Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec Read Free Book Online Page A

pioneers waiting to leave for outer space, for one private cosmodrome or another, this bright yellow paper with blue printing on it is also known as a claim.
    The language spoken in Grand Junction is often translated into dozens of dialects from all over the world, but its basis is Anglo-Saxon, the lingua franca of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first (after that, various bits of Chinese slang had entered the mix). In this language particular to the Cosmograd terminal, there are expressions from the frontier mythology of the mid-nineteenth century—that time of steam locomotives and Colt Single Action guns, and cowboys and Indians. The conquerors and the conquered.
    All around him, as he makes his way through the milling crowd at the aerostation exit, between vast concrete-composite pillars made to resemble Minoan columns, the name of that bright yellow paper with blue printing resonates in almost every language on Earth: the Golden Track. The
Sentier d’Or.
The
Pista de Oro.
    For Plotkin, the fact that Grand Junction had been able to flourish on “federal indigenous territory”—an Amerindian reserve covering the equivalent of several counties, and straddling the American-Canadian border, no less—was in no way the result of mere chance.
    As he picks his way toward the robotaxi station, little by little the tableau comes together. Through the light evening fog, he thinks that he can make out the wavering bunches of city lights. He has an odd feeling that he has not yet been told everything about himself or about this world. He knows, somehow, that this is only the beginning.
    He knows that he is going to like Grand Junction enough to be able to kill its mayor without the slightest twinge of guilt.
    You must pray as if everything depends on God, and act as if everything depends on us.
    The words were those of Bossuet, a French Catholic author from the Great Century; some attributed them to Ignatius Loyola. Why had the instruction program revealed them to him? Why were they contained at all in a clandestine neuro-implant? Why had he remembered them only now?
    It was an amusing enigma, like the face of a woman seen in an aerostation crowd. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with his present situation: the robotaxi gliding toward the city; the wide circular avenue running around the periphery of the county in three main branches, each bearing the name of one of the mythical early American space conquests. To the west, Mercury Drive. To the north, the vast curve of Apollo Drive. To the east, Gemini Drive, where he finds himself at the moment, a vast ribbon of concrete regularly dotted with tunnels. The drive is, he notes, a good way to see various parts of the city, lit in successive sequences by the Toyota robotaxi’s orange sodium lights. As they pass the head of Von Braun Heights, he catches glimpses of the cosmodrome itself, with its hangars and its three takeoff runways, one of which is currently awaiting the arrival of a rebuilt Russian Protron resting on its crawler, a sort of giant rover, moving toward the pad from its warehouse at two kilometers per hour.
    The second platform is empty at the moment, though he can see the movements of human activity on it, and vehicles, and flashing lights—perhaps there has just been a takeoff? On the third and farthest platform, a replica of a twentieth-century American shuttle points its black muzzle toward the sky, mounted bravely atop the bomb of hydrogen and liquid oxygen that is the enormous fuel tank, wreathed in plumes of greenish smoke that waver in the glare of the spotlights.
    “Monolith Hills,” he had told the robotaxi’s verbal interface as he slid into the violet vinyl backseat, with its myriad tiny rips from which protruded nubs of piss yellow foam.
    His neuroprogram had informed him of the exact address only a few seconds earlier, while he stood with his hand pressed to the taxi door’s keypad decoder. The Toyota was orange, the