Railsea (37 page)

“It’s a bridge,” Sham said. “Of course there’s something on the other side.”

“That does not follow,” Mbenday said.

“Benightly!” Sham said.

But the harpoonist cleared his throat, & in his deep Norther voice rumbled hesitantly, “Come, Sham. Don’t need to do this. You, too, Shroakes.” Caldera made a rude noise.

“Hob?” Sham said. “Fremlo?” They wouldn’t look at him. He could not believe it.

“Walking?” said Fremlo. “Through void? For one knows not what? Sham, I beg you …”

“Anyone!” Sham shouted.

“We came for you,” Vurinam said. “We came for your Shroakes. We came as far as the angels. There ain’t nothing else we want. Now come back with us.”

“Tell Troose & Voam I send my love, but I’m following through,” said Sham, not looking at him.

“I’ll come.”

It was Captain Naphi. Everyone stared at her.

Even the Shroakes turned back. Naphi rattled her chains, & looked at them in splendid hauteur until someone ran to undo them.

“I can’t have mine,” the captain said. She looked at Caldera, at Dero & at last at Sham ap Soorap. “So someone else’s philosophy is better than none.”

I
T FELT STRANGE TO WALK ON TRACKS, LET ALONE SUCH
tracks as these. The Shroakes, the captain & Sham went single file. A terrible short distance to either side the bridge stopped & emptied into the air. Behind them were the clattering & drill-sounds of the crew’s salvage, under Sirocco’s exasperated supervision. People shouted goodbye, & not the Shroakes, Sham, or the captain answered.

Sham kept his eyes ahead, for hours, focussing on anything but the fall that hemmed them in. He thought of the crew tugging bits & pieces of the old angel out of their housings, teeth from a mouth, filling the rendering cart, the butchery floor, the storage containers, the hold of the
Medes
with unlikely meat. The ceramic, glass & old metal mechanisms.

Daylight went & they continued walking, until even with torches the darkness made it dangerous. They ate together. The Shroakes muttered to each other, & sometimes to Sham. Naphi said nothing. When they slept, they tied themselves to the rails. In case of thrashing, rolling, in their dreams.

They woke before the sun was fully up to the clattering
passage of getterbirds overhead. “Maybe we’ll feel it when they go,” Caldera said, after an inadequate huddled breakfast. “The train I mean. Maybe we’ll feel it in the rails.”

“Maybe it’ll shake us off,” Dero said. He made a whistling noise, like something falling.

“We won’t feel nothing,” Sham said. They had been walking a long time. “What if it rains?”

“Then we’ll have to be very bloody careful,” Dero said.

Through all the long hours of that day they trudged. Sham kept his eyes mostly down so the trainlines would not mesmerise him, the surrounds not make him dizzy. It meant he didn’t see the empty sky, the birdlessness, anything much at all, until Caldera shouted, & he stopped & looked ahead.

They were approaching another cliff face. It loomed out of horizontal haze. The tracks, the bridge dwindled threadlike to invisibility, but beyond the last of it they could see vertical earth. The far side of the chasm.

Sham swallowed. Stonefaces knew how many miles to go. They kept on. & every time he looked up that surface seemed as far away as ever. But then abruptly as the evening grew close he could make out texture. He could see where the struts of the bridge entered it.

In the absolutely dark small hours, exhaustion stopped them a while. But they had walked through much of the night, & it was not very long after that that the sun came up & woke him, & Sham at last could see where they had got to. He gasped.

No more than a mile ahead, the bridge touched land.

S
LOWLY, WEAPONS UP, EYES WIDE, THEY APPROACHED A
different kind of a different earth. Heaven was geologically distinct.

It was all rubbly uneven hillscape, slopes & steepness & crags right up to the sheer. They stepped tie by tie out of the air & under an arch of stone, by hatchways & incomprehensible trackside boxes, onto new land. Heaven had mechanisms.

They were silent, dusty from the crossing. The line took them through a grey gorge. Daybe circled the travellers, never going far. The peaks around them pushed easily into the upsky.

