Railsea

  Yes, they would mind. But not as much as if he were a miserable bad doctor for years.

  “I think,” Sham said slowly, trying to think it through, “they wanted me to do well, maybe even get my own philosophy.”

  “I thought it was just captains did that,” Dero said.

  “You could be a captain from being a doctor. Although I don’t know if they thought it through that much.” What Troose & Voam knew well was that he’d had a space to be filled, Sham thought with a little ache for them.

  “Dero,” said Caldera. “Go get it. Do you want to philosophise?” she said to Sham when her brother left. “Get obsessed with an animal? Give it a meaning? Make that your life?” There was nothing snide in her tone. She staggered under the load she carried. “There are places,” she said, “where rails go up off the beach into uplands.”

  “Railrivers, yeah,” he said.

  “Yes. Some go up the mountains. Right into the uplands.”

  “& loop down again somewhere else. They all merge back into the railsea.”

  “Some of them go into old dead cities up there.”

  “& out again,” Sham said. Caldera looked at him.

  “This is heavy,” she said. Her burden, not the story. Sham took it from her, carried it to the jetty. Where he stopped, & stared.

  Something was approaching from between knolls in the railsea. The earth around it breaking with curious moles’ snouts. Here came Dero, in—well. In a train.

  The engine was a snubby, tough-looking thing with a few small carriages behind it. There were glass portholes in its flanks. Daybe raced through the intervening air to investigate. The engine was armoured & chimneyless. There was no telltale exhaust at all, that Sham could see or smell. & these were not electrified rails. “How does it run?” he whispered.

  Dero leaned out of the oncoming vehicle. He looked up at Daybe, who dipped in his turning & angled his wings. “Caldera,” Dero shouted.

  She stood by Sham. “We’re off, then,” she said to him. She looked through gaps in the surrounding rocks, into the railsea. A complicated tangle of gauges, here, a tricksy piece of switching, there. “So. Would you like to come, Sham?”

  & Daybe cawed, an uncharacteristic crowlike sound, just as if it had heard the idea & got excited. & Dero shouted, “Caldera, come on.”

  “What if it’s terrible?” Sham blurted out. “What if it all ends in tears? It ain’t like there’s no warning. You were the one reminded me we’re supposed to shun it!”

  Caldera did not reply. She & her brother turned, in the same moment, & stared at the house. Sham knew they were thinking of Dad Byro. Tears came up in Caldera’s eyes. They stayed there a moment. Then without a word, she pushed them down again.

  Sham could be with them. & while he wouldn’t be a salvor, nor would he be a train doctor nor a moler either. He’d be something else.

  But he wasn’t saying anything, & then it was a moment later & still he wasn’t saying anything. He heard himself saying nothing. Caldera looked at him, a long, a long moment. Then at last gave a sad shrug. The train approached. The switches on its route switched. Caldera turned away from Sham towards it.

  The train accelerated faster than Sham would have imagined. It turned more tightly, too. He, contrariwise, was still.

  “Wait,” he shouted. He ran at last forward. But he was slow, & the train was fast, & here it was at the jetty’s end, opening a door, & Caldera was jumping on & getting in, not looking at him, determinedly not looking at him, & the train was moving again. How did that happen so quick? What crazy cutting edge & salvage-cobbled equipment were they driving?

  “Wait!” Sham shouted again, reaching the edge of the wood, jumping in the glints off the tracks below, but time had moved on & the Shroakes were receding.

  Sham sat. Just collapsed on his bum. Watched the rear end of a train move at an amazing rate.

  The light was going. When the sun went down it went down fast. As if giving up all the effort with a flop of relief. The Shroakes’ train was away in the dusk.

  Leaving Sham to pick himself up when all sight of it was gone. He looked into the shallow coastal rails. Made his way through the garden, past the house, under the washing-machine arch, back into bloody Manihiki. Where his moletrain waited.

  Stupid, useless. That’s what he kept saying to himself, all the way.

