Railsea (9 page)

Sham had had a go on an ordinator once or twice, but they didn’t interest him overmuch. There weren’t many in Streggeye Land, & those there were, he’d been told, were not up-to-date. The captain cleared away wires that piled around the screen like fairytale brambles around a castle. While a glow slowly grew on the screen, she raised her left arm & with a rapid-fire
clickclickclick
different bits of it came to the fore: special machinery, magnifying glass, mini-telescope, leather-needle. It was her way of fiddling. Like someone else might drum their fingertips on a table. Sham stood politely, waited, murdering the captain in his mind. She inserted the plastic into the ordinator’s slot.

Bad enough to find it & have it nicked
, Sham thought.
Without you taunting me with it
. He wondered whether the memory, so long mouldering in the cold ground, nibbled by animals, would even be readable, or if there was anything
on it. Then suddenly a man looked out at him from the screen.

A big, bearded man, in his fifties, perhaps. He stared at the lens full on, pulling his head slightly back, his arm jutting in perspective. The typical stance of people taking a flatograph of themselves, holding a camera at arm’s length. He didn’t smile, the man, but he had humour in his face.

Digitally degraded, the picture looked dirt-flecked. Behind the photographer, a woman was visible. She was out of focus, her expression unclear, folding her arms & glancing with what just might be patience, indulgence, affection.

You’re the skull
, Sham thought.
One of you’s who I found
. He moved minutely from foot to foot.

Naphi pressed something; the image shifted. Two children. Not on a train: the backdrop was a town. Under a strange, tumbledown, unfocused arch of ill-matched white blocks. A little girl, an even younger boy. Skin the dark grey typical of Manihiki. Smiling. They stared right at Sham. He frowned. The captain glanced at him as if he’d said something.

A stern boy! A thoughtful girl! Hands by their sides, hair neat … but then, again, a shift. Too fast, the children were gone, & Sham was looking at a gloomy room full of junk, then almost instantly at a picture of some huge harbour, way larger than any he had ever seen, teeming with trains of countless kinds. It made him gasp, but then that went, too, & now an image from a traintop, rattling on the tangles of the railsea. Then the woman, again, back to the camera, standing before gauges & dials in the engine.

Clickclick
, the captain scrolled. Sham was being driven crazy by her ability to sit without speaking. & on-screen were
images of the railsea itself & its islands. Tracks among & through thickets of old trees. A forest, no other word for it, not on any humpback island but part of the railsea itself. It had been autumn when the shot was taken, & banks of leaves piled up on the rails ahead.

A desert, flat sand, sparse tracks. Rocks like fangs under the overcast sky. Where,
where
, had these people been?

Playing moles frozen midleap ahead of the train’s prow, pursuing leg-sized earthworms. The sett of a huge bull badger. A little lake rimmed with rails. Hedgehog tangles in tree roots. & at the very limit of the camera’s capabilities, a hulking & hermetic track-riding presence. Sham held his breath. Some train, not like anything he had seen before but abruptly familiar nonetheless.

He realised what the silhouette reminded him of. A fanciful & speculative image, as all such images were, from some book of religious instruction, of an angel. A sacred engine, rolling the rails to save them.

Sham gaped. Wasn’t it bad luck to see an angel? Some were rumoured to maintain the rails in deep railsea reaches—& trainsfolk were supposed to turn fast away should they ever come close enough to see such interventions. Should he look away now? How could he?

Wait wait!
Sham thought, but the captain had moved on. A new picture was below him now, a rearing great talpa. The captain’s turn to freeze. But the moldywarpe’s fur was dark. On she scrolled.

Where had this train been going?

Geography that made Sham furrow his brow. Strange, distinctive rock formations like giant melted candles. Overhangs above railsea lines.

& suddenly. Railsea. But not.

Land stretched like some pegged-out dead animal in an Anatomy & Butchery class. Flat & dusty & specked with broken brown stones & little bits of matter that might be salvage, but mean stuff if it was. A lowering downsky, storm clouds growling like guard dogs. A glowing upsky above. The prow of the train was visible like a fat arrow in the middle of the shot, pointing at an oddly foreshortened horizon. The line it was riding was an unnaturally straight stretch, the two rails bisecting the view all the way to where perspective knitted them together. & to either side of it—

—either side of that line the train was riding—

—was nothing.

