Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (44 page)

“If you cannot answer that question,” she said, “then your understanding of what it means to be a reve is incomplete, and your ability to make an objective decision hopelessly inadequate.
Adieu.”

The only sound she made as she left the room was the rustle of silk on the carpet, swishing softly like a breeze out of his life.

~ * ~

Ten o’clock came slowly, but eventually the ponderous airship docked at
Le Chateau de la Mort Dorée’s
departure platform. Thick cables tethered it to ancient wooden posts as the whining of its electric fans ebbed. The massive, rocking balloon shuddered once as it surrendered itself to earth-bound will, then became still.

Martin, standing in a chill draft blowing straight down from the mountain’s snow-capped summit, watched the gondola’s ramp unfold towards him with half a mind. The rest was still in his room, catching up on the night’s events. It was hard to believe that he was already leaving. The short flight to Jungfrau connected with an orbital shuttle leading half-way around the world where, on his ranch in Texas, Arthur Winterford waited. His uncle would want a detailed report of every event, every word, every insinuation. Martin, as would-be reve, had been in a privileged position to gather information.

What
had
he learned? That the Change was fraught with danger, yes, and that the reves were afraid of what he might do to upset the delicate balance of world affairs, when he emerged from the Change the founder of a new House. Nothing new, in other words, nothing critical. Even in one of their many homes, the reves had been judicious with their secrets.

In a perverse way, that made the Reve Guillard’s offer tempting. It almost made sense to consult a reve when plotting their downfall — although his uncle would kill him if he took advantage of it.

The more he thought about it, the more tempted he was to cut ties with everyone and to continue as a free agent, following whatever impulses he felt at the time, or none at all.

But... Freedom? As a reve? He doubted it.

“We can’t force you to do anything,” the blonde had said, and for the first time he truly appreciated what the words meant to him. And to Spyro Xenophou — for whom volition hadn’t even entered the equation.

Suddenly, Martin understood.

Reves were dead. The fact that they could still participate in the world of the living was irrelevant: the nanomolecular agents behind the mystery of revenation ripped the life from them as surely as a forty-metre fall would kill a mortal human. All biological needs were left behind in the process, including the need to eat, drink, breathe, sleep and die; to a certain extent, the senses, particularly those of taste and smell, were also muted. In exchange, they received total mastery over their flesh — the ability to produce an erection at will, for instance — and potentially eternal life. But the oldest parts of the psyche sometimes refused to accept the bad things with the good, and compelled them to fight the thought of death being something to accept and to put behind them, rather than something to dread.

Where that fight would lead him, Martin had no way of telling. What he
did
know was what must have gone through Spyro Xenophou’s mind mid-coitus with the brunette. Faced with one single, yet fundamental, aspect of his new incarnation, the battle had been won. Or lost, depending on the point of view.

Only then had Xenophou realised what he had done.

Enough,
he had said. A farewell, certainly — but to what? The brunette, or life? Or an eternity existing only as a poor facsimile of what he had once been, driven by needs and urges that had risen to fill the ones he had left behind forever?

The conductor whistled from the gondola, and the few passengers began to make their way towards the ramp. Martin picked up his suitcase and did the same, bidding farewell, for now, to the reves of Fool’s-Death House.

One month to go. There was so much to see and do before he closed the door on the mortal part of his life. And he didn’t want to miss out on anything, while he still had the chance.

It was going to be a long month. He would make certain of that. And a very long afterlife to follow.

<>

~ * ~

PASSING THE BONE

With my right hand I absently finger the thumb-bone of my great-great-great-grandfather, Maxwell Owen. The ancient phalanx has a hole for a leather thong or chain drilled through its mid-point, and has been hollowed lengthwise to act as a crude whistle. My Dad left it to me when he died, and I’ve kept it handy ever since—usually around my neck, although occasionally, like now, I prefer to hold it in my hand. The official story, for friends, is that old Max carved it himself after his thumb was blown off during a war somewhere, but the truth is that he did it on his death-bed while waiting for the rot to finish off the rest of him.

Sometimes if I blow through it hard enough it makes a noise that might be called musical. Other times it seems to whisper directly into my mind: the ghost of the great-great-great-grandad I never met in life, ossified for eternity yet giving me advice when I most need it.

If I concentrate, I can hear him saying:
Hurry, Billy ... Hurry ...

Or so I’d like to believe. Being undead doesn’t mean you can’t be sentimental as well as practical. Within two days I won’t be able to move very well—maybe not at all, if what happened to Dad is anything to go by. And to reach Sydney in time I do need to hurry, no matter who tells me.

I clench my fist around the thumb-bone in my pocket and push my foot down hard on the accelerator.

I have been dead for seven hours and Coober Pedy is hundreds of kilometres behind me. When I stopped to refill the tank at Port Augusta not long ago, the young attendant looked at me a little strangely. Maybe I’ve started to smell. I don’t know; it’s hard to tell. Probably. For the first couple of hours, rigor was insidious. I had to keep stopping to stretch my limbs; otherwise my fingers locked around the wheel and my head pointed stubbornly forward, refusing to turn either left or right. That was the worst of it: not knowing if I would be able to react in an emergency.

I feel a little more limber now, although perhaps that isn’t entirely a good thing. I don’t know much about what happens after rigor mortis, except that it certainly isn’t pretty. Remembering how hot the Commodore became during the day on the way over, I wind the windows up, tug both sun-visors down and switch the air-conditioner on full. But I leave my coat on with the hood up, as I wore it into the petrol station, just in case a car overtakes with a load of curious kids in the back. No need to invite unwelcome attention, or to frighten the innocent. Not just yet.

