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

the place where you want to go and, if possible, a plan of the city or, even better, the hill in question to have a chance of finding your way in this labyrinth of collapsible Recyclo carton houses, these makeshift shelters built of abandoned mining facilities or scrap metal, these ruins of who knows what.
    Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is recognizable among all the others on Midnight Oil; it is the only Combi-Cube on the hill and one of the last models made by Honda, much more spacious than the old Chinese model Yuri lives in. In addition to the standard photovoltaic sensor, it has its own working windmill.
    Pluto Saint-Clair is one of those people seriously beginning to climb the rungs of Junkville’s hierarchical ladder. He stays here at the southern extremity of the city more out of habit than any feeling of belonging, apparently. No one ever gets too attached to anything in Junkville. The city is constantly in a state of transition; overall mobility is a condition of survival, even for the rich. Little Congo will probably be gone in a year or two, other hills becoming home to the current residents and their former home resettled by another branch of activity in the city where everything, always, is recycled.
    If Pluto Saint-Clair has been able to obtain such a Combi-Cube, there are certainly reasons for it.
    He is also a longtime resident of the area. He is even older than Chrysler; he knows everything that happens, every plan, and he knows them before anyone else. He is their best source of information, and that doesn’t come free.
    He, of course, traffics, too.
    Not that he knows anything about the secret of the young man with the guitar. He just collects his money—and not a small amount of it—ascompensation. But he is the one that tells them where, how, and who to look for, who possesses what, what condition it is in, and who might interest their mysterious “client.” He is the one who tells them about specific breakdowns people suffer, clients of his they might be able to help. He is often the one that enables them to put the two “clients” in contact, he who acts as the “invisible hand” linking the supply and demand. He likes to think of himself that way. The Invisible Hand.
    He is a man who loves secrets. Not because of paranoia or fear but because of taste. The taste for what is reserved only for a few; the taste for a trap, constantly redeveloped to keep anyone from discovering it. The taste for the risk inherent in every lie, any defense of the truth. Yuri is beginning to know him very well. He shares so many things with this man, and he knows there are so many things this man can teach him.
    He traffics, too, like half the population of Junkville—at least.
    But unlike Chrysler Campbell and Yuri, he does not deal in technology. To be more specific, the technology he deals in was not considered as such before the fall of the Metastructure; it had already almost disappeared at the time of the Cataclysm.
    But now that all the machines are dead or dying, what was not considered technology before is appearing suddenly under the implacable projector of history, in all its terrifying nudity, its magnificent armor.
    Not only is it technology, it is the source of all possible Technology, and one might even say that it was the very first technology invented by man.
    Pluto Saint-Clair deals in books.
    He traffics in literature.

4 >   ACHTUNG BABY

    The stomach contracts violently, like a muscle subjected to an electric discharge, a spasmodic cramp followed by the ejection from the esophagus of gastric juices and bits of food half devoured by body acids. It drips with the slowness of a dribble of spittle; it explodes out of him in jets inside the retractable bathrooms, and outside of them.
    He cannot prevent the attack. He cannot do anything. There is nothing to be done. He has been vomiting for fifteen minutes already, in an average cycle of ten to fifteen minutes for every hour or two, and it has been