No other rails at all.

Empty earth.

Sham leaned forward. He was trembling. Saw the captain leaning forward herself, in time with him.

Empty earth & one straight line.
One line in the railsea
. Couldn’t be.
There’s not nor can there be any way out of the tangle
. A single line could not be. There it was.

“Stonefaces come between us & all harm,” Sham whispered, & clutched his bat, because it felt like an unholiness, all that nothing, because for goodness sake what was the world between islands but the railsea?

All that nothing. Sham got his own little camera out. Fumble, fumble, not looking at its screen, & trembling, he took a picture of that picture, the most amazing image he had ever seen.

All that nothing!
It made him reel. He staggered, fell hard & loud against another ordinator. The captain turned to him
as he put his camera back in his pocket. She fingerstabbed the keyboard & the image disappeared.

“Control yourself,” Naphi said in a low voice. “Pull yourself together, right now.”

Sham’s head was still all full of that impossible rail, surrounded by all that equally impossible railless nothing.

A
WAY AGAIN
. E
ATING UP LINES, EATING UP THE
tie-&-rail miles between Bollons & the Salaygo Mess & Streggeye itself. The
Medes
, if slowly, if by roundabout routes, was going home. Without Unkus Stone.

“What d’you mean, he can’t come with us?” Sham had said.

“Ah now, lad,” had said Unkus Stone, & added a short scream as someone shifted where they leaned on his bed & moved his still-very-tender legs.

Sham & Vurinam & Dr. Fremlo & Yehat Borr & a few others had been in the sanatorium. The equipment around Unkus & the few other patients—here someone with injuries caused by crushing train-metal, there a blood-rabbit bite, one or two with bugs of the railsea—was battered. But it was not unclean, & the smell of the lunch the staff had brought Stone was not undelicious.

“Can’t believe I’m awake,” Unkus said.

“Neither can I,” said Fremlo.

The laughter after that was uncomfortable.

There was no way they could wait, Sham’s colleagues told him. He was being sentimental. There were moles to hunt. The bill for the sanatorium was paid for a while longer—topped up, might they point out, by the captain herself out of her own share. They had to get on.

“I really do not like it here,” Vurinam said. He glanced to either side & lowered his voice. “People keep asking where we’re going, where we been. Bollons people are
nosy
. Someone even asked us if it was true we was salvors!” He raised his eyebrows. “Said they heard we’d found a wreck! & a treasure map!”

Hmmm
, thought Sham, a little uneasily.

“Shouldn’t just leave you,” Sham had said.

“Ah now, lad.” & Unkus had given Sham an awkward pat on the arm. “I can get myself to the docks, get paid passage back when I’m better.”

“It ain’t right.”

It wasn’t just for Unkus that he wanted to stay, though Sham could not admit that. The longer they stayed in Bollons, he thought, the more chance he might persuade the captain to visit Manihiki. From where, it was his tentative judgement, the man, woman, children in those images came. He felt uncharacteristically certain that going there was what he wanted to do—to make that connection between those images, & that place.

He had been running through increasingly baroque ideas of what he might say or hint to Captain Naphi to persuade her so far out of her intended path. He had nothing. & he was still astonished, could barely believe they were not in any case going.

He couldn’t not, with an ecstasy of scandal, keep recalling
that picture. The secret of that line, that solitary line, leading, it seemed—& it still felt like curse words even just to think it!—out of the railsea. One of the first things he had done, back from the ordinator room in Bollons—whatever job the captain would have had him do forgotten by both of them—was to draw, as well as he could, all the images he had seen, from memory. Until he had a sheaf of scrappy ink renderings of memories of images of unlikely landscapes. They would have meant nothing to most who saw them, but to him were mnemonics, reminders, to conjure the railsea flatographs he had seen, that the captain had destroyed.

Oh yes. She had, making sure he saw her do so, carefully crushed the memory in her tough, skinless hand, while Sham made an involuntary noise of protest. When she opened her tough hydraulic fingers again it was full of plastic dust. “Whatever that silliness was,” she had said, “it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants.”

