Railsea

Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.

Over the raskaba of the wheels & the whooshing of the fusion engine, Caldera hummed. Did she stare with the same hankering for distance & something-or-other as did her brother & as had her mother? Perhaps. Something like that.

She thought about Sham, with gratitude for his information, for the picture that he had shown them. She tapped keys on Dad Byro’s ordinator. Extracted information. Collated it with their other information, including Sham’s descriptions. Began to build a route.

With distant affection Caldera regretted that Sham had not come. She took bites from a sandwich, sung.

An alarm bleated, glowed red. She checked her clattering information. A change of gauge was coming.

She prodded buttons. How much would this particular technology have excited the burghers, the salvors, the privateers of Manihiki! she thought.

Raskaba-tak, the train slowed but not by very much—a tug or two of levers, a switch set & the engine shuddered exactly like a troubled animal; braces emerged from its underside, took its weight as it rolled, raised it an instant, mechanisms wound, the wheels on the momentarily suspended vehicle slipping closer together to return & to land snikt into these new narrower rails.

There were no hours of complicated rail-&-wheel-side shenanigans, only seconds with the gauge-slip. Caldera inserted words of salutation & praise for her family into her song.

She did not wake Dero when she passed a hunk of metal that she suddenly suspected was one of her parents’ carriages. Discarded by them so early in their trip, for reasons unknown. She said nothing.

When she had to sleep she stopped the train & armed its defences. The ordinator would probably have been able to continue the journey unwatched, but she would rather avoid any risk. It would soon be five, & Dero’s turn.

& on the day that followed, & for days after that, the Shroakes continued their single-minded drive through hostile country. They traced creative routes through the railsea towards its most arcane & neglected places, following their family’s secret route, looking for whatever it was their mother & father had found.

FORTY-FOUR

WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENCE is ferroviaoceanology, the study of the railsea’s iron lines themselves. This is boss, nexus of investigations. Done right, it extends, rail-&-tie-like, across ruminations of all fields. To study the rails means not only the metallurgy of their substance, but the applied theology of their maintenance, sustained, cleaned & fixed as they are by the secretive ministrations of the locomotive-angels. It means the study of biology, to hypothesise the relationship between the lairs of all the burrowers, those eruchthonous & those eternally underground, & the tangled lines above them.

It means the study of symbology. Ever since the godsquabble, since the rest of the world was brought into shape & existence to serve the aesthetic & symbolic needs of the railsea, we—cities, continents, towns, trains & you & me—have been functions of rails.

Travel far enough, a trainswoman will find worshippers of gods of all sizes & shapes, all powers, persuasions & proclivities. & not only gods—uplifted mortals, ancestor spirits, abstract principles. In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no wheels percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

FORTY-FIVE

IN VERY OTHER PARTS OF THE RAILSEA, A MUCH OLDER, much more traditional train, ground south. Its passage was less strange than the Shroakes’, its route on one gauge only, but it travelled with no less urgency.

Thus the Medes. Chased again by an eager coterie, a squabbling comet’s tail of railgulls chowing on the scraps the trainsfolk threw. A day was all it took, a day’s quick determined driving, & Manihiki, its outliers, a hundred rocklets prodding out between the ties, were gone. Wide-open rails, & southward ho. With perhaps a certain melancholy.

On the Medes’s last day in Manihiki, several people, of course, had been late to arrive back on-deck. One by one they returned, & one by one were punished. Nothing too severe—this was typical minor transgression.

& ap Soorap?

Sham ap Soorap?

Where was Sham ap Soorap?

He didn’t answer any calls. He did not return.

The captain herself even asked where he was. Preparations continued. The captain herself paced & asked again if there was word of the doctor’s assistant.

Until at last the harbourmasters arrived, bearing a letter to Fremlo, which the doctor read, swore at & read to the captain, leaving the door open a crack. The doctor was too experienced for that to be an accident. It was the technique known as trainboard telegraph. Minutes later the whole crew knew the message’s contents.

To Dr. Fremlo & Captain Naphi & the officers & all my friends on the train Medes. I am sorry to be not there but I cannot do this job any more I have a new crew they are salvors with T Sirocco. They will teach me to be a salvor I was never a person who wanted to be a molehunter nor a doctor so I will go with them. Please tell my family thank you & sorry. I am sorry for this but I have always wanted to be someone who finds salvage & this is my chance good luck & thank you.

Yr obedient servant Sham ap Soorap.

THEY RACED INTO WINDS that whipped with less & less mercy. The heads, the bodies, of animals that broke subterranean cover grew larger as the Medes came to wilder, colder lands. Older hands marked the change in wheelcalls & clatternames as the iron cooled.

On the fourth day they rolled in the shadow of an old pumping rig crowning above a copse, still extracting oil though near its life’s end. A labour of moldywarpes, grey beasts of moderate size & quality, surfaced near them, playing & puffing dust. Three were swiftly skewered, roped, dragged to the butchery wagons, reduced to components.

“Hey, d’you remember,” Vurinam said abruptly to no one in particular, “how that Sham ap Soorap brought the grog when he had to?” He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t work out if he liked doing it more or less than his usual doctoring, weren’t that so, Fremlo?”

There were a few laughs. Were they happy or sad that Vurinam had mentioned their runaway? Yes. They were happy or sad.

“Shut up, Vurinam,” Yashkan said. “Nobody cares.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

“Didn’t know he had it in him,” Fremlo muttered to Mbenday when they drank bad smoky tea late that night. “He was hopeless, though you couldn’t but like the lad, but I’d never have thought he’d have the oomph to go be a salvor, no matter how mooningly he stared at them.”

The Medes passed a slave-powered train from Rockvane, which the captain would not hail. Shossunder & Dramin the cook stared out to railsea, as in their wake a big old bull armadillo, like a