Railsea (4 page)

T
HEY PASSED ANOTHER
moler, diesel-powered like the
Medes
, its flags announcing it from Rockvane. The crews waved at each other. “Wouldn’t know how to mole if a suicidal moldywarpe talked them through it,” the
Medes
crew muttered through their smiles. Rockvane this & that, they went on, creative imprecations about their southern neighbour.

The rails here precluded an easy gam, a social meet-up, exchange of news & letters. So it was with surprise that Sham saw Gansiffer Brownall, the glum & intricately tattooed second mate, unroll a hunt-kite of the type they flew in Clarion, her austere far-off home.

What’s she doing?
he thought. The captain attached a letter to the kite. Brownall sent it coiling like a live thing through the air, under the roiling shadowy smear of the upsky. Two, three swoops, & she dive-bombed it into the Rockvane train.

Within minutes, the Rockvaners threw up a final pennant. Sham stared as they receded. He was still learning the language of flags, but this one he knew. In response to the captain’s question, it said,
Sorry, no
.

I
T WAS COLD BUT NOTHING LIKE THE MERCILESS FRIGIDITY
of deep Arctic. Sham watched the rumbustious ecosystems of burrows. Peeled-looking loops of worms broke earth. Head-sized beetles. Foxes & bandicoots hurried between clots of treeroots & the perforated metal & glass of up-thrust salvage. Fog closed in, obscuring rail after rail.

“Soorap,” Vurinam said. The trainswain was concentrating, experimenting with a new hat. New to him, that was. Vurinam shoved his black hair beneath it, cocked it variously with & against the wind.

“Did you not hear me at the betting?” Vurinam said. “Didn’t you want to watch?”

“Sort of,” Sham said. “But that ain’t reason enough, sometimes.”

“You’re going to have a hard time of it in this line of work,” Vurinam said. “If a bit of animal argy-bargy upsets you.”

“It ain’t the same,” Sham said. “That ain’t it. For one, we
don’t go for moldywarpes for the laugh of it. & for two, they’ve got a good chance of getting us back.”

“Allowable,” Vurinam decided. “So it’s about size? If Yashkan was put up against a couple of mole rats, or a thing his own scale, you’d have no objections?”

“I’d lay a bet myself,” Sham muttered.

“Next time you should stick it out,” Hob said.

“Vurinam.” Sham made himself go on. “What was it the captain asked the
Bagsaft
? & when we caught the big one, why did she ask what colour it was?”

“Ah.” Vurinam stopped tweaking his headgear’s brim & turned to look at Sham. “Well.”

Sham said, “It’s her philosophy, ain’t it?”

“What would you know about that?” said Hob Vurinam after a moment.

“Nothing,” Sham mumbled. “I just sort of supposed she’s looking for something. Of a certain colour. So she must have one. She was asking if they’d seen it. What colour is it?”

“So very slow at back-gammony,” Vurinam said. Glanced at the crow’s nest & back at Sham. “So ill-suited to climbing.” Sham shifted, uncomfortable in Vurinam’s gaze. “Wistful at the sight of antique trash. Ain’t much of a doctor. But that right there is a good deduction, Sham Soorap.”

He leaned in. “She calls it
ivory
,” Vurinam said quietly. “Or
bone-hue
sometimes. I heard her describe it once as
tooth-like
. Now me I’d not backchat or argue for a treble-share of the moleprice if that’s what she wants to call it but if it were
me
, what I’d say is that it’s yellow.” He straightened. “Her philosophy,” he said, speaking into the wind, “is yellow.”

“You seen it?”

“A flatograph is all.” Vurinam made a humpback motion with his hand. “Big,” he said. “Really … big.” He whispered, “Big & yellow.”

Philosophies
. Time was Sham’d wondered if that was what he wanted in his life, to surrender to a philosophy, hunt it implacably. But as he learnt more about the moletrains, it turned out they raised in him a queasiness, philosophies. A sort of nervous irritation.
I might have known
, he thought.

S
HAM WAS RARELY TEMPTED
to do anything at night but sleep. But after that conversation, he was too jittery to surrender to his dull dreams. He sat, so far as the bed-cubby would allow. Listened to the grind & snort of wind & metal of the resting moletrain. Thought things through. At last got up.

