Railhead (12 page)

It wasn’t easy, swimming through the air, scrambling like a climber along the walls, using picture frames as handholds. The bag he had rescued kept floating up and bumping against his face; the ray gun tugged him endlessly off-balance. His nose was plugging up, and he had a sharp headache, a taste in his mouth like salt and metal. Kicking off from the doorway of the inner chamber, he flailed through the hanging holographs and bashed into the cone that housed the Pyxis. It was still on its plinth inside.

Zen swung the gun at the glass, but it rebounded. He turned it round and pulled the trigger, and the recoil drove him backward and slammed him against the carriage wall.

The diamondglass held, but part of the cone had a frosted look where the impact of his shot had damaged it. He aimed at that place, firing again and again, filling the Noon collection with a thunder that he hoped would go unheard in the louder thunder outside.

At the fifth shot, or perhaps the sixth, the glass gave way. The fragments did not fall, just scattered slowly in every direction. Zen swam through them to where the Pyxis waited for him. He didn’t know what had held it to its plinth; it came away easily enough. He stuffed it into his bag as quickly as he could, fought his way back through the weightless carriage to the door.

The carriage was barely moving now, just lurching forward from time to time as the carriages behind bashed into one another. The only light came from fires, which had started farther down the line, a reddish and uncertain light that cast long shadows from the clouds of wreckage hanging in the air around the train.

For a moment then he felt complete despair. How was he supposed to move through that soup of debris? How was he supposed to find his way to these spacecraft hangars that Nova had talked about so blithely? How was he supposed to find Nova?

But she found him. Came scrambling like a spider along the carriage side and reached in to him, just as she had done on that other dead train, in Cleave.

“Well, the trainkiller worked then,” he said.

She looked at him with one of those mysterious expressions she had invented for herself. Maybe she had never felt guilt before. Now, with all those miles of loss and ruin around them, she had more to feel guilty about than almost anyone. “I’m glad I used it,” she said, as if she was challenging him to disagree. “The Noons would have killed you.”

“They still will, if they catch me,” said Zen. Portions of his mind kept trying to calculate how many people must be dead and injured, how many trillions of damage done. And he would be the one they’d blame. He had crossed a terrible line. He wasn’t just a thief anymore. He was a saboteur. A murderer. A
mass
murderer… They’d probably have to invent a whole new name for the crimes he’d be accused of.

So he needed Raven. He needed his protection. And the only way that he could get that was by finishing the job he had been sent to do.

He took Nova’s hand, and she pulled him outside, into the disaster that they had made.

A narrow tubeway ran along the side of the Spindlebridge, designed for maintenance Motos and the bolder sightseers. Once they had found their way into that, it was not too hard to pull themselves along by the handholds on the walls. So they made their way down the line, following a map that Nova found in her mind. They went past the wreckage of the great train, past the firefighting vehicles and the gashed factories, through the hooting klaxons and the booming bullhorn voices that told them not to panic, to stay in their carriages and await assistance. The air stank of burnt metal: the smell of cans on a garbage fire.

Halfway down the Spindlebridge was a wider section that rotated slowly. There was a little station there, tourist shops and novelty hotels, a park with bluegrass lawns and clumps of trees (even in space, those Noons had to plant their trees!). Refugees from the disaster were gathering there, glad of the centrifugal force, which provided something that felt like gravity and gave them back the gift of their own weight. The lights were out in that section too, but there were big observation windows that lay like pools on the floor, and up through these shone the kindly light of Sundarban.

Between the window-pools lay shapes that looked like bundles of lost clothes, surrounded by silent or weeping Noons. Still dazed, Zen wasn’t sure what they were, until he went close to one of the groups of mourners, and saw Lady Sufra lying there. Whoever had dragged her from the wreck had laid her out with as much dignity as possible, and lit a little cloud of firefly drones to hang above her head like mourning candles, but they had not been able to disguise the brokenness of her: the way her neck was twisted, her torn and filthy clothes, or the look upon her dead face.

Zen looked, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes to stop the tears, then looked some more. Telling himself what he’d been telling himself all the way down the bridge, that this was not his fault, not his, not all of it. Knowing that he’d never have the chance now to explain himself to Lady Sufra, or to say that he was sorry.

“Come away,”
warned Nova.
“Gaeta may be here, or someone else who knows about you.”

