Railsea

TUNDRA WORM

(Lumbricus frigidinculta)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 8.1)

SEVENTY-NINE

IT WAS THE NOISES THE CAPTAIN WAS MAKING THAT drew attention to her. They were not like any sounds Sham had ever heard any human make before. Naphi was not screaming or crying, she was not howling or complaining. She stood at the train’s edge, stared down into the deeps of the air where her philosophy had gone, uttered a succession of phonemes like those that might creep in between proper words. As if she spoke discards & language debris.

“Ah,” she said. Her tone was calm. “Fff.”

Sham was still dizzy with the abyssward descent he had just seen. He pulled his attention to the captain.

“Asuh,” she said. “Mhuh. Enh.” Clockwork-stiff, she walked to the edge of the deck. Sham went after her. He watched her with widening eyes. As he passed Sirocco, he grabbed a sharp tool from her salvor’s belt.

“Wait!” he said.

Naphi turned, face set. One by one, the trainsfolk on the Medes looked at her. Sham sped up. Naphi gripped the railing with her left hand. She drew herself up smartly, & saluted her crew with her right, with the arm they had always known was flesh. She drew her knife, ready for close-quarters hunting, & turned to face the darkness.

“No!” Sham shouted.

Gripping the barrier with her disguised & enhanced limb, the captain braced on it, swung herself up, her legs up & around & over the edge right out into space. She turned, neat as a gymnast, & began to plummet, to follow the moldywarpe down.

But Sham was there. Even as the captain let go the rail, he stabbed with Sirocco’s tool right down into the heavy workings of her fakely artificial arm.

He had no time to aim. Just plunged the blade into pipe-work. There was an electrical crack, a phut of smoke & the metal glove the captain had worn so long short-circuited, spasmed, snapped shut. Held her still clinging to the side of the Medes.

“Help me!” shouted Sham, leaning over. He stared at the captain, dangling over endless nothing, looking back up at him.

“Ah now,” she said, in a strange mild voice. Her legs scrabbled & kicked against the train’s side. She prodded urgently at her own robotic casing with her dagger, tried to pry it off her, to release herself from her own inadvertent grip & follow her philosophy.

“Help me!” Sham shouted again, as he grabbed for her & tried to avoid her weapon. & here came Sirocco, & Mbenday, & Benightly, who with a hunter’s precision batted the knife from her hand. It twirled out of sight. They grabbed her. Together they hauled the captain back up onto the deck.

“Ah now,” she kept saying quietly. “I have something to catch.” She did not struggle much.

“Secure her!” Mbenday shouted. They held the captain while Sirocco took pliers & screwdrivers to the snagging arm until with a click it released her. The crew cuffed Naphi’s hands behind her back.

“Ah now,” she said again, & shook her head. She murmured. She muttered to herself & slumped. She did not fight or cry.

“The bloody angel!” It was Sirocco shouting now. She stood on the Pinschon, hands on hips, staring down like the captain had. She stamped & shook her fists. “It’s gone! It went! This is a disaster!”

Was it? Sham was too tired to argue or understand. He kept looking at the Shroakes. Dero looked down into the dark, holding his breath. Caldera looked like she would explode. She was wide-eyed, fast breathing, shaking with excitement.

The bridge was brick & girders. It arced down to reach the vertical chasm-side, a buttress pushing into the flank of the railsea among suspended pebbles, hard-packed soils, the lines of salvage. The bridge, the track extended into the coming night. Looked endless. “There’s no way it should stay up,” Sham said.

“It’s stuff,” Caldera said. Her voice shook. “Material we don’t know about.”

“Sort of Heaven stuff?” Vurinam said.

Caldera shrugged. “What do you think?” she said.

We are here, Sham thought. On a bridge over nothing. We got by the guardian angel! We are on our way.

To Heaven. On a single rail.

“So …” Fremlo said. Daybe launched into the black, lurched right back, as if even the bat got vertigo. “So we’re here.” Fremlo said. “Now what?”

The way they had come, the tracks were littered with debris where Mocker-Jack had wrestled the angel into the void. It would take hours to clear.

“ ‘What now?’ ” Dero shouted. “Duh! Now we go on!”

In the quiet that followed, they did not hear the beat of any wings.

NO JOURNEY HAD EVER been like that one. The Medes’s lights were nothing: they shone a few silvered yards of rail in front, while on every other side was black. There were no junctions to negotiate, no points to throw. A single elevated night rail. Sham had no name for the percussion of a train moving over nothing, on brick arches, each arc miles long, each strut descending to whatever floor floored the universe.

The gloom at last began to fade. The sky went as gentle & clear as it did on any other morning, & above that clarity was the must & swirl of the upsky. To their star’d, to their port, empty air. Behind & in front of them, only bridge. Below them cloud, as far below as above. & they on the line in that birdless sky puttered on.

Now we see, thought Sham. Out beyond moles, beyond salvage, past the railsea itself. We’ll just see. He had made it out.

