China Mieville - Railsea

Behind the huge table, looking at Sham with his arms folded over his denim overalls, was the boy from the flatograph. Sham exhaled.

The boy was perhaps two years older than in the picture. Maybe ten? Dark skin, short dark hair jutting straight up like hedgehog bristles. Brown eyes full of suspicion. He was stocky, compact, his chest broad like a tough older boy’s. He stuck out his chin & his lower lip as if pointing at Sham with them, & waited.

The person who had led Sham in peeled off the strange outer clothes. From the helmet fell shoulder-length dark coils of hair. It was a girl who shook them from her face, the other child from the lost picture. She was close to Sham’s age. Her skin was as dark & grey as her brother’s, though dotted with rust-coloured freckles, her face as fierce & furrow-browed as his, her lips as set, but her expression not quite so forbidding. She wiped a sweat-wet fringe of hair out of her eyes & looked at Sham levelly. Under the outerwear now puddled at her feet she wore a grubby jumper & longjohns.

“Had to test it,” she said. “So.”

“So,” the boy said. Sham nodded at them & soothed Daybe, wriggling on his shoulder.

“So,” the girl said, “you have something to tell us.”

& SLOWLY, stopping & starting, not very coherently but as thoroughly as he could, Sham went over it all. The ruin of the strange train, the debris. The attack of the mole rats.

He did not mention skeleton nor skull, but, looking away, he said that there’d been evidence that someone had died there. When he looked up, the siblings were staring at each other. They made no sounds. Both of them kept their bodies still; neither of them said a word. Both of them were blinking through tears.

Sham was appalled. He looked urgently from one to the other, desperate for them to stop. They did not sob, they made very little noise. They only blinked & their lips trembled.

“What are you, can you, I didn’t,” Sham blurted. Desperate to make them say something. They ignored him. The girl hugged her brother, quickly & hard, held him at arm’s length & examined him. Whatever it was that needed to pass between them did so. They turned at last to Sham.

“I’m Caldera,” said the girl. She cleared her throat. “This is Caldero.” Sham repeated the names, keeping his eyes on her.

“Call me Dero,” the boy said. He did not sniff, but he wiped tears from his cheeks. “Dero’s easier. Otherwise it sounds too much like her name, which can be confusing.”

“Shroake,” his sister said. “We’re the Shroakes.”

“I’m Sham ap Soorap. So,” he added eventually, when they showed no inclination to speak. “It was your father’s train?”

“Our mother’s,” said Caldera.

“But she took our dad with her,” said Dero.

“What was she doing?” Sham said. “What were they doing?” Perhaps, he thought, he should not ask, but his curiosity was too strong to resist. “Way out there?” The Shroakes glanced at each other.

“Our mum,” Dero said, “was Ethel Shroake .” As if that was an answer. As if Sham should recognise the name. Which he did not.

“Why did you come, Sham ap Soorap?” said Caldera. “& how did you know where to find us?”

“Well,” Sham said. He was still troubled, far more than he understood, at the sight of the Shroakes’ grief. He thought of that side-slid train, the dust & bones & rags that filled it. Of travellers & families & adventures gone wrong, & trains turned into sarcophagi, with bones within them.

“See, there was a time I saw something that I don’t think I was maybe supposed to see.” He was talking quickly, & his breath came in a shudder. “Something from that train. A memory card from a camera. It was like … they knew everything was going to get stripped, but they found a way to hide that one thing.”

The Shroakes were staring. “That would be dad,” Caldera said quietly. “He did like that camera.”

“There were pictures on it,” Sham said. “I … saw you. He took one of you two.”

“He did,” said Caldera. Dero was nodding. Caldera looked up at the ceiling. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “We always knew they might … & as it went on, it got more & more likely.” She spoke Railcreole with a lovely strange accent. “Truth is, I thought, if anything happened, we’d never know. That we’d just wait & wait. & now, you come here with these stories.”

“Well,” Sham said. “I think if someone in my family never came back … Which actually, sort of …” He took another breath. “I think I’d like it if someone told me if they found them. Later.” Caldera & Dero stared levelly at him. He thought of the pictures, & his heart sped up with excitement; he couldn’t help it. “& also,” he said, “because of what else was on them pictures. That’s why I wanted to find you. What were they looking for?”

“Why?” said Dero.

“Why?” said Caldera, her eyes narrowing.

This is something , Sham thought, & excitement filled him right up. He took out his camera. He told them, one by one, about the images he had seen. He thumbed on the tiny screen that showed his own, scrolled through one by rubbish useless one of rails & penguins & raildwellers & weather & the Medes crew & not much at all, until he reached that picture. The picture of the last shot Caldera’s parents had taken.

His camera was cheap, his focus was off, he had taken it as he fell. It was a poor effort. But it was just clear enough, if you knew what you were looking at. An empty plain & a single line. Rails stretching out to nowhere. Alone.

“Because,” he said, “they were coming back from this.”

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN WE DID NOT FORM ALL words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ widths from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

I CAN’T HELP WONDERING,” SHAM SAID, “WHAT THEY WERE doing.”

“You’re a moler?” said Dero. Sham blinked.

“Yeah.”

“You hunt moles?”

“Well, me, no. I help a doctor. & sometimes I clean floors & pick up ropes. But I do that on a train that hunts moles, yeah.”

“You don’t,” said Dero, “sound happy.”

“About moling? Or doctoring?”

“What would you rather be doing?” Caldera said. She glanced at him, & something in her look rather took his breath away.

“I’m fine,” Sham said. “Anyway, look. This isn’t why I came here, to talk about this.”

“No indeed,” agreed Caldera. Dero shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, stern-faced as a little general. “Still though. What would you like?”