  FORTY-ONE

  ROBALSON WAS IN THE PUB AGAIN. “WHAT GOT HOLD of you?” he said, at the sight of Sham’s face.

  “I’m stupid & useless.”

  “Blimey,” Robalson said.

  “You know I said I was going to see some people? Well, they gave me the chance to go somewhere with them. They wanted me to go with them, I think. One of them. & I wanted to go with her. But I bottled it. & I don’t even know why! I think I did want to go. But I can’t have done, can I?”

  “Who were they?”

  “Just a family. I found something of theirs. A sort of a treasure map. Sort of. & they’ve gone off to find out if it’s right.”

  “This is them Soaks. & you didn’t go?”

  “I didn’t. Because I’m stupid …”

  “Whoa, hush. Look. Tell me about it. I don’t think you’re stupid or useless. You’re no one’s fool, Sham.”

  Nice to have someone think so. It was a scrappy version of the story that Sham told. He rambled about the wreck, spoke in vague terms of “evidence,” of “something,” of a secret that the poor dead prospectors appeared to have managed to keep, that the Shroakes had the right to know.

  Robalson was rapt. “I heard Engineday they was going!” he said.

  “That was … disinformation.”

  “No!” Robalson said at last. He looked thoughtful. He looked grim. “I think I understand. The rumours are right!”

  “Eh? What rumours?”

  “The rumours about you.”

  “What?” breathed Sham. “What are you talking about?”

  “You made the right decision not to go, Sham.” Robalson spoke tensely. “I have to tell you something.” He was glancing side to side.

  “What is this? What do you mean?”

  “Come outside,” Robalson said. “I’ll explain. Wait. Don’t make it look like we’re going together. You’ve got to be careful.” He was not looking at Sham as he spoke. “Outside, left, there’s a little alley. I’ll go first. Five minutes, follow me. & Sham—don’t let anyone see you leave.”

  & he was gone, & Sham was bewildered & not unafraid. He waited. He swallowed. He felt his blood rush. At last—head whizzing & not from booze—he stood. Was he watched? He glanced at the drinkers in the dim light. He had no idea.

  Into the grey of local streetlamps, the Manihiki night. He crept round into shadows. Daybe came out of the sky & landed on him. He nuzzled it. There was Robalson, slouched by the wall, waiting by a trash bin.

  “You got your bat with you?” he whispered nervously.

  “What’s the big secret?” Sham whispered.

  “The big secret.” Robalson nodded. “You remember when you asked me what my train was? Asked me what I did?”

  Sham shivered. “Yeah,” he said. “You said you was—well, you made a joke.”

  “Yeah. You remember. The secret’s this.” Robalson leaned closer. “I wasn’t lying. I am a pirate.”

  & Sham discovered—as he was grabbed roughly from behind & gripped so he couldn’t move, as his unseen assailant shoved a fumey cloth up against his mouth & nose so great gusts of bleach-&-menthol-smelling stuff went into his lungs & made his head corkscrew into dark, as he heard Daybe shriek a bat shriek—Sham discovered that he wasn’t really surprised to hear it.

  ANTLION

  (Myrmeleon deinos)

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

  Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 4.1)

  FORTY-TWO

  WHAT CAN WE GET ON WITH WHILE OUR CONSCIOUSNESS rests? A researcher into the mind, a psychonomer, a tho
ught-mapper, might claim this is a meaningless question: that we are nothing without our consciousness. When it rests, so do we.

  Conversely, others might see this as a kind of paradox that gives rise to critical thought, to mental innovation. Provocations do not have to be sensible to help our minds rise to an occasion. What if ridiculous questions are an indispensable philosophical tool?

  Our minds we salvage from history’s rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story. This is the story of a bloodstained boy. It is his mind that renders it down. But in such rendering we might defy paradox, perform the cheeky escapology of narrative, & thus the resting of that crucial particular consciousness might not detain us. Asked: What should the story do when the primary window through which we view it is shuttered? we might say: It should look through another window.

