Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
The old hooker permits herself the luxury of two or three seconds of suspense. “Yes. I know someone. A landlord. He owns a capsule building on BlackSky Ridge.”
“Okay, great. He’s the one?”
“No. I won’t tell you his name, either. My friend knows another guy very well, somewhere else in the city. I won’t tell you his name, either.”
Three degrees, including his contact in Clockwork Orange. Three degrees of separation, thinks James Vegas Orlando. Where is the man I’m looking for?
“The man told my friend more than once that he was waiting for someone. Someone important. He kept using those words. This stranger arrived around two days ago, my friend told me. He’s the man you need to see. He might be able to heal you, and maybe others. At least that’s what the man thinks who knows my friend at BlackSky Ridge.”
Ah, okay, thinks James Vegas. So it’s
four
degrees of separation.
“Great,” he says. “BlackSky Ridge, you said? A capsule building?”
“Yes, on the site of an old motel in Monolith Hills. You can’t miss it—it has a sign with the UManHome logo. They’re orange.”
“I’ll find it,” he says. “The usual price?”
“The usual price. I don’t like to change my habits.”
The light falls in heavy rays on the face of Wilbur Langlois, illuminating the angular bones of his face in a play of halogen gold and dusty shadow. His black eyes shine like coals lit up by subterranean tungsten; the light makes him even more nocturnal, it brings something out of his being, the millennia of savagery buried in his genetic memory and a bare half-century of civilization—and then a few years of decivilization. It exposes the darkness he is made of, and makes it darker still.
The light streaming in from outside the dark-blue-tinted anti-UV Plexiglas, the solar dimness accentuating the hard planes of his face carved by the artificial light, gives him the look of a robot ready for his turn in a game of chess.
Here in Heavy Metal Valley, he knows he is protecting a sort of sanctuary. It certainly wasn’t his job originally; more than twenty years earlier, the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium of the Territory of Grand Junction, the owner of the cosmodrome, offered him the position of sheriff in this zone that was then in full expansion, built barely a dozen kilometers to the northwest of the launchpad, around a community of “greasers,” those irrepressible amateur lovers of gasoline-powered vehicles whose presence was just barely tolerated by the UHU. He brought order, justice, and law to them. He brought power and its counterpart, freedom. Of all the residents of the Territory, those who lived in HMV had suffered the least from the attacks of the Metastructure as it broke down.
He had eventually told himself at the time that it was probably due to the Christian communities whose presence he accepted, putting himself outside the law with regard to Grand Junction’s Mohawk authorities and the faceless police of Human UniWorld. He had turned from a Protector
of Social Law into a Resistor of World Order, and yet at the time, it had been like a revelation; he had continued his job as sheriff, even amplifying it somewhat; he had remained the armed hand of Justice while welcoming these refugees from the Invisible onto his soil. When, after the end of the Metamachine-World, the wars and guerrilla fighting of all types had broken out again everywhere on the planet in a final struggle for the honor of History, he had organized the city’s defense against the renegades coming from various holdover Islamic emirates, from Ontario, from Illinois, and from certain parts of Quebec. He had become head of the City Council; then, one fine day, he had decided to have himself baptized by Father Newman.
He is now a sheriff in the Post-World, harder than flint, with the inflexibility of a soldier of lost civilizations.
Shortly after his baptism, Milan Djordjevic and his companion—the android former prostitute who had discovered the baby under the Dead-link interchange—the two adoptive parents of little Gabriel Link de Nova, had come to see him, and they had brought the little boy with them.
And they had explained to him what was really happening.
Wilbur Langlois had held to HMV’s democratic procedure. The City Council had met; its members were brought up to date, and the most absolute secrecy decreed concerning Gabriel’s powers. Wilbur Langlois had done everything he could during the years since then to ensure that the secret remained as well protected as if it were sealed in a strongbox welded shut with an oxyhydric torch.
But the World is full of holes now. Nothing can keep the truth from coming out, like lava erupting from a volcano. Nothing can change the fact that the only materiality in this world now comes from lying and its confrere, betrayal.
