11 >   I CAN SEE FOR MILES

Here, winter storms are the most violent. It is in winter that three opposing forces—hot, humid winds from the Gulf of Mexico, cold winds from the Arctic, and very hot, dry winds from the Midwest and central Canada—collide in the upper atmosphere to create “supercells” whose titanic storms can generate lightning powerful enough to reduce kilometers of woods to ashes.

The approaching storm won’t be on that scale, but in an hour or two it will have reached the city limits, and in three hours visibility will be reduced to nothing. And the whole town will huddle enclosed in its makeshift huts.

The whole Territory will be at the mercy of the desert’s power. Every man will be subject to the laws of the sand.

Everyone. Even them.

“How do you know this guy is from Little Congo; do you know him?”

It is Chrysler who has just spoken; he is talking to Leo MacMillan, the BlackSky renter, and he has been controlling the conversation all along.

They are here, all four of them—Yuri, Chrysler, Pluto Saint-Clair, and the Professor. Above them, the sky is deep gold. The southern horizon is filled with a wall resembling a million swarms of hornets flying in their direction. From here, they can see the entire city. To the southwest are the high black buttes of Carbon City. Yuri can still clearly discern the desert expanse of New Arizona, with its sparse dunes among the rocks, its thousands of makeshift houses gleaming like shells deposited by the tide.

They are here, all four of them, around Leo MacMillan.

Yuri contemplates the Professor, who has just gathered his things from one of the neighboring orange capsules.

They had a good amount of time to get to know one another—a few hours, this morning. He and Chrysler learned a lot. Much more than they expected.

But still not enough. Not quite enough. Just enough to convince them of the validity of what they already knew, and of the fact that they must lead the Professor directly to what he is seeking.

They must take him to Milan Djordjevic.

They must take him to the father of their secret.

“No, Mr. Campbell; I don’t know him, but he used to be a pimp in the northern part of the city. I frequented several of them, but they all look alike.”

“Can you describe him for us?”

The old man grimaces in disappointment. “I don’t see very well anymore; my optical implants aren’t operational, and my glasses only help a little.”

“Can you give us a description? Yes or no.”

“Well, he was dark—yes; black hair, very black. And a sort of beard, or maybe a mustache, I’m not sure … he didn’t stay for more than a minute; I told you—”

“If you can’t see very well, what makes you say that he’s a pimp in Little Congo?”

The old man shifts from one foot to the other, hesitating. “It’s true, Mr. Campbell; I can’t see details, but I can make out the whole. He was wearing one of those 1970s orange suits. That’s a trademark of the pimps in Little Congo. I’m almost sure of it.”

“What else?”

“He drove a goddamned huge gasoline-powered red Buick from the turn of the century. An antique. The thing was sparkling clean. Like a Ferrari. Polished until it shone like a diamond. That’s the sort of detail that doesn’t go unnoticed in Junkville.”

Yuri says nothing; does not move at all; keeps his face totally impassive.

Always keep your distance, repeats Chrysler Campbell’s voice in his head.

A red Buick. A gasoline-powered “midsize” sedan from the turn of the century, just like the one he accidentally brushed this morning while driving at the bottom of the mesa. He’d better plan the right moment to tell Chrysler—and only Chrysler—about it.

“Okay, then,” Chrysler is saying at that moment. “Bright orange suit. Red Buick. That’s an excellent beginning. What did he say to you? What exactly did he ask you?”

“He asked me if the renter in Capsule 14 was at home. I said no.”

“That’s it?”

“No. He asked me if I knew when he was coming back. I said I didn’t. I asked him if he wanted to leave a message with me. He said no and turned right around. He got into his red Buick and drove away to the north. That’s how I know that—”

“All right, Mr. MacMillan. He asked for the renter in Capsule 14; is that what you just told us?”

Yuri sees Chrysler’s gaze flick for an instant to the man who just arrived, and who has already been scoped out by the local mafia. The man from Texas. The man who knows the father of Link de Nova. The man who had worked on the last, fatal update of the Metastructure.

The man who has brought chaos with him. The man who might, perhaps, be the means to recreate a World.

“Yes, Mr. Campbell. That’s what he asked me. In those words.”

“So he didn’t ask for a certain Mr. Untel, or just Untel?”

“No, sir. That would have been pointless anyway; I don’t know the man’s identity. Pluto asked me to keep it anonymous on the capsule-park register. He’s under Jack Black, and that’s the only name I know him by.”

The old man points his chin in the Professor’s direction.

