by Peter Liney
“Gigi!” Gordie protested. “You gotta be kidding!”
“What’s it got to do with you?” she challenged, and he had the good sense not to reply. “Huh!” she still grunted, as if he’d said something anyway.
“You wanna go back?” Delilah cried in disbelief.
“Yeah.”
Delilah exchanged looks with Jimmy, as if barely believing what she was hearing. “Think about it, girl,” she muttered. “Think about it.”
I turned to Lena, hoping for some kinda guidance from the only other person who knew the whole story, and despite feeding Thomas, she sensed me looking at her.
“Why risk what we’ve got?” she asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be real careful,” Gigi promised, knowing what Lena was saying. “The last thing I’d do is endanger you or Thomas.”
“But why?” Lile repeated, as if suspecting the first symptom of madness. “Why d’ya wanna go?”
There was a frustrated and uncomprehending pause that was eventually interrupted in a way I didn’t think any of us would’ve anticipated.
“Maybe we should all go?” Hanna half-suggested.
Gigi glared at her. The others, as one, were shaking their heads. But this was approval from the most unlikely of quarters, and all the more surprising for it. It was a bit like when we were out on the Island and finally accepted that we couldn’t hide in the tunnels anymore, that we had to go out and face the Wastelords.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lena announced.
I took a deep breath. It was high time I told Lena what I had in mind. “I was thinking of going along too.”
“What?”
“Big Guy!” Jimmy protested. “Not cool. Not one little bit.”
“Just to take a look,” I said, ignoring Gigi’s grunting, obviously still convinced I was lying.
“Clancy!” Lena wailed, a little like she’d suddenly realized she was drowning.
“I’ll keep a real low profile, I promise.”
“You’re too big to keep a low profile,” she replied, in all seriousness.
The discussion got increasingly heated, what with Gigi saying she wished she’d just snuck away and Lena getting angry with me, reminding me—as if I needed reminding!—that I was a father now. It even went on later, when we went to bed; which was unusual for us.
“We need to know what’s going on,” I told her again.
“I don’t see why?”
“’Cuz it’s beginning to affect us.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know! That’s what we need to find out.”
She turned over, punching her pillow a few times in frustration. “What about Gigi?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“What about her?” I replied, though I knew what she meant.
“Do you trust her?”
“Yeah,” I said, not entirely convincingly.
“You sure?”
“After all this time—yeah, why not?”
“You’re prepared to risk everything?”
I paused for a moment, feeling like I was getting boxed in and wanting to fight my way out. “I’m used to working with people I’m not sure of. I can handle it,” I told her. “I’m just gonna take a quick look . . . put our minds at rest.”
“Jesus, Clancy!” she groaned, and without another word, turned off the light.
For a while we both lay there in the half-light of a peeping-tom moon, then I heard, as clearly as if it’d dropped from the highest leaf of a tree to the forest floor, a tear fall onto her pillow and I immediately pulled her to me.
“I’m scared,” she told me.
“You think I’m not?” I replied. “All the more reason to find out what’s going on.”
“But we’ve got so much more to lose now!”
She was right, of course, and I was all too aware of it. It wasn’t just the house and farm, or living in this picturesque valley, or this new and unsuspected lifestyle, but that little guy quietly dreaming away over in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe.
“It’ll be all right,” I told her—the four most useless words in the English language.
She sighed like she knew there was nothing else she could say; the two of us gradually stepping onto the top of that slow slide down to sleep. I think my eyes had just about closed when she suddenly jolted me back.
“What was that?”
“What?”
For a moment she didn’t speak, her concentration positively crackling beside me. “I felt something.”
“What?” I repeated.
“I don’t know. It felt like something passed over us.”
“I didn’t notice anything,” I replied.
“Really?”
“Nope.”
Again she paused, all her heightened sensors quivering away, searching in places I knew I couldn’t go, ’til finally she began to relax. “It was something,” she said, making herself comfortable again before returning to her search for sleep.
For a while I just lay there, listening to her breathing slowly getting heavier. I hadn’t noticed anything, but I was pretty sure she was right and I had a fair idea what it’d been: that thing had swept across our land again, taking in the farm and the house, threatening everything and everyone before it.
The following morning—and I wouldn’t have minded putting money on it—a fight broke out about who else was going to the City. Gordie was of a mind to come along; in fact, he was of the opinion the venture wouldn’t stand a chance without him. He’d grown a lot over the last year, not just upward and outward but in confidence too. I’d trained him a little, taught him a few tricks of the old trade. They call prostitution the world’s oldest profession, but I bet you they were only there to service soldiers—we been beating the hell out of each other a lot longer than we been paying someone to love a little heaven into us.
I’d been through some fairly basic stuff with him, how to cause the most damage with the minimum amount of effort, tricks we’ve probably been using since the beginning of time. No matter how much I might’ve disapproved of violence now, I didn’t seem able to get away from it. But it was because he had become that much more formidable, so much better at handling himself, that I wanted him to stay at the house. With all the strange things that’d been going on, I knew I’d feel a whole lot better knowing he was there looking out for everybody.
