Railsea

Credit: China Mieville (illustration credit 8.1)

SEVENTY-NINE

IT WAS THE NOISES THE CAPTAIN WAS MAKING THAT drew attention to her. They were not like any sounds Sham had ever heard any human make before. Naphi was not screaming or crying, she was not howling or complaining. She stood at the train’s edge, stared down into the deeps of the air where her philosophy had gone, uttered a succession of phonemes like those that might creep in between proper words. As if she spoke discards & language debris.

“Ah,” she said. Her tone was calm. “Fff.”

Sham was still dizzy with the abyssward descent he had just seen. He pulled his attention to the captain.

“Asuh,” she said. “Mhuh. Enh.” Clockwork-stiff, she walked to the edge of the deck. Sham went after her. He watched her with widening eyes. As he passed Sirocco, he grabbed a sharp tool from her salvor’s belt.

“Wait!” he said.

Naphi turned, face set. One by one, the trainsfolk on the Medes looked at her. Sham sped up. Naphi gripped the railing with her left hand. She drew herself up smartly, & saluted her crew with her right, with the arm they had always known was flesh. She drew her knife, ready for close-quarters hunting, & turned to face the darkness.

“No!” Sham shouted.

Gripping the barrier with her disguised & enhanced limb, the captain braced on it, swung herself up, her legs up & around & over the edge right out into space. She turned, neat as a gymnast, & began to plummet, to follow the moldywarpe down.

But Sham was there. Even as the captain let go the rail, he stabbed with Sirocco’s tool right down into the heavy workings of her fakely artificial arm.

He had no time to aim. Just plunged the blade into pipe-work. There was an electrical crack, a phut of smoke & the metal glove the captain had worn so long short-circuited, spasmed, snapped shut. Held her still clinging to the side of the Medes.

“Help me!” shouted Sham, leaning over. He stared at the captain, dangling over endless nothing, looking back up at him.

“Ah now,” she said, in a strange mild voice. Her legs scrabbled & kicked against the train’s side. She prodded urgently at her own robotic casing with her dagger, tried to pry it off her, to release herself from her own inadvertent grip & follow her philosophy.

“Help me!” Sham shouted again, as he grabbed for her & tried to avoid her weapon. & here came Sirocco, & Mbenday, & Benightly, who with a hunter’s precision batted the knife from her hand. It twirled out of sight. They grabbed her. Together they hauled the captain back up onto the deck.

“Ah now,” she kept saying quietly. “I have something to catch.” She did not struggle much.

“Secure her!” Mbenday shouted. They held the captain while Sirocco took pliers & screwdrivers to the snagging arm until with a click it released her. The crew cuffed Naphi’s hands behind her back.

“Ah now,” she said again, & shook her head. She murmured. She muttered to herself & slumped. She did not fight or cry.

“The bloody angel!” It was Sirocco shouting now. She stood on the Pinschon, hands on hips, staring down like the captain had. She stamped & shook her fists. “It’s gone! It went! This is a disaster!”

Was it? Sham was too tired to argue or understand. He kept looking at the Shroakes. Dero looked down into the dark, holding his breath. Caldera looked like she would explode. She was wide-eyed, fast breathing, shaking with excitement.

The bridge was brick & girders. It arced down to reach the vertical chasm-side, a buttress pushing into the flank of the railsea among suspended pebbles, hard-packed soils, the lines of salvage. The bridge, the track extended into the coming night. Looked endless. “There’s no way it should stay up,” Sham said.

“It’s stuff,” Caldera said. Her voice shook. “Material we don’t know about.”

“Sort of Heaven stuff?” Vurinam said.

Caldera shrugged. “What do you think?” she said.

We are here, Sham thought. On a bridge over nothing. We got by the guardian angel! We are on our way.

To Heaven. On a single rail.

“So …” Fremlo said. Daybe launched into the black, lurched right back, as if even the bat got vertigo. “So we’re here.” Fremlo said. “Now what?”

The way they had come, the tracks were littered with debris where Mocker-Jack had wrestled the angel into the void. It would take hours to clear.

“ ‘What now?’ ” Dero shouted. “Duh! Now we go on!”

In the quiet that followed, they did not hear the beat of any wings.

NO JOURNEY HAD EVER been like that one. The Medes’s lights were nothing: they shone a few silvered yards of rail in front, while on every other side was black. There were no junctions to negotiate, no points to throw. A single elevated night rail. Sham had no name for the percussion of a train moving over nothing, on brick arches, each arc miles long, each strut descending to whatever floor floored the universe.

The gloom at last began to fade. The sky went as gentle & clear as it did on any other morning, & above that clarity was the must & swirl of the upsky. To their star’d, to their port, empty air. Behind & in front of them, only bridge. Below them cloud, as far below as above. & they on the line in that birdless sky puttered on.

Now we see, thought Sham. Out beyond moles, beyond salvage, past the railsea itself. We’ll just see. He had made it out.

There was life. They saw scuttling on the tracks. Lizards. & if there were such beasts, there must be bugs, to feed them. Vegetation in the mottles of the wood. A tiny ecosystem between rails, on the approach to Heaven.

The captain did nothing but stare as Sirocco wielded trinkets & expertise & fixed Naphi’s left arm. The crew cuffed it to the rail, with heavy chains, for Naphi’s own protection.

“What if it just goes on forever?” said Sham. “This line.”

“If it goes on forever,” Caldera said, “then we’re in for a long journey.”

ON THE EARLY MORNING of the second day, they saw something blocking their way. A lumpy presence. They stared as they approached, at its fly-eye bulbous front, its spiked extrusions, its gnarled barrels, & Mbenday’s voice suddenly clicked on in panic from the intercom: “It’s another angel! It’s facing us! Coming for us! Full reverse!”

Chaos! Everyone raced, running to their stations, hauling to turn the engine.

“Wait!” someone shouted. It was, they realised to their shock, Captain Naphi. “Wait.” She spoke with enough authority that even unamplified her voice carried. “Look at it,” she said. “It is not coming. Look at it.”

The angel’s joints, the cracks between its plates of armour, were verdigrised & overgrown. Built up with calcified exudations, runoff from within. On it & in it grew moss & lichen. The angel was furred with the stuff. Boughs & bushes of it, in frozen gushes.

“It’s dead,” Dero said.

It was. The angel was dead.