The whole station seemed full of weeping. Children howling for their mommies, tough Noon CoMa with tears carving tracks through the soot on their shocked faces. Even the wrecked
Time of Gifts
had stopped howling and was doing something that was more like sobbing: a desperate, desolate sound. Zen had not known a train could grieve like that. It made him angry, made him use his elbows to jab those stunned, tearful people aside as he followed Nova toward some hatchway she’d discovered from the station plans.

He was afraid whole raggedy crowds of Noons would be making for the spacecraft hangars on the outer hull, but none were. The K-bahn was the backbone of their world, and even as they stumbled out of the wreckage of their carriages, it never occurred to them that another train would not be along soon to take them to Sundarban. There the planet lay, bright outside the windows, but who would think about flying down to it in a spacecraft, when a train would get them there in more comfort and less time?

Well, someone had—the first hangar Nova found was empty. But in the second a dart-shaped shuttle dangled from its launching gear above a space-door made from a single wide disc of diamondglass. Below it lay the continents and seas of Sundarban, ruffs of white cloud gleaming in the raking sunlight.

They went in through the airlock. This outer part of the station seemed unaffected by the failures that were spreading inside. Lights came on obediently, and when Nova transmitted a command to the ship, a ceramic gangplank extended, leading to an airlock in its hull. Orange lamps began to spin and flash around the space-door, and stuff happened up in the tangle of ducts and plumbing overhead: sloshing sounds, which Zen guessed were fuel and coolant gurgling through pipes.

“Will it let us aboard?” he asked. He was wary of the ship and the long drop beneath it. “It’s a Noon ship…”

“You
are
a Noon, remember?” Nova said. “Anyway, it is a very stupid ship; I have already persuaded it to accept your orders. I’m transmitting a message to Raven, down on Sundarban. He can tell it where to land.”

“That was easy, then,” said Zen.

She smiled at him. A weepy sort of smile. Then she leaned close and he felt the print of her lips on his cheek and the corner of his mouth. When she stepped back she was blushing. Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn’t been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.

He was wondering if it would be weird to tell her so when a small red light came wavering across the shuttle’s hull and settled between her eyebrows like a bindi.

He started to shout a warning, but she had already felt the laser’s touch. She threw Zen down, and the bullets whipped over them and struck sparks and shrill noises from the gantry above the yacht.

As the sound of the shots faded, Zen heard the rotors of a drone, and looked up in time to see his old friend the Beetle flying into the hangar. Gaeta Noon must have ordered it to hunt Zen down, and it was obeying single-mindedly, ignoring the disasters around it and the damage it had suffered. It flew like a maimed bird, lopsided, dipping down to scrape the floor every few feet. Zen guessed most of its weaponry had been put out of use. Even the railgun it had just fired was silent now.

“It’s out of ammunition,” Nova said.

“Can you knock it out?”

“It has good firewalls. It will take a moment…”

The Beetle, which was nothing if not persistent, launched itself clumsily toward them, extending a whirling silver blade.

“Get onto the ship,” said Nova. “I’ll open the space-door.”

He started to tell her that she couldn’t, but that bright mind of hers had already flicked a parcel of code into the boathouse’s brain. The flashing lamps turned from orange to red. Klaxons whooped, drowning out Zen’s words. The door beneath the moored ship slid aside, and the boathouse atmosphere started pouring out into space. The Beetle went tumbling after it. Zen nearly followed. He struggled up the gangplank, through the gale. The shuttle shuddered on its gantry and the lights flashed red, red, red. He turned as he reached the shuttle hatch, and there was Nova scrambling up behind him.

But even as it hurtled away into the dark, the Beetle seemed intent on vengeance. Either that or it was making one last, desperate attempt to anchor itself to the Spindlebridge. Zen saw a spark of light out there, but he took it for a reflection flashing from some piece of litter that had vented with the air. A second later, just as Nova reached the top of the gangway, the grapnel that the Beetle had fired punched her in the back and drove through her, exploding from her chest in a spout of blue gel.

Her fierce grin faded. She looked wide-eyed at Zen. Stuff came out of her mouth, wet and blue, with little deeper blue fragments in it.

He reached for her. His fingers touched hers. For a moment he almost had hold of her. But the Beetle was still tumbling away from the station. The carbon-fiber cable went taut, dragging the grapnel’s barbed head against whatever Nova had in place of a breastbone.

“Zen…” she said, and then the Beetle yanked her after it, away from him, out into space.