There was life. They saw scuttling on the tracks. Lizards. & if there were such beasts, there must be bugs, to feed them. Vegetation in the mottles of the wood. A tiny ecosystem between rails, on the approach to Heaven.

The captain did nothing but stare as Sirocco wielded trinkets & expertise & fixed Naphi’s left arm. The crew cuffed it to the rail, with heavy chains, for Naphi’s own protection.

“What if it just goes on forever?” said Sham. “This line.”

“If it goes on forever,” Caldera said, “then we’re in for a long journey.”

ON THE EARLY MORNING of the second day, they saw something blocking their way. A lumpy presence. They stared as they approached, at its fly-eye bulbous front, its spiked extrusions, its gnarled barrels, & Mbenday’s voice suddenly clicked on in panic from the intercom: “It’s another angel! It’s facing us! Coming for us! Full reverse!”

Chaos! Everyone raced, running to their stations, hauling to turn the engine.

“Wait!” someone shouted. It was, they realised to their shock, Captain Naphi. “Wait.” She spoke with enough authority that even unamplified her voice carried. “Look at it,” she said. “It is not coming. Look at it.”

The angel’s joints, the cracks between its plates of armour, were verdigrised & overgrown. Built up with calcified exudations, runoff from within. On it & in it grew moss & lichen. The angel was furred with the stuff. Boughs & bushes of it, in frozen gushes.

“It’s dead,” Dero said.

It was. The angel was dead.

The celestial cadaver was huge. It was on a double- or triple-decker scale. Even long-cold it made the watchers gape. It exuded antiquity. It was absurdly, ostentatiously ancient. Odd machine parts, sigils & script adorned it, like pictograms, like paintings found in caves.

The Medes reached it & stopped. The crew regarded it a long time.

Sham reached out with trembling fingers. “Careful, Sham,” Vurinam whispered. Sham hesitated. Prepared himself for physical contact with an emissary from beyond the world, in its endless sleep. Before he could touch it, however, a bolt sailed over his head & ricocheted off the front of the angel with a flat clang.

“Are you bloody mad?” he screamed, turning. Caldera stood with her arm still poised from the throw. The crew stared at her.

“What?” she said exuberantly. Before Sham could say anything Dero threw his own missile. Sham yelped, the object clanged & bounced over the side of the bridge, into the endless air.

“Stop throwing rubbish at the dead angel!” Sham shouted.

“What?” Caldera yelled. She was staring at the old engine with a strange expression. “Why?”

EIGHTY

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THIS IS WHERE YOU GET off?” Sham said.

“Which bit do you not understand?” Sirocco said. She smiled at him, not meanly.

“You’ve come this far,” Sham said. “You came this far & you, you rescued me! We’ve only a last bit more to go. Only a little way.”

Sham stood at the front of the Medes, shouting up to her. Sirocco stood on the tip of the angel. The two trains were pressed up as if in an unequal kiss. Sirocco had leapt onto the angel, hauled herself up its curve & had announced that she was claiming it, for salvage, while the crew stared at her quizzically. She had begun to probe & prod & pry at chinks in the angel’s carapace.

Whatever. But there was no way past it. There was only the one rail. & there would be no shifting that corpse. Nor could you haul a jollycart over its landscapey body.

“Well, we’ll have to walk,” Dero said. & while much of the rest of the crew, still befuddled with everything that had happened, still awesick, you might say, had watched, the Siblings Shroake had strapped on their packs of dried food & water bottles & tools & whatnot, & tripped goatlike up onto the angel. Caldera glanced back more than once, stood at last atop a weather-beaten outcrop of angelback & watched Sham watch her.

“Wait!” Sham shouted. “Where the bloody hell are you going?”

“Oh come on,” Caldera shouted back. She shrugged. “You know fine well, Sham. We’re farther than they got, but we still ain’t there.”

“Where’s there?”

“I’ll know when I see it. Question is what you’re going to do?” She walked on, picking her way past copses of antennae, clots of rust, aeons’ worth of grime.

“Will you bloody Shroakes stop!” Sham shouted. Caldera hesitated. “Give us five minutes & stop being melodramatic. We’re all coming!”

NOT REALLY.

“This is where I get off. What makes you think I want to go to the end of the world?” Sirocco said. She had drilled an opening in the angel’s coating, & she was shoving her hand into its cold insides.

“We’re way past the end of the world already,” Sham said. “& I thought, I mean, you came for me …”

“Well now,” she said. “What I came for, in fact, is right here.” She slapped the engine-corpse flank. Her goggles were lit from within, illuminating her smile with pale grey light.

“Salvage?” Sham said. “You came here for salvage?”

“Sham ap darling Soorap,” Sirocco said. “I like you, Sham, & I like your friends, but I ain’t here for you, & I ain’t even here for any old salvage. That I can get anywhere. I’m here for angel salvage!”

