China Mieville - Railsea

The next morning the groups parted with ceremonial valedictories, & Sham realised that they had swapped a few members. The whole convivial, he supposed, had only cost a half-day or so. But a couple of days after that he saw more rapidly approaching sails, & Sham thought he might cry in frustration.

This time, though, there was to be no relaxation, no nattering or supper. The newcomers were blowing alarm trumpets & waving flags. When they came close enough, he saw they wore expressions of misery & rage. They were waving flags & pointing. They were pointing right at Sham.

HIS RESCUERS STRUGGLED to explain. Somewhere, something the Bajjer treasured had been attacked. In a place they went to hunt & harvest. It was not an accident. & it was something to do Sham.

“What are they talking about?” Sham said.

They were not accusing him, though they stared in suspicion & anger. It was more tenuous than responsibility. Nothing was certain; these travellers had seen nothing at first hand, were passing on garbled information as it had been passed to them. But even as details faded farther from the source, the whispers that raced along rails & among traveller bands linked whatever it was that had been perpetrated—some abomination, committed by ferocious pirates, the slaughter of some band & the poisoning of their runs—to the story of Sham’s grub-trap rescue.

The few survivors of the onslaught said their onslaughterers had been looking for someone, demanding information to stop what they were doing. A lost boy. A Streggeye boy lost & got away from pirates.

“We go.” Everyone readied their carts & weapons. “See. All the Bajjer go.” East. Towards wherever it was that had happened had happened. Away from Manihiki, & from any direction the Shroakes might have taken.

“But …” Sham half-wanted to beg. “We can’t lose any more time.” But how could he? These were their people. How could they not go?

NOTHING PREPARED THEM. Three days into their eastward trek, the two bands sailing together, they reached the outskirts of the tract where the attack had happened. Where Sham had thought they might find injured escapees, perhaps dead remains, a battered sail-cart band.

There was a stink in the air. Chemicals, worse than any factories Sham had ever sniffed. They rolled towards smoke. “Look.” Sham pointed. A stench came up from below. Sham’s eyes widened. Oil & effluent, on the ground between the rails, on the roots of trees, dripping from the branches, on the rails themselves. The trainsfolk switched, swung, steered, their faces grim.

A grieving silence descended. Even the wheels seemed muted, as they reached splintered & scattered remnants of Bajjer craft. At the limits of his vision Sham saw a tower, a huge engine, of the type that dotted the railsea, drawing energy from deep below the flatearth. It was motionless, burning off no excess.

“Is it a spill?” Sham said. “Have they had a blowout? Is that what happened here?”

Other sails were approaching. Bands were converging as word spread. With signals, with coloured flags, they swapped what little they knew, going farther, slowly, in more disgust & misery, into a zone that seemed almost to be dissolving, sopping & destroyed with industrial slop, defoliant & toxin.

“This ain’t no broken rig,” Sham said. This was thuggery, a carnage of landscape. Someone was sending the Bajjer a message. No wild crops would grow here now. There was nothing to hunt, & would not be for years. The earth was motionless, animals all rotting in their holes.

Among the vehicles approaching, Sham saw one much larger than the rattling wooden crafts. All around him, the Bajjer stared at this act of oily war. Sham narrowed his eyes. The big train came out of the distance, venting diesel fumes.

Despite the depredation around him, the despondency & anger of his companions, Sham’s whole body lurched with shock, because the train approaching through the trashed-up hunt-grounds, escorted by scudding Bajjer-carts, cutting through the newly ruined railsea, was the Medes .

Even as the Bajjer gazed helplessly at the catastrophe, Sham let out a whoop of joy. & then another as, like a nuzzling thunderbolt, streaking out of the sky into a heavy sniffing kiss in his arms, came Daybe, the bat.

EARWIG

(Dermaptera monstruosus)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 6.1)

IT WAS BADLY BATTERED, A BRUTALISED & CREAKING train in which the Shroakes passed beyond any horizon most trainsfolk would ever see. & here their troubles began.

Actually—

It is, in fact, not time for the Shroakes. Not quite.

That phrase—here the troubles began—is ancient. It has been the fulcrum of many stories, the moment when everything is much bigger & more vertiginous than anyone thought. This is in the nature of things.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens —wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete.

That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

OUT OF THE EAST & SOUTH THE TRAIN CAME. IT howled, it whistled, en route through & out of the known railsea. It breathed diesel breath. An everyday moletrain, transmogrified by urgency & peculiar direction into something more than itself, something grander, buckling of more swashes.

The Medes was not alone. It came as part of a multitude.

Syncopating with the staccato of its iron wheels was the hard wood rush of a Bajjer war party, windblown in the Medes ’s wake. Like a huge semitrained predator, the subterrain Pinschon grumbled fast into the light where rails allowed, submerged again to tunnel alongside & below the hunters.

Leaning from the Medes , Sham was at the head of an armada. Don’t dwell on that , the voice in him said. Don’t even think about it. You have a job to do .

It had been a bittersweet reunion, in the mashed-up Bajjer grounds. Of course, the eruption of welcome from his trainmates had made Sham cry happy tears. The tears had stayed & the happiness gone when he heard what had gone down, of the loss of Klimy & Teodoso to a monster out of the bad sky.

“Someone punished us,” a Bajjer warrior said, staring at pools of scummy offrun in what had been fertile soil. “Who? For what?”

“Who,” Sirocco said, “is easy.” She had leaned on the subterrain’s hatch.

“You!” Sham said.

“Good to see you again, young man.” She touched the brim of an imaginary hat.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sham!” It was Hob Vurinam. Arms outstretched, vaguely dandy threads even more battered than usual by the remorseless journey, tiredness making him look much older than he was, but his lined face wide in delight. He grabbed Sham & they pounded each other’s back in greeting, & Vurinam scruffed up Sham’s now-shaggy hair for longer than you would have thought, only becoming embarrassed after a few seconds.

& there was Mbenday, jumping from foot to foot, almost as vigorous in his welcome, & Kiragabo Luck, more restrained but not by much, Shappy, all his trainmates, suddenly Dr. Fremlo to Sham’s happy squawk, giving Sham a huge & lengthy hug, then holding him at arm’s length & shaking his hand.