Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  Threnody shrugged. But she thought she knew why Chandni had done what she did. She had just been trying to keep herself and Threnody alive. She had thought Zen was leading them to disaster, and she had probably been right — she couldn’t have known the Neem were going to arrive. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked. “If you’d said the Neem were going to help, your plan would have made sense…”

  “I didn’t know,” said Zen.

  “So it was just a coincidence?” asked Nova’s head, in its tinny little voice. “The Neem busting in had nothing to do with you?”

  Zen was silent. He was thinking that if he said he had planned it all, it would make him seem like a mastermind, but Nova and Threnody both knew that he wasn’t, and he didn’t think that he could keep up the lie.

  He shook his head.

  “Well, that was a stroke of luck, then,” said Nova.

  “Not at all!” said the Neem that called itself Uncle Bugs. “The Nestworld Zzr’zrrt is only one gate away. The Kraitt are our neighbors, and if you have neighbors like the Kraitt, you keep an eye on them. We had an agent in the Tzeld Gekh’s house, a hive without a suit. Her people thought it was just an infestation of insects. The Neem have long been wary of her tinkerings with technology. We cannot let those rude lizards develop weapons that would allow them to assault our Nestworlds. Our agent sent word when Miss Nova arrived. When I told the Mother-hives what Miss Nova was, it was decided to send a team to the Shards of Kharne to observe the situation. Some of our hives trade minerals with the Karneiss, so a Neem train arriving was not unusual. We were planning to attack the Tzeld Gekh’s house only if she seemed to be making progress, but when I saw you arrive, I guessed that you were planning rescues. So I persuaded the others that we must help.”

  “We’re grateful,” said Zen, though he was still uneasy about being cooped up in a carriage with those big, spiny arachnid bodies, even now that he knew they were just suits. He could hear the billion beetles that made up Uncle Bugs and his friend, seething and stirring inside their carapaces.

  The Damask Rose was uneasy too. “The Neem morvah is hooting at me,” she announced. “I think it wants me to go on.”

  “Yes!” said Uncle Bugs. “We must not stay here, in case the Kraitt come after us. The next gate leads to the Nestworld Zzr’zrrt. We will be safe there, among the many hives. And I will show you the Nestworld, Zen Starling: the Insect Lines my people longed for!”

  “What about the way home?” Threnody asked Zen.

  In the chaos on the Shards he had forgotten that he had ever promised her such a thing, but Nova guessed what she meant. “We’re already on our way. The border of the Black Light Zone is farther down this line, beyond the Nestworld,” she said.

  “And there is really a gate in this Black Light Zone that leads back home?”

  “There has to be. The Neem prove it. They’re made of Monk bugs, just like our Hive Monks are. That means there must have been K-gates connecting our Network with the Web of Worlds at some point.”

  “And you think we can open them again?” asked Threnody.

  “Only one way to find out,” said Nova’s head, cheerfully.

  The train was moving again. The interface came swaying through from the dining car, carrying a big metal tray filled with bowls of rice and small pots of spicy sauces. Little wedges of steaming flatbread had been stuck in between the pots at jaunty angles, garnished with sprigs of edible greenery that the Rose’s spiders had found growing beside the tracks somewhere.

  Threnody grabbed some and started eating. When the Neem came and the fighting started, she’d thought it was the end of her. Finding that she was still alive after all had given her a fearsome appetite.

  Zen couldn’t eat anything. He carried Nova’s head through to the rear car, and the Neem followed with her body. Nova had already been communicating wirelessly with the 3-D printer, and it was whirring away, creating the components she would need to repair herself. The Neem set her body down on the seat beside the printer, and she reached out and took her head from Zen. She smiled at him as she carefully fitted it back into place, the ends of ducts and cables reaching out like eager little snakes to reconnect with each other, ceramic vertebrae locking into place with a satisfying click. “Zen, I missed you so much,” she said.

  “Me too. Missed you, I mean.”

  “You’re always coming back for me.”

  “That was the last time,” he said, mock-sternly. “I don’t know what would have happened if the Neem hadn’t shown up when they did.” But he knew really. The knowledge of how close he’d come to dying made him tremble now.

