Grand Junction (72 page)

Campbell, for his part, seems to be deep in thought. “Yuri, how does Link think he’s going to build—and then launch—a space vessel into orbit from …”

He cuts himself off.

There he goes, thinks Yuri. The human computer has just found the correct algorithm; he has just put the right data in the right banks.

Yuri wonders for a moment if he can allow himself the indulgence of leaving even the tiniest possibility of doubt.

But this world has no more room for doubt. What they must detonate now are the blinding grenades of truth.

“They’re going to use the twelve rockets left at the cosmodrome.
Link’s going to restore everything to working order. Absolutely everything. The rockets, the orbiters, the launch center, the platforms. Everything.”

“Goddamn,” spits Campbell, a bit dazzled nonetheless. “An ark, you said?”

“Yes, like Noah’s Ark. But much more modest, of course.”

“If they succeed, each orbiter stored in the cosmodrome can hold six passengers. Multiply that by twelve and you get seventy-two. There will still be more than twelve thousand people left in HMV County.
‘Modest.’
I like your adjectives.”

“Okay, but it isn’t really any more daft than waiting for the Thing to kill us all, one after the other, in one way or another. Even if the Neo-machine works, it is still in the first phase of its activity. Link wants to stay one step ahead of the Thing. Because, as you know, it is endlessly adapting—that seems to be one of its favorite pastimes. When I was leaving, he said to me that this is only the initial phase. He said it’s nothing compared to what he has in mind next.”

Chrysler does not answer.

When Link de Nova has an idea in his head, it can take form in reality at any moment. Link de Nova foresaw the arrival of the last entity. He has decided to take on its successors. He has decided that the best way to fight against a world that has come to take the place of another world is to abandon it like a picked-over carcass.

He has made up his mind that the cosmodrome will function again, one last time.

The rumors spread through the Territory as rapidly as an outbreak of the Black Death.

The men of HMV have placed a sort of machine—a beacon, an antenna; it is difficult to pinpoint an exact designation—near one of the groups of windmills on Xenon Ridge. The sheriff’s patrols have completely secured the cosmodrome as well as the whole part of the strip located near North Junction Road. It looks like a zone under siege, according to one of Belfond’s informers; he is quick to pass this information along to Jade Silverskin. The latter only remarks: “This has something to do with the spontaneous remissions.” Then he asks: “Where are we with Deadlink?”

“Cybion I is going to name one Laura Descarville as bishop of the township; we already have an initial group of two or three hundred followers there.”

“The men of HMV and their fucking machine are moving faster than us,” says Silverskin.

It is the first time the humans have pulled ahead of the Anome. He guesses that it must be part of a plan.

The problem is knowing who the idea man, the executor, is—the HMV Machine, or the Anome itself?

Which of the two is trapping the other? Which of the two is pulling off a master ruse?

Which of the two will win?

For Link de Nova, the solution to the problems posed by the double polarities at play in the relationships among tyranny, mutation, politics, theology, and the two humanities that articulate them in their irreconciliable
ways obviously do not come from rational reflection anchored in reading, or even in the study of outside phenomena.

As usual, the answer comes to him as he is deeply asleep. It is like an explosion, so bright that he wakes abruptly though dawn is hours away and all of HMV is plunged in night blackness.

His Neomachine was created to fight the Thing on the plan of individuation; it immunizes both the biological and the mechanical, and thus protects the symbolic of their disjunction. He knows the machine will be of great use in the launch of his space program, his plan to reconquer the High Frontier.

But it is totally powerless against the attack happening now, the attack against writing, against books, against libraries. Against
the
Library.

He remembers his first instinct when he realized how to fight the devolution of human language.
It is not through the organic and language itself that it must happen, but rather through the mechanical
. Hence his solving of the problem via electric music.

How to build the network of correspondences in the face of this an-tiscriptural attack? What is the device? Should they rewrite the threatened texts?

The work of medieval copying against the destructive power of a Metamachine inverted and integrated into humanity …no, that wouldn’t work. That is not the answer.

The solution is still lost in the haze of sleep. The flash woke him, but it faded away the moment he opened his eyes. The main problem with consciousness is that it requires constant effort.

The manuscript.

The story his father has been trying to write for so long.

They will fight the devolution of Logos with the Voice, the Word in action—and thus with Music, the electric Song. They will fight the annihilation of writing with the rebirth of writing. It is the only “place” where the interface can split. Because a book is always active, because it is what etches mind onto matter, it is what individuates language in itself, what
signs
singularity and unity of sense and form.

“You have to start work on your novel again, Father. It’s the only way to save all your books. Your fiction will be an action. It will protect the scriptural reality of the Library.”

Milan Djordjevic cannot find the words to answer.
He has
, thinks Link de Nova,
immediately understood what I mean
.

The narration of the origins and of the final end against the disinscription of the future and of memory.

You have found your place, dear Father
, he thinks.
Now you know your role and your importance in this war
.

He knows his father lost his first wife and a daughter in the last “historic” war in southern Europe, twelve years ago.

You’re ready for Armageddon, Father
, he cannot stop himself from thinking.
You always have been
.

Transluminic
. That is the best word to describe the “substance” of the antenna, as they say of transfinite numbers. It is connected to active infinity; it is much more powerful than the numeric devolution based on the Aristotelian precepts of
indefiniteness
.

In it, all speeds beyond that of light are so many infinities incorporating endlessly, merging, dividing, and reincorporating again.

It is the Antenna of cognitive Light; it is the Antenna of the Halo. The Halo that will serve as an active diagram among all lights.

It will be beautiful. It will be immense. It will be tomorrow.

Yuri and Campbell stand in the doorway of the now-deserted hangar. They have come on behalf of the sheriff, who must submit to the Council the motion permitting them to select the seventy-two chosen people who will leave for the Ring.

