21 >   ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK

Rock seems, by definition, to be the music of the machine. Not only because this particular sort of arm is made with the necessary assistance of this or that machine, but more because the machine as such, as a potential world, and thus in all its possible forms, uses this or that riff, this or that sound, this or that rhythm, this or that harmony, for its own existence.

Rock gives existence to the machine, through music. Existence, meaning individuality that goes beyond its simple specific identity as a thing, even an electrically “animated” one.

It gives it a voice. It gives it language. Infinite tautness between sense and form, sign and substance, matter and spirit.

It gives it the means—how did the Professor put it?—oh yes, to become a coevolutionary, regulatory, ecological process.

Thanks to rock, electricity becomes the central aesthetic meaning of the machine and no longer just the current that permits it to function. This is the essential point.

Rock gives electricity the possibility to be Creation and not just Creature, to become orchestra/meaning/sound, the Kingdom of Man, and not just an instrument, a mechanism, a worker ant. Electricity animates machines as much in the electrophysical sense as the most purely symbolic. Rock is the electricity-language of the Machine. It turns electricity into poetry articulated amid the proper structure of sonorous language, which it permits machines to enunciate, and all of the meaningful propositions coming from this physiology, not just in purely mechanical terms but as a series of archetypal aesthetic configurations, can perhaps after all be justly called “clichés.” Wasn’t it the poet Baudelaire who said once that genius was the invention of cliché?

Thanks to rock, machines have a soul, an electric soul, just as they have a body, an electric body, and organs, electric organs—guitars, amplifiers, basses, effects modules and pedals, synthesizers, sequencers, and rhythm boxes. And human voices.

Because the human voice is the most sophisticated of all machines. Its neural electricity alone is projected in the sounds of the deepest breath, there where the motor impedance is born, in the organic harp of the larynx.

Thanks to electric music, machines become “undivided” in their turn, both unique as singularities capable of expressing the particular sonority of an individual, and specific, that is, “universal,” enunciating their own substance, their “core,” their “color”—in short, all of the qualities that are found, unchanged, from one model to another. Their singular existence arises from this articulation, this “double fold.”

Why does this thought come while he is trying mentally to reproduce the terrible general tautness, rhythmic and melodic, of “Red,” from King Crimson’s album of the same name, as it came to him last night in his sleep?

Since the long night spent in the Hotel Laika, a sort of breach has opened in the veil masking the world of his illusions.

He saw what he shouldn’t have seen.

He heard what should never be heard.

He understood what it would have been better not to understand.

He hasn’t been able to talk to anyone about it. He shares this secret with the sheriff’s bionic dog.

And with the man who knows the secret of the hotel.

Which is also, in large part, the secret of his own existence.

The day is, above all, that of the ship’s arrival in Halifax. It is the morning of February second.

Finally. It’s here. The library is in America. It crossed the Atlantic without too many problems, except that its ship had had to deal with the violent storm that had risen behind it as it passed southwest of Greenland—at least, that is how his father put things at the small, informal meeting they hold around noon.

His father is very nervous. His mother is doing her best to calm his anxiety with the help of Professor Zarkovsky.

“Paul, your friend from Junkville guaranteed the perfect safety of the men escorting the cargo during its time in Quebec, right?”

“Don’t do that, Milan. He knows his work, and he knows the Territory. I know he found the right men for the job; I met them.”

“Oh?” Djordjevic asks. “What makes you so sure?”

Zarkovsky chuckles.

“You met them too, Milan. And they satisfied you on all points.”

Link shivers in his corner without anyone taking any notice of him. He has already guessed. Incredible connections are forming relentlessly in his head.

Djordjevic knits his eyebrows, two black bars above a pair of black eyes that seem able to consume everything that passes within his field of vision.

“The two bounty hunters? The ones that traffic with Gabriel? You’re crazy if you trust men like that.”

Link intervenes, timidly.

“Father, if I may—these men are honest; they don’t just ‘traffic,’ as you say; they help people not to die. I also know they are in the process of compiling an enormous database for you and the Professor on the cases that are of interest to us—this ‘second mutation’ in the Territory.”

“My dear son, I don’t doubt their skills. It’s their ability to stay honest, as you call it, around the equivalent of an archaeological treasure.”

Link sighs. His father isn’t really living in the now; his needle has stayed stuck before the Fall. He can’t yet admit that his twelve or thirteen thousand books, even the most precious ones, don’t have any real value outside the archives of the Vatican.

Through one of the mobile home’s large windows, Link catches a glimpse of the sun, which is casting moving, glittering stars on all the surrounding metal and Plexiglas surfaces, creating a silent, golden, blinding, pyrotechnical, unceasing storm of light bouncing gold like grains of sand off the towers and piles of automobiles.

