China Mieville - Railsea

A desert, flat sand, sparse tracks. Rocks like fangs under the overcast sky. Where, where , had these people been?

Playing moles frozen midleap ahead of the train’s prow, pursuing leg-sized earthworms. The sett of a huge bull badger. A little lake rimmed with rails. Hedgehog tangles in tree roots. & at the very limit of the camera’s capabilities, a hulking & hermetic track-riding presence. Sham held his breath. Some train, not like anything he had seen before but abruptly familiar nonetheless.

He realised what the silhouette reminded him of. A fanciful & speculative image, as all such images were, from some book of religious instruction, of an angel. A sacred engine, rolling the rails to save them.

Sham gaped. Wasn’t it bad luck to see an angel? Some were rumoured to maintain the rails in deep railsea reaches—& trainsfolk were supposed to turn fast away should they ever come close enough to see such interventions. Should he look away now? How could he?

Wait wait! Sham thought, but the captain had moved on. A new picture was below him now, a rearing great talpa. The captain’s turn to freeze. But the moldywarpe’s fur was dark. On she scrolled.

Where had this train been going?

Geography that made Sham furrow his brow. Strange, distinctive rock formations like giant melted candles. Overhangs above railsea lines.

& suddenly. Railsea. But not.

Land stretched like some pegged-out dead animal in an Anatomy & Butchery class. Flat & dusty & specked with broken brown stones & little bits of matter that might be salvage, but mean stuff if it was. A lowering downsky, storm clouds growling like guard dogs. A glowing upsky above. The prow of the train was visible like a fat arrow in the middle of the shot, pointing at an oddly foreshortened horizon. The line it was riding was an unnaturally straight stretch, the two rails bisecting the view all the way to where perspective knitted them together. & to either side of it—

—either side of that line the train was riding—

—was nothing.

No other rails at all.

Empty earth.

Sham leaned forward. He was trembling. Saw the captain leaning forward herself, in time with him.

Empty earth & one straight line. One line in the railsea . Couldn’t be. There’s not nor can there be any way out of the tangle . A single line could not be. There it was.

“Stonefaces come between us & all harm,” Sham whispered, & clutched his bat, because it felt like an unholiness, all that nothing, because for goodness sake what was the world between islands but the railsea?

All that nothing. Sham got his own little camera out. Fumble, fumble, not looking at its screen, & trembling, he took a picture of that picture, the most amazing image he had ever seen.

All that nothing! It made him reel. He staggered, fell hard & loud against another ordinator. The captain turned to him as he put his camera back in his pocket. She fingerstabbed the keyboard & the image disappeared.

“Control yourself,” Naphi said in a low voice. “Pull yourself together, right now.”

Sham’s head was still all full of that impossible rail, surrounded by all that equally impossible railless nothing.

AWAY AGAIN. EATING UP LINES, EATING UP THE tie-&-rail miles between Bollons & the Salaygo Mess & Streggeye itself. The Medes , if slowly, if by roundabout routes, was going home. Without Unkus Stone.

“What d’you mean, he can’t come with us?” Sham had said.

“Ah now, lad,” had said Unkus Stone, & added a short scream as someone shifted where they leaned on his bed & moved his still-very-tender legs.

Sham & Vurinam & Dr. Fremlo & Yehat Borr & a few others had been in the sanatorium. The equipment around Unkus & the few other patients—here someone with injuries caused by crushing train-metal, there a blood-rabbit bite, one or two with bugs of the railsea—was battered. But it was not unclean, & the smell of the lunch the staff had brought Stone was not undelicious.

“Can’t believe I’m awake,” Unkus said.

“Neither can I,” said Fremlo.

The laughter after that was uncomfortable.

There was no way they could wait, Sham’s colleagues told him. He was being sentimental. There were moles to hunt. The bill for the sanatorium was paid for a while longer—topped up, might they point out, by the captain herself out of her own share. They had to get on.

“I really do not like it here,” Vurinam said. He glanced to either side & lowered his voice. “People keep asking where we’re going, where we been. Bollons people are nosy . Someone even asked us if it was true we was salvors!” He raised his eyebrows. “Said they heard we’d found a wreck! & a treasure map!”

Hmmm , thought Sham, a little uneasily.

“Shouldn’t just leave you,” Sham had said.

“Ah now, lad.” & Unkus had given Sham an awkward pat on the arm. “I can get myself to the docks, get paid passage back when I’m better.”

“It ain’t right.”

It wasn’t just for Unkus that he wanted to stay, though Sham could not admit that. The longer they stayed in Bollons, he thought, the more chance he might persuade the captain to visit Manihiki. From where, it was his tentative judgement, the man, woman, children in those images came. He felt uncharacteristically certain that going there was what he wanted to do—to make that connection between those images, & that place.

He had been running through increasingly baroque ideas of what he might say or hint to Captain Naphi to persuade her so far out of her intended path. He had nothing. & he was still astonished, could barely believe they were not in any case going.

He couldn’t not, with an ecstasy of scandal, keep recalling that picture. The secret of that line, that solitary line, leading, it seemed—& it still felt like curse words even just to think it!—out of the railsea. One of the first things he had done, back from the ordinator room in Bollons—whatever job the captain would have had him do forgotten by both of them—was to draw, as well as he could, all the images he had seen, from memory. Until he had a sheaf of scrappy ink renderings of memories of images of unlikely landscapes. They would have meant nothing to most who saw them, but to him were mnemonics, reminders, to conjure the railsea flatographs he had seen, that the captain had destroyed.

Oh yes. She had, making sure he saw her do so, carefully crushed the memory in her tough, skinless hand, while Sham made an involuntary noise of protest. When she opened her tough hydraulic fingers again it was full of plastic dust. “Whatever that silliness was,” she had said, “it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants.”

Naphi had put a mechanical finger to her lips. “Be quiet,” she’d said. The instruction had covered both the noise of the clumsiness of his awe, & the potential saying of what he’d seen to others.

“Captain,” he’d whispered. “What was …?”

“I’m a moler,” Naphi had said. “You are a doctor’s assistant. Whatever you saw or thought you saw, it has nothing to do with your life & aims, whatever they might be, any more than it does with mine. So we don’t speak of it.”

“That was Manihiki,” he said. “Where they came from. We should—”

“I strongly advise,” the captain had said, looking at her own hands, “that you do not now or ever tell me, or any other captain under whom you roll, what ‘we’ ‘should’ do.” The quotation marks were audible. “I am considering, ap Soorap.”

So Sham said nothing. The captain had led him out of the café past packs of the goats that Bollonsians let roam the streets, trained to eat rubbish & leave their droppings in alleyway compost-heaps. Slowly, heart still slamming (approximating the clattername fudustunna , he thought, that came with great but dogged & determined pace), he thought through what he had seen. Those pictures.