Railsea

EARWIG

(Dermaptera monstruosus)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 6.1)

SIXTY-NINE

IT WAS BADLY BATTERED, A BRUTALISED & CREAKING train in which the Shroakes passed beyond any horizon most trainsfolk would ever see. & here their troubles began.

Actually—

It is, in fact, not time for the Shroakes. Not quite.

That phrase—here the troubles began—is ancient. It has been the fulcrum of many stories, the moment when everything is much bigger & more vertiginous than anyone thought. This is in the nature of things.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens—wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete.

That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

SEVENTY

OUT OF THE EAST & SOUTH THE TRAIN CAME. IT howled, it whistled, en route through & out of the known railsea. It breathed diesel breath. An everyday moletrain, transmogrified by urgency & peculiar direction into something more than itself, something grander, buckling of more swashes.

The Medes was not alone. It came as part of a multitude.

Syncopating with the staccato of its iron wheels was the hard wood rush of a Bajjer war party, windblown in the Medes’s wake. Like a huge semitrained predator, the subterrain Pinschon grumbled fast into the light where rails allowed, submerged again to tunnel alongside & below the hunters.

Leaning from the Medes, Sham was at the head of an armada. Don’t dwell on that, the voice in him said. Don’t even think about it. You have a job to do.

It had been a bittersweet reunion, in the mashed-up Bajjer grounds. Of course, the eruption of welcome from his trainmates had made Sham cry happy tears. The tears had stayed & the happiness gone when he heard what had gone down, of the loss of Klimy & Teodoso to a monster out of the bad sky.

“Someone punished us,” a Bajjer warrior said, staring at pools of scummy offrun in what had been fertile soil. “Who? For what?”

“Who,” Sirocco said, “is easy.” She had leaned on the subterrain’s hatch.

“You!” Sham said.

“Good to see you again, young man.” She touched the brim of an imaginary hat.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sham!” It was Hob Vurinam. Arms outstretched, vaguely dandy threads even more battered than usual by the remorseless journey, tiredness making him look much older than he was, but his lined face wide in delight. He grabbed Sham & they pounded each other’s back in greeting, & Vurinam scruffed up Sham’s now-shaggy hair for longer than you would have thought, only becoming embarrassed after a few seconds.

& there was Mbenday, jumping from foot to foot, almost as vigorous in his welcome, & Kiragabo Luck, more restrained but not by much, Shappy, all his trainmates, suddenly Dr. Fremlo to Sham’s happy squawk, giving Sham a huge & lengthy hug, then holding him at arm’s length & shaking his hand.

“If it weren’t for her we wouldn’t have ever found you,” Mbenday said, pointing at the salvor. “She knows how to follow trails, & she was watching the bat, & then there were rumours that someone had you, & then that there’d been something terrible. But it was her.”

“Me?” Sirocco said. She glanced down into the bowels of the Pinschon. “I’m just here for the salvage.”

People lined up to greet the returned boy. Even Lind & Yashkan shook Sham’s hand, surly but not wholly ungracious. & then, suddenly, there was Captain Naphi.

She stood back. Sham hesitated. Was he happy to see her? Unhappy? He could not have said. She looked a little lessened. Diminished? She wore—Sham blinked at the sight—a bandage wrapped around her artificial arm. He bowed, & the captain bowed back. “Ap Soorap,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you’re alive. We’ve worked hard. We’ve given a lot to find you. A lot.”

“How did you know where I was?” he said. “Why did you break off hunting? &—” He stared at the stink all around. “& who then?”

“Who did this?” Sirocco said. “Who do you think?”

“Pirates!” someone shouted. Sirocco shook her head.

“That? See that?” She pointed at a particular ditch of sump. “That oil—you’ll excuse me but as you can imagine I know my effluent & runoff—that particular oil …” She wafted the air towards her & sniffed like a connoisseur. “… is used almost exclusively by one force. The Manihiki ferronavy.”

There was a silence. “That—” She pointed at a bush not merely killed but dripping with the remains of leaves enzymatically degraded into slop like a salted slug. “—is their favourite unleafer.”

“I heard it was pirates,” the same voice as before said.

“They may have driven under the skull-&-spanners flag.” Sirocco shrugged. “But …” She performed a mocking salute.

“What do they want?” Sham said. Then looking across the acres of miserable Bajjer, he said, “I know why. They were looking for information. & punishing the Bajjer because of who they once helped.”

“What?” said Vurinam. “Who did they help?”

“They want information about me,” Sham said. “& the people I’m trying to go after. & they’re punishing these people. Because of who they taught about the railsea.”

The Bajjer who could understand him nodded. “Shroakes,” someone said.

