Railsea

catastrophe, its specifics never known, in the wilds of the railsea. His bones doubtless gone to animals, as the bones of the train were gone to salvors. Sham’s mother had taken off soon after, travelling the islands of the archipelago. There had never been a letter. Her grief was too great, Voam had gently explained to Sham, to return. To be happy. To be anything but alone. Ever. She’d hidden from her cousin, as Voam vaguely was; her son; herself. & hidden she had stayed.

“You’re so big!” shouted Troose. “You’ve got deckhand muscles! You’ve got to tell me all the doctoring you’ve learned. Tell us everything!”

So over broth, Sham did. & in that telling he discovered himself with pleasure & a degree of surprise. A few months ago, had that stumbling young chap tripping on cables & stays on the roofdecks of the Medes attempted to tell a story, it wouldn’t have gone well. But now? He could see Voam’s & Troose’s faces, agog. Sham fished for gasps & aaahs & the goggle-eyed fascination of his audience of two.

“… so,” he was saying, “I’m by the crow’s nest, captain’s yelling blue & bloody murder, & down comes a razory bird right at me. I swear it wanted my eyes. But up goes Daybe, right for it, & the two of them go wrestling in the air …” & no force on hardland, on the railsea, under it or in any of the skies would have prodded Sham into admitting, including to himself, that the bird had been not quite as low as all that, had been in fact somewhat of a speck, that it & Daybe had rather than fighting to the death perhaps been competing for the same ill-fated bug, & their wrestling match a brief bump.

But Voam & Troose enjoyed it. & there were some events he told & varnished nothing. The eruption of the mole rats from the earth; antlions gnawing prey in sight of the train; the outpost city of Bollons.

He told stories while Voam & Troose ate; he told them while the moon came up & made the metal of the railsea shimmer its own cold colour; while the night sounds of Streggeye Land rose around the house. His mouth got on with the telling, leaving him free to think about Manihiki in the centre of the world. He did not tell them what he had seen on the ordinator screen.

“You’re a proper grown man now,” Troose said. “You should join us. Three adults.” The two men looked intense with pride as Troose said it. “Like adults like us do. We’re going to the pub.”

& impatient as they could sometimes make him, Sham felt that pride swell in his own chest, walking with them through the steep streets of Streggeye, kicking cobbles that bounced a long way to scuff & settle eventually, perhaps, on the railsea itself. So good was Sham’s mood that it did not suffer more than a little when he realised that they had come to the Vivacious Weevil, a captains’ pub, one of the most famous. Where Captain Naphi would surely be. Discussing her lemon-coloured philosophy.

TWENTY

IT WAS CONTAINEDLY RAUCOUS WITHIN. FULL OF EXCITED debate. People sat listening to the stars of the evening holding forth. Naphi was there, listening to the speaker, a portly, muscular man close to two meters high. Sham could tell by his cadences that he was well into his story.

“It’s Vajpaz,” Troose whispered. “He had another encounter.”

“… By now,” the big man said, “my philosophy was coursing frenetically horizonward. You see? Carrying my leg.” Oh, yes, he was missing one, Sham noticed. There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. On the whole, you were a leg person or an arm person: had one a tail to lose, a pair of prehensile tentacles, a wing or two, it would increase the possibilities for those vivid scars of philosophising. “But I was beyond fretting. I tourniqueted my own stump & laughed. & set that jollycart after the beast. I set the course to hope. Always a few yards ahead, the rolling humps of its passage. Behind me my crew were piled onto the upturned wreck of the train, yelling for me to come back.

“The greatstoat slowed & readied itself, & burst out of the earth, looping overhead. I could have reached up & grabbed its hairs. I watched as it set forth horizonward again, underground dancing at speed. & I stopped trying to catch it, & tried only to keep pace with it, & gloried in its letting me do so. I surrendered to the speed.”

Ah, there it was. So this philosophy was about speed. Acceleration. Captain Vajpaz theorised about a slim sinuous line of fur & savage teeth, focused on him with spike-eyes personal & full of urgency. It wanted to pass on a message. Even taking his leg had been part of its communications. “Follow me!” it had been saying. “Quick!”

So Vajpaz followed his philosophy, this greatstoat. The acceleration had become its own point, & Vajpaz’s life was changing as he became a prophet of enstoated speed. & so on.

“The speed!” Vajpaz said. There was a whisper of appreciation.

In the taverns of Streggeye Land, in the books they wrote, which Sham & his classmates had sat through, in lectures public & exclusive, captains held ruminatively forth about the bloodworm, the mole rat, the termite queen or angry rex rabbit or badger or the mole, the great mole, the rampaging great moldywarpe of the railsea, become for them a principle of knowing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something. The story of the hunt as much their work as the catching of meat.

Tales told in pubs & cafes, bars & clubs of Streggeye were also of the discovery of stowaways, members of the Siblinghood of Railsea Hoboes, tucked in some hold or other. Of foreign shores. Of the imagined lands past the edge of the world. Of ghost trains, of enormous bloodworms that could emerge from the ground & wind around a train before dragging it under the ground, of the mysteries of crewless derelicts creaking on the lines, meals half-eaten but not a soul aboard, of monstrosities of the rails in secluded & terrible places, sirens, sillers, traptracks, dust krakens. But it was the philosophies that were the mainstay of these storytelling sessions.

Streggeye Land, on the western tip of the Salaygo Mess archipelago. Famous for hunters, for mole oil, for molebone art & for its philosophers. Their texts were intellectual touchstones across the railsea.

Sham had never heard Captain Naphi talk publicly about her own quarry. He watched her stand. Sip her drink. Clear her throat. The room quieted.

But nothing had happened, Sham thought. The Medes had not come anywhere near the big mole she was looking for, the not-yellow thing. What was there to tell? It was tradition for any captain with a philosophy to hold forth about it at the end of any journey, but he had not until now considered what they would do had the object of their obsession not appeared. Which, now the thought occurred, must be common. Was she going to say, “Sorry—nothing to report,” & sit down again?

Oh, hardly.

“The last time I spoke to you,” Naphi said, “my philosophy had evaded me. Left me adrift on the railsea, without fuel or direction, with only its disappearing dust & a long road of molehills for my eyes. I watched him go.

“Mocker-Jack.” The name rung in the room.

“You know how careful are philosophies,” Naphi said. “How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation.

“When we set out at last again, we, the Medes, went south. Mocker-Jack was somewhere near, surely. What confronted us first, however, was another animal, throwing itself at us. & after that, no word. No nothing. All the trains we passed I asked for help & information, but the silence about Mocker-Jack was its own taunt. His absence was a looming presence. The lack of him filled me with him, so he burrowed not only through the earth & dirt of the railsea but through my own mind, night after night. I know more now about him than ever I did before. He stayed away & came closer in one magic movement.”

Ah, Sham thought. Brilliant. Troose was rapt. Voam was intrigued. Sham was amused & impressed & annoyed all at the same time.

“You been waiting a long time for this?” Voam whispered to a woman near him.

“I come for all the good philosophies,” she said. “Captain Genn’s Ferret of Unrequitedness; Zhorbal &