Railsea

  “The tracks went in?” said Sham.

  “It had a lot of dark in it. It was full up with shadow. & something else. Something that, blaring that noise, suddenly & loud & awful, came out.”

  Sham started as something gripped his shoulder: Daybe, dropped from the air, to perch on him.

  “I won’t call it a train,” Fremlo said. “Trains, in all their varieties, are machines made for carrying us. This was for nothing but itself. It came out of that hole in silver fire.

  “D’you think we stuck around to see it get closer? We hightailed it back out into the known railsea. & luckily it let us go. Went back for more orders from the great director in the sky.”

  The way Fremlo said it, Sham could not tell if the doctor was a believer, or merely citing folklore.

  AN INVISIBLE CLOUD squatted above the train. To Sham, everyone seemed contained, oppressed. No one said a word, but everyone seemed to agree that something was definitely following the damned train. Be it for angels, hungry monsters, pirates, marauders or imaginaries, the train was a quarry.

  So it was almost a surprise that they made it anywhere. When, late on a beautiful evening in a stretch where the ground between the rails was thick with wild grass & tall weeds that rippled at them in wind-driven welcome, they saw a set of islands. Rocks where gulls fluffed their bums in scrub & eyed them with interest.

  The Medes came closer, past larger landings, signs of habitation, more switches, electrical wires, lighthouses warning of weak-railed patches, & nasty rocks & reefs & pylons spreading & electrifying certain rails for trains that could run by that current, & then trains themselves, suddenly, shuffling or motionless, trains of every possible kind ranged around a great rocky land. On its shore a city. A place of towers & an architecture of scrapyard ingenuity & awe.

  “Land!” announced the tannoy, someone from the crow’s nest, wildly redundantly. Everyone knew by then where they were.

  Manihiki City.

  BURROWING TORTOISE

  (Magnigopherus polyphemus)

  Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.

  Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 3.1)

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SO THIS WAS THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.

  Sham did his best not to gaze like a greenhorn. Manihiki didn’t make it easy, though: the spectacle started before they’d even pulled into the sidings in the largest harbour in the known world.

  They came through an endless chaotic catalogue of vehicles. Past crews that ignored them, crews that stared at them, crews in outfits that marked them out as Streggeye’s neighbours, & those dressed like illustrations or dreams. & the engines. Or, to be more precise—because not all the trains were engined—the means of locomotion.

  Here a small train, three carriages only, manoeuvring the rails of the harbour at the end of great thrumming cables, tugged by two great birds. Well: a buzzard-train, emissary from the Teekhee archipelago. Wooden trains decorated with masks; trains coated in die-cast tin shapes; trains flanked with bone ornaments; double- & triple-decker trains; plastic-pelted trains stained in acrylic colours. The Medes passed the clatter & clank of diesel vehicles like their own. Past the shrill fussy shenanigans of steam trains that spat & whistled & burped dirty clouds, like irritating godly babies. & others.

  The railsea: a vast & various train ecosystem. They passed under wires, for the few juiced-up miles of coastal rails. Here a stubby vehicle of scrubbed steel, its few windows tinted, & turning its wheels were back-curved pistons jutting from its sides. What were these grim faces from Fremlo, from all Sham’s crew? This controlled disgust Captain Naphi showed?

  Oh. That was a galleytrain. In its hot bowels scores of slaves were strapped in rows, hauling on the handles to turn the wheels, encouraged by whips.

  “How can they allow it?” Sham breathed.

  “Manihiki calls itself civilised,” Fremlo said. “No slavery ashore. But you know how port-peace works. On each harboured train the laws of home.” There were as many laws among the railsea lands as there were lands. In some were slaves.

  Sham imagined kicking down doors & racing through the train corridors, shooting dastardly guards. His impotence embarrassed him.

  & solar trains from Gul Fofkal; lunar ones from who-knew-where?; pedal trains from Mendana; a rococo clockwork train that made Zhed smile & salute as its crews sang the songs of winding & twisted their great key; treadmill trains from Clarion, their crews jogging to keep them moving; little trains tugged by trackside ungulate herds able to fight off the burrowing predators of shallow railsea; one-person traincycles; hulking invisibly powered wartrains; electric trains with the snaps & sparks of their passing.

