Page 6 of Railsea


  Sham was certainly curious about that last. He watched that sniggering section of the crew making rude gestures & jokes, lascivious intimations & muttering about to which establishment they would go. Certainly he was intrigued, but on that issue he was shyer than he was curious, so after a second Sham veered & followed Vurinam & Borr, Benightly, Kiragabo Luck, a bunch of cheerful & chatty crew whose intentions were clear from their raucous rendition of the traditional landfall shanty, “We’re Going to Get Unbelievably Drunk (in a Pub).”

  IT TURNED OUT, in fact, that the song was misleading: they visited not one pub but many, migrating from one alcohol-hole to the next in an increasingly bleary & beery & ultimately slobbering group like some restless migratory herd.

  The first was called the Tall Bird. Its proper name was in Bollons, but it announced itself pictorially in its sign. It was lugubrious & underlit & full of muttering locals & visitors eyeing each other. Kiragabo put a small glass of something in front of Sham. It tasted like blackberries & dust.

  “What was it the captain took from you?” said Kiragabo. “After Stone was bit?”

  “Something from the wreck.”

  “Ooh, mystery man. What was it, Soorap you toerag?”

  “Just a thing,” he muttered, while his companions jeered & nudged him while he drank so it slopped on him, & demanded to know more, then forgot what they were talking about when Vurinam launched into some unlikely lewd anecdote. Then to the Grumpy Molly, a more flamboyant place where the walls were garish & a gleaming jukebox blared syncopated JazzleHouse that quickly had Vurinam bouncing like a fool, flirting with anyone near. He was shouting & comparing clothes with a temporary dance partner, a young woman pretty enough to make Sham blush without her even seeing him.

  Benightly saw him, though, Sham realised, & laughed at him. Then Vurinam was back at the table, & there was something sweeter & darker & a lot thicker than the first drink going down Sham’s throat. He pulled Daybe from beneath his shirt, let it have a sip, & his companions screamed at him for bringing the happy animal with them, then forgot what had scandalised them.

  “It was a wossname,” Sham said. “Little thing for a camera.” It took a moment for his crewmates to understand he was answering a question from a whole pub ago.

  “A memory!” said Luck. Benightly raised an eyebrow & was about to ask more, but was distracted by the insistence of a local bravo challenging him to an arm-wrestle. Then they were all at the pinnacle of a thoroughly corkscrewing path at the Clockerel, a snooty establishment signed by a hybrid timepiece-fowl, on a rock spur overlooking the raily harbour. Its staff tried for a moment to keep them out till it looked like causing more difficulties than letting them in.

  “Look!” Sham bellowed. “ ’S the train!” Visible through the windows, it was, yes, the Medes. On it glimmered a few home lights. & it was Sham’s round, it turned out, his trainmates helpfully informed him, & helpfully they took out his moneypouch, & helpfully emptied it to pay for jugs of Stone-faces knew what, & this time some bar snacks, too, chilli-fried dustcrab & locust thing the whiskers & segmenty legs of which Sham eyed without enthusiasm but chewed on nonetheless.

  “How’d you even end up on the moler?” Vurinam asked him, bewildered but not unkind. The others were leaning in with interest to hear his answer. “Was it your mum & dad?” Sham was befuddled enough that he wasn’t even sure what it was he said in response.

  “ ‘Mumble mumble mum & dad mumble’?” Vurinam said. “Well, thank you for elucidating.”

  “It weren’t me,” Sham tried to explain, “it was my cousins. I ain’t got a …” The last four words sounded suddenly loud to him, & he closed his mouth before the words mum & dad could get out past his teeth & dampen the evening.

  No one was listening anyway. His Medes-mates were all cackling loudly at Vurinam’s impression of him. Vurinam who was punching him on the shoulder, now, in friendly enough fashion, telling him, “Aaah, you’re alright, Soorap, just need to ease up a bit,” & there was Sham thinking ease up on what? but that was a mystery for another time, because conversation had moved on.

  Benightly was looking at him. From the sympathy on the big man’s face might even have guessed the missing words. Sham took another sip.

  Then where? Some place called the Ancient Cheese, another called the Formidable, another the Drip & Doctor & Drain & Dragon or something. At what point the Medes women & men had started up conversations with their fellow drinkers Sham had no idea, but he was at it, too.

  “Wha’for the men staring?” he said to a woman with tattoos on her neck & her hair coiled like rope. She peered over her glasses. “Where you from please also?”

  “Bollons men like women indoors,” she said in Railcreole, the lingua franca of railsailors, with an accent Sham couldn’t place. “Don’t like the likes of me. From Cold Basin, me.” Cold Basin! Miles & miles away, easter even than Streggeye! “Come to buy rumours. Sell them, too.”

  “I’ve heard about the rumourmarkets. Where are they?”

  “You have to buy rumours of where they are from street-corner rumourjockeys, hope you get lucky.”

  “Buy rumours about rumours?”

  “How else?”

  “They going to stop you doing whatever you’re here t’do?” Sham said.

  She shook her head. “They ain’t so dumb here to tell outlanders what to do. I already done updiving on the east highlands.” She teased with hinting talk about Sowmerick, a mythical upsky toxicontinent. “What was this wreck, then?”

  “Oh!” Sham’d forgotten he was telling her. A garbled version of the story of, what was it? Back he set off like a train on a straight stretch, with the tale of the wreck. He gabbled through it & she stroked his daybat. Then it was another pub & she was still with him & oops, Sham was outside, puking into the steep gutter. Leaving a little bit of Streggeye behind, he thought. You’re welcome, Bollons. More room for that schnapps, was that what they called it?

