Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  Egus sat back in her – his – chair. ‘Someone new I’m trying,’ he said, twisting from side to side in the chair with the energy of a bright, bored kid. ‘As you say, why should I feel constrained? That’s what we do here. We delimit communication. We revolutionise identity, change the way you think about it. Don’t we, David?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Coady uttered slavishly.

  ‘We don’t like to feel constrained by traditional methods, but I don’t see that as any reason to go floating around on clouds or sitting on mushrooms or swimming with dolphins in bubbles of water on a daily basis. I happen to love this office. I always have. We designed it with love and intention and respect. So I stay here.’

  ‘I get that,’ Vidal said.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be more comfortable if I change my body?’ Now he became the younger Jamie Egus, who the world had seen on magazine covers twenty years ago, in the lime-green hoodie and jeans he liked to wear. ‘Or this?’ He immediately aged two decades, his hair mostly silvered, much longer, thoughtfully unkempt, with a trim greying goatee.

  ‘I really don’t mind,’ Vidal said. ‘I’m not at all uncomfortable.’ I really don’t give a fuck, more to the point, he thought. Let’s just get these documents out of the way.

  Egus steepled his fingers under his chin. His eyes were more expressive than most avatars’, giving too much away, shifting between sharp, intelligent scrutiny and a dull interior stare. Nothing is an error, Vidal reminded himself. Despite the demise of his empire and his obsessive clinging onto the scraps, Egus remained the man who had almost taken over the world by consensual coup.

  ‘So you’ll have copies of the new contracts,’ Vidal said. He’d scanned and forwarded them from Gina Orban’s office a couple of days before. ‘I’ll just need your signature to extend the contracts for another six months and to continue the payments to the suppliers.’

  ‘And your commission, of course,’ Egus said.

  Vidal nodded and smiled, but inwardly grated. His commission was a fact of the transaction; it went without saying, unless Egus was somehow implying that Vidal was making undue gains. Perhaps it was a sign of increasing desperation in Green Valley that Egus should seem, for the first time in his life, to be worrying about money.

  ‘The farmers are still on board?’ Egus asked. ‘I hear there’s drought out there. Will they still be able to supply the nutrients we need alongside their other demands?’

  ‘The farmers I have contracted supply Green Valley exclusively.’

  ‘Even in a drought?’

  ‘Even then.’

  ‘Good. You’re certain there are still no animal byproducts in it? Nobody taking shortcuts? I won’t become part of that particular social disease.’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain.’

  Egus called the document up on his screen. ‘You’ll have noted our reduced requirements for both nutrients and materials. You’ve reflected that in the new contracts, I see. That’s all good.’

  Vidal had noted the reduction: thirty per cent less foodstuff and fifty per cent fewer materials. Every order had been slashed and he knew this gig would be up soon. ‘Mr Egus…’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘We need to talk about an exit strategy. The way these orders are declining, it may become hard to keep even one farmer exclusively bound. Maybe you just want to wrap it up?’

  ‘So you’re going to leave us on our sinking ship? Go sniff out richer scraps elsewhere?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I’m happy to arrange supplies as long as you need. I just wonder how long that will be.’ Vidal bristled at being called a rat. From what he’d seen, Green Valley had sunk a long time ago, and it was only Egus’s delusion that was shoring up the pretence that it was still working in any form. He bit his tongue and focussed on the bottom line. This wasn’t just selfishness; he had his daughter’s future to worry about. ‘Maybe your plans are changing.’

  Egus’s eyes cycled through an opaque moment. ‘I’ll let you know.’ Even the jovial old wizard’s voice he’d chosen couldn’t disguise the cold, sharp glint of steel in the words.

  ‘And are you sure,’ Vidal was compelled to ask Egus again, like he had every time they’d met, ‘that they can’t overhear us in here? That the Stanton police, the NSA, the authorities, whoever, aren’t following your every move and your every conversation?’

