Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (4 page)

I studied him suspiciously, wondering if he was playing me for a fool. He wasn’t. He was deadly serious.

But he had to be lying.

I too shucked my helmet and breathed the air of the fifth level. It tasted faintly electric, and of the population that had breathed it before me. I could still feel the weight of rock around me, defying the view through the window at my feet. A planet
within
a planet ... ?

I turned away from the sight. It was too much.

“Come on,” said Carnarvon. “We have to log ourselves in.” He took my arm and led me along the bay, towards a corridor. The narrow passageway ended in a desk.

A clerk behind a computer terminal greeted us patiently. “Names?” he asked.

Carnarvon gave him mine and added, “Skimmer,” when asked for my profession. The ease with which my identity had been redefined did not escape me: from quester to tourist to skimmer in less than two days. Had something similar happened to Martin? The clerk handed me a white, plastic ID card, which I absently tucked into a ziplock pouch.

Then it was Carnarvon’s turn. The clerk accepted the title, “Manager,” with little sign of being impressed.

“When?” he asked, tapping at the keyboard.

“‘45 to ‘55.”

“We had your predecessor through here last year,” said the clerk. “He lasted a month.”

“Taken?”

“Killed.” The clerk handed him a red card which Carnarvon stuck to the front of his suit. “You have a fortnight’s grace, you and your friend, after which you’ll have to find work.”

“Of course,” said Carnarvon, not at all fazed by the apparent insubordination. “Thank you.”

He commandeered an electric cart and drove me deeper into the habitat. Occasionally we passed a circular window in the floor, reminding me that beneath my feet lay not the earth my apparent weight suggested, but empty space and then something far more remarkable.

“You’ll probably be asking yourself the same questions I asked when I came here.” Carnarvon smiled at me sympathetically as he drove. “I was a fusion technician from Earth, so the first thing I said when I looked out that window was, ‘How do you pay your fuel bill?”‘ He chuckled self-depreciatingly. “It wasn’t until two years later that I learned where the energy actually comes from.”

“And where does it?” I croaked.

“Deeper still,” he said. “The next level powers the entire mine. The ROTH were far more advanced than we are. All the equipment in this chamber and the sixth were just lying around, waiting to be used. So we used it. We didn’t have to understand how it worked.”

Memory prompted me to ask: “I thought there were seven levels?”

“There are,” he said, but I could draw him no further on the issue of the last. Instead, he described life in the fifth: the way most of the mining on the planet is tele-operated; how the miners spend nearly all of their time in the ceiling habitats, only venturing to the surface to deal with circumstances that cannot be handled by automatics or remotes. The energy-lances are directed from a cluster of habitats in a segment of the level that has been designated North, coinciding with the magnetic field of the planet.

It was there, I learned, where Martin had worked. When I asked to be taken there first, Carnarvon smiled grimly.

“You haven’t grasped the scale yet, have you? It’ll take at least three days to get there by cart; one if we can requisition a shuttle.”

The corridor widened, became a busy thoroughfare. Miners in clean uniforms walked or drove by on unknown errands, and I watched them in silence, trying to remember what the surface— ‘home,’ I reminded myself—looked like.

But I couldn’t. It was too far away.

Carnarvon pulled us to a halt outside a small door.

“Clothes, food, and rest,” he said. “And then we keep going.”

I nodded numbly, and let myself be led inside.

Standard uniform on the fifth level is a white, cotton one-piece, fitted with numerous pockets and pouches. The outfits are comfortably simple—almost spartan. The food, however, is an order of magnitude better than that of the previous level, being the product of hydroponic gardens scattered across the ‘roof’.

“The ROTH left them, too,” said Carnarvon as we ate our way through real vegetables and soy-base steak.

“And the habitats?”

“Yes.” Carnarvon smiled wryly. “They were more like us than we give them credit for, most of the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, everyone down here regards the Director as almost godlike,” he said, “when it’s probably just a ROTH that eats the same food as us, and stands only a little taller.”

I finished my meal in silence, bothered by that thought. I put myself in the shoes of those first colonists, stumbling upon this tremendous cavern and its contents. What had they imagined they’d found? And why hadn’t research teams descended upon the mines from all corners of the inhabited galaxy?

I knew better than to ask for answers to these questions. All I could do was wait until the truth became clear on its own, however long that took.

When we’d finished our meal, Carnarvon drove us to a transport dock, where we caught a shuttle halfway to the Northern quadrant. The stubby craft swooped low over the planet below, granting me an unequalled view of the mining operations taking place. From this angle, the sprawl of habitats above resembled a colony of small, white mushrooms suspended from a distant ceiling—or a world of sealed cities, turned inside-out.

As we left the shuttle, a party of miners came towards us through the airlock umbilical. One called for my attention as he approached.

“Cavell, you old bastard, where’ve you been? It’s been ages, and you still owe me for Carole.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, staring at him. He was short, grizzled, and completely unfamiliar. “You must be thinking of my brother. We look the same.”

“No,” he said. “I remember you. We worked—”

One of his companions nudged him in the ribs.

“Oh, right,” he said. “You’re on your way Down.” He reached out for my hand and shook it. “The name’s Donahue, anyway. I guess I’ll meet you later.”

He entered the shuttle with his workmates. The doors closed on his smiling face, shutting out my confusion.

“What the hell?”

“It happens,” said Carnarvon. “You’ll get used to this sort of thing.”

“I don’t
want
to get used to it.” Mental exhaustion—too many riddles in too short a time—was taking its toll. “I just want to find out what happened to Martin and get out of here.”