And the boathouse was empty of air, and the ship was nagging at Zen to close the outer hatch, and there was nothing he could do but duck inside and let the door hiss shut. He pressed his face to the window while the airlock filled with air. He could not see Nova or the Beetle.

The ship still followed Nova’s instructions. Zen ignored it when it told him to strap himself in. A moment later he was flung against the ceiling as thrusters fired, blasting it away from the Spindlebridge. When the thrust ended, he did not fall, but floated free, weightless again. He shouted Nova’s name, but she did not answer. Only the calm, stupid voice of the ship, telling him that she had set a course for coordinates on Sundarban.

He went from the airlock into the main cabin, a livewood bower with huge diamondglass windows. From there he saw the exterior of Spindlebridge for the first time, bone-white and sky-wide. One end of the huge structure was in ruins, blasted open by the explosions at the rear of the Noon train, spewing debris and atmosphere into space.

But Nova and the Beetle were gone, lost in the never-ending deserts of the night.

“Well,” said Raven, when Zen came stumbling out of the ship. “That all went very smoothly!”

Night winds chased litter across a patch of scrub country outside Sundarban Station City. Along the horizon the lights glittered in a forest of high buildings. Nearby, a K-bahn line emerged from a tunnel in the side of a rocky hill, weeds growing as tall as people up between the rails. The tunnel had been blocked. Fragments of the shattered barrier lay on either side of the track, and the
Thought Fox
sat smugly waiting among them, its scarred old hull faintly silvered by Sundarban’s moons.

“You’ve got to tell the ship to go back up,” Zen said. He pointed behind him at the spacecraft, which perched on the sand, its hull ticking and steaming after the journey through the atmosphere. His voice was hoarse from shouting orders at it. Locked on the course that Nova had given it, it had refused to obey him. “Nova’s still up there,” he explained. “We have to rescue her.”

“Nova’s gone,” said Raven. “I lost her signal hours ago.”

“She’s adrift. In orbit!” Zen thought of her up there, falling and falling around the wide, blue world. “She’s Motorik,” he pleaded. “She doesn’t need air, she’s not like a human being, you could repair her…”

Raven looked up at the sky. The Spindlebridge was a bright star, low on the horizon. The sky was streaked with the meteor trails of debris hitting the upper atmosphere. “Sorry, Zen,” he said. “We need to leave. We can’t waste time looking for a broken wire dolly. She’ll burn up in orbit like the rest of the debris. She’ll be a shooting star. It’s what she would have wanted.” He grinned at Zen, and danced a few shuffling steps on the sand. “Now, what about what
I
want? You have the Pyxis, I presume?”

Zen held out the bag. Raven looked inside, and his face softened. “Good boy! Now we can really get to work.”

“We killed Lady Sufra,” Zen said. “And the
Wildfire
and the
Time of Gifts—
and so many people…”

“Best not to think about that,” said Raven kindly. “Give me the box, Zen.”

“What?”

“The Pyxis.”

Zen took it out of the bag. He had not noticed until then how unexpectedly heavy it was.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s just a box. A container.”

“Lady Sufra told me it was solid.”

“It looks solid when scanned.”

“So—is there something inside it?”

“Open it,” Raven suggested.

Zen looked down at the Pyxis, still clutched in his hand. It still looked solid, but suddenly a crack appeared, and then another, and it folded open. Inside, in a dense nest of metallic foam, lay a shining black ball. Across the ball’s surface, almost too fine to see, there stretched a labyrinth of faint grooves, an infinitely complex pattern, ruled by geometries that Zen didn’t recognize and couldn’t hope to understand: a maze so intricate that, as he looked at it, it seemed to crawl and shift.

“What is it?” he asked. “Is it more art?”

“In a way,” said Raven. He came and took the Pyxis and the sphere from Zen’s hands. “It’s very old,” he said, a sort of reverence in his voice as he ran his fingertip over the strange patterns. He replaced it in its nest, and the Pyxis snapped shut, the secret seams along which it had opened fading away. “It is very old, and it has been hidden for a long time. Thank you for helping me to get it back.”

He tossed the Pyxis into the air, caught it, and darted it into a pocket of his coat. He looked at Zen, and his eyes were kindly. “Come. It’s late, and you’ve been working hard. You want my advice? Forget all this. You’ve done your bit. You get to step off the ride now. It’s time to go home.”

