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had been in an accident, hurt her leg. So we caught a ride up to the mine;
Sharr wanted to see that her mother was all right, and I went for moral
support." She eased me back onto her lap. "Don't wrinkle your brow, dear
one you liked Sharr too, once upon a time. Before you decided to blame her for
everything."
I started to protest, then stopped. The blasted link-seed wouldn't let me lie
to myself. I hated Sharr; I had no reason to hate Sharr; I blamed her for
things she didn't do. "Go on," I told Lynn. Nestling down warm against her.
"We got to the mine infirmary, and your father was already there, looking at
Mother Crosbie's ankle. Saying it was only sprained, not broken. He put it
into a foam-cast just to keep it safe for a few days, then gave her a talk
about staying off the leg, making sure she had good circulation to the toes,
blah, blah, blah."
"This was in the infirmary?" I asked.
"Where else?"
The infirmary was a single-room dome clustered in with Rustico's other
outbuildings, all above ground. "How did Dads end up in the mine when the
cave-in happened?"
"You don't know?" Lynn's hand stopped stroking my hair for a moment. "My own
brother carried a copy of the report over to your compound."
"Which he gave to my mother. Who went into shrieking hysterics and tried to
scratch my face to ribbons." I closed my eyes, remembering. "She screamed it
was all my fault for leading a life of sin. God's revenge or something like
that... not that she spent much effort believing in God, but she devoutly
believed I was utter dirt."
"You believed it too," Lynn murmured softly. "We all look forward to the day
you change your mind."
Not a direction I wanted the conversation to go. "The point is," I said, "I
never heard the exact details of Dads's death."
"You actively avoided finding out. Because you knew it would be more fun
having Freudian episodes thirty years later."
"Twenty-seven years. I could tell you the number of days, but that would be
showing off."
Lynn pretended to tweak my nose. "What a one you are. If I tell you what
happened that day, do you promise to get over all your psychological traumas
in the blink of an eye?"
"Yes, Mom-Lynn." I took her hand and squeezed it to me.
"Then here's what I know... and I was on the spot through the whole thing.
Not underground, of course, but I was plunk there in the infirmary when they
started bringing up survivors. I heard all the details..."
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Lynn's story.
Dads was talking Mother Crosbie through the care and maintenance of sprains,
when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence. "Damn!" he said. "They've hit a..."
("Hit what?" I asked. "And who's they?"
"He must have meant the miners," Lynn replied. "The official explanation for
the cave-in was they'd broken into a pocket of natural gas."
"But how did Dads know?"
Shrug.)
The next thing Lynn knew, Demoth was shaking. Not hard just a teeny tremor,
like the rumble when an ore-wagon goes by. Considering the number of
ore-wagons trundling around the mine's upper compound, Lynn didn't realize
anything was wrong till Dads sprinted for the door. Seconds after he left,
alarms went off full-hoot in the classic SOS pattern: three short, three long,
three short.
Lynn's parents were both miners. She knew the signals meant "Cave-in."
Mother Crosbie shouted, "Damn it!" and tried to hobble out of the
infirmary scrambling to help whoever d got trapped down the mine. Sharr made
it to the door first and barred the way: "No, no, too dangerous"... which was
just a scared daughter talking, because Sharr didn't know bugger-all about
what'd happened, any more than anyone else did at that point.
Mother and daughter squabbled for a bit, Sharr in panic, her mother going on
about how other miners might need her; then the company nurse barreled into
the room and said everyone was deputized to help him get ready to receive
wounded. Sharr's mother let herself be persuaded she'd be more help in the
infirmary than limping underground, slowing down the rescue teams. They all
began to set up cots, break out medical supplies, that sort of thing... as if
they were doing bed duty at the Circus again.
When everything was ready, they waited.
The first survivors arrived half an hour later. "Like a bomb going off," one
said: a tunnel wall had blown clean out, cutting off half the afternoon shift
on the other side of a thousand tons of rubble. The casualties arriving at the
infirmary had broken arms, legs, ribs... but they'd still been standing on the
lucky side of the explosion. At least they hadn't been trapped. Now anyone who
could dig was down in the caved-in tunnel, frantically using lasers and
ultrasound powderers to flake away the rock-fall, aiming toward those who'd
been walled in.
"Did you see Dr. Smallwood?" Lynn asked a survivor. Lynn, Lynn, heartsore in
love with me even then. She worried about Dads for my sake.
A gashed-up miner told her, "Smallwood was down there before anyone else.
Checking us over. Making sure we were safe to move."
The ground shook again. Precious lightly. A tiny settling in the earth,
nothing more. Down in the mine the rescuers backed off fast, pulling well up
the tunnel to safer ground... all but Henry Smallwood, who was fixing an
immobilization collar around the neck of a man who might have broken his
spine. A tiny section of the tunnel roof collapsed, almost nothing at all a
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token scattering of rock that separated Smallwood from the other rescuers for
a bit.
Clearing away that rock took at most ten minutes. They found the man Dads had
been working on, out cold but still alive. They also found my father: dead as
haddock, though there wasn't a mark on him. The official diagnosis two days
later said his heart failed from stress... all keyed-up, and when the roof
came down, the jolt of fear must have been too much for him. Still, the miners
told everyone he'd died in the cave-in. Call it tribute to a man who'd been
right there with them, doing whatever he could.
One last thing the rescue team found when they broke through the baby
cave-in: all the missing miners. The ones who'd been on the other side of the
big cave-in, trapped behind tonnes of debris. The debris was still there, as
solid as ever. Somehow the miners had passed through ten meters of hard-choked
stone.
"Somehow they'd passed..."I sat bolt up again.
"Faye," Lynn said, putting her arms round my neck. "You know miners. They
invent folklore all that time down in the dark. My parents were forever
talking about queer things in the mine: eerie lights, strange sounds..."
"I never heard stories like that."
"No? Maybe the miners didn't want those tales getting back to your father. He
might knock off points from their psych profiles, next time Rustico sent them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]