“A little more patience.” Carnarvon smiled: a mixture of amusement and sympathy. “Not far now.”

We took another cart the rest of the way, through a network of evacuated tunnels that criss-crosses the roof of the sixth chamber. Like insects, we crawled for seven hours along this hollow web, inch by strange inch, while the world-within-a-world turn implacably below us.

Above the unnamed planet’s North pole, vast forces crackle through the dust-filled vacuum. Enormous bolts of static electricity split the nether sky, and the habitats echo with thunder. Martin’s old home, amidst all of this, trembles on the edge between stone and fire—just as many homes did, and still do, on this level.

A security officer showed us Martin’s file. It stated that he had worked in the habitat for no less than two years.

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “He’s only been missing for six weeks.”

She handed me a photo. “Is that him?”

I looked carefully. The man in the hologram was older than I remembered, but definitely Martin.

“Yes, it is,” I admitted, grudgingly. “But how do you explain—?”

“We don’t,” she said. “We just accept.”

Carnarvon took the file from her, winking. “Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s go see where he was taken.”

I followed him out of the administration building, hating the curl of amusement I saw in his profile. With the end of my quest in sight, the last thing I wanted to hear was more nonsense.

“This is crazy,” I stated.

“Sure,” he agreed pleasantly. “But blame the ROTH if you have to blame someone.”

We headed to a nearby building, where the files told us Martin had lived.

“He left his room at midnight,” read Carnarvon. “Going to meet a lover, apparently.”

We followed a series of corridors, all equally unremarkable, until Carnarvon brought me to a sudden halt.

“The cameras tracked him as far as here, then lost him.”

I looked around. The corridor was empty and featureless. There was no sign that anybody had passed this way at all, let alone died here.

“What else does the file say?” I asked, staring at the blank, polished floor.

“Not much. Martin turned a corner, walked four steps and vanished. The general consensus, as you guessed, is that the Director took him.”

“Where?”

“No-one knows.” Carnarvon put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged his hand away. “I don’t believe you’re telling me everything.”

“Of course not. But I don’t know everything, do I?”

“Bullshit.” His flippancy annoyed me, fuelled my growing frustration. “This has been one long cover-up right from the beginning. You told me I’d understand when I saw the fifth level. Well, I’m here and I’ve seen it but I still don’t understand. Why can’t you just tell me?”

“I—“

“My brother’s disappeared, for God’s sake!”

“Look around you. Can
you
understand what’s going on here? No-one can. Your brother was taken in full view of a security camera and it saw nothing. Four steps—zap—gone. Where? If I knew I’d tell you, I swear. We lose something like three hundred people a year under similar circumstances, and nearly triple that many are killed—”

“So why doesn’t somebody do something?”

“Such as? What do you suggest? This has been happening for one hundred years; if something could have been done, we would have done it already.”

“So close the mines.”

“We can’t. They’re too productive. And the odds of the Director striking is statistically insignificant, anyway. You’ve more chance of dying on the surface.”

I felt caged in, and wanted to strike something. “You’re lying.”

“Not at all—”

“You think you can palm me off with false records and insanities—”

“If you’ll just calm down—”

“No! I refuse to believe that Martin is dead. He’s down here somewhere and I’m going to find him.”

I turned on my heel and walked angrily away.

“How?” Carnarvon called after me. “You’re not the first to have tried, you know!”

I ignored him. Grief, anger, and a sense of betrayal fought for control of my mind, clouding my thoughts and judgement. I knew that Martin was alive somewhere; I could feel it in my bones. I
wasn’t going to let the matter go so easily. Martin would have done the same for me, I was sure, had our roles been reversed.

I wandered the corridors, losing myself in the maze of the habitat, not caring if Carnarvon followed. Ten minutes passed before I regained my senses and realised that I was alone. When I did, I set out to begin my own investigation.

I was allocated a room near his and started asking questions.

No-one could give me hard facts about my brother. Few people remembered him, as though years had passed since his disappearance. One even went so far as to suggest that it
had
been years, but I dismissed her as a liar, part of the conspiracy keeping me from the truth, even though she insisted that she had been his lover.

My two weeks of grace passed quickly and fruitlessly, spent for the most part in mess-halls and recreation facilities, always asking questions. The citizens of the fifth level, although sympathetic, were victims of the same passivity to fate espoused by the security officer who had shown me Martin’s file. I despaired of ever learning the truth, but for the wrong reasons: I wondered what Martin had done to warrant such a thorough white-wash of his sudden departure.

And always, everywhere I looked, was the strangeness of the mines, the sheer improbability of it all, from the planet below to the habitats above. I felt overwhelmed by odd details gleaned from the people I interviewed: the way power was beamed by maser from the south ‘pole’ rather than sent along cables; the slag-pit, an apparently bottomless hole in the ‘ceiling’ that was used to dispose of waste materials; the odd discrepancy between the mass of minerals extracted from the planet and that which arrived on the surface of Barnath, the latter being roughly one-sixth of the former; and the cluster of ROTH artifacts on the planet itself, which, although active, seemed to serve no other function than to send bright sparks of ball lightning hurtling around the sundered crust. But I refused to submit to the disorientation; I vowed that I would remain undistracted until I knew the truth. My life on the surface was waiting. I had to find Martin and bring him back, no matter how long it took.

So great was my blindness that I disregarded what was staring me in the face: that, in order to comprehend what had happened to Martin, I would first have to comprehend the Mines themselves, a task for which I was both physically and mentally unprepared.