Railsea

  “Or if there’s something you’re spending your life chasing …” said Sham slowly. Something that gets close enough to you, sometimes, for you to see. But that keeps slipping away again.

  “You ain’t seen one before, have you?” Shikasta smiled. “I thought you’d like it.”

  If you spent your life like that, chasing some taunting quarry, what wouldn’t you do for one of these? Sham thought. You’d go out of your way, wouldn’t you, to get one, he thought.

  You’d go to Manihiki to buy one.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CAPTAIN NAPHI?”

  If she was surprised to see Sham, she showed no sign of it. It was plausible, he supposed, that he might have simply wandered into her favourite café. That he had not tracked down several of his comrades from the Medes & asked them where they thought he might find her.

  She was sitting at a corner table, with a journal in front of her & a pen in her hand. She did not invite him to sit nor shoo him away. She merely stared at him, long enough that his already great nervousness grew greater.

  “Soorap,” she said. “Doctor’s aid.”

  She sat back & placed her hands, with a soft thump & a hard clack, on the table in front of her.

  “I sincerely hope, Soorap,” she said, “that you are not here to discuss—”

  “No!” he stammered. “No. Not at all. Actually, there was sort of something I sort of wanted to sort of show you.” Daybe scrabbled under his shirt. He pulled the animal out.

  “Your beast I’ve seen,” said the captain. Sham held out Daybe’s leg, on which the tiny mechanism still protruded like a tick.

  After her demonstration, Shikasta had been appalled at her inability to entice Daybe back to her, to retrieve the transmitter. She had waved, & it, of course, ignored her. “I ain’t going to get that thing back!” she had shouted. & Sham had had an idea.

  He beckoned the bat for her, but when it got within a few yards, he surreptitiously altered his come-here motion to a get-away one, so, wary, Daybe would spiral off up again. Sham gave Shikasta his best shrug & apologetic eyebrows. “It don’t want to come,” he said.

  “You better hope,” she said finally, all the unexpected friendliness of the last couple of days quite gone, “that no one clocks that there’s one fewer of these things. I’ll be in so much trouble!” Sham nodded humbly, as if it was his fault she had stolen it. “When your flying rat comes back, you take that thing off & get it back to me, alright?”

  That evening, out of her ear- & eyeshot, he had whistled Daybe into his arms. Examined the clip on its leg. Whispering an apology, he had twisted it tighter. Now it would take a metal cutter to get it off. & here he was now, nervously pointing out a transceiver, or receptor, or receiver, or transceptor, or whatever the thing was called, while Daybe fiddled.

  “One of my mates found this, Captain,” he said. “She showed me how you work it. There’s a, there’s this box like a, um, & it knows where this thing is.” Naphi’s face gave away nothing. On Sham plunged. Talk-tunnelled through the captain’s dirt-cold silence like a conversation-mole.

  “I thought maybe it might interest you.” He gave a rambling & rattling description of what that odd thing did. “After what I heard—I was in the pub, Captain. It’s been an honour serving with you & I was hoping maybe you might let me do it again.” Let her think he was a brownnoser, & ambitious. Fine. “& I thought this might be of, like of help, you know.”

  The captain tugged at the bat’s leg, hard enough to make Daybe squeak & Sham wince. Naphi looked intent. She was breathing a little faster than a moment ago.

  “Did your friend tell you,” Naphi said, “where such items might be obtained?”

  “She did, Captain,” Sham said. “Scabbling Street Market, it’s called. It’s on …” He hesitated, but where else did one get the cuttingest-edge salvage? “On Manihiki.”

  Oh, she looked up at him then. “Manihiki,” she said. The most gentle & sardonic ghost of a smile haunted her lips for a few seconds. “Out of the goodness of your heart, you bring me this.” Still her mouth was haunted. It twitched. “How enterprising. How enterprising you are.

  “This might be of use, true, Soorap,” she said at last. He swallowed. “It’s a possibility,” she said, “to be pursued.” She stared into space. Sham could almost see the train of her mind grinding over plan-rails.

  “So,” he said carefully, “I just thought you might want to know there are those things on Manihiki. & if you’re travelling again, you know …”

  “How did you find me, Sham ap Soorap?”

