Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  She glanced quickly at Zen and smiled, pleased with herself. “They say we’re welcome.”

  “How did you do that?”

  She tapped the side of her head. “Decryption software. I’m already starting to translate some simple phrases. I’ve recorded their sounds so that I can speak back to them…”

  The antelope things hooted and whinnied, dipping their heads.

  “They say welcome to… to Yaarm. That’s the name of this place: ‘Yaarm in the Jeweled Garden.’ Pretty! They are glad to meet us. They say it has been a long time since a new race found its way onto the Web of Worlds.”

  The conversation continued. The see-through newts had voices that sounded like someone farting in the bath. The things with tentacles used a complicated sign language, and when Nova tried to talk to them by waving both arms and one leg they rippled with oily rainbow colors that Zen guessed was their way of laughing. Sometimes she would send a message to his headset, explaining something she had just been told: It sounds very big, this Web of Worlds — thousands of stations… They call those living locomotives morvah… But mostly she was too busy trying to keep up with the talk, editing and playing back her own responses.

  Zen started to feel left out. Nova was so much smarter than he was. Frightened by all the strange creatures, he looked past them at the station buildings. Behind the platform rose one of the big structures he had noticed from the train. It was made from the same glasslike stuff as the platform, and it looked just as ancient, and sort of abandoned. Cracks and fissures ran across its surface, and it was overgrown with a creeping weed. The shadows were lengthening by then, the alien suns dipping toward the horizon. In the places where the shade lay deepest, the creeper glowed with a wavering, ghostly light, as if all its leaves and stems were made of glass, and hollow, and filled with summer multitudes of fireflies. Through the shining strands Zen could just make out some carvings on the walls…

  “That’s odd,” said Nova.

  “What is?”

  “I told them we came to meet the Station Angels, but they don’t seem to understand. I mean, I know they probably don’t call them Station Angels, but you’d think they’d recognize a description: giant insect things made out of light. You wouldn’t think they could have missed things like that…” She tried to imitate the way the Angels moved, but that just made the squid things ripple with brighter colors.

  So Zen did have something to add to the conversation after all. “You mean those,” he said, pointing to the carved wall.

  Enough of the aliens seemed to know what pointing meant that all heads eventually turned to see. He made his way cautiously through the crowd and pulled some of the glowing weed aside so that the carvings showed more clearly. Station Angels, flat as painted pharaohs in a tomb. They gestured with their mantis legs at stylized suns and fading lines of what might have been lettering. A noise ran through the platform crowd.

  “Railmakers,” said Nova, coming to stand with Zen, while the antelope and the tents and the see-through things all explained it in their different languages. “They call them the ‘Railmakers.’ But they say we are too late. The Railmakers are gone, long gone…”

  “How did they call to us, then? Those projections they sent through the K-gate, the ones that Raven danced with…”

  “I think maybe those were recorded messages,” Nova said. “The Railmakers opened the gates, and laid the rails, and raised these buildings here, but then they went away — they died — there was something called the ‘Blackout’ — some sort of dark age, I suppose. Now younger races use the Web of Worlds to trade. But somehow the Railmakers’ projections are still running, still calling and calling… Oh, Zen.”

  She looked sad, but Zen felt relieved. The Angels or Railmakers or whatever you called them hadn’t just been giant insects, which was bad enough; they must have been incredibly powerful, to build a railway that spanned the whole galaxy. They would have been like Guardians. Like gods. But these younger races seemed no more advanced than human beings, and maybe less so.

  “Tell them we’ve come to explore this Web of theirs,” he said. “Tell them the Network Empire has asked that nobody travels through our K-gate until we have visited their worlds, and met their leaders, and shown them the things we have to trade. Tell them I’m the Ambassador for Humans, and I’ve come to look around before our Empire opens trade links with these worlds of theirs.”

  Nova frowned. “But that’s a lie. We can’t ever go home. The Guardians and the Noon family would kill us.”

