50 >   THAT’S ALL RIGHT, MAMA

It is ontological. A firearm without ammunition becomes a hand weapon. It is equipped with a bayonet at the very least; in the best case it is a quarterstaff, a bat, a billy club, a blunt instrument.

The very first weapon in the world.

They still have their combat swords as well: for Yuri, his small Nepalese Gurkha saber with its curved blade; for Campbell, his long-toothed Navy Seals knife. The sword: the first technical perfection of the bladed weapon.

They have something to strike with, to cut with, to stab with, to pierce with, to cut throats and disembowel with.

And so does the enemy.

The enemy. These three people approaching the Circle of Steel, while below, to the south, the rest of the army flees through the last gaps left in the invisible border, leaving thousands of “corpses” behind them.

Yuri and Campbell recognize them instantly. Two men, one woman. Belfond, the rotten cop promoted to general, and his two personal bodyguards: Wanda Walker, the former strip gladiatrix, and Lee Kwan Osborne, the Korean American military doctor turned poisoner-assassin.

Yuri and Campbell emerge slowly from the Circle of Steel. It is time. The moment they were born for has come. The last moment.

Belfond is still holding the long Winchester rifle topped with a powerful telescope that he used to kill Sheriff Langlois.

All three of them know they have lost. They know they will not leave the Territory-within-the-Territory alive, that the ontological barrier will kill them.

The Vessel is getting farther away with each passing minute. In the Ark the light is fading, losing its fluidity; the sounds of infinity disappearing frequency by frequency, going back to where they came from. The last trap is about to snap shut on them.

There is nothing left to do but kill the people responsible for their defeat.

And, without a doubt, these are the people responsible. The last two Men of the Territory, the last two Men of the Law of Bronze. Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell.

So the very last war will be fought with bare hands. Or very nearly. It will be fought in a false night copied from the dawn of time. It will be fought between four men and one woman. Two against three. The initial ratio has been brought down to a reasonable number, but the fundamental imbalance necessary for the actualization of any conflict is still there, like the last Pillar of the Law.

The last of all wars will end with no eyewitness except the elements and the animals of the Territory, like the large purple crow soaring in high, large circles above the former site of the cosmodrome.

It will end like a family quarrel gone wrong. It will end like all wars begin.

Yuri and Campbell look at each other for an instant, enough time to synchronize their minds one last time, to send a clear and final message.

In this type of situation three tactics can prevail; certain accidental conditions determine the eventual choice:

The problem is not so much knowing who their leader is, who the dominant man is, because Belfond is officially and obviously that man. The question is, which of the two others is the true weak link? The powerful strip gladiatrix or the Asian expert in poisons of all kinds?

Osborne is like the incarnation of all the old venomous plants that can now be found only in the county of HMV. He is as dangerous as Territory cowbane.

But Yuri and Campbell are the Trap-Men. The floral devices of Grand Junction have been part of their everyday world since they were children. They are the Camp Doctors; poison holds no secrets from them.

The master poisoner, then, will come up against the Territory’s venom.

He will come up against the Law.

And the Law strikes him. Like a flash. A double flash of flesh and shining metal.

It is simple, direct, quick.

Yuri and Campbell fall on him in such a way that Yuri is able to cover a counterattack from Belfond and the gladiatrix. It is very simple, very direct, very quick. The blades come up, sparkling rods of silver, and they sketch lines of mercury as they lunge at the man’s body and pull back, red and glistening, while Yuri and Campbell dance like ghosts around him. Yuri stabs him four times in two quick thrusts; the first slices across his neck, and the second, with the point, gets him right between the shoulder blades. The spinal cord, he hopes, has been cut at least once now. Campbell simply slashes him back and forth across the throat; on the first pass his Navy Seals diving knife cuts the carotid artery, which explodes in a spray of crimson droplets, a thousand scarlet points glittering in the false night that reigns over the world. With the second pass, a very deep gash brings forth thicker, viscous red blood.

The man emits an unintelligible cry mingled with a gasp of surprise. His latex-gloved hands, each holding a long, sharpened spike gleaming with some sort of poison, flap frenetically in all directions.

Campbell finishes him off with a violent slash right in the face. A gout of blood accompanies the man’s final slump onto Territory soil, as his head detaches halfway from his body. The false night is red. Ultrared.

They have broken the weakest link in a single blow. They have broken it so rapidly that the other two cannot even react.

For a few seconds, at least.

The rifles-turned-hand-weapons quickly end up on the ground. They are moving to the more sophisticated phase of the first war—the battle of blades. It is the last kind of progress. The very last one.

It is at this moment of disconnection that, probably, destiny finds the energy necessary for actualization. The distribution of forces, the redivision of lines of frontal collision, the crystallization of points of no return.

