Railhead

  I must ask them not to tell Priya about this, she thought. She’ll be so jealous…

  The blue woman came nearer, gliding over the fractal fidgetings of the tiles. It was hard to judge her scale. Threnody wanted to believe that she was the size of an ordinary human being, but if she stopped concentrating, she became aware of sparks of light streaming through the room, falling toward the woman and vanishing into her. They were the same sparks that she had been able to convince herself were no bigger than plankton before, but now she had the feeling that they were as big as suns, and that the figure who stood among them was light-years tall. Through the gold-in-gold eyes she felt some huge intelligence focus on her.

  “Welcome, Threnody Noon.”

  Above the Guardian’s head, like a thought bubble, the image of a room appeared. It was the room in Sundarban Station City where Threnody sat in the big chair, with Lyssa Delius and the data diver beside her. A dizzy, overhead view, as if the Guardian had hacked into the feed from a security camera on the ceiling. She let the image hang there for a moment, then pulled a long silver pin from her hair and stabbed the thought bubble, which vanished with a loud pop.

  “I am a digital interface of Autonomous Networked Artificial Intelligence System 6.0,” said the Guardian. “You may call me Anais.” She nodded at the drawer that Threnody had opened and said, “Emails.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I collect them. They are a sort of message that people used to send to one another. Much like the messages you send your friends I expect, except that in the olden days people actually used to type them, can you imagine? They’re all still down there somewhere, in the deepest levels of the data-silt that piles up on the data-floor of the Datasea. ‘Thank you for your interest,’ they say, or ‘I’m having a wonderful time,’ or ‘Your order has been dispatched,’ or ‘I love you,’ or ‘The gerbil died.’ Every one a gem! It is my ambition to acquire every email ever sent. Would you like to read them?”

  All around her, silently, drawers began to slide open.

  “No,” warned Mr. Yunis, a tiny voice way off in the corner of Threnody’s consciousness, like a helpful mouse in a fairy tale.

  “Perhaps later?” said Threnody nervously. “They said you wanted to talk to me?”

  The drawers slammed shut. Anais flickered. She glitched. She turned away from Threnody. Seen from behind she was hollow, like a gelatin mold. She moved her hands, drawing glowing shapes on the air. “I have detected patterns,” she said. “The claims of the man Malik. A train on the Dog Star Line. We should have seen, but we did not see. I believed he was dead. We all did.”

  Threnody tried to follow her. “You believed who was dead?”

  “Raven! Raven!” The Guardian rounded on her. Threnody saw now that its face was a porcelain mask, covered with a fine network of tiny cracks. Instead of eyes it had two letter i’s. Instead of a mouth, the word “mouth” was written in red.

  “You talked to the boy on the Noon train, the boy Zen Starling.”

  “Yes,” said Threnody. “No, not really; it was my Auntie Sufra who took a liking to him…”

  There was no point trying to lie to Guardians. Anais said, “I am looking at footage from Adeli Station. He is coming aboard the train. You lead the way. You welcome him.”

  “Well, I was just being friendly—I didn’t know he was an imposter; if I’d known…”

  “What does he want?”

  Threnody was starting to panic. “The art collection. He said he wanted to see the art collection. Auntie Sufra showed him round…”

  The Guardian’s eyes flickered. Part of it was still watching Threnody, another part was scanning catalogues of the Noon collection. “Did the boy Zen Starling express an interest in any particular item in the collection?” it demanded.

  “I don’t think so,” said Threnody.

  Something appeared in the air between her face and the face of the Guardian. It was a dull little lead-gray cube. “Did the boy Zen Starling express an interest in this object? The Pyxis, artist unknown, acquired by Lady Rishi Noon?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Why did I never notice this object before?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” asked Threnody.

  “It is the right size. It is the right weight. Is it possible that… The Lady Rishi… Raven was friendly with her. Can it be that he… ?”

