Railsea (38 page)

The birds looped & skimmed the surface of the liquid.
There’s stuff in there they can eat
, thought Sham. He thought of the stringy fish that lived in the small ponds & pools of the islands & the railsea itself. Looked as far as he could to the horizon. Thought how much bigger such creatures might get in a space so uncramped.

Sham felt something rising through his bones. Daybe felt it, too, snuffled in alarm. A rhythm, getting louder. “Getterbirds,” Sham said.

Three of them. They came from behind the hills into the downbeat heaven. They veered towards the travellers. They farted smoke, lower than Sham had ever seen them before. The wind from their whirling wings sent up rubbish. They
zoomed abruptly off, over the ancient debris, to some out-of-sight nest for old, tired angels.

“What was that?” Dero said. “Curiosity?”

“I don’t think so,” Sham said quietly. “I think they were giving directions.” He pointed.

Figures were emerging from the ash & stubs of the old city.

What were they, these dwellers beyond the world? Rag-clad, hulking & shaggy, creeping, sniffing, they loped out of the dust that announced them. Ten, twelve, fifteen figures. Big women & men, all muscle & sinew, baring their teeth, coming on two limbs & four, apelike, wolflike, fatly feline. Staring as they came.

“We have to go,” Dero said, but they could not get past. The newcomers had reached the base of the jetty. & there they stopped. Their dark clothes were so shredded they looked like feathers. They licked their lips; they stared a long time.

“Is it me,” Dero said at last, “or do they look excited?”

“It’s not you,” Sham said.

Something was approaching from the ruins. Seven feet tall, sloped, immense. An ancient, powerful man, of great girth. He wore a repatched dark coat, a tall black hat.

“That costume,” Caldera said. “It’s like That Apt Ohm.”

What looked like a degenerate avatar of the god stepped slowly past his fellows, towards Sham & the others. The jetty shook with his great steps. He licked his face in delight.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Dero.

“Wait,” said Sham. He kept his pistol down. The man’s eyes were wide. He stopped a few feet away, & gazed at the visitors.

& then, enormously, he bowed. Behind him, the others bayed. It sounded like happiness. Like triumph. The big man bellowed. Snarls & growling, gulping, knotty language.

“That’s some weird mix of old Railcreole,” Caldera said. “
Really
old.”

“Do you understand it?” Sham said. He recognised a few words himself. “Controller,” he heard. “Rails.” & with a start, a line from an old hymn: “Oh shun!”

“Only a little bit.” Caldera squinted with attention. “ ‘Here’ … ‘At last’ … ‘Interest.’ ”

The enormous figure reached into his coat, & Naphi & Sham stiffened. But what he drew out & offered was a wad of paper. After several motionless seconds, while Naphi kept watch, her gun in her hand, Sham came forward & snatched it. He & the Shroakes leaned over the sheet.

Columns, words, on sheet after sheet, ancient typing that made only a very little sense to Sham. A long preamble, lists, footnotes & observations. “What is this?” he said.

On the last page of the pile was a long string of numbers. Circled in red. Caldera looked at her brother, & up at Sham.

“It’s a bill,” she said. “They say this is what we owe them.”

T
HINGS FLICKERED THROUGH
Sham’s mind. These figures’ feral wanderings in ruins from where once the trains & tracks had been controlled. The man’s hat. “He’s the leader,” Sham said. “The controller.”

Caldera stared at the paper. “This is … more money than there’s ever been in history,” she whispered. “It’s gibberish.”

“Their ancestors must’ve got lost here,” Dero said. “On
the wrong side of the gap.” The controller snarled strange words.

“He …” said Caldera. “He’s saying … something about
settling up
?”

“You said something about credit,” Sham said. “Oh, this lot didn’t get lost. They’ve been
waiting
.”

He stared at the massive man. The controller. Who licked his lips again, & bared sharp teeth. “Our ancestors couldn’t afford their ancestors’ terms,” Sham said. “For the use of the rails. The bill’s been growing. They’ve been charging us interest. They think that’s why we’ve come. He thinks we’re ready to
pay
.”

