Railsea

Alas, logging is sometimes neglected. Everyone is happy to write of encounters with predators or prey, dramatic mole chases & revelations. But the long & many days of nothing, of mere passage on everyday rails, of swabbing, seeing little of note, finding nothing, not arriving but being still a long way from where you set out? Those days, a logger can make mistakes, or not bother. & from such situations come questions like “Did we—?”

Though, sometimes, it is not inadequate attention that generates uncertainty. Even shock. The Medes is about to set wheel to rail. On a route very different from its initial planned. & all because of an intervention Sham very cannily made.

It seems, not at all least to him, hard to believe that is why the deviation, hard to reconstruct how he had got there. Sham’s own cunning has startled him out of understanding it. He does not understand how he can be going where he wanted to go.

TWENTY-SEVEN

BACK ON THE RAILROADS, BACK AT RAILSEA. ROCKING on his heels on the Medes. Soon to remember that conversation, Unkus Stone’s warning. It was amazing how much Sham felt pleasure at the slide of his feet, the rattle & tilt of rushing rails. Daybe dived & scattered the railgulls that followed them.

The captain had put together almost the same crew as before. For all her quietness, her abstraction & ponderous ruminations—the usual flaws of any captain chasing a philosophy—she motivated loyalty. Here was Fremlo & Vurinam, Shossunder & Nabby & Benightly, now blondly unshaven & still not talkative but who whacked Sham on the back with unexpected friendliness that sent him sprawling. They worked with Sham as before, with similar teasing backchat & rough camaraderie, but now drank with him, too, when his shifts finished, & did not seem exasperated if he was shtum, uncertain what to say.

There were more animal fights, of course. Lind & Yashkan would jeer at Sham as they put their coins down on the outcomes of awful assaults by ratlings, mice, miniature bandicoots, birds & fighting bugs. Sham stayed away from the arenas. Whenever he saw them, he would fuss with & simper over & gush attention at his surprised & gratified daybat. He did notice that Vurinam, who glanced more than once at these ministrations, seemed not to frequent the battles as once he had.

Near the upsky border was a sputtering biplane, & Daybe spiralled up towards it. Sham could see the little source-nubbins on its leg. It had not been hard to avoid returning it to Shikasta.

The aeroplane buzzed on westward. Perhaps it was from Mornington, swish island of aviators. Perhaps a transport of rich crew from the Salaygo Mess. With the complex tech available only in a few railsea countries, the cost of fuel, the necessity of long flat runways—hard to build on steep & slopey islands—air travel was expensive & uncommon. Sham looked up at the craft longingly, wondering what its drivers could see.

They were a few days out from Streggeye, veering a good clip through forest & on undulating ground. They went through unusual railscapes. By rivers & pools, crossing the waterways on jutting mooncalf elevated tracks.

“Where we heading, Captain?” Sham heard more than one officer ask, & the question, while mildly impertinent, was not surprising. They went west, not the south or southwest or south-southwest or even west- southwest that they might have expected for a mole hunt. “We have equipment to pick up,” was all the captain would say.

Sham had his duties in Fremlo’s poky surgery, but he made time to explore. Found cubbyholes. Crawl- spaces. Sections of holds. He sat in a big cupboard in a storage car, put his eye to an imperfectly sealed plank & through layers of wood could glimpse the sky.

They rode tangled & intersecting bridges for yards over the yawing drops of gorges, passed small islands poking out of the endless rails, stopping sometimes to pick up provisions & stretch their land-legs.

“Morning, Zhed.”

Well might Sham hesitate. He had exchanged only a few words with the harpoonist before. But he was massaging his daybat’s wings, feeling its healing with fingertip gentleness, near the captain’s dais, & there Zhed was leaning on the hindmost barrier, staring directly at the rails on which they had passed.

She was an odd one. A tall & muscular soldier, originally from South Kammy Hammy. She still wore the ostentatious leather of those warlike & oddball far-off islands, where wartrains ran on clockwork motors.

“Morning,” Sham said again.

“Is it a good morning?” Zhed said. “Is it? Is what I wonder.” She continued to stare. They twisted in the outskirts of a wood, trees rising between the tight tracks, & animals & flouncy-feathered birds screamed at them from boughs. Zhed put fingers to her lips & pointed at a spot far off above the canopy. A zipping flurry of leaves. A swirl of disturbed, rain-bloated cloud. “Look.” She briefly indicated rails to either side of the one they rode.

After long seconds with only the chukkachuchu of the wheels, Sham said, “I don’t know what I’m seeing.”

“Rails cleaned like they shouldn’t be if they ain’t been used in days,” she said. “Is what you’re seeing. Things moving like they only would if something was nearby.”

“You mean …”

“I think someone is near us.” At last she turned & met Sham’s eye. “For us. Waiting. Or tracking.”

Sham glanced around for Stone. “Are you sure?” he said.

“No. Not at all. I said ‘I think.’ But think it I do.”

Sham looked into the dark the racing trees shed as shadow. “What might it be?” he whispered.

“I ain’t a psychic. But I am trainsperson & I know how the rails go.”

THAT NIGHT, Sham swayed in his bunk to the Medes’s rhythm, & the motion of the carriage through the dark translated itself into unhappy dreams. He was walking across rails, long steps tie to tie, shuddering & fear-stiff so close to the earth. The earth that boiled, that oozed with life, ready to take him at his first stumble. & behind him something was coming.

It chased him out of a fringe of trees. It was something, oh, it was certainly something. He tried to hurry & stumbled & glimpsed & heard a snort & felt the rails shake & saw something both train & beast, a snarling thing pawing the rails as its wheels ground at him. Grunting. A goblin of the railsea, an angel of the rails.

When he woke Sham was not surprised to find that it was still deep night. He shivered & crept deckwards without waking his comrades. Stars or little lights winked far out to railsea, miles & miles from safe hardland.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN an angel?” Sham said to Dr. Fremlo.

“I have,” Fremlo said, in that voice both low & high. “Or I have not. Depends. How long does a glimpse have to be to count as a ‘see’? I’ve travelled longer than anyone else on board, you know.” The doctor smiled sharply. “I shall tell you something, Sham ap Soorap, which, while not a secret, is not generally admitted. Trains’ doctors—we are awfully much more exciting than your sawbones is at home. But mostly, we’re not nearly such good doctors.

“Can’t keep up with the research. We’re years out of date. & what gets us into this line is that we want to think about things other than medicine, sometimes. Which is why I’m not wholly stricken by your variable interest.” Sham said nothing. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ll do for most of the things likely to afflict a traincrew. I am at worst a mediocre doctor, but I’m an excellent tracksperson. & I’m the only person—& yes, I think that includes the captain—who’s seen an angel.

“But if you’ve come to me for ghoul stories I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It was a long time ago, it was far away, & it was a moment. They’re not invisible, whatever you’ve heard. But they move fast. By byways & switchways no one else knows.”

“What did you see?” Sham said.