China Mieville - Railsea

Through all the long hours of that day they trudged. Sham kept his eyes mostly down so the trainlines would not mesmerise him, the surrounds not make him dizzy. It meant he didn’t see the empty sky, the birdlessness, anything much at all, until Caldera shouted, & he stopped & looked ahead.

They were approaching another cliff face. It loomed out of horizontal haze. The tracks, the bridge dwindled threadlike to invisibility, but beyond the last of it they could see vertical earth. The far side of the chasm.

Sham swallowed. Stonefaces knew how many miles to go. They kept on. & every time he looked up that surface seemed as far away as ever. But then abruptly as the evening grew close he could make out texture. He could see where the struts of the bridge entered it.

In the absolutely dark small hours, exhaustion stopped them a while. But they had walked through much of the night, & it was not very long after that that the sun came up & woke him, & Sham at last could see where they had got to. He gasped.

No more than a mile ahead, the bridge touched land.

SLOWLY, WEAPONS UP, EYES WIDE, THEY APPROACHED A different kind of a different earth. Heaven was geologically distinct.

It was all rubbly uneven hillscape, slopes & steepness & crags right up to the sheer. They stepped tie by tie out of the air & under an arch of stone, by hatchways & incomprehensible trackside boxes, onto new land. Heaven had mechanisms.

They were silent, dusty from the crossing. The line took them through a grey gorge. Daybe circled the travellers, never going far. The peaks around them pushed easily into the upsky.

“What’s that sound?” Sham said. The first words beyond the world. A repeated rhythm—a subtle, unending hushing beat—came from up ahead.

“Look!” Dero said. A tower.

Above a jawline of stone. It was ancient, windowless, a ruin of strange design. The walkers froze as if it would approach them. It didn’t. They continued at last & the landscape slowly lowered. Until the tracks turned, lines of metal running now at last into—Sham gasped—a gusting, cloud-filled, silent city.

Low shacks, blocks in concrete, a town bifurcated by the rail. Destroyed by time. The crumbled remains of houses, empty but for wind. Birdless sky. Sham heard patterings of displaced stone. Daybe went up to investigate, but that empty expanse kept intimidating him, & he returned to Sham’s shoulder.

The travellers walked on rails overhung by decrepitude in a deepening cut. They saw no weeds, no birds, no animals. The sallow clouds of the upsky moved like nothing living. The railway cut through a wreck-town of long-dead concrete, banks of ossified rubbish, dunes of shredded paperdust. Under what looked like vines & were wires sagging with age & thick muck.

“So where’s this treasure people keep mentioning?” Dero said at last. No one looked at him.

Their footsteps were slow & unsteady. They walked on. & deep in his mind, staring into all the drifts of ruin, under which the remnants of urban layout were just visible, Sham became aware of something.

Heaven, the world beyond the railsea, was empty, & very long dead. & he, though utterly awed, was not surprised. Everything was made at once clear & meaningless, & his mind felt at once as near-empty & gusted by scrags & stubs of nonsense as this old city—& inhabited by a sly, growing excitement.

& then after Sham had no notion how long of walking, ahead was an impossible thing. Something that did surprise him. That blasted him, in fact, with shock. First he, then the Shroakes, then Captain Naphi gasped.

“What … is … that?” Dero said at last.

The rail stopped.

It did not double-back to rejoin itself in a loop. Did not tangle aimlessly among a collection of other lines, nor fan out to various sidings which themselves fanned out & eddied into randomness. It was not broken by landslip, explosion or mishap, unfixed yet by any angel.

The track stopped .

In a yard, in the shadow of a building, it approached a wall, & ended. Two big piston-looking things extruded from a brace, as if to push back on a train shoving against them, & the railway line,

JUST,

STOPPED.

IT WAS UNHOLY, uncanny. The perversion, the antithesis of what railroads had to be, a tangle without end. & there it was.

“The end of the line,” Caldera said at last. Even the words sounded like a transgression. “That’s what they were looking for. Mum & Dad. The end of the line.”

There were long moments of quiet, of awestruck gawping at the quite impossible flat stop . Somewhere, Sham realised, he could still hear an endless sibilant, like a repeated injunction to hush.

“You wouldn’t think,” said Dero, his voice hollow, “the rails could finish, would you?”

“Maybe they don’t,” Sham said. “Maybe this is where the railsea begins.”

BEYOND THE END of the cut & the rails—the end of the rails!—a crumbling staircase ascended to the city. Dero climbed while Daybe circled him. Caldera, still staring at it, walked past the end of the track towards a hole that had once been a door in what had once been a wall in what had once been the building. She moved with sudden urgency.

“Where you going?” Sham shouted. She shoved inside. Sham swore.

“Come on!” shouted Dero from the top. He ran out of sight. From within the building, Sham heard Caldera gasp.

“Dero, wait!” Sham shouted. He dithered, as Naphi followed Caldera. “Dero, come back!” he shouted, & ran after the older Shroake, into shadow.

Light & gusts of dust-grey wind came slantwise into a half-memory of a room. Staircase stubs rose a few feet in steep zigzags. There had once been many floors in this railside hall. All were gone; the travellers stood at the bottom of a concrete hole, shin-deep in splinters & plastic shapes once desks & ordinators. A maze & dented blocky slope where a building’s worth of filing cabinets had piled up. Some were burst open, strewing paperwork become mulch. Some were buried, some wedged shut.

Caldera scrambled up them. She grabbed at handles. Reached into shafts between cabinets. She pried at them. “What are you doing?” Sham said.

Her voice echoed out with the banging of yanked-open drawers. “Take these,” she said, handing back ragged papers. “Careful. They’re falling apart.”

“Come out,” Sham said. She handed him more. The metal creaked. She spelunked a scree of drawers, her hands full of folders. She looked lost.

“What is it,” Naphi said, “you’re looking for?”

“I need to know,” Caldera said after a long silence. “About … about everything. Everything our mum & dad always said.” She furrowed her brow & began, manically, to scan the papers she held. “About the railsea.”

“Know what?” Sham said. “Come out of there.”

“It doesn’t … I can’t …” She shook her head, hunting for meaning to it all. “I don’t know. Why did we do all this?” The report in her hand disintegrated. Her fingers trailed its muck. “Mum taught us this old writing. Points …” she read. “Oil stores …” She went through the sheets, one by mouldy one. “Personnel. Ticket prices. Credit. I can read it, but I can’t put it together!”

“You already did,” Sham said gently.

“I came here to understand!”

“There’s nothing here you don’t understand,” Sham said. Caldera stared at him. “You’ve known all this for ages. Things head out from here. You seen which way that dead angel was facing.” He spoke slowly. “ You told me all this. What the godsquabble was. Well, this is the town where it happened. The town where the winners were.” He raised his hands slowly. “& they’re gone. You was never going to find out anything new here. That ain’t why you’re here, Caldera.”