Railsea (16 page)

The person who had led Sham in peeled off the strange
outer clothes. From the helmet fell shoulder-length dark coils of hair. It was a girl who shook them from her face, the other child from the lost picture. She was close to Sham’s age. Her skin was as dark & grey as her brother’s, though dotted with rust-coloured freckles, her face as fierce & furrow-browed as his, her lips as set, but her expression not quite so forbidding. She wiped a sweat-wet fringe of hair out of her eyes & looked at Sham levelly. Under the outerwear now puddled at her feet she wore a grubby jumper & longjohns.

“Had to test it,” she said. “So.”

“So,” the boy said. Sham nodded at them & soothed Daybe, wriggling on his shoulder.

“So,” the girl said, “you have something to tell us.”

& SLOWLY
, stopping & starting, not very coherently but as thoroughly as he could, Sham went over it all. The ruin of the strange train, the debris. The attack of the mole rats.

He did not mention skeleton nor skull, but, looking away, he said that there’d been evidence that someone had died there. When he looked up, the siblings were staring at each other. They made no sounds. Both of them kept their bodies still; neither of them said a word. Both of them were blinking through tears.

Sham was appalled. He looked urgently from one to the other, desperate for them to stop. They did not sob, they made very little noise. They only blinked & their lips trembled.

“What are you, can you, I didn’t,” Sham blurted. Desperate to make them say something. They ignored him. The girl
hugged her brother, quickly & hard, held him at arm’s length & examined him. Whatever it was that needed to pass between them did so. They turned at last to Sham.

“I’m Caldera,” said the girl. She cleared her throat. “This is Caldero.” Sham repeated the names, keeping his eyes on her.

“Call me Dero,” the boy said. He did not sniff, but he wiped tears from his cheeks. “Dero’s easier. Otherwise it sounds too much like her name, which can be confusing.”

“Shroake,” his sister said. “We’re the Shroakes.”

“I’m Sham ap Soorap. So,” he added eventually, when they showed no inclination to speak. “It was your father’s train?”

“Our mother’s,” said Caldera.

“But she took our dad with her,” said Dero.

“What was she doing?” Sham said. “What were
they
doing?” Perhaps, he thought, he should not ask, but his curiosity was too strong to resist. “Way out there?” The Shroakes glanced at each other.

“Our mum,” Dero said, “was
Ethel Shroake
.” As if that was an answer. As if Sham should recognise the name. Which he did not.

“Why did you come, Sham ap Soorap?” said Caldera. “& how did you know where to find us?”

“Well,” Sham said. He was still troubled, far more than he understood, at the sight of the Shroakes’ grief. He thought of that side-slid train, the dust & bones & rags that filled it. Of travellers & families & adventures gone wrong, & trains turned into sarcophagi, with bones within them.

“See, there was a time I saw something that I don’t think I was maybe supposed to see.” He was talking quickly, & his
breath came in a shudder. “Something from that train. A memory card from a camera. It was like … they knew everything was going to get stripped, but they found a way to hide that one thing.”

The Shroakes were staring. “That would be dad,” Caldera said quietly. “He did like that camera.”

“There were pictures on it,” Sham said. “I … saw you. He took one of you two.”

“He did,” said Caldera. Dero was nodding. Caldera looked up at the ceiling. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “We always knew they might … & as it went on, it got more & more likely.” She spoke Railcreole with a lovely strange accent. “Truth is, I thought, if anything happened, we’d never know. That we’d just wait & wait. & now, you come here with these stories.”

“Well,” Sham said. “I think if someone in my family never came back … Which actually, sort of …” He took another breath. “I think I’d like it if someone told me if they found them. Later.” Caldera & Dero stared levelly at him. He thought of the pictures, & his heart sped up with excitement; he couldn’t help it. “& also,” he said, “because of what else was on them pictures. That’s why I wanted to find you. What were they looking for?”

“Why?” said Dero.

“Why?” said Caldera, her eyes narrowing.

