Railhead (2 page)

The K in K-gate stands for KH, which stands for “Kwisatz Haderech,” which means “the shortening of the way” in one of the languages of
Old Earth
. Only the
Guardians
know how it works. You step aboard a train, and the train goes through a K-gate, and you step off on another planet, where the sun that was shining on you a moment ago is now just one of those tiny stars in the sky. It might take ten thousand years to travel that far by spaceship, but a K-train makes the jump in seconds. You can’t walk through those gates, or drive through in a car. Rockets and bullets and lasers and radio waves can’t make that crossing. Only
trains
can ride the K-bahn: the old, wise trains of the
Empire
, barracuda-beautiful, dreaming their dreams of speed and distance as they race from world to world.

Nowadays most people rode from one star-system to another as carelessly as if they were traveling between the districts of a single city. But Zen was one of those who still sensed the magic of it. That night, like all nights, he kept his face to the window, watching the worlds go by.

Un-bang
. Tarakat: chimneys belching vapor and some big moons hanging. (The train sped through without stopping.)
Un-bang
. Summer’s Lease: white streets above a bay; the kind of place people like Zen could only dream of living.
Un-bang.
Tusk: giant gas planets tilting their rings like the brims of summer hats across a turquoise sky. There was a big market in Tusk. Maybe next time he’d go there rather than risk showing his face in Ambersai too soon. Or maybe he should just keep off the K-bahn altogether for a while; there were plenty of things to steal at home in Cleave.

But he knew he wouldn’t. His sister, Myka, said he was just a railhead, said he needed the K-bahn like a drug. Zen guessed she was right. He didn’t make these journeys up and down the line simply to steal things, he made them because he loved the changing views, the roaring blackness of the tunnels, and the flicker of the gates. And best of all he loved the trains, the great locomotives, each one different, some stern, some friendly, but all driven by the same deep joy that he felt at riding the rails.

Those locos didn’t care what loads they pulled. Shining carriagesor battered freight cars, it was all the same to them. They didn’t usually take much interest in their passengers, either, although they were romantics at heart, and you often heard about them helping fugitive lovers, or good-looking thieves. And now and then a murderer might board a train, or a banker absconding with other people’s savings, and the loco would whistle up the authorities at its next stop, or just set its own maintenance spiders on the creep…

Zen was thinking about that as the Interstellar Express tore through one last gate and the long darkness of a tunnel gave way to a cavernous rail yard. Stacked freight containers like a windowless city. Chilly reflections in ceramic tiles, the name of the station sliding past the windows. The gentle voice of the train announcing, “Cleave. End of the line. Cleave. All change.” Stepping out onto the platform, he noticed a couple of maintenance spiders scuttling along the carriage roofs. It made him wonder if the drone had pinged his details to the train before it left Ambersai. Maybe it was going to turn him in. Maybe he was not good-looking or romantic enough. Maybe the train felt sorry for the goldsmith he had robbed. As he went along the platform he imagined those many-legged robots jumping down on him. Pulling him apart with their mechanical pincers, or just holding on to him till the local law arrived.

They did neither. He was just letting his fears run away with him like Ma did.
I ought to watch that
, he thought. He knew where too much imagining could lead you. The spiders went about their work, checking couplings, repairing scratches in the train’s paintwork, while Zen walked through the barriers and out of the station amid a little crowd of other passengers, a herd of roll-along suitcases scurrying behind them, nobody looking exactly delighted to be getting off at Cleave.

*

Zen’s hometown was a sheer-sided ditch of a place. Cleave’s houses and factories were packed like shelved crates up each wall of a mile-deep canyon on a one-gate world called Angkat whose surface was scoured by constant storms. Space was scarce, so the buildings huddled into every available scrap of terracing, and clung to cliff faces, and crowded on the bridges that stretched across the gulf between the canyon walls—a gulf that was filled with sagging cables, dangling neon signage, smog, dirty rain, and the fluttering rotors of air-taxis, ferries, and corporate transports. Between the steep-stacked buildings, a thousand waterfalls went foaming down to join the river far below, adding their own roar to the various dins from the industrial zone. The local name for Cleave was Thunder City.

