China Mieville - Railsea

“It’s Vajpaz,” Troose whispered. “He had another encounter.”

“… By now,” the big man said, “my philosophy was coursing frenetically horizonward. You see? Carrying my leg.” Oh, yes, he was missing one, Sham noticed. There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. On the whole, you were a leg person or an arm person: had one a tail to lose, a pair of prehensile tentacles, a wing or two, it would increase the possibilities for those vivid scars of philosophising. “But I was beyond fretting. I tourniqueted my own stump & laughed. & set that jollycart after the beast. I set the course to hope. Always a few yards ahead, the rolling humps of its passage. Behind me my crew were piled onto the upturned wreck of the train, yelling for me to come back.

“The greatstoat slowed & readied itself, & burst out of the earth, looping overhead. I could have reached up & grabbed its hairs. I watched as it set forth horizonward again, underground dancing at speed. & I stopped trying to catch it, & tried only to keep pace with it, & gloried in its letting me do so. I surrendered to the speed.”

Ah, there it was. So this philosophy was about speed . Acceleration. Captain Vajpaz theorised about a slim sinuous line of fur & savage teeth, focused on him with spike-eyes personal & full of urgency. It wanted to pass on a message. Even taking his leg had been part of its communications. “Follow me!” it had been saying. “Quick!”

So Vajpaz followed his philosophy, this greatstoat. The acceleration had become its own point, & Vajpaz’s life was changing as he became a prophet of enstoated speed. & so on.

“The speed!” Vajpaz said. There was a whisper of appreciation.

In the taverns of Streggeye Land, in the books they wrote, which Sham & his classmates had sat through, in lectures public & exclusive, captains held ruminatively forth about the bloodworm, the mole rat, the termite queen or angry rex rabbit or badger or the mole, the great mole, the rampaging great moldywarpe of the railsea, become for them a principle of knowing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something. The story of the hunt as much their work as the catching of meat.

Tales told in pubs & cafés, bars & clubs of Streggeye were also of the discovery of stowaways, members of the Siblinghood of Railsea Hoboes, tucked in some hold or other. Of foreign shores. Of the imagined lands past the edge of the world. Of ghost trains, of enormous bloodworms that could emerge from the ground & wind around a train before dragging it under the ground, of the mysteries of crewless derelicts creaking on the lines, meals half-eaten but not a soul aboard, of monstrosities of the rails in secluded & terrible places, sirens, sillers, traptracks, dust krakens. But it was the philosophies that were the mainstay of these storytelling sessions.

Streggeye Land, on the western tip of the Salaygo Mess archipelago. Famous for hunters, for mole oil, for molebone art & for its philosophers. Their texts were intellectual touchstones across the railsea.

Sham had never heard Captain Naphi talk publicly about her own quarry. He watched her stand. Sip her drink. Clear her throat. The room quieted.

But nothing had happened, Sham thought. The Medes had not come anywhere near the big mole she was looking for, the not-yellow thing. What was there to tell? It was tradition for any captain with a philosophy to hold forth about it at the end of any journey, but he had not until now considered what they would do had the object of their obsession not appeared. Which, now the thought occurred, must be common. Was she going to say, “Sorry—nothing to report,” & sit down again?

Oh, hardly.

“The last time I spoke to you,” Naphi said, “my philosophy had evaded me. Left me adrift on the railsea, without fuel or direction, with only its disappearing dust & a long road of molehills for my eyes. I watched him go.

“Mocker-Jack.” The name rung in the room.

“You know how careful are philosophies,” Naphi said. “How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation.

“When we set out at last again, we, the Medes , went south. Mocker-Jack was somewhere near, surely. What confronted us first, however, was another animal, throwing itself at us. & after that, no word. No nothing. All the trains we passed I asked for help & information, but the silence about Mocker-Jack was its own taunt. His absence was a looming presence. The lack of him filled me with him, so he burrowed not only through the earth & dirt of the railsea but through my own mind, night after night. I know more now about him than ever I did before. He stayed away & came closer in one magic movement.”

Ah, Sham thought. Brilliant . Troose was rapt. Voam was intrigued. Sham was amused & impressed & annoyed all at the same time.

“You been waiting a long time for this?” Voam whispered to a woman near him.

“I come for all the good philosophies,” she said. “Captain Genn’s Ferret of Unrequitedness; Zhorbal & the Too-Much-Knowledge Mole Rats; & Naphi. Of course. Naphi & Mocker-Jack, Mole of Many Meanings.”

“What’s her philosophy, then?” Sham said.

“Ain’t you listening? Mocker-Jack means everything.”

Sham listened to his captain describe her encounters & non-encounters with the quarry she’d been chasing for years, that represented everything anyone could ever imagine. “I’ve had my blood & bone ingested by that burrowing signifier,” she said, waving her intricately splendid arm. “A taunt, daring me to ingest him back.”

Naphi looked right at Sham, just then. Right at him, into his eyes. She paused just a fraction of a moment. Not long enough that anyone but him would have noticed. He smoothed down his unruly hair in blushing fluster & looked away.

I know what I want to do , he thought. I want to get to Manihiki, whatever the captain thinks. That boy & girl deserve to know what happened .

He looked back at Naphi, imagined her racing over junctions & the wildest railtangles, bearing down on her philosophy, the toothy giant Mocker-Jack.

Sham thought, What will she do if she catches it?

PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO NARRATE SINCE FIRST WE banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

Some such stories are themselves about the telling of others. An odd pastime. Seemingly redundant, or easy to get lost in, like a picture that contains a smaller picture of itself, which in turn contains—& so on. Such phenomena have a pleasing foreign name: they are mise-en-abymes .

We have just had a story of a story. Tell it yourself, again, & story of a story in a story will be born, & you will be en route to that abyme . Which is an abyss.

In his first days back in Streggeye, there was, for Sham, plenty of storytelling, some of it about stories.

STRANGE TO HAVE DAYS NOT DICTATED BY THE CLATTER of wheels. To have his legs not flex & straighten in the unthinking expertise of the trainsperson, with the sway. Fremlo didn’t treat patients on hardland, so Sham’s duties were sweeping, cleaning, running the occasional errand, answering the very occasional telephone call, then slipping off not quite with explicit permission, but without any opposition. Scooting by pedestrians & horses tugging carts, past the horns of a few electric autos crawling up the jostling streets, to join some of the other Streggeye apprentices, snatching their own moments off from work as cooks’ assistants, clerks, porters, tanners & electricians & artists, trainees of all kinds.