This is something
, Sham thought, & excitement filled him right up. He took out his camera. He told them, one by one, about the images he had seen. He thumbed on the tiny screen that showed his own, scrolled through one by rubbish useless one of rails & penguins & raildwellers & weather & the
Medes
crew & not much at all, until he reached
that
picture. The picture of the last shot Caldera’s parents had taken.

His camera was cheap, his focus was off, he had taken it as he fell. It was a poor effort. But it was just clear enough, if you knew what you were looking at. An empty plain & a single line. Rails stretching out to nowhere. Alone.

“Because,” he said, “they were coming back from this.”

T
HERE WAS A TIME WHEN WE DID NOT FORM ALL
words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go
everywhere
but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back
down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ widths from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

I
CAN’T HELP WONDERING,
” S
HAM SAID,
“
WHAT THEY WERE
doing.”

“You’re a moler?” said Dero. Sham blinked.

“Yeah.”

“You hunt moles?”

“Well, me, no. I help a doctor. & sometimes I clean floors & pick up ropes. But I do that on a train that hunts moles, yeah.”

“You don’t,” said Dero, “sound happy.”

“About moling? Or doctoring?”

“What would you rather be doing?” Caldera said. She glanced at him, & something in her look rather took his breath away.

“I’m fine,” Sham said. “Anyway, look. This isn’t why I came here, to talk about this.”

“No indeed,” agreed Caldera. Dero shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, stern-faced as a little general. “Still though. What
would
you like?”

“Well,” Sham said. “I mean …” He was shy to say it. “It would be good to do what your family does. To be a salvor.”

Dero & Caldera regarded him. “You think we’re
salvors
?” said Dero.

“I mean, well, yeah,” said Sham. “I mean—” He shrugged & indicated the house, so full to brimming with found technology & reconstructed bits & pieces. “Yeah. & where they were going.” He shook the camera. “That was salvage hunting. Far off. Weren’t it?”

“What do your family do?” Dero said.

“Well,” Sham said. “My, it’s my cousins, sort of, they do bits & pieces, nothing like this. &, but my mum & dad were—well, my dad was on the trains. Neither of them were salvors anyway. Not like yours.”

Caldera raised an eyebrow. “We’ve
been
salvors, of sorts,” she said. “I suppose. Mum was. Dad was. Once. But is that what you think would get you up in the mornings?”

“We are not salvors,” Dero said. Sham kept looking at Caldera.

“I said we were,” she said. “Not we are. What we are is salvage-
adjacent
.”

“I mean, all the searching, though,” Sham said, his voice coming quicker the more he spoke. “That’s got to be exciting, ain’t it? Finding things no one’s found before, digging down, finding more, uncovering the past, making
new
things, all the time, learning & that.”

“You’re contradicting yourself,” Caldera said. “You can’t find things no one’s found before by uncovering the past, can you? Searching for something. I see the appeal.” She stared at him. “But you don’t
uncover the past
if you’re a salvor: you pick
up rubbish. The last thing I think you should think about’s the past. That’s what they do wrong here.”

“Here?”

“Here Manihiki.” She shrugged a big shrug, to indicate the island beyond her walls.

“Why you here?” Dero said.

“Yeah, why are you? In Manihiki?” Caldera said. “Your crew. No moles here.”

Sham waved his hand. “Everyone always ends up in Manihiki at some point. Supplies & whatnot.”

“Really,” Caldera said.

“Salvage,” Dero said. “You here for salvage?”

“No,” Sham said. “Supplies. Whatnot.”

He walked with Caldera & Dero through their house. It was so rambling & tumbledown he called it, in his head, rambledown. Up stairs, down again via elevator, escalator up, ladder down, past all sorts of odd spaces like sheds indoors.

“It was good of you to come tell us,” Caldera said.

“Yeah,” said Dero.

“I’m very sorry about your dad & your mum,” Sham said.

“Thank you,” Caldera said.

