Railsea (36 page)

TUNDRA WORM

(Lumbricus frigidinculta)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society
.
Credit: China Miéville
(illustration credit 8.1)

I
T WAS THE NOISES THE CAPTAIN WAS MAKING THAT
drew attention to her. They were not like any sounds Sham had ever heard any human make before. Naphi was not screaming or crying, she was not howling or complaining. She stood at the train’s edge, stared down into the deeps of the air where her philosophy had gone, uttered a succession of phonemes like those that might creep in between proper words. As if she spoke discards & language debris.

“Ah,” she said. Her tone was calm. “Fff.”

Sham was still dizzy with the abyssward descent he had just seen. He pulled his attention to the captain.

“Asuh,” she said. “Mhuh. Enh.” Clockwork-stiff, she walked to the edge of the deck. Sham went after her. He watched her with widening eyes. As he passed Sirocco, he grabbed a sharp tool from her salvor’s belt.

“Wait!” he said.

Naphi turned, face set. One by one, the trainsfolk on the
Medes
looked at her. Sham sped up. Naphi gripped the railing with her left hand. She drew herself up smartly, & saluted her
crew with her right, with the arm they had always known was flesh. She drew her knife, ready for close-quarters hunting, & turned to face the darkness.

“No!” Sham shouted.

Gripping the barrier with her disguised & enhanced limb, the captain braced on it, swung herself up, her legs up & around & over the edge right out into space. She turned, neat as a gymnast, & began to plummet, to follow the moldywarpe down.

But Sham was there. Even as the captain let go the rail, he stabbed with Sirocco’s tool right down into the heavy workings of her fakely artificial arm.

He had no time to aim. Just plunged the blade into pipe-work. There was an electrical crack, a
phut
of smoke & the metal glove the captain had worn so long short-circuited, spasmed, snapped shut. Held her still clinging to the side of the
Medes
.

“Help me!” shouted Sham, leaning over. He stared at the captain, dangling over endless nothing, looking back up at him.

“Ah now,” she said, in a strange mild voice. Her legs scrabbled & kicked against the train’s side. She prodded urgently at her own robotic casing with her dagger, tried to pry it off her, to release herself from her own inadvertent grip & follow her philosophy.

“Help me!” Sham shouted again, as he grabbed for her & tried to avoid her weapon. & here came Sirocco, & Mbenday, & Benightly, who with a hunter’s precision batted the knife from her hand. It twirled out of sight. They grabbed her. Together they hauled the captain back up onto the deck.

“Ah now,” she kept saying quietly. “I have something to catch.” She did not struggle much.

“Secure her!” Mbenday shouted. They held the captain while Sirocco took pliers & screwdrivers to the snagging arm until with a click it released her. The crew cuffed Naphi’s hands behind her back.

“Ah now,” she said again, & shook her head. She murmured. She muttered to herself & slumped. She did not fight or cry.

“The bloody angel!” It was Sirocco shouting now. She stood on the
Pinschon
, hands on hips, staring down like the captain had. She stamped & shook her fists. “It’s gone! It went! This is a disaster!”

Was it? Sham was too tired to argue or understand. He kept looking at the Shroakes. Dero looked down into the dark, holding his breath. Caldera looked like she would explode. She was wide-eyed, fast breathing, shaking with excitement.

The bridge was brick & girders. It arced down to reach the vertical chasm-side, a buttress pushing into the flank of the railsea among suspended pebbles, hard-packed soils, the lines of salvage. The bridge, the track extended into the coming night. Looked endless. “There’s no way it should stay up,” Sham said.

“It’s stuff,” Caldera said. Her voice shook. “Material we don’t know about.”

“Sort of Heaven stuff?” Vurinam said.

Caldera shrugged. “What do you think?” she said.

We are here
, Sham thought.
On a bridge over nothing. We got by the guardian angel! We are on our way
.

To Heaven. On a single rail.

“So …” Fremlo said. Daybe launched into the black, lurched right back, as if even the bat got vertigo. “So we’re here.” Fremlo said. “Now what?”

