Railsea

  “Why did you come, Sham ap Soorap?” said Caldera. “& how did you know where to find us?”

  “Well,” Sham said. He was still troubled, far more than he understood, at the sight of the Shroakes’ grief. He thought of that side-slid train, the dust & bones & rags that filled it. Of travellers & families & adventures gone wrong, & trains turned into sarcophagi, with bones within them.

  “See, there was a time I saw something that I don’t think I was maybe supposed to see.” He was talking quickly, & his breath came in a shudder. “Something from that train. A memory card from a camera. It was like … they knew everything was going to get stripped, but they found a way to hide that one thing.”

  The Shroakes were staring. “That would be dad,” Caldera said quietly. “He did like that camera.”

  “There were pictures on it,” Sham said. “I … saw you. He took one of you two.”

  “He did,” said Caldera. Dero was nodding. Caldera looked up at the ceiling. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “We always knew they might … & as it went on, it got more & more likely.” She spoke Railcreole with a lovely strange accent. “Truth is, I thought, if anything happened, we’d never know. That we’d just wait & wait. & now, you come here with these stories.”

  “Well,” Sham said. “I think if someone in my family never came back … Which actually, sort of …” He took another breath. “I think I’d like it if someone told me if they found them. Later.” Caldera & Dero stared levelly at him. He thought of the pictures, & his heart sped up with excitement; he couldn’t help it. “& also,” he said, “because of what else was on them pictures. That’s why I wanted to find you. What were they looking for?”

  “Why?” said Dero.

  “Why?” said Caldera, her eyes narrowing.

  This is something, Sham thought, & excitement filled him right up. He took out his camera. He told them, one by one, about the images he had seen. He thumbed on the tiny screen that showed his own, scrolled through one by rubbish useless one of rails & penguins & raildwellers & weather & the Medes crew & not much at all, until he reached that picture. The picture of the last shot Caldera’s parents had taken.

  His camera was cheap, his focus was off, he had taken it as he fell. It was a poor effort. But it was just clear enough, if you knew what you were looking at. An empty plain & a single line. Rails stretching out to nowhere. Alone.

  “Because,” he said, “they were coming back from this.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THERE WAS A TIME WHEN WE DID NOT FORM ALL words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

  Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

  What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

  An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ widths from where we began.

  & tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I CAN’T HELP WONDERING,” SHAM SAID, “WHAT THEY WERE doing.”

  “You’re a moler?” said Dero. Sham blinked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You hunt moles?”

  “Well, me, no. I help a doctor. & sometimes I clean floors & pick up ropes. But I do that on a train that hunts moles, yeah.”

  “You don’t,” said Dero, “sound happy.”

  “About moling? Or doctoring?”

  “What would you rather be doing?” Caldera said. She glanced at him, & something in her look rather took his breath away.

  “I’m fine,” Sham said. “Anyway, look. This isn’t why I came here, to talk about this.”

  “No indeed,” agreed Caldera. Dero shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, stern-faced as a little general. “Still though. What would you like?”

  “Well,” Sham said. “I mean …” He was shy to say it. “It would be good to do what your family does. To be a salvor.”

  Dero & Caldera regarded him. “You think we’re salvors?” said Dero.

  “I mean, well, yeah,” said Sham. “I mean—” He shrugged & indicated the house, so full to brimming with found technology & reconstructed bits & pieces. “Yeah. & where they were going.” He shook the camera. “That was salvage hunting. Far off. Weren’t it?”

  “What do your family do?” Dero said.

  “Well,” Sham said. “My, it’s my cousins, sort of, they do bits & pieces, nothing like this. &, but my mum & dad were—well, my dad was on the trains. Neither of them were salvors anyway. Not like yours.”

  Caldera raised an eyebrow. “We’ve been salvors, of sorts,” she said. “I suppose. Mum was. Dad was. Once. But is that what you think would get you up in the mornings?”