  “You need to rest,” said Nova, smiling up at him. The shock of finding her in kit form was leaving him; she was becoming herself again, and lovely. “Go and sit down, and eat something,” she said, brushing his face with her remaining hand. “Uncle Bugs and his friend can help me here. I’ll come and find you when I’ve pulled myself together.”

  So he left her there, with the Neem using their delicate manipulator-arms to fit freshly printed parts into the holes the Kraitt had made in her, and went back to the state car. The interface had fallen asleep again, and Threnody was finishing off the food, scooping the last smears of sauce out of the bottoms of the little bowls with chunks of flatbread. She looked up when Zen came in and said, “How is your Moto? Is she ready to show us the way home?”

  “She’ll be fine,” he said.

  “You don’t look very happy about it.”

  Zen slid into the seat opposite her and helped himself to a last triangle of flatbread before it vanished. He was happy; he just wished Threnody had not seen Nova like that, with the secret machinery of her insides laid bare. He wanted her to understand how he felt when he lay beside Nova in the flickering light of the passing lamps of unknown stations, how he felt when she smiled at him, when her wise eyes narrowed and looked at him as if he was someone worthwhile and wonderful. But he couldn’t explain that. Threnody was about his own age, maybe a year older, but she seemed suddenly very young to him, because he had learned, and she had not, that love grew wild and didn’t much care about things like who was human and who was a machine.

  “So do you think she’s right?” Threnody said, wiping chutney off her chin and trying to look empress-y. “Can she find our way home?”

  “Yes. I mean — Nova’s usually right. But…”

  “What?”

  “It could be dangerous. Everyone else on the Web of Worlds is afraid of the Zone.”

  “Who cares? They’re primitives. I expect they still believe in gods and ghosts. I’m sure we can handle whatever’s out there.”

  “Maybe. But what do you think the Guardians will do with us, if we do ever make it back to the Network Empire?”

  “We have a version of Mordaunt 90 with us,” said Threnody, turning to look at the interface, who was snoring softly with his head resting against the window. “The instant we arrive on a world with a Datasea he can start communicating with the other Guardians.”

  “But the Guardians don’t like you. They let the Prells kick your family out of power.”

  “That was the Twins,” said Threnody icily. “And when the other Guardians hear about what the Twins did on Desdemor, they’ll stop letting them have their own way.”

  “And what about me?” asked Zen. “It’s all right for you — you’re a Noon and everything…” He wondered if he should tell her that he had Noon blood too; how his mother had run off with the surrogate baby she had been carrying for some rich Noon couple, and brought him up as plain Zen Starling. But that wouldn’t help; to Threnody it would just mean that his mother was a thief too. The family would long ago have had a new son to replace him; they wouldn’t want him back. Better if she just thought he was a kid from Cleave. “I’m nothing,” he said with a shrug.

  “That’s true,” said Threnody. “But you have served me well, Z
en Starling. We would not even be thinking about going home if it wasn’t for you and your Motorik. I’ll make sure you’re all right, when we get there.”

  They were quiet for a while, eating the last of the flatbreads. Then Zen said, “I’m sorry for everything. The Noon train. Lying to you, and the Spindlebridge.” Hating himself as he said it. “Sorry.” As if he’d dropped her favorite mug or forgotten to feed her goldfish. It wasn’t enough. She had told him how everything had spiraled after he left. Kobi’s death, the Prell attack. You couldn’t just apologize for the kind of things he’d caused.

  But Threnody nodded, and looked away, and said, “Malik told me it wasn’t your fault. He said this Raven person made you and Nova let loose the program that broke the Noon train. I suppose you didn’t know how much damage it would cause.”

  “We guessed,” said Zen. “We both guessed.”

  Threnody kept looking out of the window. She couldn’t afford to hate him. She needed him too badly. She couldn’t afford to hate him yet.

  “Just get me home,” she said. “Then we will be even.”