The way they had come, the tracks were littered with debris where Mocker-Jack had wrestled the angel into the void. It would take hours to clear.

“ ‘What now?’ ” Dero shouted. “Duh! Now we go on!”

In the quiet that followed, they did not hear the beat of any wings.

N
O JOURNEY HAD EVER
been like that one. The
Medes
’s lights were nothing: they shone a few silvered yards of rail in front, while on every other side was black. There were no junctions to negotiate, no points to throw. A single elevated night rail. Sham had no name for the percussion of a train moving over nothing, on brick arches, each arc miles long, each strut descending to whatever floor floored the universe.

The gloom at last began to fade. The sky went as gentle & clear as it did on any other morning, & above that clarity was the must & swirl of the upsky. To their star’d, to their port, empty air. Behind & in front of them, only bridge. Below them cloud, as far below as above. & they on the line in that birdless sky puttered on.

Now we see
, thought Sham. Out beyond moles, beyond salvage, past the railsea itself.
We’ll just see
. He had made it out.

There was life. They saw scuttling on the tracks. Lizards. & if there were such beasts, there must be bugs, to feed them. Vegetation in the mottles of the wood. A tiny ecosystem between rails, on the approach to Heaven.

The captain did nothing but stare as Sirocco wielded
trinkets & expertise & fixed Naphi’s left arm. The crew cuffed it to the rail, with heavy chains, for Naphi’s own protection.

“What if it just goes on forever?” said Sham. “This line.”

“If it goes on forever,” Caldera said, “then we’re in for a long journey.”

O
N THE EARLY MORNING
of the second day, they saw something blocking their way. A lumpy presence. They stared as they approached, at its fly-eye bulbous front, its spiked extrusions, its gnarled barrels, & Mbenday’s voice suddenly clicked on in panic from the intercom: “It’s another angel! It’s
facing
us! Coming for us! Full reverse!”

Chaos! Everyone raced, running to their stations, hauling to turn the engine.

“Wait!” someone shouted. It was, they realised to their shock, Captain Naphi. “Wait.” She spoke with enough authority that even unamplified her voice carried. “Look at it,” she said. “It is
not
coming. Look at it.”

The angel’s joints, the cracks between its plates of armour, were verdigrised & overgrown. Built up with calcified exudations, runoff from within. On it & in it grew moss & lichen. The angel was furred with the stuff. Boughs & bushes of it, in frozen gushes.

“It’s dead,” Dero said.

It was. The angel was dead.

The celestial cadaver was huge. It was on a double- or triple-decker scale. Even long-cold it made the watchers gape. It exuded antiquity. It was absurdly, ostentatiously ancient. Odd machine parts, sigils & script adorned it, like pictograms, like paintings found in caves.

The
Medes
reached it & stopped. The crew regarded it a long time.

Sham reached out with trembling fingers. “Careful, Sham,” Vurinam whispered. Sham hesitated. Prepared himself for physical contact with an emissary from beyond the world, in its endless sleep. Before he could touch it, however, a bolt sailed over his head & ricocheted off the front of the angel with a flat clang.

“Are you bloody mad?” he screamed, turning. Caldera stood with her arm still poised from the throw. The crew stared at her.

“What?” she said exuberantly. Before Sham could say anything Dero threw his own missile. Sham yelped, the object clanged & bounced over the side of the bridge, into the endless air.

“Stop throwing rubbish at the dead angel!” Sham shouted.

“What?” Caldera yelled. She was staring at the old engine with a strange expression. “Why?”

W
HAT DO YOU MEAN, THIS IS WHERE YOU GET
off?” Sham said.

“Which bit do you not understand?” Sirocco said. She smiled at him, not meanly.

“You’ve come this far,” Sham said. “You came this far & you, you rescued me! We’ve only a last bit more to go. Only a little way.”

Sham stood at the front of the
Medes
, shouting up to her. Sirocco stood on the tip of the angel. The two trains were pressed up as if in an unequal kiss. Sirocco had leapt onto the angel, hauled herself up its curve & had announced that she was claiming it, for salvage, while the crew stared at her quizzically. She had begun to probe & prod & pry at chinks in the angel’s carapace.

