Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams Read Online Free Page A

smile, curled like a question-mark as though he doubted my motives.
     
    “He’s alive,” I insisted. “I can feel him.”
     
    “If you say so.”
     
    “All I want to do is find him and take him home. Is that so difficult?”
     
    Carnarvon helped me to my feet, and we trudged back to the Shaft building. I expected to don our old clothes, but we didn’t.
     
    “Pressure suits from here on,” he explained, as we waited for the cage to reach our level. “Just in case.”
     
    The cage rattled to a halt and the doors opened. I regarded the interior with foreboding. Carnarvon didn’t hesitate, however, so I reluctantly followed.
     
    The cage dropped downwards. Again I felt that strange sensation of giddiness half-way, but this time my companion chose to remain silent for the rest the journey, lost in thought.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    FIVE
     
    I was definitely lighter when I stepped from the cage. The disembarkation bay was an enormous room, sterile-white and brilliantly lit. Behind me, six identical airlocks opened into the wall; we had entered the chamber via the second from the right. A large section of the floor was transparent, and Carnarvon gestured that I should look down through it.
     
    It took me a minute or so to find a sense of perspective. The view was surreal. Great blue sheets of energy slashed and hacked at something I couldn’t quite identify. A hill, I thought at first; then a mountain. It wasn’t until I realised that the dots drifting over the surface of the object were ore-lifters—themselves so huge they made men look like specks—that I guessed the incredible truth.
     
    Trapped within the mines, orbiting slowly beneath my feet, was an entire planet.
     
    “That’s impossible,” I breathed, as bolts of stupendous energy sheared free continent-sized chunks of rock. My vantage point was high—at least thirty thousand metres—and the view spectacular.
     
    “I know,” said Carnarvon, “but we’re mining it anyway. And it’s not that large, really—barely the size of Mars. Completely dead, of course, and metal-rich. It’ll keep the mines active for a century or two at least.”
     
    My gaze wandered from the planet, across the roof of the incomprehensible chamber. Giant habitats clung to the naked rock of the ‘roof’ like shellfish, upside down. Huge docking grapnels awaited ore-lifters ferrying material from the scarred surface below. Everywhere I looked, there were men and women in white pressure-suits, crawling like flies over an unimaginable carcass.
     
    “How many?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
     
    “Two and a half million,” replied Carnarvon, and I swallowed. I had in mind the unofficial government estimate of five thousand, which now seemed ludicrous in the face of what I was seeing.
     
    “Surely someone must have noticed?”
     
    “To date, no-one has.” Carnarvon unsealed his suit, crooking the helmet over his forearm like an old-timer. “As I said, people this deep rarely leave.”
     
    “But still, they had to come from somewhere —”
     
    “Exactly. A few, like your brother, come from the surface, drifting down through the levels over the years, but that still leaves us quite a large number short of the real population of the mine.”
     
    “Where, then?” I had a vision of the miners raising families, which I immediately discredited. Only an idiot would have children in a place like this.
     
    “We may never know the full answer to that question,” said Carnarvon. “Some miners come Up from the deeper levels without ever having gone Down in the first place.”
     
    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