“What’s that sound?” Sham said. The first words beyond the world. A repeated rhythm—a subtle, unending hushing beat—came from up ahead.

“Look!” Dero said. A tower.

Above a jawline of stone. It was ancient, windowless, a ruin of strange design. The walkers froze as if it would approach them. It didn’t. They continued at last & the landscape slowly lowered. Until the tracks turned, lines of metal
running now at last into—Sham gasped—a gusting, cloud-filled, silent city.

Low shacks, blocks in concrete, a town bifurcated by the rail. Destroyed by time. The crumbled remains of houses, empty but for wind. Birdless sky. Sham heard patterings of displaced stone. Daybe went up to investigate, but that empty expanse kept intimidating him, & he returned to Sham’s shoulder.

The travellers walked on rails overhung by decrepitude in a deepening cut. They saw no weeds, no birds, no animals. The sallow clouds of the upsky moved like nothing living. The railway cut through a wreck-town of long-dead concrete, banks of ossified rubbish, dunes of shredded paperdust. Under what looked like vines & were wires sagging with age & thick muck.

“So where’s this treasure people keep mentioning?” Dero said at last. No one looked at him.

Their footsteps were slow & unsteady. They walked on. & deep in his mind, staring into all the drifts of ruin, under which the remnants of urban layout were just visible, Sham became aware of something.

Heaven, the world beyond the railsea, was empty, & very long dead. & he, though utterly awed, was not surprised. Everything was made at once clear & meaningless, & his mind felt at once as near-empty & gusted by scrags & stubs of nonsense as this old city—& inhabited by a sly, growing excitement.

& then after Sham had no notion how long of walking, ahead was an impossible thing. Something that did surprise him. That blasted him, in fact, with shock. First he, then the Shroakes, then Captain Naphi gasped.

“What … is … that?” Dero said at last.

The rail stopped.

It did not double-back to rejoin itself in a loop. Did not tangle aimlessly among a collection of other lines, nor fan out to various sidings which themselves fanned out & eddied into randomness. It was not broken by landslip, explosion or mishap, unfixed yet by any angel.

The track
stopped
.

In a yard, in the shadow of a building, it approached a wall, & ended. Two big piston-looking things extruded from a brace, as if to push back on a train shoving against them, & the railway line,

JUST
,

STOPPED
.

I
T WAS UNHOLY
, uncanny. The perversion, the antithesis of what railroads had to be, a tangle without end. & there it was.

“The end of the line,” Caldera said at last. Even the words sounded like a transgression. “That’s what they were looking for. Mum & Dad. The end of the line.”

There were long moments of quiet, of awestruck gawping at the quite impossible flat
stop
. Somewhere, Sham realised, he could still hear an endless sibilant, like a repeated injunction to hush.

“You wouldn’t think,” said Dero, his voice hollow, “the rails could finish, would you?”

“Maybe they don’t,” Sham said. “Maybe this is where the railsea begins.”

B
EYOND THE END
of the cut & the rails—the end of the rails!—a crumbling staircase ascended to the city. Dero climbed while Daybe circled him. Caldera, still staring at it, walked past the end of the track towards a hole that had once been a door in what had once been a wall in what had once been the building. She moved with sudden urgency.

“Where you going?” Sham shouted. She shoved inside. Sham swore.

“Come on!” shouted Dero from the top. He ran out of sight. From within the building, Sham heard Caldera gasp.

“Dero, wait!” Sham shouted. He dithered, as Naphi followed Caldera. “Dero, come back!” he shouted, & ran after the older Shroake, into shadow.

Light & gusts of dust-grey wind came slantwise into a half-memory of a room. Staircase stubs rose a few feet in steep zigzags. There had once been many floors in this railside hall. All were gone; the travellers stood at the bottom of a concrete hole, shin-deep in splinters & plastic shapes once desks & ordinators. A maze & dented blocky slope where a building’s worth of filing cabinets had piled up. Some were burst open, strewing paperwork become mulch. Some were buried, some wedged shut.