  32

  Zen dreamed of insects and woke to find the dreams were real. The train had stopped, and the bare world that had been passing outside the windows when he fell asleep had been replaced with an overstuffed one where spindly towers, apparently built from burnt toffee, poked up into a murky, sulfur-yellow overcast. Swarms of bugs billowed between the buildings like twisting ribbons of black smoke. Rivers of them poured up and down the walls, their beetle bodies shining in the jaundiced light, and between them scuttled the Neem crab-suits. Wood lice morvah rumbled past, trailing their long lines of windowless cars.

  He stretched, blinking the sleep away. He had dozed off in his seat.

  “Welcome to the Nestworld Zzr’zrrt,” said Nova, who was sitting with Threnody at the state car’s dining table. She was herself again, except that her newly printed left hand had not yet matched its pigment to the rest of her and was still dead white. It held a triangle of cinnamon toast that she was eating corners first. She had not often eaten since they came through Raven’s gate, saving the Rose’s stocks of human food for Zen. “I hope you don’t mind?” she said. “I need all the energy I can get. My body was on reserve power, and the new batteries the Rose printed for me aren’t fully charged yet. Anyway, I missed the taste.” She put down her toast and came to Zen and kissed him. “I missed the taste of you too.”

  Zen held her. He pressed his face against the side of her face, breathing in the soft vinyl smell of her, like the smell of a new toy. He kissed gently the collar of fresh synthiflesh around her neck that marked the join where her head had been reattached. He would have liked to have gone on kissing her, but Threnody was still there, looking determinedly out of the window at the ugly view, so he sat down instead and said, “Where’s Uncle Bugs?”

  “He’s gone back to his own train,” said Nova, leaning over him to peer out of the window. “The Neem are running a hell of a greenhouse effect on this planet. One hundred degrees in the shade and lots of lovely, bracing CO2. They must like it that way. It won’t be good for you, though. You’ll need to suit up before you go outside.”

  “I’m not going out there!” Zen said.

  “We all are,” said Threnody. “We need to ask the Neem for supplies and fuel and permission to travel through this world into the Black Light Zone. Uncle Bugs is taking us to meet something called a Mother-hive.”

  *

  There were only three space suits in the rear car, so Nova had to go without, but it didn’t matter — the Neem already knew what she was. The others suited up and she followed them out through the emergency airlock at the back of the carriage, pulling the hood of her raincoat up against the dirty rain. A thing like a ski lift was ferrying Neem up to the higher levels of their city. Uncle Bugs fitted himself into one of its metal harnesses, folded his long legs beneath him, and let himself be carried upward. Nova, the two humans, and the interface followed, holding on tight, their own legs dangling as the harnesses went grinding up a long cable, through the honeycomb interior of the nest-city. They passed farms where fat white grubs the size of cars were being milked, pits where bugs swarmed in their naked millions. Each time Zen felt a bead of sweat trickle down inside his suit he started to panic, afraid the insects had found a way in.

  “It’s all the Railmakers’ doing,” said Nova. “The size they made the rails and the gates defines what size a train can be. It favors roughly human-sized species, like the Herastec. Creatures who are too big, like the Night Swimmers, have to cooperate with smaller species. Ones who are too small, like the Neem, have to learn to work together to make trains that are big enough. The Neem exist because the railway does…”

  “Not all Neem are the same size!” said Uncle Bugs. “Wait until you meet the Mother-hive!”

  From the pod, they went on foot up a ribbed passageway that sloped so steeply that they had to struggle up it on all four fours, while Uncle Bugs ran ahead of them along the walls and ceiling, buzzing encouragement, clearly loving this nimble new body the Neem had given him. At the top of the crawl-way was a big space, dark and steamy, filled with a soft thrumming sound. Pillars rose up, not shaped according to any geometry that Zen recognized. Water came down the pillars, twining around them, feeding clear pools that stood at the pillars’ bases. The pools quivered slightly as the water flowed into them. The surface of each pool reflected amber lights way up on the high ceiling. There was mist in the air, like the mist in a hothouse, but the thing that waited in the middle of the room looked as dry as a mummy in a tomb.

