitting on his quad bike isn’t talking, either, but on his face Yuri can see a feeling other than simple, banal human terror. It is more a sort of fascinated curiosity, as if he isn’t really there, as if an infinite distance separates him from what is happening.

He is in the process of learning what humanity really is. It is as captivating as the quantum ballet of quarks or the building of an anthill.

The man with the red Buick is dead. Night reigns over the Territory. The night is their Territory.

So the ultrablack night, the interrogatory night, has taken things into its own hands. It commands, it orders, it obliges.

It is the greatest freedom in this poor world. It is a process that unfolds without the slightest discontinuity, not even that of death, which it turns into a simple comma, a pause, a sigh, between two barely distinct movements.

Phase one:
Campbell turns to the kneeling Pluto Saint-Clair, glancing briefly at Yuri, who is still pointing his assault rifle at the man. Yuri will not falter. He has become a guardian of the Territory in his turn, a starfire killer, a hunter in the ultrablack night, a man of the Law of Bronze. The Winchester emits a last belch of powder. Pluto dips his head further, hunches his shoulders, his whole body shaking violently.

“Don’t kill me, please …” he begs brokenly.

“Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t, Pluto?”

The silence of the night, the fire of the stars, humanity as an experience of death.

Pluto does not speak. The Winchester seems more talkative.

Phase two:
Campbell looks at Yuri; Yuri looks at Campbell. They have no need to say anything; the night speaks for them, whispering in their ears. The Law of the Territory has synchronized them perfectly.

Campbell heaves a long sigh of resignation.

He lets the barrel of his rifle droop toward the ground. The night is far beyond black.

“Shoot him,” he says very simply to Yuri.

Phase three:
Pluto has no time to react. At the most, an indistinct noise sounds deep in his throat.

Yuri has stowed his rifle in a bandolier slung over his shoulder. The tube of anodized metal is an extension of his hand, and it is quickly pointed in the direction of Pluto Saint-Clair’s exposed neck.

The ultrablack night is hypodermic silence. The syringe emits only a weak hiss when it is propelled from the injection gun to land cleanly, burying its needle in flesh. Pluto turns his head and stares blearily at Yuri, his eyes already glassy; he holds out his hand in a slightly absurd gesture, as if trying to grasp hold of something.

But there is nothing to grasp here.

Nothing but the ultrablack night. The night into which you are about to sink, thinks Yuri.

And count yourself lucky. For you, there will be a morning
.

Phase four:
Division of labor, dispatch of the black night, secret organization under the starfire. Not a word is exchanged. Everyone knows his task. The silence is their Territory.

For Pluto there will be a morning; Campbell is taking care of him now. The injection Yuri gave him was a simple narcoleptic. Now specialized amnesia must be induced. Chrysler creates a complete neurological
map of Pluto Saint-Clair’s brain. Yuri knows he will make up his programmable scopolamine tonight in his cabin at Aircrash Circle, and that when Pluto wakes up in his own home a day or two from now, he will remember nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except what Campbell allows to remain in his memory. His body will live. But his brain will be partially dead.

It is the Law of the Territory.

Phase five:
Now they must deal with the problem of Vegas Orlando, the night’s troublesome issue. They must deal with the problem of his corpse.

There is a body. There are trash bags, adhesive tape, and some twine brought with them in their backpacks. Campbell’s intuitions are certainties planned for in advance.

There is a body. And there is a lake.

The equation is childishly simple. The child of the ultrablack night.

The dock is a bit rotted, its disjointed planks letting a few pieces of putrefied wood float on the surface of the water. Yuri walks toward the quicksilver lake. He knows he is walking on the wild side of the night; he knows he is walking toward the starfire itself; he knows that this time he has really gone over to the other side.

The most serious murder isn’t necessarily the one you commit yourself. And especially, during a murder, the most crucial act isn’t necessarily the inducement of death itself.

At the very end of the dock, chained to an iron ring by a rusty mooring, a rowboat floats with difficulty on top of the waves. Its floor is moldy, full of holes, splintered, and covered with puddles of stagnant water; it is kept above the surface of the water only by virtue of the cord attaching it to the small dock. The night is made for them. The ultrablack night of killers. The night of the Camp Doctors.

Phase six:
The night of the Territory loves to facilitate the actions of its soldiers. Everything goes very fast on both sides. Pluto is connected to a neurosensor pack. The numbers and lines of code scroll past on the screen of the night. Vegas Orlando is dragged to the dock, tightly wrapped with swaths of adhesive tape and nylon cord in two huge industrial garbage bags from Big Bag Recyclo into which Yuri has placed large stones gathered from the side of the road, then placed into the rowboat, which wavers heavily under its new load. A well-aimed slash of the mooring. A single shove with a half-rotted oar serves to push the boat as far as
possible from the dock into the middle of the lake. A dozen meters at most, and it falls apart and founders. Yuri can’t even see the garbage-bag bundle as it sinks to the bottom of the lake.

The ultrablack night watches over the Territory and its guardians. The disappearance is obligated to remain invisible.

Yuri goes to get the pickup. Campbell carefully watches the numbers scrolling across the screen of the biopack monitoring the metabolism of Pluto Saint-Clair.

He raises his eyes to the boy, still sitting on the front of his bike, still silent, still unmoving in front of the two electric guitars laid side by side on the carpet of moss. All around them, the moon and the stars shed their rays of cool light on the coating of snow lightly burying the piles of sand.

All around them is the Law of Bronze, the Law of the Night, the Law of the Territory.

The Law of Men.

“I could have told you to go home, to keep you from seeing this. I even thought of it.”

