Railsea (5 page)

“Finish this later,” Zaro whispered.

Whatever
, thought Sham. At least the roosters had had a brief reprieve. He moved slowly again, all the energy that had hurtled him so uncharacteristically fast quite gone. Breathing heavily, Sham clambered off his little platform to find out what had been seen.

“W
HAT IS IT
?” Sham said. Trainsman Unkus Stone ignored him, & Mbenday tutted irritably.

They were in a stretch of atolls the size of houses. Woolly squirrels watched the
Medes
from where shoreline trees met the metal of the railsea. Across a sparsely railed stretch, Sham could see a line of much newer ruin. A crumpled silhouette.

He answered his own question. “A wreck.”

A small & shattered train. An engine, lying on its side in the dust. Completely off the rails.

“S
O ATTENTION THEN,
” the captain intercommed from her dais, in her usual mournful tones. “No flags, no activity. We’ve heard no maydays. No flares. We know zero. You know the protocols.” Salvage, the crew of a moler was not equipped to deal with. But a vehicle in distress? All legitimate trainsfolk would drop everything for a potential rescue. That was rail-code. The captain’s sigh, which she did not bother turning away from the microphone to disguise, suggested she obeyed this moral obligation without enthusiasm. “Get ready.” Any deviation from her own project, Sham thought—her fervour to follow, find, finesse her philosophy—she must resent.

Switchers took the train across the tracks, closer. It was tiny, that ruin, one car, one engine. It lay like a tipped cow.

Vehicles from moling nations across the railsea plied the bays of the Salaygo Mess archipelago, & of Streggeye Land his home. Sham had seen many train-shapes in his time, at harbour, & illustrations of more, in his studies. Even ruined as this one was by its damage, it looked utterly unfamiliar.

I
T WAS EASIER
than he’d thought it would be to insinuate himself onto the cart sent to investigate. Sham ran about on inventy errands as if by Fremlo’s instruction, &, still buoyed up by adrenaline from his foiled animal rescue, got behind Hob Vurinam lining up for duty & jumped into the swinging cart as if ordered. Muttered something about first aid.

Shossunder, still on the main deck, raised an eyebrow, but obviously thought it beneath him to complain. Thank the Stonefaces for the cabin boy’s pride, Sham thought. Second mate Gansiffer Brownall leaned from the cart as it puttered
toward the wreck & yelled into a loudhailer. “Anyone there? Ahoy!”

Ain’t no one alive in that
, Sham thought.
That’s medical knowledge right there
, he added to himself.
That’s as mashed as if an angel’s had at it
.

The sideways engine had no chimney: not steam-powered then. The first carriage bulged with machine remnants. It was scrunched up. Its portholes were blocked & broken. A thornbush had grown its sinewy way all the way through the carriage.

The crew was hushed. They creaked slowly closer through flat light. Ginger-pelted & multicoloured daybats rose in congregation from where they’d been fiddling in the ruin. They circled, complaining, swept out to the nearest island.

Technically, this might be salvage. No one living on the remains? Then anything the crew found & could carry was theirs. But glad as Sham was of all the drama, that would be nu-salvage. What floated his boat, what rung his bell, what he pined for, was the glamour of arche-salvage. The most incomprehensible & ancient remains.

Little animals bustled through the grass. The
Medes
loitered in the distance, the rest of the trainsfolk staring as the jollycart ghosted to a stop, nudging the dusty engine.

“Now,” said Brownall. “Volunteers.” The crew eyed her. She pursed tattooed lips & pointed. “Can get in from here. No one asks you to touch the ground.” They checked weapons. “Vurinam,” Brownall said. The trainswain bounced on his toes & took off his battered hat. “Teodoso. Thorn & Klimy, Unkus Stone, here with me. The rest of you, double-line. In you go. Top to bottom. Anyone, anything, let’s find it.
Where you off to?” She said that last to Sham, as he stood with the others as if to board.

He was busy being staggered by his own uncharacteristic behaviour. “You … said we was going in …”

“Soorap, don’t bugger about,” she said in the melancholy accent of the island of Clarion. “Did I moan about you being on the cart? I don’t notice? Didn’t know you had the front, boy. Don’t push your luck. Aft.” She pointed. “& …” She put her fingers to her lips.