Pluto had been very careful to ensure that the Professor’s anonymity would be preserved. Very astute of him, thinks Yuri.

Very astute. But not enough.

Not enough here in Junkville, where the tiniest fragment of information spreads as fast as sand at the heart of a storm.

Pluto was right to insist that the Professor move immediately, but it is already too late, he says to himself, watching the yellow-gray wave rise in the sky, looming over the Territory.

The wave will crash soon enough. It is both a sign and an event that will push them to take desperate measures.

He watches a tall black tornado growing atop one of Carbon City’s hills, just across from them. The wind is beginning to lash their faces, striking them with tiny, sharp, innumerable crystals of silica.

Chrysler continues his interrogation imperturbably. He continues to act, as is his habit, with the sangfroid of a machine. He has been well trained by this World, Yuri muses to himself. He might even be able to fight it, as if in an MMA ring.

“Did you notice any special details about him? I don’t know, a distinctive scar or some other mark?”

“Nothing except that fucking suit and his Buick … but, wait—yes, in fact—the guy didn’t seem to be in very good shape.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hard to say. He looked feverish, and he was shivering. Looked like maybe one of his implants was breaking down. But that isn’t exactly uncommon these days, is it?”

Yuri gazes at the black mass of Carbon City, at the frozen image of the monumental advance guard that will soon rush in on the whole Territory.

“Do you have any idea of this man’s identity, other than the fact that he lives in Little Congo?”

“I know a few pimps there, I told you, that used to be on the Monolith Hills strip. They could probably tell you something.”

Yuri continues to stare at Carbon City’s inky peaks, but out of the corner of his eye he can perceive a typical change of frequency in his friend’s brain. It is their unique mutual brand of telepathy.

And he knows exactly what Chrysler is thinking, not least because he has arrived at the same conclusion himself, at the same time. At the same instant, in the same place.

If the BlackSky renter knows pimps in Little Congo, and if the man in the orange suit is really from that township, this connection might prove very useful as a source of firsthand information.

But that also means that Mr. Leo MacMillan probably talks to those pimps, too. And since all the pimps know one another, especially the ones in the same township, then everything Mr. MacMillan has just told them, as insignificant as it might seem, will have also reached the ears of the man who is looking for the Professor.

Yuri also understands that Chrysler is hesitant to deliver the death blow—to ask the old man straight out who he has told about the arrival of the man from Texas.

“What language did he speak?” Chrysler asks, hopelessly.

“He was from the south of the Territory, I’d say. A native English speaker for sure.”

The heights of Carbon City jut, black, into the exploding yellow sky.

Pure-black density. Waves of coal standing immobile against the undertow of the sandy tide.

Black, completely black. Huge pyramids slicing into the depths of this night that has fallen on the Earth.

So black. So utterly black.

No.

Except there.

Except there. On the summit just across from them, in the second of the staggered rows of peaks behind the burgeoning spiral of the micro-tornado. There, on that point that reaches as high as the mesa they are standing on.

A red spot.

Brilliant red.

Maintaining its shine even under a sky so filled with the dark clouds of the oncoming storm.

Bright red. Very bright.

Given the apparent distance, it is as big as a car.

He looks at Chrysler, careful not to let any emotion show on his face. He takes a breath and says, cold as ice:

“Chrysler, I’m going to check something in the truck.”

Chrysler throws a frigid but intense glance at Yuri. He understands, thinks Yuri to himself. He understands that something has happened.

Something that must be investigated at all possible speed.

The Schmidt & Bender binoculars are at least fifty years old, but they work fantastically. Thanks to Link de Nova, all their processors are operational; there are two day modes—full-light and half-light—and three night-vision modes. The laser range finder works as well. The binoculars are worth as much as a weapon.

A whole arsenal of weapons.

Which is exactly why they are in the truck, along with a cache of guns. Under the passenger seat in a hidey-hole made of an aluminum box, well concealed but easily extractable from their place of concealment. There is a Sig Sauer P226, fifteen-shot and double-barreled. There is the Texan Taser Yuri uses quite often. And under the driver’s seat, in a similar hiding place, there is the standard U.S. Army Beretta from the turn of the century that is Chrysler’s weapon of choice, as well as his electric billy club and his own Taser. The two automatic pistols use nine-millimeter bullets—the same ammunition, and thus interchangeable. They are sturdy, precise, and very reliable weapons. The kind of weapons that were dismissed as antiques before the Fall, during the era of hyperkinetic micromunitions and magnetic propulsion rifles. Today, these are practically weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention the slide-action, 12-caliber, nine-round Mossberg 590 machine gun and the big-game-hunting shotgun, both also using the same type of bullets, and the Winchester SX3 Composite semiautomatic, fitted with a self-loading system, that are stashed beneath the pickup’s narrow backseat.

