DIGGING
Ian McDonald
Tash was wise to the ways of wind. She knew its many musics: sometimes like a flute across the pipes and tubes; sometimes a snare-drum rattle in the guylines and cable stays or a death drone-moan from the turbine gantries and a scream of sand past the irised-shut windows when the equinox dust storms blew for weeks on end. From the rails and drive bogies of the scoopline the wind drew a wail like a demon choir and from the buckets set a clattering clicking rattle so that she imagined tiny clockwork angels scampering up and down the hundreds of kilometers of conveyor belts. In the storm-season gales, it came screaming in across Isidis’s billion-year-dead impact basin, clawing at the eaves and gables of West Diggory, tearing at the tiered roofs so hard Tash feared it would rip them right off and send them tumbling end over end down, down into the depths of the Big Dig. That would be the worst thing. Everyone would die badly: eyeballs and fingertips and lips exploding, cheeks bursting with red veins. She had nightmares about suddenly looking up to see the roof ripping away and the naked sky and the air all blowing away in one huge shout of exhalation. Then your eyeballs exploded. She imagined how that would sound. Two soft popping squelches. Then In-brother Yoche told her you couldn’t hear your eyeballs exploding because the air would be too thin, and the whole story was a legend of mischievous Grandparents and Subaunts who liked to scare under-fours. But it made her think about how fragile West Diggory was and the other three stations of the Big Dig. Spindly and top-heavy, domes piled upon half-domes upon semi-domes, swooping wing roofs and perilous balconies, all resting on the finger-thin cantilevers that connected the great Excavating City to the traction bogies. Like big spiders. Tash knew spiders. She had seen spiders in a book and once, in a piece of video excitedly shot by Lady-cousin Nairne in North Cutter, a real spider, in a real web, trembling in the perennial beat of the buckets working up the scoopline from the head of the Big Dig, five kilometers downslope. Lady-cousin Nairne had poked at the spider with her fingers—fat and brown as bread in high magnification. The spider had frozen, then scuttled for the corner of the window frame, curled into a tiny balls of legs, and refused to do anything for the rest of the day. The next day when Nairne and her camera returned it was dead dead dead, dried into a little desiccated husk of shell. It must have come in a crate in the supply run down from the High Orbital, though everything they shipped from orbit was supposed to be clean. Beyond the window where the little translucent corpse hung vibrating in its web, red rock and wind and the endless march of the buckets along the rails of the excavating conveyor. Buckets and wind. Tied together. Wind; Fact one: when the buckets ceased, then and only then would the wind stop. Fact two: all Tash’s life it had blown in the same direction—downhill.
. . .
