Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  Zen wasn’t sure what he was feeling. It was hard to imagine Ma ever having been together enough to slip out of a Noon family facility with a Noon family baby. It was hard to imagine her ever loving him enough to try. He supposed he should feel grateful that she had wanted him that badly, but he was too busy wondering how he could use this new knowledge. He was a Noon. By rights he should be living in a palace somewhere, heir to a great trading house. He was a Noon! He was related to the Emperor himself!

  And he understood now where Ma’s fears had come from. The Noons had given up hunting for her, but she had never stopped running.

  “How do I know this is true?” he asked.

  “We’ll run a blood test if you like,” said Raven. “You’ll find you have Noon DNA. Which brings us back to this job I want you to do for me.”

  He took a little device from his pocket and set it on the table. A Baxendine holoprojector, its wooden casing shaped like a big, smooth bean. It hung a picture of a young man in the air above the table.

  Zen stared at the image for a couple of seconds before he realized that it was not an image of himself. He had never had a haircut that expensively accidental-looking. He had never worn a Kendo Berberian smart-vinyl jacket, or grinned at a camera in those gardens of coral above that sapphire lake. No, this was someone else. This was some rich kid who looked like him.

  “His name is Tallis Noon,” said Raven. “You see the family resemblance?”

  “There is a seventy-six percent similarity,” said Nova.

  Zen nodded, feeling wary. He could guess where this was going.

  “Actually there are about thirty members of the Noon family who look pretty much like you,” said Raven. “That’s what you get for wandering about with their genes. I’ve chosen Tallis here because he’s from an outlying branch, very minor, based at Golden Junction.”

  More pictures of the Noon kid flipped up. Zen hated him already, with his fine clothes and his cheerful smile. Who wouldn’t be cheerful, living the life he lived? You could see he’d never done an honest day’s work. (Nor had Zen, of course. But he thought he could imagine what an honest day’s work must feel like, and he was pretty sure Tallis Noon couldn’t.)

  Raven said, “Tallis finished university a standard year ago. He should be taking his place in the family business by now, but he’s a dreamer. Prefers poems and paintings to profit margins. He thinks he’d like to travel a bit before he settles. He’s another railhead, in fact. You two have so much in common!”

  Zen thought of the kids who had sat across from him on that train out of Ambersai. The Network was full of rich kids, aimlessly shuttling from one world to another in search of something their families’ money couldn’t seem to buy.

  “It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Tallis were to board the Noon train,” Raven went on. “It’s his family’s most famous asset, and as far as I can tell he’s never ridden it.”

  “But they’ll know I’m not him!” Zen said. “I might look a bit like him, but I don’t talk like him, I don’t know anything about his life, his family…”

  “I’ll brief you. Posing as Tallis will get you through security. Once you’re on the train, you go straight for the box. It’s in the carriage that houses the family art collection. It won’t seem strange if you want to look around the collection.”

  “It’s art, then? This box? We’re art thieves?”

  Raven grinned. “A step up from your old line of work, isn’t it?”

  The holo changed, showing an image of the thing Zen was supposed to steal. It was a small, dull, metal cube.

  “It’s called the Pyxis,” said Raven. “Don’t let the fancy name intimidate you. It just means ‘box’ in one of those Old Earth languages, Roman or Spanish or Klingon…”

  “Ancient Geek, I think,” said Nova.

  “Is it valuable?” asked Zen. (It didn’t look valuable.)

  “It’s unique,” said Raven. “That makes it very valuable indeed.”

  He made the picture change again. Now they were looking at a map of the Network. A red dot marked the current position of the Noon train, way out on the Silver River Line.

  “A few days from now, the Thought Fox will take us to Surt. From there you can catch a regular train to Adeli, where the Noon train will be pausing for a day or two. You can board it there. It will be traveling to Jangala, the Spindlebridge, and Sundarban. On the way, you’ll snitch the Pyxis. I’ll be waiting at Sundarban to whisk you away down the Dog Star Line again. And then you’ll be rich, Zen.”

  “But I can’t do it,” Zen said. He flapped his hands at the holo, which detected the movement and changed to a video image of the Noon train like a river of grand buildings, pouring across a viaduct above some shining delta. “Look at it!” he said. “You think I can just walk on there and find my way off again with this box? There will be surveillance, security—”

  “Nova will take care of that,” said Raven.