“Thank you,” Dero said solemnly.

“We’re sorry about yours,” Caldera said.

“Oh.” Sham was vague. “That was
ages
ago.”

“It must’ve been a massive effort to get here,” Caldera said. “To tell us.”

“We were coming anyway,” Sham said.

“Of course.” She stopped at a door. Put her hand on the handle. Looked at her brother, who looked back at her. They seemed to draw strength from each other. She breathed deep.
Dero nodded, she nodded back, & led them into what had once been a bedroom, now had two walls removed so it opened onto the low sky of the garden. Daybe chirruped at the smell of fresh air. The space contained as much mould, ivy, old rain stains & outside air as it did furniture & floor. Caldera ran her fingers over damp dust.

Sitting at a desk, facing out into the hole, was a man. He was writing, skipping between pen & paper & an ordinator. He was writing almost alarmingly quickly.

“Dad,” said Caldera.

Sham’s eyes widened.

The man looked around & gave them a smile. Sham stayed at the door. The man’s eyes looked not quite focused. His pleasure at seeing them was a little desperate.

“Hello there,” the man said. “A guest? Please please do come in.”

“This is Sham,” Caldera said.

“He came to do us a favour,” Dero said.

“Dad,” said Caldera. “We’ve got some bad news.”

She came closer, & trepidation went across the man’s face. Sham backed quietly out & closed the door. He tried to move a good distance away, but after a minute or two, he did think he could hear crying.

& a minute or two after that, the sombre-faced Shroake children came back out.

“I thought, you said that was your dad who … that that was who I found,” Sham whispered.

“It was,” said Dero. “That’s our other one.”

There were almost as many kinds of families as there were rock islands in the railsea—that, of course, Sham knew. There were many disinclined to take the shape that their
homes would rather they did. & in those nations where the norms were not policed by law, if they were willing to put up with disapproval—as, it was clear, the Shroakes were—they could take their own shapes. Hence the Shroakes’ strange household.

“There were three of them,” Caldera said. “But Dad Byro …” She glanced in the direction of the room. “He didn’t have the same want to go gallivanting that Dad Evan & our mum did.”

“Gallivanting,” Sham said, hopeful for more.

“He keeps house,” Dero said. Behind him, unseen by him, his sister met Sham’s eye &, silently, mouthed the word
kept
. “He writes.” Caldera mouthed
Wrote
. “He’s … forgetful. He looks after us, though.” Caldera mouthed,
We look after him
.

Sham blinked. “There’s no one else here?” he said. How could they be looking after that lost man & themselves, all alone? A thought struck him.

“You know what I heard,” he said. “I heard there was ways of building artificial people. Out of this stuff.” He indicated the salvage. “That could walk around & think & do things …” He looked around as if expecting such a trash-coagulation, a junk nanny powered on strange energies, to appear, cooing at her charges.

“A salvagebot?” Dero said. He made a rude noise.

“Myths,” Caldera said. “No such thing.” The metal-rubber-glass-stone figure in Sham’s head disappeared in a puff of reality, leaving Caldera & Dero looking after themselves, & their lamenting second father.

D
ESPITE THE ODD TUG OF COMMUNITY HE FELT TO
the Shroakes in their newly certain two-thirds orphanhood—a bond he had not expected—& despite his frustration at not understanding more of the elder Shroakes’ story, Sham could not stay. Time was doing what time always does, going faster & faster as if downhill. & in truth, Sham admitted to himself, he was not sure the Shroakes did not want him gone. Did not want to be alone with their remaining parent.

Dero ushered him from the house as Caldera checked again on Dad Byro. As he retraced his steps out of the garden, under the arch of washing machines & back into the streets of Manihiki, Sham thought about the duty roster, about Dr. Fremlo & whoever else might be around, about whose instruction he could & whose he could not evade, in his eagerness to slip away, revisit the Shroakes. Perhaps it was because he was thinking about authority & unwanted attentions that he noticed the man outside the Shroake house.