  Manihiki.

  SHAM’S FIRST TASK at port was not, as he’d expected, to wind bandages, nor to clear up Fremlo’s cabin, nor even to go shopping for whatever doctorly bits & pieces were needed. Instead, to Fremlo’s narrow-eyed fascination, the captain herself ordered Sham to accompany her on what she called “her errands” in Manihiki town.

  “You’ve never been here before,” she said, pulling on her gloves, the left one altered to fit her inorganic hand, checking the buttons & fastenings of her dress coat, sweeping dust from her stiff pantaloons.

  “No, Captain.” Sham wished he had good clothes into which to squeeze.

  By the jollycart, with the putter & grind of displaced earth, the curious snub faces of local moles & baby-sized earthrats, semi-tame & well-fed on thrown scraps & organic rubbish, poked their heads up. Blind or not, they seemed to meet Sham’s gaze. Daybe gripped his shoulder all the way to the harbour. Until they disembarked.

  Into a city that, Sham’s limited experience with alcohol suggested, was as giddying as being drunk. Raucous docks, a tight-packed, polyglot crowd. Catcalls, laughter, the shouting of wares. Sham saw people in clothes of all designs & colour & every tradition, beggarly rags through rubberized jumpsuits to the top hats of priests of That Apt Ohm, mimicking the dandy dress of their god. &—Sham stared—the rugged crazy costumes & makeshift uniforms of salvors.

  Scholars from Rockvane watched Tharp conjurors; Cabigo emissaries swept their robes out of Manihiki puddles; hunters in Pittman overalls swapped maps & banter with updivers from Colony Cocos. The quaysides were haunts of pickers of pockets, players of rigged games, shake-lurks, fake survivors of fake train wrecks, asking for alms. Sham had no money to protect.

  History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered. This building was grandly new, with steel in its plaster. This next was older by hundreds of years, & shabby. A mongrel place. Animal-tugged landcars, rickshaws, combustion engines growled past street furniture in endlessly different styles, houses made from what looked nothing like building materials. As if they’d been used as part of a bet.

  Manihiki naval officers lounged in uniform, half on duty, half on display, half flirting with passersby. Yes, the maths was correct: such swagger could only be made up of three halves. They might bellow an instruction to a passing kid, or intervene in some minor altercation with tough, sanctioned panache. Imagine them at rail, Sham thought. A ferronaval train grinding down on pirates, guns going, rescue missions & defence-for-hire.

  Off went Daybe into the low sky, investigating eaves, carvings, the gargoyles cobbled, Sham realised, out of salvage. “Careful,” he called to the bat. Maybe there were arm-sized flying scorpions above Manihiki. He’d no clue.

  He followed the captain, squeezing through the throng. By shops, stalls & hawkers selling bottles & magnets. Flowers & cameras. Illustrations of beasts & angels punishing the hubristic, sneaking out at night & fixing rails, of swirling-winged birds from beyond the world.

  Into a region of bookshops, with, Sham realised, a broad view of what made a book a book. Dark rooms full of paper & leather, disks for ordinators & spools of film. Captain Naphi was greeted with courteous recognition. At more than one stand, she said her name & the seller would check a ledger or pull up a file on a glowing scr
een.

  “The Unknown,” they would murmur. “Is that correct? General theories. Also Floating Signifiers, Asymptotic Telos, Evasive Purpose. Loss. That’s what we have you for.” They cross-referenced her on-record tags with texts newly acquired. “Sulayman’s On Hunting Philosophies has a new edition. & there was an article, let me see, ‘Catching Quarries’ in the last-but-three issue of Captain-Philosopher’s Quarterly, but you’ve probably seen it.” & so on.

  What am I doing here? thought Sham. If she needed a dogsbody, why ain’t she brought Shossunder?

  As if she heard that thought the captain muttered, “Come now, Soorap, eyes up. Your suggestion brought us to Manihiki. Well done. Would you waste these sights?”

  She considered the merits of various offerings. Those texts she bought she passed wordlessly to Sham. His bag grew heavy.