“How could you know we’d—”

“Meet them? Everyone knows there’s angels in the way of Heaven. Beat them? I didn’t. I made a bet. & you should take that as a vote of confidence.”

“Sham,” shouted Caldera.

“In a minute!” he shouted back.

“I know you’d face ’em when I knew where you wanted to go,” said Sirocco, “& I had faith. I couldn’t believe it when that old mole took it down. Could, not, believe it. But then stick on a few miles & here we are. Do you get what this is? This ain’t nu-salvage. This ain’t arche-salvage. It ain’t alt-salvage even. This is a whole other thing. This is trash from Heaven. This is dei-salvage! & it is mine.” Her delight was terrifying.

“We need your help,” Sham said.

“No, you don’t. & if you do, I’m afraid it ain’t yours to have. I wish you well, I really do. But this is what I came for, & this I have. So best of luck to you.”

From one of her pockets she pulled out a microphone. Little as it was, the tech in it amplified her voice so all the crew could hear. “Attention please,” she said. “You can’t get any farther. May I propose a business arrangement? I know what I’m doing: you’ve got a conveyance. We can come to an arrangement.

“I know where to go to do selling. This is my hunting, like that great moldywarpe was yours. Same terms, same shares as if it was molemeat you were bringing back. & you think people pay well for moldywarpe bits? Well, you never dealt in salvage before. & this ain’t any salvage. This is all our fortunes.”

“Fine,” Sham interrupted. “But I’m going with the Shroakes. You can keep my bloody share.” He raised his voice. “Who’s coming with us?”

A silence followed that. What does it say about me, Sham thought, that I’m genuinely surprised no one’s putting their hand up? That no one’s saying a word?

“Sham,” Mbenday said. “We are not explorers. We’re hunters who look after our friends. We came for you. Didn’t we?” Some of Sham’s comrades were looking avariciously at the dead angel. Some were looking sheepishly, or avoiding looking, at him or the Shroakes. “So let us look out for you. You have no idea where you’re going,” Mbenday said. He raised his arms & the leather of his coatsleeves creaked. “Or even if there’s anything at the other side.”

“It’s a bridge,” Sham said. “Of course there’s something on the other side.”

“That does not follow,” Mbenday said.

“Benightly!” Sham said.

But the harpoonist cleared his throat, & in his deep Norther voice rumbled hesitantly, “Come, Sham. Don’t need to do this. You, too, Shroakes.” Caldera made a rude noise.

“Hob?” Sham said. “Fremlo?” They wouldn’t look at him. He could not believe it.

“Walking?” said Fremlo. “Through void? For one knows not what? Sham, I beg you …”

“Anyone!” Sham shouted.

“We came for you,” Vurinam said. “We came for your Shroakes. We came as far as the angels. There ain’t nothing else we want. Now come back with us.”

“Tell Troose & Voam I send my love, but I’m following through,” said Sham, not looking at him.

“I’ll come.”

It was Captain Naphi. Everyone stared at her.

Even the Shroakes turned back. Naphi rattled her chains, & looked at them in splendid hauteur until someone ran to undo them.

“I can’t have mine,” the captain said. She looked at Caldera, at Dero & at last at Sham ap Soorap. “So someone else’s philosophy is better than none.”

EIGHTY-ONE

IT FELT STRANGE TO WALK ON TRACKS, LET ALONE SUCH tracks as these. The Shroakes, the captain & Sham went single file. A terrible short distance to either side the bridge stopped & emptied into the air. Behind them were the clattering & drill-sounds of the crew’s salvage, under Sirocco’s exasperated supervision. People shouted goodbye, & not the Shroakes, Sham, or the captain answered.

Sham kept his eyes ahead, for hours, focussing on anything but the fall that hemmed them in. He thought of the crew tugging bits & pieces of the old angel out of their housings, teeth from a mouth, filling the rendering cart, the butchery floor, the storage containers, the hold of the Medes with unlikely meat. The ceramic, glass & old metal mechanisms.

Daylight went & they continued walking, until even with torches the darkness made it dangerous. They ate together. The Shroakes muttered to each other, & sometimes to Sham. Naphi said nothing. When they slept, they tied themselves to the rails. In case of thrashing, rolling, in their dreams.

They woke before the sun was fully up to the clattering passage of getterbirds overhead. “Maybe we’ll feel it when they go,” Caldera said, after an inadequate huddled breakfast. “The train I mean. Maybe we’ll feel it in the rails.”

“Maybe it’ll shake us off,” Dero said. He made a whistling noise, like something falling.

“We won’t feel nothing,” Sham said. They had been walking a long time. “What if it rains?”

“Then we’ll have to be very bloody careful,” Dero said.

Through all the long hours of that day they trudged. Sham kept his eyes mostly down so the trainlines would not mesmerise him, the surrounds not make him dizzy. It meant he didn’t see the empty sky, the birdlessness, anything much at all, until Caldera shouted, & he stopped & looked ahead.

