Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams, page 2
~ * ~
THREE
The third level held the first of many surprises to greet the settlers. Its heart was an enormous chamber as large as five Old Earth cathedrals stacked one on top of the other, criss-crossed by ladders and pipes and startlingly well-lit—a brilliant contrast to the upper levels. Its walls are orange and thickly-veined. The air is full of the rumbling of machinery and echoing explosions. Huge ROTH artifacts, inactive for the most part, cling to the walls and ceiling; some are mounted like stalagmites on the ‘floor’, around which cluster the refineries brought Down a piece at a time by human settlers. Green-clad miners swarm like ants along the walls and walkways, issuing from the myriad tunnels that lead deeper into the earth.
“How many people work here?” I asked, left almost breathless by the sheer scale of the chamber. Too large to be fully comprehended in even a series of glances, it provoked a feeling of vertigo so powerful as to dull the mind.
“On this level, something like six thousand. Most of them in side-cuts rather than the actual core. Your brother was one of them, for a while.”
I shook my head. The figure didn’t make sense. It was larger than that which I’d received earlier regarding the total population of the mine, and there were still four more levels to go—but I chose not to pursue the matter then and there. I supposed that I’d misheard him through the constant noise echoing in the chamber.
I tried to imagine Martin working here, and failed. We had spoken briefly before his departure for the mines, but he had said nothing about intending to seek employment. Just a holiday, he had said, to satisfy his curiosity. What had happened, I wondered, to change his mind?
The lift ends halfway down the chamber.
We stopped there to procure water bottles, to exchange a handful of words with a taciturn attendant, and to admire the view. Huge ore-lifters floated past us—up, full; down, empty. Carnarvon informed me that protocol forbade us taking such a direct route to the base of the third level. Between the midway point of the third level and its rock floor were only ladders.
“Nothing else can truly do this place justice,” he said, and I believed him.
By then I had an inkling that the Grand Tour was far more than a quick circuit of faces and off-cuts—hence Carnarvon’s initial reluctance to take me. I was glad that I had no-one waiting for me above ground.
It took us three hours to reach the base of the chamber and the first of many way-stations. We rested there for an hour or so, meeting a few of the deeper miners—called ‘moles’—who were heading Upwards for a stint in the refineries and, ultimately, the surface. They were uniformly dirty, but only two thirds were pale-skinned. The rest were deeply tanned, which I found strange. All shared a peculiar dullness of stare, a hybrid of world-weariness which I later learned was called ‘miner’s eyes’. As though nothing more could surprise them, they regarded the world with patient, cynical skepticism.
I asked them about my brother, but received only quizzical stares in reply.
“Tourist,” explained Carnarvon patiently. Some laughed openly; others touched my shoulder in sadness, and went to sit elsewhere.
“Why is everyone so ...” I struggled for the word, but couldn’t find it.
“Unconcerned?” suggested Carnarvon, a wry smile twisting his rubbery features. “If they are, it’s because they know something you don’t.”
“Which is?”
“Don’t ask now. You’ll—”
“I know, I know. I’ll find out later.”
His smile broadened. “Exactly.”
When we had rested, Carnarvon showed me some of the machinery that fills the third level. The purpose of the ancient ROTH mechanisms eluded me then, just as it has eluded human researchers for one full century.
Then it was time to enter the Shaft, the central column that plummets downwards through the four remaining levels. The cage was three times as large as the lift by which we had previously descended. Low benches lined two of the walls.
A crowd of miners spilled from the cage, dressed in unfamiliar white uniforms. They stared at us, but said nothing. When they had gone, Carnarvon turned to face me.
“The journey really begins here,” he said, on the threshold of the cage. “If you want to turn back, it’s not too late.”
I shook my head. “I need to know what happened to Martin.”
“Why?” He seemed genuinely unable to understand.
“Because he was important to me,” I said. “Am I in danger?”
“Yes.” His honesty was both dismaying and thrilling. “Everyone who enters the mines is at risk—and the deeper, the more so.”
It was my turn to ask: “Why?”
But Carnarvon, waving me inside, refused to answer.
He stood silently by my side as the cage fell, not meeting my stare. Five minutes passed without a word spoken by either of us. If Carnarvon didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to make him.
Then, after fifteen minutes, the floor lurched, and I felt momentarily light-headed. Only then did Carnarvon speak, as though we had passed some unannounced barrier.
“The last time I passed this way was twelve years ago—heading Up from the fifth level, swearing that I would never come back.” He took off his hardhat and slicked back his wiry, grey hair. “But part of me always knew I would, one day. And the same part knows that there’s no going back this time. You only get out once. If you return, the mines have you forever.”