  At an enormous, shabby & tumbledown warehouse, from within which came raucous bickering, Daybe investigated roofs. Naphi watched it go. “Tell me again,” she said, “the places your friend thought the tracker might be found.”

  “Scabbling Street,” Sham said. “The market. She said that’s where the best salvage is.”

  She pointed at a sign on the wall. Scabbling Street Market. Sham gaped. Naphi knew, no question, what sort of artefacts it was he hankered to see. After schlepping through all the bookshops, was this a reward for telling her about the tech?

  “So,” Naphi said. She indicated, with a sudden lovely sweep of her hands, that he should enter before her. “I am going salvage shopping.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  YOU HAVE THE BOOKS?” THE CAPTAIN SAID. “YOUR JOB is to get them back to the train. I won’t need you, Soorap, for a while.”

  “I’ve to go back?” You only just brought me in here, he thought.

  “Indeed. I want my books by nightfall.”

  “By …?” That was hours away. He had hours. She was giving him hours! Hours to find his way through the streets of Manihiki. Through this market. Naphi was holding out a note. Money, too? “Lunch. Consider it from your share.” He stammered a thanks, but Naphi was gone.

  Well here I am, Sham thought languidly. Amid the salvage.

  The market was in an arcade. Above, levels of busy walkways reachable by spiral stairs. Around Sham, stall after stall of startling found detritus. Absolutely ringing with the noise of attempted sales, arguments, singing, the declaration of wares. A little band accompanying all the business with guitar & oboe, a woman overseeing strange sounds emerging from what looked like a bone box.

  People smart & scruffy, businesswomen & -men, tough-dressed mercenaries & buyable thugs. Trainsfolk. Bookish types. Dignitaries & explorers in the sumptuous or strange or barbarian clothes of their homelands. & everywhere salvors.

  I know, I know, Sham thought in answer to the correctives & the warnings levelled by Troose & Voam. I know they’re showoffs. Still though!

  The salvors yelled at each other in slang. Slid layered visors into use & out of it again, pressed studs & extrusions on their protective overalls, their leather butchers’-style aprons & many-pocketed trousers. They prodded & finger-tinkered with odd boxes, with bits & pieces of salvage that threw colours & images into the air, that sung & dimmed local lights & made dogs lie down.

  His curiosity overcame Sham’s awe. “What’s that?” He pointed at a rust-deformed wedge of iron. The salesman looked wryly at him.

  “A wrench,” the man said.

  “& that?” Some rot-mottled square in various colours, stamped on by tiny statues.

  “A children’s game. So scholars say. Or a divination kit.”

  “That?” A filigreed arachnid nub of what looked like glass, leg-things drumming in complicated articulation.

  “No one knows.” The man handed Sham a bit of wood. “Hit it.”

  “Eh?”

  “Give it a whack.” The man grinned. Sham walloped the salvage. It did not break as it looked like it should. Instead the stick itself coiled in on itself like an injured tentacle. Sham held it up. It was a tight spiral, now, though it still felt hard in his hand.

  “That’s offterran, duh,” the man said. “That’s alt-salvage, that curlbug. From one of the celestial stopoffs.”

  “How much are they?” Sham said. The man looked at him gently & said a price that made Sham clamp his mouth shut & turn away. Then he turned back.

  “Oh, can I ask you …” He glanced around to make sure Naphi wasn’t in sight or earshot. “Do you know some, some kids? A family? They have an arch, that looks like made of some old salvage.”

  The man stared at him. “What are you after, boy?” he said at last. “No. I don’t. I have no idea who they might be & I suggest that you don’t either.” He ignored Sham’s consternation & started up again with his barking, singsonging announcements that he was selling tools & curlbugs & fine cheap salvage.

  Sham tried a woman haggling with an ill-tempered buyer over antique ordinator circuitry; to a pair of men who specialised in offterran alt-salvage, their cubbyhole full of thoroughly discomfiting nuggets of strangeness; to a purveyor not of salvage but of equipment for its extraction: lodestones, gauges, telegoggles, shovels, corkscrew drillboots, air pumps & masks for total earth-submersion. A group of young men & women about his age watched Sham. They snickered & whispered to each other, picked their fingernails with foolish little knives. They dispersed as a sharp-faced ferronaval officer glared at them, gathered again when he passed on.