They were approaching another cliff face. It loomed out of horizontal haze. The tracks, the bridge dwindled threadlike to invisibility, but beyond the last of it they could see vertical earth. The far side of the chasm.

Sham swallowed. Stonefaces knew how many miles to go. They kept on. & every time he looked up that surface seemed as far away as ever. But then abruptly as the evening grew close he could make out texture. He could see where the struts of the bridge entered it.

In the absolutely dark small hours, exhaustion stopped them a while. But they had walked through much of the night, & it was not very long after that that the sun came up & woke him, & Sham at last could see where they had got to. He gasped.

No more than a mile ahead, the bridge touched land.

EIGHTY-TWO

SLOWLY, WEAPONS UP, EYES WIDE, THEY APPROACHED A different kind of a different earth. Heaven was geologically distinct.

It was all rubbly uneven hillscape, slopes & steepness & crags right up to the sheer. They stepped tie by tie out of the air & under an arch of stone, by hatchways & incomprehensible trackside boxes, onto new land. Heaven had mechanisms.

They were silent, dusty from the crossing. The line took them through a grey gorge. Daybe circled the travellers, never going far. The peaks around them pushed easily into the upsky.

“What’s that sound?” Sham said. The first words beyond the world. A repeated rhythm—a subtle, unending hushing beat—came from up ahead.

“Look!” Dero said. A tower.

Above a jawline of stone. It was ancient, windowless, a ruin of strange design. The walkers froze as if it would approach them. It didn’t. They continued at last & the landscape slowly lowered. Until the tracks turned, lines of metal running now at last into—Sham gasped—a gusting, cloud-filled, silent city.

Low shacks, blocks in concrete, a town bifurcated by the rail. Destroyed by time. The crumbled remains of houses, empty but for wind. Birdless sky. Sham heard patterings of displaced stone. Daybe went up to investigate, but that empty expanse kept intimidating him, & he returned to Sham’s shoulder.

The travellers walked on rails overhung by decrepitude in a deepening cut. They saw no weeds, no birds, no animals. The sallow clouds of the upsky moved like nothing living. The railway cut through a wreck-town of long-dead concrete, banks of ossified rubbish, dunes of shredded paperdust. Under what looked like vines & were wires sagging with age & thick muck.

“So where’s this treasure people keep mentioning?” Dero said at last. No one looked at him.

Their footsteps were slow & unsteady. They walked on. & deep in his mind, staring into all the drifts of ruin, under which the remnants of urban layout were just visible, Sham became aware of something.

Heaven, the world beyond the railsea, was empty, & very long dead. & he, though utterly awed, was not surprised. Everything was made at once clear & meaningless, & his mind felt at once as near-empty & gusted by scrags & stubs of nonsense as this old city—& inhabited by a sly, growing excitement.

& then after Sham had no notion how long of walking, ahead was an impossible thing. Something that did surprise him. That blasted him, in fact, with shock. First he, then the Shroakes, then Captain Naphi gasped.

“What … is … that?” Dero said at last.

The rail stopped.

It did not double-back to rejoin itself in a loop. Did not tangle aimlessly among a collection of other lines, nor fan out to various sidings which themselves fanned out & eddied into randomness. It was not broken by landslip, explosion or mishap, unfixed yet by any angel.

The track stopped.

In a yard, in the shadow of a building, it approached a wall, & ended. Two big piston-looking things extruded from a brace, as if to push back on a train shoving against them, & the railway line,

JUST,

STOPPED.

IT WAS UNHOLY, uncanny. The perversion, the antithesis of what railroads had to be, a tangle without end. & there it was.

“The end of the line,” Caldera said at last. Even the words sounded like a transgression. “That’s what they were looking for. Mum & Dad. The end of the line.”

There were long moments of quiet, of awestruck gawping at the quite impossible flat stop. Somewhere, Sham realised, he could still hear an endless sibilant, like a repeated injunction to hush.

“You wouldn’t think,” said Dero, his voice hollow, “the rails could finish, would you?”

“Maybe they don’t,” Sham said. “Maybe this is where the railsea begins.”

BEYOND THE END of the cut & the rails—the end of the rails!—a crumbling staircase ascended to the city. Dero climbed while Daybe circled him. Caldera, still staring at it, walked past the end of the track towards a hole that had once been a door in what had once been a wall in what had once been the building. She moved with sudden urgency.

“Where you going?” Sham shouted. She shoved inside. Sham swore.

“Come on!” shouted Dero from the top. He ran out of sight. From within the building, Sham heard Caldera gasp.

“Dero, wait!” Sham shouted. He dithered, as Naphi followed Caldera. “Dero, come back!” he shouted, & ran after the older Shroake, into shadow.