  Egus barked out a scornful laugh. ‘There is no way those dullards could ever break our layers of encryption.’

  ‘You sound very confident.’ Too confident, maybe, he thought.

  ‘People like me wrote every line of code they used for their surveillance systems. We’re the only ones who understood it. We built in some useful vulnerabilities.’

  ‘Do you think they have a clue?’ David added in his evangelical tone. ‘We built it all. And then they tore it down. We check every day, like Homo sapiens scanning the sky for intelligent life, but there’s nothing but dead air out there. They’re still grubbing around in their caves with their clubs and wall paintings. Do you think those Neanderthals could even rub two sticks together to make fire?’

  Vidal would leave Coady and Egus to their smug celebration. Surely they knew the truth – there was no way they couldn’t be aware of what had become of Green Valley under its roof – but the awareness was buried under too many layers of denial and delusion. He changed the subject.

  ‘Is the nutrient mix still working for you? You’re all getting what you need?’

  ‘We’re getting by.’

  Not what he’d seen, not by a long way, but he was increasingly anxious to be done in here. This place started to work at your nerves if you hung around for too long. ‘Great. So if I can just get those signatures, we’ll be good to go.’

  Egus picked up his stylus and signed the electronic documents. ‘I’ll see you again, Mr Barrett. No doubt when your money runs out.’

  Vidal stood and went to the door without answering. He’d had enough of this shit.

  ‘Hang on.’ A woman’s voice, Egus as assistant. She came up behind Vidal and he could smell her shampoo and her citrusy deodorant. She put her hand on his shoulder and leaned into his neck, her breath warming his skin as she spoke. ‘By the way, you have a tail. Out there.’ She extended a finger towards the window of fake landscape, but Vidal knew where she meant: beyond the wall.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You’re being monitored by the police. Electronic, the whole primitive routine. Like it’s 1984.’

  He shook himself away from the drape of her arms and turned chest-on to face her. ‘No, you’re wrong. They don’t do that any more. We rejected this’ – he swept his hand around the entire facsimile – ‘this bullshit.’

  Egus laughed, a pretty trill, the sort of amusement Vidal would normally yearn to cause in a woman. ‘They do. And they are.’ Egus turned to David. ‘You might like to know who’s after him. It’s your sister-in-law, David.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘We left a tracer in her, of course.’

  14 Checking his rear-view mirror, Vidal noticed no movement in the sterile shadow of the wall as he pulled away and headed back to the city. He puffed out his cheeks and tried to blow out his anxiety. It was possible that Egus was just a raving paranoiac, but just as possible he was telling the truth. Taking the kids behind Egus’s back, even lifting Coady’s own daughter from his own home, had been safe – or so he’d thought. Once he’d got them outside the wall, there was no way they could follow him – or so he’d thought. But if Coady’s sister-in-law, here in the real world, was a spook, and if she was onto him, that changed things – she had more personal stakes in the case than any of the other spooks: she would want her niece safe. Egus had said she was monitoring him, and that word coming from his (fake) mouth implied that she had access to electronic surveillance. True or not, he had to activate his contingency plans.

  Vidal unlocked the high chain-link gate down the alleyway into the small lot behind his
office building, got back in his car and parked. He’d spotted a uniformed patrol officer hanging around on the street opposite the office’s front door, and while street cops weren’t especially common in this part of town, they weren’t a complete rarity either. He never used to be the sort of person who would get infected by other people’s paranoia, but the thought of Sofie getting into trouble sent ice through his veins. Coming out of the alley and rounding into Ocean Street, Vidal scanned the sidewalks. It took a moment to spot him, but there was the patrolman, staring into the window of the pharmacy a way down the block, much too idly.

  Crap, Egus was telling the truth.

