Railsea

  Sham moved for a better look. Quex twirled dials & the lights changed. Changed colour, position, velocity. Sham stopped moving a moment, then continued, & as he did so, so did those lights. Everyone looked at him. He blinked & moved again. The lights’ shenanigans continued with his motion.

  “What the hell?” said Quex. He prodded a button, the glow grew in his hand. The instrument was paying attention to Sham. Daybe poked its head up from his shirt.

  “Ah. It’s the animal,” said the captain. “It has the thing still on its leg. This one is picking up something from that, some backwash signal. Quex, you’ll have to adjust it. Make sure it’s looking for these ones, instead.” She shook her handful of receivers. As they rattled, the receiver barked like a duck & its light changed again.

  “As I say,” the captain said, “there is some learning to do. But still. This changes things, does it not? So so so.” She rubbed her hands. She looked at Sham, the source of this idea, to seek out this mechanism. She did not smile—she was Captain Naphi!—but nod at him she did. Which was enough to fluster him. “Check what details we have, work out where last there was sign. Where we might find good molegrounds. That is where we’re heading.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  I KNOW, BUT WE CAN’T JUST LEAVE HIM,” DERO SAID.

  “We ain’t just leaving him,” Caldera said. “It ain’t like we haven’t got people coming to take care of him. You think I won’t miss him, too? You know he’d want us to go.”

  “I know, but I don’t want us to go. Not with him here. He needs us.”

  The siblings Shroake had retired to another room to have this argument, but if they’d thought it removed them from Sham’s earshot they were mistaken.

  “Dero.” Caldera’s voice was subdued. “He’ll forget we’re gone.”

  “I know but then he’ll remember & be sad again.”

  “& then forget again.”

  “… I know.”

  When the Shroakes came out, into the corridor where he waited, Dero, red-eyed, stared at Sham as if in challenge. Caldera stood a fraction behind her brother, hand on his shoulder. They met Sham’s gaze.

  “He’s why we haven’t gone looking for them,” Caldera said. “It’s been a while. It’s not like what you told us was a big surprise. But him.”

  “He’s been waiting,” her brother said.

  “Byro’s been waiting to hear,” Caldera said. “That’s what he’s been writing. Letters to them. Are you a letter-writer, Sham?”

  “Not as much as I should be. With Troose & Voam—” Sham stopped, aware, suddenly, of how long it had been since he’d sent them word. “Last night,” Sham said. “When I was here before. When I came out, I saw something. Someone. Your house.” He looked grim. “It’s being watched.” The Shroakes stared at him.

  “Well, yeah,” said Dero. He shrugged.

  “Oh,” said Sham. “Well. As long as you know.”

  “Of course,” said Caldera.

  “Well, obviously of course,” Sham said. “But, you know, I just wanted to make sure. So, why? Why is it of course?”

  “Why’s it watched?” said Caldera.

  “ ’Cause we’re the Shroakes,” said Dero. He jerked his right thumb at himself as he made the announcement, used his left one to snap his braces. Raised one eyebrow. Sham could not help laughing. Even Dero, after a moment of glowering, laughed a bit, too.

  “They were sort of salvors, like I said,” Caldera told Sham. “& sort of makers. & investigators. They went places & did things this lot would love to be able to do. They want to know where they went, & why.”

  “Who does?” Sham said. “Which lot? Manihiki?”

  “Manihiki,” said Caldera. “So of course, when they didn’t come back, Byro couldn’t go to the navy. Search & rescue ain’t their priority. Oh, they came offering to search, asking what maps we had, where they’d been going.”

  “As if we’d tell them,” Dero said. “As if we knew.”

  “They didn’t keep logs of their route on the train,” Caldera said. “That’s why they hid that memory. Even wounded, one of them made sure to bury it in the ground. They must’ve realised there were hints on it about where they’d been.”

  “They took windabout ways where they were going & windabout back again,” Dero said.

  “Dad Byro might have been getting a little …” Caldera’s voice petered out & picked up again. “But he wasn’t so gone as to trust the navy. Nor tell them what he knew of the route.”

