captain herself out of her own share. They had to get on.
“I really do not like it here,” Vurinam said. He glanced to either side & lowered his voice. “People keep asking where we’re going, where we been. Bollons people are
“Shouldn’t just leave you,” Sham had said.
“Ah now, lad.” & Unkus had given Sham an awkward pat on the arm. “I can get myself to the docks, get paid passage back when I’m better.”
“It ain’t right.”
It wasn’t just for Unkus that he wanted to stay, though Sham could not admit that. The longer they stayed in Bollons, he thought, the more chance he might persuade the captain to visit Manihiki. From where, it was his tentative judgement, the man, woman, children in those images came. He felt uncharacteristically certain that going there was what he wanted to do—to make that connection between those images, & that place.
He had been running through increasingly baroque ideas of what he might say or hint to Captain Naphi to persuade her so far out of her intended path. He had nothing. & he was still astonished, could barely believe they were not in any case going.
He couldn’t not, with an ecstasy of scandal, keep recalling that picture. The secret of that line, that solitary line, leading, it seemed—& it still felt like curse words even just to think it!—out of the railsea. One of the first things he had done, back from the ordinator room in Bollons—whatever job the captain would have had him do forgotten by both of them—was to draw, as well as he could, all the images he had seen, from memory. Until he had a sheaf of scrappy ink renderings of memories of images of unlikely landscapes. They would have meant nothing to most who saw them, but to him were mnemonics, reminders, to conjure the railsea flatographs he had seen, that the captain had destroyed.
Oh yes. She had, making sure he saw her do so, carefully crushed the memory in her tough, skinless hand, while Sham made an involuntary noise of protest. When she opened her tough hydraulic fingers again it was full of plastic dust. “Whatever that silliness was,” she had said, “it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants.”
Naphi had put a mechanical finger to her lips. “Be quiet,” she’d said. The instruction had covered both the noise of the clumsiness of his awe, & the potential saying of what he’d seen to others.
“Captain,” he’d whispered. “What was …?”
“I’m a moler,” Naphi had said. “You are a doctor’s assistant. Whatever you saw or thought you saw, it has nothing to do with your life & aims, whatever they might be, any more than it does with mine. So we don’t speak of it.”
“That was Manihiki,” he said. “Where they came from. We should—”
“I strongly advise,” the captain had said, looking at her own hands, “that you do not now or ever tell me, or any other captain under whom you roll, what ‘we’ ‘should’ do.” The quotation marks were audible. “I am considering, ap Soorap.”
So Sham said nothing. The captain had led him out of the cafe past packs of the goats that Bollonsians let roam the streets, trained to eat rubbish & leave their droppings in alleyway compost-heaps. Slowly, heart still slamming (approximating the clattername
Alone at last, back on the train, he had checked his own camera. That she had not seen him use. There it was. The picture. Horribly compromised by his shakes. Off-centre. But there it was, & it was not mistakable. The single rail.
He bit his lips.
There was a family. At the centre of the railsea. A woman & man of that family had left. Exploring? The extraordinary trainless landscapes. Exploring. Past animals. Past a place where what might be an
& then they had come back. By some strange route, at last via the fringes of the Arctic. Heading, surely, for home. Where those children waited.
What a journey, Sham thought, & knew that that sister & brother needed to know what had happened. Those trainsfolk had been returning for them, & it was their right to know that.
& they would. Whatever strangeness it was, that impossible rail, it was a priceless insight. The captain, he had thought, must be desperate to get going. He thought she must be working out routes to get them to Manihiki lickety-split. Where she & her officers could do whatever it was they’d do, work out how & to whom to sell the information, reconstruct the route those flatographs represented. & meanwhile, if they weren’t going to do it themselves, he, Sham, could pass on the sad news of the train’s & the trainsfolks’ demise to that boy & that girl.
That was what the captain must be doing.
“Your train’s away soon, then,” the harbourmaster said approvingly to Vurinam, in Sham’s hearing. “Good good. I hear chatter.”
He considered saying something, but remembering her rejoinder to his first attempt, unconsidered it. Well then, he thought at last, as pugnacious as he could make his inner voice, if she really wasn’t intending to go there anyway, as she bloody well should, he’d just have to persuade her.
THE BEST-LAID PLANS can go belly up, & Sham’s was not even best laid. Twice he started to approach the captain, heart clatternaming on his inner rails, ready to ask her how she could do this, what this was, this refusal to pursue those images, her resolute not-talking-about-it-ness. The
EIGHTEEN
ON THE DOWN SIDE, ONE OF THE
Between the Cape of Chatham & the questionable little hardland islands of the Leweavel Range, they snaffled two star-nosed moles. Where interline railsea earth was churned up, they would slow, & the women & men of the
They caught the smallest moldywarpes, that grew with the telling, arm-length hunting earthworms that made the crew howl in disgust, beetles as big as their heads, that, depending on their island of origin, some would eat & others throw back. Shrews, muskrats, carnivorous rabbits. Burrowing bees. This was a rich stretch of railsea. Fussy, tidying rail angels did not come here often, it seemed: there was edible weed protruding between