“The Shroakes,” said Sham. That little bit of history! That investigation, by Caldera & Dero’s parents, the meeting of those minds. All these years later, this deadened land was what it had cost the Bajjer, to have helped the Shroakes find a way to Heaven & the eternity of tears. To have helped them, & now to have helped him.

“Would someone,” Fremlo said, “& by ‘someone,’ Sham ap Soorap, I mean you, please explain what in the name of the Stonefaces & Their Stern Gaze you are talking about?”

So, rushing the details for now & promising to come back to them, Sham told the gathering about the Siblings Shroake, about their family & their family’s work, of their odyssey towards something of which they were quite unsure, & of what & who was hunting them.

The Bajjer had no loudspeakers, but Sirocco had three. “Can’t believe she came for me,” Sham whispered to Vurinam, as the equipment was checked & walloped into working. He stared at Captain Naphi on her dais.

“Well …” Vurinam said, & shrugged. “Tell you later.”

Sham saw the captain check the scanner again, again & again, but such glimmers of nostalgia for the hunt she almost made were surely forgivable. When she spoke, her voice was firm.

“May I suggest,” she said, “that we come to some sort of order?” & one by one, across all the vehicles, loudhailers sounded in repetition, translation & debate, until everyone there understood the shape of this. That, when you got down to it, Sham was looking for a hunted girl & boy.

“& whatever the rest of you decide,” Sham said, “I’m going after them. I’ve got to. They need help.”

The Bajjer were raging. The dead & the land, they said, whispering translations to Sham between exhortations, demanded revenge. “Don’t think who did this is finished with you,” Sham said. “Until they get what they want.”

“Punish.” That word was fast translated, & more & more Bajjer began to say it, in Railcreole.

“Plus also,” Sham said after a decent pause, “where we’re going there’s an X. X the unknown. Off the edge of the map. Figuratively speaking. You know what X means.” He rubbed his fingers together.

Night reached them. Tumbleweed tumbled, investigating the gathering while a consensus emerged in shouts & declarations.

Sham listened. He was slowly staggered. He had to bite his lip. Whether out of a sense of justice at the thought of young Shroakes chased by armoured trains, out of a hope for treasure, out of fury at this despoliation, solidarity with him, or some combination, an astonishing number of those present were ready to come with him.

“But come where?” Mbenday said. “The whole point of this—” He indicated the poisonous slurry. “—is that no one knows where the Shroakes’ve gone.”

During the silence that followed that, Sham thought. A strategy he could not have followed on his own might not, in company, be closed.

“The Bajjer go all over, yes? All over the railsea? & Sirocco?” She was moonbathing on the hull of her digger. She looked up politely. “You must’ve travelled a lot, there’s salvage all over. & us.” Sham looked at the Medes crew. “We got people from Streggeye, from Manihiki, Rockvane, Molochai, from all over. We’re trainsfolk. What we don’t know about the railsea ain’t worth knowing. Between all of us,” he said, “we’d surely recognise pretty much anything out there.

“Captain,” Sham said, & gave up the last secret. Rumbled her. “A long time ago, you & me saw some pictures.” Everyone turned to her & stared. “I want you to help me, because you saw them, too. If we want to find the Shroakes,” Sham said, “we have to find where they’re going. So everyone listen. Tell me where you think this stuff is. I’m going to describe some places to you.”

SEVENTY-ONE

NOW. AT LAST. SURELY.

This must be the moment to return to the Shroakes & to their rail. Surely.

It is, in fact, yes, Shroake O’Clock.

THE STRANGE TRAIN MANAGED. How battered it was. How shortened, how patched where glass had broken, beasts had snatched, where the frustrated fire of pirates had worn down armour.

Where the gauges narrowed, their mechanism still—just—worked. Where the pitch of rising tracks would have been impassable to most vehicles, the Shroakes’—just—coped. Event after brutalising event.

Pirate biplanes, very far from home, breaking the prime rule of exploratory flying, which was “Don’t.” Blitzing them from the air till they hid under overhangs. Railtracks through rock, into darkness, swaddled in silk, tunnels made lairs by train-eating funnelwebs. Shedding more rear carriages, distractions, like a lizard sheds its tail. Once above a beach of cracked helmets they watched a tussle between two specklike upsky monsters, until one must have glanced their way, & showered them with caustic spittle as they raced away.

Caldera, as bruised & tired-looking as her train, read from what screens still operated.

“So,” said Dero.

“So what?” said Caldera. Her voice cracked.

“Wait. I’m thinking.”

“If this is another not-very-disguised one Mum & Dad brought back from the Bajjer that I remember from when we were little, you forfeit ten million points,” Caldera said.

“Shut up.”

“You’re already on minus seventeen million.”

“Shut up,” Dero said. “There was a mouse. Who lived in a hole.” Mostly it was Caldera who told stories as they drove, but not this time.

