Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (6 page)

“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.

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.