Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams, page 5
Kris Parker had a list of the things that should have killed us— and could still do so—which he showed to anyone who began to forget the legacy of the past. Most just learned to hide the scars a little better and got on with life—as though we had always lived on the tops of buildings in the middle of a shallow, fresh-water ocean.
Except in my dreams of the Fall, we always had. That was the trouble with being fifteen years old when the world was ten years dead.
Max and I lived in one of the smaller buildings on the outskirts of the flooded city. Davo’s was much larger. A monster of more than sixty storeys, its upper levels were stepped and thick with plants. Despite that, it was home to just ten people. He occupied one entire floor of the ‘scraper’, of which only a small percentage was devoted to himself. The bulk of it contained every electrical good he had scavenged from the remains of the old world. Not the complex, specialised equipment—but the gadgets, like coffee machines, batteries, electric screwdrivers, televisions and digital clocks.
I loved browsing through the relics, trying to imagine what they could possibly have been for. Few of them worked, but Davo could fix almost anything if left to tinker unhindered. I remember my absolute faith in his wizardry, tinged with only a small amount of envy. Even the air smelt better in there, as though the presence of so much of the past somehow cleansed it of the present.
Davo’s biggest problem—apart from those, like Kris, who felt better with the old technology forgotten—was power. The old solar panels—thoughtfully stored away by one of the founders, and requiring only cleaning and a technical mind to get them working again—were efficient but their output was limited. Furthermore, people often accused Davo of “stealing” more than his fair share of power, even though he had been the one to give it back to us in the first place.
He rarely spoke to me about the relics he was fiddling with, but I sometimes overheard him talking about these things with Max. Their secrecy bothered me for no other reason than that I felt left out, as children often do when barred from something adult.
As I mounted the steps to his level, I was greeted by an even greater state of disorganisation than usual. A couple of heavy racks had collapsed in the quake, spilling multicoloured wires and transistors like a tide of tiny bugs across the floor. I could hear Davo cursing somewhere in the depths of the workshop, but couldn’t see him. A strange sound filled the air: a whisper like, yet quite unlike, the hissing of cold rain or the crackling of fire.
“Hello?” I called, taking off my mask.
A ragged reply came from under a mound of old TV screens. “Shee-it! Is that you, Hogey? Give me a hand, would you?”
I ran to where he lay pinned beneath a cupboard. Taking a corner, I heaved until it lifted enough for him to wriggle free. I let go once he rolled away, and the crash reverberated for long seconds.
“You okay?” I asked, bending over him. He clutched his leg, which was turning a strange purple colour.
“Fucking thing!” I didn’t know whether he referred to his leg or the cupboard that had injured it. “Dislocated my bloody knee, I think. Hurts like buggery anyhow. Help me over to the tube.” I gripped him under one armpit and helped him limp across the room. A length of hose dangled from the ceiling, culminating in a small nozzle which Davo held to his lips.
“Wait,” he said, waving a hand at the bench. “Turn it off. Big red button—push it!” There was a machine on the workbench—a large metal box, its face adorned with knobs and dials and a blank screen in one corner. I did as he said and the hissing sound died away.
“What is it?” I asked, staring at it in wonder.
“Later.” He blew hard into the nozzle and I heard whistling from a higher floor echo down the stairwell. Davo hopped on one leg with the nozzle at his ear, anxious for a reply.
“Hello?” said a voice from the tube, faint and male.
“It’s Davo. Is Jerrie around?”
“Yeah. Somewhere.”
“I need to speak to her.”
“Hang on, I’ll ask.” After a long pause, the voice returned. “Sorry, but she’s busy right now, repairing the garden.”
“Tell her it’s urgent.”
“It won’t make any difference.” The distant voice sounded amused. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Davo.”
“Okay, thanks anyway.” Davo hung up the tube. “Shit. Stupid bitch.”
I looked at him, shocked. For me—going through puberty with Adelaide’s male-to-female ratio at more than seven-to-three and no-one at all near my age—any woman was to be regarded with near-reverence, especially one who was ostensibly single, such as Jerrie.
“Bloody cow.”
“Shall I go get her?” I asked, wondering if they’d argued.
“No.” Davo leaned some of his weight on his leg, and winced. “I really don’t think I’ve done anything too serious. If you want, though, you could run up and get some cabbage leaves and a bandage.”
“Okay.” Cabbage leaves were good for muscle injuries.
“And if you do happen to see Jerrie, tell her I’d like to talk to her later. Just talk, if she asks.”
I headed for the stairwell. Rapidly winded by the humidity and the mask, I was gasping by the time I reached the rooftop. I needed permission before taking the leaves and sought Jerrie herself rather than anyone else. She was tending one of the gardens, her sun-browned and exercised figure distinctive among the others.
