Railsea

The Shroakes were staring. “That would be dad,” Caldera said quietly. “He did like that camera.”

“There were pictures on it,” Sham said. “I … saw you. He took one of you two.”

“He did,” said Caldera. Dero was nodding. Caldera looked up at the ceiling. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “We always knew they might … & as it went on, it got more & more likely.” She spoke Railcreole with a lovely strange accent. “Truth is, I thought, if anything happened, we’d never know. That we’d just wait & wait. & now, you come here with these stories.”

“Well,” Sham said. “I think if someone in my family never came back … Which actually, sort of …” He took another breath. “I think I’d like it if someone told me if they found them. Later.” Caldera & Dero stared levelly at him. He thought of the pictures, & his heart sped up with excitement; he couldn’t help it. “& also,” he said, “because of what else was on them pictures. That’s why I wanted to find you. What were they looking for?”

“Why?” said Dero.

“Why?” said Caldera, her eyes narrowing.

This is something, Sham thought, & excitement filled him right up. He took out his camera. He told them, one by one, about the images he had seen. He thumbed on the tiny screen that showed his own, scrolled through one by rubbish useless one of rails & penguins & raildwellers & weather & the Medes crew & not much at all, until he reached that picture. The picture of the last shot Caldera’s parents had taken.

His camera was cheap, his focus was off, he had taken it as he fell. It was a poor effort. But it was just clear enough, if you knew what you were looking at. An empty plain & a single line. Rails stretching out to nowhere. Alone.

“Because,” he said, “they were coming back from this.”

THIRTY-THREE

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN WE DID NOT FORM ALL words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ widths from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

THIRTY-FOUR

I CAN’T HELP WONDERING,” SHAM SAID, “WHAT THEY WERE doing.”

“You’re a moler?” said Dero. Sham blinked.

“Yeah.”

“You hunt moles?”

“Well, me, no. I help a doctor. & sometimes I clean floors & pick up ropes. But I do that on a train that hunts moles, yeah.”

“You don’t,” said Dero, “sound happy.”

“About moling? Or doctoring?”

“What would you rather be doing?” Caldera said. She glanced at him, & something in her look rather took his breath away.

“I’m fine,” Sham said. “Anyway, look. This isn’t why I came here, to talk about this.”

“No indeed,” agreed Caldera. Dero shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, stern-faced as a little general. “Still though. What would you like?”

“Well,” Sham said. “I mean …” He was shy to say it. “It would be good to do what your family does. To be a salvor.”

Dero & Caldera regarded him. “You think we’re salvors?” said Dero.

“I mean, well, yeah,” said Sham. “I mean—” He shrugged & indicated the house, so full to brimming with found technology & reconstructed bits & pieces. “Yeah. & where they were going.” He shook the camera. “That was salvage hunting. Far off. Weren’t it?”

“What do your family do?” Dero said.

“Well,” Sham said. “My, it’s my cousins, sort of, they do bits & pieces, nothing like this. &, but my mum & dad were—well, my dad was on the trains. Neither of them were salvors anyway. Not like yours.”

Caldera raised an eyebrow. “We’ve been salvors, of sorts,” she said. “I suppose. Mum was. Dad was. Once. But is that what you think would get you up in the mornings?”

“We are not salvors,” Dero said. Sham kept looking at Caldera.

“I said we were,” she said. “Not we are. What we are is salvage-adjacent.”

“I mean, all the searching, though,” Sham said, his voice coming quicker the more he spoke. “That’s got to be exciting, ain’t it? Finding things no one’s found before, digging down, finding more, uncovering the past, making new things, all the time, learning & that.”

“You’re contradicting yourself,” Caldera said. “You can’t find things no one’s found before by uncovering the past, can you? Searching for something. I see the appeal.” She stared at him. “But you don’t uncover the past if you’re a salvor: you pick up rubbish. The last thing I think you should think about’s the past. That’s what they do wrong here.”

“Here?”

“Here Manihiki.” She shrugged a big shrug, to indicate the island beyond her walls.

“Why you here?” Dero said.

“Yeah, why are you? In Manihiki?” Caldera said. “Your crew. No moles here.”

Sham waved his hand. “Everyone always ends up in Manihiki at some point. Supplies & whatnot.”

“Really,” Caldera said.

“Salvage,” Dero said. “You here for salvage?”

“No,” Sham said. “Supplies. Whatnot.”

He walked with Caldera & Dero through their house. It was so rambling & tumbledown he called it, in his head, rambledown. Up stairs, down again via elevator, escalator up, ladder down, past all sorts of odd spaces like sheds indoors.

“It was good of you to come tell us,” Caldera said.

“Yeah,” said Dero.

“I’m very sorry about your dad & your mum,” Sham said.

“Thank you,” Caldera said.

“Thank you,” Dero said solemnly.

“We’re sorry about yours,” Caldera said.

“Oh.” Sham was vague. “That was ages ago.”

“It must’ve been a massive effort to get here,” Caldera said. “To tell us.”