  & again here he went with stories of the wreckage, of his fumbling, of the terrible mole-rat attack. “ ‘S’why we’re here. Our mate got his leg bit.” Look at me, thought Sham, the storyteller. A storm of faces hanging on him & listening as off in other bits of wherever they were Kiragabo & Vurinam were dancing together, & someone gave Sham another drink, & someone said, “So what was it you found on the wreck?” & “Aaaaah,” he was saying, tap-tapped the side of his nose, never you mind, secrets, that was what. That was a secret. Not that he knew, nor that he’d refrained, apparently, from mentioning that he’d found something. Hey ho, drink up. Then he was under the stars & snuggling down his head all rested on a something. They weren’t so bad, he thought. They were nice, in Bollons, he thought. Giving him something to sleep on.

  FIFTEEN

  IT WAS A STONE, WAS WHAT IT WAS. HIS PILLOW.

  Sham found that out gradually. Very gradually.

  First a fingernail-sized rough something scratched & scratched at him. Through a very slow stretch Sham hauled himself like a hero out of the sticky slough of dreams up & oh, really very gradually, geared up the strength to reach up &, with his finger, pry open an eye.

  So. Turned out he’d slept outside in the yard of some final pub. Whimpering at the assault of merciless morning light on his eyes, he blinked until he could see a few of his crewmates still snoozed in a barn, watched by contemptuous goats. Daybe the daybat was licking Sham’s face. Crumbs from around his mouth. When did I eat something? Sham thought. Couldn’t remember. Hauled himself up, froze & moaned & sat still while his head did its lurching business.

  Stonefaces, he was thirsty. Was that his sick in a big splattery spread just beside him? No proof one way or the other. Through his fingertips, he glanced up at the sun. The upsky was pretty clear—a little fuzzing miasma, a few swirls of way-high poison camouflaging a few terrible high-fliers, but it felt as if he could see all the way into space. The sun fairly glared back down at him, like a teacher disappointed. Oh sod off, Sham thought, & set out for the harbour.


  Past terraces where women & men were watering windowsill plants, & cooking breakfast, or what, in fact, must be lunch, & was, whatever it was, by a long way the most unbelievably delicious-smelling food Sham had in all his years of life been privileged to sniff. Past the dogs & cats of Bollons, cheerful ownerless animals that trotted around unfussed, eyeing him sympathetically. Past the blocky rectangular churches, where the history of the godsquabble was sung. Down towards the harbour from where, over rows of houses, grocers, a statue of a sardonic-looking local godlet, he could hear the clack & smack & pistonhammer crack of trains.

  It wasn’t a big town, Bollons, & there was really one main thoroughfare. Up he stared at the telescopes & sensors on its roofscape, trained by way of veering tubes & wires on Cambellia. This was somewhere new, a different place. In principle he was excited. I am getting annoyed with this, he thought, when he wasn’t sure how he felt.

  He saw Medes comrades: Ebba Shappy at a café, waving over her chicory drink; Teodoso, who looked worse than Sham felt, & did not notice him; Dramin, the grey cook, examining odd herbs, who did see him & did not say hello.

  Sham almost wept at the thought of breakfast. Bought a salty pasty from a vendor, sat on the steps of a street-pump to eat it & washed it down with the metally water. Fed finger- & thumbfuls to Daybe.

  His head hurt, he ached all over, & he was sure, oh, yes, quite sure that he smelled. But whoever’d bought rounds with his money the previous night had given him back his change. He’d slept dusty but he had slept. The passersby were ignoring him or grinning at him, less judgmental than the sun. He had two or three hours before he was due back on the train. Maybe hangovers were survivable. Whether he should or not, & despite that little flurry of familiar frustration with himself, Sham felt not too too bad.

  SIXTEEN

  AT ONE CORNER OF THE RAILSEAFRONT WAS THE TEKNIQALL Noshhouse, a combination eaterie, chatterie (at its many tables the captains & officers of moletrains & explorers were doing obviously secret, muttering business), announcerie & technickerie. Sham stopped. In the shadow behind its awnings, he saw Captain Naphi talking to the owner.

  She was describing something big with her hands. She handed over a piece of paper, & the man nodded & placed it in the information window, among many such flyers. Sham squinted to make out the larger words.

  INFORMATION LEADING TO.

  REWARD.

  PHILOSOPHY.

  He was about to continue. He was about, indeed, to creep away, not eager to have Naphi’s imperious melancholy spoil his mood. But there was to be no creeping. She saw him & beckoned him over. Not a flicker on his face, of course, but Sham felt his heart pitch.

  “One more thing,” the captain said to the cafékeeper. “You have ordinators?” She pulled a handful of paper from one pocket. “I have something for you,” she said to Sham. LARGE MOLDYWARPE, Sham read as he took them. UNIQUE COLOUR.

  She clenched her artificial hand so a hatch opened within it. Inside was the camera memory. That’s mine! Sham thought as she extracted it. Finder’s rule! The café owner was nodding them towards the back. “Come. I shall check this,” the captain said. “& then I’ll tell you where you’re going.”

  In the sideroom was a collection of ordinators, cobbled-together equipment, tangled tubing, jury-rigged screens from movographs, black-&-white flickering projectors, lettered keys, the hmph of a diesel generator keeping the data safely on the machines.

  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 sid
e 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.

  SEVENTEEN

  AWAY AGAIN. EATING 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.