I stammered a hesitant greeting as she stood upon catching sight of me. I explained why I needed the leaves, and that Davo wanted to see her later. She frowned at “just talk,” but I didn’t pry into their affairs.
“He’s not badly hurt, is he?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “He reckons he’ll be okay.”
She leaned close to whisper in my ear. “Is the radio working?”
I frowned. “The what?”
“Never mind.” She backed away. “Tell him I’ll be down later.”
I nodded and headed back downstairs, clutching the leaves and bandage she had given me.
Davo had sat on the floor but was otherwise where I had left him. Together we bound his leg and manoeuvred him into the hammock. Only then did I ask: “Davo, what’s a radio?”
He stared at me blankly for a moment, until he realised. “Of course! You wouldn’t remember—you’re too young! Christ.” He reached for my arm. “Help me back up and I’ll show you.”
He hobbled painfully over to the workbench and settled into a stool in front of the mysterious machine, mumbling about waves through the air and antennae and frequencies—more things I didn’t understand. Talking across distances using electricity, or something like it, sounded impossible to me; only his matter-of-factness convinced me I might be wrong.
“It’s an old CB-V, practically a collector’s item but it works— that’s the important thing.” He twiddled with knobs and aligned metal rods. I watched him, fascinated.
“Okay. Listen.” He turned a knob and the unearthly hiss returned, more softly this time.
We both listened closely, I expecting voices, he something else entirely. Both of us were disappointed.
“Damn.” He rummaged around the workbench for a length of wire. “The quake must have fucked up the ionosphere or something.” He detached a metal rod and fixed one end of the wire to it. Handing it to me, he said, “Hang this out the window. Don’t let anyone see.”
I did as he asked. The stench of decay was stronger in the dull sunlight, and I held my breath until I got the rod in position. He waved me back and I hurried to his side.
He fiddled with knobs for a few minutes until, breathing a sigh of gratification, he leaned onto his stool and motioned for me to listen closely. The hiss grew louder and louder until I could hardly think.
“Hear it?” Davo shouted above the din, flapping his hand open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
I watched the hand and listened. A sound rose out of the chaos, a note repeating in time with his gesture:
… pip-pip-pip-pip-pip …
I stared at Davo in confusion, and nodded my head. I could hear the sound all right, but had no idea what it meant. Davo smiled triumphantly and killed the noise.
The sudden silence was eerie, until Davo filled it: “It’s a beacon,” he said, his voice trembling.
“A what?”
He did his best to explain. “Imagine you’re on the top of your building and I’m on the top of mine. You want to talk to me, but it’s too far to shout. All you have is a mirror. How do you attract my attention?”
“I guess I’d use the mirror.”
“Of course—reflecting the sun until I see you. That’s what a beacon is: a repeated flash, but of sound not light, carried through the air by radio waves.”
“So ... ?” I was breathless at the thought gradually dawning.
“So somebody’s out there.”
“And they’re trying to get our attention?”
Davo’s face was very serious when he replied: “Maybe. I hope so. You see, the great advantage of having this old CB-V is that we can do more than receive. We could transmit, talk to them, find out who they are—if we wanted to.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“Have you tried?”
He looked guilty, but was saved by the baying of a horn. I was about to press him, but Davo cocked his head to listen, and put a finger over his mouth.
I listened too. The horn-player, having attracted the attention of everyone in the city, rattled out a short, staccato code almost too quick for me to follow, then wound down with one final blast. A few horns replied, echoing raucously among the towers.
Davo winced as he shifted his leg to a more comfortable position. “So this is it, the excuse they’ve been waiting for. They’ve finally called a Council.”
“They always do after a quake.”
He smiled wryly. “But not always just to find out if some poor bastard’s been killed.”
“I don’t understand.”
He pulled another face, and I suggested he should go back to bed. He could see the sense in that, despite himself, and, after switching off the radio, allowed me to manhandle him back to his hammock.
“Can I ask you for another favour?”
I nodded.
“I need to go to the Council meeting tonight,” he said. “Would you and Max could help me get there?”
“Sure. I’ll ask Max, anyway.”
“Thanks.” He leaned back into the hammock and regarded me through half closed eyelids. “You’d better go do some work, seeing you’ll miss the night because of this damned bureaucratic bullshit.”
I nodded, although reluctant to leave the wizard’s den of his workshop. Even mysteries adults refused to explain were preferable to tilling soil and killing insects.
“You’re a good kid,” he said, before I left. “Don’t tell anyone what I showed you.”
The afternoon passed slowly. I helped Max prune our crop of tomatoes and carry some ripe vegetables into the depths of our building, where the relative coolness would keep them fresh. As I performed my chores, my attention kept straying beyond the confines of the rooftop garden. I wondered who might be out there, across the seemingly endless ocean, and if they really were talking to us.
