Railsea

  “You’re a proper grown man now,” Troose said. “You should join us. Three adults.” The two men looked intense with pride as Troose said it. “Like adults like us do. We’re going to the pub.”

  & impatient as they could sometimes make him, Sham felt that pride swell in his own chest, walking with them through the steep streets of Streggeye, kicking cobbles that bounced a long way to scuff & settle eventually, perhaps, on the railsea itself. So good was Sham’s mood that it did not suffer more than a little when he realised that they had come to the Vivacious Weevil, a captains’ pub, one of the most famous. Where Captain Naphi would surely be. Discussing her lemon-coloured philosophy.

  TWENTY

  IT WAS CONTAINEDLY RAUCOUS WITHIN. FULL OF EXCITED debate. People sat listening to the stars of the evening holding forth. Naphi was there, listening to the speaker, a portly, muscular man close to two meters high. Sham could tell by his cadences that he was well into his story.

  “It’s Vajpaz,” Troose whispered. “He had another encounter.”

  “… By now,” the big man said, “my philosophy was coursing frenetically horizonward. You see? Carrying my leg.” Oh, yes, he was missing one, Sham noticed. There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. On the whole, you were a leg person or an arm person: had one a tail to lose, a pair of prehensile tentacles, a wing or two, it would increase the possibilities for those vivid scars of philosophising. “But I was beyond fretting. I tourniqueted my own stump & laughed. & set that jollycart after the beast. I set the course to hope. Always a few yards ahead, the rolling humps of its passage. Behind me my crew were piled onto the upturned wreck of the train, yelling for me to come back.

  “The greatstoat slowed & readied itself, & burst out of the earth, looping overhead. I could have reached up & grabbed its hairs. I watched as it set forth horizonward again, underground dancing at speed. & I stopped trying to catch it, & tried only to keep pace with it, & gloried in its letting me do so. I surrendered to the speed.”

  Ah, there it was. So this philosophy was about speed. Acceleration. Captain Vajpaz theorised about a slim sinuous line of fur & savage teeth, focused on him with spike-eyes personal & full of urgency. It wanted to pass on a message. Even taking his leg had been part of its communications. “Follow me!” it had been saying. “Quick!”

  So Vajpaz followed his philosophy, this greatstoat. The acceleration had become its own point, & Vajpaz’s life was changing as he became a prophet of enstoated speed. & so on.

  “The speed!” Vajpaz said. There was a whisper of appreciation.

  In the taverns of Streggeye Land, in the books they wrote, which Sham & his classmates had sat through, in lectures public & exclusive, captains held ruminatively forth about the bloodworm, the mole rat, the termite queen or angry rex rabbit or badger or the mole, the great mole, the rampaging great moldywarpe of the railsea, become for them a principle of knowing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something. The story of the hunt as much their work as the catching of meat.

  Tales told in pubs & cafés, bars & clubs of Streggeye were also of the discovery of stowaways, members of the Siblinghood of Railsea Hoboes, tucked in some hold or other. Of foreign shores. Of the imagined lands past the edge of the world. Of ghost trains, of enormous bloodworms that could emerge from the ground & wind around a train before dragging it under the ground, of the mysteries of crewless derelicts creaking on the lines, meals half-eaten but not a soul aboard, of monstrosities of the rails in secluded & terrible places, sirens, sillers, traptracks, dust krakens. But it was the philosophies that were the mainstay of these storytelling sessions.

  Streggeye Land, on the western tip of the Salaygo Mess archipelago. Famous for hunters, for mole oil, for molebone art & for its philosophers. Their texts were intellectual touchstones across the railsea.

  Sham had never heard Captain Naphi talk publicly about her own quarry. He watched her stand. Sip her drink. Clear her throat. The room quieted.

  But nothing had happened, Sham thought. The Medes had not come anywhere near the big mole she was looking for, the not-yellow thing. What was there to tell? It was tradition for any captain with a philosophy to hold forth about it at the end of any journey, but he had not until now considered what they would do had the object of their obsession not appeared. Which, now the thought occurred, must be common. Was she going to say, “Sorry—nothing to report,” & sit down again?

