Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
Young women and men come to Junkville strung out, ready to do anything for a chance to get near the cosmodrome again, to touch a fingertip to the fire of their dreams. They are ready for anything. Absolutely anything. Their sex, their age, their physical condition—those things don’t matter much at all.
They were ready for anything before the Fall.
And now they will be ready for even worse, if they survive.
* * *
Yuri takes the gasoline-powered Kawasaki from its parking compartment adjoining the service module and pulls it carefully away from his Combi-Cube.
He drives east toward the quarter of the old kings, and then turns full south. Road 34, running evenly north-south, takes him—floating a few centimeters above the ground—across a long expanse of stone and silicon. The sun is already high in a steel-gray sky streaked with gold light.
Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is on the northern face of the butte. The interior streets of the hill villages are often unnamed, even unnumbered—you have to have a precise description of the place where you want to go and, if possible, a plan of the city or, even better, the hill in question to have a chance of finding your way in this labyrinth of collapsible Recyclo carton houses, these makeshift shelters built of abandoned mining facilities or scrap metal, these ruins of who knows what.
Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is recognizable among all the others on Midnight Oil; it is the only Combi-Cube on the hill and one of the last models made by Honda, much more spacious than the old Chinese model Yuri lives in. In addition to the standard photovoltaic sensor, it has its own working windmill.
Pluto Saint-Clair is one of those people seriously beginning to climb the rungs of Junkville’s hierarchical ladder. He stays here at the southern extremity of the city more out of habit than any feeling of belonging, apparently. No one ever gets too attached to anything in Junkville. The city is constantly in a state of transition; overall mobility is a condition of survival, even for the rich. Little Congo will probably be gone in a year or two, other hills becoming home to the current residents and their former home resettled by another branch of activity in the city where everything, always, is recycled.
If Pluto Saint-Clair has been able to obtain such a Combi-Cube, there are certainly reasons for it.
He is also a longtime resident of the area. He is even older than Chrysler; he knows everything that happens, every plan, and he knows them before anyone else. He is their best source of information, and that doesn’t come free.
He, of course, traffics, too.
Not that he knows anything about the secret of the young man with the guitar. He just collects his money—and not a small amount of it—as
compensation. But he is the one that tells them where, how, and who to look for, who possesses what, what condition it is in, and who might interest their mysterious “client.” He is the one who tells them about specific breakdowns people suffer, clients of his they might be able to help. He is often the one that enables them to put the two “clients” in contact, he who acts as the “invisible hand” linking the supply and demand. He likes to think of himself that way. The Invisible Hand.
He is a man who loves secrets. Not because of paranoia or fear but because of taste. The taste for what is reserved only for a few; the taste for a trap, constantly redeveloped to keep anyone from discovering it. The taste for the risk inherent in every lie, any defense of the truth. Yuri is beginning to know him very well. He shares so many things with this man, and he knows there are so many things this man can teach him.
He traffics, too, like half the population of Junkville—at least.
But unlike Chrysler Campbell and Yuri, he does not deal in technology. To be more specific, the technology he deals in was not considered as such before the fall of the Metastructure; it had already almost disappeared at the time of the Cataclysm.
But now that all the machines are dead or dying, what was not considered technology before is appearing suddenly under the implacable projector of history, in all its terrifying nudity, its magnificent armor.
Not only is it technology, it is the source of all possible Technology, and one might even say that it was the very first technology invented by man.
Pluto Saint-Clair deals in books.
He traffics in literature.
The stomach contracts violently, like a muscle subjected to an electric discharge, a spasmodic cramp followed by the ejection from the esophagus of gastric juices and bits of food half devoured by body acids. It drips with the slowness of a dribble of spittle; it explodes out of him in jets inside the retractable bathrooms, and outside of them.
He cannot prevent the attack. He cannot do anything. There is nothing to be done. He has been vomiting for fifteen minutes already, in an average cycle of ten to fifteen minutes for every hour or two, and it has been going like that for more than a week.
And it is getting worse; every day, every hour. Every time the constrictions are more explosive, more painful, more infernal.
He knows very well that if nothing is done he will die. And worse still, he knows equally well that nothing can be done.
His Sony-Motorola implant is failing. His central nanogenerator.
It is a marvel of transgenic technology. And if it breaks down, the retroviral nervous-degenerative illness will rapidly recur at full strength. This is a disease that doesn’t waste any time. He would only have had a brief reprieve anyway, perhaps a few years.
The implant functioned for five years. It’s almost a miracle.
But now it’s over. He has been infected in his turn, just like all those billions of other human beings who thought they were safe and then died during the past six years.
He has often prayed to some cybernetic god to protect his new implant from falling prey to the mutant strain of the virus. This outbreak seems slower than the original one, the one in ’57. There are still some people with bionic implants around who survived after the death of the Metastructure.
Maybe a little slower. But just as merciless. And now, voilà—it’s his turn. His day. The first of his last days.
Thirty-nine years old. Not even forty. And probably less than a week to live.
After the attack of vomiting comes a terrible migraine, as usual, clamping his skull in its burning grip. A ton of aspirin wouldn’t be enough; it’s useless to hope for anything from classic analgesics, or from anything that can still be found in Junkville. The head pain indicates the beginning of the recurrence of his degenerative disease; the Sony-Motorola implant will probably be good for only three or four more days. And he will probably live only three or four more days after that.
Lying on his small Japanese futon, he watches his legs and hands shake convulsively, unable to control their frenetic movement. He feels his facial muscles begin to contract in jerks, and he knows—he watched it in the bathroom mirror once—his eyes are rolling back periodically in their sockets, causing him to lose his vision for an instant.
And all this is only the beginning. The symptoms are only going to get worse, gaining amplitude and intensity, and soon other dysfunctions will appear.
