China Mieville - Railsea

They rode tangled & intersecting bridges for yards over the yawing drops of gorges, passed small islands poking out of the endless rails, stopping sometimes to pick up provisions & stretch their land-legs.

“Morning, Zhed.”

Well might Sham hesitate. He had exchanged only a few words with the harpoonist before. But he was massaging his daybat’s wings, feeling its healing with fingertip gentleness, near the captain’s dais, & there Zhed was leaning on the hindmost barrier, staring directly at the rails on which they had passed.

She was an odd one. A tall & muscular soldier, originally from South Kammy Hammy. She still wore the ostentatious leather of those warlike & oddball far-off islands, where wartrains ran on clockwork motors.

“Morning,” Sham said again.

“Is it a good morning?” Zhed said. “Is it? Is what I wonder.” She continued to stare. They twisted in the outskirts of a wood, trees rising between the tight tracks, & animals & flouncy-feathered birds screamed at them from boughs. Zhed put fingers to her lips & pointed at a spot far off above the canopy. A zipping flurry of leaves. A swirl of disturbed, rain-bloated cloud. “Look.” She briefly indicated rails to either side of the one they rode.

After long seconds with only the chukkachuchu of the wheels, Sham said, “I don’t know what I’m seeing.”

“Rails cleaned like they shouldn’t be if they ain’t been used in days,” she said. “Is what you’re seeing. Things moving like they only would if something was nearby.”

“You mean …”

“I think someone is near us.” At last she turned & met Sham’s eye. “For us. Waiting. Or tracking.”

Sham glanced around for Stone. “Are you sure?” he said.

“No. Not at all. I said ‘I think.’ But think it I do.”

Sham looked into the dark the racing trees shed as shadow. “What might it be?” he whispered.

“I ain’t a psychic. But I am trainsperson & I know how the rails go.”

THAT NIGHT, Sham swayed in his bunk to the Medes ’s rhythm, & the motion of the carriage through the dark translated itself into unhappy dreams. He was walking across rails, long steps tie to tie, shuddering & fear-stiff so close to the earth. The earth that boiled, that oozed with life, ready to take him at his first stumble. & behind him something was coming.

It chased him out of a fringe of trees. It was something, oh, it was certainly something. He tried to hurry & stumbled & glimpsed & heard a snort & felt the rails shake & saw something both train & beast, a snarling thing pawing the rails as its wheels ground at him. Grunting. A goblin of the railsea, an angel of the rails.

When he woke Sham was not surprised to find that it was still deep night. He shivered & crept deckwards without waking his comrades. Stars or little lights winked far out to railsea, miles & miles from safe hardland.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN an angel?” Sham said to Dr. Fremlo.

“I have,” Fremlo said, in that voice both low & high. “Or I have not. Depends. How long does a glimpse have to be to count as a ‘see’? I’ve travelled longer than anyone else on board, you know.” The doctor smiled sharply. “I shall tell you something, Sham ap Soorap, which, while not a secret, is not generally admitted. Trains’ doctors—we are awfully much more exciting than your sawbones is at home. But mostly, we’re not nearly such good doctors.

“Can’t keep up with the research. We’re years out of date. & what gets us into this line is that we want to think about things other than medicine, sometimes. Which is why I’m not wholly stricken by your variable interest.” Sham said nothing. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ll do for most of the things likely to afflict a traincrew. I am at worst a mediocre doctor, but I’m an excellent tracksperson. & I’m the only person—& yes, I think that includes the captain—who’s seen an angel.

“But if you’ve come to me for ghoul stories I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It was a long time ago, it was far away, & it was a moment. They’re not invisible, whatever you’ve heard. But they move fast. By byways & switchways no one else knows.”

“What did you see?” Sham said.

“We were off the coast of Colony Cocos. Treasure hunting.” Fremlo raised an eyebrow. “By a right tangle of rails, some rock teeth. We knew something was watching us. & then we heard a sound.

“A little way off, no more’n a couple of hundred yards, a clot of the rails tangled together, crisscrossing back & forth & merging into a tunnel into cliff.”

“The tracks went in?” said Sham.

“It had a lot of dark in it. It was full up with shadow. & something else. Something that, blaring that noise, suddenly & loud & awful, came out.”

Sham started as something gripped his shoulder: Daybe, dropped from the air, to perch on him.

“I won’t call it a train,” Fremlo said. “Trains, in all their varieties, are machines made for carrying us. This was for nothing but itself. It came out of that hole in silver fire.

“D’you think we stuck around to see it get closer? We hightailed it back out into the known railsea. & luckily it let us go. Went back for more orders from the great director in the sky.”

The way Fremlo said it, Sham could not tell if the doctor was a believer, or merely citing folklore.

AN INVISIBLE CLOUD squatted above the train. To Sham, everyone seemed contained, oppressed. No one said a word, but everyone seemed to agree that something was definitely following the damned train. Be it for angels, hungry monsters, pirates, marauders or imaginaries, the train was a quarry.

So it was almost a surprise that they made it anywhere. When, late on a beautiful evening in a stretch where the ground between the rails was thick with wild grass & tall weeds that rippled at them in wind-driven welcome, they saw a set of islands. Rocks where gulls fluffed their bums in scrub & eyed them with interest.

The Medes came closer, past larger landings, signs of habitation, more switches, electrical wires, lighthouses warning of weak-railed patches, & nasty rocks & reefs & pylons spreading & electrifying certain rails for trains that could run by that current, & then trains themselves, suddenly, shuffling or motionless, trains of every possible kind ranged around a great rocky land. On its shore a city. A place of towers & an architecture of scrapyard ingenuity & awe.

“Land!” announced the tannoy, someone from the crow’s nest, wildly redundantly. Everyone knew by then where they were.

Manihiki City.

BURROWING TORTOISE

(Magnigopherus polyphemus)

Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society .

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 3.1)

SO THIS WAS THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.

Sham did his best not to gaze like a greenhorn. Manihiki didn’t make it easy, though: the spectacle started before they’d even pulled into the sidings in the largest harbour in the known world.

They came through an endless chaotic catalogue of vehicles. Past crews that ignored them, crews that stared at them, crews in outfits that marked them out as Streggeye’s neighbours, & those dressed like illustrations or dreams. & the engines. Or, to be more precise—because not all the trains were engined—the means of locomotion.