  Oh, hardly.

  “The last time I spoke to you,” Naphi said, “my philosophy had evaded me. Left me adrift on the railsea, without fuel or direction, with only its disappearing dust & a long road of molehills for my eyes. I watched him go.

  “Mocker-Jack.” The name rung in the room.

  “You know how careful are philosophies,” Naphi said. “How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation.

  “When we set out at last again, we, the Medes, went south. Mocker-Jack was somewhere near, surely. What confronted us first, however, was another animal, throwing itself at us. & after that, no word. No nothing. All the trains we passed I asked for help & information, but the silence about Mocker-Jack was its own taunt. His absence was a looming presence. The lack of him filled me with him, so he burrowed not only through the earth & dirt of the railsea but through my own mind, night after night. I know more now about him than ever I did before. He stayed away & came closer in one magic movement.”

  Ah, Sham thought. Brilliant. Troose was rapt. Voam was intrigued. Sham was amused & impressed & annoyed all at the same time.

  “You been waiting a long time for this?” Voam whispered to a woman near him.

  “I come for all the good philosophies,” she said. “Captain Genn’s Ferret of Unrequitedness; Zhorbal & the Too-Much-Knowledge Mole Rats; & Naphi. Of course. Naphi & Mocker-Jack, Mole of Many Meanings.”

  “What’s her philosophy, then?” Sham said.

  “Ain’t you listening? Mocker-Jack means everything.”

  Sham listened to his captain describe her encounters & non-encounters with the quarry she’d been chasing for years, that represented everything anyone could ever imagine. “I’ve had my blood & bone ingested by that burrowing signifier,” she said, waving her intricately splendid arm. “A taunt, daring me to ingest him back.”

  Naphi looked right at Sham, just then. Right at him, into his eyes. She paused just a fraction of a moment. Not long enough that anyone but him would have noticed. He smoothed down his unruly hair in blushing fluster & looked away.

  I know what I want to do, he thought. I want to get to Manihiki, whatever the captain thinks. That boy & girl deserve to know what happened.

  He looked back at Naphi, imagined her racing over junctions & the wildest railtangles, bearing down on her philosophy, the toothy giant Mocker-Jack.

  Sham thought, What will she do if she catches it?

  TWENTY-ONE

  PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO NARRATE SINCE FIRST WE banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

  Some such stories are themselves about the telling of others. An odd pastime. Seemingly redundant, or easy to get lost in, like a picture that contains a smaller picture of itself, which in turn contains—& so on. Such phenomena have a pleasing foreign name: they are mise-en-abymes.

  We have just had a story of a story. Tell it yourself, again, & story of a story in a story will be born, & you will be en route to that abyme. Which is an abyss.

  In his first days back in Streggeye, there was, for Sham, plenty of storytelling, some of it about stories.

  TWENTY-TWO


  STRANGE TO HAVE DAYS NOT DICTATED BY THE CLATTER of wheels. To have his legs not flex & straighten in the unthinking expertise of the trainsperson, with the sway. Fremlo didn’t treat patients on hardland, so Sham’s duties were sweeping, cleaning, running the occasional errand, answering the very occasional telephone call, then slipping off not quite with explicit permission, but without any opposition. Scooting by pedestrians & horses tugging carts, past the horns of a few electric autos crawling up the jostling streets, to join some of the other Streggeye apprentices, snatching their own moments off from work as cooks’ assistants, clerks, porters, tanners & electricians & artists, trainees of all kinds.

  Many of those whose paths he crossed on the same old runs would barely have spoken to him before. Despite the years of lessons they had taken together, he knew them less well than he did his trainsmates. & he was not much more smooth now than he had been while at school. But he was a traveller, who had gone out & come back, & that meant he had stories. He told Timon & Shikasta & Burbo of the mole rats & the great southern moldywarpe. & they listened, no matter that, now he spoke not to his own cousins, his delivery was hesitant. Encouraged by the attention, Sham introduced the listeners to his bat. That sealed it.