Finally—and it will doubtless come as a relief—he will die. All this effort absurdly thwarted, all this life reduced to nothing, all this strength of will erased from human memory.
For two or three years during the time of the Metastructure, more than a decade ago now, James Vegas Orlando was one of the young prodigies of the township of Little Congo. He had been quickly noticed for his sense of business organization and had advised the committee that renovated the Flesh Market district in order to make it a true showroom for the local whores. He had established solid rules with the pimps of Monolith Hills. He was full of ideas, careful to never step in anyone’s flower bed as he ran his business like an old pro. Even better, thanks to him, the pimps of Little Congo had seen their collective prosperity multiply by two or three times in the space of twenty months. It was some sort of record.
His trajectory within the elite of Junkville’s aristocracy had been like one of the cosmodrome’s rockets. He had quickly become rich, really rich, and was serenely envisaging a home in the city of Grand Junction itself—Monolith
Hills, most likely, or even one of the trendy quarters: Novapolis, or Von Braun Heights?
Then the dream had been shattered, along with the rest of the world.
The attack passed shortly after noon.
He is able to think again. He tries to place his thoughts in some sort of order, so they might at least delay the end.
Of course, there is the rumor. It has been swirling throughout the whole Territory for two years now. It’s the biggest rumor around. It’s THE rumor. But it’s only a rumor, undoubtedly one of those urban legends that appear whenever two or three houses agglomerate anywhere.
People say all kinds of things. They talk about a child gifted with paranormal powers, and sometimes about an old man, and sometimes even a young woman. They talk about some sort of secret army formed just before the fall of the Metastructure. They talk about an experimental laboratory that has a universal bionic antivirus. They talk about voodoo and magic orchestrated by mediums. They talk about an antimachine created by the Metastructure itself, before or after its death. They talk about an extraterrestrial artifact. They even talk about angels. They have seen it everywhere, in Heavy Metal Valley to begin with, but also in the rest of the territory. They talk of its presence, whatever that means, in Deadlink, Grand Junction, Monolith Hills, Omega Blocks, Junkville, of course, and also the deserted city of the old body tuners of Neon Park, or in some isolated township—Aircrash Circle, or X-15, or Surveyor Plateau, or Grand Funk Railroad …
It is just a rumor, but it might be his only chance. The rumor has crystallized during the past few months. There are more and more functioning electric machines in the Independent Territory. It is especially obvious that a surprising number of people whose vital systems were infected are being miraculously healed. And it isn’t a temporary remission, either. People are being immunized forever. The people themselves never talk about it. They all talk about some “inexplicable miracle” and other bullshit like that. In the best-case scenario they might slide you some tiny tidbit of information that gives credit to one or another variant of the rumor.
It has truly attained the status of a legend; soon people will be talking about millions of healings, even though half of the current population of the globe will have died.
Maybe there is another way.
There is his connection with that girl, that Irish-Haitian ex-whore he had had working on Monolith twelve or thirteen years ago, in Flesh Market. Ariane Gallagher. One of his former neighbors in Little Congo, now living in Clockwork Orange County a little to the north. She heard him talking about a guy who knew someone, a person who just arrived in the territory and who, they say, is one of the men who worked on the last version of the Metastructure.
One of his old friends says she knows someone who knows someone. A third-degree connection in the best light. The usual way of things in Junkville. But it might be a beginning, which is much better than nothing. And it is all he has. Where does she live again? Oh yes—in Vortex Townships, above Ultrabox, just before Autostrada. That’s northwest of the city. Ariane Gallagher has managed to avoid the downward spiral that generally awaits the old whores of Flesh Market; she could easily have ended up living in a Recyclo particleboard box in Toy Division or on New Arizona, where the refugees from the American Midwest huddle, where life is worth less than sand. She probably found some old guy to hustle, meeting his needs during his final days, and she came out of it pretty well. Vortex Townships isn’t so bad. It isn’t too far from Little Congo, in fact. Not too far from survival. He might be able to make it there in his old gasoline-powered Buick …
So this is Vortex Townships, the only area anywhere near as high-tech as Junkville. It consists of a long line of structures built of specialized technological junk, mostly or completely mechanical but from electronic systems, requiring some programming and thus no longer functioning anywhere in the world. These hills were settled at about the same time as the others, but Vortex Townships quickly found its niche, its unique specificity. Before the fall of the Metastructure and the death of the machines, Vortex Townships served as a hub for almost all the techno trafficking in the southern part of the Independent Territory.
There’s nothing better to be found there now than old, just barely functioning televisions and radios, cassette players from the twentieth century, gear-driven watches, hydraulic pumps, gasoline engines, bottles of propane gas, plumbing fixtures, and toothed keys.
The only traffic happening there now, really, is that of the necro Triads, who recover all the bodies found in public areas and even private homes in order to harvest their natural, possibly profitable, organs. The Triads of Vortex Townships are the best organized in the entire territory; they compete easily with the small organizations of Big Bag Recyclo or Snake Zone.
Here, the human body is still used for something. Here nothing is lost, only transformed. Even death. Especially death.
Here, everything has some use. Everything is recycled.
Ariane Gallagher looks exactly like what she is—an old prostitute. She looks like what this city has become, like what the entire territory of Grand Junction has become.
Like what the world has become.
There is no need for preliminary small talk with a whore. Not even for conversation. And he doesn’t have one second to lose.
But on the other hand, he knows she is like him—business before anything—and that she would not believe he had come halfway across the city to exchange reminiscences about Flesh Market. He can attack directly. He can say everything he has come to say. He can reveal his secret.
“One of my old implants just broke down. I have a contact—I won’t tell you his name—who told me you might be able to help me. That you know someone.”