Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams, page 4
I forced myself out of my daze. “The newscast,” I said. “What did it say?”
Azimuth hesitated. “You sure you want to know?”
I gripped him firmly on the arm. “Tell me.”
“All I remember is the headline: ‘Brothers separated, then reunited by death.’ Very tragic. I don’t know whether that helps you, or makes things worse, but there you go. You wanted to hear it.”
I gaped incredulously. Reunited, I echoed to myself, by death?
He obviously interpreted my stunned silence as a sign of comprehension and barrelled upwards from his seat, chuckling deep in his belly. “Be seein’ you, maybe.”
When he had gone, I regarded my drink with despair, thinking dull, slow thoughts. The truth was like a heavy weight—the weight of miles of solid earth—settling upon my shoulders.
When my glass was empty, I wandered ‘home’, alone.
That evening, I tracked down Carnarvon. He was still in the Northern habitat, easily reached by internal vidcom.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said. “I knew you would.”
I hesitated for a moment, balanced on the edge of total acceptance. When the words eventually came, it didn’t sound like me speaking:
“Who did you lose?”
“My wife.” His voice was even; his eyes reflected the sympathy I offered, unwanted. “It took me a month to realise I’d never find her by looking. When I tried to escape back to Earth by one of the other Shafts, I ended up on Barnath, where I decided to stay. For all the years I’ve been Manager, I’ve been waiting for someone like you to bring me back.”
“And here we are.”
“Yes. Here we are. Looking without finding again.”
The silence claimed us again. I had only one question left.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“Sure.” He smiled. “The Grand Tour isn’t over yet.”
We met the next day and logged out of the fifth level. The Shaft accepted our pressure-suited bodies indifferently, and we dropped like stones into the depths of an impossible earth.
~ * ~
SIX
The sixth level opens onto the fiery face of a sun.
Our period of grace had expired. I found work as an energy-scoop operator, and met the man called Donahue who had greeted me in the embarkation bay of the fifth level. He didn’t remember me, of course, but we quickly became friends. He helped me adjust to the artificial gravity of B station and taught me everything I needed to learn about my new job. It wasn’t long before my tan was as deep as his, and my acceptance of the impossible almost as automatic.
The sixth level does that to you. It overwhelms, it terrifies, it can even drive a person mad. But those who make it this far and stay for any length of time tend to have been a little crazy in the first place.
Carnarvon’s time as surface Manager served him in good stead, even though the post was irrelevant to the deeper levels. He worked in administration, somewhere in the heart of the central gravity-platform. We met once a week to discuss our progress.
Progress where? It didn’t matter. We were both marking time before the inevitable.
Then, six months after Carnarvon and I had entered the mines, he didn’t show for our weekly meeting. I dug around for information and eventually learned that the Director had come for him during the week. His body was never found.
I waited a month before moving on. My link with the surface had been severed; there was no point staying any longer than I had to. As though I had oscillated until then from a stretched rubber band, I suddenly found myself cut free. I started to fall.
The level supervisor was sympathetic.
There was only one way left to go, at the very end.
~ * ~
SEVEN
The cage opens and I float into a transparent sphere nearly one hundred metres across fixed to the base of the Shaft like a bubble on a straw. There is no-one present to watch or to censure me as I drift through the zero gravity, press my face against the surface of the bubble and stare outwards.
My eyes adjust eventually. Instead of darkness outside the bubble, I see stars.
Stars ...
The Shaft ends here. There is no Downward path any more— only Up, and Up, and Up. Forever.
There appears to be no way to leave the bubble, but part of me wonders what would happen if I could. Could I travel through space and re-enter the mines from above, thus completing a strange loop of navigation?
Even here, it seems, there are no answers. There are only questions—and me, staring ape-like at the sky. What could be stranger than this? Like the first colonists, I have stepped into the alien Mines of Barnath and found everything I didn’t expect: space beyond comprehension, time in disarray, resources without end, and ...
I suddenly realise what else the first colonists found, what prevented word from spreading across the galaxy, and what halted the scientific jihad aimed like an arrow at the heart of the mines. Only one discovery could have been sufficient:
People. People have always been here, wandering twisted loops through time, crossing and recrossing, occasionally colliding. They greeted the first explorers of the deeper levels, and integrated them seamlessly into a pre-existing society. Later arrivals were likewise assimilated, lured by mysteries and wonders in abundance, by a curiosity so great that not even the threat of death deterred them.
Whether the mines themselves are from the future or from the distant past, or whether they exist entirely beyond time, doesn’t matter. Nothing here is certain, except that humanity has moved in and has therefore been here forever, entangled in some unknowable cosmic scheme.