For Wilbur Langlois, it means a single imperative:
immediate reinforcement of security procedures
.
Wilbur Langlois. A Mohawk. A mixed-blood, in fact, originally from southern Quebec. A barely human block of stone. A man who is usually laconic, and who at first seems slow and awkward, but who, they say, can hit an old one-dollar coin with a .223-caliber bullet from more than fifty meters away. And that he can do the same thing to a human skull at the same distance, without a twinge of guilt.
Link is facing him. He is nervous.
Wilbur Langlois looks at him without kindness. He stands straight,
but without any sign of tension. With him, it is calmness that indicates anger; quietude points the compass needle toward the “danger” pole. It is ice that signals the presence of flame.
Here, he is the Guardian. The Man of the Law.
What remains of it.
And he is utterly pitiless.
“We made a deal. It’s called a contract.”
Link doesn’t reply. He shrinks in on himself slightly, barely looking at the sheriff in his midnight blue uniform, his silvery badges, his Canadian Mounted Police–style gray hat. And his steely black eyes, harder than bullets about to be fired.
“Everything has to go by me, at least everything important. And even what’s unimportant,” Langlois continues.
Link huddles in on himself even more tightly. The whole City Council is there. And even Judith.
“And it seems to me that this information is of the very highest importance.”
Link de Nova does not speak. He looks in turn at each of the members of the Council, sitting here in their excuse for a city hall, this old Quebecois school bus found one day, full of dead children, south of the river.
“And so someone has betrayed my trust, and, even worse, taken unwise risks.”
The voice holds the almost indifferent calm of an assassin ready to deliver the deathblow.
“So you can easily imagine that I am not happy at all.”
Link watches the members of the Council.
They don’t look very happy, either.
“I wanted to talk to you about it as soon as possible. Right now we’re only dealing with rumors.”
“I’m sick of this, Gabriel. We agreed that I would be kept updated about each visit, especially the important ones. Your friend hasn’t been to see me.”
“We don’t know yet what this is really about, Sheriff Langlois, or even what to do, or how; I assure you, that’s why I talked to Judith about it.”
“Yeah,” grumbles the sheriff, “that’s the best thing you’ve done, because she told her parents right away. And her parents, as you know, are Council members.”
Again, Link looks out of the corner of his eye at each of the men and women sitting around the table in the center of the remodeled school bus and taking up almost its entire length.
He recognizes Judith’s parents, sitting on either side of the young woman, and their friends the Sommervilles, an evangelical pastor and his wife. Father Newman is there, too, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick, the deacon. And there is Lady van Harpel, his mother’s best friend, who moved to Deadlink two years ago when masses of refugees overtook the small valley where she had been parking her mobile home.
And then there is the sheriff. The block of granite. The Man of Classical Law. He is accompanied by his first adjunct, a solid fellow from Alberta called Slade Orange Vernier.
And to top it all off, at the other end of the table, facing the sheriff, who is presiding over the assembly, is Link’s own father, Milan Djordjevic.
His father, who is looking at him with his clear eyes, two opalescent pearls that fix him with an indecipherable mixture of compassion and hardness.
His father, who is not very happy, either, but who knows that Link is doing what he can, with his scanty childish resources, to survive on his own.
His father, who knows he is afraid. Of his own powers as much as of what they must fight.
His father, who knows he is exactly right to be afraid.
“Are these isolated cases, or are we looking at an epidemic in progress? Or the threat of one?”
“Like I told you, Sheriff, we don’t know anything yet. My friend told me about two cases that both happened last week. If it started in October there have definitely been others. But how many, is the big question.”
“A question we need to answer as soon as possible.”
“My friends are looking, Sheriff. You know as well as I do that what they look for, they find.”
Langlois’ black gaze plunges into Link’s own. The fact that he is only twelve years old means nothing, Link knows. In Heavy Metal Valley, you stop being a child after the first twenty-four hours of your life.
“It would be in your interest to keep me informed and to respect procedures, Gabriel.”