  “So there was a chart?” Sham said.

  “Not on the train. & none that you or they could read. Manihiki wanted to find them, but for their reasons, not ours. The Shroakes never gave them what they wanted.” She sounded proud. “All manner of engines & machines made that no one else could make. What they wanted wasn’t Mum & Other Dad back—it was whatever they might have with them. What they might have made or found.”

  “They’ll have been looking for them for ages,” Dero said. “Since they were gone.”

  “But now you’re here,” Caldera said, “they’ll be whispering for the first time in years, ‘We have a lead!’ ”

  “They had me hiding in a gutter,” Sham said. “Takes more than a bit of whatever-they-are to get hold of a Streggeye boy.”

  “Wanted to know who you are,” Caldera said. “& what you know. About where the Shroakes are.” Sham remembered the caution with which Caldera & Dero had greeted him, when first he had arrived. No wonder they had been suspicious. No wonder they had no friends: even had they not been looking so carefully after Dad Byro, & pining for the return of their other parents, they had to assume everyone who visited was a potential spy.

  “Till you came,” Dero mumbled to Sham, “I still always thought they might come back.”

  “It was the longest time they’d been away, but you don’t stop wondering,” Caldera said. She inclined her head in the direction of the room where Dad Byro confusedly grieved. “& how could we leave him when we weren’t sure? Go off in one direction, have them come back in the other?”

  “We’re sure now though?” Dero said. It sounded like a statement until the very end, when it tweaked suddenly up into a question, a moment’s hope for uncertainty, that twanged on Sham’s heart.

  “We’re sure now,” Caldera gently said. “So we have to do right by them. Finish what they started. It’s what Mum & Other Dad would’ve wanted. & it’s what he’d want, too,” She looked at the door again.

  “Maybe,” Dero said.

  “He might be writing to them again,” Caldera said.

  “If he’s going to forget,” Sham asked, “why did you tell him they were gone?”

  “Well he loves them, don’t he?” Caldera said. She led him to the kitchen, brought Sham a cup of some oily-looking tea. “Doesn’t he deserve to mourn?”

  Sham stirred the drink dubiously. “Whenever I mention this place to anyone,” he said, “I get looks. It’s obvious people talk about your family. & I saw the wreck. I ain’t never seen a train like that. & then there’s that picture.” He looked up at her. “Will you tell me? What were they doing? Do you know?”

  “Do we know what they’d been up to?” said Caldera. “Where they were going, & why? Oh, yes.”

  “We do,” said Dero.

  “But then, you do, too,” Caldera said. She glanced at her brother. After a second, he shrugged. “It’s not very complicated,” Caldera said. “Like you say, you’ve seen the picture.”

  “They were looking for something,” Sham said.

  “Found,” said Caldera, after a moment. “They were looking for something & they found something. Which was …?” She waited like a schoolteacher.

  “A way out of the railsea,” Sham said at last. “Something beyond the rails.”

  Well of course. Sham had seen that one line. So he had sort of known that. Still, to hear it! He had a delight in the blasphemy. Spouting heresy, it turned out, was invigorating as well as nerve-wracking.

  “There is nothing beyond
the rails,” he squawked. Annoyed by his own voice.

  “Looks like we’ve got work to do, Dero,” Caldera said. An edge of seriousness, an effort, had come into her voice. When her brother spoke, it was in his, too.

  “There’s some stuff in Dad Byro’s room,” Dero said. “I’ll bring it down when I get him his supper.”

  “There is nothing beyond the rails,” Sham said again.

  “Can we seriously leave him?” Dero said. He glanced back at the door where their remaining father waited.

  “We aren’t going to leave him,” Caldera said gently. “You know that. We’ll take care of him.” She came closer to Dero. “All that we’ve been putting away for the nurses—you know they’ll look after him. You know if he could he’d go himself. He can’t. But we can. For him. For all of us.”

  “I know,” Dero said. He shook his head.

  Sham started to give it one more try. “There is …”

  “Oh, will you stop it?” Caldera said to him. “Obviously there is. You saw the picture.”