*

Back through all the K-gates, through the un-light and the roaring tunnels, back down the Dog Star Line. Zen barely saw the worlds that flashed past outside the windows, nor the food that Raven put in front of him. Ukotec, Ukotec, Ukotec, said the wheels on the tracks, reminding him of the pictures he’d found in the Noon train’s archives, the
Thought Fox
rolling through passageways built from the crumpled bodies of the people it had murdered. The white noise of the engines reflecting from tunnel walls blended with the roar of the train crash, which still seemed to be going on somewhere inside him, as if echoes of the disaster were rumbling through the marrow of his bones.

There were sleeping compartments on the
Fox
’
s
upper decks. He dozed for a while, dreamed of Threnody, and woke again wondering if she was dead too, and knowing that, if she was, then it was he who’d got her that way.

Sufra Noon was in his memories too. And, more than either of them, Nova. He had never dreamed the breaking of a Motorik could hit him so hard. He missed her more than anything, her voice in his ear and her not-quite-human kindness. It was all very well for Raven to tell him he should forget it all, but how could he? How was he ever going to forget any of it?

*

He slept again. When he woke, Raven was sitting beside his bunk. The train was rattling through a long tunnel between K-gates, and the light from lamps on the tunnel walls came through the blinds and flashed across Raven’s face. He started to talk, and it reminded Zen of times when he’d been ill as a small child, when Myka or even his mother had sat beside his bed and told him stories.

But as he woke up and started to listen, he realized that what Raven was telling him was not a story. Not the made-up sort, at any rate.

*

“There was once a boy very much like you, Zen Starling. He lived hundreds of years ago, on a world way off down the
Orion Line
. Like you, he was a little too clever, not bad-looking, eager not to live the life his parents lived, but not sure how to change things. And then something happened that changed things for him. I’ve never been sure if his luck turned good or bad.

“What happened was this. The Guardians used to move among human beings much more often and more openly in those days. Sometimes they would download themselves into cloned bodies just to attend a party or take a walk in the evening air on some particular world. Interfaces, we called those bodies. The boy—his name was Dhravid—had seen them often, because his parents were minor officials, and they tended to go to the sort of parties and ceremonies that the Guardians liked to attend. He had met the Shiguri Monad, which wore the body of a golden man, and Sfax Systema, which appeared as a cloud of blue butterflies. He had seen the Mordaunt 90 Network, whose favorite interface was a centaur, truly exquisite, a triumph of biotech. And one day he met a Guardian who called itself Anais Six.

“It was at a summer party on the terraces beside the Amber River. Moonlight on the vineyards across the water, and the music of the songflowers. The body that Anais Six wore was sexless, blue-skinned, with golden eyes and high golden antlers. Dhravid could tell that it had not used interfaces as much as the other Guardians: it seemed clumsy and uncertain of itself. It kept looking at its hands, or running the tips of its fingers over its face. The boy found it charming. As he was watching it, thinking how strange and beautiful it was, it tripped on a stairway. He put out a hand to stop it falling.

“That was how they met. And, to cut the story short, it fell in love with him. And he fell in love with it. In the years that followed, Anais came to him again and again. Sometimes its interface was female, sometimes male. Sometimes it was neither. Different bodies, different faces, but he always knew it. Through all those eyes he felt the same immense intelligence watching him. It was flattering to be loved by something so great. And there were practical rewards, too; someone who has won the love of a Guardian does not want for much in this life.

“But this life is short. Anais began to worry. It knew that Dhravid would one day die, and it could not have that. So it stored a copy of his personality. He became data. Can you imagine it, Zen? Perhaps nobody can who has not experienced it for themselves. To become data in the Datasea: living in the information streams, but part of them, too. Dhravid became, not quite a Guardian himself, but a thing with many of the same powers. He put copies of his mind into probes and sent them to the far stars. He had interfaces of his own now: cloned bodies, all with the same face, his own face, so that he still had some tie to the person he used to be. He lived a thousand lives on a thousand worlds. He swam down into the data-deeps. He started to understand the very origins of the Datasea, and of the Great Network itself.