One by one the cautious hunt descended through a window-turned-trapdoor. “You’re lucky you’re not walking back,” Brownall said to Sham. He gnawed his lip. She wouldn’t. The very idea, though, that thought of one foot after the other, careful on the dusty ties, avoiding the terrible earth, all the way back to the train, made him swallow.

So he waited. Stared out to railsea & back at the ruin. Jens Thorn threw rusty screws at a distant signal box. Cecilie Klimy took bearings for the Stonefaces knew what reason with an intricate sextant. Unkus Stone sang to himself & carved at scrap. His voice was lovely: even Brownall didn’t tell him to shut up. Stone sang an old song about falling on the dirt & being rescued by an underground prince.

The daybats settled. A couple of shaggy rabbits watched the crew, & Sham raised his little camera, the best that Voam & Troose could afford, that they’d presented to him with a delighted
tadah
!

“Ahoy!” Hob Vurinam’s head poked from a horizontal porthole. He shook his head & dust rose from his hair.

“& so?” shouted Brownall. “Situation?”

“Well,” Vurinam said. He spat over the edge of the train.
“Nothing. Been here like a million years. Engine’s already been gone through. More than once.”

Brownall nodded. “& the last carriage?”

“Well,” Vurinam said. “About that. You know you was saying Sham Soorap had to stay put?” Vurinam grinned. “Might want to rethink.”

S
HAM STRUGGLED THROUGH A ROOM ASKEW
. H
IS FLOOR
had once been a wall. He picked a cramped way past his comrades.

“See the problem?” Vurinam said. There was a door, now by the ceiling, flapping a few inches on its hinges. “It’s wedged,” Vurinam said. “& we’re all a bit big.”

It didn’t seem right. Most of the time the crew kept on about Sham being big for his age, & he was. He wasn’t the youngest on the
Medes
, nor the smallest, nor lightest crew-member. Yehat Borr was three foot something, muscled & bear-strong. Could do handstand press-ups. Throw harpoons almost as far as Benightly. Turn upside down dangling from a rope. But what Sham was was the smallest & lightest who happened to be right there, right then.

“I ain’t even supposed to be here.” Sham hated how his own voice suddenly quavered to his own hearing. But he
was
here, wasn’t he? Snuck on in a sudden pining for excitement, & the universe had called his bluff. His job was to apply bandages
& brew tea, thanks very much, not to haul arse into sealed-off wrecks.

Oh Stonefaces
, he thought. He didn’t want to go into the cabin—but how he wanted to want to.

“I told you,” someone mumbled. “Leave it, he ain’t going to …”

“Come on,” said Vurinam. “You like salvage, don’t you?” He met Sham’s gaze. “What do you say?”

All his crewmates were looking at him. Was it shame or bravery that made Sham say yes? Ah, well. Either way.

H
E GRIPPED, HE HAULED
. He kicked. Just like exploring deserted buildings in Streggeye, he told himself. He’d done that. Not that he was brilliant at it, but he was better than you might think. He was shoved at, feet & bum, wriggled, held his breath, scraped through the gap.

Beyond the door it was dark. The windows in what was now the car’s ceiling were shuttered. Rods of dusty light extended from holes, picked out patches of ground, mildew, paperscraps, cloth.

“Can’t see much,” Sham said. He scrabbled, bolder, was over & in & down with a thud.
Well
, he thought cautiously, wiping his hands.
This ain’t so bad
.

“Here we go,” he reported. “What’s here?”

Not much. The back of the carriage was crushed, rammed from outside, long ago. Sham’s eyes adjusted. The paper litter was still speckled with stubs of writing, too small to make sense. There were ash-piles.

“It’s all rubbish,” he said. The windows at his feet were open to the ground. He shivered to be so close to earth.

No surprise, of course, that this made Sham wonder about his father. Thoughts trundled as slow as an old goods vehicle through his skull. Was this how it had looked when his father’s train went down? There had been no survivors & no word. Sham had imagined the train many times—an elongated, wheeled crypt. He had not, however, envisaged it on its side, like this. A failure of his imagination he now rectified. He sniffed.