  “I just heard you might be here,” he said. Was she having a tryst? he thought. He had barely stopped to wonder how badly he was intruding. “Someone said you were—”

  “That I was meeting someone?” she said, & with that perfect timing, a person behind Sham said Captain Naphi’s name.

  He turned, & it was not the secret lover he had momentarily imagined. It was Unkus Stone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  AFTER THE SHOUTS OF GREETING, SHAM’S HAND still on the older man’s back, he realised Stone was limping, badly. That he supported himself on sticks.

  “How did you even get here?” Sham said.

  “Got better,” Stone said. He smiled, but it wasn’t what he wanted it to be. “Thumbed a ride on a Streggeye-bound carrier. A mail train. Legs gammy or not there are things a trainsman like me can do.”

  “Hello, Stone,” Naphi said.

  “Captain Naphi.”

  The silence became excruciating.

  “Should I go, Captain?” Sham said. But I’ve only just got started, he thought. I had you all interested in my salvage! We was getting somewhere! Next thing we’d have been going somewhere!

  “What are you here to tell me, Stone?” said the captain.

  “Rumours,” Stone said. He met Sham’s eyes & glanced at the doorway, inclined his head.

  Sham got the message. Despondently he turned & walked towards the door. He tried to strategise as he went. But there was a scraping sound, & the captain said his name. She had pulled another chair into place.

  “If it’s rumours,” she said, “I’d not be so foolish as to think that any trainsperson wouldn’t soon hear it anyway.” She pointed, with her bone-&-metal-&-wood finger. “& I’d not be so mean-spirited,” she said, “as to make her, or him, wait any longer than necessary.” Sham bowed thanks, heart racing & sat. “So. I appreciate you being the conduit of whatever it is you’re conduiting, Mr. Stone.”

  “Well,” said Stone. Coughed. “We’re being followed,” he said.

  “Followed,” said Naphi.

  “Right. Well, you are. Or were. See, Captain, I was in bed for a long time, back on Bollons. But after a while, I got up.” He shifted. “Did a few odd jobs. Got to know the nurses. Some of the people around. Got to hobbling myself around the area. Got to knowing the byways, & the—”

  “Do please,” said Captain Naphi, “expedite this journey relevance-ward.”

  “So one of the fruit-sellers I knew was asking me who were my friends.” Stone almost stuttered in his efforts to speak quickly. “He says there’s people asking about what happened to me. To us. Asking for information. Said they’d heard something from someone, from a woman who’d heard about something we’d found …” He shook his head & shrugged. Sham swallowed, & shrugged, too. I don’t know anything about that either! he managed not to yell. “They were asking about our journey. The wreck. About the crew. Asking about you, Captain. First I thought it was all nothing.”

  “But,” Naphi said.

  “But. See, when I got on that mail-train to come back, after a couple of days, there’s a little train behind us. Miles off. A smart engine, a single-car & whatever it’s burning’s not putting out much exhaust that I can see. Top-notch quality. I know a good vehicle when I see one, & it should’ve been going a mad clip. But it stayed the same distance behind us. For way too long.

  “Even then, I might not have thought anything of it. It was gone aft
er a while. Except I saw it again. & not only that.

  “We were in a plain. No hills, forests, nothing. Nowhere to hide. I saw it again, & then there was another. Keeping their distance.”

  “Following you,” the captain said. “Even assume that were true, surely everyone knew where you were going?”

  “They knew where I said I was heading, Captain. & I was going there. But maybe they thought I was going somewhere else. Like they thought we had a plan.”

  “Thank you, Unkus Stone,” the captain said at last. She nodded. “Well. Well, whatever our peculiar tails think they know, they’re bound to disappointment. After all I’ve no secrets to give them.

  “Well.” Naphi sat up & sniffed. “Rumours must have eddied around us. Rumours & wrongnesses. If they decide to, whoever our unwanted disciples are won’t have much difficulty finding out where we’re going next. & going again I am. Would you like to accompany me?”

  “Another voyage already, Captain?” Stone said. “It would be an honour.” He swallowed. With his legs as they now were, Stone wouldn’t be first choice for many crews. Naphi was going a mile for him that many would not. “So we going back down south?” Stone said. “More great southerns to find?”