He crept shivering through the cabin & its sleepers. Not easy in a space so intricate & equipment-cramped. Every step a negotiation of bundled rope & rags, clattery iron, tin tools, the tchotchkes by which sentimental trainsfolk made rolling stock homely. From low ceilings dangled all sorts of things on which a head could bash. But days at rail had changed him. Sham was no longer a landlubber.

Up. Night-shifts moved on other roofdecks, but Sham kept low. Into the middle of the huge cold railsea dark where nightlights swung in line, each queried by its own loyal moths. There were glints on iron lines alongside, racing shadows on the ties. Sham saw no stars.

He wanted to make a way along the traintop, to the ropeladder, to the crow’s nest. Then he wanted to make a rude gesture towards where Vurinam slept & climb into the wind,
to the platform where whichever poor soul on duty crouched by a two-bar heater & stared towards the unseen horizon.

Only the maddest captain would hunt, switch rail-to-rail, at night. The lookout was watching for lights, which might be other hunters, might at worst be pirates—or just very possibly might be current-running salvage. That, Sham told himself, was what he wanted to see.

Not merely—merely!—to spot one of the looming loops of concrete-scabbed girders or a broken black dome or rubbish or plaster-glass-&-circuitry artefacts that broke the railsea. But to find one powered, running by whatever occult source ran the rarest salvage. Emitting sound or light, obeying forgotten plans. He wanted that, not some captain’s stupid philosophy.

Sham looked at the dangling ladder. Swore. As if it weren’t too cold & he too scared. & if he did get up there & see anything, nothing would happen. Captain Naphi would mark it on a chart, to pass to others. The
Medes
would keep hunting moles.

I’d rather find nothing
, Sham thought, as sulkily as a child. He crept his freezing way back to bed, refusing to feel ashamed of himself.

T
HE NEXT DAY
when a lookout announcement made Sham’s heart surge, it wasn’t the call for a moldywarpe, but it wasn’t really salvage either. It was something he hadn’t even considered.

T
HERE ARE TWO LAYERS TO THE SKY, & FOUR LAYERS
to the world. No secrets there. Sham knew that, this book knows that, & you know that, too.

There’s the downsky, that stretches two, three miles & a biscuit from the railsea up. That high, the air suddenly goes dinge-coloured, & more often than not roils with toxic cloud. That is the border of the upsky, in which hunt oddities, ravenous alien flyers. Mostly unseen in the dirty mist, thank goodness, except when the cover clears & makes watchers shudder. Except when their limbs & bits reach down to grab some ill-advisedly ambitious bird flying above what’s sensible.

We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the fourfold of the world.

There is the subterrestrial, where the digging beasts dig, where there are caverns, roots, ancient seams of salvage & maybe the iron & wood of long-forgotten or not-yet-seen lines of railsea.

The railsea, sitting on the flatearth; that is the second
level. Tracks & ties, in the random meanders of geography & ages, in all directions. Extending forever.

The lands & the countries & the continents are level three. They jut above the rails. They rise on the grundnorm, the foundation of hard earth & stone too dense for the diggers of level one to hole. That makes them habitable. These are the countless archipelagos, solitary islands, the nations & questionable continents.

& over & above all that, where the peaks of the larger lands reach, protrude through the miles of breathable downsky into the upsky, above the borderline, are the cloggy, claggy highlands. On which poison-mist-&-dodgy-air-obscured levels creep, scurry & stagger the cousins of the upsky flyers, poison-breathing parvenu predators. Like them, troublesome biology, originating elsewhere.

Of those four zones there are two & a half where human life goes on. Inland, on the islands looking over iron & ties & savage dirt of the railsea, there are orchards & meadows. There are pools & quick streams. Fertile, gentle soil full of crops. This is where farmers farm, next to where towns town. That is where the landbound, the mass of humanity, lives. Above train travels & troubles.

Edging such places is the railseaside, called the littoral zone. Those are the shorelands. Port towns, from where transport, freight & hunting trains set out. Where lighthouses light ways past rubbish reefs breaking earth. “Give me the inland or give me the open rails,” say both the railsailor & the landlubber, “only spare me the littoral-minded.”

There are many such homilies among trainsfolk. They are particularly given to sayings & rules. Like: “Always do your best for those in peril on the railsea.”

A
GAIN, THE CIRCLE OF OFF-DUTY TRAINSPEOPLE
bickering over the odds of fighting animals. Again, the prodding & tweaking of the handlers.

