Railsea

“So there was a chart?” Sham said.

“Not on the train. & none that you or they could read. Manihiki wanted to find them, but for their reasons, not ours. The Shroakes never gave them what they wanted.” She sounded proud. “All manner of engines & machines made that no one else could make. What they wanted wasn’t Mum & Other Dad back—it was whatever they might have with them. What they might have made or found.”

“They’ll have been looking for them for ages,” Dero said. “Since they were gone.”

“But now you’re here,” Caldera said, “they’ll be whispering for the first time in years, ‘We have a lead!’ ”

“They had me hiding in a gutter,” Sham said. “Takes more than a bit of whatever-they-are to get hold of a Streggeye boy.”

“Wanted to know who you are,” Caldera said. “& what you know. About where the Shroakes are.” Sham remembered the caution with which Caldera & Dero had greeted him, when first he had arrived. No wonder they had been suspicious. No wonder they had no friends: even had they not been looking so carefully after Dad Byro, & pining for the return of their other parents, they had to assume everyone who visited was a potential spy.

“Till you came,” Dero mumbled to Sham, “I still always thought they might come back.”

“It was the longest time they’d been away, but you don’t stop wondering,” Caldera said. She inclined her head in the direction of the room where Dad Byro confusedly grieved. “& how could we leave him when we weren’t sure? Go off in one direction, have them come back in the other?”

“We’re sure now though?” Dero said. It sounded like a statement until the very end, when it tweaked suddenly up into a question, a moment’s hope for uncertainty, that twanged on Sham’s heart.

“We’re sure now,” Caldera gently said. “So we have to do right by them. Finish what they started. It’s what Mum & Other Dad would’ve wanted. & it’s what he’d want, too,” She looked at the door again.

“Maybe,” Dero said.

“He might be writing to them again,” Caldera said.

“If he’s going to forget,” Sham asked, “why did you tell him they were gone?”

“Well he loves them, don’t he?” Caldera said. She led him to the kitchen, brought Sham a cup of some oily- looking tea. “Doesn’t he deserve to mourn?”

Sham stirred the drink dubiously. “Whenever I mention this place to anyone,” he said, “I get looks. It’s obvious people talk about your family. & I saw the wreck. I ain’t never seen a train like that. & then there’s that picture.” He looked up at her. “Will you tell me? What were they doing? Do you know?”

“Do we know what they’d been up to?” said Caldera. “Where they were going, & why? Oh, yes.”

“We do,” said Dero.

“But then, you do, too,” Caldera said. She glanced at her brother. After a second, he shrugged. “It’s not very complicated,” Caldera said. “Like you say, you’ve seen the picture.”

“They were looking for something,” Sham said.

“Found,” said Caldera, after a moment. “They were looking for something & they found something. Which was …?” She waited like a schoolteacher.

“A way out of the railsea,” Sham said at last. “Something beyond the rails.”

Well of course. Sham had seen that one line. So he had sort of known that. Still, to hear it! He had a delight in the blasphemy. Spouting heresy, it turned out, was invigorating as well as nerve- wracking.

“There is nothing beyond the rails,” he squawked. Annoyed by his own voice.

“Looks like we’ve got work to do, Dero,” Caldera said. An edge of seriousness, an effort, had come into her voice. When her brother spoke, it was in his, too.

“There’s some stuff in Dad Byro’s room,” Dero said. “I’ll bring it down when I get him his supper.”

“There is nothing beyond the rails,” Sham said again.

“Can we seriously leave him?” Dero said. He glanced back at the door where their remaining father waited.

“We aren’t going to leave him,” Caldera said gently. “You know that. We’ll take care of him.” She came closer to Dero. “All that we’ve been putting away for the nurses—you know they’ll look after him. You know if he could he’d go himself. He can’t. But we can. For him. For all of us.”

“I know,” Dero said. He shook his head.

Sham started to give it one more try. “There is …”

“Oh, will you stop it?” Caldera said to him. “Obviously there is. You saw the picture.”

“But everybody knows—” Sham said, then stopped. He exhaled. “Alright,” he said. There were no certainties. He itemised what he knew. “No one knows where the railsea came from.”

“Well, no one knows,” Caldera said, “but they’ve got a sense of the possibilities. What do they say where you come from? Streggeye, you said? What do you think? Were the rails put down by gods?” Her questions came faster. Were they extruded from the ground? Were they writing in heavenly script, that people unknowingly recited as they travelled? Were the rails produced by as-yet-not-understood natural processes? Some radicals said there were no gods at all. Were the rails spit up by the interactions of rock, heat, cold, pressure & dirt? Did humans, big-brained monkeys, think up ways to use them when the rails emerged, to stay safe from the deadly dirt? Was that how trains got thought up? Was the world an infinity of rails down as well as around, seams of them through layers of earth & salvage, down to the core? Down to hell? Sometimes storms gusted off topsoil & uncovered iron below. The most excavation-gung-ho salvors claimed to have found some tracks yards underground. What about Heaven? What was in Heaven? Where was it?

“I think—what we were told—you know,” said Sham. He tutted at his own incoherence. “It all comes from That Apt Ohm.”

“Ah, right,” Caldera said. Of all the gods worshipped, feared, scorned, placated & bickered with, his influence was the most widespread. Great chimney-headed controller in dark robes. He protected & controlled the railsea, its nations, its passengers. “There might have been one sometimes,” Caldera said. “Years & years ago. A boss. Where do they go? The rails? What’s at the edge of the railsea?”

Sham twisted in discomfort.

“Sham,” Caldera said. “What’s the upsky? Don’t say it’s where the gods put poison. Where do the rails come from? What’s the godsquabble?”

“It’s when at the start of the world all the gods were fighting to make the earth, & That Apt Ohm was the strongest, & in their fighting the railsea rose out of the earth.”

“It was a fight between different railroad companies,” Caldera said.

Sham had heard that theory, too, he conceded, nervously.

“It was after everything went bad, & they were trying to make money again. With public works. People paid for passage, & rulers paid for every mile of build. So it went crazy. They were competing, all putting down new routes all over the place. Ruthless, because the more they built the more they made.

“They burnt off years of noxious stuff—that’s where the upsky comes from—& ended up chugging stuff into the ground, too, changing things. They could jury-rig the whole world. It was a company war. They laid traps for each other’s trains, so there’s trap-switches, trap-lines, out there.

“They made the lines,” Caldera said. “They destroyed each other. But they couldn’t stave off ruin. & all they left were the rails. We live in the aftermath of business bickering.” She smiled.

“Our mum & dad were looking for something,” Dero said. “They knew the history. Stories about dead treasure, history, angels, a vale of tears.”

“I’ve heard all that!” Sham said. “ ‘The ghost of all the riches ever born & yet unborn live in Heaven!’ ” He recited words from old stories. “ ‘Oh, shun the vale of tears!’ You telling me they was chasing myths?”

“What if it isn’t?” said Caldera. “Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth. It don’t mean the ghosts of all the riches ain’t there, either.”

With an abrupt digital blare, one of the wall clocks demanded Sham’s attention. Not now! he thought. He wanted to hear these salvage stories, to rummage through this house.

“I … have to go,” he said. “Got to meet someone.”

“That’s a shame,” said Dero politely. “We have to go, too.”

“What? Where? Who?”