Trucksong Read Online Free Page A

‘One thing to do is to play to a indie’s pride. They’re all vain and they like to have things no other truck has got. If you can offer them something rare, they’ll trade with you for it. Trade for roadin or truckdream haze. You gotta be careful coz you never know what they is gunna do, but if you can find the right truck, you can make a team, truck and rider. You can make a pair, like a pair between a showman and the Wotcher. Hook them through the link and show them you got patches to trade. You can even use the patches to get the trucks to do what you want sometimes, it hits them like haze hits a human. And like haze, it’s a leash you can jerk.’
    Smoov ranted on and on though we had heard it many times before. But there was always something you couldn’t predict with Smoov, always some surprise coming out of his mouth. That night he said this: ‘Them trucks is gettin more and more interested in the ways of interpretin the Wotcher’s trancemissions. They don’t got the same kind of thinkin as a human, but they know the Wotcher’s part of their own past too. I reckon they got a feelin of kinship with the Wotcher, like sometime back they come from the Wotcher and the Wotcher’s got the keys to their codin, see, and if they knowed what it was, they could take control of the present and breed their own hybrids. They’re loadin fragments from the Wotcher’s frequency into their trucksongs and puttin them together like a showman would, to find the patterns.’
    I could see Isa was hooked up intense in Smoov’s words, she was listening hard. What I took from what he said was the trucks thought they could find their own past in the Wotcher and use it to make a better future, like we were trying to do. Then the haze took Smoov over and he turned mean and swiped me with his fist till the sparks flew in me head. And looking back, maybe I should have done things different, taken me swag and headed out on me own right there and then. But maybe it doesn’t make any difference.
    Next day we saw a camp of desert people. They’d been there long before the flapples and bigdogs and trucks and goanna droans came, and they’d be there longtime still. They knew the places to dig for water, they knew the ways of hunting meat, they knew how to cook and how to live off that land. They didn’t want nothing to do with the indie trucks what roared and shook the rutted roads and they didn’t want nothing to do with dusty riders and showmans and sandblasted followers of truckdream haze. And I thought they’d got the right idea and we got the wrong of it.

Chapter 4
    It was later on. The moon had fatted and wasted with none to account and no more sign of brumbies. We were on the plainlands and down in the dirt, digging for old hardware in the rubble of broken ruins. Me and Isa picked through the muck, mining for data on dead media drives. Smoov was a little way off, wild scraggyface hair but digging carefully. He could scan the drive to pull the fragments of pictures or sounds and splice them in to spice the show from the Wotcher. He was a showman, and the showmans were the only ones who could extract the data and interpret what came up from those wells beneath the earth and from the shining Wotcher up above.
    Isa’s brown hands were working next to mine, going over broken cases and copper wires. I looked up and caught her eyes and she smiled. I lived for those smiles. They were me campfire embers on a cold desert night. Smoov collected a clatter of junk up over the rise. Always digging, looking for the pieces that were going to make the puzzle fit together. But there wasn’t no fit, no together, just the pieces. I knew it by then, even if I was too young and dumb to say anything. There was only the puzzle, only the smooth surface, nothing underneath. Especially nothing in the junk we dug up out of the ground, just bits and bites of random signs left behind from people who were long gone from the earth.
    I climbed over a mound