  “But everybody knows—” Sham said, then stopped. He exhaled. “Alright,” he said. There were no certainties. He itemised what he knew. “No one knows where the railsea came from.”

  “Well, no one knows,” Caldera said, “but they’ve got a sense of the possibilities. What do they say where you come from? Streggeye, you said? What do you think? Were the rails put down by gods?” Her questions came faster. Were they extruded from the ground? Were they writing in heavenly script, that people unknowingly recited as they travelled? Were the rails produced by as-yet-not-understood natural processes? Some radicals said there were no gods at all. Were the rails spit up by the interactions of rock, heat, cold, pressure & dirt? Did humans, big-brained monkeys, think up ways to use them when the rails emerged, to stay safe from the deadly dirt? Was that how trains got thought up? Was the world an infinity of rails down as well as around, seams of them through layers of earth & salvage, down to the core? Down to hell? Sometimes storms gusted off topsoil & uncovered iron below. The most excavation-gung-ho salvors claimed to have found some tracks yards underground. What about Heaven? What was in Heaven? Where was it?

  “I think—what we were told—you know,” said Sham. He tutted at his own incoherence. “It all comes from That Apt Ohm.”

  “Ah, right,” Caldera said. Of all the gods worshipped, feared, scorned, placated & bickered with, his influence was the most widespread. Great chimney-headed controller in dark robes. He protected & controlled the railsea, its nations, its passengers. “There might have been one sometimes,” Caldera said. “Years & years ago. A boss. Where do they go? The rails? What’s at the edge of the railsea?”

  Sham twisted in discomfort.

  “Sham,” Caldera said. “What’s the upsky? Don’t say it’s where the gods put poison. Where do the rails come from? What’s the godsquabble?”

  “It’s when at the start of the world all the gods were fighting to make the earth, & That Apt Ohm was the strongest, & in their fighting the railsea rose out of the earth.”

  “It was a fight between different railroad companies,” Caldera said.

  Sham had heard that theory, too, he conceded, nervously.

  “It was after everything went bad, & they were trying to make money again. With public works. People paid for passage, & rulers paid for every mile of build. So it went crazy. They were competing, all putting down new routes all over the place. Ruthless, because the more they built the more they made.

  “They burnt off years of noxious stuff—that’s where the upsky comes from—& ended up chugging stuff into the ground, too, changing things. They could jury-rig the whole world. It was a company war. They laid traps for each other’s trains, so there’s trap-switches, trap-lines, out there.

  “They made the lines,” Caldera said. “They destroyed each other. But they couldn’t stave off ruin. & all they left were the rails. We live in the aftermath of business bickering.” She smiled.

  “Our mum & dad were looking for something,” Dero said. “They knew the history. Stories about dead treasure, history, angels, a vale of tears.”

  “I’ve heard all that!” Sham said. “ ‘The ghost of all the riches ever born & yet unborn live in Heaven!’ ” He recited words from old stories. “ ‘Oh, shun the vale of tears!’ You telling me they was chasing myths?”

  “What if it isn’t?” said Caldera. “Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth. It don’t mean the ghosts of all the riches ain’t there, either.”

  With an abrupt digital blare, one of the wall clocks demanded Sham’s attention. Not now! he thought. He wanted to hear these salvage stories, to rummage through this house.

  “I … have to go,” he said. “Got to meet someone.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Dero politely. “We have to go, too.”

  “What? Where? Who?”

  “Not quite now,” Caldera said. She closed her eyes.

  “Soon though,” Dero said.

  “Not quite now,” Caldera said. “But now we know what happened, now you told us, we have a job to finish. Don’t look surprised, Sham. You heard what we’d been saying. You knew we’d have to. I think that’s why you came to show us the picture.

  “You didn’t think we’d leave Mum & Dad’s work unfinished, did you?”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE DUSTMAID WAS AS CROWDED AS MOST DOCKSIDE drinkeries, loud with the electronic chirps of games. Sham watched the salvors gathered by the bar. They weren’t wearing their salvaging clothes, but even their downtime outfits marked them out—reconstructed finery from ages of high fashion up to which humanity had long since failed to live. He got close enough to hear them spouting their Salvage Slang—they called each other Fren & Bluv, they talked about Diggiters & Spinecandy & Noshells. Sham mouthed the words.