“Father, what no one has the courage to tell you is that these books have great intrinsic value, but here in the Territory they possess no value other than the price of paper by the kilo or the ton. Do you understand? No one’s going to risk his life to steal them. And neither Yuri McCoy nor Chrysler Campbell has any interest in causing this operation to fail. Yuri has told me that they, too, are very curious to know what this famous transatlantic library really contains, and they know that can’t happen without you.”

“Milan,” says the Professor, “I can’t urge you strongly enough to listen to your son. These two men are trustworthy. They know the Territory and the south of Quebec by heart. We need them to guide the papal escort and the truck here.”

Milan doesn’t reply; it is almost as if he has lost interest in the problem altogether.

He looks at his son, eyebrows still drawn together, black eyes shining with low intensity.

“You told me they’re planning to come back tonight for one of your ‘experiments,’ right?”

“They aren’t experiments, Father, as you well know. I’m trying to take care of people, to repair their machines, and in exchange I ask only for an addition to my collection of musical instruments.”

“I told you, you can’t keep going with this. Even if your mother sees things differently. This scandal has to stop. Simony. Outrage. I’ve already spoken to the sheriff about it. You’re lucky that fucking Wilbur Langlois has a head harder than granite—but I’m not going to give up; I’ll show him.”

“Father, why are you still living in the past? The alphanumeric contamination is gaining ground every day. That’s why they’re coming tonight. We have to find a real strategy. Fast. You’re going to have to realize that my little ‘experiments,’ as you call them, have allowed me to learn a huge amount about the Thing threatening us. I don’t mean ‘learn’ in the usual sense—it isn’t my abstract, logical brain—it has more to do with pure intuitive memory, almost dreamlike. But what I can tell you, Father, and Balthazar himself has confirmed it, is that I ‘sense the Thing’ as if I were a hunting dog!”

Professor Zarkovsky looks at Link with singular intensity. “Have you never suspected, young man, that this might be an ability you share with the Thing?”

The night sky is streaked with long, creamy striations whose curves gleam in the starlight, the final rear guard of the ocean storm. Altocirrus clouds in high-altitude escadrilles pursued by Moon Flak. It creates ultraviolet lines in a sky exploding with stars.

Link is at another of the habitual meeting places. This time, due to the sodden terrain and damaged roads left by the storm, he has asked Campbell to come to the place closest to HMV.

He parked his quad-cycle at the edge of a small clearing in one of the rare surviving wooded areas west of the cosmodrome, on the border of the counties of Grand Junction and Heavy Metal Valley. The area is filled with wild grasses; his Suzuki’s wheels are lost amid the masses of reeds, sharp-leaved weeds, and night-flowering catchfly.

There, to the east, between two rocky hills, he can make out the metallic structures of some parts of the cosmodrome—platforms, launch towers, a series of pylons and their large radar antennae, and the mobile shadows of tumbleweeds blowing across the tarmac in all directions.

Here, all around him, is the scenery typical of the northwestern part of the Territory.