  The mask of Anais cracked and fell away in eggshell fragments. Behind it were leaves: orange and yellow and brown, a whirlwind of autumn leaves the size of a nebula. The room with the checkerboard floor flashed out of existence, as though Anais couldn’t be bothered with that illusion anymore. For a moment Threnody thought she was standing on a world where a huge new station was under construction, machines digging deep foundations into red bedrock. People in old-style clothes gathered round what seemed a clutch of black eggs, half buried in the soil. Black spheres, the light dazzling off their surfaces in strange patterns. Then that was gone too, and she was back in the gray tides of the Datasea. Plankton lights rushed past her, through her, pouring in and out of an immense darkness, which billowed slowly away from her.

  “Go,” said Anais.

  And she was writhing and gasping on the big chair as if she’d just been pulled from deep water, scrabbling at the headset as Mr. Yunis pulled it off her face, staring into the eyes of Lyssa Delius, who bent over her, saying, “Did you speak to it? To the Guardian? What did it say? What did it want?”

  Threnody thought about that, while her heartbeat came slowly back to normal.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” she said.

  *

  Beside a heart-shaped sapphire lake in the mountains of Sundarban’s northern continent stood an old house. Its gates were locked, and had not been opened for many years. In an earlier age its gardens would have been overgrown, and the house itself crumbling, ivy-clad, a home to birds and bats. But this was the age of the Network Empire, so the house was self-repairing, and had drones to trim its lawns and rake its long gravel driveways and feed the carp in the sapphire lake while it slept.

  Now, for the first time in a century, lights flickered on in the big, silent rooms as the house responded to instructions pouring into it out of the Datasea. The light twinkled in the sequins and shimmercloth of the clothes that hung in the huge wardrobes. Down in the basement, where the faded chlorine scent from a drained swimming pool still hung in the air, Motorik jerked awake, and a drawer in a white wall slid open. It was a long, shallow, coffin-shaped drawer, and inside it was a tube of diamondglass, like a luxury version of the tubes where prisoners were frozen.

  The machinery of the place whirred and hummed. Readouts flickered on temperature gauges. The Motorik bustled about their tasks. The frost on the inner surface of the tube was thawing, the gel that filled it gurgling away through hidden pipes. Soon the body inside was visible. Golden eyes opened wide. The body shuddered and blinked in brief confusion as a partial copy of Anais Six downloaded itself out of the Datasea into its brain.

  Anais Six had had this interface grown for a party, and then lost interest and never used it. Now it stirred at last. The thawing procedure was supposed to take hours, but as soon as it had control of its muscles, the interface forced its way out of the freezer tube, grabbed the party dress that one of the Motorik servants held ready for it, and strode away through the silent rooms, out into the garden. The air-car that would take it to the station city was already touching down.

  40

  A red train in a white world. A long viaduct, immensely high, spanning a gorge between two stony mountainsides. The mountains scarred with old mine workings and bandaged with snow. Fresh flakes flurrying down, gray against the snow-colored sky, then settling soft and white. In the middle of the viaduct was a silent station. Icicles fringed the canopies above the platforms, and trailed from a sign that read WINTERREISE.

  There
the Damask Rose stopped, just as exhausted as her passengers by the battle that they had left behind.

  “What happens now?” asked Nova, in the silence.

  Zen didn’t have any good answer to that. He needed air. He had been too busy to be scared while the bullets were buzzing around him, but now that the danger was over he felt appalled at how near to death he had been. He thumbed the door release and jumped down into the drifts beside the track. So still and quiet. The only sound the whisper of the snow. The gravity was lower than on Sundarban. He wondered if that was what made the flakes so big.

  Crunching softly over the drifts, he walked along the platform to the front of the train, checking the loco for damage. There were some scars and scorch patterns. Some of Flex’s paint had been scraped off. A broken maintenance spider dangled from its hatch, clanking against the loco’s side when the breeze blew: a small, cold sound. Higher up, the Rose’s guns still jutted from their hatches, hissing and steaming as stray snowflakes touched them.

