‘Any idea where they is holed up?’
‘Na, mate, they come and go. I think they got a few diffrint hidey holes about the place. I heard one of them is in the Warby Ranges — they got a cave there — but they shift round so much its hard to say and they is always on the move, carryin everythin they they need and raidin whatever else. I also seen in the gigacity, searchin in the ruins for signs of the Wotcher’s passin.’
‘They’d stop for foragin fuel sometime, but.’
‘Dunno, maybe not. I heard the black one runs nuke, but thats just rumour.’ He paused then said, ‘Mate, it’s not gunna be a easy wrangle.’
‘I don’t think so neither. The Brumby King took somethin of mine and I want to get it back, thats all.’
He was right, it was a few days before the patternings of trucks around the boss fell into place and Sinnerman could get seen to. Meantime I hung around with the detailers, trading yarns and writing me thoughts down in me typewriter. I saved them together where all the trancecrypts of Smoov’s rants were kept, clipped up in the lid of the HERMES case. I thought maybe I were getting the beginnings of a trancecryption of me own, and if not I were at least getting things straight in me head.
The first night in the truckstop I watched as the detailers gathered after darkness come down. It was time for the Wotcher’s passing and the boss had got her decks together and the detailers and their camp followers that hung on like skinny yeller dogs pushed in closer to the show. Behind the screen Sheila tuned in with the Wotcher like a showman would, except instead of making meanings with truckshows, what she pulled out were pictures from the Wotcher’s feed. Different designs came out of the staticky waves, spirals and shapes, hard blocks or soft edges. Pictures of different trucks through the ages, trucks from the past time that the Wotcher beamed down. I realised they were the markings that were gunna be etched onto the trucks they were working on.
Next day I walked through the camp watching the detailers and seeing how the trucks come in from the backroads looking for the patterns from the night before. Thinking on how the trucks loved that stuff from the Wotcher, it was like they were looking to find their own image in the static that got beamed down from on high each night. Those indies looked to the Wotcher for answers just like the showmans and the camps did, except for the trucks there was something real at stake. Maybe they thought the Wotcher could give them some secret codes in mechin their new hybrid forms, like maybe the Wotcher had the knowing of their first codes from before things went all bad with the gigacity system. Maybe they needed the codes to be everything that they wanted to be, not having to mech new parts all the time from herding up spare trucks but something that could heal itself like a wound would scar up, not break down.
When the sun got too hot I went off down the gully to wash me own wounds and took some haze like I was growing accustomed to it. The sky was dotted with shapes hanging in the air and riding the breeze. At first I thought they were some new kind of flapple but then I seen they were tethered to the ground and rode on strings by kids that were floating them up there in the sky. They made an eerie sound like frogs or angered insects as the wind shook through their cloth feathers. I ate off of a grill the camp followers set up under a blue tarp beside a trickling creek and watched the kids float their flying things. Some of the flyers were real skilled, could make the things on strings do dips and loops and fight against each other. As well as the detailers there was another cult there sharing the camp, a goannaman looking after a big lizard that was all painted up with signs and symbols. Seemed that everyone had their own kind of creature outside of themselves that was gunna bind them together into a whole. I could tell the goannaman were well thought of in the truckstop, he got the best cuts off the grill. His goanna crunched up the bones and maybe it were how they kept out the flapples and robodroans, by having the goannaman around to clean up all the carrion. There wasn’t nothing left there for them to scrounge. It also made me feel safe from Crow too even though I’d only seen him a few days ago. Where there were too many scavengers already, Crow wasn’t likely to show up.
