China Mieville - Railsea

“I think I found the captain,” Sham said quietly. “& I think the captain don’t want much rescuing.”

An arm bone poked up from the bare dirt in a windowframe. It went deep. Near it was a broken cup, its jag filthy. As if it had been used to dig.

Sham was no baby. He knew, of course, how superstitions worked, that the earth wasn’t literal poison. It had been many years since he’d thought it really would kill him just to touch it. But it certainly was for real dangerous. His whole life he’d been trained to avoid it, & not without reasons.

He squatted, now, though. Slowly, he reached out. Tentatively, he prodded the soil in the window, snatched his hand right back as if from a stove. It reminded him of being by the shore back in Streggeye, clustered with classmates at the island’s edge, by the loamy earth of railsea where tracks tangled. Everyone goading each other to pat it.

Sham wrinkled his face, wrapped his hand in his sleeve. He tugged the arm bone from the ground & threw it from him. He steeled himself. He reached slowly into the hole, to find what the dead person had been taking out, or putting in.

He grit his teeth. It was cold & dry within. He groped. Stretched. Felt something. He fiddled, fingertip-gripped, slowly extracted it from the earth. A plastic wafer, like the one in his camera. A picture card. He put it in his pocket, lay flat & put his hand back in the hole.

“Sham!” Vurinam said. Sham pressed his cheek to the earth. Outside the cabin, he heard wings like ruffled pages, screams of returning daybats. “Sham, get out!”

“Hold on a minute,” Sham said, & stretched again.

Something bit him.

UP SHAM SPRANG like a spring-loaded toy, yelling in terror & trailing blood. Vurinam shouted, bats screamed & from the earth came a chattering.

Sham knew where the captain’s other bones had gone. He knew what had shredded all the clothes. He grabbed for the sideways door but, hurt, his hand couldn’t take his weight. In the window-frames, the dirt bulged. A dreadful bony sound sounded. Sham stared into the hole. From its deeps two eyes stared back.

The thing rose. It burst from its tunnel. Chewing its way out . A thing of pale, wrinkled corpsy skin, appalling scissoring teeth.

The naked mole rat launched itself out of the earth.

AS LONG AS HUMANITY HAS ROLLED ON THE RAILSEA, the rigours & vigours & bloody triggers of the underground have been legendary. There are predators on the islands, too, of course, above the grundnorm. Hill cats, wolves, monitor lizards, aggressive flightless birds & all manner of others bite & harass & kill the unwary. But they’re only one aspect of the hardland ecosystems, pinnacles on multiform animal pyramids. These systems contain vastly varied behaviours, including cooperations, symbioses & gentlenesses.

Subterrestriality, by contrast, & life on the flatearth that is its top, is more straightforward & exacting. Almost everything wants to eat almost everything else.

There are herbivores. Chewers on roots. But they are a small unhappy minority. You might think the Squabbling Gods of the railsea, when their bickering made the world, put them there for a mean-spirited joke. Look under the tracks & ties: the beasts that make caverns, that tunnel, that steal their way into others’ networks, that rise & sink above & below the groundline, that squeeze through crevices in the fractured world, that coil around roots & stalactites, are overwhelmingly, & ferociously, predators. There is something about the compact materiality of that realm, naturalists speculate, that heightens the pressures of life. By comparison, the island ecosystems are oases of pacifism.

This savage underground & flatearth does not preclude complexity. There are many ways—often ingenious—one ravenous animal can eat another, or a hapless woman or man. The beasts of the railsea give them all a try. For trainsfolk, this means a hierarchy of awfulness.

Fast flatearth-runners are bad enough, they’ll tell you, of the animals that scurry with hungry intent on the surface, overleaping tracks, but what provokes the worst terror are the eruchthonous. That is a railsea word. It means that which digs up from underneath & emerges .

& of those eruchthonous beasts, connoisseurs of animal aggression debate the worst. Size, voracity & the sharpness of claws, while important considerations, may not define the most frightful hunter. There are other, more uncanny things to consider. There are reasons a certain animal above all, one particular tunneller more than any other, has a uniquely horrible place in the rail traveller’s imagination.

WITH A SHOVE OF AWFUL NAILLESS HANDS THE mole rat flew at him. Sham stumbled. A lucky stumble. The animal flew over him, hit the wall & slid down, dazed.

In Streggeye Terrarium Sham had seen such things. Runt, domesticated versions, chewing what scraps their keepers threw. Kept carefully apart from each other. Below him right now, the wild cousins of those prisoners used guillotine teeth to bite paths through dirt. They rose into sight. They came as a colony. Collective soldiers. Thinking with the hive mind their Streggeye keepers so assiduously kept them from attaining.

The mole rats shook off earth. Like hairless, wrinkled mammal newborn, swollen to dog-size, snapping dreadful incisors. Eyes like raisins shoved in dough. They breathed throatily. The earth growled.

Sham jumped for the door-top. He hung. The beasts gathered. Sham heard teeth.

His fingers slipped.

He fell.

Was caught.

Vurinam, just beyond the door, gripped his arm & groaned in effort. The animals leapt & bit at Sham’s feet. Vurinam hauled, Sham climbed, & together they got Sham out. He fell among the crew in the sideways cabin.

“Go!” someone shouted. People jumped on what remnants of furniture there were, hammering at the earth with sticks & weapons, as it began to move. Hoe-toothed mole-rat faces boiled the grit in the window-frames.

Clinging to walls, overleaping the snapping lurches of the colony, the trainsfolk got up & out. Sham heard shots. He ran along the skew-whiff traintop.

Bats bustled & buffeted him. Sham leapt, he pitched, he landed heavily in the jollycart among the escapees, as Gansiffer Brownall & the others clubbed mole rats breaching all around them, & fired into the moiling ground. At the cart’s edge rose a flannelly animal face, all quivering whiskers & malevolent percussion. Sham grabbed for anything heavy & it was a kettle left for some dumb reason in the cart that his hand found & which he swung.

Vurinam staggered as he landed, smacked heavily into Unkus Stone. Who himself staggered to the cart’s edge, tipped, toppled, fell out, between two sets of rails.

Onto the ground.

Stone floundered. He sank a clear inch into crumbling earth. Quite redundantly—everyone saw it—someone screamed: “Man overboard!”

Mole rats looked up with a simultaneous motion, puppets on one string. The capsized carriage itself shuddered, as if something big & underneath it paid sudden attention. Synchronised, the mole rats dived, bite-burrowed towards Unkus. Moving towards the jollycart, a ridge was rising in the earth.

“Grab hold!” Vurinam shouted, stretching out his hand. “Move!” Unkus crawled. Incompetent quadruped. Mole rats moved in with gusts of stygian dust. Ploughed massively from below, that big furrow still grew. Stone screamed.

Vurinam grabbed him & pulled, & others grabbed Vurinam. Agitated bats swept in chaos around Sham, making him flail. The earth rampart rose & growled & cracked & within, Sham could see a huge hump of saggy skin, a mole-rat back twice the size of any other. The mole rats were a hive, & what was coming was the queen.