And, of course, the binoculars.

The lenses are in light-dark mode; codes scroll in a saraband of letters and numbers across the periphery of the vision field.

The red spot swims into focus.

It is indeed a car. A Buick. And there is a man inside it, in the driver’s seat.

And the man inside the red Buick is holding an oblong object to one of his eyes.

An object he is pointing in their direction.

Yuri zooms in farther, then refocuses.

The man in the Buick certainly fits the BlackSky renter’s description. The orange suit looks dirty beige in the faint light, but it is topped by a head of very black, oily-looking hair. He can even see the black beard ringing the man’s mouth.

He recognizes the man from the night before; they crossed paths on the way to Autostrada. He recognizes the car perfectly, down to the scrape his Kawasaki left on its rear fender when they narrowly avoided a serious collision.

But the man is no longer trembling convulsively; he doesn’t look bad at all. Between the time when Yuri and the renter encountered him and now, he has changed a lot. One of those rare temporary remissions, maybe …

And then there is the object the man is holding.

Holding up to his right eye, and pointing in their direction.

A telescope. One of those ancient naval telescopes Yuri saw once as part of a lot in Vortex Townships. Is it one of those very devices that is now in the hands of the man in the red Buick?

The man who is spying on them.

The man who can, like them, watch from far away.

*   *   *

The smoked anti-UV windows of the Ford F-350 should adequately mask him from the man’s view.

The man can see long distances with his telescope, surely, but he has neither Schmidt & Bender binoculars nor the military-origin radiation-absorption filters that are installed on their truck, which was customized by Chrysler’s father, a former army officer and security specialist who had then done the same sort of work for the cosmodrome authorities.

He can see from far away, but Yuri can see close-up. Very close-up. Better than if he were sitting next to the man. And Yuri is invisible to the man with the telescope.

He can observe the other man, but the other man can’t observe him. It is a fundamental Special Forces rule from the last century, as Chrysler Campbell told him one day: To see, you must not be seen.

Of course, the man probably got a glimpse of him as he was getting into the truck, but after that Yuri had disappeared from his field of vision, cocooned in a sarcophagus of metal and Plexiglas, safe from the prying eyes of men in the outside world.

Even men equipped with naval telescopes.

Even men driving sparkling turn-of-the-century Buicks.

Even men who consider themselves kings of the city.

“I need to know the truth, Pluto,” Campbell says. “I need to know exactly what you told that old bastard of a renter, Mr. MacMillan, who’s buddies with all the pimps in Little Congo.”

All four of them are in the truck, heading toward Aircrash Circle—the first point of orbital rendezvous, as Chrysler calls it.

They are just crossing the northern city limits on one of the rare bridges still in use that crosses the old highway from west of Autostrada. The towers of Omega Blocks rise up to their right, overlooking dry savannas and scrubby balls of tumbleweed. Behind them, in the Ford’s taillights, Yuri can see the sky transforming into a rumbling, fiery, black and gray and yellow mass.

On the tarmac of Block 8 is the depressing sight of the Vortex Townships Triad at work. But a bit farther away, in Block 14 or 16, he can make out the green uniforms of the Snake Zone Triad busy with activities of their own. In Junkville, for the Triads as for most of the economic players, the rules are simple—to each its own township and private property—but for the rest, in the city’s common areas and the rest of the Territory, it all boils down to the law of “first come, first served.” It looks like Slim Dubois has competition. And it can only grow. Death has many allies in this world. Above all those who have already been condemned to die.

Pluto is hunched sullenly in a corner of the backseat next to Professor Zarkovsky, who stares out the window at the sand-lashed, windswept landscape.

“I think I fucked up,” Pluto says finally. “I talked to him two or three times about my ‘friend from Texas.’ First to reserve a capsule, and then I don’t remember why. Wait, yes I do—I had just received a message from the Professor, from Ohio. I was really excited, and I mentioned ‘my friend the Professor.’”

“Is that all?”

“No. That’s when I really screwed up. He asked me a couple of harmless questions.”

“There’s no such thing as a harmless question in Junkville,” Chrysler snaps.

“I know that,” retorts Pluto Saint-Clair, piqued. “So he asked me two or three questions. Where my friend was from, why he was coming, who he was. And the worst part is that I answered him.”

