Read Online Grand Junction by Maurice G. Dantec - Free Book Online Page A

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.”

6 >   ABSOLUTELY LIVE

    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 pathdidn’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