Naphi had put a mechanical finger to her lips. “Be quiet,” she’d said. The instruction had covered both the noise of the clumsiness of his awe, & the potential saying of what he’d seen to others.

“Captain,” he’d whispered. “What was …?”

“I’m a moler,” Naphi had said. “You are a doctor’s assistant. Whatever you saw or thought you saw, it has nothing to do with your life & aims, whatever they might be, any more than it does with mine. So we don’t speak of it.”

“That was Manihiki,” he said. “Where they came from. We should—”

“I strongly advise,” the captain had said, looking at her own hands, “that you do not now or ever tell me, or any other
captain under whom you roll, what ‘we’ ‘should’ do.” The quotation marks were audible. “I am considering, ap Soorap.”

So Sham said nothing. The captain had led him out of the café past packs of the goats that Bollonsians let roam the streets, trained to eat rubbish & leave their droppings in alleyway compost-heaps. Slowly, heart still slamming (approximating the clattername
fudustunna
, he thought, that came with great but dogged & determined pace), he thought through what he had seen. Those pictures.

Alone at last, back on the train, he had checked his own camera. That she had not seen him use. There it was. The picture. Horribly compromised by his shakes. Off-centre. But there it was, & it was not mistakable. The single rail.

He bit his lips.

There was a family. At the centre of the railsea. A woman & man of that family had left. Exploring? The extraordinary trainless landscapes. Exploring. Past animals. Past a place where what might be an
angel
prowled. Just far enough from it to stay safe. Through areas beyond the known railsea. To (that line) … to (that single line) … to that single line. To where the railsea untangled. & out of it.

& then they had come back. By some strange route, at last via the fringes of the Arctic. Heading, surely, for home. Where those children waited.

What a journey, Sham thought, & knew that that sister & brother needed to know what had happened. Those trainsfolk had been returning for them, & it was their right to know that.
If someone found anything of the train my father’d been on
, thought Sham,
I’d want to know
.

& they would. Whatever strangeness it was, that impossible
rail, it was a priceless insight. The captain, he had thought, must be desperate to get going. He thought she must be working out routes to get them to Manihiki lickety-split. Where she & her officers could do whatever it was they’d do, work out how & to whom to sell the information, reconstruct the route those flatographs represented. & meanwhile, if they weren’t going to do it themselves, he, Sham, could pass on the sad news of the train’s & the trainsfolks’ demise to that boy & that girl.

That was what the captain must be doing.

“Your train’s away soon, then,” the harbourmaster said approvingly to Vurinam, in Sham’s hearing. “Good good. I hear chatter.”

Chatter about what?
Sham wanted to ask. But he never got that information, & in Bollons chatter itself—as currency, bait & weapon—was trouble enough. Then word of their intended route had got out, & Sham had, in disbelief, realised Naphi had meant what she first said. That it had not been a moment’s reflexive denial of an underling while a plan was hatched. That Naphi was not taking them to Manihiki.

He considered saying something, but remembering her rejoinder to his first attempt, unconsidered it. Well then, he thought at last, as pugnacious as he could make his inner voice, if she really wasn’t intending to go there anyway, as she bloody well should, he’d just have to persuade her.

T
HE BEST-LAID PLANS
can go belly up, & Sham’s was not even best laid. Twice he started to approach the captain, heart clatternaming on his inner rails, ready to ask her how she could do this, what this was, this refusal to pursue those images,
her resolute not-talking-about-it-ness. The
Medes
set out, & headed in, as far as Sham was concerned, entirely the wrong direction, & he couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. & each time she looked at him one second too long, with very cold eyes, & he swallowed & turned away. & instead of to Manihiki, home to Streggeye Land they went.

O
N THE DOWN SIDE, ONE OF THE
M
EDES
TRAINSFOLK
had been left behind, flesh & muscle gnawed off his bones, in an ether-smelling shed on the shores of a land he didn’t know or like. On the up side, they’d snaffled quite the moldywarpe. Their holds were full of salted molemeat, barrels of rendered mole-oil, carefully cured skin & fur.