The rising sun, to my left, transforms the clear sky from a map of infinity into a blue sheet pressing down on the world. The highway is a black line through blurred fields of brown: not desert any more, but arid farms desperate for overdue winter rains. If there wasn’t so much further still to go I might enjoy the scenery for a while. Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the tarmac, and my attention on what happened and what I have to do about it.

Focus...

Graeme Parkinson is five years my senior, and my exact opposite in almost every respect. A tall, solid man with sun-blonde hair and weathered, callused skin, he reminds me of the many shearers that descended on my father’s property once every year during my childhood. He wears jeans, scuffed leather work boots and flannelette shirts on every occasion, regardless of temperature or company. Once, on our first trip to Coober Pedy, we side-swiped a roo in his already battered van. Not content to leave the carcass behind, he stopped to investigate. In the revealing light of the van’s high beam, I saw him reach into the animal’s pouch, remove the kicking body of a young joey and snap its neck with a perfunctory twist.

I first met him through Kerry while I was taking night school. I can’t say we liked each other much, but the mutual respect was real. He admired the way I strove to better myself in the face of a difficult life, and I felt the same about his obstinate practicality. He was one tough son of a bitch—I had to give him that—and his plan to conduct aerial surveys of the old opal mines at Coober Pedy, looking for any gaps or likely outcrops that might have been missed, had an audacious ring. When he offered to form a partnership—the money I’d saved plus his pilot’s license—I was tempted. After discussing the pros and cons with Kerry for a month or two, we decided to go ahead.

That was five years ago. When Graeme rang last weekend and told me I had to come see the find he’d made, I went without hesitation. I arrived at Coober Pedy three days later and immediately noticed his edginess in the way he hurried me through a couple of drinks in the local underground pub then took me straight back to my wagon before I had time to change—but I didn’t suspect that anything was wrong. Why would I? He was my business partner. If something had gone astray, he would have told me. And if he seemed nervous, I told myself, then it was only because of the magnitude of the find, and the fear that someone else might steal it from us before we had time to declare it. That’s all.

He led me out to the old mines, calling out directions while I drove. The route took us a half-hour out from the centre of Coober Pedy and into ragged, dusty hills. Night had fallen some time back and the air was bitter; the only light came from the headlights of the Commodore. Old fences with warning signs marking shafts that had been abandoned for years flashed in and out of view as I followed dirt roads through back-lots, heading God only knew where. It had been too long since I last came to visit the mines, content to let him handle that side of things; during the last six months spent blasting and digging he never once asked for my help. The times we actually met in person were during his infrequent trips back to Sydney.

He finally called a halt in a shallow valley between two slump-backed, stony ridges. The stars were bright as we stepped out of the Commodore, he in his shirt and I in a thick coat to keep the desert chill at bay. For the first time I realized how far from town we were; the night was still, and very quiet.

“Through here,” he said, guiding me along a narrow track to where tools waited at the lip of a shaft. The rear reflectors of another car reflected the beams of our torches back at us; one of them was broken, which led me to assume that they probably belonged to Graeme’s old hulk. “Be careful you don’t slip,” he added, his voice as rough and unassuming as unvarnished timber. “You didn’t come all this way to be winched out of a hole on your bloody arse.”

I recall his words vividly, although their meaning is clear to me only now. The bastard was having fun at my expense.

Then, however, I suspected nothing. The beer I’d consumed after the long, exhausting trip had given me a light buzz. At that moment I was friends with the entire world.

“How rich is the seam?” I asked, negotiating my way slowly across sand strewn with shards of shattered rock.

“Rich
enough
,” he grunted. “You’ll earn back your investment, and more. Much more. Trust me.”

“I have so far, haven’t I?” I asked, turning back to face him.

“Yeah, you have.” Graeme’s eyes glinted at me as he swung his torch toward the lip of the nearby shaft. I followed the circle of light automatically.

“How far down?” I asked, feeling rather than hearing him shift closer behind me. To look as well, I assumed.

“Not far,” he said, bending to lift something heavy from the ground. “But far enough ...”

With those words, and a sickening crunch, something hard smashed into the back of my head. The night exploded into a billion points of brilliant pain and I doubled over, hands clutching at my head and feeling only hot wetness where my skull had once been.

I may have screamed; I can’t remember. I know I staggered forward a step—trying in vain to escape the pain—and lost my footing.

As I toppled downward into gaping blackness, my last thought was for my father. I remembered him sitting in the homestead cellar with a tarpaulin over his knees, grinning at me through lips half-rotted away. His eyes had sunk back into his skull and hair lay plastered to his scalp like damp seaweed. The bullet wound to his left shoulder, where he’d accidentally shot himself while clearing goats, gaped like a petulant mouth. Clotted blood stained his overalls and shirt, and the stench made me want to gag.

I was six years old, and Dad had been dead for forty-eight hours.

“One day you’ll understand,” he said, his voice sounding like something that had bubbled up from a swampy grave. “I don’t want to leave you, but that’s the way it has to be.”

I nodded dumbly through tears and accepted his word. With that sort of evidence before me, how could I doubt him? Then
and
now?

If I was conscious when I hit the bottom of the shaft, that moment is gone forever from my memory.

I leave Highway One at Two Wells to cut east across to Gawler, just north of Adelaide, where I refill again. This time the station attendant doesn’t look twice at me although, with my coat done up and the hood over my head to cover the wound that killed me, I must make a strange sight. She’s seen odder people than me in her time, I guess. If that’s possible.

Back in the Commodore, heading along the Sturt Highway toward Nuriootpa, I resume my patient routine: hands on the wheel, eyes forward, mind turning constantly. The scenery greens as the highway turns to follow the Murray River, but I hardly notice. Roughly seven hundred kilometres lie between me and Coober Pedy: a third of my journey. I have been driving without rest for eight hours, but am not hungry, thirsty or tired. I never imagined death to be like this. I thought it would hurt more, despite what my father told me.