  They were a temporary gang, & they trekked across the roofs of Streggeye’s industrial quarter, hooting & breaking the windows of deserted halls, flirting & bickering, Daybe wheeling around them in curiosity, ducking through the forest of steam- & smoke-venting chimneys. They watched the comings & goings in markets in the busiest streets of the prosperous parts of town, & in the other places, they entered defunct warehouses, set up camps in the cold boilers of unusable ovens.

  Some of the time, they talked about salvage.

  STREGGEYE WAS NOT FAMOUS for salvors. Of course those searchers in old earth, those disinterrers of oddities, were from everywhere & nowhere. The various collective names they granted themselves tended to refer to that very fact: they were the Diffuse College, you might hear; they were the Scattered Siblinghood; the Antiplaced; the Universal Diggers.

  Small as it was, though, Streggeye was no backwater. It provided a disproportionate amount of the molemeat & the philosophy in the railsea. It was known among explorers & updivers for its Stonefaces, the gazing rock figures that topped the island, above the treeline in unbreathable highlands air. (Sham had visited the viewing stations below the transit zone, peered through long mirrored-&-lensed periscopes at the blocky gazing heads on the island’s top.) So though it was not their first port of call, salvors did, in fact, periodically visit Streggeye. More than once Sham had watched salvage trains come in.

  They were like no other rolling stock on the railsea. Patchwork vehicles. Powerful engines, wicked shunters at the front, train sides riveted with cladding, bristling with the peculiar tools of the salvor’s trade. Drills, hooks, cranes, sensors of various unorthodox kinds, to find & sort through the millennia of discarded rubbish that littered the railsea. Bits of salvage used & incorporated. On the topside decks salvors themselves in their distinctive clothes, tool-belts & bandoliers & stained leather chaps, snips of treated cloths & plastic feathers & showy bits & pieces pulled from the earth & miraculously unruined. Helmets of various complicated designs.

  First the city authorities would come aboard & bargain for what salvage they wanted. Then high-rolling clients, the Streggeye rich. & finally, if the salvor crews were feeling generous & had a few days, they would run a market.

  Their antique & reclaimed wares were set on stalls on the dockside, according to various taxonomies. Pitted & oxidized mechanisms from the Heavy Metal Age; shards from the Plastozoic; printouts on thin rubber & ancient ordinator screens from the Computational Era: all choice arche-salvage, from astoundingly long ago. & the less interesting stuff, too, that discarded or lost anything from a few hundred years ago to yesterday—nu-salvage.

  There might even be a table or two of items from the third salvage category. The physically disobedient impossible scobs, that looked & behaved like nothing should. Sham remembered one such object—or was it three? A Strugatski triskele, the salvor had called it, waving it around to attract interest. Three curved black rods equidistant from each other in a Y-shape. The man had held one, & above it jutted the others, & in the centre, where they should join, was nothing. They did not touch, though they stayed together no matter how you shook them.

  What that was was a piece of alt-salvage. Something made not only epochally long ago but unthinkably far away, way beyond the farthest reaches of the upsky. Brought to the railsea, used, & discarded by one of the visitors from other worlds, remnants brushed from cosmic laps, during the long-ago years when this planet had been a busy layby, a stopover point for the same brief visits that had accidentally stocked the upsky with its animals. This world had been a tip. Frequented by vehicles en route from one impossibly far place to another, with trash to dump.

  The thought of striking out to salvage-reefs unknown, the burrowing, the mining, dustdiving, the picking through shorelines of ancient trash—these activities quickened Sham’s blood. But then what? He had questions. Where did salvage end up? What happened when you’d found it? Who used it for what when whoever sold or bartered it did, to whomever?

  &, though it was harder to think of, a last thing gnawed at him & he could not leave it alone—when he thought of salvage, why did Sham start awed & end up deflated?

