Railsea

TWENTY-THREE

THERE WAS A WRECK IN A BAYFUL OF FIDDLY RAILS AT Streggeye’s eastern rim, just out of town. It was a few hundred yards from shore, a stalled & rusting engine & cart that had long ago lost power—a bad captain, a drunk crew, inadequate switchers. It was too ruined to fix, worth nothing as nu-salvage. It mouldered, full of rust-dwelling birds, cawing in outrage as Daybe flew around their home.

Timon, Shikasta & Sham were alone on the pebbly beach. They sat near a gorge where a stream of water & a railriver—a line, a long loop of track—emerged from inland & joined the railsea. They threw stones at the old engine offshore. Timon & Shikasta talked. Sham, still surprised at being in their company, watched the animal dwellers of shallow coastline earth. Meerkats, groundhogs, the tiniest moldywarpes. Shikasta, as bossy as she had been at school, but now unaccountably noticing him, looked at Sham until he blushed.

“So you going to be a moler’s doctor, Sham?” Timon said. Sham shrugged. “Going to turn out like your boss? No one knowing if you’re a man or a woman?”

“Shut up,” Sham said uncomfortably. “Fremlo’s Fremlo.”

“I thought you wanted to go into salvage.” Timon said.

“Talking of,” interrupted Shikasta, “want to see something cool? He’s right, salvage was the only thing ever made you perk up. So I wanted to show you something.” From her bag she took a thing that looked somewhat like a switcher’s remote control. It was black plastic or ceramic, a peculiar shape. It glimmered with lights. Bits poked from it according to absolutely no sense. It came out with a murmur as if of troubled flies.

Sham’s eyes widened. “That’s salvage,” he gasped.

“It is,” said Shikasta proudly. She brought out a box of things the size of grapes, soldered with ugly circuitry.

“That’s alt-salvage,” Sham said. Junk from another world. “How’d you get it?”

“Off a trainmate.” Shikasta, like Sham, was working on the railsea—a transport vehicle, in her case. “She got it from someone else, who got it off someone else, & on & on, leading back to Manihiki. She said I could have a go on it.”

“Oh my That Apt Ohm,” said Timon. “You blatantly stole it.”

Shikasta looked prim. “Borrowing ain’t stealing,” she said. “I wanted to show you,” she said. “Can you make your bat come here?”

“Why?” said Sham.

“I ain’t going to hurt it,” she said. She held up one of the grapey things. There was a clip on it.

Sham stared at Daybe, circling in the air. Somewhere in the back of his brain were stories he’d heard, about some of the capabilities of some of the things left in some of the seams of some of the salvage. Somewhere was a little idea.

He enticed Daybe in with a strip of biltong. “You better not hurt my bat,” he said.

“It ain’t your bat,” Shikasta said. “You’re its boy.” She snapped the thing on Daybe’s right leg. Immediately it chirruped in rage & shot into the air, peeing on her arm as it went, to her yelled disgust.

Daybe zipped in complicated jackknifes, loop-the-loops, corkscrews, twisting its body, trying to dislodge the thing. Shikasta wiped bat wee off her hand. “Right,” she said.

Her box whistled & cooed. It clicked in complicated staccato time with Daybe’s ill-tempered aerobatics. The blue-lit screen glowed, an electric fog in which appeared a dot that echoed Daybe’s aerial motions. The bat veered into the distance, the noise from the machine grew quieter: closer, louder.

“Is that …?” said Sham.

“Yes it is,” said Shikasta. “It’s a tracker. It knows where the signal thing is.”

“How does it work? How far?”

“It’s salvage, ain’t it?” Shikasta said. “No one knows.”

They all three ducked as Daybe came at them. The receiver squealed, then moaned as the bat flapped away.

“Where did you—or your trainmate—get it?” said Sham.

“Manihiki. Where all the best salvage is. There’s a new place in the Scabbling Street Market.” She said that exotic name carefully, clearly enjoying it, like a spell. “These things are really useful. Like, if someone steals something & you’ve got one of these in it, you might be able to follow. So they ain’t cheap.”

“Or if there’s something you’re spending your life chasing …” said Sham slowly. Something that gets close enough to you, sometimes, for you to see. But that keeps slipping away again.

“You ain’t seen one before, have you?” Shikasta smiled. “I thought you’d like it.”

If you spent your life like that, chasing some taunting quarry, what wouldn’t you do for one of these? Sham thought. You’d go out of your way, wouldn’t you, to get one, he thought.

You’d go to Manihiki to buy one.

TWENTY-FOUR

CAPTAIN NAPHI?”

If she was surprised to see Sham, she showed no sign of it. It was plausible, he supposed, that he might have simply wandered into her favourite cafe. That he had not tracked down several of his comrades from the Medes & asked them where they thought he might find her.

She was sitting at a corner table, with a journal in front of her & a pen in her hand. She did not invite him to sit nor shoo him away. She merely stared at him, long enough that his already great nervousness grew greater.

“Soorap,” she said. “Doctor’s aid.”

She sat back & placed her hands, with a soft thump & a hard clack, on the table in front of her.

“I sincerely hope, Soorap,” she said, “that you are not here to discuss—”

“No!” he stammered. “No. Not at all. Actually, there was sort of something I sort of wanted to sort of show you.” Daybe scrabbled under his shirt. He pulled the animal out.

“Your beast I’ve seen,” said the captain. Sham held out Daybe’s leg, on which the tiny mechanism still protruded like a tick.

After her demonstration, Shikasta had been appalled at her inability to entice Daybe back to her, to retrieve the transmitter. She had waved, & it, of course, ignored her. “I ain’t going to get that thing back!” she had shouted. & Sham had had an idea.

He beckoned the bat for her, but when it got within a few yards, he surreptitiously altered his come-here motion to a get-away one, so, wary, Daybe would spiral off up again. Sham gave Shikasta his best shrug & apologetic eyebrows. “It don’t want to come,” he said.

“You better hope,” she said finally, all the unexpected friendliness of the last couple of days quite gone, “that no one clocks that there’s one fewer of these things. I’ll be in so much trouble!” Sham nodded humbly, as if it was his fault she had stolen it. “When your flying rat comes back, you take that thing off & get it back to me, alright?”

That evening, out of her ear- & eyeshot, he had whistled Daybe into his arms. Examined the clip on its leg. Whispering an apology, he had twisted it tighter. Now it would take a metal cutter to get it off. & here he was now, nervously pointing out a transceiver, or receptor, or receiver, or transceptor, or whatever the thing was called, while Daybe fiddled.

“One of my mates found this, Captain,” he said. “She showed me how you work it. There’s a, there’s this box