A heavy silence falls like a leaden sky over the school bus and the Council table. Langlois’ last remark is one that needs no additional commentary.
Then the sheriff inclines his head in Milan Djordjevic’s direction, at the other end of the table.
“And now we will move on to the second subject that involves us. Or rather … that involves Mr. Djordjevic.”
Link watches his father with unfeigned curiosity. The man’s face is imperturbable; a very slight smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
“The confirmation is valid, Sheriff,” Milan Djordjevic says. “The Vatican’s holographic seal has been identified.”
Sheriff Langlois says nothing. Clearly, the ball is in Link’s father’s camp.
“The convoy leaves in a few days. According to the weather, it will take three weeks—maybe four—to cross the western Mediterranean, then the Atlantic, and come ashore in Halifax. I think, given the ongoing troubles on the Maine-Canada border with leftover bands of Islamists, that they will have to wind across New Brunswick and the cantons of eastern Quebec, and then the old Mohawk reservations, to reach Grand Junction. But there are still a Catholic community and naval infrastructures in Halifax to receive them, which is what motivated this choice.”
The sheriff asks a silent question that resonates like an alarm siren in the long steel cage of the school bus.
“It will probably take a week to ten days for them to get here from Nova Scotia.”
The silence washes over them like a frigid Arctic wind. There is still a question hanging in the air.
“Two men will accompany the merchandise. They will be authorized by the Order, by grant of a papal bull.”
The silence stretches on, neutral and cold. There is one more question. The final one.
“There will be around twelve thousand books in all.”
Pluto Saint-Clair’s Combi-Cube is halfway up the butte, facing slightly west. It has been repainted with a layer of yellow acrylic lacquer, very bright, like a lemon. It is a startling block of color against the mineral darkness of the hill.
Vague pathways partly covered with scrap metal cover the hillside in every sense, drawing a network of anthracite dust around the collapsible houses and shelters of every type grouped on the slopes.
The butte is marked by etchings and carbon waste, like at least half of the hill villages in Junkville. The slag heaps of the mining complex have been occupied since their creation, and the refining facility adjoining them completely pillaged during the first years of the town’s foundation. Nothing is left of it now but the jagged bases of a few rusty pillars, just barely visible above the rocky sand.
A public dump has in the meantime transformed the main shaft into a giant garbage pit, and several heaps of rubbish already surrounded the old mine when Junkville appeared in this inhospitable part of the territory. Black-slag heaps and vaguely polychrome mounds form the motley landscape of the city. Since the fall of the Metastructure, carbon has once again become a widely used energy source. The refuse hills have new competition.
He rides the Kawasaki through the maze of trails, trying not to lose sight of the yellow-painted Combi. The splash of citrus color can be seen for kilometers against the dark slope of Midnight Oil, but the incessant winding of the access roads cause it to disappear several times from his field of vision.
The city is always changing.
The last time he came here, a few days earlier, this particular path
didn’t exist—it was blocked off, and that other one over there didn’t really go in this direction; it didn’t lead to the summit then, but it does today.
This is Junkville. Nothing is stable; nothing is fixed, not even the topography. Only the hills don’t move. It is the single bit of consolation to be found in the desert.
Pluto Saint-Clair opens the door of his Combi after having uncovered the convex surface of its peephole to get a good look at his visitor. In Junkville, an
identified
man isn’t necessarily a friend, but at least he isn’t an immediate threat, either.
“It’s me, Pluto. Chrysler said—”
“I know. Come in.”
Pluto is a tall man, thin and gangly, with salt-and-pepper hair. He wears a threadbare ultramarine Diacra suit and a vermilion shirt; tinted memory-wire glasses cover his eyes. One of his eyes is artificial; Yuri spotted it the first time they met, a glaring reminder of the passage of the “virus” years earlier. Pluto Saint-Clair’s optic implant had been saved by some remission or ontological limit of the virus, but he had not escaped severe aftereffects. Today, his natural eye sees as well or better than what had been a top-of-the-line bionic visual amplification system.