Chrysler’s silence might as well be a string of curses. Finally, he speaks. “And you answered him precisely, I hope? Gave him all the details?” His voice is like ice.

“No, but I did mention the ’56 Nobel Prize, and the fact that the Professor worked on the last version of the Metastructure. I realized my mistake too late.”

There is another brief silence, but they can almost hear the swear words erupting from Chrysler Campbell’s tightly closed lips.

“And you live in Junkville, Pluto? I hope you realize that you’ve broken the cardinal rule of any security system.”

Pluto doesn’t answer. It’s as clear to him as it is to the rest of them.

As they cross the semiarid plains stretching north of Omega Blocks, Yuri concentrates for a moment on the vast spaces covered with the Territory’s neoecological vegetation, now predominantly weeds of all kinds: prickly whitish phragmites; Canadian dogwood whose tough branches look like bunches of charred veins; various types of thistles recognizable by the colors of their flowers and the precise structures of their serrated petals—Flodman’s thistles, Russian thistles, field thistles, marsh thistles, prairie thistles, Canadian thistles, nonfeathery thistles, unbent thistles, common thistles. Greenish carnivorous ambrosia and mugwort, whose aggressive pollen causes dermatitis and hay fever; false quillwort, with its alternating wavy and sharp-edged leaves, so brilliantly green they appear lacquered, covered with forked bristles whose narrow, branching stalks end in dense bunches of flowers with yellow petals and orange seeds; young stems of Canadian goldenrod with their three-pointed leaves, spreaders of tormenting allergies, whose inflorescence forms pyramidal clouds of intense yellow-green; the high, dense columns of various types of euphorbia, whose bushy branches reach up to three feet in height; clumps of chick-weed and starflowers whose stems grow in tangled knots while their blossom-filled branches bear compact bunches of whitish berries; the purple-streaked branches and small white flowers of the highly poisonous water hemlock; Centaurea pratensis—meadow knapweed—with its spiny purplish blue flowers; blackberry brambles with long bearded stems; wild roses and hawthorn with small pink-and-white blossoms; poison sumac with its skin-irritating secretions; Saint-John’s-wort, its towering sturdy stalks topped with bunches of bright yellow flowers; milkweeds with tall, spiny stems and purplish blossoms; viperines with large blue-and-violet flowers and bristly leaves like fangs; various bindweeds whose green tendrils wind like snakes around neighboring plants or the trunks of accessible trees while their cardioid leaves and small short-stemmed flowers grow in wispy bunches at the end of their multibranched stalks and cover the ground with a carpet of rough growth. All the soil thus populated by hardy and sometimes toxic plants, this parasitic vegetation of neonature, is often swept by errant, barbed-wire-like tumbleweeds and serves as a natural nest for colonies of wasps and hornets, mosquitoes and black flies, horseflies, dragonflies, deerflies, army ants, termites, tarantulas, huge garden spiders and enormous centipedes, worms and slugs—an entire armada of crawling and flying insects. It is the most beautiful ecology in the world, the deadliest, the most vibrant.

Yuri turns again in his seat to look out the rear window at the wide, dusty road that has become the principal north-south route in the Territory during the past twelve years of intensely speeded-up desertification. He glances at the large exterior rearview mirror.

“Chrysler,” he says in his mildest tone, “I think it would be a good idea for us to take our ‘special route.’”

Campbell hasn’t spoken for long moments, maintaining his habitual, calmly ironic smile in the face of the world’s chaos. He and Yuri might as well be discussing the territory’s applied weather, the storm beginning to break over Junkville. “The code-red route, Yuri?” he asks, as if inquiring about the location of some obscure intersection.

“Red. Completely red,” Yuri replies, keeping his voice casual.

Still, he notices an odd shiver run through his friend’s body, and knows that his friend has not failed to take the hint, even if he is unaware of anything more specific than that.

Row 299. They are somewhere near Neon Park now, not far from the shores of Lake Champlain. The “code red” special route is tortuous. It runs northeast of Deadlink, then dips southeast toward Aircrash Circle, passing through a desolate landscape of naked rocks and clumps of vegetation surviving with difficulty in the midst of a bare steppe scattered with a few acres of wild grass and thorny perennials, vestiges of what was once, before the Fall, lush subtropical flora.

Now it has all been subjugated by the desert. The desert that has already forced men to adapt their lives to its dictates.

“The storm must be over Junkville by now. We can go to yellow alert,” observes Yuri.

“Yes. We’ll take the diagonal roads and get back to the north-south route. We need to catch the storm.”

