Grand Junction (87 page)

Belfond and Yuri are caught up in their own Dance of Sabers, Song of Blades, Music of Knives. They circle each other like tigers. Yuri has not been able to mount a single attack against Belfond, but none of Belfond’s assaults has borne fruit, either. Neither of them has even wounded the other. Yuri knows that in this type of combat, the first to be wounded is often the first to die. And the first wound is often enough to do the job.

And Belfond knows it, too. His attacks become more cautious as Yuri begins to understand and anticipate the main tactics he is using. He may be immortal, but time is not on his side.

Yuri sees the impressive bulk of the gladiatrix on top of Campbell.
She is big enough to dominate him easily with all her weight, lying in a lateral position, out of reach of his feet and knees.

She is using the battering force of her knees as well as her fists. Systematically, between two series of heavy blows right in his face, she raises her enormous mass above Campbell’s immobilized body, bends her right leg, and slams her knee as hard as she can into his bloodied face, which will surely be crushed in a few more seconds.

More clashing of metal blades. Belfond is moving faster now; he wants to finish this. But to do that, he needs to take more risks. He manages to shove Yuri up against the grille of a big Chevy truck set into the external wall of the Circle of Steel. His blade flashes in all directions. Yuri fights back, parrying and counterslashing; he doesn’t know exactly how he is doing what he is doing, but it’s working—much better than it should, given the fact that his eyes are full of blood that is red, very red, in the night.

Tactics against numbers. Technique against Mass. It is thanks to this fundamental Territory principle that Campbell escapes, that he manages to wriggle away from Walker, to slide underneath her body, holding one of her fists firmly down. He throws his two crossed legs around the gladiatrix’s head, trapping her arm against the ground at the same time—and then it is classic, splendid
juji-gatame:
dragging your adversary backward, pulling to break her neck, using the key component—her head—caught between your own legs.

Tendons rip, cartilage breaks, muscle fibers tear. A cry of pain rings out.

Seen from the sky, the situation is not unfolding in Yuri’s favor. True, he has wounded his opponent, but only superficially—nothing more than a bloody laceration running from shoulder to forearm. He has not been able to regain the upper hand. The purple crow gets closer to the scene. No detail escapes it.

After an exchange of kicks and punches in the standing position, Campbell finds himself once again at a disadvantage and on the ground. This time the gladiatrix falls on him with all her weight, 115 kilograms at least. She is trying to hold him down at a higher point on his body, the thorax, in order to try a guillotine-hold strangling. Campbell knows all the traps. He does nothing to prevent her from getting into the position she wants. He drops his chin and protects his neck with his forearms. A barrage of
punches attempts to make him let go, but he holds on. So she uses her elbows, her head, even a rock snatched from the ground nearby. The girl’s arm is ready to crush his throat. Campbell knows that if he is hit full-on by the rock, he will be finished. He knows the moment has come.

The moment of triangular strangulation. He raises his legs toward the sky, as if for
juji-gatame;
this time he crosses them around her neck, managing to grab her wrist with one of his hands. Then all he has to do is bend his legs and to tighten, tighten, tighten; this will break the cervical vertebrae, causing asphyxiation by compression of the whole laryngopharyngeal system, and it is extremely painful.

Yuri has just been wounded in his turn. He managed to avoid the circular movement of the machete aiming for his stomach, but the blade made a large gash in the flesh of his left thigh as it passed. He easily blocks the thrust that follows, but then finds himself forced to recoil, recoil, recoil. Endlessly. But he holds on, parrying, striking the enemy blade with his own. He fights.

Something tells the purple crow that the battle is nearing its end. It does not know why, because
whys
don’t interest this Territory bird. What counts for it, and for those who will be hearing what it has to say, is
how
.

The lines of destiny are diverging farther and farther, the purple crow knows.

For the young man named Yuri McCoy, the outcome will be determined by a mistake committed by the man called Belfond, a mistake for which the counterattack can be at once instinctive and completely lethal.

For Campbell the solution is something else entirely, and it is he who will choose it.

Back on his feet, he faces the gladiatrix. He knows he will not be able to beat her with a simple combination of kicks and punches, but he also knows he has bruised her. And he knows that on the ground her weight is both an advantage and a handicap. A handicap is just an advantage that meets the Territory, thinks Campbell.