“Just tell the sheriff that I’m going to start restoring everything to working order tomorrow. It won’t take much more than twenty-four hours. Then we can proceed with the launches.”

“The sheriff would like to remind you that only a dozen residents of HMV, not including the two androids, have ever experienced a space flight.”

“That doesn’t matter; the cosmodrome orbiters are totally automated. And if twelve of your volunteers are already experienced space travelers, all you have to do is put one of them in each shuttle as mission chief. As for the ‘chosen’ people, tell the sheriff there won’t be any; they will just be pioneers, because after the cosmodrome launches I have a plan to put the whole community of HMV in orbit.”

“Link?! What are you talking about?” gasps Campbell.

“Let me be. Let’s worry about the conventional launches first.”

“Conventional?” asks Yuri.

“The propulsion rockets at the cosmodrome.”

“Yes, I know, but—do you mean that the rest of your plan isn’t based on conventional space technology?”

The light-haloed boy bursts into laughter. His hangar is empty, all traces gone of his many machines, which are now assembled into the single “object” above Xenon Ridge. There is only sun and sky, whose beauty persists.

“Nothing you’ve seen before now will be anything like what you’ll see on that day,” answers Link de Nova, simply.

It is a conclusion like a plane crashing somewhere on the prairie. It is a conclusion like a fireball shooting toward the stars.

It is beautiful. It is immense. And now it is today.

It is early morning in the Territory. The cosmodrome is lit with a thousand lights scattered like sodium petals at the tops of the tall pylons surrounding the launch platforms. The launch center is ablaze with light. The hangars are ablaze with light. The huge crawlers carrying the launchers to the ramps are ablaze with light.

The Antenna on Xenon Ridge alone is as magnificently brilliant as a star.

Not far away, a young boy with a Gibson electric guitar runs his fingers up and down the neck of the instrument. The boy is surrounded with a halo of light; the guitar is incorporated into that halo, and so is the Machine. All three of them—the boy, the guitar, and the antenna—are in the midst of reawakening a vanished civilization; all three of them—the non-born human, the electric instrument, and the Machine of light—are in the midst of
causing future humanity to be reborn
.

Indeed, the three of them are really only one.

And the rockets are twelve brilliant warheads with their noses pointed toward the alabaster sky, where a few ghostly stars can be seen in the faint blueness.

They are the twelve ardent arrows that will pave the way for multitudes, thinks Link.

They are our first real war machines, thinks Yuri.

There aren’t enough of them, thinks Campbell.

They are going to get us out of the Camp-World dominated by the Thing, think the seventy-two occupants of the automated orbiters.

They are all of this at once.

Above all, at the moment they are tall silver pipes emitting thick greenish clouds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

In the launch center, lights leap from one screen to another; all the computers are working; huge maps of the sky are holographically projected on the four corners of the control room; images of the rockets in place on their platforms or en route on their crawlers can be seen on the wall screens. But the huge building is empty, empty of all human presence, as if the ghosts of the operators who worked there forty years ago have secretly come back to work.

At the top of Xenon Ridge, the Antenna has never glowed more brightly; the guitar has never been more supersonic; the boy has never played such riffs, such series of world-explosions.

Yuri understands the secret that the diagram of the boy-guitar-Neo-machine is drawing: beneath appearances, beneath the world of the total simulacrum that has been put in place like a materialized form of the Nothingness, we are all Antennas. We are all sensors of intensity, of image, of affect, of plan; we are all sensor emitters of ontic energy, of superphysical tensors. Light is the operative becoming of matter. Its photonic future, its cosmogonic future. Its absolutely unitary dimension suggests the incredible possibility of a luminous future for Humanity itself, like the critical and actual convergence of potentialities that are yet incompossible.

It is what forms the ultimate diagrammatical plan of the Real World. It is the atemporal Future of all cognition.

It is the future of light; it is the fundamental ontology of the machine. It is the sole power that can stop the progression of the Great Devolution.

This Light is what, itself uncreated, permits Creation to hold itself within the processive relationship between unity, form, meaning, and difference.

This Light is us.

Now, one by one, a few minutes apart, the engines begin to hum.

This is Reality, thinks Yuri. This is the act. This is the event.

In the real universe, neither “subjects” nor “objects” have any concrete existence—because reality is what fills the created world with events and actualizations of differentials, with a unitary and metamorphic multiplex of pure intensities, with processes in constant variation; in the real world, only varying and photonic entities remain. Quantum forces. On the other
side of this, the universalization of the Simulacrum, the hyperfalse World, this “intrigue” insinuating itself into the Created World, endlessly offers its fundamental schism between subject and object, which permits it to establish its domination, through the terminal setup of a global system of representations whose goal is to reduce chronological singularities in binary series of numbers and invariants. So the Technical World imposes its relinquishment in order to cause individuals to devolve into “human material.” This trend, Yuri knows, has been happening since the beginning of the previous century, the terrible twentieth century, but the wave reached its peak with the arrival of the Metastructure; then, after the paradoxical disappearance of that,
it became the wave
, and it brought about a global tsunami. A technoplanetary device, but without Technology, without World, without Language.

The real world is the world of Link de Nova. At this moment the real world is here, condensed in the illuminated cosmodrome. The Real World, this Future-Light of matter, is the warped conspiracy against the conspiracy; it is the conspiracy of Beauty against posthumanity.

The platforms enveloped in thick gray smoke; the red-orange flare of oxyhydric fire pouring from the bottoms of the rockets; the burning lava ejected at thousands of kilometers per hour. Then the ascension, slow at first and then faster and faster, and the points of fire and metal disappearing into the high atmosphere. It is so beautiful, this ultimate eruption of the Created World.