Zen had been just ten standard years old when he came there with Ma and Myka. Before that they had lived on Santheraki, before that Qalat, and before that he couldn’t even remember; so many worlds; a blur of cheap rooms and changing skies. They tended to leave places in a hurry, always running from the people Ma said were following them. But by the time they got to Cleave, Myka and Zen were starting to understand that the people were just bad dreams leaking out of Ma’s imagination, like the “thought waves” that she saw coming off walls and windows sometimes. So there they had stayed, managing Ma as best as they could. Myka had found a job for herself in the factories. Zen had been drawn to easier ways of making money.

Well, not
that
easy. The chase in the Ambersai Bazar had shaken him. As he came out of the station he could still feel the weight of that stolen necklace dragging his coat down on one side. It felt like bad luck. Wanting rid of it, he walked through the neon puddles and the white noise of the falls to the street where Uncle Bugs kept shop.

He did not notice the drone that followed him, training its cameras on him through the rain and the spray and the crowds.

*

Uncle Bugs wasn’t really anybody’s uncle. He wasn’t even technically a “he.” He was a
Hive Monk
, a colony of big brown beetles clinging to a roughly human-shaped armature, which they’d made for themselves out of sticks and string and chicken bones.
There must be millions of them
, thought Zen, as he stood in the dim little office behind the shop, holding up the necklace. A rustling sound came from under Uncle Bugs’s grimy burlap robe. In the shadows of the hood there was a paper wasp’s nest of a face, like a chapati with three holes poked in it—two eyes and a ragged mouth, with shiny bug bodies crawling and seething in the dark behind. The voice that came out of the mouth hole was made by a thousand saw-toothed limbs rubbing together.

“That is a nice piece, Zen. Better than the usual junks you bring me.” Long black antennae wavered at Zen through the holes in the mask. Most Hive Monks spent their time riding the K-bahn on endless, mysterious pilgrimages. It was odd to find one running a shop, but Uncle Bugs was good at it; he could haggle as well as any human. “Two hundred,” he buzzed.

That was at least a hundred less than Zen had hoped for, but he was tired, and he didn’t like that necklace anymore. So he put it on Uncle Bugs’s greasy counter, and a crude, insect-covered, coat-hanger-sculpture hand reached out from beneath the burlap robes and took it.

He came out of the shop counting the wad of notes, each with its smiling video portrait of the Emperor. Then he headed for home, feeling like he always did at the end of a job—like he’d flown free for a while and now he was going back into his cage.

He didn’t think to look back. He did not see the drone descend out of the neon fog onto the roof of Uncle Bugs’s shop. There was a flare of light, a quick clattering sound from inside the shop, and the drone reappeared. It hovered outside until a girl in a red raincoat arrived. She looked up at it. The drone angled its rotors and took off after Zen, with the girl following on foot.

The Starlings were living that year on Bridge Street, a low-rent district built on one of Cleave’s spindly suspension bridges. The houses there were all bio-buildings, grown from modified baobab DNA. They huddled on the bridge like dejected elephants planning to fly off to warmer climes. Most had gone to seed, sprouting random balconies and bulbous little pointless extensions. Zen’s family rented the top floor of one of them: a few shapeless rooms that opened unexpect-edly off a winding corridor. They lived there like three beetles in an oak gall. Their front door was a chunk of plastic packing crate, stenciled with the logo of a
Khoorsandi
rail-freight outfit.

Zen pushed the plastic door open and went in. Dim yellow light on fading carpets and cancerous-looking walls. There had been a time when his sister, Myka, had tried to keep the place nice. She’d cleaned daily, and tried out holowallpapers that made the living room look like a beach on Summer’s Lease or a meadow in the Crystal Mountains, if you ignored the downstairs neighbors’ amped-up bhangra booming through the floor. But none of it made much difference to Ma, who was as scared of beaches or meadows as she was of blank walls. When Myka started working extra shifts and hadn’t time to do housework anymore, Zen couldn’t be bothered to take over. Dishes heaped up in the sink, dead flies dotted the windowsills, and the wallpaper had shut down long ago.

Ma looked up at him with scared eyes as he let himself in. Her fine, graying hair made crazy pencil scribbles against the light from the window behind her. She said, “You’re back! I didn’t think you’d ever come back; I thought something had happened to you…”

“That’s what you always think, Ma. That’s what you say when I go to the food store for five minutes.”