Hanna debated it for a while—she did actually want to come with us even if Gordie wasn’t there—but Gigi made it perfectly plain she wasn’t welcome. Jimmy and Delilah kept insisting that no one should be going anywhere, their fear of what they might lose on their faces for everyone to see, so that, in the end, things stayed as they were: with just Gigi and me going alone.
Saying goodbye to Lena and Thomas in the midst of all that uncertainty was something I could’ve well done without. It was the first time the three of us had been parted and we had this kind of awkward three-way group hug, with little Thomas, getting squashed in the middle, protesting in the only way he knew how.
Gigi acted as if she would definitely be coming back, that there was no need to say a proper goodbye, but I reckoned that was as much down to her hating emotional outpourings as anything else. Over and over I told Lena I’d be back as soon as I could, certainly no more than a few days, though really, I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was I wanted to get in and back out again as quickly as I could.
As we made our way down the track and past the two small wheat fields, still calling back or giving the occasional wave, we gotta real nice surprise. Damned if in some places there weren’t a few tiny green shoots already poking their way out, like stubble on the face of the Incredible Hulk. I shouted back to the others, told them to come and take a look, but we continued on our way rather than risk getting delayed and having to say our goodbyes all over again. But something about seeing that new life clawing its way outta the ground flushed out a whole new area of unsuspected optimism. It was a sign, a promise for a brighter future,
and I was more than ready to put my faith in it.
Once we reached the road, we had to turn in the direction of the pass, walk for thirty minutes or so, then leave the road and make our way across country and up the mountain.
If it’d been a straightforward journey without the occasional stretch of dense forest or boggy soil I might’ve tried to persuade Gigi to make use of the present Jimmy made for Lena and me—for sure it would’ve saved us several hours—but I couldn’t imagine her ever getting on that thing, no matter how much easier it might’ve been.
I think he did it partly for the challenge—for the pleasure of designing and making something, using that side of his brain, but also, as so often with the little guy, purely outta the goodness of his heart. I’d known he was up to something ’cuz when I went over to the barn one day I found my entrance blocked and I was pushed away. All he would say was he was working on something but wasn’t ready to tell me what—mind you, if he’d given me a thousand guesses, I never would’ve come up with it.
Finally the day arrived when he proudly called Lena and me outside and we walked out to find him standing at the bottom of the steps, this huge smile on his face, waiting for me to get over the surprise so I could explain to Lena what he’d made for us.
Maybe I gave him the idea the day he saw me fooling around with one of the kids’ bikes the previous occupants had left behind, circling the farmyard like a circus clown, Delilah laughing at the way my knees kept hitting the handlebars, the many times I almost wobbled my way off. What you’d describe it as exactly, I dunno; I guess you’d call it a “tandem,” though I don’t think the world’d ever seen one quite like his. He’d used both of the kids’ bike frames as a kinda base, but then had to weld in a part of an old iron bedstead to extend it. The original wheels weren’t up to a tandem and two adults, so it had two at the back, one in the middle, and one at the front for steering. Apart from that, it had all kinds of bits and pieces holding it together—some from the barn, even some from the kitchen—and he obviously must’ve felt the end product wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as it could be, ’cuz to top it all off, he’d found some paint—the color we’d done Hanna and Gigi’s bedroom—and coated the whole thing in this particularly vivid shade of green.
To be honest, though I thanked him, my first reaction wasn’t that different from Gigi’s—that you wouldn’t get me on that thing if you paid me—but when I saw how proud he was of it, when I appreciated just how enthusiastic Lena was, I swallowed my pride and clambered aboard, the two of us, slightly nervously, heading off on our maiden trip.
It didn’t take me long to appreciate that, as usual, I’d underestimated the little guy. It was ingenious. With me at the front pedaling and steering and Lena at the back pedaling and taking in the day—I can’t tell you how much pleasure it brought us. We went all over with it, clashing the centuries: old-fashioned techno in an unspoiled world.
But like I said, Gigi thought it was distinctly uncool—worse, in fact, just plain embarrassing—though that might have had something to do with the fact that Hanna’d managed to persuade Gordie to go out on it a few times, and they’d come back all happy and smiling and saying how great it was.
We slept that night on the other side of the mountain, neither of us wanting to make the descent in the dark. It might not be that high, but it still got pretty cold up there. We hung one of our blankets on a bush to give us a little shelter; the other we used to keep warm. Neither of us said much. I’ve never been much of a talker and Gigi was never gonna be anything but a dyed-in-the-wool ex-Island kid who found it impossible to empathize with any adult. Sometimes when I overheard her chattering away to Gordie I could barely recognize her: so animated, so emotional, so relaxed and full of life. But as soon as an adult appeared, the drawbridge went up, fires were lit and the tar was brought to the boil. She didn’t trust us and I didn’t believe she ever would, which was one helluvan irony, bearing in mind the concerns I had about her.
The following morning, to our immense relief, we found the limo still in the cave just as we’d left it. It looked a bit sorry for itself, covered in various slimy substances, some looking on the point of taking root, but whatever you might say about modern vehicles, they’re one helluvan improvement on what used to be, ’cuz believe it or not that thing fired up first time.
