Railsea (21 page)

In the uppermost bunk slept Dero, swaying with the vehicle’s motion. He woke occasionally & abruptly—such had been the shape of his sleep a long time, since two-thirds of his parents had disappeared. When woke he did, he would sit up
& stare, as if through the metal ceiling, as if he were the train’s eyes. His gaze was the same as the one his mother had had when she grew tired of salvage, of piecing together & making things, & had looked, instead, beyond. Dero was too young to remember his inherited expression on she who had bequeathed it to him, but when his sister saw it on his face, she gasped, because she was not.

Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.

Over the
raskaba
of the wheels & the whooshing of the fusion engine, Caldera hummed. Did she stare with the same hankering for distance & something-or-other as did her brother & as had her mother? Perhaps. Something like that.

She thought about Sham, with gratitude for his information, for the picture that he had shown them. She tapped keys on Dad Byro’s ordinator. Extracted information. Collated it with their other information, including Sham’s descriptions. Began to build a route.

With distant affection Caldera regretted that Sham had not come. She took bites from a sandwich, sung.

An alarm bleated, glowed red. She checked her clattering information. A change of gauge was coming.

She prodded buttons. How much would this particular technology have excited the burghers, the salvors, the privateers of Manihiki! she thought.

Raskaba-tak
, the train slowed but not by very much—a
tug or two of levers, a switch set & the engine shuddered exactly like a troubled animal; braces emerged from its underside, took its weight as it rolled, raised it an instant, mechanisms wound, the wheels on the momentarily suspended vehicle slipping closer together to return & to land
snikt
into these new narrower rails.

There were no hours of complicated rail-&-wheel-side shenanigans, only seconds with the gauge-slip. Caldera inserted words of salutation & praise for her family into her song.

She did not wake Dero when she passed a hunk of metal that she suddenly suspected was one of her parents’ carriages. Discarded by them so early in their trip, for reasons unknown. She said nothing.

When she had to sleep she stopped the train & armed its defences. The ordinator would probably have been able to continue the journey unwatched, but she would rather avoid any risk. It would soon be five, & Dero’s turn.

& on the day that followed, & for days after that, the Shroakes continued their single-minded drive through hostile country. They traced creative routes through the railsea towards its most arcane & neglected places, following their family’s secret route, looking for whatever it was their mother & father had found.

W
ITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENCE
is ferroviaoceanology, the study of the railsea’s iron lines themselves. This is boss, nexus of investigations. Done right, it extends, rail-&-tie-like, across ruminations of all fields. To study the rails means not only the metallurgy of their substance, but the applied theology of their maintenance, sustained, cleaned & fixed as they are by the secretive ministrations of the locomotive-angels. It means the study of biology, to hypothesise the relationship between the lairs of all the burrowers, those eruchthonous & those eternally underground, & the tangled lines above them.

It means the study of symbology. Ever since the godsquabble, since the rest of the world was brought into shape & existence to serve the aesthetic & symbolic needs of the railsea, we—cities, continents, towns, trains & you & me—have been functions of rails.

Travel far enough, a trainswoman will find worshippers of gods of all sizes & shapes, all powers, persuasions & proclivities. & not only gods—uplifted mortals, ancestor spirits,
abstract principles. In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no wheels percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

I
N VERY OTHER PARTS OF THE RAILSEA, A MUCH OLDER
, much more traditional train, ground south. Its passage was less strange than the Shroakes’, its route on one gauge only, but it travelled with no less urgency.

Thus the
Medes
. Chased again by an eager coterie, a squabbling comet’s tail of railgulls chowing on the scraps the trainsfolk threw. A day was all it took, a day’s quick determined driving, & Manihiki, its outliers, a hundred rocklets prodding out between the ties, were gone. Wide-open rails, & southward ho. With perhaps a certain melancholy.

On the
Medes
’s last day in Manihiki, several people, of course, had been late to arrive back on-deck. One by one they returned, & one by one were punished. Nothing too severe—this was typical minor transgression.

& ap Soorap?

Sham ap Soorap?

Where was Sham ap Soorap?

He didn’t answer
any
calls. He did not return.

The captain herself even asked where he was. Preparations continued. The captain herself paced & asked again if there was word of the doctor’s assistant.

Until at last the harbourmasters arrived, bearing a letter to Fremlo, which the doctor read, swore at & read to the captain, leaving the door open a crack. The doctor was too experienced for that to be an accident. It was the technique known as
trainboard telegraph
. Minutes later the whole crew knew the message’s contents.

T
HEY RACED INTO WINDS
that whipped with less & less mercy. The heads, the bodies, of animals that broke subterranean cover grew larger as the
Medes
came to wilder, colder lands. Older hands marked the change in wheelcalls & clatternames as the iron cooled.

On the fourth day they rolled in the shadow of an old pumping rig crowning above a copse, still extracting oil though near its life’s end. A labour of moldywarpes, grey
beasts of moderate size & quality, surfaced near them, playing & puffing dust. Three were swiftly skewered, roped, dragged to the butchery wagons, reduced to components.

“Hey, d’you remember,” Vurinam said abruptly to no one in particular, “how that Sham ap Soorap brought the grog when he had to?” He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t work out if he liked doing it more or less than his usual doctoring, weren’t that so, Fremlo?”