  That is to say, follow other rails, see through other eyes.

  FORTY-THREE

  LATE EVENING, INTO THE GLOAMING, THROUGH ITS DESCENT into night & that night itself, the Shroakes’ train went. It went untroubled by the darkest of the darkness.

  The Shroakes checked expensive maps, used their fine & cutting-edge sensors, which surrounded the vehicle in a fringe of sensitivity. In those lines close enough to shore that Manihiki’s government claimed them as their own, the Shroake train, as much as any train could ever be said to, crept. It whispered along unlit.

  The Shroakes wore their best clothes. Though the day was a secret, & though they had packed almost nothing but rugged, ugly items chosen for practicalities, each had made one outfit’s worth of an exception. A few miles beyond the shoreline of Manihiki, where their journey could be said to have started for real, they had changed.

  Dero wore a fancy lapelled suit in blue cotton, only very slightly too small for him, & had parted his disobedient hair in the middle. Caldera wore loose burgundy trousers & a froufrou shirt that made her brother raise his eyebrows, & that she was not wildly fond of herself, but that was without question her smartest thing. She & Dero stared at each other with their identically brown eyes.

  “There,” Dero said. It was a formal occasion, this, they had decided.

  In the distance, the lighthouse of the main harbour shone, its beam rotating, a sweep of glimmering across the miles as the illumination touched thousands of rails in its passing. The train’s engines & equipment, its charts & intentions, were matters of interest, its passengers knew, to the government. So they rode darkly, days before they had claimed, to escape attention.

  Eventually, beyond their nation’s immediate purview, they kicked up the levels of their strange engine, accelerated & turned on their lamps. From its front the locomotive was a light-cyclops, its blasting ivory beam flooding the iron tangle before it, sending startled burrowing beasts out of its way. The train went east, north, east, north, north, north. Whole generations, whole civilisations of moths hurtled at this luminously exciting thing &—so cruel a fixation!—were swiftly splatted on the light they loved.

  If any had made it past that unforgiving glow, entered, what would they have seen? The foremost carriage shared something of the character of the Shroake House. More compact & cleaner, but its bunks, chairs, table, desk, discreet commode were, too, hemmed in by paperwork, books, tools & salvage.

  In the uppermost bunk slept Dero, swaying with the vehicle’s motion. He woke occasionally & abruptly—such had been the shape of his sleep a long time, since two-thirds of his parents had disappeared. When woke he did, he would sit up & stare, as if through the metal ceiling, as if he were the train’s eyes. His gaze was the same as the one his mother had had when she grew tired of salvage, of piecing together & making things, & had looked, instead, beyond. Dero was too young to remember his inherited expression on she who had bequeathed it to him, but when his sister saw it on his face, she gasped, because she was not.

  Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.

  Over the raskaba of the wheels & the whooshing of the fusion engine, Caldera hummed. Did she stare with the same hankering for distance & something-or-other as did her brother & as had her mother? Perhaps. Something like that.

  She thought about Sham, with gratitude for his information, for the picture that he had shown them. She tapped keys on Dad Byro’s ordinator. Extracted information. Collated it with their other information, including Sham’s descriptions. Began to build a route.

  With distant affection Caldera regretted that Sham had not come. She took bites from a sandwich, sung.

  An alarm bleated, glowed red. She checked her clattering information. A change of gauge was coming.

  She prodded buttons. How much would this particular technology have excited the burghers, the salvors, the privateers of Manihiki! she thought.

  Raskaba-tak, the train slowed but not by very much—a tug or two of levers, a switch set & the engine shuddered exactly like a troubled animal; braces emerged from its underside, took its weight as it rolled, raised it an instant, mechanisms wound, the wheels on the momentarily suspended vehicle slipping closer together to return & to land snikt into these new narrower rails.