Sparse clumps of pines, birches, cedars, acacias. Masses of underbrush—blackberry brambles, bindweed, chaparral, pink and white hawthorn, thistles, wild grass, Cornus canadensis, knifeweed, euphorbia, white lychnis, wild oats, and Liatris alba in soil that is alkaline in some places and marshy in others. He gazes for long moments at the mutant neovegetation mingling with the perennials and self-propagating plants that run rampant in the Territory, spreading via seeds, spores, suckers, rhizomes, buds, stems, branches, nonbranches, hollows, and knots, with pedunculated sheaths or scales and leaves of all colors—gray, purple, green, blue, and yellow; with parallel or intertwined veins; caulinary, alternating, opposed, sessile, pointed, smooth, prickly, whole, hairy; composed of petioled leaves, in rosettes, in leafy buds, halberd-leaved, with needlelike or round petals, parallel stalks rising up and diverging at angles, buds in dense globes in the crooks of the stems, divided into terminal and lateral lobes, or whose lower faces are covered with a pubescent down; with oblong bristles and smooth upper faces; flowering bracts rounded at their pointed tips, wormlike tendrils at the base of their stems or scattered along the lengths; umbels with finely fragmented involucres of bracts ending in bunches at the tips of the stalks, rough or smooth leaf stems, their sheaths jagged like fish bones; some with bristles, panicles separated into husks protecting the flowers; plump stems, narrow ones, bristled, spiny, veined; ribbed or membranous ligules, smooth seed pods and those covered with sharp bristles, four-sided at their bases, rising on their angled stems or attached to floral stalks, compressed, strong, overlapping, and forming a tight raceme; floral ears and reniform seeds, warty, protuberant, oblong, angular, smooth, reticulated, exposing their yellow, brown, black, white, or gray kernels, straight rows of capsules along floral stems forming pyramidal panicles; carpels in disks, rounded and smooth or rough and thin, tall floral suckers, upright, compact, sometimes glandulous; the white stickiness of milkweed, wild chicory, and euphorbia, distributed throughout the entire structure of the plant by fleshy rhizomes from which new branches spring, the numerous fertile flowering pods of the lush, poisonous vegetation whose venomous stamens lurk just above the ground; the various green tints of the sap of chlorophyll-absorbing plants, the heavier, beige nutrients, anemochoral plants releasing their spores as high as the treetops—poisons are the life of the Territory; poisons are the secret ecology of life; poisons are the natural signs of the Law, as are the various defensive secretions like tannins, ethylene, and the terpenoid substances that the wild plants employ against parasite insects, the nausea-inducing fragrances indicating the presence of wild hemlock, extremely poisonous, sometimes called snake-weed or stinkweed, with its swiveling roots, sometimes branched, atop a stalk rising six or seven feet in height, covered in purple spots and studded with fine-toothed leaves whose veins end in a colorless point contrasting with its bunches of white flowers in large open umbels, small bracts at their bases where the seeds of mericarpel fruits are covered with spines from base to tip; the oily, yellowish gleam of the rhizomic suckers of cicutoxin, as dangerous to animals and men as it is to many other plants; druces of all shapes and volumes, petals of all forms and colors, often divided; unified sepals forming an inflated, veined tube, where calyxes persist in the elongated and spiny lobes, the network expands, floral and semantic; he recognizes species, categories, varieties—grasses, Caryophyllaceae, Amarantaceae, Polygonaceae, Umbelliferae, Asclepiadaceae, composites, Hypericaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Ranunculaceae, Cruciferae. The miniscule jungle of the Territory. Its hidden jungle. The invasion of subterranean rhizome and photosynthesis from the sky—hardy perennials and harmful plants now represent more than half of the surviving wild vegetation. They are to the forest what the last men are to civilization. What remains is evil by nature, but even what is evil cannot resist the slow, all-consuming expansion of the desert.

In front of him, a row sparsely covered with a layer of gravel runs alongside a line of blue maples, a mutant species that appeared only within the last forty years or so as far as he knows, and there to the south, almost as far as the horizon, glitter the headlights of Yuri and Chrysler’s pickup truck.

If he can find a way this time, Campbell explains, there will be a huge reward. A 1977 Rickenbacker, a 1988 Gibson Flying V, a Guild semihollow metal guitar from the early 1970s, a Mesa Boogie amplifier, and a Roland RE-501 soundproof echo chamber. They don’t function perfectly, of course, but fixing them would be child’s play for Link.

No—of course, the true problem is the man who possesses these treasures, and is ready to hand them over if he can recover the use of language. He is a problem, like all the others were.

For now, he can easily repair these simple electric machines that are now being attacked in their turn by the Thing. The machines are still within his reach.

But until now the Thing has managed, thanks to this “second mutation,” to widen the gap between itself and him, in a sense that is not biological.

Link is acutely aware of the sharp double-edge of frustration and anger at the center of his attention, his thoughts, his will.

He will not let the Thing get away with this. He will find …

He will find a way. He will find the way.

He will find weakness, and he will strike there with all his might.

Yes, he will find it.

Tonight.

Fat bastard of a Nothingness, he thinks. I am the mouth, and you are just a boot.

I will swallow you.

Among the electrical systems to be repaired besides the victim’s instruments, there are several machines from Deadlink and Vortex Townships, Campbell says. Microprocessor-based machines that are still suffering the consequences of the first mutation, the one in ’63. The trial run.

And then there are the small, simple machines—coffee mills, mini-ovens, radios, batteries, razors, electric lightbulbs, microengines of all types—the sort of thing he sees regularly now. It is all quickly taken care of, as usual.

Link’s thoughts are simple: It will not come between me and electricity.

Now, though, comes the real problem, descending from the back of the pickup in Yuri’s arms.

This problem that, whoever the individual involved, proves every time that the Thing is managing to come between men and their language.

Link cannot shake the ephemeral suspicion that the two problems are closely connected.

How many times has he experienced this scene over the past two years? How many times has he had the feeling that he isn’t acting, as his father thinks, for the sake of personal gain? He has even saved a few people without receiving anything in return—like the stray adolescent with no family, hardly older than himself, that the two men brought to him one winter night, his entire antileukemia system in arrest; or the young Japanese woman Chrysler knew in a little Ontarian township called LaCrosse Terrain, who had nothing more than a makeshift shelter to live in, whose renal bio-implants had all failed at once, sending her into a hasty physical decline?