I studied him closely. If this was a confession, then I failed to comprehend it. “Caught?” I asked, using his own word.
He laughed softly. “Well and truly. I hate this place, but I love it too. And the people that work here, mad bastards that we are.”
His attention wandered back to his own thoughts. Reluctant to let the silence claim us again, I asked him a question that had been troubling me for some time:
“Why are we the only ones going Down?”
Carnarvon laughed again. “You noticed? Good. If you can answer that question, my friend, you’ll be one step closer to grasping the truth about the mines.”
And he would speak no more until the cage bumped to a halt and we stumbled from it.
~ * ~
FOUR
Imagine a grey plain at midnight, rippled in a series of low, undulating hills and valleys. The plain is in complete darkness, except for an area as large as a small town illuminated by powerful, white spotlights. In this lighted area sits an open-face mine, hacked into a hillside like a weeping sore. It is so dark in this place that nothing else can be seen: no stars, no horizon; just one patch of brilliant light and a slender line rising upwards into blackness.
Take the plain and bury it four thousand metres underground in a chamber so large that the walls and ceiling are invisible.
And this is the fourth level.
A faceless technician handed me a pressure-suit. A clumsy outfit of rubber and carbon-fibres, it stank of sweat and grease, as though worn by thousands of people in its lifetime. Puzzled, I followed Carnarvon’s lead and shrugged into it, leaving my outer garments in a locker. I felt oddly light, and wondered if the air had a higher oxygen content than I was accustomed to. Carnarvon led me to an airlock and cycled the pair of us through.
“Poisonous atmosphere,” he said via the suit radio, explaining the suits if not the sight that lay before me.
I watched as cranes swung and powerful vehicles unloaded their burdens beneath the spotlights. The miners swarming across the face looked like dark animals in their grey suits—hence, I supposed, the nickname ‘moles’.
“What are they mining for?” I asked.
“Here, iron ore,” replied Carnarvon. “There are other faces nearby cut for strontium and uranium.”
I hunted for a reference point, some means of guessing the size of the space around me, but failed.
“How big is this level?” I asked, admitting defeat.
“Bigger than you think, I promise you.”
We headed through the gloom towards a row of huts, where Carnarvon introduced himself to the level supervisor, a portly man called Stolle whose suit resembled a blowfish with stumpy arms and legs. Still dazzled by the strangeness of the fourth level, I was content to let them do the talking.
“I remember you,” said Stolle to Carnarvon, squinting through his plastic visor. His voice was liquid with static. “Two years ago— three, maybe?—you worked here for a while.”
“Twelve,” corrected Carnarvon.
“Christ.” Stolle winked at me dryly, as though sharing a joke I failed to understand. “Time flies down here.”
“Any news of the Director?” asked Carnarvon.
“It’s out there,” said the Supervisor, shrugging. “Definitely out there. We’ve lost a few on this level, but not many. Usual story. That, and the rumours of an eighth level, are about the only things we can depend on down here.”
He invited us to join him for a drink, but Carnarvon explained that we were tired. This wasn’t a lie, as far as I was concerned; my watch told me that eight hours had passed since my arrival at the mines, and my eyes were thick with fatigue. So Carnarvon made excuses, and we bunked down in a crowded dormitory wing with a dozen off-duty moles, clipped by airhoses to a communal tank, our radios silenced.
Thus I spent my first night in the mines of Barnath: in a rubber suit, breathing air that stank of human, wondering what the hell I was doing. And when I dreamed, it was of Martin walking ahead of me along a dark, stone tunnel, forever out of reach.
A dull explosion woke me an unknown time later. When we stumbled out of the wing, a new hole had been added to the scarred hillside. The ever-present glare of the spotlights seemed brighter and the ceaseless activity of the open-face mine more feverish than before.
We dined on pre-processed slop in one of the few pressurised compartments of that level. The moles around us eyed us curiously, and it was a moment or two before I realised what it was that distinguished us from them. It was, quite simply, that we were talking. On the fifth level, where communication is only practical via intersuit radio, casual conversation is discouraged. Even in the mess-hall.
“How much further?” I asked Carnarvon, regardless. The night’s sleep had left me irritable, rather than refreshed. I was impatient to make some progress on my quest to find Martin.
“Forever and a day, as they say.” He glanced at me in amusement. “You still think you’ll be leaving here in a hurry?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Because these are the mines of Barnath, my friend. They’re not like anywhere else. Where you come from, everything’s the same— it never changes, it’ll be there tomorrow, forever. But here ... if the Director doesn’t get you, then you’re caught anyway.”
I put down my spoon, appetite forgotten. There was a new strength in Carnarvon’s eyes that bothered me, left me feeling like an intruder, unwanted. His stare was almost a challenge, defying me to unravel the riddle of the mines on my own.