Another night came on down again and I started to get itchy to be roadin after Isa. I’d gotten some good leads on the brumby mob and wanted to get to the gigacity to start the search there. Sinnerman was being worked on but wasn’t ready yet. But there was no hurrying along the detailers. They had their own time marked out, and it wasn’t set by the rising and falling of the sun. They’d go on for three solid days on a job and then crash and sleep right through for a day. It was set by the timing and motion of the Wotcher, but also it come down to what was being broadcast in the trancemission. If there wasn’t anything they could use in there, they’d just get tanked up some more and fight with each other round the fireplace. All the while that goannaman’s reptile monster crunched on bones. It got me nerves jangled and I was getting itchy for Sinnerman’s IV again too. I sneaked up inside Sinnerman’s cab and loaded up, even though it wasn’t ridgey didge to do it while there wasn’t no roading happening. It kept me going and I kept Sinner going with a splay of new patches I’d been working on, and I could feel we was both rebuilding our strengths from the battle with the Left Tenant, and who knew what else was coming round the bend for us.
Two days later the boss got done with Sinnerman and Lam came out and he shook me hand and said, ‘Where you headed now?’
‘Gunna road towards the gigacity I reckon.’
‘Fair enuff. The Wotcher’s signal’s strong there. There’s a place called the Lie Bury where them from the past times is buried all the lies, it’s somewhere near the centre of where the Wotcher’s freek can be tuned. Keep yer eyes out for it.’
I shook his hand.
‘Hooroo,’ I said.
I turned and walked to Sinner’s fresh mint truck skin glistening with sparkling new glyphs, still red and white and with a western look but new designs and new tweaks to its running gear. I almost didn’t wanna dusty up its steps with me boots as I swung up in to the cab. Slotted home the spike and Sinner gunned up again and the flow of the haze met me own blood flowing pounding into me heart and the machine of me dreams. Slowly we roaded back out into the bright sunlight, so blinding and strange after that dark shed of truck magic and the long campfire nights. The gigacity loomed large on the horizon ahead.
Chapter 14
Sinner was feeling more of its usual self with the road shaking and shuddering underneath its rolling wheels riding on the coast road. It wasn’t more than a day before we could see the steel skeletons of towers looming ahead on the viewscreen. As we came closer, I saw more and more flapples flying like flies around the bodies of dead trucks, crushed fliers and scattered robos and telly presents droans in the broken lands. Bodies of roadkilled roos and camels and people too, black as engine oil from a busted sump. Smoke rising up from the stripped chassis bodies. Bricks and blocks and chunks of concrete, bits of bitumen and all the rubble from the buildings of lost times when the gigacity was towers of glass and thin pollymer plastic glittering in the sun like a million streams of waterfalling stars, living machines of glass and smart thinfilm building minds talking and transacting in a brilliant system built of light stretched over steel bones. That’s the picture I had of it in me mind from when Isa told me that time of the stories from the past and I seen them overlaid on the earth outside the window and it was a shadow that stained the ground and rose up like wisps of smoke behind me eyes, like the dream coursing through me system with the black liquor that leaked through the IV from Sinnerman’s alkaloid synthfac. The land outside the cab flowed past like a smooth surface, I couldn’t penetrate beneath. And maybe there’s nothing beneath at all, maybe the surface is all there is but still you gotta try to break through. So we rolled over the skin, looking for a way in.
The gigacity beckoned up ahead and the shadows of that place made me shudder and I understood how come folks never went there no more. Shimmering like a lost world. The screen seemed a part of me. No highlights anymore. Nothing, just
the flow, just the jets that moved me along through the deep water of a truckbound life, losing the use of me limbs, me memories all jumbled up out of order like a cloud of locusts flying over the road. Still there was a pattern and everything I saw was filtered through the screen. Me and Sinnerman was a system, but which one was the host and which the parasite? I was living on haze and rolling through the backroads in the machine, but Sinner was living off me patches as well, living off me code wrangling as I led it up to be broken on the highway and when we found Isa, it would be in a slaughterhouse of brumby trucks. All the handsome trucks and their running lights shining bright in the night behind me eyes. It was all gunna catch up with us sometime, we were running ahead of a foamy wave and soon it would break us but I pushed them thoughts away and kept on going.