There were a few laughs. Were they happy or sad that Vurinam had mentioned their runaway? Yes. They were happy or sad.

“Shut up, Vurinam,” Yashkan said. “Nobody cares.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

“Didn’t know he had it in him,” Fremlo muttered to Mbenday when they drank bad smoky tea late that night. “He was hopeless, though you couldn’t but like the lad, but I’d never have thought he’d have the oomph to go be a salvor, no matter how mooningly he stared at them.”

The
Medes
passed a slave-powered train from Rockvane, which the captain would not hail. Shossunder & Dramin the cook stared out to railsea, as in their wake a big old bull armadillo, like a grunting armoured cart, groped up into the air, sniffed for prey, & ground below again.

“He was funny with his food,” Dramin said.

“Odd having him not around,” the cabin boy said.

They reached a huge & clanking wartrain from one of the Cabigo monarchies. They approached the double-decked wheeled fortress, porcupine-spined with guns, howling sooty smoke, on its manoeuvres & reconnaissance.

Admiral Shiverjay received Naphi, & after niceties & a cup of cactus tea, after paying sufficient polite attention to his
ill-tempered train-cat, in the halting combination of languages with which they could get by, she asked him if he had any news of a large, pale moldywarpe.

& he only bloody
had
.

M
ANY TRAINS KEPT RECORDS
of overhearings like sightings of megabeasts, of any talk of sports & monsters they encountered, knowing molers they met might be searching. Shiverjay ran a finger down a rumour-list, past tales of the largest badger, albino antlions, aardvarks of prodigious size. Some had the names of captains marked alongside. Some had more than one: oh, those were awkward occasions, clashes of hunt.
What to do when more than one philosopher sought the same symbol?
It was notoriously embarrassing.

“Ah now,” Shiverjay said. “Here’s a thing.” He had a superb stock of stories. “You know where the Bajjer roll?” Naphi nodded a vague nod. The sail-nomads gathered & hunted across great swathes of the railsea. “A deep-railsea spearhunter, back from their grounds, she told me something that she’d heard from a furrier who’d been trading with a salvor crew—”

The lineage, the genealogy by which the story was delivered at last into Captain Naphi’s ears, was convoluted & not important. What mattered was this: “A solo trainsman saw our quarry,” Naphi said, back on her own vehicle. She controlled herself, stiff & upright & careful, but she was all-but bass-string vibrating at the news. “He
ain’t too far
. Switchers, south-southwest.”

& still there was that sniff of loss about the
Medes
.

A
PECULIARITY OF GEOGRAPHY HAD
the railsea dipping into a sheltered declivity that thronged with rabbit. There a light steam train all the way from Gulflask passed on stories they, too, like the wartrain, had heard about the jaundiced-looking
Talpa rex
. They directed the
Medes
west, to where the earthworms were huge & sluggish & the largest moldywarpes fed.

Three days, following earth-trails of ever-increasing sizes, & the
Medes
saw two great southern moldywarpes. One sleek young male too far to chase; the second, a grizzled sow, they might have been able to run down. But Naphi told the harpoonists no.

As the sun dropped & the cold went vicious, they reached a dangerous intricate knot of rails, of manifold gauges. It would need charting for passage. The captain was untouched by any tiredness. She stared rapt & intently through her telescope, into the last of the light.

Abruptly she volunteered Mbenday, Brownall, Benightly & Borr to go with her. The crewmembers were like inflated people, so bundled were they in fleece & fur. The captain herself wore only a moderately quilted jacket.

“She don’t need no furs, she’s warmed by her crazy,” Borr whispered to Benightly as they took the jollycart slowly forward. They mapped & took careful notes, prepared switches for the
Medes
that would follow. They glanced longingly at the receding warmth & light of the train.

Slowly they rounded a patch of bushes metal-coloured in the twilight … steered between trees thin & gnarled as pained skeletons … knocked stones from the rails with their trainhooks … They moved at a creeping pace in thickets of tough vegetation, in a range of dense rails, broken by spare patches of ground & the curve of a hill towards which they steered.

“Stop here,” Naphi said, her voice trembling. She stood, ready to disembark. “Let’s see what we can see from the top.” They rolled closer to the pale hill. The shaggy bone-coloured hill.

The hill covered not in pale freeze-bleached grass but in hair.

The yellow hill rumbled. It shuddered.

The hill growled.

A twitch, a switch & stubs & tufted nubs on the hill moved. Moved as a chewing sound sounded, as there came from all around them a slam of teeth & a throaty animal exhalation.

The hill opened wicked eyes.

“Oh my good gods!”
someone screamed. “It’s him!”

& with violence & suddenness the earth shook & birds were calling as loud as the crew & the hill was not a hill, was the colossal humped flank & back of Mocker-Jack the pale mole. & there was throating & a snarl of tree-sized slaver-spattering tusks & a plunging with appalling motion so enormous that the world itself, time itself, seemed to buckle, & countless tons of meat & malevolent muscle & dead-hued fur moved. & with a red stare near-sightless but quite terrible the beast rose an instant then plunged straight, straight down, leaving ruination, buckled rails, splintered ties, a quivering-edged pit.