  Vidal had naively thought the cops wouldn’t waste a second on dead Green Valley kids. It was Sofie’s idea to place the girl in the bakery. Something the kid had told her about her family. Vidal liked to think he would have dealt with it more cleanly, just weighted the bodies down in the canal and be done with them, but faced with Sofie’s kindness, her humanity, he’d gone along with her decision to honour the kids in some small way. But that cop was still sauntering back and forth in front of the kebab place; he knew it was a mistake, and it mustn’t happen again.

  He unlocked the security gate at the front door of the office and walked inside. Barrett & Sanders, Family Law. If anyone asked, Sanders was an uncle who had died, but Sanders never existed; Vidal had thought two names would make his practice sound more like a firm, less like a flimsy one-man show. When he’d opened, Dierdra had surprised him with a plaque of the yellow rooster that was the firm’s emblem; that was back when she’d loved him, when she’d bothered to do things like that for him. The yellow rooster, Upright Gallo, was a character in a running joke they used to share when they were lovers. The plaque, cemented next to the sign behind the reception desk, used to make him smile every time he saw it, and now still burped a tiny bubble of warmth up him, like a conditioned response. He’d made something of himself, he’d benefited from Dierdra’s partnership for many years, and there was still something to show for it.

  The three clients in the waiting room were also glad for his efforts. He did his best for them, better than they could normally expect from the justice system, and he wasn’t out to cheat them – which is why he could absolutely justify his peri-legal excursions to himself. He had never intended any harm.

  ‘Afternoon, Tertia,’ he said to his paralegal plenipotentiary at the front desk, then smiled at the old couple waiting deferentially at the edge of the seats, as if they couldn’t presume to make themselves at ease here, in the face of the awesome monolith that was the law. Their seven-year-old grandson Peter was caught up watching the pneums racing in and out through the transparent tubes he’d installed just for fun. ‘I’m sorry to be late, Mr and Mrs Alvarez. Peter, come get a soft drink and we’ll start.’

  * * *

  When Sofie knocked at the door later that afternoon, Vidal was shunting a tube with documents from three cases into the pneum to the civil court. Tertia got up to let her in and Vidal invited her into his office, closing his door.

  ‘Coffee, sweetie?’ he said.

  ‘Nah. What’s up, Dad?’

  ‘Listen, Sofe, you can’t come here any more. You must go straight home after school.’

  ‘Why?’

  Vidal wanted to lie to her, to protect her, but he remembered his promise that he would never bullshit her. ‘We’re being watched by the police.’

  She straightened and turned in her chair, staring at the door as if she could see through it. Her face hardened and Vidal thought back to the Green Valley masks; looking at the flesh-and-blood face of this real girl, he could read her mind. Defiance, pride, anger, grief.

  ‘So?’ she shrugged. ‘Let them.’ She raised her voice, as if they could hear her, or as if she suspected they were listening in on their conversation with some electronic device, and she wanted them to know she was not afraid. But what would she know about bugs? She was only a little kid before the Turn.

  ‘I didn’t mean to get you into this but you need to stop, right now.’

  She glared at him, sneering at his mortifying attempt at parental authority. Christ, how would he be able to stop her doing what she wanted to do? It would be his fault if she got into trouble. Openness, honesty, talking to her like an adult would be his only chance.

  ‘Sorry. The truth is, I just expected the police to turn a blind eye to these kids. They’ve always treated people from Green Valley as invisible. Despite anyone’s personal feelings about the terms of the Partition Treaty, what Zeroth did was legal. As a corporation, they hadn’t been found guilty of any crime. All along, they had been incorporated as an independent town council, and they were within their rights to administer their town as they saw fit. Stanton PD’s got a lot on its plate, much more to do than concern itself with our newly independent neighbour.’

  ‘But building that massive wall, that roof,’ Sofie said. ‘Surely that would need special planning permission?’

