Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (5 page)

It wasn’t until I met a man called Azimuth, a well-tanned mole from the sixth level, that I learned what fate was really awaiting me.

I happened across him in a bar on the North-east quadrant of the fifth level—a dirty man, dressed in his stained undersuit from further Up. He recognised my face, and came to join me at my table.

“I remember you,” he said. “You came here looking for your brother, right?”

“That’s right. Do you know anything about—?”

He laughed, anticipating my question. “No, no. I never met him. But I heard about you on the news circuits topside, before I came here.”

I frowned. “When was that?”

“Well, let me see, now. I came here five years ago, and I’d heard the story six months before that. Five and a half years, then. Sure, that’d be about right.”

I must have gaped at his words, for he laughed again at my confusion.

“You haven’t noticed yet?” he asked, misunderstanding. “Time is all fucked up down here. You arrived, what... ?”

“Fourteen days ago,” I forced out.

“And I’m in my sixth year, with the Director’s grace. Topside, it could’ve been centuries. You never know how long until you look.”

Azimuth didn’t stop there, but I hardly heard what he said. According to Martin’s records, he had worked in the Mines for two years—a fact I had initially dismissed as ridiculous. If time really was askew deep in the mines—a possibility I could not discredit, given the other wonders I had already witnessed—then the obstacles facing me were greater than I had imagined. But there was still hope.

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.