  “Why do you have guns, train?” he asked.

  “We were all fitted with them,” answered the Damask Rose. “I was built in troubled times. There was war on the Spiral Line. My sisters and I were fitted with weapons in case we were ever attacked.”

  “And were you?”

  “Not until today.”

  “They will come after us, you know.”

  “I know, Zen. We should move on, but I must wait and make repairs.”

  “How long? They’ll be coming soon.”

  “Just for an hour, maybe less.”

  Zen turned away and looked down over the viaduct. Its long legs vanished below into a white cloud that filled the valley between the two mountains. Through the cloud he glimpsed the shapes of buildings: roofs collapsed under the weight of heaped snow, the streets between them choked with drifts. An old world, he thought, and empty; the mines scraped bare. A good place for fugitives to hide and lick their wounds. But not for long. There was only one K-gate between here and Sundarban. Pretty soon Railforce would be popping through it, and they’d be ready for the Rose and her little guns this time.

  “Is Flex all right?” the train asked.

  “He’s fine. He got shot in the shoulder, but it’s repairing.”

  “He is a good painter. Do you like my angels?”

  “They’re great. They really suit you.”

  “What about the insect Monks? Did they survive?”

  “No. They were scattered.”

  “Good. I did not like them.”

  “They saved Nova and me,” said Zen. “Without them, we’d never have got off Sundarban.” He felt guilty, because he hadn’t liked the Hive Monks either, and he was glad they were gone. Something moved in his hair. He groped for it and pulled it free. A white maggot. Disgusted, he almost hurled it over the parapet, before he remembered how it had got there. He searched his hair and clothes and found more of the grubs, which he took back aboard the train, cupped in his hands. There were hundreds of Monk bugs in the front carriage. They scurried in aimless streams over the floor and walls and seats, while winged females battered themselves against the lamps. Zen wondered how long it would take them to hatch enough eggs and rear enough maggots to turn themselves back into a Hive Monk, and whether that Hive Monk would still be Uncle Bugs.

  Nova was sitting with Flex in the next carriage, away from the insects. It was a dining car, tables spread with crisp white cloths, laid with silver cutlery, tinkling glassware, traditional squeezy plastic sauce holders shaped like oversized tomatoes. Nova and Flex sat there in silence, but Zen guessed they were talking, in some wordless, Motorik way. It made him feel left out and faintly jealous. He noticed that Flex had changed back into a girl.

  “Why do you keep switching?” he asked. “Male to female, female to male…”

  Flex looked up at him and smiled. “Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

  “I don’t think so…”

  “It doesn’t make much difference really,” said Flex. “Not to Motorik. Only to how others see us. Inside, we’re not really male or female. We’re just us. Don’t you ever switch, Nova?”

  Nova suddenly stood up, brushed past Zen, and left the train. He called after her, but she didn’t stop, just strode across the platform and into the old station. He started to go after her, then hesitated, looking back at Flex. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Flex smiled again, fingering the rent in the shoulder of her jacket where the Railforce bullet had torn through. “All repaired. I’m going to carry on painting,” she said. “I don’t mind the cold.”

  Zen stepped out of the carriage, following Nova’s footprints across the snowy platform and into the station building. It was a collection of linked domes, grown from genetically engineered ivory. The light was cool and blue in there, filtering down through the snow on the skylights, but bio-lamps came on as he crossed the concourse, and the shops and food stalls opened their shutters hopefully, sensing business after all these years.

  He found Nova on an upper level, looking out through high windows at the snow.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She wouldn’t turn to face him. “I thought I was so clever,” she said. “Tweaking my settings, shortening my nose, making freckles. I thought I was brilliant! But Flex was just a labor unit, and she’s passed for human among humans all these years. I couldn’t do that.” She stared at the reflection of her face in the glass, at the shadows of the snow that brushed across it. Zen watched her. He wondered what she would look like as a boy.