  The girl was following right alongside him, sharp as a tack, Vidal thought with a swell of pride. Maybe she could be his Sanders in times to come. ‘Yeah, that’s the other side of it. They still had a lot of money, and they spent it to help their plans along, just as they had to fast-track the incorporation of Green Valley years before. The mayor, councillors, senior police – it was all in their interest to keep quiet and leave Green Valley alone. And the way the treaty was pushed through so quickly, before anyone had a chance to understand it. I’m sure they’re still getting paid off, but of course nobody can prove anything. That’s why I’m surprised anybody’s showing any interest in the kids. Officially, they don’t exist, and they’re certainly not in Stanton’s purview. Why would they upset the status quo now?’

  ‘Maybe it’s because they were found here, in Stanton’s jurisdiction?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before Green Valley was sealed completely and after the wall went up, a few people living there came across, to buy supplies and visit family. They’d be targeted, mugged, a couple were murdered. The cops never flinched. Not their business.’ He paused, thinking what had actually changed, then repeated, ‘The kids don’t exist. Even if the cops investigated for whatever reason, and they found their deaths to be suspicious, it’s a crime on nobody. These people were no longer citizens. Why would they want to add ghosts to their list of unsolved deaths? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  Sofie nodded, frowning.

  ‘There must be some new element,’ Vidal said. ‘Something new complicating the mix.’

  At that moment, they heard a thumping on the ceiling, a muffled scream. Sofie started out of her chair and was on her way out of the door already.

  ‘No, Sofe. You can’t be involved any more.’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  Vidal tailed her down the corridor to the back of the office suite, not shouting, not running, not wanting to make a scene in front of the clients, past the bathroom and the kitchenette and to the locked steel door barring the back stairs. He’d painted it turquoise to make it seem less out of place, shunted into the back of the office with its adobe-lite decor. Sofie was using her keys to unlock the door, and the second she opened it, a half-naked, skinny little kid bowled her way out, knocking Vidal over. He whacked the side of his head on a steel filing cabinet and bit back the moan of pain as Rainbow and Sofie headed past him, chasing the kid, who was howling her head off in the reception area. He picked himself up and ventured carefully to the scene, trying to smile in a comforting way at the middle-aged couple in the waiting area. They were the Williams divorce, and they were unconsciously huddling together, Franco grasping Melissa’s thigh and Melissa with her arm through her husband’s. Nothing like the soul-scream of a banshee to melt away marital strife, Vidal noted fleetingly.

  But now he stopped, watching the two older girls squatting down near the scared little one, hands up and arms out, ready to take her in. He knew that a grown man like him was the last person who would be able to calm this particular child down, a
nd he left the teens to it. Together, they folded her into a soothing embrace, Sofie allowing the child to wipe her snot and tears and filthy hair into her sweater.

  This was why Sofie wanted to be involved. This was why she needed to be involved. This was why what they had done was right.

  Eventually, the girl was calm enough to go back towards the stairs, Rainbow following behind her saying, ‘I won’t make you. Promise. Only when you’re ready.’ Melissa and Franco had shifted a yard apart again, and Vidal collared Sofie as she passed him.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Rainbow tried to get her in the shower.’

  ‘Christ. How did she get through the security gate upstairs?’

  A complicit look darted between Sofie and Rainbow. ‘We left it open by mistake. Do you still want me to go home?’ Sofie said to him.

  He suddenly realised what he had to do. He shouldn’t have left it so long. ‘Yes, in fact,’ he checked his watch. It was nearly four. ‘We both need to go home now.’

  IV

  15 ‘I don’t know what more you want from me,’ Jordan said, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he sucked on his cigarette, slurping the smoke down like it was oxygen. A dense thunderhead was blotting out the sky, bringing night down early and making the lights in the buildings opposite glare across at us where we stood on the precinct’s rooftop terrace. Squalls of wind kicked dust and pigeon feathers into a noxious whirl with Jordan’s smoke as he exhaled. ‘I put the patrol on Barrett’s office, and I’m already getting stick from upstairs, asking me why. I can’t waste resources on unregistered kids.’

  ‘They’re dead, Jordan,’ I insisted. ‘You’ve got yet another dead child on your books. This is not just about me and my family. It’s not just personal.’