  “We are not salvors,” Dero said. Sham kept looking at Caldera.

  “I said we were,” she said. “Not we are. What we are is salvage-adjacent.”

  “I mean, all the searching, though,” Sham said, his voice coming quicker the more he spoke. “That’s got to be exciting, ain’t it? Finding things no one’s found before, digging down, finding more, uncovering the past, making new things, all the time, learning & that.”

  “You’re contradicting yourself,” Caldera said. “You can’t find things no one’s found before by uncovering the past, can you? Searching for something. I see the appeal.” She stared at him. “But you don’t uncover the past if you’re a salvor: you pick up rubbish. The last thing I think you should think about’s the past. That’s what they do wrong here.”

  “Here?”

  “Here Manihiki.” She shrugged a big shrug, to indicate the island beyond her walls.

  “Why you here?” Dero said.

  “Yeah, why are you? In Manihiki?” Caldera said. “Your crew. No moles here.”

  Sham waved his hand. “Everyone always ends up in Manihiki at some point. Supplies & whatnot.”

  “Really,” Caldera said.

  “Salvage,” Dero said. “You here for salvage?”

  “No,” Sham said. “Supplies. Whatnot.”

  He walked with Caldera & Dero through their house. It was so rambling & tumbledown he called it, in his head, rambledown. Up stairs, down again via elevator, escalator up, ladder down, past all sorts of odd spaces like sheds indoors.

  “It was good of you to come tell us,” Caldera said.

  “Yeah,” said Dero.

  “I’m very sorry about your dad & your mum,” Sham said.

  “Thank you,” Caldera said.

  “Thank you,” Dero said solemnly.

  “We’re sorry about yours,” Caldera said.

  “Oh.” Sham was vague. “That was ages ago.”

  “It must’ve been a massive effort to get here,” Caldera said. “To tell us.”

  “We were coming anyway,” Sham said.

  “Of course.” She stopped at a door. Put her hand on the handle. Looked at her brother, who looked back at her. They seemed to draw strength from each other. She breathed deep. Dero nodded, she nodded back, & led them into what had once been a bedroom, now had two walls removed so it opened onto the low sky of the garden. Daybe chirruped at the smell of fresh air. The space contained as much mould, ivy, old rain stains & outside air as it did furniture & floor. Caldera ran her fingers over damp dust.

  Sitting at
a desk, facing out into the hole, was a man. He was writing, skipping between pen & paper & an ordinator. He was writing almost alarmingly quickly.

  “Dad,” said Caldera.

  Sham’s eyes widened.

  The man looked around & gave them a smile. Sham stayed at the door. The man’s eyes looked not quite focused. His pleasure at seeing them was a little desperate.

  “Hello there,” the man said. “A guest? Please please do come in.”

  “This is Sham,” Caldera said.

  “He came to do us a favour,” Dero said.

  “Dad,” said Caldera. “We’ve got some bad news.”

  She came closer, & trepidation went across the man’s face. Sham backed quietly out & closed the door. He tried to move a good distance away, but after a minute or two, he did think he could hear crying.

  & a minute or two after that, the sombre-faced Shroake children came back out.

  “I thought, you said that was your dad who … that that was who I found,” Sham whispered.

  “It was,” said Dero. “That’s our other one.”

  There were almost as many kinds of families as there were rock islands in the railsea—that, of course, Sham knew. There were many disinclined to take the shape that their homes would rather they did. & in those nations where the norms were not policed by law, if they were willing to put up with disapproval—as, it was clear, the Shroakes were—they could take their own shapes. Hence the Shroakes’ strange household.

  “There were three of them,” Caldera said. “But Dad Byro …” She glanced in the direction of the room. “He didn’t have the same want to go gallivanting that Dad Evan & our mum did.”

  “Gallivanting,” Sham said, hopeful for more.