Maybe the ROTH never existed at all. Even the Director might be human, with a purpose of his own.
My skin crawls, as though across an incomprehensible distance I am being watched.
On the heels of that thought comes an impatience, a need to move—in any direction. Time is passing around me like the heavy surges of a deep sea. A minute here might be a million hours on the surface, for all I know; or a heartbeat a whole lifetime. I want to travel, to be taken further. Now.
But the Director will come, I remind myself, only when it comes. Not before. Of that I am reasonably certain, if nothing else.
My ghostly reflection stares back at me with Martin’s face—the face of my other half, my twin. A not-so-distant light in the alien starscape moves like a tear down the face of my reflection. I sense that he is waiting for me, wherever he is.
<
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO:
......................................................GHOSTS OF THE FALL
I’ve happily spent most of my life in Adelaide, the much-maligned (murder) capital of South Australia. It follows therefore that I’ve destroyed it one or two times in the course of my writing. Or if not actually destroyed it, as in “White Christmas”, then at least put it through the wringer.
This is the oldest piece in Magic Dirt. Written in October 1992, it was my fortieth short story and signals, to my mind at least, a clear boundary between the work I’d been doing up to that point and the work I produced afterwards. Not only did this story win a prize in the Writers of the Future Contest, thereby introducing me to the very wide world of professional writers, but it was the first for which I was paid a significant sum. It also earned me my very first Ditmar nomination (although learning later that my story made the ballot by virtue of just one recommendation did take the shine off that milestone somewhat).
Looking back on this story now, sixteen years older and with almost three million published words behind me, I remember my love of the opening and closing lines. I remember researching the bells of Adelaide’s St Peters cathedral and learning that they do indeed have names. I remember trying to capture Hogarth’s feelings as he negotiated the social complexities of a world he wasn’t yet adult enough to understand. The rising tide of forgetfulness has taken the rest.
I do, however, remember struggling through poverty, crappy jobs, ill-health and other obstacles in the hope of one day being a full-time writer—not so different from Hogarth’s post-apocalyptic squalor, now I come to think about it (except I never had any luck growing my own vegetables). Doubt that I had made the right decision was inevitable. Would I ever look back and wish I’d put my energies elsewhere?
I once wrote that if I could go back and meet my younger self, I would comfort him by paraphrasing Hogarth’s closing thoughts from this story: It’s worth it, because I know I’ll go the distance.
But the truth is, the effort’s sufficient unto itself. If I was writing for any purely material reason, I would have given it away long ago. Our jobs, just like our homes, should be expressions of who we are, not projections of who we think we ought to be. It’s good to aspire, but if a foundation is out of whack no edifice will stay up long.
Magic Dirt marks the semi-miraculous feat of keeping this particular house of cards elevated for eighteen years. If I’d known something like this lay in the future, I would’ve been a whole lot more chill in 1992.
~ * ~
GHOSTS OF THE FALL
A warm current rolled in overnight, bringing with it the stench of death. When I awoke at dawn, my nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting mucus. Gagging, I rolled over and reached for my stained filtermask. When it was in place, I struggled from my hammock and squinted from the arbour of my room. The sun, eclipsed by the shadowy bulk of a vine-tangled building, was feeble and brown, but enough of its light filtered between the towers to allow a rough study.
Plumes of steam rose from the waters far below, which, although slightly lower in level than they had been the night before, still drowned the groundward floors of the city. Black shapes hunted lazily, deceptively small from my altitude: crocs, searching for food.
A dull flash of light from the top of the opposite building caught my eye. Davo was up already, adjusting his solar panels. Every drop of energy was precious, even that which struggled through poisoned clouds on a day such as this. Rubbing my eyes and trying in vain to make the seal of my mask comfortable against cheekbones and jaw, I prepared to face the morning.
A warm current and a brown dawn, I thought. Someone, or something, will die today ...
Max, my foster, had been up and working for some time. He greeted me as I emerged from the access stairway in the centre of the rooftop garden.
“‘Morning, Hogarth.” He put down his hoe in order to wipe the sweat from his brow. Viewed from the top of the building Sol was a malign ball hovering low over the yellow-smudged horizon. Although I knew the colour was caused by pollution and dust in the lower atmosphere, I couldn’t help but feel as though the sun itself had been corrupted. Under its light, Max looked twenty years older: his skin was pallid and blotchy, and his white hair seemed thinner than cobwebs.
I could almost see the leaves of our plants withering along with us.
“Whew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Bad tides.”
Max shrugged. “Got to have them, I suppose. Balances the good times.”
“Kris’ll be disappointed.”