The sea was deep to the west, almost navy blue at the horizon; eastwards it grew shallower and lighter in colour as it approached the islands. Waves played on the distant beaches, white fingernails appearing and disappearing as though vast, submerged hands were reaching for the surface. Birds were few and far between when a warm tide happened upon us, and only the odd dark speck disturbed the hazy tranquillity of the eastern horizon that day.
As recently as four years earlier, I had gone with Max and a few others on an expedition to Barker, the nearest of the islands. We were collecting wood to light a bonfire on Council Tower—a scheme devised by a man named Cameron Dennis, who wanted to see if there were any other survivors nearby. The Council had forbidden the use of the city’s store of wood, so we had to go to the islands to collect fuel.
We took even more stringent precautions than normal, wrapping ourselves from head to foot in old plastic and leather to keep out the poison, and ensuring our masks were equipped with triple the normal thickness of filters. Even so, the terrible malignance of the soil seemed to eat at us as we hacked at the mutated trees. One of our number scratched himself on an axe, and died two weeks later of fever.
What I remember most clearly is the return to Adelaide. The three heavily laden boats were rowed by our strongest men—one of whom was Max—and they hurried through the thickening gloom, oars splashing and creaking with effort. I crouched at the foremost point of our boat, staring ahead at the vision of our home silhouetted against the setting sun.
So flat and still was the sea that the buildings appeared to rise out of the surface of a shining mirror. Their reflections stabbed deep into the water, as though Adelaide were a city of crystal anchored to the very heart of the earth. Occasionally, a beam of light flashed through one of the abandoned floors, and my spirits soared, uplifted by the sight.
Then the light changed. The skyscrapers darkened, became slender pillars of blackness like the petrified legs of an enormous creature sinking into the sea. I’d never seen a gravestone—our bodies were burned or dumped into the sea—but I knew what they were, and what they meant to me. The place I called home was made of tombs, archetypal symbols of the empty, final flesh. Within ten, maybe twenty years, we would be gone, except perhaps for me and a few of the younger ones. Not long after, the buildings themselves would succumb to the acids that ate at their foundations and topple into the ocean. Adelaide would disappear without trace.
The sun set, like the slamming of a door, and everything went dark.
When the expedition returned, we unloaded the wood, hauled it up Council Tower and heaped it on a concrete block. Disaster struck when we tried to light it. Chemicals had so permeated the wood that it refused to burn, no matter how hard we tried. Eventually it was thrown into the sea and the attempt to signal fellow survivors abandoned.
As the sun slowly crept toward the horizon on the day Great Fred chimed four times, I was reminded of that venture.
“Do you think anybody’s out there?” I asked Max as we finished our jobs for the day.
My foster looked at me carefully, his grey eyes both amused and saddened. “I don’t think so, son. Why?”
“Just curious, I guess.” The day faded in a wash of deep browns and reds, tending to black. “Whatever happened to Cameron Dennis?” I asked, realising that I hadn’t seen him for a long time.
“He killed himself when the bonfire project failed.”
“Oh.” I was tempted to ask how, but could guess the answer. The preferred method of suicide was to leap from a building and be killed upon impact with the forbidding waters below.
We were silent as stars appeared one by one in the grey sky. The first to emerge were the Strange Stars: three brilliant points of light hanging over the northern horizon, always brightest at the end of the day. The Strange Stars had paths of their own, entirely separate from the circle of the heavens, and they’d always fascinated me. They represented change and mystery in my otherwise immutable world.
I watched them with renewed interest until Max handed me a sack of compost.
“Take this down to the storeroom,” he said, “then we’ll head off to the Council.”
I obediently put aside my thoughts and hurried down the stairwell. When I returned, Max had a bag full of spare produce ready to take with us.
We crossed the bridge to Davo’s building. My friend waited for us there, hopping nervously back and forth on a pair of makeshift crutches. Jerrie was not present, having already gone to Council Tower.
“She means well,” said Max. “Perhaps a little too well for the likes of you.”
“She’s brainwashed, you mean,” Davo laughed bitterly. “Tell it like it is, you old bastard.”
The three of us inched our way up the four flights of stairs to the bridge connecting Davo’s home to the next building. I took the crutches and the bag while Max hoisted Davo onto his back, where the technician clung like a giant child. Slowly, we inched our way across the bridge, I prayed all the while that there would be no repeat of that day’s quake.
There wasn’t. A light breeze had sprung up, dispelling the fog rising from the water. The night was clear and silent. Gap-toothed buildings surrounded us like silhouettes of all the world’s dead cities, immense and hollow. Five bridges ahead, we could hear a whisper of voices from where the Council gathered.