(
And one day it will be true
, he thought. One day soon he’d find the courage and the money to leave this place for good, take the Interstellar Express all the way to Golden Junction, and keep going…)

“I was sure they’d caught you,” his mother grumbled. “Those people…”

Myka came through from her small room, still wearing the gray overalls and grumpy scowl that she wore every day to her job in the factory district. She didn’t look too pleased to see her little brother.

“Where have you been?”

“Here and there.”

“Riding the trains?”

“Those trains are part of it,” Ma interrupted. “And the Guardians. The Guardians see everything.”

“With everything that’s going on in all the worlds, the Guardians are hardly going to bother watching you and me and Zen,” said Myka wearily.

She was nothing like him, this sister of his. Or half sister, maybe—Ma had never told them who their fathers were, and they’d not asked. Myka was big, taller than Zen, broad across the hips and shoulders, with darker skin, and a cloud of black hair, which spat angry lightning when she tugged a comb through it. She knew what Zen did on his jaunts through the K-gates, and she didn’t approve, but she never turned away Uncle Bugs’s money. Without it, they couldn’t afford to live anywhere half as nice as Bridge Street.

“She’s been bad,” Myka said, deciding to talk about Ma rather than Zen and his thieving ways. “She was in a real state when I came home…”

“They’ve found us again,” said Ma. “They listen to us. Through the walls.”

“It’s all right, Ma,” said Myka softly. She wasn’t a soft sort of person usually—she was usually angry at everyone—Zen, her coworkers, the company she worked for, the
corporate families
, the Emperor, even the Guardians themselves. She had taken part in the anti-Moto riots, and sometimes Zen found her frowning over illegal pamphlets, dreaming of rebellion. But with their mother, she always kept her temper.

“It’s not all right!” Ma whimpered. “They’re watching us! We’re going to have to leave this place…”

“No one is watching us, Ma.” Myka gently laid a hand on Ma’s shoulder, but Ma, with a hiss of irritation, slapped it away.

Zen didn’t know where Myka got her patience from. Perhaps it was because she was older than him, and remembered Ma in times when Ma’s imagination was still under control, before the men started hunting her, the walls started listening. Myka just pitied her. Zen pitied her too, but mostly he felt angry. Angry at the way his whole life had been shaped by her delusions. At how many years she’d had him believing in her made-up conspiracies.

“They’re outside now!” she whimpered. “Spying on us!”

He crossed to the window, peered out through the misted cellulose. “Ma,” he said, “there’s nobody—”

And then he stopped.

He was looking down onto the bridge, at the narrow roadway that ran between the two lines of bio-buildings. It was crowded with pedestrians: day-shift workers like his sister trudging back from the factory district, night-shift workers tramping in the opposite direction to go on duty. Rickshaws and maglev cars pushed through the river of wet rain capes, hats, and umbrellas. And on the far side of the street, the girl in the red coat stood motionless, staring straight at him.

*

Just before a train went through a K-gate there was a moment of quiet, so short that only railheads caught it, as the wheels moved from the normal K-bahn track to the strange, ancient, frictionless rails that ran through the gate itself. That was what it felt like to Zen when he recognized the girl: a heartbeat’s silence, and then he was in a new world.

“Nobody there,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. He took a step back from the window, although he didn’t really think the girl would be able to see him. He kept watching her. How had she followed him here? She must have been on the same train as him out of Ambersai. But she couldn’t have been; he had not seen her get off at Cleave. It couldn’t be the same girl…

And then she raised her face and seemed to look straight at him, and although he still couldn’t make out her features through the rain and the shadow of her hood, he felt sure that it was her.

“Come with me!” she had said.

She had known his name.

So what was she? Police? An assassin?
The goldsmith must have sent her
, Zen thought. That didn’t make much sense. It was only a necklace that he’d stolen, and once it went through the K-gate the insurance would have covered the loss. But it was the only explanation he could think of. The Ambersai goldsmiths must be hiring killers now, to hunt down anyone who robbed them.

The girl crossed the street toward his building.

Myka was asking Ma about the evening meal. When Ma was bad she always believed that they couldn’t afford food, and that the water and power would run out at any moment. She didn’t want to eat and she didn’t want anyone else to eat either. Myka was being patient still, asking her if she could manage a little green curry. Zen wondered how he could warn Myka about the watcher without Ma overhearing and getting even more scared.

