Railsea

tell you where you’re going.”

In the sideroom was a collection of ordinators, cobbled-together equipment, tangled tubing, jury-rigged screens from movographs, black-&-white flickering projectors, lettered keys, the hmph of a diesel generator keeping the data safely on the machines.

Sham had had a go on an ordinator once or twice, but they didn’t interest him overmuch. There weren’t many in Streggeye Land, & those there were, he’d been told, were not up-to-date. The captain cleared away wires that piled around the screen like fairytale brambles around a castle. While a glow slowly grew on the screen, she raised her left arm & with a rapid-fire clickclickclick different bits of it came to the fore: special machinery, magnifying glass, mini-telescope, leather-needle. It was her way of fiddling. Like someone else might drum their fingertips on a table. Sham stood politely, waited, murdering the captain in his mind. She inserted the plastic into the ordinator’s slot.

Bad enough to find it & have it nicked, Sham thought. Without you taunting me with it. He wondered whether the memory, so long mouldering in the cold ground, nibbled by animals, would even be readable, or if there was anything on it. Then suddenly a man looked out at him from the screen.

A big, bearded man, in his fifties, perhaps. He stared at the lens full on, pulling his head slightly back, his arm jutting in perspective. The typical stance of people taking a flatograph of themselves, holding a camera at arm’s length. He didn’t smile, the man, but he had humour in his face.

Digitally degraded, the picture looked dirt-flecked. Behind the photographer, a woman was visible. She was out of focus, her expression unclear, folding her arms & glancing with what just might be patience, indulgence, affection.

You’re the skull, Sham thought. One of you’s who I found. He moved minutely from foot to foot.

Naphi pressed something; the image shifted. Two children. Not on a train: the backdrop was a town. Under a strange, tumbledown, unfocused arch of ill-matched white blocks. A little girl, an even younger boy. Skin the dark grey typical of Manihiki. Smiling. They stared right at Sham. He frowned. The captain glanced at him as if he’d said something.

A stern boy! A thoughtful girl! Hands by their sides, hair neat … but then, again, a shift. Too fast, the children were gone, & Sham was looking at a gloomy room full of junk, then almost instantly at a picture of some huge harbour, way larger than any he had ever seen, teeming with trains of countless kinds. It made him gasp, but then that went, too, & now an image from a traintop, rattling on the tangles of the railsea. Then the woman, again, back to the camera, standing before gauges & dials in the engine.

Clickclick, the captain scrolled. Sham was being driven crazy by her ability to sit without speaking. & on-screen were images of the railsea itself & its islands. Tracks among & through thickets of old trees. A forest, no other word for it, not on any humpback island but part of the railsea itself. It had been autumn when the shot was taken, & banks of leaves piled up on the rails ahead.

A desert, flat sand, sparse tracks. Rocks like fangs under the overcast sky. Where, where, had these people been?

Playing moles frozen midleap ahead of the train’s prow, pursuing leg-sized earthworms. The sett of a huge bull badger. A little lake rimmed with rails. Hedgehog tangles in tree roots. & at the very limit of the camera’s capabilities, a hulking & hermetic track-riding presence. Sham held his breath. Some train, not like anything he had seen before but abruptly familiar nonetheless.

He realised what the silhouette reminded him of. A fanciful & speculative image, as all such images were, from some book of religious instruction, of an angel. A sacred engine, rolling the rails to save them.

Sham gaped. Wasn’t it bad luck to see an angel? Some were rumoured to maintain the rails in deep railsea reaches—& trainsfolk were supposed to turn fast away should they ever come close enough to see such interventions. Should he look away now? How could he?

Wait wait! Sham thought, but the captain had moved on. A new picture was below him now, a rearing great talpa. The captain’s turn to freeze. But the moldywarpe’s fur was dark. On she scrolled.

Where had this train been going?

Geography that made Sham furrow his brow. Strange, distinctive rock formations like giant melted candles. Overhangs above railsea lines.

& suddenly. Railsea. But not.

Land stretched like some pegged-out dead animal in an Anatomy & Butchery class. Flat & dusty & specked with broken brown stones & little bits of matter that might be salvage, but mean stuff if it was. A lowering downsky, storm clouds growling like guard dogs. A glowing upsky above. The prow of the train was visible like a fat arrow in the middle of the shot, pointing at an oddly foreshortened horizon. The line it was riding was an unnaturally straight stretch, the two rails bisecting the view all the way to where perspective knitted them together. & to either side of it—

—either side of that line the train was riding—

—was nothing.

No other rails at all.

Empty earth.

Sham leaned forward. He was trembling. Saw the captain leaning forward herself, in time with him.

Empty earth & one straight line. One line in the railsea. Couldn’t be. There’s not nor can there be any way out of the tangle. A single line could not be. There it was.

“Stonefaces come between us & all harm,” Sham whispered, & clutched his bat, because it felt like an unholiness, all that nothing, because for goodness sake what was the world between islands but the railsea?

All that nothing. Sham got his own little camera out. Fumble, fumble, not looking at its screen, & trembling, he took a picture of that picture, the most amazing image he had ever seen.

All that nothing! It made him reel. He staggered, fell hard & loud against another ordinator. The captain turned to him as he put his camera back in his pocket. She fingerstabbed the keyboard & the image disappeared.

“Control yourself,” Naphi said in a low voice. “Pull yourself together, right now.”

Sham’s head was still all full of that impossible rail, surrounded by all that equally impossible railless nothing.

SEVENTEEN

AWAY AGAIN. EATING UP LINES, EATING UP THE tie-&-rail miles between Bollons & the Salaygo Mess & Streggeye itself. The Medes, if slowly, if by roundabout routes, was going home. Without Unkus Stone.

“What d’you mean, he can’t come with us?” Sham had said.

“Ah now, lad,” had said Unkus Stone, & added a short scream as someone shifted where they leaned on his bed & moved his still-very-tender legs.

Sham & Vurinam & Dr. Fremlo & Yehat Borr & a few others had been in the sanatorium. The equipment around Unkus & the few other patients—here someone with injuries caused by crushing train- metal, there a blood-rabbit bite, one or two with bugs of the railsea—was battered. But it was not unclean, & the smell of the lunch the staff had brought Stone was not undelicious.

“Can’t believe I’m awake,” Unkus said.

“Neither can I,” said Fremlo.

The laughter after that was uncomfortable.

There was no way they could wait, Sham’s colleagues told him. He was being sentimental. There were moles to hunt. The bill for the sanatorium was paid for a while longer—topped up, might they point out, by the