He sifted through the papers. “How long you been waiting?” Sham said. “How long ago was the godsquabble? The railway wars?” Years. Centuries. Epochs.

The watchers yowled. One or two shook what Sham saw were the scraps of briefcases. They must have grown up with a prophecy. As had their parents, & theirs, & theirs near-endlessly, shuffling through the collapsing city. Waiting in their boardrooms & in emptiness. A prophecy they thought was coming true.

Abruptly, Sham hated them. He didn’t care that they were lost, too, in thrall to a remorseless drive, the hunger of a company presiding over ruin. That refused to allow the fall & rise of civilisations, the visitations & transformations & leave-takings & rubbish-pickings of aliens, the fall of waters, the poisonings of skies & the mutation of the things in the earth, because of the very actions for which they charged, to intrude on their patient accounting. Endlessly extending terms to a humanity unaware they were in debt, that they had for millennia been buying travel-passes on the never-never.
All in the hopes that at the end of time, economies would be back in place to pay.

“ ‘Ghost money in Heaven,’ ” Sham said. “Not ’cause it died—ghosts because it weren’t born yet.” He stared the big man in the face. “We,” he said, “owe you nothing.”

The controller stared at him. His look of hungry expectation slowly changed. To one of uncertainty. Then slowly to one of misery. & abruptly to one of rage.

He roared. All the Heaven-dwellers roared. They lurched forward. The jetty rocked as they came.

Daybe launched at the huge figure, but the controller batted it away. “Move!” Sham shouted, but before he could even get his pistol up, the controller had snagged his neck & squeezed & smacked the weapon from his hand. Through blood pounding in his ears, Sham heard the gun hit the water.

His vision was darkening as he flailed. He could make out the Shroakes trying to get away, Captain Naphi firing her pistol twice, before a perfectly flung rock slammed into her hand & disarmed her. & then there was simply not enough blood in his head for Sham to focus.

He shifted in woozy pain. Someone was tying his feet together, his hands behind his back, with manky old rope. He was hustled, tugged, cuffed, dragged to the jetty’s edge, the yells & struggles of his fellows behind him, the screeches of impotent daybat rage.

His head spun, he heard Caldera’s voice. She was next to him, Dero by her, then Naphi, all tied up but for the captain’s enhanced arm, too strong for cord, held instead in the grips of several captors. Who bickered & chattered. Some sobbed, in the epochal disappointment of prophecy unfulfilled. Some hissed. Some busily filled their captives’ clothes with stones.

The controller raged. He ground his teeth. Daybe swooped below curious gulls, but the man ignored or smacked it away again.

“Oh, shun!” he whispered. The feral businessman pointed at the water, & snarled some more. He was declaiming for his minions. He was, Sham thought,
announcing sentence
.

“Other people’ll come,” Sham shouted. “They think there’s treasure here! All the fares, the imaginary money you think you’ve got coming!”

Sham staggered under his weighed-down clothes, & struggled in his captors’ grasps, stared out at his attackers & the remnants of this bureaucratic heaven. “No!” he shouted. “This isn’t how it ends!”

He looked right at Caldera. She stared at him. She called Sham’s name as he was shoved to the walkway’s edge.

Sham tried to dig in his toes. He felt the ground shake. For a moment he thought it was his heart thundering his body. But his captors were hesitating, too. Something was happening.

Daybe’s alarm call changed timbre.

Grinding towards them all, coming backwards along the rails, through the cut in the ruins, towards the buffers at the line’s end, was an angel. A huge & age-crusted angel. An oil-fouled angel. The angel over the corpse of which Sham had clambered. Woken & alive again, hauling in reverse back the way, generations before, it must have come.

T
HE EXECUTIVES
of the factory-town screamed. They howled. They scattered. Sham reeled. It must be very much longer than a lifetime since the angel had died & isolated them.
None of them had ever seen a train move, seen any rolling stock on any line.