Through the smeared cellulose of the window he saw a shape slide past. If it wasn’t the drone that had pestered him at Ambersai, it was another exactly like it.

He dropped to the floor. Ma screamed. At the same moment there came a knock on the apartment’s plastic door, and a voice calling, “Zen Starling!”

Zen scrambled on hands and knees across the room and into his own narrow bedroom, shaking his head at Myka when she glanced at him. He stood in the shadows, as still as he could, like a kid playing hide-and-seek. He could hear Ma whimpering, then the sound of the front door opening. “He’s not here,” Myka was saying, and, “Can’t you see you’re frightening her?”

The girl saying something, too softly to hear, then Myka again, angrier. “He’s not here! Go away! We don’t like
your type
in Cleave.”

Zen looked around his room. The unmade bed and strewn clothes. Stuff from when he was a kid: his model trains, and the brooch he’d stolen from a stall at McQue Junction when he was seven. The brooch had been an impulse theft, followed by six weeks of guilt and worry. By the end of that time he’d learned something that he’d lived by ever since: it was possible to take people’s stuff without getting caught.

But he’d been wrong, it seemed. Retribution had arrived at last. He heard the drone go clattering past outside, circling the building. Myka was telling their visitor again that Zen wasn’t there. Ma was shouting too, words Zen couldn’t catch, angry and afraid.

There was a window above his bed, smeared and thickened like all the apartment’s windows, but big enough to squeeze out through, if you were desperate. It hadn’t been designed to open, but it turned out that it did if you hit it hard enough. It flopped out of its frame and dangled by a few strands of plant fiber. Quickly, before the drone made another circuit, Zen threw himself at the wet square of night outside, squeezed shoulders and hips through, tumbled down the side of the roof. The tiles were modified leaves, thick and leathery, overlapping like the leaves of artichokes. He grabbed a fat cable, swung from it, dropped to a lower roof, jumped across the narrow gap to a neighboring building. From there it was easy enough to reach one of the original supports of the bridge and climb down it, glancing up for the drone as he went, not seeing it. Falling into the microfiber mesh that was stretched under the bridge to catch garbage and would-be suicides, he scrambled on hands and knees through the dark under the roadbed, through the slices of light that came down through gratings, fighting his way past bundled greasy cables and the trailing roots of the houses. Below him buzzed air-jitneys and fat delivery drones. Below them, at the bottom of an abyss of lighted windows, Cleave River took out its temper on the rocks.

He reached the canyon wall that way, went sideways along some of the thick sewage pipes that clung to it, then down to the level below, using the neon ideograms outside a restaurant as a ladder. Waiters shrieked at him, but waiters were the least of his worries. What were they going to do? Flap him to death with their napkins? He scanned the busy air behind him for a glimpse of the drone, found none, and sprinted toward Uncle Bugs’s shop.

Uncle Bugs wasn’t the sort of person you’d usually turn to for help. But Zen had been thinking while he swung about on that mesh under the bridge. He reckoned his only hope was to buy the necklace back, return it to Ambersai, and make a full and groveling apology.

The shop was shuttered when he reached it. “Uncle Bugs?” he said, loud but not too loud, and knocked at the peeling door.

Which swung open, giving him a view into the cluttered shop, and a bad feeling.

He went inside. The back room was full of rain and the window-light-flutter of a passing train, both of which were coming in through a large hole in the roof. Uncle Bugs was still there, and yet he wasn’t. On the floor lay his burlap robe, his paper mask, and a few pathetic twigs and wires that had been part of his stick-man scaffolding. The robe, the floor, the walls, the furniture were covered with insects. A lot of them were dead: crushed or scorched. The rest scuttled around waving their feelers, or buzzed heavily through the air, which still held the burnt metal smell of recent gunfire. Monk bugs only became intelligent when enough of them clustered together to form a Hive Monk: scatter them, and they were just mindless insects again.

That was bad enough, but as Zen stood there staring, he noticed something worse.

The necklace that he had stolen was still on the counter.

So it wasn’t about that necklace at all. There was something else going on, and he had no idea what it could be.