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

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,”