As for the lasers I’d hidden in a secret well in the trunk, they were fine, though their power-packs had got badly corroded. No way were they gonna fire, though I hoped that at least they’d act as a kind of deterrent, something we could wave around to impress people.
I slowly backed out the limo, maneuvered around the slab and went slithering and slipping down the slope, Gigi screaming at me at one point ’cuz she thought we were gonna topple over. When I got to the forest floor and started to make my way through the trees we got lost a coupla times, my memory fooled by how fast some of the undergrowth had grown since we were last there. I also managed to dent the final untouched panel on the limo, that poor, mistreated, mechanical beast now looking like it had paid a consultation trip to the breaker’s yard. Yet at length we burst out of the undergrowth, leapt across a small ditch and landed on the dirt track.
I knew I had to take it real easy: it was more than a hundred miles to the first bit of power strip and we were unlikely to come across any gas. And maybe it was our slow progress, one too many degrees of boredom, that finally prompted Gigi to speak to me properly—though I gotta say, it wasn’t the subject I’d expected.
“It was this guy on the garbage boat,” she suddenly said, as if I’d just asked her a question.
You didn’t have to be a genius to work out what she was talking about, nor where the conversation was heading. I never said a word, nor even glanced her way, just in case it frightened her off.
“He started making these jokes about all the spies on the Island—kids and wrinklies—I guess seeing how I’d react. Slowly it became more serious—more of an ‘offer.’ Not ‘spying,’ just . . . keeping an eye on things.”
Those “guys” on the garbage boats, men and women, had a bit of a reputation. They’d been our only possible contact with the Mainland but something about them often hadn’t seemed quite right. They’d trade you stuff, get it to order, but it’d arrive looking like it’d been sourced straight from a warehouse. Clothing or food, stuff you hadn’t seen in years, providing you had something they wanted in exchange. At the time I assumed they were just taking the opportunity to make a little on the side, a dabble in the black market; since then I’d come to realize that some of them were probably working for Infinity.
“Didn’t take it seriously at first—more fool them; I wasn’t telling them anything everyone didn’t already know—but the more it went on, the more they gave me, the more I got sucked in,” Gigi continued, her voice flat and emotionless. “Then one day, when I told them to leave me alone, that I wouldn’t do it anymore, they threatened to tell all the other kids . . . I knew I was in deep shit.”
She spoke nonstop for about twenty minutes—which was about ten times longer than I’d ever heard her speak before, all about how they picked her up the night we escaped from the Island and briefed her about what was going on, the places she needed to hang out where she might be recruited by enemies of Infinity, where to report if she got any information. A few days later she was befriended by “the resistance,” taken to a kinda halfway house and kept there ’til they were sure they could trust her, then finally brought up to speed about their activities: how they were fighting back against Infinity, stepping up techno-terrorism to try to cut off the many tendrils of Big Sister.
It’s funny how that expression came into use: “Big Sister.” Makes you realize how devious big business can be. For so long we used to talk about Big Brother, the government, spying on us, abusing our rights, ignoring our privacy, but then things began to change and it wasn’t so much government spying anymore as private enterprise. At first it was just to assist in their marketing, to direct the appropr
iate goods and services our way, but then it became something else. They used our secrets for all manner of reasons, and those they had no use for, they sold on to others. But the worst thing was they were watching us all the time, checking our techno-footprints, seeing what we were up to, making sure we did nothing to harm their commercial interests—“editing” us out of normal life if we did, making us “non-people.”
Sound familiar? You don’t have to go too far from there to get to where Infinity are now: “cleaning up” their society, keeping it the way they want, the way it’s easiest for them to manage and exploit.
It was them who came up with the expression “Big Sister,” the conglomerates—or probably some high-end ad agency they hired. They knew people’d find a nickname for their behavior and decided to invent one and plant it into the nation’s consciousness before someone arrived at something more sinister. I mean, “Big Sister”? That’s someone who’s always looking out for you, who might take the odd unpopular decision but at heart she’s always on your side, always there to protect your interests . . . Sneaky, huh?
At first Gigi didn’t take “the resistance” too seriously—they were just this bunch of weirdoes and losers, right? She didn’t know them, and didn’t give a damn about informing on them . . . but the more they hung out, the more she started to respect them, to suspect there might be something in what they had to say. The only problem was, just like before, she’d already got in too deep and there was no way back—if she’d tried, she’d probably’ve had both sides after her.
Then, to make matters worse, this one time she went to the Infinity building, she came to the attention of Nora Jagger. She started to receive star treatment, little favors, luxuries she’d never known before in her life.
In the end, she’d just resigned herself to being a victim of circumstance, that she might as well carry on and enjoy her lifestyle as best she could. It was only when she infiltrated our world that her loyalties started jostling again, things finally coming to a head the night we broke into Infinity. If she’d killed Nora Jagger, if I’d set my laser properly, that would’ve been an end to it, but as she didn’t, just like me, she’d made probably the worst enemy she possibly could, and frankly, the very last place either of us should be heading was back to that City.