  “Of course. That is, after all, our job. But perhaps this will be a long trip, this one. You never know where we might end up, or by what route we might have to go.”

  But seeing her eyes, seeing how the captain stared at the mechanism clipped to Daybe’s leg, Sham in fact suspected he did know. Did have a good idea of where any detours might take them. & the excitement battered on the inside of his chest. At that moment it felt in his ribs just as he imagined it would if Daybe was flying around in there.

  TWENTY-SIX

  DID WE—?

  The maintenance of a log is indispensable. A good officer will be diligent, & treat any such document, whether typed into a digital machine, handwritten on fine paper, tugged into the knot-writing of the northern railsea, or whatever, like the external memory it is. Focusing on what was done & what followed should clarify causes & effects.

  Alas, logging is sometimes neglected. Everyone is happy to write of encounters with predators or prey, dramatic mole chases & revelations. But the long & many days of nothing, of mere passage on everyday rails, of swabbing, seeing little of note, finding nothing, not arriving but being still a long way from where you set out? Those days, a logger can make mistakes, or not bother. & from such situations come questions like “Did we—?”

  Though, sometimes, it is not inadequate attention that generates uncertainty. Even shock. The Medes is about to set wheel to rail. On a route very different from its initial planned. & all because of an intervention Sham very cannily made.

  It seems, not at all least to him, hard to believe that is why the deviation, hard to reconstruct how he had got there. Sham’s own cunning has startled him out of understanding it. He does not understand how he can be going where he wanted to go.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  BACK ON THE RAILROADS, BACK AT RAILSEA. ROCKING on his heels on the Medes. Soon to remember that conversation, Unkus Stone’s warning. It was amazing how much Sham felt pleasure at the slide of his feet, the rattle & tilt of rushing rails. Daybe dived & scattered the railgulls that followed them.

  The captain had put together almost the same crew as before. For all her quietness, her abstraction & ponderous ruminations—the usual flaws of any captain chasing a philosophy—she motivated loyalty. Here was Fremlo & Vurinam, Shossunder & Nabby & Benightly, now blondly unshaven & still not talkative but who whacked Sham on the back with unexpected friendliness that sent him sprawling. They worked with Sham as before, with similar teasing backchat & rough camaraderie, but now drank with him, too, when his shifts finished, & did not seem exasperated if he was shtum, uncertain what to say.

  There were more animal fights, of course. Lind & Yashkan would jeer at Sham as they put their coins down on the outcomes of awful assaults by ratlings, mice, miniature bandicoots, birds & fighting bugs. Sham stayed away from the arenas. Whenever he saw them, he would fuss with & simper over & gush attention at his surprised & gratified daybat. He did notice that Vurinam, who glanced more than once at these ministrations, seemed not to frequent the battles as once he had.

  Near the upsky border was a sputtering biplane, & Daybe spiralled up towards it. Sham could see the little source-nubbins on its leg. It had not been hard to avoid returning it to Shikasta.

  The aeroplane buzzed on westward. Perhaps it was from Mornington, swish island of aviators. Perhaps a transport of rich crew from the Salaygo Mess. With the complex tech available only in a few railsea countries, the cost of fuel, the necessity of long flat runways—hard to build on steep & slopey islands—air travel was expensive & uncommon. Sham looked up at the craft longingly, wondering what its drivers could see.

  They were a few days out from Streggeye, veering a good clip through forest & on undulating ground. They went through unusual railscapes. By rivers & pools, crossing the waterways on jutting mooncalf elevated tracks.

  “Where we heading, Captain?” Sham heard more than one officer ask, & the question, while mildly impertinent, was not surprising. They went west, not the south or southwest or south-southwest or even west-southwest that they might have expected for a mole hunt. “We have equipment to pick up,” was all the captain would say.

  Sham had his duties in Fremlo’s poky surgery, but he made time to explore. Found cubbyholes. Crawl-spaces. Sections of holds. He sat in a big cupboard in a storage car, put his eye to an imperfectly sealed plank & through layers of wood could glimpse the sky.