Light & gusts of dust-grey wind came slantwise into a half-memory of a room. Staircase stubs rose a few feet in steep zigzags. There had once been many floors in this railside hall. All were gone; the travellers stood at the bottom of a concrete hole, shin-deep in splinters & plastic shapes once desks & ordinators. A maze & dented blocky slope where a building’s worth of filing cabinets had piled up. Some were burst open, strewing paperwork become mulch. Some were buried, some wedged shut.

Caldera scrambled up them. She grabbed at handles. Reached into shafts between cabinets. She pried at them. “What are you doing?” Sham said.

Her voice echoed out with the banging of yanked-open drawers. “Take these,” she said, handing back ragged papers. “Careful. They’re falling apart.”

“Come out,” Sham said. She handed him more. The metal creaked. She spelunked a scree of drawers, her hands full of folders. She looked lost.

“What is it,” Naphi said, “you’re looking for?”

“I need to know,” Caldera said after a long silence. “About … about everything. Everything our mum & dad always said.” She furrowed her brow & began, manically, to scan the papers she held. “About the railsea.”

“Know what?” Sham said. “Come out of there.”

“It doesn’t … I can’t …” She shook her head, hunting for meaning to it all. “I don’t know. Why did we do all this?” The report in her hand disintegrated. Her fingers trailed its muck. “Mum taught us this old writing. Points …” she read. “Oil stores …” She went through the sheets, one by mouldy one. “Personnel. Ticket prices. Credit. I can read it, but I can’t put it together!”

“You already did,” Sham said gently.

“I came here to understand!”

“There’s nothing here you don’t understand,” Sham said. Caldera stared at him. “You’ve known all this for ages. Things head out from here. You seen which way that dead angel was facing.” He spoke slowly. “You told me all this. What the godsquabble was. Well, this is the town where it happened. The town where the winners were.” He raised his hands slowly. “& they’re gone. You was never going to find out anything new here. That ain’t why you’re here, Caldera.”

Caldera sniffed. “Really?” she said. “Why am I here?”

“You’re here because your parents wouldn’t do what they was told. Wouldn’t shun anything. They wanted to see what’s at the end of the world. & you actually did. Do. Are doing.” Sham held her gaze.

“HEY.” It was Dero. He stood silhouetted in the doorway. Behind him Daybe veered in agitation.

“You Shroakes,” said Sham. “Always gallivanting off in all directions …”

“You need to see something,” Dero said. He spoke in a dreamlike monotone. “There’s something you need to see.”

BEYOND THE BUILDING & the rails there were yards of paved land, more nothingy concrete-stubbed remains, & then the land, all land, abruptly stopped. But not on void this time.

They stood on a pitted coastline road, a raised walkway just like a shore in the railsea. It rose not out of rails, though, as any shoreline must surely, but from miles upon miles, from a giddying, endless expanse of water.

EIGHTY-THREE

SHAM REELED. THE WATER FOAMED. IT ROCKED & slapped against the concrete wall. Sham’s heart powered. What was this? & what was beyond? A ruined jetty poked above the waves just as normal jetties did above rails. Tentative with wonder, Sham walked to its end.

The enormity of that water. It rose & fell back in lurching swells. It was like nothing he could have imagined.

Above it, the strange deadness of the air ended. Gulls! They wheeled & whooped. Swept curiously past Daybe, which soared in exhilarated aerobatics. This was the source of the repeated noise. The water huffed & shuffled & rocked back & forth against the land.

“The water level’s so high,” Naphi whispered at last. She looked back the way they had come. “It should be flooding back into that chasm. Even back into the railsea. Should half-fill it.”

“You told me they jury-rigged the world,” Sham said to Caldera. “Maybe they did something to seal the rock here when they put the water in, so it can’t spill out. Can’t seep through the sides.”

“Yeah,” said Caldera. “Only they didn’t put the water here: they left it here.” She was staring, too, but dividing her attention, still sifting through the papers she held, frowning as she glanced at the disorganised snips of information. “They drained all the rest. To make more rail-ready real estate.”

“The world?” Sham said.

“Used to be underwater.”

THEY STAYED THERE, said nothing more, for a long time. Sham was too awed to care much that he was cold. The sun dawdled slowly through space, behind the upsky, illuminating it. They could see no beasts up there just then. Only the arcing gulls.

The birds looped & skimmed the surface of the liquid. There’s stuff in there they can eat, thought Sham. He thought of the stringy fish that lived in the small ponds & pools of the islands & the railsea itself. Looked as far as he could to the horizon. Thought how much bigger such creatures might get in a space so uncramped.

Sham felt something rising through his bones. Daybe felt it, too, snuffled in alarm. A rhythm, getting louder. “Getterbirds,” Sham said.

Three of them. They came from behind the hills into the downbeat heaven. They veered towards the travellers. They farted smoke, lower than Sham had ever seen them before. The wind from their whirling wings sent up rubbish. They zoomed abruptly off, over the ancient debris, to some out-of-sight nest for old, tired angels.

“What was that?” Dero said. “Curiosity?”