The silence of the night. This time, the boy is part of it, too. He is free. He is free to let the ultrablack night speak for him.

“Then I told myself it would be unfair. Yes, unfair. Because it would have meant breaking the pact that unites us, if we had kept you from knowing.”

Link asks no questions. He is the night. He is silence. He is the secret.

But Campbell is going to tell him everything; he is the Guardian of the Night, the mercenary of silence, the hired starfire killer.

“Because you need to know. You need to know this isn’t a game—that it’s bigger than that, and supremely dangerous. You need to know that the world is at war against itself, and you need to know what the word war means, especially on this scale. You need to know that no mistake can be let slide. You need to know that we will kill anyone who tries to find out our secret, that we will kill anyone who tries to get near the Professor or your father, not to mention you. You need to know that we’ll protect you against your will if we have to. You need to know that we’ll protect you from yourself with the same rigor we’ll defend you from a Vegas Orlando or a Pluto Saint-Clair. You need to know that the Thing is much stronger than we are, and above all you need to know that most men are a lot weaker than us. You need to know that we will give no quarter. You need
to know the price of silence, and the exact cost of the slightest word—especially a word too many. You need to recognize fear in a man’s eyes. You need to recognize death in a man’s eyes. You need to know what the impact of a bullet fired at close range does to a man’s head. You need to know the difference between a living body at instant T and the same body, dead, at instant T plus one. You need to know some simple mathematics of the night. That will help you avoid other errors in calculation.”

A human computer like Campbell is probably the best weapon to have in a fight against the digitalization of man, thinks Link de Nova.

Campbell is a friend of numbers.

Campbell is a friend of the night.

Campbell is his friend.

In a way, it is utterly terrifying.

The sun is high in the sky when Link de Nova wakes up, slightly nauseated. A fine ray of light falls directly onto his bed through the window above it. It seems to be made of the orange radiance contained in shadows. He hardly slept, just in fits of an hour or two, but the image of the man’s head exploding in the dim light of the starlit night kept repeating itself in his dreams like a film played on continuous loop by the Devil himself. The icy eyes of Chrysler Campbell, his weapon that had ended the conversation with a brief orange burst. The incredible calm of Yuri McCoy, who had made the body disappear as if he were dealing with common biodegradable trash. Barely visible elements, but ones that formed the skeleton of the nightmare, just as the night was the setting for murder.

Yuri and Chrysler are his friends. His best friends. His only friends in the Territory, in fact. They are his only friends, his “bodyguards.” They are his killers.

They would be capable of exterminating the entire population of the Territory to protect him, and also undoubtedly capable of doing much more than that.

As he slowly prepares to face this new day in the Post-World, Link sees, more clearly than he ever has before, that he is the sole keeper of a secret that is worth the lives of millions of men, because he could probably save at least that many. He sees that he is treading a fine line between life and death. He sees that he, himself, is a frontier between two “territories,” and that he is the map of them both. He sees that he is Mankind’s shield against the arrows shot by the Thing. But the Thing is in some way the future of Mankind. Or, rather, the monstrous
hubris
between its past and its future, an eternal present of living death.

He is the Shield of Bronze of the Territory. Unlike Sheriff Langlois
and his friends Yuri and Campbell, he is not in the service of the Law; even thinking of it makes him nearly faint with terror. It is the Law that is in his service.

It is the Law that would kill for him; it is the Law that would kill men to help him continue healing other men.

He wanders around the outside of his trailer for a few minutes. The sky is hugely blue. The sun is brilliantly yellow. The metal is fiery. The World is stupefyingly beautiful, especially because it has ended—or nearly so.

He brought up the subject one night with his mother, while his father worked late with the Professor in their trailer laboratory.

You might say that the Created World persists in showing through the Post-World that has succeeded it, he had said. What do you mean by that, his mother had asked. Beauty resists, he had said. Yuri McCoy thinks like I do; he told me when they got back. And what does he know of beauty, his mother had asked, coldly.

Yuri is a young killer, a young Territory hunter of the night, but that is not his primary vocation, of that Link is sure. The Metastructure imploded ten years ago, and eleven years ago his parents died, and Chrysler Campbell took him under his wing, like a self-appointed older brother. Neither Yuri nor Campbell is a bad man by nature.

Which is what makes them even more dangerous. Which is what makes them even more pitiless. Which is what permits them to distinguish so well between Beauty and the Beast. They are at an equal distance from both of them.

So it was with a barely discernible note of defiance in his voice that he had said to his mother:

“What Yuri knows of Beauty, he learned from his fight against the Beast.”

The song is called “We Love You,” and it was sent to us from the Ring. It says that we are loved, that we are not alone, that Beauty still exists.

It has been playing continuously for more than ten days now, twenty-four hours a day, in Judith’s little observatory.

Judith. She is there, standing in front of him, but he
is not standing
in front of her; nothing in him seems capable of standing; it is as if he is falling down on the inside; it is like a serious accident; it is as if he is in a
gaseous state. It gets worse every time; the next time, there will probably be nothing left of him.

Judith’s face is full of excitement, fascination, impatience; she looks almost childlike, full of hope. “Link, you’ll never guess!”

“Guess what, Judith?”

“The men in the Ring. I got a message this morning, right after I woke up!”

“Did they tell you to have a nice day?”

Despite himself, his tone contains a note of irony that the young woman doesn’t miss.

“Idiot. Why are you acting like you don’t care?”

Judith, almost angry. Judith, raven-haired ice. Why so emotional?

I do care, Judith
, he thinks,
but some things have happened recently that are keeping my little brain too busy for anything else
.