  “I know that. That’s why we want to get away from the gate, out into this Web of Worlds, just in case they decide to send anything after us. And it’s not all a lie; we will be trading. The Rose’s third car is full of Raven’s stuff, and it’s all unique here. Unique is valuable.”

  Nova laughed. She had been worried about Zen. She was glad to see he was still scheming. “But one day we’ll have to admit that we can’t go back.”

  “We’ll be far away by then.”

  Nova thought about that for a microsecond, then turned and told the crowd. They seemed pleased. They understood why the humans would want to see the Web before trade was opened. The Herastec themselves (she thought that meant the antelope-y ones) had kept the gateway to their homeworlds closed for many years after they first made contact. A barrier would be erected, so that no trains could pass onto the humans’ homelines without permission. And they would be welcome at all the stations of the Web: among the Herastec, the Deeka, the Chmoii…

  Nova found the box in her pocket. The Monk bug seemed to have woven a cocoon for itself in there; she could just make out the dark cigar shape of its body through the silken strands. She held it up to ask if it would be all right to release an insect like this on Yaarm, but some of the Herastec misunderstood and thought she was trying to sell it. Yes, yes, they would buy! They had no use for insects themselves, but they traded sometimes with the Neem, and the Neem liked insects, or ate insects, or collected insects, or perhaps were insects themselves (Nova’s translation software had not yet learned to cope with all the inflections of their whinnying language). She gave them the bug box, and they gave her in return three little rods of metal. She had made her first trade on the Web of Worlds.

  *

  After that, the newcomers were taken on a tour of the station city. Both small suns had set by then, but it was not much darker. Zen had never seen so many stars, nor such bright and brightly colored fans of glowing gas: plumes and swags and curtains of it filling the night sky with the stars wrapped up in them and shining through.

  “The Jeweled Garden!” said Nova, looking up at it, then down at the star-fields reflected in the still lagoons. “This world must lie in the heart of a nebula. It’s beautiful!”

  Everything had seven shadows, cast by the seven brightest stars. In that strange light the place seemed still more dreamlike. A blue-furred worm went by trailing a sort of bird on a silver chain, and Zen could not tell which one was the pet. The leaves of the windmill trees spun softly in the night breeze. There were food stalls giving off smells like chemical factories, and engine shops whose fumes smelled of peanut sauce. There were things so far outside his frame of reference that his brain refused to take them in and his gaze glanced off them, baffled. And then there were things that seemed startlingly familiar, like the jewelry stall where a couple of glass-masked Herastec were selling delicate spirals of silver and jade designed to decorate the tapering antelope horns of their kind.

  Zen paused there for a moment, studying the display with a thief’s eye. He was pretty sure he could sneak one of those horn-rings up his sleeve without either of the jewelers noticing. Maybe they didn’t even know what theft was in this corner of the galaxy.

  But he didn’t need a horn-ring, and anyway, Nova knew what he was up to. (The first time she had ever seen Zen he had been stealing a necklace from a jeweler’s stall at the Ambersai Bazar.) S
he squeezed his hand and led him onward. “No mischief, Zen Starling. You have responsibilities now. You’re an Ambassador for Humans. So am I. We have to be on our best behavior if we’re representing our whole species.”

  “So do these things not realize that you’re a Motorik?”

  “I think they believe we’re male and female humans,” said Nova happily. She was always pleased when someone mistook her for a human. “They don’t have many machines here. I’ve not seen anything yet that’s more advanced than Old Earth tech, except for those bio-trains of theirs, and I think those are born, not built.”

  “So are you going to tell them what you really are?”

  “No,” said Nova. “I’m not going to tell them you’re a thief, either.These are new worlds, Zen. We don’t have to be what we were anymore. We can be anything that we want. We can be humanstogether.”