“I don’t think so,” Sham said quietly. “I think they were giving directions.” He pointed.

Figures were emerging from the ash & stubs of the old city.

What were they, these dwellers beyond the world? Rag-clad, hulking & shaggy, creeping, sniffing, they loped out of the dust that announced them. Ten, twelve, fifteen figures. Big women & men, all muscle & sinew, baring their teeth, coming on two limbs & four, apelike, wolflike, fatly feline. Staring as they came.

“We have to go,” Dero said, but they could not get past. The newcomers had reached the base of the jetty. & there they stopped. Their dark clothes were so shredded they looked like feathers. They licked their lips; they stared a long time.

“Is it me,” Dero said at last, “or do they look excited?”

“It’s not you,” Sham said.

Something was approaching from the ruins. Seven feet tall, sloped, immense. An ancient, powerful man, of great girth. He wore a repatched dark coat, a tall black hat.

“That costume,” Caldera said. “It’s like That Apt Ohm.”

What looked like a degenerate avatar of the god stepped slowly past his fellows, towards Sham & the others. The jetty shook with his great steps. He licked his face in delight.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Dero.

“Wait,” said Sham. He kept his pistol down. The man’s eyes were wide. He stopped a few feet away, & gazed at the visitors.

& then, enormously, he bowed. Behind him, the others bayed. It sounded like happiness. Like triumph. The big man bellowed. Snarls & growling, gulping, knotty language.

“That’s some weird mix of old Railcreole,” Caldera said. “Really old.”

“Do you understand it?” Sham said. He recognised a few words himself. “Controller,” he heard. “Rails.” & with a start, a line from an old hymn: “Oh shun!”

“Only a little bit.” Caldera squinted with attention. “ ‘Here’ … ‘At last’ … ‘Interest.’ ”

The enormous figure reached into his coat, & Naphi & Sham stiffened. But what he drew out & offered was a wad of paper. After several motionless seconds, while Naphi kept watch, her gun in her hand, Sham came forward & snatched it. He & the Shroakes leaned over the sheet.

Columns, words, on sheet after sheet, ancient typing that made only a very little sense to Sham. A long preamble, lists, footnotes & observations. “What is this?” he said.

On the last page of the pile was a long string of numbers. Circled in red. Caldera looked at her brother, & up at Sham.

“It’s a bill,” she said. “They say this is what we owe them.”

THINGS FLICKERED THROUGH Sham’s mind. These figures’ feral wanderings in ruins from where once the trains & tracks had been controlled. The man’s hat. “He’s the leader,” Sham said. “The controller.”

Caldera stared at the paper. “This is … more money than there’s ever been in history,” she whispered. “It’s gibberish.”

“Their ancestors must’ve got lost here,” Dero said. “On the wrong side of the gap.” The controller snarled strange words.

“He …” said Caldera. “He’s saying … something about settling up?”

“You said something about credit,” Sham said. “Oh, this lot didn’t get lost. They’ve been waiting.”

He stared at the massive man. The controller. Who licked his lips again, & bared sharp teeth. “Our ancestors couldn’t afford their ancestors’ terms,” Sham said. “For the use of the rails. The bill’s been growing. They’ve been charging us interest. They think that’s why we’ve come. He thinks we’re ready to pay.”

He sifted through the papers. “How long you been waiting?” Sham said. “How long ago was the godsquabble? The railway wars?” Years. Centuries. Epochs.

The watchers yowled. One or two shook what Sham saw were the scraps of briefcases. They must have grown up with a prophecy. As had their parents, & theirs, & theirs near-endlessly, shuffling through the collapsing city. Waiting in their boardrooms & in emptiness. A prophecy they thought was coming true.

Abruptly, Sham hated them. He didn’t care that they were lost, too, in thrall to a remorseless drive, the hunger of a company presiding over ruin. That refused to allow the fall & rise of civilisations, the visitations & transformations & leave-takings & rubbish-pickings of aliens, the fall of waters, the poisonings of skies & the mutation of the things in the earth, because of the very actions for which they charged, to intrude on their patient accounting. Endlessly extending terms to a humanity unaware they were in debt, that they had for millennia been buying travel-passes on the never-never. All in the hopes that at the end of time, economies would be back in place to pay.

“ ‘Ghost money in Heaven,’ ” Sham said. “Not ’cause it died—ghosts because it weren’t born yet.” He stared the big man in the face. “We,” he said, “owe you nothing.”

The controller stared at him. His look of hungry expectation slowly changed. To one of uncertainty. Then slowly to one of misery. & abruptly to one of rage.

He roared. All the Heaven-dwellers roared. They lurched forward. The jetty rocked as they came.

Daybe launched at the huge figure, but the controller batted it away. “Move!” Sham shouted, but before he could even get his pistol up, the controller had snagged his neck & squeezed & smacked the weapon from his hand. Through blood pounding in his ears, Sham heard the gun hit the water.