  “So,” Robalson said. “Your captain like her books, then?” He swigged from the drink Sham had bought him. It was called Trainoil—a concoction of sweet whiskey & stout & molasses that was simultaneously disgusting & rather nice.

  “Yeah,” Sham said. “Thanks again for, you know, yesterday.”

  “So, what’s your story, Sham? How long you been at rail?”

  “This is my second trip.”

  “There you go, then. People like that, they can sniff noobs. I don’t mean no offence, it’s just how it is.”

  “So,” said Sham. “Are any of your crew here?”

  “This ain’t the sort of place they drink.”

  “They go to special pirate bars?”

  “Yeah,” said Robalson at last. He said it quite deadpan. Raised an eyebrow. “Special pirate bars.”

  MUCH LATER than he had intended, when the frenetic drumming of the song “Jump Up All You Train Ruffians” came on the jukebox, Sham shouted with pleasure & joined in the rumbustious chorus. Robalson sang, too. Other customers watched them with combined disapproval & amusement.

  “Disapprovesalment,” Robalson suggested, when Sham pointed this out.

  “Amduseapproval,” said Sham.

  “Sham,” Robalson said. “If you keep up like this you’ll get us kicked out. What is it with those salvors, anyway? Ever since you come in you been eyeing them like they’re worm meat & you’re a badger.”

  “I just, you know,” Sham said. He wriggled in his chair. “The way they dress, the way they talk. What they do. It’s—Well, it’s cool, ain’t it? I wish …”

  “You was talking to one in that hall, weren’t you? That woman.”

  “Yeah. Something Sirocco. She was lovely. Bought me a cake.” Sham grinned.

  “Don’t you think,” Robalson said, “there’s someone out there on the railsea on a salvagetrain, & all the time when they pass moletrains they’re like, ‘They do such more exciting stuff than me.’ ”

  “Don’t know,” Sham said.

  “They’re like, ‘Oh, imagine being a doctor’s assistant on that train.’ ”

  “Give me their address,
I’ll call them to swap.”

  “Plus, didn’t I hear that your captain has a philosophy?” Robalson said.

  “So?”

  “So ain’t that something to aspire to? I bet salvors are probably a boring bunch.”

  A man & a woman in the corner of the bar were watching the two young men. Sham eyed them. Not salvors, he thought. They saw him see them, looked away. His whole body froze up, stiff with a sudden memory of hiding under the cart.

  “I met a couple of people who I think might be,” he said. “Salvors. Sort of salvors.” He narrowed his eyes. “They weren’t boring. Believe me. A brother & sister.”

  “Oh, that rings a trainbell,” Robalson said. “The Shoots? The Shrikes? Soaks?”

  “How d’you know?”

  Robalson shrugged. “I listen to stories. There’s enough of them about. There’s one about an oddball brother & sister heading out on some hunt to the land of bleeding Green Cheese or whatever, Engineday next. Whispers are that someone wants after them. On the lookout for imaginary treasure.”

  Sham had crept away from the Shroakes, this time, by routes they had suggested, that took him away & back into the town without drawing the attention of the watchers that were undoubtedly there. He blinked at what Robalson was saying. Robalson himself seemed uninterested in the rumours of state attention he was, unthinkingly, recounting.

  “I just don’t see it,” he said. “About you, I mean. You think you want to be a salvor, but I’m not even sure you do.”

  “Funny,” said Sham. “That’s what they said. & what about you, then? What do you even do, Robalson?”

  “What do I do? Depends on the day. Some days I wash decks. Some days I clean the heads & oh my oily hell I’d rather get smacked into the godsquabble. Some days I do better things. Know what I saw today? Something from the upsky fell, about a month ago. Onto a beach in the north. They keep it in a jar, charge a few coppers to see it.”