  TWENTY-THREE

  THERE WAS A WRECK IN A BAYFUL OF FIDDLY RAILS AT Streggeye’s eastern rim, just out of town. It was a few hundred yards from shore, a stalled & rusting engine & cart that had long ago lost power—a bad captain, a drunk crew, inadequate switchers. It was too ruined to fix, worth nothing as nu-salvage. It mouldered, full of rust-dwelling birds, cawing in outrage as Daybe flew around their home.

  Timon, Shikasta & Sham were alone on the pebbly beach. They sat near a gorge where a stream of water & a railriver—a line, a long loop of track—emerged from inland & joined the railsea. They threw stones at the old engine offshore. Timon & Shikasta talked. Sham, still surprised at being in their company, watched the animal dwellers of shallow coastline earth. Meerkats, groundhogs, the tiniest moldywarpes. Shikasta, as bossy as she had been at school, but now unaccountably noticing him, looked at Sham until he blushed.

  “So you going to be a moler’s doctor, Sham?” Timon said. Sham shrugged. “Going to turn out like your boss? No one knowing if you’re a man or a woman?”

  “Shut up,” Sham said uncomfortably. “Fremlo’s Fremlo.”

  “I thought you wanted to go into salvage.” Timon said.

  “Talking of,” interrupted Shikasta, “want to see something cool? He’s right, salvage was the only thing ever made you perk up. So I wanted to show you something.” From her bag she took a thing that looked somewhat like a switcher’s remote control. It was black plastic or ceramic, a peculiar shape. It glimmered with lights. Bits poked from it according to absolutely no sense. It came out with a murmur as if of troubled flies.

  Sham’s eyes widened. “That’s salvage,” he gasped.

  “It is,” said Shikasta proudly. She brought out a box of things the size of grapes, soldered with ugly circuitry.

  “That’s alt-salvage,” Sham said. Junk from another world. “How’d you get it?”

  “Off a trainmate.” Shikasta, like Sham, was working on the railsea—a transport vehicle, in her case. “She got it from someone else, who got it off someone else, & on & on, leading back to Manihiki. She said I could have a go on it.”

  “Oh my That Apt Ohm,” said Timon. “You blatantly stole it.”

  Shikasta looked prim. “Borrowing ain’t stealing,” she said. “I wanted to show you,” she said. “Can you make your bat come here?”

  “Why?” said Sham.

  “I ain’t going to hurt it,” she said. She held up one of the grapey things. There was a clip on it.

  Sham stared at Daybe, circling in the air. Somewhere in the back of his brain were stories he’d heard, about some of the c
apabilities of some of the things left in some of the seams of some of the salvage. Somewhere was a little idea.

  He enticed Daybe in with a strip of biltong. “You better not hurt my bat,” he said.

  “It ain’t your bat,” Shikasta said. “You’re its boy.” She snapped the thing on Daybe’s right leg. Immediately it chirruped in rage & shot into the air, peeing on her arm as it went, to her yelled disgust.

  Daybe zipped in complicated jackknifes, loop-the-loops, corkscrews, twisting its body, trying to dislodge the thing. Shikasta wiped bat wee off her hand. “Right,” she said.

  Her box whistled & cooed. It clicked in complicated staccato time with Daybe’s ill-tempered aerobatics. The blue-lit screen glowed, an electric fog in which appeared a dot that echoed Daybe’s aerial motions. The bat veered into the distance, the noise from the machine grew quieter: closer, louder.

  “Is that …?” said Sham.

  “Yes it is,” said Shikasta. “It’s a tracker. It knows where the signal thing is.”

  “How does it work? How far?”

  “It’s salvage, ain’t it?” Shikasta said. “No one knows.”

  They all three ducked as Daybe came at them. The receiver squealed, then moaned as the bat flapped away.

  “Where did you—or your trainmate—get it?” said Sham.

  “Manihiki. Where all the best salvage is. There’s a new place in the Scabbling Street Market.” She said that exotic name carefully, clearly enjoying it, like a spell. “These things are really useful. Like, if someone steals something & you’ve got one of these in it, you might be able to follow. So they ain’t cheap.”