  It was a rambling, papery structure, like the age-old nest of wasps with delusions of grandeur. It was the size of a large house. As Uncle Bugs led his visitors toward it they realized that the thrumming sound was made up of a billion smaller sounds going on inside it — the scritch and scrabble of hooked feet, the rasp of beetle bodies, a constant chirruping and chittering. It was crowded in there. Around the base were holes where Neem attendants were busy, sweeping away a rain of insect corpses that pattered softly from one hole, tending to the thick pipes that led in and out of others. The thing was a single vast Neem hive, made up of many millions more insects than Uncle Bugs and his friends, and far too big to fit into a crab-suit.

  “Come closer,” it said, in a sort of massive whisper.

  “It is the Mother-hive of this colony,” said Uncle Bugs, beckoning the visitors forward. “I have shared some of myselves with it so that it has my memories and can speak your human words.”

  A draft whispered against the microphones on Zen’s suit. The Mother-hive was pumping out stale air through those high, spindly chimneys.

  It said, “You have been making war on the Kraitt.”

  Threnody stepped forward. She said, “I am Threnody Noon. We did not make war on the Kraitt, we only went to take back this Motorik, Nova, which was stolen from us. We are very grateful for the help your agents gave us.”

  “The machine Nova,” said the Mother-hive. “Yes. The hive you call Uncle Bugs has told us about this machine.”

  “Hello!” said Nova, waving. She hated it when people talked about her as if she wasn’t there.

  “We are builders of machines ourselves,” said the Mother-hive. “We are intrigued by the machine Nova.”

  “Humans have many such machines,” said Threnody. “When we return to our own worlds, I will send you some as gifts, to thank you for helping us, and to encourage trade and friendship between my Empire and the Nestworlds of the Neem.”

  The hive gave a long, crumpling sigh. Threnody could not tell if it was pleased or not. She pressed on.

  “But first we must ask you for more help. The K-gate that brought us here is shut. We think there is another, but it lies in the region you call the Black Light Zone. We would like to refuel our trains here, and pass through your world to the Black Light Zone.”

  Now the hive m
ade a sound like a wave withdrawing down a shingle beach. “The Black Light Zone,” it said. “No train will go there.”

  “Your morvah will not,” said Nova. “But our trains are not pulled by morvah. I’m sure Uncle Bugs has told you about our trains. Morvah are unknown in our worlds, so we have had to develop trains that are thinking machines, like me. The Black Light Zone holds no terror for them.”

  “Perhaps your trains are foolish then,” said the Mother-hive. “The Black Light Zone is the tomb of the Railmakers. Something happened in the Black Light Zone that ended their civilization. Perhaps your thinking machine trains should be afraid of it.”

  “They are,” said Zen. “We all are. But we want to find a way home.”

  That withdrawing-wave sound again. Perhaps it was the sound of the hive thinking. When it had finished, it said, “We are the Neem. We are small but we are big. We are mindless, but we are wise. Our lives are brief, but we live forever. We are always dying and always being born. You understand this?”

  Nova nodded. “We call you Hive Monks. As individuals you’re just bugs and don’t live long, but when you form hives you are intelligent, and you can pass on your memories.”

  “We remember,” whispered the Mother-hive. “We remember all the way back to the Blackout. We dream of the time before it. Very far back. The time of the Railmakers. We believe they were as we are.”

  “Insects?” asked Zen. He thought of the Station Angels, and the ancient carvings he had seen on the Railmakers’ stations. He supposed they could have been images of suits like the ones the Neem used.

  “We believe that we Neem are the descendants of the Railmakers,” said the Mother-hive. “The legacy of the Railmakers belongs to Neem. Not to Kraitt, or Herastec. Or humans. To us.”

  “We only want to find a way home,” Threnody started to say.

  The colossal whisper of the hive washed over her words like surf. “Neem have wished for a long time to send trains into the Black Light Zone, where the homeworlds of the Railmakers lie under their black suns. If we could find relics of the Railmakers, and learn their secrets, Neem could be as great as Railmakers once were. But morvah fear such places, and would rather die than go there (we have proved this). Perhaps your thinking machine trains are the answer to this difficulty. We shall let you travel through our world. But you will take Neem with you. We will add a car of our own to your train, and you will carry Uncle Bugs and some hives of our Hard Diplomacy Office as your passengers. Humans and Neem shall learn the secrets of the Zone together. But what you find on the Railmakers’ worlds shall belong to Neem.”