“Where?” said Caldera. “Between the rails?”

“Stupid. She’d get et up. A hole in a wall. & she could do magic.”

Caldera checked some notes. “What sort of magic?”

“Magic to do with sticks,” Dero decided. “She could make sticks come alive.”

Then the Shroakes gasped. The air outside the train was suddenly hammered by noise. In their nook, an alarm sounded, as if there weren’t enough cacophony already. Above them flew something nothing like a plane. An insecty thing that juddered & dangled from a patch of blurred air.

“What is that?” whispered Dero.

“What’s it doing?” said Caldera.

“Oh my lord,” whispered Caldera. “It’s an angel.”

Not one of the great & terrible driverless heavenly trains, wheeled angels shoring up foundations. A watcher. A getterbird. It scudded above them. Faced its bulbous dark sheen their way, regarded them flatly. They held their breath. It brought its own cloud with it. Venting filth. It was close enough that they could see its carapace. Scabbed with dirt & rust. Scratched & battered. The thing lurched in the air.

At last it turned & dipped its head with the hammering clattering &, faster than any bird or bat, was gone in a burst of soot.

“That,” said Caldera at last, “was a bit of an anticlimax.”

“You disappointed?” Dero said.

“Hardly. Just not used to seeing things that ain’t trying to kill me.”

“Oh,” Dero muttered. “Give it a minute.”

THE SHROAKES WERE DOWN to the last of their equipment. They lived crammed & cramped in the engine room. They took it in turns to sleep, one diagonalwise across the floor while the other drove the train.

Dero rubbed his eyes, drank water, ate a snack from their (dwindling—hush) supplies.

“Why we going so slow,” Dero said. He sniffed. “We smell,” he said.

“You smell,” Caldera said. “I’m like a flower.”

“We have to go quicker,” Dero said. “We must be nearly there.” He rocked back & forwards, as if he would lend his momentum to the train. He turned & looked from the rear window.

“I’m being careful,” Caldera said. “I thought I heard something. This is as fast as I think’s safe.”

“Well,” Dero said. He spoke very precisely. “Well, I think you should maybe consider that going a bit faster might be a bit safer than not going so quick. See, because there’s a train behind us.”

“What?” It was true. Their scanners must be on the fritz, but there it was, visible to the naked eye. “Where did they come from?” she breathed.

“Behind that little forest,” Dero said, “I think.”

“But there’s nothing there! Pirates again,” said Caldera, but then she gasped. It was getting closer. & it was not what she had thought. It was a Manihiki ferronaval train. Definitely. That was a whole other thing.

The Shroakes looked at each other. “They got us,” Dero whispered. “At last.”

“At last,” said Caldera. “Or maybe—maybe they been behind us for ages. Maybe they been following us all this time.” She swallowed. “They know the way, now. Maybe we showed them the way.”

“Cald,” Dero said firmly. “We still got a chance. Get us out of here. Top speed. Now!”

Caldera didn’t move.

“Now,” Dero said, “would be good.”

“Can’t.” Caldera bit her lip.

“Engine?”

“Engine.”

“Buggered again?”

“Again.”

He stared at her, she stared at him, the Manihiki officers got closer.

“You said you’d been going slow deliberately,” Dero said.

“I was lying.”

“I thought you was lying.”

They knew how to make the Shroake train go when it was in the mood to work, but not to tweak somethings wrong in the strange metal hearts & tubes their parents had built. The vehicle sputtered at pitiful speed.

“So what,” Dero said, “d’you propose we do?”

Caldera leaned out of the window. “You know,” she said at last, with rising excitement. “I don’t know that they’ve actually seen us. Look at how they’re switching. They know we’re round here somewhere, but …”

She steered with renewed energy. Took them over points that veered lines close to a looming cliff. Thickly, richly vegetational. Their long journey had already sprayed their train’s flanks with dirt & dust. “Right,” Caldera said. She slowed them yet slower, & stopped the train in the shadows. “Quick,” she said. Climbed out of the roof hatch, & with hook & hands snatched plant matter from the overhangs. Dero did the same, until they stood under a wodge of richly smelling sappy green stuff. They draped their vehicle in the creepers.

“This is a rubbish plan,” Dero said, as they crawled back inside.

“I await your improvements eagerly. & complaining is awesomely helpful.”

Up close, the Shroake train was an absurd, green-pelted, unconvincing thing. But perhaps, in the stark light contrasts of the railsea, over miles, at motion, their poor battered conveyance might pass for some ignorable viney nothing. Dero & Caldera waited. They watched the incoming train through dirty glass & now, too, from behind a green fringe.

“Always knew Mum & Dads had annoyed them,” Dero said. He & Caldera held hands. They waited. The naval train came closer. It approached, closer, closer, it was abreast of them, only a few rail-widths away.