Whatever. But there was no way past it. There was only the one rail. & there would be no shifting that corpse. Nor could you haul a jollycart over its landscapey body.

“Well, we’ll have to walk,” Dero said. & while much of the rest of the crew, still befuddled with everything that had
happened, still awesick, you might say, had watched, the Siblings Shroake had strapped on their packs of dried food & water bottles & tools & whatnot, & tripped goatlike up onto the angel. Caldera glanced back more than once, stood at last atop a weather-beaten outcrop of angelback & watched Sham watch her.

“Wait!” Sham shouted. “Where the bloody hell are you going?”

“Oh come on,” Caldera shouted back. She shrugged. “You know fine well, Sham. We’re farther than they got, but we still ain’t there.”

“Where’s there?”

“I’ll know when I see it. Question is what you’re going to do?” She walked on, picking her way past copses of antennae, clots of rust, aeons’ worth of grime.

“Will you bloody Shroakes stop!” Sham shouted. Caldera hesitated. “Give us five minutes & stop being melodramatic. We’re
all
coming!”

N
OT REALLY
.

“This is where I get off. What makes you think I want to go to the end of the world?” Sirocco said. She had drilled an opening in the angel’s coating, & she was shoving her hand into its cold insides.

“We’re way past the end of the world already,” Sham said. “& I thought, I mean, you came for me …”

“Well now,” she said. “What I came for, in fact, is right here.” She slapped the engine-corpse flank. Her goggles were lit from within, illuminating her smile with pale grey light.

“Salvage?” Sham said. “You came here for
salvage
?”

“Sham ap darling Soorap,” Sirocco said. “I like you, Sham, & I like your friends, but I ain’t here for you, & I ain’t even here for any old salvage. That I can get anywhere. I’m here for
angel salvage
!”

“How could you know we’d—”

“Meet them? Everyone knows there’s angels in the way of Heaven.
Beat
them? I didn’t. I made a bet. & you should take that as a vote of confidence.”

“Sham,” shouted Caldera.

“In a
minute
!” he shouted back.

“I know you’d face ’em when I knew where you wanted to go,” said Sirocco, “& I had faith. I couldn’t
believe
it when that old mole took it down. Could, not, believe it. But then stick on a few miles & here we are. Do you get what this is? This ain’t nu-salvage. This ain’t arche-salvage. It ain’t alt-salvage even. This is a whole other thing. This is trash from
Heaven
. This is
dei
-salvage! & it is
mine
.” Her delight was terrifying.

“We need your help,” Sham said.

“No, you don’t. & if you do, I’m afraid it ain’t yours to have. I wish you well, I really do. But this is what I came for, & this I have. So best of luck to you.”

From one of her pockets she pulled out a microphone. Little as it was, the tech in it amplified her voice so all the crew could hear. “Attention please,” she said. “You can’t get any farther. May I propose a business arrangement? I know what I’m doing: you’ve got a conveyance. We can come to an arrangement.

“I know where to go to do selling. This is my hunting, like that great moldywarpe was yours. Same terms, same shares as if it was molemeat you were bringing back. & you think people pay well for moldywarpe bits? Well, you never
dealt in salvage before. & this ain’t any salvage. This is
all
our fortunes.”

“Fine,” Sham interrupted. “But I’m going with the Shroakes. You can keep my bloody share.” He raised his voice. “Who’s coming with us?”

A silence followed that.
What does it say about me
, Sham thought,
that I’m genuinely surprised no one’s putting their hand up? That no one’s saying a word?

“Sham,” Mbenday said. “We are not explorers. We’re hunters who look after our friends. We came for you. Didn’t we?” Some of Sham’s comrades were looking avariciously at the dead angel. Some were looking sheepishly, or avoiding looking, at him or the Shroakes. “So let us look out for you. You have no idea where you’re going,” Mbenday said. He raised his arms & the leather of his coatsleeves creaked. “Or even if there’s anything at the other side.”