Sham shuffled through junk. When he was a kid, he’d played salvors many times. & here was, in the most trashed sense, salvage. The ruins of a chair. Shards of an ordinator. The splayed rods of a mangled typewriter. He swished his feet through debris.

Something thunked & rolled out of rags. A skull.

“What is it?” Vurinam shouted at Sham’s yell.

“I’m alright,” Sham called back. “Just a shock. Ain’t nothing.”

Sham looked at the skull, & its eyeholes watched him back. It watched him, too, from a third eye, neat hole bang centre of its forehead. He kicked the rag-shreds away. There were other bones. Though not enough, Sham thought with his new, very slight, insight, for a whole body.

“I think I found the captain,” Sham said quietly. “& I think the captain don’t want much rescuing.”

An arm bone poked up from the bare dirt in a windowframe. It went deep. Near it was a broken cup, its jag filthy. As if it had been used to dig.

Sham was no baby. He knew, of course, how superstitions worked, that the earth wasn’t
literal
poison. It had been many years since he’d thought it really would kill him just to touch
it. But it certainly was for real dangerous. His whole life he’d been trained to avoid it, & not without reasons.

He squatted, now, though. Slowly, he reached out. Tentatively, he prodded the soil in the window, snatched his hand right back as if from a stove. It reminded him of being by the shore back in Streggeye, clustered with classmates at the island’s edge, by the loamy earth of railsea where tracks tangled. Everyone goading each other to pat it.

Sham wrinkled his face, wrapped his hand in his sleeve. He tugged the arm bone from the ground & threw it from him. He steeled himself. He reached slowly into the hole, to find what the dead person had been taking out, or putting in.

He grit his teeth. It was cold & dry within. He groped. Stretched. Felt something. He fiddled, fingertip-gripped, slowly extracted it from the earth. A plastic wafer, like the one in his camera. A picture card. He put it in his pocket, lay flat & put his hand back in the hole.

“Sham!” Vurinam said. Sham pressed his cheek to the earth. Outside the cabin, he heard wings like ruffled pages, screams of returning daybats. “Sham, get out!”

“Hold on a minute,” Sham said, & stretched again.

Something bit him.

U
P
S
HAM SPRANG
like a spring-loaded toy, yelling in terror & trailing blood. Vurinam shouted, bats screamed & from the earth came a chattering.

Sham knew where the captain’s other bones had gone. He knew what had shredded all the clothes. He grabbed for the sideways door but, hurt, his hand couldn’t take his weight.
In the window-frames, the dirt bulged. A dreadful bony sound sounded. Sham stared into the hole. From its deeps two eyes stared back.

The thing rose. It burst from its tunnel.
Chewing its way out
. A thing of pale, wrinkled corpsy skin, appalling scissoring teeth.

The naked mole rat launched itself out of the earth.

A
S LONG
AS HUMANITY HAS ROLLED ON THE RAILSEA
, the rigours & vigours & bloody triggers of the underground have been legendary. There are predators on the islands, too, of course, above the grundnorm. Hill cats, wolves, monitor lizards, aggressive flightless birds & all manner of others bite & harass & kill the unwary. But they’re only one aspect of the hardland ecosystems, pinnacles on multiform animal pyramids. These systems contain vastly varied behaviours, including cooperations, symbioses & gentlenesses.

Subterrestriality, by contrast, & life on the flatearth that is its top, is more straightforward & exacting. Almost everything wants to eat almost everything else.

There are herbivores. Chewers on roots. But they are a small unhappy minority. You might think the Squabbling Gods of the railsea, when their bickering made the world, put them there for a mean-spirited joke. Look under the tracks & ties: the beasts that make caverns, that tunnel, that steal their way into others’ networks, that rise & sink above & below the groundline, that squeeze through crevices in the fractured
world, that coil around roots & stalactites, are overwhelmingly, & ferociously, predators. There is something about the compact materiality of that realm, naturalists speculate, that heightens the pressures of life. By comparison, the island ecosystems are oases of pacifism.