His vision was darkening as he flailed. He could make out the Shroakes trying to get away, Captain Naphi firing her pistol twice, before a perfectly flung rock slammed into her hand & disarmed her. & then there was simply not enough blood in his head for Sham to focus.

He shifted in woozy pain. Someone was tying his feet together, his hands behind his back, with manky old rope. He was hustled, tugged, cuffed, dragged to the jetty’s edge, the yells & struggles of his fellows behind him, the screeches of impotent daybat rage.

His head spun, he heard Caldera’s voice. She was next to him, Dero by her, then Naphi, all tied up but for the captain’s enhanced arm, too strong for cord, held instead in the grips of several captors. Who bickered & chattered. Some sobbed, in the epochal disappointment of prophecy unfulfilled. Some hissed. Some busily filled their captives’ clothes with stones.

The controller raged. He ground his teeth. Daybe swooped below curious gulls, but the man ignored or smacked it away again.

“Oh, shun!” he whispered. The feral businessman pointed at the water, & snarled some more. He was declaiming for his minions. He was, Sham thought, announcing sentence.

“Other people’ll come,” Sham shouted. “They think there’s treasure here! All the fares, the imaginary money you think you’ve got coming!”

Sham staggered under his weighed-down clothes, & struggled in his captors’ grasps, stared out at his attackers & the remnants of this bureaucratic heaven. “No!” he shouted. “This isn’t how it ends!”

He looked right at Caldera. She stared at him. She called Sham’s name as he was shoved to the walkway’s edge.

Sham tried to dig in his toes. He felt the ground shake. For a moment he thought it was his heart thundering his body. But his captors were hesitating, too. Something was happening.

Daybe’s alarm call changed timbre.

Grinding towards them all, coming backwards along the rails, through the cut in the ruins, towards the buffers at the line’s end, was an angel. A huge & age-crusted angel. An oil-fouled angel. The angel over the corpse of which Sham had clambered. Woken & alive again, hauling in reverse back the way, generations before, it must have come.

THE EXECUTIVES of the factory-town screamed. They howled. They scattered. Sham reeled. It must be very much longer than a lifetime since the angel had died & isolated them. None of them had ever seen a train move, seen any rolling stock on any line.

The angel gusted filthy smoke. Sham heard yells, saw familiar figures riding its rear. Benightly, & Mbenday, & Sirocco the salvor & Fremlo, &, his coat billowing splendidly despite all its holes, Vurinam. Sham’s crew rode towards him on the bum of a backwards-moving angel.

Sham shouted mightily in welcome. Benightly shot into the air, & the wild bosses ran. All but the giant controller. The angel’s rear-end rivet things pushed into the buffer & it stopped.

“No!” shouted the controller. That word was the same. “No, no! Shun! Oh shun!” With startling speed, he grabbed for the nearest captive. Caldera Shroake. & at that sight, quicker still, without a thought, Sham intervened.

He was a nothing, a silly pipsqueak, next to the huge figure. It was a wonder all of Sham’s momentum was sufficient to shift him at all. Perhaps in no other circumstances would it have been. But the man was poised on the very edge of the walkway. & when Sham slammed into him he wheeled his arms, tottered, his feet slipped & he pitched roaring towards the waves.

He reached, he raged. He grabbed as he went.

Grabbed Sham. Took Sham over with him, into the water. Took him down.

EIGHTY-FOUR

& THANK YOU. DO YOU FEEL IT?

We are slowing.

We will soon be done, & at our destination.

It could make a person despair, to dwell on how many parts of everything have been neglected. Have not even been discussed. You might by now have heard of the stretches of eastern & northern rails, far beyond Manihiki or any navy, where there are tribes of wild horses that have learnt so well to stay safe from burrowers, to never stray from the rails & ties, that it is encoded in their bones. So a newborn foal swaying on its stick-legs will not let its hardening hooves fall on the open flatearth. So trainsfolk in that meadowland share the rails with long lines of horses, trotting single file forever, eating the juicy grass between the rails.

In Amman Sun is a cold fortress served by trains made of ice. It’s said. The political fiddles between Deggenlache & Mornington could fill many entertaining hours. The drab & isolated lives of those cowed, bored generations of self-styled bosses in that town at the end of the rails, by contrast—they are not uplifting. But there’s things to be learned from the stunted venality of the controllers.

On & on. Had you been in charge you would, even had you started & ended in the same places, have described a different figure. A different “&.” But nothing’s done. If you tell any of this to others, you can drive, & if you wish, go elsewhere on the way. Until then, safe travels & thank you.

&—Sham, you say?

Sham is drowning.

EIGHTY-FIVE

THE WATER TASTED LIKE TEARS. THAT WAS WHAT Sham thought as he went down. This was not like the streams & ponds on the hills of the railsea: it was salt.

Oh shun, tears forever.

He tried to fight his slow descent. No good. He couldn’t see a thing or free his limbs. Couldn’t hear anything but his own blood.