“And that was how he learned that the Guardians have their secrets. Why do they not like us asking questions about the nature of the Network? Why will they never explain the technology behind the K-gates? Why did they bury the walls on Marapur? He wanted to share those secrets, and they would not allow it. They turned against him. They turned Anais against him. They had never approved of what she had made him into. They made her rob him of the gift she had given him. She deleted him from the Datasea. He was left with nothing but a handful of cloned bodies to live in. Even those died, one by one, hunted down by Railforce assassins on the orders of Anais Six, until there was just one left. It was a comedown, I can tell you. To have been a god, and then to be only human again…”

The train passed through some evening world. Low sunlight pierced the blinds, flowing over Raven’s stern face. He was talking about himself, of course. Zen had known that from the start. Telling it as if it had happened to someone else, and maybe it had; maybe his time in the Datasea and his thousand interfaces had changed him so much that he was no longer the same person who had first met Anais, on the terraces beside the Amber River, where the songflowers sang.

Remembering his eviction from the Datasea seemed to have jolted him out of the story. He was silent for a while. Then he said, “They almost destroyed me, Zen. In this one last body I crept onto the Dog Star Line to hide. I did not think at first that I could bear to live like this. I wanted to die, and I almost did. But then I thought of the things I’d learned in the Datasea. The secrets that the Guardians do not want to share. I thought I would tell everyone. But who would believe me, my word against the Shiguri Monad, and Anais Six, and the rest? And as soon as I showed myself, they would track down this last body, and destroy it like they did all the others. That is why I chose to stay hidden, to bide my time, to lay my plans in secret…”

“What plans?”

“Things need shaking up, Zen. Everything keeps repeating itself, century after century. Empires rise up and grow old, and there’s always some new would-be Emperor waiting in the wings to take their turn. Dark ages come and go. People are born and people die. It’s so
pointless
. The Guardians mean well, but they have shunted the whole human race onto a branch line of history, and we keep trundling round in circles. It’s time someone changed that.”

The train pierced a K-gate. It seemed to rouse Raven from his thoughts. He looked down at Zen, and when he spoke again his voice, which had sunk to a whisper, was its normal flat self again.

“Come, Zen Starling. Here’s where your adventure ends.”

*

He took Zen back down into the carriage. On the seats lay Zen’s old clothes. He climbed out of the ones Raven had given him and put them on, his foil jeans and ancient smart-coat. The only thing that had changed was the headset he found in the coat pocket. It was the double of the one he’d been wearing on the Noon train, and he started to put it on without thinking, imagining he’d hear Nova whisper in his ear. Then he remembered. Until Desdemor he had always been alone, and he had thought he liked being that way. Then, with Nova, he had found someone with whom he could share everything. Losing her again was more painful than anything he had ever known. He could not believe how much it hurt. This was the feeling people write all those songs about, he thought, all those poems and movies. Heartbreak. He had always thought they must be exaggerating.

Quickly, making sure that Raven didn’t see, he pocketed the old headset too. Perhaps it still held a recording of her voice, at least, a few views of Tu’Va and Jangala to prove it hadn’t all been some strange dream.

“What about making me rich?” he said. “What about what you promised to give me? Was that just a lie?”

“I’m letting you live, Zen,” said Raven. “That’s your reward. If you ever try coming after me, I might take it away.”

The
Thought Fox
banged through another gate and slowed, pulling into a darkened station. The light from the windows shone on a roof of ceramic tiles, a few Station Angels that danced and faded over a deserted platform. When the doors opened, Zen could smell burnt dust and stale air.

He stepped out onto the platform. The
Thought Fox
closed its doors behind him and let out a long hiss, which may have been its own way of saying goodbye. He saw Raven for a moment, standing behind the glass, one hand raised in a sort of salute. The platform flickered like one of Nova’s movies. Then the train was gone, and dark descended. The noise of engines faded and then cut out completely as, somewhere up the line, a K-gate opened and the train passed through it. Dead leaves whispered along the platform, dancing in the wind of the train’s departure just as they had danced when it first opened its doors for him. And then he realized that they never had been leaves, only the tiny dried-up corpses of insects.

He found his way through silent passageways and cobwebbed turnstiles to an old emergency exit. It opened for him. He stumbled out into the hot metal stink, the waterfall thunder, the never-ending noisy dusk of Cleave.

At first he wasn’t sure where he was. He put the new headset on, hoping to call up a map, and it was then that he found Raven’s gift. The headset was preloaded with false IDs and travel documents for him, and Ma, and Myka. There was a link to a bank in the local data raft. He blinked the link, and steadied himself against a wall as the details of his new accounts superimposed themselves over his vision, blotting out the dingy, spray-wet street with clouds of zeroes.

Not really a gift, of course. He’d earned all that money by lifting the Pyxis. It was payment for services rendered. For a moment, he thought about snatching the headset off and throwing it into the nearest waterfall.