  They rode tangled & intersecting bridges for yards over the yawing drops of gorges, passed small islands poking out of the endless rails, stopping sometimes to pick up provisions & stretch their land-legs.

  “Morning, Zhed.”

  Well might Sham hesitate. He had exchanged only a few words with the harpoonist before. But he was massaging his daybat’s wings, feeling its healing with fingertip gentleness, near the captain’s dais, & there Zhed was leaning on the hindmost barrier, staring directly at the rails on which they had passed.

  She was an odd one. A tall & muscular soldier, originally from South Kammy Hammy. She still wore the ostentatious leather of those warlike & oddball far-off islands, where wartrains ran on clockwork motors.

  “Morning,” Sham said again.

  “Is it a good morning?” Zhed said. “Is it? Is what I wonder.” She continued to stare. They twisted in the outskirts of a wood, trees rising between the tight tracks, & animals & flouncy-feathered birds screamed at them from boughs. Zhed put fingers to her lips & pointed at a spot far off above the canopy. A zipping flurry of leaves. A swirl of disturbed, rain-bloated cloud. “Look.” She briefly indicated rails to either side of the one they rode.

  After long seconds with only the chukkachuchu of the wheels, Sham said, “I don’t know what I’m seeing.”

  “Rails cleaned like they shouldn’t be if they ain’t been used in days,” she said. “Is what you’re seeing. Things moving like they only would if something was nearby.”

  “You mean …”

  “I think someone is near us.” At last she turned & met Sham’s eye. “For us. Waiting. Or tracking.”

  Sham glanced around for Stone. “Are you sure?” he said.

  “No. Not at all. I said ‘I think.’ But think it I do.”

  Sham looked into the dark the racing trees shed as shadow. “What might it be?” he whispered.

  “I ain’t a psychic. But I am trainsperson & I know how the rails go.”

  THAT NIGHT, Sham swayed in his bunk to the Medes’s rhythm, & the motion of the carriage through the dark translated itself into unhappy dreams. He was walking across rails, long steps tie to tie, shuddering & fear-stiff so close to the earth. The earth that boiled, that oozed with life, ready to take him at his first stumble. & behind him something was coming.

  It chased him out of a fringe of trees. It was something, oh, it
was certainly something. He tried to hurry & stumbled & glimpsed & heard a snort & felt the rails shake & saw something both train & beast, a snarling thing pawing the rails as its wheels ground at him. Grunting. A goblin of the railsea, an angel of the rails.

  When he woke Sham was not surprised to find that it was still deep night. He shivered & crept deckwards without waking his comrades. Stars or little lights winked far out to railsea, miles & miles from safe hardland.

  “HAVE YOU EVER SEEN an angel?” Sham said to Dr. Fremlo.

  “I have,” Fremlo said, in that voice both low & high. “Or I have not. Depends. How long does a glimpse have to be to count as a ‘see’? I’ve travelled longer than anyone else on board, you know.” The doctor smiled sharply. “I shall tell you something, Sham ap Soorap, which, while not a secret, is not generally admitted. Trains’ doctors—we are awfully much more exciting than your sawbones is at home. But mostly, we’re not nearly such good doctors.

  “Can’t keep up with the research. We’re years out of date. & what gets us into this line is that we want to think about things other than medicine, sometimes. Which is why I’m not wholly stricken by your variable interest.” Sham said nothing. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ll do for most of the things likely to afflict a traincrew. I am at worst a mediocre doctor, but I’m an excellent tracksperson. & I’m the only person—& yes, I think that includes the captain—who’s seen an angel.

  “But if you’ve come to me for ghoul stories I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It was a long time ago, it was far away, & it was a moment. They’re not invisible, whatever you’ve heard. But they move fast. By byways & switchways no one else knows.”

  “What did you see?” Sham said.

  “We were off the coast of Colony Cocos. Treasure hunting.” Fremlo raised an eyebrow. “By a right tangle of rails, some rock teeth. We knew something was watching us. & then we heard a sound.

  “A little way off, no more’n a couple of hundred yards, a clot of the rails tangled together, crisscrossing back & forth & merging into a tunnel into cliff.”