the Too-Much-Knowledge Mole Rats; & Naphi. Of course. Naphi & Mocker-Jack, Mole of Many Meanings.”
“What’s her philosophy, then?” Sham said.
“Ain’t you listening? Mocker-Jack means everything.”
Sham listened to his captain describe her encounters & non-encounters with the quarry she’d been chasing for years, that represented everything anyone could ever imagine. “I’ve had my blood & bone ingested by that burrowing signifier,” she said, waving her intricately splendid arm. “A taunt, daring me to ingest him back.”
Naphi looked right at Sham, just then. Right at him, into his eyes. She paused just a fraction of a moment. Not long enough that anyone but him would have noticed. He smoothed down his unruly hair in blushing fluster & looked away.
He looked back at Naphi, imagined her racing over junctions & the wildest railtangles, bearing down on her philosophy, the toothy giant Mocker-Jack.
Sham thought,
TWENTY-ONE
PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO NARRATE SINCE FIRST WE banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
Some such stories are themselves about the telling of others. An odd pastime. Seemingly redundant, or easy to get lost in, like a picture that contains a smaller picture of itself, which in turn contains—& so on. Such phenomena have a pleasing foreign name: they are
We have just had a story of a story. Tell it yourself, again, & story of a story in a story will be born, & you will be en route to that
In his first days back in Streggeye, there was, for Sham, plenty of storytelling, some of it about stories.
TWENTY-TWO
STRANGE TO HAVE DAYS NOT DICTATED BY THE CLATTER of wheels. To have his legs not flex & straighten in the unthinking expertise of the trainsperson, with the sway. Fremlo didn’t treat patients on hardland, so Sham’s duties were sweeping, cleaning, running the occasional errand, answering the very occasional telephone call, then slipping off not quite with explicit permission, but without any opposition. Scooting by pedestrians & horses tugging carts, past the horns of a few electric autos crawling up the jostling streets, to join some of the other Streggeye apprentices, snatching their own moments off from work as cooks’ assistants, clerks, porters, tanners & electricians & artists, trainees of all kinds.
Many of those whose paths he crossed on the same old runs would barely have spoken to him before. Despite the years of lessons they had taken together, he knew them less well than he did his trainsmates. & he was not much more smooth now than he had been while at school. But he was a traveller, who had gone out & come back, & that meant he had stories. He told Timon & Shikasta & Burbo of the mole rats & the great southern moldywarpe. & they listened, no matter that, now he spoke not to his own cousins, his delivery was hesitant. Encouraged by the attention, Sham introduced the listeners to his bat. That sealed it.
They were a temporary gang, & they trekked across the roofs of Streggeye’s industrial quarter, hooting & breaking the windows of deserted halls, flirting & bickering, Daybe wheeling around them in curiosity, ducking through the forest of steam- & smoke-venting chimneys. They watched the comings & goings in markets in the busiest streets of the prosperous parts of town, & in the other places, they entered defunct warehouses, set up camps in the cold boilers of unusable ovens.
Some of the time, they talked about salvage.
STREGGEYE WAS NOT FAMOUS for salvors. Of course those searchers in old earth, those disinterrers of oddities, were from everywhere & nowhere. The various collective names they granted themselves tended to refer to that very fact: they were the Diffuse College, you might hear; they were the Scattered Siblinghood; the Antiplaced; the Universal Diggers.
Small as it was, though, Streggeye was no backwater. It provided a disproportionate amount of the molemeat & the philosophy in the railsea. It was known among explorers & updivers for its Stonefaces, the gazing rock figures that topped the island, above the treeline in unbreathable highlands air. (Sham had visited the viewing stations below the transit zone, peered through long mirrored-&-lensed periscopes at the blocky gazing heads on the island’s top.) So though it was not their first port of call, salvors did, in fact, periodically visit Streggeye. More than once Sham had watched salvage trains come in.
They were like no other rolling stock on the railsea. Patchwork vehicles. Powerful engines, wicked shunters at the front, train sides riveted with cladding, bristling with the peculiar tools of the salvor’s trade. Drills, hooks, cranes, sensors of various unorthodox kinds, to find & sort through the millennia of discarded rubbish that littered the railsea. Bits of salvage used & incorporated. On the topside decks salvors themselves in their distinctive clothes, tool-belts & bandoliers & stained leather chaps, snips of treated cloths & plastic feathers & showy bits & pieces pulled from the earth & miraculously unruined. Helmets of various complicated designs.
First the city authorities would come aboard & bargain for what salvage they wanted. Then high-rolling clients, the Streggeye rich. & finally, if the salvor crews were feeling generous & had a few days, they would run a market.
Their antique & reclaimed wares were set on stalls on the dockside, according to various taxonomies. Pitted & oxidized mechanisms from the Heavy Metal Age; shards from the Plastozoic; printouts on thin rubber & ancient ordinator screens from the Computational Era: all choice arche-salvage, from astoundingly long ago. & the less interesting stuff, too, that discarded or lost anything from a few hundred years ago to yesterday— nu-salvage.
There might even be a table or two of items from the third salvage category. The physically disobedient impossible scobs, that looked & behaved like nothing should. Sham remembered one such object—or was it three? A Strugatski triskele, the salvor had called it, waving it around to attract interest. Three curved black rods equidistant from each other in a Y-shape. The man had held one, & above it jutted the others, & in the centre, where they should join, was nothing. They did not touch, though they stayed together no matter how you shook them.
What that was was a piece of alt-salvage. Something made not only epochally long ago but unthinkably far away, way beyond the farthest reaches of the upsky. Brought to the railsea, used, & discarded by one of the visitors from other worlds, remnants brushed from cosmic laps, during the long-ago years when this planet had been a busy layby, a stopover point for the same brief visits that had accidentally stocked the upsky with its animals. This world had been a tip. Frequented by vehicles en route from one impossibly far place to another, with trash to dump.
The thought of striking out to salvage-reefs unknown, the burrowing, the mining, dustdiving, the picking through shorelines of ancient trash—these activities quickened Sham’s blood. But then what? He had questions. Where did salvage end up? What happened when you’d found it? Who used it for what when whoever sold or bartered it did, to whomever?
&, though it was harder to think of, a last thing gnawed at him & he could not leave it alone— when he thought of salvage, why did Sham start awed & end up deflated?