  *

  That night a warm wind blew across the lagoons, whispering around the Damask Rose where she rested on a siding near the water’s edge. The wind stirred the curtain in the window of the sleeping compartment, lifted it, and let it fall, so that the light of all those nameless stars spilled on the bed where Nova lay holding Zen. If he had turned his head he could have watched star-gardens glowing in the sky and water, but he could not look away from her face. The light of a thousand suns and suns-to-be brushed her too-wide mouth and shone in her not-quite eyes. The shadow of the curtain slid over her almost skin, her custom freckles. He was giddy with homesickness and culture shock, and a thousand strange stations lay ahead, but he knew somehow that he would be all right, as long as he had Nova.

  3

  The worst part of being frozen was thawing out again. She woke up to blurred underwater aquarium light and horrible confusion. She was floating in a coffin-shaped bath of thick, cold fluid. The stuff wasn’t just all around her, it was inside her, filling her lungs and her throat. She should have been used to it, a repeat offender like her, a three-time popsicle girl, but she panicked, as she always did, flailing and clawing her way up through the still-frozen slush on the surface, puking and choking until the wire dollies who’d woken her took hold of her arms and legs and hauled her out of the freezer and onto a cold floor.

  Then she was shivering under a tepid shower, the last of the cryo-sleep gel swirling away down a grating between tiles the color of old men’s teeth. Peeling off adhesive sensor patches. Staring at her face in the shatterproof mirror above a metal sink. A brown face, still frostbite-blue around the lips. Her name was Chandni Hansa. She would have been quite pretty if they hadn’t shaved her head, and if her eyes didn’t look the way they did.

  She dried herself on the threadbare prison towel and put on crisp new underwear and a paper prison smock. Then she followed a red line on the floor through to another room to wait for another wire dolly to bring out a plastic bag containing the clothes she had been wearing when they arrested her. They were good clothes: a video-fabric kurta and swishy pants, a pair of little silver sandals. She’d bought them with the last of the money she’d stolen from a rich boy named Tallis Noon.

  Trouble was, she thought, pulling on the pants, all these things would be out of fashion now. The shopping spree that she remembered as happening a few days back, just before the Bluebodies caught up with her, had actually been ten years ago. That was part of the punishment, maybe. You did your time and then ended up back out on the street wearing styles that were ten years out of date. Which let everybody know you were straight out of freezer prison, which meant that you couldn’t get a job or anything, so pretty soon you’d wind up doing something that would earn you another stretch as a human popsicle. This had been Chandni’s third time on ice — or was it the fourth?

  She’d stolen Tallis Noon’s headset as well as his money, but they hadn’t given that back. It had been a beautiful headset, a delicate little bronze thing like a flower stem, with tiny flower-shaped video and audio terminals that pressed against your temple and behind your ear. Chandni guessed they’d given it back to Tallis, like he didn’t have enough money to buy another one. They’d given her a clunky-looking disposable one in a plastic envelope, which, when she put it on, turned out to offer strictly limited access to the Datasea and a lot of helpful hints on how to rejoin society. It seemed to be broken, though; it showed a date that was just six months since she’d been put in the freezers. Then she tried a few of the bland Datasea sites she was allowed to look at, and they all had that same date.

  That made her feel hopeful, and slightly suspicious. If she’d really only been in the ice for six months, that wasn’t too bad. Her clothes might still be in fashion. She might still have a chance to hook up with some of the people she’d known, not like the other times. But she’d never heard of anyone getting time off from a freezer sentence. (What for? Good behavior?) So maybe there had been a mistake. Maybe they were letting her out instead of some other poor popsicle.

  She decided to keep quiet about it as she followed the red line through to the final room. There were actual windows in this one — sunlight outside, a train crossing the viaduct that curved above the cold-prison. There was an actual person too, although she didn’t show any more interest in Chandni than the wire dollies had. She locked a tracker bracelet on Chandni’s wrist and said, “Your sister’s waiting.”

  “My what?”

  The woman gestured to the glass doors that led out into a carpeted lobby. Another woman stood out there, face hidden by a wing of black hair as she leaned forward to study one of the posters on the wall. “Your sister. Came all the way from Grand Central to collect you. You’re cleared to travel back there with her. I suggest you stay there. We don’t need your kind on Karavina.”