The day was bright & cold & windy, & made Sham blink. He sidled up.
Oh, sneck up
, he thought, in unease he couldn’t explain to himself, when he saw on what the audience was betting.

They were birds. Not indigenous to these latitudes, either—pygmy fighting cockerels. They must have been kept & coddled just for this moment. Each was smaller than a sparrow. Their tiny wattles wobbled, their minuscule cockscombs throbbed, they clucked & cawed chest-out in miniature swagger, strutted in circles, taking each other’s measure. On their lower legs they wore wicked little spurs. As was traditional for the smallest fighting birds, theirs weren’t metal but hardened, polished bramble thorns.

Yes, Sham could see the careful expertise with which some in the crowd were appraising the belligerents. He could appreciate the ferocity & bravery of the sudden madly fluttering
assault, as bird went for tiny bird. He heard the odds, the mathematics of savagery. But strive as he did to overcome distaste, to watch with enthusiasm, or even with calm interest, Sham could only wince, & could focus only on the fact that the birds were very small.

Over slow seconds, he leaned over the fighting grounds.
What was all this
, he thought? He spectated himself, as if his body was a puppet.
What is Sham up to?
Sham wondered.

Ah, there was his answer. It wasn’t only mammals for which he felt sorry, it turned out. Sham was tugging his sleeves over his fingers, while the rest of the trainsfolk watched with increasing bewilderment, not even interrupting him, so methodically did he move. Now he was reaching down into the flurry of dust & feather-fluff & blood where the two tiny cockerels struggled to slaughter each other. Then right hand, left hand, Sham picked them up.

The wind, the squawks, the huffs of the engine continued, but it still felt in that moment as if everything was silent.
Ah
. That sound was in his head. It was as if he could hear the half-approving, half-disapproving amusement of Troose & Voam at his action. & behind them—a surprise to him—a whisker of the same conflicted emotion from Sham’s long-gone mum & dad. Observing him.

Everyone on-deck stared at Sham. “What,” said Yashkan, “are you doing?”

I have no idea
, he thought. He kept watching, to learn the answer.
Ah
, again. Having rescued the birds, now, it seemed, Sham was running away.

He snapped abruptly back into his own body as if his soul was catapulted by elastic. He came to himself running full-pelt, his breath heaving, his legs drumming as the train veered.
He vaulted obstacles on the cartop deck. Behind him were outraged shouts.

A glance, & Sham saw chasing him, shaking their fists & yelling vengeance & punishment, not only Brank & Zaro, the big hauler & little switcher whose birds he carried; not only Yashkan & Lind, a bit behind them, eager to get hold of Sham for more vindictive reasons; but a great gathering of people who’d placed bets.

Sham was ungainly, but he jumped over chests, capstans & knee-high chimney stubs, ducked under the bars segmenting one deck-bit from another. Moved faster than he thought he could. Faster than his pursuers thought he could. & all without using his hands, each of which contained a carefully not-crushed fighting rooster. Sham ran from one end of the deck to the other, a trail of women & men behind him, shouting instructions to each other to head him off here & grab hold of him there. The birds pecked & scratched, & even tiny as they were & through the cloth wrapping his hands, they drew Sham’s blood. He beat his own reflex to fling them away. He was surrounded. He scuttled up a ladder, onto a storage bin.

Nowhere to go. Brank & Zaro approached. He swallowed at the sight of their fury. But as many of his pursuers were laughing as looked angry. Vurinam was applauding. Even Shossunder the cabin boy smiled. “Well run, boy!” Mbenday shouted. Sham held out his hands full of terrified birdlings as if they were weapons. As if he would throw them, thorns & all.
What
, he thought,
am I doing?

Desperately, he considered hurling the birds straight up, to where the wind gusted. Their wings were clipped, but flapping them frantically, they could fall in controlled feathery
motion right off the deck. At least that way they’d avoid the combat that appeared to be their lot. But when they landed they would, within instants, be something’s lunch. He hesitated.

There was no way he was getting out of this without a whack or two, he thought, as Brank & Zaro came at him. & then, just then as the triumphant Brank lifted his arms to pounce, there was a halloo from the crow’s nest. The train was approaching something.

A frozen moment. Then Mbenday shouted, “Stations!” The crew scattered. Brank, Zaro waited, till Sham, grudging & without a choice, handed back the birds.