  “He keeps house,” Dero said. Behind him, unseen by him, his sister met Sham’s eye &, silently, mouthed the word kept. “He writes.” Caldera mouthed Wrote. “He’s … forgetful. He looks after us, though.” Caldera mouthed, We look after him.

  Sham blinked. “There’s no one else here?” he said. How could they be looking after that lost man & themselves, all alone? A thought struck him.

  “You know what I heard,” he said. “I heard there was ways of building artificial people. Out of this stuff.” He indicated the salvage. “That could walk around & think & do things …” He looked around as if expecting such a trash-coagulation, a junk nanny powered on strange energies, to appear, cooing at her charges.

  “A salvagebot?” Dero said. He made a rude noise.

  “Myths,” Caldera said. “No such thing.” The metal-rubber-glass-stone figure in Sham’s head disappeared in a puff of reality, leaving Caldera & Dero looking after themselves, & their lamenting second father.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  DESPITE THE ODD TUG OF COMMUNITY HE FELT TO the Shroakes in their newly certain two-thirds orphanhood—a bond he had not expected—& despite his frustration at not understanding more of the elder Shroakes’ story, Sham could not stay. Time was doing what time always does, going faster & faster as if downhill. & in truth, Sham admitted to himself, he was not sure the Shroakes did not want him gone. Did not want to be alone with their remaining parent.

  Dero ushered him from the house as Caldera checked again on Dad Byro. As he retraced his steps out of the garden, under the arch of washing machines & back into the streets of Manihiki, Sham thought about the duty roster, about Dr. Fremlo & whoever else might be around, about whose instruction he could & whose he could not evade, in his eagerness to slip away, revisit the Shroakes. Perhaps it was because he was thinking about authority & unwanted attentions that he noticed the man outside the Shroake house.

  He stood leaning against a wall, swaddled in a long grey coat larger than the temperature would seem to warrant. From under the wide brim of his hat, it was impossible to see his face. Sham frowned. The man might be staring right at him. He certainly seemed to be looking in the general direction of the Shroakes’ house. & as passersby passed by & the light continued to leak from the sky, Sham was certain the man’s presence was not coincidence.

  The watcher, as Sham anxiously gazed, began to saunter across the street. Sham played for time. Knelt for a moment & fiddled with his shoes. The man was approaching him. As casually as he could manage, Sham started to walk away. He willed himself not to look over his shoulder, but the two eye-sized spots on his back where he imagined the man’s gaze landing itched, & he could not help a quick glance. The man was closing on him. Sham sped up. Still looking backwards, he walked straight into someone.

  He was gabbling an apology before he even saw who he had hit. It was a woman, tall & broad enough that despite Sham being a heavy boy, impact with him had moved her not at all. She was staring at him with concern. She put her hands on his arms.

  “Hey,” she said. “You alright?” She saw his backwards glance. “Is that man giving you trouble?”

  “No, I, yes, no, I don’t know,” Sham said. “I don’t know what he wants, he was watching—”

  “Watching?” said the woman. The man had stopped. Appeared suddenly interested in a wall. The woman narrowed her eyes. “You came from in there?” she said, indicating the Shroakes’. Sham nodded.

  “Don’t worry, son,” she said. She put an arm around his shoulder. “Whatever it is he wants, we’ll keep you out of his hands.”

  “Thanks,” Sham muttered.

  “Don’t you worry. We take care of visitors in Manihiki.” She led him away, towards better-lit parts of town. “As, I’m sure, did the Shroakes. What was it you were talking to them about?” The question came out of her mouth without the slightest change of tone. Still, though, it made Sham look up. To see that she was staring, in that instant, not at him, but at the man behind them, & that she was looking at him not in suspicion but unspoken communication.

  Sham’s very throat began to pulse, so fast did his heart slam at that sight. His rescuer who was not his rescuer looked at him, her face hardened & her hand closed tight on Sham’s shoulder. Options for subtlety & subterfuge removed from him, Sham took the only other path he could see. He stamped on the woman’s foot.