  A table of dolls. Old dolls, salvaged dolls. No matter how cleaned they had been, the dust in which they had lain for so many lifetimes had permanently coloured them: whatever tone their skin had been supposed to be, it looked ensepiaed, as if seen through dirty glass. Mostly they were shaped like people, mostly like women or girls, though of deeply questionable physical proportions, with thickety knotted & scrambled hair where it remained at all. A few were grotesques, monsters. Many were limbless. They needed the ministrations of a dollmaker.

  Everywhere Sham went the responses to his question, his description of the arch & the two children, were either sincere-seeming ignorance, or guarded recognition followed by lies &/or suggestions that he leave it alone. Mostly it was the salvors who displayed the former, the local merchants the latter.

  What did he know of this family? Older sister, younger brother. Messy house. With vigorous & far-travelling parents. Who, the bones said, had died.

  Which thoughts, inevitably, took Sham to thinking of his own family. He did not often ruminate on his mother & father, lost by him to heartbreak & accident. It was not that he did not care: certainly he cared. It was not that he did not suspect their not-there-ness was important. He was not stupid. It was, rather, all but unremembering their ministrations, cared for as he had been throughout his life by Troose & Voam—who were his parents, really, no two ways about it. The care Sham felt for his mum & dad was care for lost strangers, dwelling on whom might feel disloyal to those who had raised him.

  But he was abruptly aware that he seemed to share with these two children in the image the fact that he was, technically, to be exact about it, an orphan. Well there was a word to sit in the throat. So. Were this girl & this boy also doctors’ assistants, dissatisfied, salvage-pining, missing something? Sham doubted it.

  There were clocks all over the hall in a thousand designs. Some were modern, others obviously salvage, proudly rejigged to work again, extruding little birds at set moments. Some were blue-screened, glowing with digits. All showed Sham how fast time was going.

  “How did you become a salvor?” The tough-looking woman to whom Sham spoke looked up in surprise. She was sipping tarry coffee, had been exchanging dig-anecdotes with colleagues. She laughed at Sham, not unkindly. She flipped a coin at a baker at her stall & indicated that Sham should take a pastry.

  “Dig,” she said. “Find a piece. Take it to a salvage train. Dig more. Find another piece. Don’t be a …” She looked him up & down. “A dogsbody? A cabin boy? A steward? A trainee moler?”

  ?
??Doctor’s assistant,” he said.

  “Ah. Well yes, that, too. Don’t be that.”

  “I found a bat,” Sham said through a mouthful of his sticky bread present. “I suppose that ain’t salvage, though. It’s my mate.”

  He was still watched, he realised, by the little gang. & they, he saw, were watched by another young man, a wiry & quick-moving lad Sham wondered if he’d seen before.

  The salvor rummaged below her table. “I need more Smearing Widgets,” she said.

  “Thank you very much for the cake,” Sham said. The woman was splendid-looking. He blinked & tried to concentrate. “I don’t suppose—have you ever seen two children? They live near a …”

  “An arch,” she said. Sham blinked. “A salvage arch. I heard someone was looking for them.”

  “What?” said Sham. “Since I came in you heard that?”

  “Word travels. Who are you, lad?” She tilted her head. “What do I know about you? Nothing yet. You know I’m not from here. But these salvage-surrounded siblings, they ring a bell.”

  “You must come here all the time,” Sham said. “Maybe you heard of them once.”

  “Of course. This is Manihiki. It sticks in the mind, that sort of architectural detail you describe, don’t it? I was here, it would be a couple of journeys ago, which would be a few months, I suppose? Selling direct. Anyway.” She nodded slowly at the memory. “There were two here like the ones you’re describing. Young! Young young, but calm as you like.” She raised an eyebrow. “Prodding, picking, asking questions. & they knew their salvage.”

  “You think it was the ones I’m looking for?”

  “I could hear this lot whispering.” She twirled her hand to indicate the stallholders: not salvors, but local agents, the merchants. “Talking trash about them. & trash is my business.” She smiled. “They bought a load of stuff from me.” She clicked her fingers. “Talking of which, I really must get on.”