It passed on again. At last, the Siblings Shroake breathed out.

“This thing is barely even going,” Dero said at last. He kicked the inside of the carriage. “What are we going to do?”

“They’re going to find us again, you know,” Caldera said. “I just don’t think we can get by them. They probably will.”

“Yeah,” said Dero. For just a sad & terrible second, he looked like he would cry. “So what we going to do?”

“What can we do?” Caldera said at last. “Keep trying. Do our best.”

She shrugged. After a minute, her brother shrugged, too.

SEVENTY-TWO

THE DETAILS ARE DISTINCT, THE SPECIFICS SPECIFIC, but the trend clear. Event, encounter, pushing on, the slow degradation of the Shroake train, an against-the-odds continuation. That is what has been.

The train is such a battered shade of itself. But this is the railsea. A greater surprise is surely that the Shroakes are still here at all.

What Dero would admit to, who can say? But Caldera, certainly, is astonished.

“WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW!” Caldera didn’t even know who she was talking to anymore.

It was the purest & most undeserved luck that the Manihiki train had not wheeled round, come back & found them. Someone else, however, was after them.

The Shroake train, coaxed to a last life lease, was hauling rail to rail. There was no hiding now. Nothing in this outermost railsea—not landscape, fauna, flora, the rails themselves—behaved as it ought. They passed bridges from & to nowhere, that doubled back at the apex of their curves; lines that spiralled into sinkholes. Birds much bigger than they should be, perhaps a little too limb-encumbered, flew high enough to tickle the upsky.

“Maybe,” Dero whispered, “out here all the lines are blurry, & maybe birds in the sky & really bad things in the upsky are making babies.”

Caldera & Dero pored over charts & teased their dead parents fondly for their scrawls. They configured plans. They blinked too much & missed food. Dero snapped at Caldera & Caldera said less & less, sometimes nothing for hours.

Now here came a train, racing for them with clear intent. “You’ve done it now!” Caldera repeated. Local brigands, she thought, a ferocious compact battletrain from insular nearby islands full, myth had it, of monstrosities & prodigies, trains that ran backwards through time. & who, it seemed, had either heard of the Shroakes, or greeted all incomers in so pugnacious a fashion.

“You’ve been & gone & done it now!” Caldera shouted, & shoved forward the levers, which did nothing anymore.

Once they would have outrun such an enemy without bothering to break off from sandwiches & backgammon. Now their locomotive wheezed & lurched like a moribund mule. Dero switched & the pursuers gained. Their diesel growl grew louder.

A last push, another throttle. Caldera held her breath.

She heard a cannon fire. She closed her eyes. But nothing hit them. The train drummed under a rain of earth.

“Cal,” Dero said.

A fusillade of missiles was slamming into the attack-train on their tail. Rocks, arrows, small-arms fire. Nothing devastating, but enough to mess with, to confound & hurt the wildland attackers, who scrambled to turn their weapons towards this new threat.

Windblown carts! Switching & track-riding with skills a delight to see; tacking in gusts from line to line; firing catapults, slingshots, crossbows, pistols; in & out again. & here, bearing down by its sailing companions, on the brigand-train switching lines, came a moletrain. A moletrain, miles, miles & miles from any moldywarpe runs.

The sailing carriages scattered, firing as they went. The moler came in fast. Its harpoon guns were levelled. It faced the attacker, on the same track, heading straight for them. Caldera shook her head. “What are they doing?” she whispered. Even a moler in top shape was no match for these local warlords. Thanks very much for saving us, Caldera thought. I wish you weren’t about to die. She counted down seconds till impact. Ten, she thought. Nine. Eight.

But no: it was a well-judged challenge. The brigands flinched. A switch & they were slaloming out of the moler’s path. To where ground suddenly jumped like an animal provoked.

Up came a grinding machine. Breaching all manner of railsea taboos, a subterrain smashed through the ties themselves, buckled the rails & sent the pirate train into the air & crashing down.

The moler slowed. The trainsfolk watched. The pirates wailed. Dust was spraying. There was a silence. Then: “Come on, we got ’em!”

The Shroakes knew that voice. Caldera grabbed Dero’s arm. On the roof of the moler’s engine a young man stood.

“Wait now,” Dero said, “is it, you don’t know …” But Caldera was whooping. The figure hefted a clumsy pistol. He waved at her.

He stared through yards of air over yards of rails through the window of her own poor battered vehicle, right into Caldera Shroake’s poor tired eyes. With another whoop like a siren, like a train sounding triumph at a journey well done, at an arrival, Caldera leaned out & waved back. At the same moment, each on their own train, she & the newcomer, Sham ap Soorap, smiled.