  Which was interesting, because Chandni was pretty sure she’d never had a sister. So most likely the person waiting in the lobby was the sister of the other prisoner who should have been defrosted instead of Chandni. So most likely she would spot the mistake as soon as she saw Chandni, and Chandni would be dragged back inside and flash-frozen into a bath of gel for another nine years and six months — a prospect that suddenly seemed so frightening to Chandni that she started shaking, almost started crying like a little girl.

  She held it together, though. “Okay,” she said, and strolled toward the lobby doors, telling herself there would be a moment’s confusion when the lady outside saw they’d defrosted the wrong person, and in that moment she would take her chance and run. Her legs felt weak from the freezers, but if she could make it to the K-bahn station, maybe she could get aboard a kindly train that would take her to another planet.

  The doors slid open. The woman in the lobby turned. She was older than Chandni and a total stranger. But when she saw Chandni, her plain, yellowish face split suddenly into a lovely smile. “Chandni!” she said too loudly and came forward to wrap Chandni in the first actual hug Chandni had been given since she was a kid.

  “Well, this is odd,” said Chandni, muffled in the fake-fur collar of her fake sister’s coat.

  “I have so much to tell you, little sis,” the stranger said, still too loud, taking Chandni’s hand and more or less dragging her outside into the misty sunlight. “I’ll explain once we’re on the train. Come on! If we hurry we can catch the twenty-six thirty-two…”

  *

  The 26:32 to Grand Central was waiting at the platform: a big Ngyuen 60 loco with a line of double-decker silver cars. Chandni started to relax when she saw it. She liked trains. No matter how strange it was coming out of cold-prison, no matter how much things had changed while you’d been frozen, the trains were always there, threading their patient way through the K-gates from world to world. You knew where you were with trains. Plus, there were lots of people on them, so if the strange woman who had just collected you from cold storage pretending to be your long-lost sister turned out to be some kind of psycho who wanted to murder you and use your skin to cover throw pillows, a train journey would offer plenty of chances to give
her the slip.

  To Chandni’s surprise, the woman had first-class tickets, which didn’t seem to go with her cheap coat. She led her to the front car and into a classy private compartment. As the doors slid softly shut, she took her coat off. Underneath she was wearing black clothes that looked both very simple and very expensive and made Chandni feel a bit overdressed.

  “My name is Kala Tanaka,” said the woman. “I work for the Noon family.”

  “You mean the people who got me frozen for ten years because their son said I took some of his spare money?” asked Chandni.

  “The Noons are a corporate family,” said Kala Tanaka patiently. “That means they have many branches, many different interests…”

  “I don’t need a history lesson about the Noon family…”

  “Yes, you do,” said Kala Tanaka. “Sit down.” She said it quietly, but so firmly that Chandni fell silent and sat down. As she sank into the soft seat cushions, the train began to move. “I am L’Esprit de l’Escalier,” it said, through speakers set in the tortoiseshell ceiling. “I will be stopping at Przedwiosnie, Glorieta, Bhose Harbor, and Grand Central…”

  “You do need a history lesson,” said Kala Tanaka. “You may only have been in the freezers for six months this time, but a lot has changed.” She pointed out through the window, where the buildings of Karavina’s small station city were sliding by at gathering speed. Like all the station cities Chandni had ever seen, it had found wall space for a holographic portrait of the Emperor as high as a couple of houses. Only, for some reason, this one didn’t show the Emperor. It showed a young woman of about Chandni’s age with blue hair and a kind of ordinary face.

  “A few days after you were frozen,” said Kala Tanaka, “there was a train crash on the Spindlebridge. The Emperor Mahalaxmi was killed. There was some debate as to who would succeed him, but eventually Railforce decided to support his younger daughter, Threnody Noon. She is the new Empress of the Great Network. She is the person I work for. And she is the person who arranged for you to be released early from the freezers, though if you tell anyone that, you will find that there is absolutely no proof of it, and we will deny everything. The Empress Threnody wishes to talk with you, and she wishes to do so in absolute confidence. You know what that means?”