It is so simple then: a Vovchanchyn punch launched from behind his back, masking the position, the angle of his arm until the last instant; then the fist hits in a direct slice—that is, with a lot of amplitude in it—and slams downward from temple to ear to jaw. She is stunned. Then a series of low kicks to weaken her thighs, which are as thick as tree trunks. Let her come now. There.

He throws himself forward, legs straight in front of him, launching himself at her neck, clamping her neck between his thigh muscles exactly
as he would for a triangular stranglehold. He takes her down to the ground with him, suffering a series of brutal punches to his head but managing to carry his plan through; the idea is to end up in a dominated position underneath the gladiatrix, but voluntarily this time, so that she is perfectly situated to be garroted by a half nelson. This time the key will be turned all the way in the lock. Until her bones break. Until the deadly crack sounds. The important word here is
voluntarily
. What will be different is that it will be a deadly trap. A typical Territory trap.

The purple crow knows this. Just like it knows all the rest.

A deadly trap can be very slow or very fast. There is no in-between.

Belfond makes a serious mistake. Surely the only one of his whole life. And the last one. A very simple, banal error. In the Territory, the simplest of errors can immediately turn into a fatal mistake.

Undoubtedly unnerved by Yuri’s agility and resilience, he becomes more unsteady. Just a little more. A little too unsteady. One of his attacks is very poorly executed. Yuri dodges it easily. Again an imbalance. Belfond is easy prey for the powerful high kick that costs him several teeth and sends him crashing to the ground, groggy, as his machete falls away. Then it is all so simple, so direct, so perfect.

The Law of the Territory.

If you offer Death an inch, it will take a mile.

Yuri kneels beside Belfond. He reads in the man’s glassy eyes that the last general in history is ready. Ready or not, the Law of the Territory will be preserved; he will die. The enemy has been beaten.

“You haven’t got a chance,” Yuri tells him, just before slashing the Gurkha blade across his throat, slicing it cleanly.

The steel brings forth a gout of blood as it clangs against the rock underneath Belfond’s head.

There. It is finished. The Seventh Day of the Construction of the Vessel is ending with this double victory. This double murder that will end the whole history of murders.

The Territory is no one’s friend, but you can try to befriend it, says a local proverb that Campbell repeats often.
You didn’t try hard enough
, thinks Yuri.

Campbell turns his blue-blotched, puffy, bloody face toward Yuri. Hematomas, bumps, multiple lacerations. His face has doubled in size. He
disentangles himself with difficulty from the unmoving body of the gladiatrix. The Gurkha sword, red with the blood of the last general in human history, still in his hand, Yuri walks toward him with a wide smile.

Campbell obviously had a very bad fifteen minutes before coming out on top, during which the situation turned against him not once, but twice. Yuri, on the other hand, was constantly dominated until the flash of genius that allowed him to seize his chance.
Controlled coincidence
, they call it in the Territory.

They have survived. They have conquered. They have kept the Territory and its Law safe. They have saved the Vessel.

Campbell stands up, swaying. He looks blearily at the two corpses, fifteen meters apart.

“They may be immortal, but the Territory is invincible.”

The two bodies metamorphose into their numeric essence—semibiological, semispectral forms, reduced to a catalogue of digital organs, mingling bit by bit with the ecology of the Territory. Soon they will be re-cloned.

At the center of the Circle of Steel, the Ark is emitting a single bluish point of light with occasional flashes of quicksilver. It’s only a matter of minutes now. Link de Nova’s metabrain will shut down on this Earth to be reborn in the Vessel, which is waiting in orbit. He will leave nothing behind but a transfinite micropoint, the “aleph point” that will continue to watch over the Territory-within-the-Territory, that will allow the ontological border to be preserved, that will permit the Vessel to come back.

They have fought. They have won. They have kept the Territory and its Law safe. Together. In synchronicity. The two of them.

The three of them, counting the Ark.

The Ark, which is getting darker each second, fading little by little into the false night of the last day.

“It will leave soon,” says Yuri.

And it does leave. In a last silvery flash, it disappears suddenly from the Ridge. They can just see a ghostly gleam appear and vanish again, above them, at the zenith.

Yuri looks at Campbell. The Territory has won. They knew how to protect it. They knew how to make sure the Law was respected.

Link de Nova has become the Vessel of Infinity; now its assembly will be completed in space before the Great Departure.

They have succeeded. This false night is worth any triumphant dawn.