Chemistry.

The chemistry of blood, metal, and earth.

The particular chemistry of men who are going to kill one another.

We always seek to acquire what we are missing, for the good or the bad. We choose each other; we always choose each other in twos, mutually, because we know we will be together until death. We choose each other in the scarlet brotherhood of spilled blood, of blood that will be spilled, of all the blood that has ever been spilled. We choose each other by mutual agreement—as mutual as it is perfectly tacit.

We choose each other because we know that one of us is going to kill the other one.

The couples form, as if on a dance floor; the duos are created, the terminal engagements, the pure love of steel in blinding light.

Yuri quickly finds himself facing off against Belfond, who has just extracted a long, heavy scythe-bladed machete from a holster on his back. Campbell is confronting the gladiatrix from the strip, who is armed with a fireman’s axe. Once more two events happen simultaneously, in parallel, but with their own respective rules. Two perspectives of war, of the Law, of infinity.

Two beginnings, two unfoldings, two endings. Two lives.

Two lives compressed into a few minutes.

Two lives that crystallize, here, now, everything they have ever been.

Within the Circle of Steel, the very last citadel to have fought and the very last that will fall, at the center of the Ridge, the Ark is now nothing but continuous, varying ultraviolet light interspersed with silvery flashes. It has turned from the white of a star into a cobalt blue full moon that will, now, illuminate the final encounter between human predators.

This final encounter that resembles so closely the very first one.

Yuri McCoy. Johnson Belfond.

Chrysler Campbell. Wanda Walker.

A machete, a Gurkha sword, an axe, a diving knife.

It is a strange thing; a battle that lasts just a few minutes can only be described as if it lasted for hours. Because in a battle, each second is directly connected to death. Each second is directly connected to infinity. Each second spans a lifetime, because it could be the last.

Epic metaphor is the only solution, the ellipsis encircling the metaphysics of War, the bloody poetry of the god Mars.

The Dance of Sabers. The Song of Blades. The Music of Knives.

How to juxtapose, one more time, two coevolving realities? How to truly place them in parallel? What central point of view to adopt?

The Dance of Sabers. The Song of Blades. The Music of Knives.

If there is anyone who can follow the ballet along both of its parallel lines, it is the large purple crow flying over the Ridge and the former cosmodrome. The crow sees; it can discriminate; it can adopt several successive points of view. It can see the secret diagrams at work. It can guess who will live and who will die.

The machete strikes the Gurkha sword with a dry, sharp noise like a detonation. Under the violence of the blow, Yuri’s weapon drops. Belfond is a determined brute. He is also a good combatant. He knows how to wield his machete. Yuri is forced into a defensive position, Belfond constantly on the offensive, a wide grin on his face.

Territory techniques, thinks Yuri during one of the rare pauses between attacks. Campbell’s techniques. Mixed martial arts techniques.

They are the one solution—the only solution—offered by the Law of Bronze.

To succeed in the first place, it is not the enemy who must be eliminated, but his weapon.

Yuri knows now that his Nepalese sword will protect him for quite a while, but in the end it will succumb. Same strength ratio goes for Chrysler, with his submarine combat knife against an axe. So the very last of all wars must be taken back to its initial stage, the most elementary of all.

They will have to kill the enemy with their bare hands.

Only the purple crow knows, probably. Only the Territory crow can guess the point where the two lines will diverge absolutely and permanently. It can already see them reconfiguring themselves to their own polarities.

Even as he parries Belfond’s thrusts, Yuri catches several glimpses of what is going on twenty meters away, where Campbell is battling the gladiatrix from the strip.

Chrysler evades an attack and takes advantage of the opportunity to strike out, cutting deeply as he does—and Wanda Walker’s forearm is now nothing but a cascade of blood gushing onto her fireman’s axe.

Yuri recoils to avoid a sharp blow from Belfond. He tries a counterattack in his turn, but comes perilously close to having the enemy’s blade cleave his head in two; only a reflex from the deepest recesses of his training permits him to save his own skin.

Wanda Walker attacks again, managing this time to slam her axe heavily into Chrysler’s knife, which flies out of his hand like an arrow, but Campbell responds with a pure Thai boxing maneuver, a circular kick that directly strikes the wounded arm of the gladiatrix, who slowly lets her weapon drop. Campbell follows up with a nasty high kick to the temple; the woman, stunned, sways and falls on one knee in front of him, her head slumping forward. It is the perfect position for a vale tudo–type penalty kick—a fast kick in the jaw with a recoil of several meters, as if sending a soccer ball deep into the net.

The woman falls backward and rolls to one side. It is Campbell’s moment now. He is already on her, crouched over her body, holding her down with his knees. He is unleashing his full fury on her, raining blows on her face at two per second, left-right jabs, as if attacking a punching bag.

