“We were off the coast of Colony Cocos. Treasure hunting.” Fremlo raised an eyebrow. “By a right tangle of rails, some rock teeth. We knew something was watching us. & then we heard a sound.
“A little way off, no more’n a couple of hundred yards, a clot of the rails tangled together, crisscrossing back & forth & merging into a tunnel into cliff.”
“The tracks went in?” said Sham.
“It had a lot of dark in it. It was full up with shadow. & something else. Something that, blaring that noise, suddenly & loud & awful, came out.”
Sham started as something gripped his shoulder: Daybe, dropped from the air, to perch on him.
“I won’t call it a train,” Fremlo said. “Trains, in all their varieties, are machines made for carrying us. This was for nothing but itself. It came out of that hole in silver fire.
“D’you think we stuck around to see it get closer? We hightailed it back out into the known railsea. & luckily it let us go. Went back for more orders from the great director in the sky.”
The way Fremlo said it, Sham could not tell if the doctor was a believer, or merely citing folklore.
AN INVISIBLE CLOUD squatted above the train. To Sham, everyone seemed contained, oppressed. No one said a word, but everyone seemed to agree that something was definitely following the damned train. Be it for angels, hungry monsters, pirates, marauders or imaginaries, the train was a quarry.
So it was almost a surprise that they made it anywhere. When, late on a beautiful evening in a stretch where the ground between the rails was thick with wild grass & tall weeds that rippled at them in wind-driven welcome, they saw a set of islands. Rocks where gulls fluffed their bums in scrub & eyed them with interest.
The
“Land!” announced the tannoy, someone from the crow’s nest, wildly redundantly. Everyone knew by then where they were.
Manihiki City.
PART III
BURROWING TORTOISE
Credit: China Mieville (illustration credit 3.1)
TWENTY-EIGHT
SO THIS WAS THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.
Sham did his best not to gaze like a greenhorn. Manihiki didn’t make it easy, though: the spectacle started before they’d even pulled into the sidings in the largest harbour in the known world.
They came through an endless chaotic catalogue of vehicles. Past crews that ignored them, crews that stared at them, crews in outfits that marked them out as Streggeye’s neighbours, & those dressed like illustrations or dreams. & the engines. Or, to be more precise—because not all the trains were engined—the means of locomotion.
Here a small train, three carriages only, manoeuvring the rails of the harbour at the end of great thrumming cables, tugged by two great birds. Well: a buzzard-train, emissary from the Teekhee archipelago. Wooden trains decorated with masks; trains coated in die-cast tin shapes; trains flanked with bone ornaments; double- & triple-decker trains; plastic-pelted trains stained in acrylic colours. The
The railsea: a vast & various train ecosystem. They passed under wires, for the few juiced-up miles of coastal rails. Here a stubby vehicle of scrubbed steel, its few windows tinted, & turning its wheels were back- curved pistons jutting from its sides. What were these grim faces from Fremlo, from all Sham’s crew? This controlled disgust Captain Naphi showed?
Oh. That was a galleytrain. In its hot bowels scores of slaves were strapped in rows, hauling on the handles to turn the wheels, encouraged by whips.
“How can they allow it?” Sham breathed.
“Manihiki calls itself civilised,” Fremlo said. “No slavery ashore. But you know how port-peace works. On each harboured train the laws of home.” There were as many laws among the railsea lands as there were lands. In some were slaves.
Sham imagined kicking down doors & racing through the train corridors, shooting dastardly guards. His impotence embarrassed him.
& solar trains from Gul Fofkal; lunar ones from who-knew-where?; pedal trains from Mendana; a rococo clockwork train that made Zhed smile & salute as its crews sang the songs of winding & twisted their great key; treadmill trains from Clarion, their crews jogging to keep them moving; little trains tugged by trackside ungulate herds able to fight off the burrowing predators of shallow railsea; one-person traincycles; hulking invisibly powered wartrains; electric trains with the snaps & sparks of their passing.
Manihiki.
SHAM’S FIRST TASK at port was not, as he’d expected, to wind bandages, nor to clear up Fremlo’s cabin, nor even to go shopping for whatever doctorly bits & pieces were needed. Instead, to Fremlo’s narrow-eyed fascination, the captain herself ordered Sham to accompany her on what she called “her errands” in Manihiki town.
“You’ve never been here before,” she said, pulling on her gloves, the left one altered to fit her inorganic hand, checking the buttons & fastenings of her dress coat, sweeping dust from her stiff pantaloons.
“No, Captain.” Sham wished he had good clothes into which to squeeze.
By the jollycart, with the putter & grind of displaced earth, the curious snub faces of local moles & baby-sized earthrats, semi-tame & well-fed on thrown scraps & organic rubbish, poked their heads up. Blind or not, they seemed to meet Sham’s gaze. Daybe gripped his shoulder all the way to the harbour. Until they disembarked.
Into a city that, Sham’s limited experience with alcohol suggested, was as giddying as being drunk. Raucous docks, a tight-packed, polyglot crowd. Catcalls, laughter, the shouting of wares. Sham saw people in clothes of all designs & colour & every tradition, beggarly rags through rubberized jumpsuits to the top hats of priests of That Apt Ohm, mimicking the dandy dress of their god. &—Sham stared—the rugged crazy costumes & makeshift uniforms of salvors.