Campbell looks at him, and smiles.

Then he falls to the ground, plunged brutally and deeply into an irreversible coma.

Yuri spends almost an hour trying to bring his friend back to consciousness. It is no use; the purple crow knows it; it watched the whole battle, every microsecond, every single thing that happened.

During the second submission, the one Campbell escaped from in extremis thanks to the triangular strangulation move, the violence of the punches he received, their number, their placement near sensitive cephalic areas, all of this—added to the shocks he underwent during the various other exchanges—yes, all of it has finally taken its toll on his cerebral structure.

Yuri knows it: just a single internal hemorrhage would be enough.

It is enough. Campbell will be the last man to die by another’s hand.

Campbell dies with the perfect sense of timing that marked his whole life. He fought, he won, he was there for the departure of the Ark, and then he died, the smile still on his lips.

Everything is all right.

They will be Territory Men forever. Dead or alive, they have accomplished the very last mission entrusted by the Law to its Guardians. They will not see the Orbital Ring; they will never join the Vessel of Infinity; they will never know the Third Humanity. They will both remain here, in this bit of the world they have always belonged to, but which belongs to no one. They will watch over the Territory-within-the-Territory. They will watch over the Sanctuary. They will pass the torch to other watchers when the time comes; until then, they will watch unceasingly—and, in any case, the micropoint of singularity will know what to do.

They will wait here in every sense of the word, here in the Territory, ready for the Second Coming.

The eighth day, according to the Legend, is called the Morning of the Night.

The Vessel has left orbit; it is no longer visible from Earth, not even in the astronomic telescope belonging to Judith that Yuri finds in her cabin along with the young woman’s good-bye letter to him, written in response to the text he gave her a few days before the Departure. The letter
contains a very simple message. A few words that focus on all the light of infinity, the whole sunlit night of their love. The Legend does not pass on the exact contents of the letter. Like the one Judith took with her on her journey into the Cosmos, this missive will remain secret. The last secret of the Territory.

Yuri also finds another object, lying on his own bed as if placed there by a human hand. It is Link de Nova’s Gibson guitar, with a mini amplifier, a digital recorder, and a series of tablatures with chords and divisions. It is the last electric guitar in the world. It is with this guitar that he will continue to compose his songs about the Territory. The last rhapsodies. The last rhapsodies on the last world.

The Anome’s army has retreated, far, very far from the Territory-within-the-Territory and its invisible, deadly border. He is alone. The last man. The last man, alone.

The Morning of the Night is marked by several “days” of sharp brightness during which the sun makes its appearance and traces its usual path through the sky. But this sun is no brighter than a full moon. It is just a ghostly shadow of itself, a yellowish dot hardly larger than a star. The long, luminous
daynight
has given way to its dark opposite.

Yuri realizes that the Vessel altered local Time and Space to depart for Infinity. What he is seeing at this moment are the last instants in the life of the star that shone for billions of years on the Planet of Men. He knows this is a message, not just a simple spatial-temporal illusion. When the Anome withdraws its fingers from this Earth, its white universal sun will return for thousands of years. But its end has already been written, too. The Vessel of Infinity will come back as well. It will come back to bring the News. The News of the Coming.

Yuri spends the next several days burying all the dead. More than a hundred and fifty men and women. No question of a mass grave. Every one of them has the right to an individual tomb topped with a cross. He gives them that, and in so doing he continues the first cemetery begun during the Day of the Great Silence, at the northern base of the Ridge, in a vast semicircle that surrounds the point of quantum singularity left behind by the Vessel at the summit of the mesa. He finds tools for the job in his cabin—picks, shovels, spades, a magnetic jackhammer—enough to dig a good fifteen graves per day. Up at dawn, his hands in the earth, his feet on the rocks; to bed well after sunset, he hardly sleeps; in the chrome-colored sky, the sun of the
aworld
moves silently above him and the bodies he is burying. With each grave the uniqueness of the individual
he is covering with sand and rocky dirt comes back to him in memory: Slade Vernier and his killing Desert Eagle; Sheriff Langlois, the Man of the Law of Bronze, with his decisive pronunciations; Francisco Alpini, the very last soldier-monk; Erwin Slovak and his predatory intuitions; Scot Montrose, the oldest of the Guardians; Bob Chamberlain, the dutiful patrol officer. All of them, each of them, lived, killed, and died for the Law of the Territory.