  There were no hours of complicated rail-&-wheel-side shenanigans, only seconds with the gauge-slip. Caldera inserted words of salutation & praise for her family into her song.

  She did not wake Dero when she passed a hunk of metal that she suddenly suspected was one of her parents’ carriages. Discarded by them so early in their trip, for reasons unknown. She said nothing.

  When she had to sleep she stopped the train & armed its defences. The ordinator would probably have been able to continue the journey unwatched, but she would rather avoid any risk. It would soon be five, & Dero’s turn.

  & on the day that followed, & for days after that, the Shroakes continued their single-minded drive through hostile country. They traced creative routes through the railsea towards its most arcane & neglected places, following their family’s secret route, looking for whatever it was their mother & father had found.

  FORTY-FOUR

  WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENCE is ferroviaoceanology, the study of the railsea’s iron lines themselves. This is boss, nexus of investigations. Done right, it extends, rail-&-tie-like, across ruminations of all fields. To study the rails means not only the metallurgy of their substance, but the applied theology of their maintenance, sustained, cleaned & fixed as they are by the secretive ministrations of the locomotive-angels. It means the study of biology, to hypothesise the relationship between the lairs of all the burrowers, those eruchthonous & those eternally underground, & the tangled lines above them.

  It means the study of symbology. Ever since the godsquabble, since the rest of the world was brought into shape & existence to serve the aesthetic & symbolic needs of the railsea, we—cities, continents, towns, trains & you & me—have been functions of rails.

  Travel far enough, a trainswoman will find worshippers of gods of all sizes & shapes, all powers, persuasions & proclivities. & not only gods—uplifted mortals, ancestor spirits, abstract principles. In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no wheels percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

  FORTY-FIVE

  IN VERY OTHER PARTS OF THE RAILSEA, A MUCH OLDER, much more traditional train, ground south. Its passage was less strange than the Shroakes’, its route on one gauge only, but it travelled with no less urgency.

  Thus the Medes. Chased again by an eager coterie, a squabbling comet’s tail of railgulls
chowing on the scraps the trainsfolk threw. A day was all it took, a day’s quick determined driving, & Manihiki, its outliers, a hundred rocklets prodding out between the ties, were gone. Wide-open rails, & southward ho. With perhaps a certain melancholy.

  On the Medes’s last day in Manihiki, several people, of course, had been late to arrive back on-deck. One by one they returned, & one by one were punished. Nothing too severe—this was typical minor transgression.

  & ap Soorap?

  Sham ap Soorap?

  Where was Sham ap Soorap?

  He didn’t answer any calls. He did not return.

  The captain herself even asked where he was. Preparations continued. The captain herself paced & asked again if there was word of the doctor’s assistant.

  Until at last the harbourmasters arrived, bearing a letter to Fremlo, which the doctor read, swore at & read to the captain, leaving the door open a crack. The doctor was too experienced for that to be an accident. It was the technique known as trainboard telegraph. Minutes later the whole crew knew the message’s contents.

  To Dr. Fremlo & Captain Naphi & the officers & all my friends on the train Medes. I am sorry to be not there but I cannot do this job any more I have a new crew they are salvors with T Sirocco. They will teach me to be a salvor I was never a person who wanted to be a molehunter nor a doctor so I will go with them. Please tell my family thank you & sorry. I am sorry for this but I have always wanted to be someone who finds salvage & this is my chance good luck & thank you.

  Yr obedient servant Sham ap Soorap.

  THEY RACED INTO WINDS that whipped with less & less mercy. The heads, the bodies, of animals that broke subterranean cover grew larger as the Medes came to wilder, colder lands. Older hands marked the change in wheelcalls & clatternames as the iron cooled.

  On the fourth day they rolled in the shadow of an old pumping rig crowning above a copse, still extracting oil though near its life’s end. A labour of moldywarpes, grey beasts of moderate size & quality, surfaced near them, playing & puffing dust. Three were swiftly skewered, roped, dragged to the butchery wagons, reduced to components.