The angel gusted filthy smoke. Sham heard yells, saw familiar figures riding its rear. Benightly, & Mbenday, & Sirocco the salvor & Fremlo, &, his coat billowing splendidly despite all its holes, Vurinam. Sham’s crew rode towards him on the bum of a backwards-moving angel.

Sham shouted mightily in welcome. Benightly shot into the air, & the wild bosses ran. All but the giant controller. The angel’s rear-end rivet things pushed into the buffer & it stopped.

“No!” shouted the controller. That word was the same. “No, no! Shun! Oh shun!” With startling speed, he grabbed for the nearest captive. Caldera Shroake. & at that sight, quicker still, without a thought, Sham intervened.

He was a nothing, a silly pipsqueak, next to the huge figure. It was a wonder all of Sham’s momentum was sufficient to shift him at all. Perhaps in no other circumstances would it have been. But the man was poised on the very edge of the walkway. & when Sham slammed into him he wheeled his arms, tottered, his feet slipped & he pitched roaring towards the waves.

He reached, he raged. He grabbed as he went.

Grabbed Sham. Took Sham over with him, into the water. Took him down.

&
THANK YOU
. D
O YOU FEEL IT
?

We are slowing.

We will soon be done, & at our destination.

It could make a person despair, to dwell on how many parts of everything have been neglected. Have not even been discussed. You might by now have heard of the stretches of eastern & northern rails, far beyond Manihiki or any navy, where there are tribes of wild horses that have learnt so well to stay safe from burrowers, to never stray from the rails & ties, that it is encoded in their bones. So a newborn foal swaying on its stick-legs will not let its hardening hooves fall on the open flatearth. So trainsfolk in that meadowland share the rails with long lines of horses, trotting single file forever, eating the juicy grass between the rails.

In Amman Sun is a cold fortress served by trains made of ice. It’s said. The political fiddles between Deggenlache & Mornington could fill many entertaining hours. The drab & isolated lives of those cowed, bored generations of self-styled bosses in that town at the end of the rails, by contrast—they
are not uplifting. But there’s things to be learned from the stunted venality of the controllers.

On & on. Had you been in charge you would, even had you started & ended in the same places, have described a different figure. A different “&.” But nothing’s done. If you tell any of this to others, you can drive, & if you wish, go elsewhere on the way. Until then, safe travels & thank you.

&—Sham, you say?

Sham is drowning.

T
HE WATER TASTED LIKE TEARS
. T
HAT WAS WHAT
Sham thought as he went down. This was not like the streams & ponds on the hills of the railsea: it was salt.

Oh shun, tears forever.

He tried to fight his slow descent. No good. He couldn’t see a thing or free his limbs. Couldn’t hear anything but his own blood.

Somewhere below him in the cold, because it was desperately cold, he could feel a disturbance, the flailing limbs & bulk of the controller, thrashing.
I hope I don’t end up on top of him
, Sham thought.
I don’t want that to be where …

To be where.

I saw the end of the world
, Sham thought, & ceased moving his body, & breathed out in streaming bubbles, & closed his eyes & continued sinking.

& THEN ABRUPTLY STOPPED
.

Felt something grip him painfully by the restraints that held his hands. Felt pressure shift. Was moving up again, against the pull of gravity, upside down, away from the huge body of the man, the last of whose motions he could still just feel, receding below.

I
NTO THE AIR
, spluttering, retching, sucking in oxygen. The captain had him. Clutching him with her metal hand. She was held by the rope still wound around her waist, held tug-of-war-style by the crew. At its end was Benightly, bracing & taking the weight. The captain had gone right in for Sham, her metal hand pulling her down.

Naphi gripped Sham’s wet & salty waist & delivered him to the dock. Where Caldera reached for him first & grabbed him, hauled him back & slapped his cheek & shouted his name. Where Daybe came down & licked his face. Where he lay on the concrete & coughed, & vomited & wheezed while the Shroakes & Vurinam & Fremlo & Sirocco & everyone applauded in relief.