I was deep in that connection and it was scary and wonderful too, a new page cranked into the typewriter. I’d never been so close to another creature in me whole life. Even Isa done nothing but push me away. And now I had this connection what had got me in its hooks, it’d got me in its spiked arm. Its IV and its hazy visions. This creature that I didn’t even know till just a few days ago was now me whole life, and yet me life was not a whole and we were riding together into the gigacity looking for Isa, my lost sister my lost lover my lost half. Hid below the surface all you find is more surfaces.
We drove in through the outskirts. Cinderblock boxes and broken corners piled with rubble. Rubble piled on troubles. No one around, it was a ghost town left for dead by those who lived there and cursed ground for us who come later. We kept on, though it were slow going. The road hadn’t been kept through passage. The robo roadcrew builders that kept the backroads on their own programs weren’t in sight of the gigacity. And in the backroads at least the tracks though rutted and ridged was kept opened from so much traffic passing through. My whole life passing through, one stop to the next.
The houses where once there was people were all long since looted and burnt. Frames pulled apart for fuel, fire blackened fronts stained with sooty smoke. I rode high up in the rider’s cab, feeling the growing wonderment of that place and all its glass ghosts were grown on me like creepers on a tree, slowing me down on the road and all the stories I’d heard of the gigacity danced in me head. I couldn’t keep them separate from what I saw in front of me eyes. The stories infected the daylit towers of tangled steel like a virus so they seemed to glow in the afternoon sunshine and called out to me with the voices of all those whose footsteps and trucktracks had gone before in the world and all them who were dead and left to rot out in that place of poisoned ground and slinking snakes moving shapes in the corners of me eyes. I saw it and I didn’t see both at the same time. I knew it was in me mind, I knew it was the stories, I knew it was both what I seen and not seen and all at the same time. Most of all I knew then why there was so many stories of the gigacity and why it wasn’t a place to be visiting or for living in them ruins long since left for leavings good and proper.
On and along we went, slow and careful forging a path through the shattered wreckage. It took a while to see it but the city was being taken back by rioting life. Roots growed up through everything, tangled creeping greenery clawing at the red brick. Lizards and slithering creatures scrubbled out of the way as we crawled through. Either side the buildings loomed and got thicker and taller towards the centre. Ahead a steel canyon wall above a river of glittering glass shards beneath.
We come to a place of dead ends. Five ways intersecting. The buildings here were seamless towers, their tech all bound up and sealed behind grim black surface. I had a flash it could be just like Isa said, the buildings was standing ready and waiting for the right codes to get started in working again and restoring the past system. We made our way through broken laneways and busted concrete. Burn scars wherever I looked. I felt like I’d been there before, in a dream. Shiver of craving for the missing haze flow became a new syntax written in me blood by machines not built by human hands.
Time’s ticking, time sticking. Time didn’t flow straight forwards like most people were happy to think. You could slip down inside of it, you could feel its texture. It’s grainy, not smooth. It comes out in lumps and clumps around certain things that you keep coming back to in your memory. If all time was the same, how come there’s some moments that stick out from others, some faster, some slower? Then there’s them other times when you look up from what you’ve been doing and you see it’s near dark and you’d not realised the day passing. Cruising the gigacity street sweating out haze visions from me skin, I was remembering and remembering, bringing memories back to me mind, like a feeling that breaks through from the other place, from a different place down where the river bends by the creek side in the wet season and the daylight stretched to its end and I was there with Isa and the creatures that lived in the rocks and the stone and a slinky snake slithering in the muggy sunshine. We were all lost in time, the things we see in front of our eyes, in front of our –I–s, is what takes up most of the brain but if you can shut them out for a time, the memories start coming up, the things that happened and maybe they didn’t even happen but on some level you know they did. Some level, some time, some Wotcher seeded those signs in your head. But try to grasp it and it’s already gone, like a slinky snake into a crack in the rocks.