  “I thought I was unique,” she said. “I thought I was the only Motorik who’d ever… But there must be loads of others. How many like Flex, on all the other stations? Thousands?”

  “But that’s good, isn’t it? If there are more like you?” said Zen.

  And guessed at once that it had been the wrong thing to say. He should have said, “You are unique.” He should have said, “You are the one and only Nova.” He wasn’t used to having to deal with other people’s feelings. It made him miss the old days, when he’d been alone and had nothing more to worry about than keeping ahead of the police and the Ambersai lathi boys.

  Nova sniffed. She had no need to sniff, but she had seen movies, and knew it was something that people did when they’d been crying. “Where will we go?” she asked.

  “Somewhere we can hide,” he said. He didn’t really believe there was any such place, but he wanted to comfort her, and himself too. “We’ll find some world where we can get far away from the K-bahn, and wait, and hope this all blows over.”

  “What about Raven?” asked Nova.

  “What about him? You don’t owe Raven anything. He left you behind!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant—I wonder what he’s doing.”

  “I expect he’s back on Desdemor,” said Zen bitterly. “I expect he’s happy enough now he’s got his little black ball.”

  “What?”

  “I forgot—you never saw it—the Pyxis was hollow; he made it open; there was this thing inside.”

  “A black sphere?”

  “Yes…” Zen was starting to feel uneasy. Because the way her eyes were widening made it seem that there had been a weight to what he’d said, and he did not know what. He hadn’t thought about the Pyxis or the sphere inside it since Raven dumped him in Cleave. He’d been too busy finding his way back to Nova to give much thought to it, or to the strange things that Raven had said on that last train journey.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Nova stared at him, or through him, and he knew she was searching her perfect memory for something. “That’s why he wanted it…” she said.

  “What? What is it?”

  “There’s a story from history. Raven told it to me once, and I didn’t even pay much attention; he told so many stories, but this one…”

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “He said that when the new station on Marapur was being built, the machines that were digging the foundations uncovered ruined walls, left over from some other time.”

  “So?”

  “Marapur was a newly settled world. It had only had a breathable atmosphere for a hundred years or so. How could there be old ruins there? It was a mystery. But before people could investigate, a Guardian arrived. It was an interface of the Shiguri Monad itself. It announced that the ‘walls’ were a natural geological formation, and built some machines of its own to help speed up the construction process. The walls were destroyed, and every reference to them in the Datasea deleted.”

  Zen was tired, and having trouble understanding what this had to do with him, or why Nova was so worried about it. This wasn’t what he’d imagined their reunion would be like. He wasn’t quite sure what he had imagined, but not this. He walked to a dusty sofa in one of the abandoned food bars and sat down. Nova stayed by the window, and the snow fell past her.

  “So there were these walls, only they weren’t walls, and the Guardians covered them up?” Zen said.

  “As well as the walls they found six spheres. The Guardians took those too. They said they were just blobs of volcanic glass.”

  “It’s still not much of a story,” said Zen, though he could see where it was going now.

  “It’s not much of a story because it doesn’t have an ending,” said Nova. “Only perhaps it does now. I never thought about it before. I think Raven stopped me from thinking about it. I think he put a block in my mind so I wouldn’t ask certain questions. That’s why I didn’t make the connection.”

  “What connection?”

  “The station on Marapur was a Noon project. The person in charge of the work there was Lady Rishi Noon. Zen, what if there weren’t six spheres? What if there were seven? What if Lady Rishi managed to get hold of one before the Guardians found it?”

  “And she hid it in the Pyxis? Why would she—?” But Zen already sensed the answer to that one. The Guardians knew everything. How sweet it would be to trick them, to have one secret that they did not know. “But the thing I saw inside the Pyxis wasn’t a blob of volcanic glass.”