China Mieville - Railsea

“Who were they?”

“Just a family. I found something of theirs. A sort of a treasure map. Sort of. & they’ve gone off to find out if it’s right.”

“This is them Soaks. & you didn’t go?”

“I didn’t. Because I’m stupid …”

“Whoa, hush. Look. Tell me about it. I don’t think you’re stupid or useless. You’re no one’s fool, Sham.”

Nice to have someone think so. It was a scrappy version of the story that Sham told. He rambled about the wreck, spoke in vague terms of “evidence,” of “something,” of a secret that the poor dead prospectors appeared to have managed to keep, that the Shroakes had the right to know.

Robalson was rapt. “I heard Engineday they was going!” he said.

“That was … disinformation.”

“No!” Robalson said at last. He looked thoughtful. He looked grim. “I think I understand. The rumours are right!”

“Eh? What rumours?”

“The rumours about you.”

“What?” breathed Sham. “What are you talking about?”

“You made the right decision not to go, Sham.” Robalson spoke tensely. “I have to tell you something.” He was glancing side to side.

“What is this? What do you mean?”

“Come outside,” Robalson said. “I’ll explain. Wait. Don’t make it look like we’re going together. You’ve got to be careful.” He was not looking at Sham as he spoke. “Outside, left, there’s a little alley. I’ll go first. Five minutes, follow me. & Sham—don’t let anyone see you leave.”

& he was gone, & Sham was bewildered & not unafraid. He waited. He swallowed. He felt his blood rush. At last—head whizzing & not from booze—he stood. Was he watched? He glanced at the drinkers in the dim light. He had no idea.

Into the grey of local streetlamps, the Manihiki night. He crept round into shadows. Daybe came out of the sky & landed on him. He nuzzled it. There was Robalson, slouched by the wall, waiting by a trash bin.

“You got your bat with you?” he whispered nervously.

“What’s the big secret?” Sham whispered.

“The big secret.” Robalson nodded. “You remember when you asked me what my train was? Asked me what I did?”

Sham shivered. “Yeah,” he said. “You said you was—well, you made a joke.”

“Yeah. You remember. The secret’s this.” Robalson leaned closer. “I wasn’t lying. I am a pirate.”

& Sham discovered—as he was grabbed roughly from behind & gripped so he couldn’t move, as his unseen assailant shoved a fumey cloth up against his mouth & nose so great gusts of bleach-&-menthol-smelling stuff went into his lungs & made his head corkscrew into dark, as he heard Daybe shriek a bat shriek—Sham discovered that he wasn’t really surprised to hear it.

ANTLION

(Myrmeleon deinos)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 4.1)

WHAT CAN WE GET ON WITH WHILE OUR CONSCIOUSNESS rests? A researcher into the mind, a psychonomer, a thought-mapper, might claim this is a meaningless question: that we are nothing without our consciousness. When it rests, so do we.

Conversely, others might see this as a kind of paradox that gives rise to critical thought, to mental innovation. Provocations do not have to be sensible to help our minds rise to an occasion. What if ridiculous questions are an indispensable philosophical tool?

Our minds we salvage from history’s rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story. This is the story of a bloodstained boy. It is his mind that renders it down. But in such rendering we might defy paradox, perform the cheeky escapology of narrative, & thus the resting of that crucial particular consciousness might not detain us. Asked: What should the story do when the primary window through which we view it is shuttered? we might say: It should look through another window .

That is to say, follow other rails, see through other eyes.

LATE EVENING, INTO THE GLOAMING, THROUGH ITS DESCENT into night & that night itself, the Shroakes’ train went. It went untroubled by the darkest of the darkness.

The Shroakes checked expensive maps, used their fine & cutting-edge sensors, which surrounded the vehicle in a fringe of sensitivity. In those lines close enough to shore that Manihiki’s government claimed them as their own, the Shroake train, as much as any train could ever be said to, crept. It whispered along unlit.

The Shroakes wore their best clothes. Though the day was a secret, & though they had packed almost nothing but rugged, ugly items chosen for practicalities, each had made one outfit’s worth of an exception. A few miles beyond the shoreline of Manihiki, where their journey could be said to have started for real, they had changed.

Dero wore a fancy lapelled suit in blue cotton, only very slightly too small for him, & had parted his disobedient hair in the middle. Caldera wore loose burgundy trousers & a froufrou shirt that made her brother raise his eyebrows, & that she was not wildly fond of herself, but that was without question her smartest thing. She & Dero stared at each other with their identically brown eyes.

“There,” Dero said. It was a formal occasion, this, they had decided.

In the distance, the lighthouse of the main harbour shone, its beam rotating, a sweep of glimmering across the miles as the illumination touched thousands of rails in its passing. The train’s engines & equipment, its charts & intentions, were matters of interest, its passengers knew, to the government. So they rode darkly, days before they had claimed, to escape attention.

Eventually, beyond their nation’s immediate purview, they kicked up the levels of their strange engine, accelerated & turned on their lamps. From its front the locomotive was a light-cyclops, its blasting ivory beam flooding the iron tangle before it, sending startled burrowing beasts out of its way. The train went east, north, east, north, north, north. Whole generations, whole civilisations of moths hurtled at this luminously exciting thing &—so cruel a fixation!—were swiftly splatted on the light they loved.

If any had made it past that unforgiving glow, entered, what would they have seen? The foremost carriage shared something of the character of the Shroake House. More compact & cleaner, but its bunks, chairs, table, desk, discreet commode were, too, hemmed in by paperwork, books, tools & salvage.

In the uppermost bunk slept Dero, swaying with the vehicle’s motion. He woke occasionally & abruptly—such had been the shape of his sleep a long time, since two-thirds of his parents had disappeared. When woke he did, he would sit up & stare, as if through the metal ceiling, as if he were the train’s eyes. His gaze was the same as the one his mother had had when she grew tired of salvage, of piecing together & making things, & had looked, instead, beyond. Dero was too young to remember his inherited expression on she who had bequeathed it to him, but when his sister saw it on his face, she gasped, because she was not.

Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.