Through the viewscreen I seen grooves in stone steps on the gigacity pathway. There was something about the place that made me mind move. The stairs were sagging like the grooves in Smoov’s linkmaker where me greasy fingers thumbed the shiny metal clean. I thought about all the trudging feet that had made those grooves over so much spans of time and maybe it don’t matter what I thought or typewrited anyways, it was all gunna be dust soon enough. There wouldn’t be no one left who could read it, no one to decode these writings. But then maybe it’s like the grooves in them steps, someone would see the passing from the bits that aren’t there in this place where roads came to die. The words twist in on themselves and there’s no way in or out in that blasted landscape of red rock and smooth brown stone in the dried up creek beds of dry city streets that have never flowed for a hundred years or more. It’s just deadly death and danger to anyone passing by. A broken neck and stolen boots. Let me die in trucktyre shoes tied up with twine so they’ll know I died standing up.
Chapter 15
The day bled into moonfaze in the gigacity where the wreckage from the time before piled up on the underside of overpasses by the broken banks of the river. Stacks of rusted shipping cans piled like the broken toys of a babby mountain sprung loose from its roots. A plastic tide of black water flecked with styrofoam. I rolled in Sinnerman along the busted pathway. I’d not seen a sign of anybody at all since I been in the city, and there were reasons for it. Looking down to the side, there was movement down there in the rubble. Staring closer and I seen it was a slinky snake, segments of its body like a earthworm and a red eye light lit for its hunting of warmth and skin and fur to feed on. And then the more I looked, the more of them I seen, squirming in the corners of me eyes. There wasn’t just one, there was a hundred. Long as I were inside of the truck I were safe, so we set to roaming, rolling on the road that criss crossed the river and the water, broken down parts of freeway shattered on the ground, picking our way through the mess looking for signs of brumby life.
The night blur of cruising the gigacity. The roads twisted around each other and led back to the same place. Down inside a tunnel and then back on up the other side, wrecked trucks lit under lights. Some roads were broken and some weren’t, so we felt our way through there, looking out brumby tracks but there was none. Over and under it all, the stench of death and smoke rising from the ruins but it weren’t so bad as some places I been. Sinnerman was antsy for the next to point the way but I kept it held tight. There had to be a way out of the swirling ruins and scavenged meats from the trickery of the rubble that moves according to the light that falls on it. If I could get to the place where that truckdetailer told me the Wotcher’s signal could be tune
d louder and clearer. Through the night I sat in the cab and I searched for the connections that would unlock the meaning in it all. Wrote down what happened and what I seen on me typewriter and rifled Smoov’s notes just trying to come to some understanding of the world rolling them streets overgrowed with greenery and creepers. Broken signs and light rail lines stretched on a long road that ran through a canyon of twisted steel.
Some force drawed me onwards to Isa, pulled me along through the streets as daylight started to shine between the towers and the water rising up through buildings that stuck out of the ground like rotted teeth from a black gum. River broke the bank and flooded out all over the place, out of where it would be its own self. I spent the next day searching through burnt out cars and the remains of them who was gone from the world now. There wasn’t much left, the place was picked clean like white bones bleached in the sun. And yet there was plenty still in the places in between. And all the blue tarps in the world couldn’t keep off that rain that blowed from the south and the afternoon sky hung low and dark and the buildings sailed like downside up ships in a black and stormy sea.
We came to a broken door in a wall. It opened on to a garden secret and lush and green, I’d never seen nothing like it, it were a pair of dice there in the ruins beset on all sides by dust and crumbling stone chaos. I pulled at the IV in me arm but it were clawed so deep it had become stuck. I saw inside the gap in the wall to that place, it were so green. There were many different kinds of plants, fronds and spines and leaves, not like anything else in the backroads of dried up spinifex and scrubby brown shrubs. I wanted to check it out so I pulled harder and finally the IV come out with a well of blood that I staunched with me sleeve. I hobbled Sinner with linkmade patch to keep it still while I were gone, though neither of us fancied lingering long in that place crawling with poisoned life and there in the corner of me eye a brumby skitter skated.
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