  She howled & swore & hopped & bellowed, & the dark, shadow-faced man behind them started sprinting after Sham. He was fast. His coat gusted around him.

  Sham ran. Opened his shirt & released Daybe. The bat dive-bombed the man, but unlike the young bullies, this enemy was not so easily cowed. He swatted at Daybe & continued running, closing in on Sham.

  “Up!” shouted Sham. “Get away!” He flapped his arms & the bat rose.

  Had it been decided on speed alone, Sham would have been in custody within seconds. But he felt possessed by the souls of generations of young people chased through neighbourhoods by adults for reasons unclear or unfair. He channelled their techniques of righteous evasion. None-too-fast as he was, still he veered with the zigzags of justice, scrambled low walls with the vigour & rigour of unfairness-avoidance, reached a street still full of catcalls & the noise of late-afternoon commerce & traffic & rolled in the waning light below low-chassised vehicles with valorous discretion. To lie very still. He held his breath.

  Daybe, he thought, ferociously attempting to project his mind, stay away.

  Among the percussion of urban footfall, the disembodied steps tramping by him, the grind of wheels & the curious noses of cats & dogs, Sham saw two black leather boots pound down the middle of the street. Stop. Turn. Run a few steps in this direction, a few in that, take off finally in a third. When they were out of sight, Sham burst out, wheezing, hauled himself out from under the cart.

  Muddied, shaking & bloodied. He looked up, raised his arms & here came Daybe, out of the sky & back into his shirt. Sham swayed. Stood mostly ignored by Manihiki locals, until he croaked a question to one of them, got directions back to the docks & skulked, by as roundabout routes as he could manage, back to the Medes.

  THE WAY TO THE DOCKS took Sham under disorganised streetlamps, electricity, gas, glowing sepia. Through places where those lights were salvage from humanity’
s past, bright, historically misplaced colours; & even some alt-salvage, for show, turning footprint-like shapes, or unfolding swirls within containment fields.

  His bruises were puffing up. A jollycart, its lamp swaying, shedding shadows as it rolled between snoozing trains, took him to the Medes.

  “Late night, was it?” shouted Kiragabo. Sham cringed & stumbled over deck stuff.

  “I’m late,” he said. “Captain’ll flay me.”

  “She will not. She’s got other stuff on her mind.”

  & indeed, when he made his way belowdecks, he didn’t just creep his way to Naphi’s cabin to drop the texts into her lockbox, but was distracted by & went to investigate the noises he heard from the officers’ mess. Oohs, ahs, goshes of impressedness.

  The captain & her officers were crowded around something. “Sham,” someone said. “Get on in here, look at this.” Even the captain beckoned him. The officers made space around the table. On which were artefacts.

  Sham thought his appearance, the muck & fight-residue on him, would necessitate an explanation. But no one cared. Sham had never heard the captain so voluble. Clickety-glimmer went her arm, the lights on it, the tripping of her fingers faster than flesh fingers could go.

  “& look, this. You see here.” She was fiddling with a receiver. It winked & made henlike sounds. It showed lights in combinations. So she’d found the receiver-seller, then.

  “Range of—well, miles, they tell me. Perhaps as many as a hundred. & it can pass through feet of earth.”

  “They go deeper’n that, Captain,” someone said.

  “Yes & they come up again. No one’s suggested it’ll take us to the moldywarpe’s door, Mr. Quex. No one claims the receiver will let us in & make us tea. We will still have a job to do. You’ll still be a hunter. We still even have to learn how to read this thing. But.” She looked around. “Get this—” She held up a little transmitter. “Get this in its skin—it will change things.”

  Bozlateen Quex shifted his dandy clothes &, with Naphi’s permission, picked up the receiver. It was cobbled together. More cobbled than together, really—a mess poised at the point of collapse. Made from arche-salvage & alt-salvage. It whispered like a live thing. Odd little circuit. Antiquity & alien expertise mashed into one ugly astonishing machinelette.