Railsea

“Stonefaces!” Vurinam emerged from the surgery. “You had to fart around with whatever you were doing in there, didn’t you?” It took Sham a moment to realise it was him the trainswain was shouting at.

“Hold on a minute,” Sham said. “I never—”

“Had to prick up the ears of the bloody mole rats & was I not telling you to get out? Now look!” Vurinam stamped. He gesticulated towards where Unkus slept.

Sham tried to think of what to say.

“Steady, mate,” said someone. “Sham didn’t mean—”

“Well,” yelled Vurinam. “ ‘Didn’t mean’ never buttered no bloody parsnips, did it?”

“Attention,” the captain’s voice interrupted from the corridor speakers. “Unkus Stone,” she said, “needs a hospital. Dr. Fremlo assures me we don’t have the resources aboard. So.” You could hear a big sigh down the intercom. “Detour.” Another pause. “Switchers, brakers, engineers, stand by to set course,” she said. “Set course for Bollons.”

There were moments of silence. “Bollons?” Vurinam said.

“Stations!” the captain’s voice cracklingly demanded, & everyone moved.

“Unkus can’t be in a good way,” someone muttered.

“Why?” said Sham to the trainswoman’s retreating back. “How? How bad is it?”

“Bad enough,” Vurinam shouted back, “that we’re going where we’re going. Bad enough that we’re going to the nearest land, when it’s Bollons.”

He stamped away, leaving silence, a cold corridor, & Sham alone. Sham shivered. He wondered where to go. He lifted up the bat & stared into its confused animal eyes. Don’t be scared, he thought. You need my help.

PART II

NAKED MOLE RAT

(Heterocephalus smilodon glaber)

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

Credit: China Mieville (illustration credit 2.1)

ELEVEN

A MOLETRAIN ON THE HUNT BEATS OUT ONE KIND OF rhythm. It is insistent, not too fast, stop-starting as it backs & forwards onto sidings, changes lines, trailing its prey, crews alert for give-away earthmounds.

One kind of rhythm: not one rhythm. The wheelbreath of hunts takes many shapes, but all instil in a moler a certainty, a calm energy, a controlled rush. They are all the default blood- quickening beats of the predator train. When old hunters hang up their trainboard gear, retire to a cottage on a crag to get up with the sun, it is one of those hunting rhythms to which their feet, unbidden & unnoticed, will move. Even in their coffins, some say, those are what the heels of a dead captain drum.

Very different is a train moving under emergency. Its rhythm is quite other. The Medes raced.

TWELVE

THE WHEELS SPOKE MOSTLY RADAGADAN, AT SPEED. One, two, three days after Unkus’s injury, the train ground north as fast as it safely could on such wild rails. Sham brought the sick man food. He held the bowls of hot water while the doctor changed the dressings. He could see the worsening state of the wounds, the creep of necrosis. Unkus’s legs suppurated.

These dusty barren stretches of plain-&-rails were near the edges of the world, & maps were contradictory. Captain Naphi & her officers annotated those they had. Kept the log up to date. The captain pored over her rumourbook. Sham would have loved a look at that.

The Medes headed north, but the eccentricities of rails & junctions took them briefly west, too. Enough that late one day, at the limits of vision, like a smoke wall at the horizon, loomed the slopes of Cambellia. A wild continent, a legend & a bad one, it rose from the railsea.

That would have been enough to get most of the crew out & staring at the horizon, but veering a little nearer it was clear that what might have been a line of bushes, some peculiarities of rock, was the fallen corpse of an upsky beast. Well that brought them all out. Muttering, pointing, taking flatographs.

It happened sometimes that those alien things fighting their obscure fights in the poisonous high air would kill each other, send each other’s strange carcases plummeting to the railsea. It wasn’t unprecedented for trains to have to grind slowly past or even through them, pushing impossible meat out of the way with their front-plows, their figureheads getting sticky with odd rot. “No flies on that, eh,” said Vurinam.

Upsky things tended to decay according to their own schedules & whatever grubs they carried in them. Most made earth maggots fastidious.

This, the first upsky corpse Sham had seen, was not very comprehensible. Long, stringy, knotted strands emerging out of ooze, bits of beak, bits of claw, splayed tendrils like ropes, if they weren’t bits of innard. No eyes he could see, but least two mouths, one like a leech’s, one like a buzz saw. Perhaps it was beautiful & delicate on the world on which its ancestors were born, where they had infested the ballast of some otherworldly vehicle during a brief stopoff, later to be sluiced off here on another, epochs ago.

Sham & Vurinam stood at the barrier of the forecastle, behind the howling engine. They looked away from the receding monster corpse to port at that miles-off country Cambellia. They glanced at each other. One at a time. Each only for a moment, when the other had looked away. The train’s figurehead, a traditional bespectacled man, jutted over the rails, staring woodenly away from their awkwardness.

They were not so far from Bollons. From whispers, the mutterings of the crew, Sham had ascertained that it was a soulless place, too close to poisonous upland, that in Bollons they would sell everything, including secrets & their mothers, without honour or hesitation.

Every railsea nation other than Streggeye, if it was discussed by many of the Streggeye-born trainsfolk, was, Sham noted, traduced. It was too big or small, too lax or strict, too mean, too gaudy, too plain, too foolishly munificent. Lands of all dimensions & governments met with disapproval. The scholarocracy of Rockvane was snootily intellectual. Cabigo, that quarrelsome federation of weak monarchies, was quarrelsomely monarchist. The warlords who ran Kammy Hammy were too brutish. Clarion was governed by priests whose piety was too much, while far-off Mornington needed a dose of religion. Manihiki, far the most powerful city-state in the railsea, brashly threw its weight around with wartrains, the grumbles went. & the democracy of which it crowed so loud was a sham, they added, in hoc to money.

& on & on. Similarity to its detractors’ home was no defence. Streggeye was one of several islands in the Salaygo Mess archipelago, in the railsea’s east, run by a council of elders & advised by eminent captains