Everything has changed in a very short time, with this Third Fall, with the men and women Yuri bring to him in their truck. These humans who are coming face-to-face with their limitations. With their deaths.

The man is standing in front of him, unsteady from the effects of Chrysler’s various injections.

A sort of biker. An old Hells Angel from Montreal, Campbell says. He is from a township located just south of the city of Grand Junction. They have managed to learn that he played in one of the very last Canadian rock groups when he was eighteen or twenty years old. He had managed to preserve several twentieth-century instruments but now, stricken by the alphanumeric devolution, he would sell all the Harley-Davidsons and Gibsons on the planet rather than die like a modem.

Link can’t say where this sensation comes from, this feeling as if all his thoughts are taking shape within him—a dazzling composition, a summary infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

It is very simple, very clear, mysteriously obvious.

Until now he has vainly tried the method successfully tested again and again after the ’63 mutation: applying his hands to the victim’s body, then improvising language, taking possession of the other person’s body more or less briefly and penetrating his brain, giving new sense to all the organs that have become ontologically separate from one another, and then imparting new life to nanorobotic implants and clusters of modified cells.

But that method no longer works at all for the victims of alphanumeric devolution.

And it suddenly seems so logical! How can he hope to fight an entity that attacks language with language itself, human language?

His intuition is so clear, so crystalline. It is all here, right here, surging like a flash of light from the depths of his consciousness.

In fighting human linguistic devolution, neither biological nor mechanical, human language—even glossolalic—is of no use, obviously!

Rather, to combat this symbolic trap—neither biological nor mechanical, but located in the “disjunctive synthesis” of the two—closing in on humanity, on its language, they must use a countertrap that is equally symbolic—neither biological nor mechanical—but that opens up the possibility of language, through electricity, for machines. You don’t trap water with water, but with sand. You don’t trap sand with sand, but with trees. You don’t trap light with light, but with a crystal.

One day Yuri told him, laughing, of a rumor they were spreading about a mythical “Anti-Machine” located somewhere in the south of the Territory. It was a decoy, a manipulation, a lie, inasmuch as it had no real value against the biological/mechanical destruction wrought by the first mutation.

But now, with this “intensified inversion,” as Professor Zarkovsky calls it, with this numerization of language, only the electric language of the Machine, only the singular aesthetic tension born of its individuation as poesis projecting beyond itself, only the serial chaos of riffs as infinite combinations of the physical, concrete, real uprising of the World of the Machine animated both materially and stylistically by electricity—that is, in a way, at once specifically and individually—yes, only the language/ electricity of the machine might be able to …

He has to try. He feels it—yes—there is the weak spot. He is the weakness in the Thing’s strategy.

It is the fact that music-making machines are extensions of him. And that he knows their whole language.

He connects the Gibson to the Mesa Boogie. Jack input. Volume turned down almost to nothing, a distant stridence indicating the potential Larsen effect. At first he simply lets his hands rest on the body of the guitar, on the flesh of the machine, with the organic electricity pulsing near the strings. He understands the meaning of each act as he does it. He no longer needs to touch “human” bodies that are being symbolically deconstructed; he can capture, through simple contact between his body and that of the guitar, and with the aid of his hyperdeveloped intuition, the notes, the sounds, the riffs, the rhythms, the harmonies, the texts whose substance is, by nature, the enemy of the anti-substance of the Thing.

The electric language of the infinitely individuated machine against the numeric mechanization of the language of indefinitely divided humans. Yes, that seems to correspond with the concepts his father has been talking to Professor Zarkovsky about. “Without music, life would be a mistake,” said a nineteenth-century author he only just discovered.

To which he now mentally adds: without life, music would be a concept.

I am the Camp Orchestra. You can kill all of us one after the other, but you can’t kill music, because the Orchestra is not made only of living beings who play, it is also made of all those who died playing.

He needs no physical contact, because the physical will be undulatory, electroacoustic supertension operating in the interface space that connects their two brains; he does not need to use glossolalia, because the texts exist, the words exist, the Word exists, and he is inextricably linked to the very form of the electric fireballs of which he is the halo—the visible trace of the eternal relationship between meaning and symbol.

The hardest one to convince of the reality of his remission ends up being the biker himself—but, as Campbell whispers to him: “Fortunately, the programmable scopolamine will begin to take effect in less than an hour. When I drop him at his house, he’ll thank me for the lift, wondering what bar we met in. And tomorrow morning he won’t remember a thing.”

To which Yuri McCoy retorts: “We, on the other hand, had better not forget anything at all.”