Belfond’s attack is vicious; Yuri does not notice him pick up a handful of dirt and gravel, but suddenly his eyes are full of the blinding mixture. Too late, he remembers one of Campbell’s first lessons: In person-to-person combat, the only thing you should focus on is your opponent. He manages to avoid the next thrust by throwing himself to the ground in a controlled jiujitsu roll.

The purple crow could help him, of course, but that is not its role. A Territory animal, part of the aerial force of Grand Junction, it is there to observe, to report to the dead what happens in the world of the living, always watching, never even trying to understand.

*   *   *

Yuri is not aware of the full extent to which the Territory has synchronized them, him and Campbell; only the purple crow knows it.

The gladiatrix’s formidable body mass and bull-like energy allow her to reverse the situation in her favor several times—or, at least, to wriggle out of Campbell’s traps.

For example, the Kimura key he patiently executes in his crouched position above her body: his right hand seizes her right wrist, keeping her arm bent like a chicken wing, elbow pointed upward, fist downward; then he slides his left arm between her bicep and her forearm, trapped at a right angle, so that his left hand and right fist can, with an ultraquick lateral rotation, flip the enemy joint skyward while her forearm is immovably bent outward. But, screaming in pain, using all her own weight, striking with all her strength, the gladiatrix manages to wrench herself away from him. Pain is an indicator of impairment; when he stands, he can see in the girl’s contorted face that he has torn numerous muscles, perhaps dislocated others. Campbell applies rule number one of mixed martial arts: Above all, knock your enemy to the ground. Again and again his heel flies up in a violent kick to the gladiatrix’s face, which rapidly turns purple with bruising. When she does manage to rise, a roundhouse kick sends her staggering. Campbell attacks again, using a front kick to knock her off balance again, but the girl easily outweighs his hundred kilos; the blow to her solar plexus causes her to gasp and scream out in pain, but it does not fell her. She gathers herself again, and her tactic is obvious: make Campbell fall as fast as she can, and then overwhelm him with her sheer body mass. A series of direct blows, and then she pounces on him and his defensive knee thrusts do nothing to prevent her from pummeling him brutally into the ground.

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.

He stays for a whole day beside the body of Chrysler Campbell as it lies beside its grave.

They talk for a long time. They remember all the not-so-long-ago days of their respective childhoods and adolescences, so recent, hardly an eternity. They talk about the growth of their friendship amid the ruins, during the End of Mankind. They exchange a few specialist points of view on firearms, motor vehicles, Territory traps. Yuri brings up Link de Nova, and even says a few words about Judith. They talk for a long time about what they didn’t know, what they will never know. They are silent for longer still.

In the space of ten days, the former county of HMV has become a necropolis. The necropolis of the Guardians of the Territory. And Yuri has become its guardian. He will watch over the dead, over the poisonous flora, and over the few manufactured vestiges of what this piece of the world was, when there was still a world.

October has begun, and it rains without stopping for weeks. The thin drizzle formed of slush and silica sometimes falls in pellets of hail, but except for a few variable jumps in intensity, the icesand-rain remains the same, perfectly constant, everywhere, for everyone. Except in the Sanctuary, protected by the Aleph, which receives only a few trailing wisps of cloud, peripheral hailstones, isolated elements.

Above what was once called the Independent Territory of Grand Junction, a large purple crow glides, an old bird native to the area, that has seen many things during its lifetime. Along with packs of wolves and wild dogs, it is the last living being to have seen the World of Before, the world before the neoecology of the icesand. It is even old enough to have seen the World of Before the World of Before. It has seen everything it is possible to see with regard to the end of a species called Man.

The bird comes often to visit Yuri, who has been living alone in his cabin for months. The bird brings him silent news of the outside world. Anomanity now extends in an unbroken stretch from one end to the other of the globe. Humanity possesses nothing now but a single body; it speaks only a single language—a nonlanguage, in fact—the simple flux of undifferentiated organic information; it lives in a totally unified world, remade in its image. Here, in the Territory, and most probably in the whole of the American Northeast, he is the last man. He is protected by the transfinite point hidden in the Ridge, and by these purple crows that seem to want to outlive the neoecology of the Anome at all costs. The Territory-within-the-Territory is in itself a sort of Noah’s Ark. The crows, and also the wolves, the lynxes, the deer, the foxes, and eventually the caribou come slowly, to repopulate the Sanctuary. The poisonous vegetation is growing everywhere once more; Yuri can again admire what once brought death, and what will inevitably cause death in the future to anyone who does not understand Territory flora. Its beauty is nothing if not more intense. This beauty that will survive him.

Everything will be all right.