Somewhere below him in the cold, because it was desperately cold, he could feel a disturbance, the flailing limbs & bulk of the controller, thrashing. I hope I don’t end up on top of him, Sham thought. I don’t want that to be where …

To be where.

I saw the end of the world, Sham thought, & ceased moving his body, & breathed out in streaming bubbles, & closed his eyes & continued sinking.

& THEN ABRUPTLY STOPPED.

Felt something grip him painfully by the restraints that held his hands. Felt pressure shift. Was moving up again, against the pull of gravity, upside down, away from the huge body of the man, the last of whose motions he could still just feel, receding below.

INTO THE AIR, spluttering, retching, sucking in oxygen. The captain had him. Clutching him with her metal hand. She was held by the rope still wound around her waist, held tug-of-war-style by the crew. At its end was Benightly, bracing & taking the weight. The captain had gone right in for Sham, her metal hand pulling her down.

Naphi gripped Sham’s wet & salty waist & delivered him to the dock. Where Caldera reached for him first & grabbed him, hauled him back & slapped his cheek & shouted his name. Where Daybe came down & licked his face. Where he lay on the concrete & coughed, & vomited & wheezed while the Shroakes & Vurinam & Fremlo & Sirocco & everyone applauded in relief.

“SO,” SAID SHAM. “Changed your minds?”

The crew of the moletrain Medes, hitchers of rides on the backsides of celestial dead, had made a fire at the end of the line. They were singing & eating, telling each other stories.

It was night beyond their firelight. More than once they heard what might be people around them, trying to be quiet. They stationed guards, but they were not much concerned.

“The last head controller is currently being dissipated into fish-poo,” Fremlo said. “I think the rest of the board is a little disoriented, don’t you?”

Sham nodded his damp head. With it wet he had realised how long his hair had grown. “I thought,” he said to Sirocco, “that you were going back.” He huddled in his towel.

“Know what happened?” Sirocco said. “Funniest thing. There I was, taking the angel apart. We’d hauled out loads of the bloody thing, & it suddenly occurred to me that with a little tugging of this, & a replacement of that with the other, I could start it up again. That’s sort of the key to salvaging: you don’t need to understand it. Anyway.

“So after a while & a few false starts, we get it moving. & we’re thinking about how to back up the moletrain so we can get the angel going forward, move them in tandem, get the angel-chassis back into the railsea. When someone says, I can’t even remember who it was …”

“It was you,” Benightly said to her.

“Can’t even remember,” Sirocco said. “Someone says, maybe we should just have a little quick look-see check how that lot’s getting on over the bridge. Took a vote, easy pass. Backed our way up, through that tunnel, heard a commotion. Here we are.” She dusted her hands in a job-done motion.

Here you are, Sham thought. Here you are indeed.

“Tomorrow,” Sirocco said, “we start again. Back again. I mean, forward again—back to the railsea. & now you can come back with us.” She pushed her stick into the fire, roasting her supper. Sham took a bite of his own. He looked at the Shroakes in the flickering light. Caldera met his eyes. “Not,” Sirocco said, “that you’re going to. Come back I mean.” She smiled.

“Take a message for me?” Sham said. “To my family?”

“Of course,” Sirocco said. “What’s your plan, Sham?”

Sham stared at the fire.

For the railsea, most things would stay the same. Angels, on automatic, long-ago-programmed loops, would continue to police the rails. A few getterbirds would ply back & forward from the dead HQ, delivering automatic surveillance that would be filed against the end of the universe. The debt that the trainsfolk accrued would rise, owed this fossil company, compounding with interest into a sum ever more meaningless.

But thanks to Mocker-Jack, the angel that guarded the bridge was gone. & with the ministrations of the salvor, so was the corpse-blockage. It might take time—it might take years—but the crew of the Medes would not be the last visitors. The way was open.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “First I was thinking about updivers. I bet you’ve got suits, Sirocco? I wonder what’s up there.” He raised his eyes at the mountain silhouettes around them. “& then I was thinking, if you had suits to go up, you could use them to go down, too.” He jerked his thumb behind him, at the water. Sham listened to the huffy repetitive investigations of the water on the shore.

“Then I was thinking. Why change direction? I been heading this way so long.” He looked at Caldera. “I want to go where your mum & dad wanted you to go,” he said.

“Excuse me?” said Dero.

“What?” said Caldera. “We’re here.”

“They were so keen to learn from the Bajjer,” Sham said. “Their myths & stuff, yeah, but it’s a long way to go for stories, no matter how good. So I was thinking, what other sort of thing could you learn from them, & only from them, hands on?”

The Shroakes stared. Their eyes grew ever wider & more fascinated.

“You remember that last carriage your parents left behind?” Sham said. “Near the bridge? The one that looked weird? I been thinking about it. Can’t get it out of my head. I think that’s what they wanted to happen. Seeing this place gives me an idea.”