Caldera scrambled up them. She grabbed at handles. Reached into shafts between cabinets. She pried at them. “What are you doing?” Sham said.

Her voice echoed out with the banging of yanked-open drawers. “Take these,” she said, handing back ragged papers. “Careful. They’re falling apart.”

“Come out,” Sham said. She handed him more. The metal creaked. She spelunked a scree of drawers, her hands full of folders. She looked lost.

“What is it,” Naphi said, “you’re looking for?”

“I need to know,” Caldera said after a long silence. “About … about everything. Everything our mum & dad always said.” She furrowed her brow & began, manically, to scan the papers she held. “About the railsea.”

“Know what?” Sham said. “Come out of there.”

“It doesn’t … I can’t …” She shook her head, hunting for meaning to it all. “I don’t know. Why did we do all this?” The report in her hand disintegrated. Her fingers trailed its muck. “Mum taught us this old writing. Points …” she read. “Oil stores …” She went through the sheets, one by mouldy one. “Personnel. Ticket prices. Credit. I can read it, but I can’t put it together!”

“You already did,” Sham said gently.

“I came here to understand!”

“There’s nothing here you don’t understand,” Sham said. Caldera stared at him. “You’ve known all this for ages. Things head out from here. You seen which way that dead angel was facing.” He spoke slowly. “
You
told
me
all this. What the godsquabble was. Well, this is the town where it happened. The town where the winners were.” He raised his hands slowly. “& they’re gone. You was never going to find out anything new here. That ain’t why you’re here, Caldera.”

Caldera sniffed. “Really?” she said. “Why am I here?”

“You’re here because your parents wouldn’t do what they was told. Wouldn’t shun anything. They wanted to see what’s at the end of the world. & you actually
did
. Do. Are doing.” Sham held her gaze.

“H
EY.
” It was Dero. He stood silhouetted in the doorway. Behind him Daybe veered in agitation.

“You Shroakes,” said Sham. “Always gallivanting off in all directions …”

“You need to see something,” Dero said. He spoke in a dreamlike monotone. “There’s something you need to see.”

B
EYOND THE BUILDING
& the rails there were yards of paved land, more nothingy concrete-stubbed remains, & then the land,
all
land, abruptly stopped. But not on void this time.

They stood on a pitted coastline road, a raised walkway just like a shore in the railsea. It rose not out of rails, though, as any shoreline must surely, but from miles upon miles, from a giddying, endless expanse of water.

S
HAM REELED
. T
HE WATER FOAMED
. I
T ROCKED &
slapped against the concrete wall. Sham’s heart powered. What was this? & what was beyond? A ruined jetty poked above the waves just as normal jetties did above rails. Tentative with wonder, Sham walked to its end.

The enormity of that water. It rose & fell back in lurching swells. It was like nothing he could have imagined.

Above it, the strange deadness of the air ended. Gulls! They wheeled & whooped. Swept curiously past Daybe, which soared in exhilarated aerobatics. This was the source of the repeated noise. The water huffed & shuffled & rocked back & forth against the land.

“The water level’s so high,” Naphi whispered at last. She looked back the way they had come. “It should be flooding back into that chasm. Even back into the railsea. Should half-fill it.”

“You told me they jury-rigged the world,” Sham said to Caldera. “Maybe they did something to seal the rock here
when they put the water in, so it can’t spill out. Can’t seep through the sides.”

“Yeah,” said Caldera. “Only they didn’t put the water here: they
left
it here.” She was staring, too, but dividing her attention, still sifting through the papers she held, frowning as she glanced at the disorganised snips of information. “They drained all the
rest
. To make more rail-ready real estate.”

“The world?” Sham said.

“Used to be underwater.”

T
HEY STAYED THERE
, said nothing more, for a long time. Sham was too awed to care much that he was cold. The sun dawdled slowly through space, behind the upsky, illuminating it. They could see no beasts up there just then. Only the arcing gulls.