China Mieville - Railsea

“Is that it, then?” Robalson said, to Sham’s back. “Come on, mate!” Sham didn’t answer. Didn’t look back. Began the miserable trudge back to the harbour.

He slowed as he went. Began to feel the ache & scrape of all those injuries. Down the hill he went, through streets & by landmarks he’d not known he’d noticed on the way. Sham dragged out the journey. He more than took his time. He was thinking about the books. He’d clocked how expensive & rare some were.

A figure emerged from an alley ahead, cutting off his morose descent. He stopped. It was Robalson. “Books?” Robalson said. Meeting Sham’s eye, holding out the bag in which was every one of the texts he thought he’d lost.

“HOW DID YOU FIND THEM?” Sham’s question came after a flurry of gratitude & astonishment.

“I know Manihiki better than you. I’ve been here a few times. Second of all I thought I saw your bat circling over something, so I went to check it out. Well, it was: it was over this. That lot who went for you ain’t interested in stuff like this.”

“But these are precious.”

“They ain’t master criminals, they’re just out for a quick dollar. They slung them.”

“& you found me again.”

“I know where the harbour is. It was obvious you were having a bad day, figured you’d head home. So.” Robalson raised his eyebrows. They stared at each other. “Anyway, so,” Robalson said. He nodded. “Glad you got them back,” he said at last. He turned to go.

“Wait!” said Sham. He jiggled the coin in his pocket. “I owe you big-time. Let me … I’d like to say thanks. Do you know any good pubs or whatever?”

“Sure,” said Robalson. He grinned. “Yeah, I know all the best Manihiki places. Near the harbour? We’ve both got trains to get back to.”

Sham thought. “Maybe eight o’clock tomorrow? I have to do something now.”

“The Dustmaid. On Protocol Abyss Street. Eight o’clock. I’ll be there.”

“& what’s your train?” Sham said. “Mine’s the Medes . Just in case there’s a problem I can find you.”

“Oh,” said Robalson. “My train’s—something I’ll tell you later. You ain’t the only one with secrets.”

“What?” Sham said. “What is it? Is it a moler? A trader? Railnavy? Fighter? Salvor? What are you?”

“What is it?” Robalson walked backwards & met Sham’s eye. “What am I? Why’d you think I want to get away from the navy?” He put his hands to the sides of his mouth.

“I’m a pirate,” he said, in an exaggerated whisper, grinned, turned, was gone.

DAYBE CAME BACK. IT LOOKED PLEASED WITH ITSELF, lazily snapping at local beetles more on principle than out of hunger.

“You’re such a good bat,” Sham cooed. “Such a good bat.” It nipped his nose & drew a blood bead, but he knew it was in affection.

Sham followed the salvor’s directions. “Why’d you want to go there?” the locals asked, but they pointed the way. Through noisy machine- & navy-filled streets, into grubbier areas full of rubbish & quivering dogs eyeing Sham & making him nervous.

“He says he’s a pirate,” whispered Sham to Daybe. Images came to Sham—how could they not?—of pirate trains. Devilish, smoke-spewing, weapon-studded, thronging with dashing, deadly men & women swinging cutlasses, snarling under crossed-spanner pendants, bearing down on other trains.

“ ’Scuse me,” he asked stoop-sitters, hawkers, builders & loungers-by-roadsides. “Where’s the arch?” He could feel the streets descending. They were nearing railsea level. “Can you tell me where the arch is?” he asked a street-sweeper who leaned amiably on his shuddering cleaning machine & pointed him on.

This was a region of building sites, rubbish sites, drosscapes. & right there in among them—“How’d I miss that, Daybe?” Sham whispered—was the entrance to a lot. & over it, announcing it, was that arch.

Eighteen yards tall, triumphal & oddly blocky as if it were pixelated, it looked as if it had been cut, hewn as the captain might have had it, from cold white stone. But those weren’t stone slabs Sham was looking at. They were metal. They were salvage.

The arch was salvage. Arche-salvage, too—but not of mysteries. The nature of this had been long-established by scholars. The arch was mostly made of washing machines.

He’d seen a demonstration of one once. At a fair on Streggeye, a show of restored findings. Hooked up to chuggering generators, a whining thing like a needy animal prince issuing stupid orders: a fax machine. An ancient screen on which enthusiastic badly drawn figures hit each other: a vijogame. & one of these white things, used to clean ancients’ clothes.

Why would you use arche-salvage for something it clearly wasn’t for? When there were much bloody easier things to build an arch out of?

“Hello?” Sham knocked on it. His knuckles made the hollow machines boom.

Beyond the arch was a bony-looking leafless tree, a big garden, if he could call the tangles of bramble & wire that, if a scrubland free of plants but for exuberant weeds was gardeny. What the land seemed really to be was a resting place for endless bits of salvage, odd-shaped metal, plastic, rubber, rotted wood, festooned with sludgy ruins of old advertisements. There was a patch of scratched-up plastic telephones. Their wires jutted up, stiffened. At the end of each was a coloured receiver like a recurved plastic flower.

“Hello?” A path led to a big old brick house, with extra rooms constructed, Sham saw, of more washing machines, of the old ice makers called fridges, of antique ordinators, of black-rubber wheels & the hulking fish-body of a car. Sham shook his head.

“Hello?”

“Leave it at the end of the path,” someone said. Sham jumped. Daybe jumped, too, from his shoulder, & kept going, circled a tree. Watching Sham from a branch, a security camera winked. “What have you brought? Leave it at the end of the path. We’re in credit,” said a crackling voice from a speaker, that had been crooked so long in the V where a bough met the trunk that the tree had grown around it, embedded it in its skin, so it protruded like a bubo.

“I …” Sham stepped closer & talked into it. “I think you’ve got me mixed up. I’m not a delivery man. I’m looking for—I don’t know their names. I’m looking for a girl & a boy. About … well I don’t know how old the pictures are. One’s about three or four years older than the other, I think.”

Sham could hear distant bickering from the speaker, voices muttering at each other, disguised by static. “Go away,” he heard; then in a different voice, “No, wait.” Then more murmurs. & at last, to him, the question, “Who are you?” Sham could hear the suspicion. He ran his fingers through his hair & gazed into the clouds & the discoloured upsky above.

“I’m from Streggeye Land,” he said. “I’ve got some information. From a lost train.”

WHAT OPENED the door to him was a stamping figure covered completely in a dark leather costume, eyes obscured behind flinty glass, uniform strapped all over with charcoal filters & water bottles, bits of equipment, tubes & nozzles, shaggy & swaying like a fruit tree. Sham didn’t blink. The figure raised an arm & ushered him ponderously in.

The house didn’t even surprise him. After that arch & the garden he fully expected it to be the mix of sumptuous decay, jury-rigged half-fixes, splendour & grubby salvage it was. Past all kinds of strange stuff, salvage stuff, the silent guide took him into a kitchen. Also crammed, every surface covered, in bits of everything. Junk covered the huge table like unappetising hors-d’oeuvres. Trash sat under dust on windowsills.