“Who is the Director?” I asked, pacing my words deliberately.
Perhaps he saw the growing frustration in my eyes, and the anger that lurked behind it. Or he too was tired of his own guessing-game. Either way, he also put down his spoon and finally began to explain, after a fashion.
“The Director lives in the mines,” he said, “or else it’s an integral part of it. Either. We don’t know much about it, except that it can go anywhere, any time it wants to. We don’t even know where it goes between appearances—I’ve never heard of it being seen topside— but we always know when it’s been.”
“’It’?” I asked. “I thought you were talking about someone in particular. Your superior, perhaps.”
“No. One of the early explorers coined the name, for whatever reason, and it’s as good as any other.”
He paused, watching me closely, waiting for a response.
“So what is it? A machine?”
“That’s certainly possible. The mines aren’t human-built. The ROTH made them; the ROTH left them here for us to plunder. Maybe they switched on some sort of security system before they left, and the Director is its enforcer.” He shrugged. “But few people really believe it’s an alien artifact.”
“Then someone must know about it, surely?”
“Just think for a second, before you jump to conclusions. It should be obvious. What if the ROTH didn’t leave? What if they’re still in here, somewhere?”
I stared at him. “Are you suggesting that the Director is an alien?”
“That’s the most popular explanation. More than one ROTH, perhaps. No-one’s seen it and lived. All we know is that it takes people working in the mines—usually the best, most talented. Those it comes for and doesn’t take, it kills.”
“You’re kidding.”
Carnarvon shook his head gravely. “It’s no joke down here. Deeper still, it’s positively morbid. Live in the mines for a while and the fact starts to get to you. You’re always wondering if it’ll come for you, and if you’ll be taken when it does.”
“I never heard any of this before.”
“Of course not. The Mine looks after itself. Hardly anybody who comes this deep leaves again. Those few who do leave hang around the surface for a while, and then go back Down. The Director is all part of the lure and the trap of Barnath, you see. No-one knows where it takes the ones it doesn’t kill.” He picked up his spoon and attacked his breakfast viciously. “That’s why I’m here. The mystery has me hooked.”
“And me? Why am I here?”
“To find your brother, of course.”
“Did the Director take him?”
Carnarvon paused between mouthfuls. “If you meet it, you can ask it yourself.”
I pushed my bowl aside and sealed my suit.
“Going somewhere?” asked Carnarvon, amused.
“Outside,” I said. “I need to think.”
I shouldered my way through a crowd of miners and headed out into the darkness. The face of the cut was hidden behind a low hill; the only light came from reflected haze and a crooked line of beacons strung across the grey-green dust that served for a floor on the fourth level.
I squatted on my haunches and regarded the empty view for a long while. It was like sitting on the face of a starless moon. I didn’t hear Carnarvon approach.
“Time to go,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Coming?”
I raised my head wearily.
“You say Martin disappeared from the next level?”
“Yes, the fifth. That’s what the records said, anyway.”
“Then I’m coming. At least that far.”
Even through the visor I could see his skeptical smile, curled like a question-mark as though he doubted my motives.
“He’s alive,” I insisted. “I can feel him.”
“If you say so.”
“All I want to do is find him and take him home. Is that so difficult?”
Carnarvon helped me to my feet, and we trudged back to the Shaft building. I expected to don our old clothes, but we didn’t.
“Pressure suits from here on,” he explained, as we waited for the cage to reach our level. “Just in case.”
The cage rattled to a halt and the doors opened. I regarded the interior with foreboding. Carnarvon didn’t hesitate, however, so I reluctantly followed.
The cage dropped downwards. Again I felt that strange sensation of giddiness half-way, but this time my companion chose to remain silent for the rest the journey, lost in thought.
~ * ~
FIVE
I was definitely lighter when I stepped from the cage. The disembarkation bay was an enormous room, sterile-white and brilliantly lit. Behind me, six identical airlocks opened into the wall; we had entered the chamber via the second from the right. A large section of the floor was transparent, and Carnarvon gestured that I should look down through it.
It took me a minute or so to find a sense of perspective. The view was surreal. Great blue sheets of energy slashed and hacked at something I couldn’t quite identify. A hill, I thought at first; then a mountain. It wasn’t until I realised that the dots drifting over the surface of the object were ore-lifters—themselves so huge they made men look like specks—that I guessed the incredible truth.
Trapped within the mines, orbiting slowly beneath my feet, was an entire planet.
“That’s impossible,” I breathed, as bolts of stupendous energy sheared free continent-sized chunks of rock. My vantage point was high—at least thirty thousand metres—and the view spectacular.