Max’s brown eyes crinkled. Kris Parker, one of the joint chiefs of our community, had a theory that the ecosystem was gradually stabilising. Bad tides, which occurred about once every month, confounded him.
“This ain’t nothing on the old days.” Max picked up the hoe again and tilted his hat to ward off the sun. “I don’t suppose you remember it that well.”
I didn’t, although I’d heard the stories often enough. “Has Davo been over?”
“Earlier. He was asking for you. Take the morning off, if you want to go see him.”
“Thanks, Max. I’ll make it up.”
“No worries, son. Have a little fun for a change.”
He bent back to his work. For a thoughtful moment I, the youngest in the community, studied him, the eldest. We made an odd couple, but I knew I’d miss him when he succumbed. The thought alone was unpleasant. Max had been my foster for so many years that I had almost forgotten my real father. But whether I liked it or not, poison or accident would take him in the end, as they took everyone.
Perhaps he noticed my scrutiny, or sensed my mood.
“Git,” he said, without lifting his head, “before I put you to work.”
I ran off through the garden and down the access ladder, mindful of the broken rungs. From the third floor down stretched a rope bridge to the building in which Davo lived. I ran across, not looking down, and was exactly halfway when the earthquake hit.
But for the bells, I would’ve had no warning. With a gentle clatter at first, then with a strident jangling, every metal mobile and brass clapper in the city began to sound. I clutched the sides of the bridge and wrapped a rope around my ankle. As the quake set the bridge jumping, I hung on for dear life, too frightened to open my eyes, thinking of crocs and poisoned currents.
There came a deep, resonant bong, and I realised with a chill of fear that the old Cathedral bell was sounding, as it hadn’t more than once in my memory. Great Fred chimed four times in two minutes, and those two minutes felt like a lifetime to me, suspended between two derelict skyscrapers by little more than homespun string. Beneath the ringing, I could hear masonry falling and screams, some distant, some near; all perhaps reliving the Fall.
When the clatter died down and the shocks faded, I released the breath I hadn’t known I was holding and crawled the rest of the way to Davo’s building. Once over the threshold, I lay trembling in the darkness, trying not to cry.
I am too young to have memories of the War, but I do faintly recall the Fall: the clouds that covered the sky, the months of darkness, the constant tremors. I dream occasionally of the nine waves that swept the old world away. Sometimes I even see the face of my long-dead father as he presses me into an elevator crammed with women, heading for higher ground.
The elders of Adelaide didn’t talk about these times, except in whispers. Much of my knowledge regarding the origins of our community was overheard and therefore patchy and incomplete. I suspect that, given time and allowing me descendants, it would have developed into a full-blown mythology. I truly believed that ogres had attacked us from the sky, hurling rocks upon our heads and leaving us to drown, cursed with childlessness and disease.
It wasn’t until I was about eleven years old that Davo sat me down and filled in a few blanks. He explained that the “ogres” had been the forces of the OEG, the Off Earth Government; that there had been just one massive rock, like an iceberg; and that the sterility and sickness were the results of radiation and industrial poisons set free by the Fall.
The descent of that single rock marked a decisive end to the long and bitter war between Earth and space. Davo spoke of melting icecaps, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and shifting continental plates. I understood very little of what he said, and in a way I was glad, for the words themselves sounded grim. Some things, however, I could understand. What we called magnetic north had once been south-west. Inconstant seasons were the result of a new wobble to the Earth’s axis. Every time it rained or a calved iceberg drifted near us, I wondered whether it was composed of water from Earth or from space. And the reason why we, the citizens of Adelaide, had no visitors was because no one else was left.
On the roofs of our flooded city we lingered, alone and forgotten.
A fluke of geography had kept the buildings from falling. Currents of clean, cold water flowing from the melting Antarctic icecap kept us from being poisoned. We survived on plants grown from seedlings found on nearby islands. The islands—which had once been hilltops—were themselves uninhabitable due to a proliferation of waste, but they had provided valuable resources during the early years. As our numbers dwindled from the original thousand to a bare one hundred, we learned to manage our crops better, and even bred chickens to balance our diet.
Few ever forgot the fact that we had survived the Fall by nothing short of a miracle, or that our existence was still tenuous. We were reminded of that every time the Earth’s new tilt precipitated a shift in currents and we received a flow of the dreaded warm tide. On such occasions, we were forced to rely on tank water until the tides once again turned—although other species, such as the giant crocs from the nearby islands, enjoyed the poisonous current. Strange mutants, rotting and twisted, were carried by the dark waters; poor food by any creature’s standards, but something where little existed elsewhere.
