Railsea

untended rails, that the crew snatched for salad.

“Mr. Vurinam.” Sham practised clearing his throat to introduce a topic. “Dr. Fremlo.” He thought of those images he had seen & decided that dammit, yes, he would, he would tell them, that they were his friends were they not?

But the secrets dried up in his mouth like unloved fuel tanks. It was simply too much, that stretch, that solitary iron road, too impossible to be describable. He could show them the picture. But even if that shaky flatograph would mean anything to one who had not seen the original, word of his words would surely reach the captain. & that would be him committing incitement to mutiny.

It was not only that he was intimidated by her—though certainly, yes, he was. It was a sense Sham could not shake, that it would not be unhelpful to have her on his side.

TWICE, THEY PASSED close enough to trains from Streggeye that they halted & connected to each other via catapulted rope-pulley, to exchange gossip & letters. Captain Skaramash of the outgoing Murgatroyd visited them for tea. Over he came, sitting sedately in a dangling chair hauled & swaying across the yards of tracks.

While Shossunder & Dramin brought in the best tea & dry biscuits & silver & porcelain, Sham clambered the outside rear of the caboose—astonished by himself as he did—& hunkered out of sight, flattened at a porthole, listening & catching glimpses.

“So, Captain Naphi,” he heard Captain Skaramash say. “You’ll do me a service if you can help me. I’m looking for a certain beast. A grand, big fellow.” His voice took on a certain tone. “A ferret. At least a carriage-long. & in his head he carries a hook. I gave him that. It protrudes out now like crooked fingers, dangling back. Beckoning me.” He whispered. “Beckoning me wherever he goes. Old Hookhead.”

So Skaramash had a philosophy, too, & that’s what he was after. Right then, get on with it, Sham thought. Captain Naphi cleared her throat.

“No such animal’s crossed our paths,” she said. “Be assured I know now your vehicle’s name, & at the first sign of that beckoning metal in a sinuate mustelid eruchthonous presence, I shall take careful notes of locations. & I shall get you word. On my honour as a captain.”

“I thank you,” Skaramash murmured.

“I don’t doubt yours took something from you, as mine took something from me,” Naphi said. Skaramash nodded, on his face an expression of speculation & grimness. Which now that he formulated that in his head, Sham realised was the expression he most usually saw on any captain’s face. It was their mien.

Skaramash rolled up a trouser leg, knocked his knuckles on wood & iron beneath. Captain Naphi nodded appreciatively, then raised her light-winking arm, its intricate molebone, jet & metal. “I remember the feel as those teeth closed,” she said.

“I’m grateful for your help,” said Skaramash. “& for my part I will watch for the custard-coloured moldywarpe.”

Sham’s eyes widened.

“Old-tooth coloured, Captain,” Naphi said harshly. “A great mole the hue of ancient parchment. Ivory-reminiscent. Lymphlike. A white stained like the old eyes of frantically ruminating scholars, Captain Skaramash.”

The visitor whispered some apology.

“There’s nowhere I’ll go & nothing I’ll not cross to reach it. My philosophy,” Naphi said slowly, “is not yellow.”

Her bleeding philosophy! That was why she was ignoring those pictures, Sham thought. Those proofs of—he didn’t even know what of, of some grand tremendous upset to the world of the railsea, at very least. She would not spare the time out from her molehunting philosophising!

Any more than would Skaramash, it sounded like. How many of these philosophies were out there? Not every captain of the Streggeye Lands had one, but a fair proportion grew into a close antipathy-cum-connection with one particular animal, which they came to realise or decide—to decidalise—embodied meanings, potentialities, ways of looking at the world. At a certain point, & it was hard to be exact but you knew it when you saw it, the usual cunning thinking about professional prey switched onto a new rail & became something else—a faithfulness to an animal that was now a world-view.

Daybe was learning to hunt. The daybat could fly again, now, for short distances. Sham swung a bit of meat on the end of a rope, at the corner of the deck, while Daybe flapped & snapped at the whirling snack. Now that was hunting with a point.

Sham thought of the awe with which those very few who snared the objects of their fascination, who made it into the Museum of Completion, were held. Maybe there was competition between the captains, he thought. “Call that a philosophy?” they perhaps sneered behind each other’s backs. “That prairie dog you’re after? Oh my days! What is that supposed to signify?” One-upmanship, one-upcaptainship, of the themes some quarries had come to mean.

THEY CROSSED A RAVINE to get home, on one of the tangle of bridges that stretched the twenty-, thirty- yard gap. He’d known it was coming, but the view made Sham uneasy. The rails went up on raised earthworks & wood-&-iron rises, jumping pools & streams full of cramped fish.

“Hardland ho!” the tannoy announced. Then: “Home ho!”

It was twilight. Birds circled. The few interrail trees were thick & shaggy with them. The crew bustled & laughed. The local daybats were going home; darkbats were coming out. They greeted each other, handed over sky-scudding duties with chitterings. Daybe, on Sham’s shoulder, chittered back. He leapt up & out. Sham wasn’t worried: the daybat always came back to the Medes: often, as then, crunching an unlucky cricket.

Lit up by the last red blast of the sun were stone slopes. Like dark mildew, patches of jungle pelted the hilly nation they approached, & like light mildew, houses & buildings aggregated around its flanks & became the town of Streggeye. Bustling from the harbour came hardy tug-trains, to ferry goods in & out of land, to guide the Medes into dock.

Home.

NINETEEN

THE RETURN OF ANY MOLETRAIN IS ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED by delighted shrieks of husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends & creditors. Sham’s heart shook happily to see Voam & Troose, on the railsea wall, waving & yelling with everyone else. They hugged him, yanked him into the air, bellowing all sorts of endearments, dragging him embarrassed & delighted home, as Daybe whirled around his head wondering what these man-things were that were attacking its human, & why it appeared to make Sham so happy.

His cousins were unsurprised by Sham’s animal acquisition. “It was going to be a tattoo,” said Voam, “or jewels, or something, so this ain’t bad.”

“Lots of lasses & lads on moletrains come back with some companion,” Troose said. He nodded enthusiastically. Voam winked at Sham. Troose always nodded. He always had. Including at silences, as if it was imperative that he & the world be in accord about everything, including nothing.

The house where Sham had grown up: halfway up a steep street, overlooking the railsea, epic darkness punctured from time to time by the lights of night-voyaging trains. All was as he’d left it.

He did not remember his arrival there, the first time, though he very dimly recalled moments he knew predated it, the voices & solidity of his missing mother & father. Sham did not even know where on Streggeye he had lived with them. Once, some years previously, Troose had offered to show him, as they walked through an unfamiliar part of town. Sham had deliberately stamped in a puddle & got mud all the way up his trousers, begged to be taken home to change, rather than continuing wherever they were going.

His father had disappeared almost his whole life ago on some ill-fated messenger train lost to an everyday