Yuri glances at Chrysler out of the corner of his eye. Yes. His friend knows that the man in the red car, who has been following them since Junkville, was forced to execute a speedy turnaround in order to avoid getting lost in some barren part of the Territory. It has been more than ten minutes since Yuri saw the red spot in the rearview mirror or the window, appearing and disappearing in the treacherous terrain.

They use the “special route” to lose possible pursuers in the labyrinth of rows and roads he and Chrysler know by heart, to exhaust their fuel supplies and their patience, and to make it impossible for them to follow their prey.

As a passive, defensive weapon, it has proved its usefulness more than once.

By the time Chrysler pulls the truck into the aluminum shelter his father built years ago, the wind is gusting at almost a hundred kilometers per hour. Chrysler takes a portable biophosphorescent lantern from the wall and switches it on, filling the metal shed with yellowish light.

From a tin armoire, he takes a small steel ladder equipped with a pneumatic jack and automated rollers. Then, opening a trapdoor at his feet, he lowers the ladder slowly into the ground.

The lantern’s yellow light casts long, wavering shadows on the aluminum walls and titanium-composite beams of the underground structure. Chrysler’s father was always a prudent man—one might even say paranoid. It was he who built the little hut with its underground passage, he who stockpiled the weapons here that Chrysler has been hoarding since his childhood to go along with the Ruger Mini-14 rifle hidden in the main house; there is the SAR-7 assault rifle from the turn of the century, the Californian copy of the redoubtable Russian army AK-47, the German-made H&K MP5 tommy gun, the nine-millimeter automatic pistol, the hands-free Remington semiautomatic shotgun, and the 7615 patrol air rifle once used by police tactical units with a magazine copied from that of an AR-15, capable of ten or twelve rounds and fitted with a small Nikon scope, housed in a .223 Remington. There are also two French-made belts of defensive shattering grenades, several blinding grenades made in China, and a bunch of flash missiles and smoke bombs of various origins. There are the two military antiques in perfect working order: a Waffen-SS Luger P08 and a 1945 Russian Tokarev, which may well have faced off against each other during the Battle of Berlin. And in addition to all this, there are enough munitions to support a weeks-long siege, safely packed in their fir boxes and long hidden in this subterranean crawl space. A veritable arsenal. One day Chrysler had told Yuri, only half joking, that the two of them alone could probably compete with the arms traffickers at Powder Station.

“They’ve been in the shit since the First Fall,” he had said, “with their fucking magnetic rifles and stores of ‘intelligent’ micromunitions.”

Evidently his father, though he worked for the cosmodrome, had had very little trust in the technological innovations of the 2010s and 2020s.

Evidently he hadn’t believed it could last.

The world had proved him right. And in so doing, it had consigned him to the grave.

The four men climb down into the dark, narrow depths of the subterranean passage, Yuri first, Chrysler last.

The storm howls more fiercely every minute. Jets of sand strike the walls in a long and deafening barrage. Less-solid structures sway periodically in the gale-force wind. Noises of all sorts—cracks, creaks, whistles, scratches—assault their ears continuously as they gather in the tiny single-room space.

Yuri can see nothing more out the plastic-composite fuselage windows than a dark cloud of particles dancing with crazily kinetic energy. It must be what an electromagnetic storm in space is like, he muses to himself, thinking—he doesn’t know why—of the sky obscured by the passing storm, but also by the End of the World. Thinking of the sky, cut off from the Earth, and of the several hundred thousand men and women still living in the Ring. Living in freedom. With their machines.

For decades, the Territory provided a sort of exit door to anyone and everyone who wished to try living without the totalitarian presence of the Metastructure, in the Orbital Ring. Just before the Fall, more than a million people were living in the Ring, but nine-tenths of them were lowly temporary workers or seasonal technical specialists, or simply travelers in transit. The Machine-World had tolerated the Ring’s presence while keeping a tight hold on research funds for its expansion and for space exploration (or so Chrysler Campbell says his father told him). During the Fall, most of the temporary workers managed to make it back to Earth in spite of numerous accidents. They soon regretted their success.

The desert that has come now to threaten the Territory with its absolutely undeniable physical presence is like a meteorological copy of the thing that is killing machines and men. The desert is acting like a geophysical clone of the Post-Machine.

Together, the two phenomena might be able to destroy the world—but is it possible that their efforts are concentrated on the annihilation of the Territory?

On the annihilation of Gabriel Link de Nova, and the small circle of people who have gathered around him in a last protective stand?

Is the desert, to some degree, part of the thing’s plan?

It is at once inconceivable and terribly, utterly logical.