  “Nova’s coming?”

  “Of course. You’ll be working closely together. A young man of Tallis Noon’s status doesn’t travel alone. You’ll have your Motorik secretary with you.” He handed Zen a stylish little headset of brass and ivory. “Nova can keep in touch via that, feed you any information you need. Now we just need to make you look the part. Get changed, for a start. You’ll find clothes in the wardrobes in your suite. A young man of Tallis Noon’s breeding wouldn’t be seen dead in that junk you’re wearing…”

  *

  Up in his room, Zen put on some of the new clothes and stood in front of the mirror. There were half a dozen outfits. He had chosen foil jeans, red ankle boots, a mirrorcloth windcheater. He stood up straight and pretended he was a young Noon. His hair did not look as if a Golden Junction stylist had cut it, but then Tallis Noon was supposed to have been riding the rails for a while. Zen knew where he’d been, too: the headset that Raven had given him came preloaded with Tallis’s travel documents and his photos of the sights he’d seen—all faked or stolen by Raven, Zen presumed.

  For the first time he started to think that the plan might work. It was daunting, the scale of it. Frightening. But nothing a Thunder City kid couldn’t handle. Just one job, Raven had said, but Zen guessed that this was more like a test. If he could get away with the Pyxis, there would be other jobs. A chance to travel the galaxy, meet interesting people, and nick their stuff. With Raven’s help, he could stop being a little thief, and become one of the greats.

  And even if it didn’t work out—even if the Noons saw through his disguise and arrested him—well, at least he could say he had ridden the Noon train. At least he would get to see Jangala, and cross the Spindlebridge…

  He fingered the foil of his new jeans. Too clean, he thought. He’d wear this stuff around Desdemor a bit, get some dust and scuff marks on it. If his clothes were in character, maybe the rest of him would follow.

  11

  When he lived on Santheraki, Zen had dreamed for a while of being an actor. He was still a kid then, still half believing the old lie that you could be whatever you wanted to be if you just wanted it badly enough. Ma had managed to outrun her fears for a little while, Myka had a good job by Myka’s standards, and Zen went to acting lessons at a shabby little theater just down the street from the apartment they were renting. The teacher, Ashwin Bhose, was threadbare and down on his luck, but he’d been famous in his time. The corridors of the theater were walled with posters and holos of his performances.

  The other students were from wealthier homes than Zen’s. They took part meekly in the exercises Bhose set them, pretending to be trees, or trains, or breezes. It made Zen feel embarrassed, that stuff. He’d never wanted to be a tree or a breeze. He just wanted to dress up and pretend for a while that he was somebody important, or at least somebody else, anybody but Zen Starling, with his raggedy life and frightened mom. When he was being himself, he never knew what to say. He sta
mmered shyly, or stayed silent. Out on a stage, he thought, it would all be different. Words would pour out of him. He’d have whole conversations learned by heart.

  Ashwin Bhose must have seen something in him. After a few months Myka’s hours got docked and she couldn’t pay Zen’s fees, but Bhose kept him as a student anyway. He said Zen was good at watching. “You see the little details,” he told him once. “The small habits that tell us so much about people’s characters. But it’s not just about watching. You have to understand what goes on in other people’s heads. The feelings that underlie their movements and expressions. That secret inner weather.”

  Zen didn’t really know what the old actor meant. He’d never been much good at understanding other people. He still wasn’t. Maybe if they’d stayed on Santheraki, Bhose could have taught him. But Ma’s fears caught up with her, and then Myka’s factory went over to Motorik labor and she lost her job. The Starlings packed their lives into their plastic suitcases and took wing again, leaving Santheraki in the pink of a winter dawn, refinery flare-off shimmering in the mudflats, a long silver train taking them through the K-gates to Cleave.

  *

  Zen had not thought much about his old dreams since then, except to stop and wonder sometimes at what a fool he must have been to have had them, and to feel guilty about never saying goodbye to Ashwin Bhose. But there in Desdemor, as he got ready for this job of Raven’s, the memories of those acting lessons came back. He started to enjoy himself. Partly it was the space and the quiet and the clean air of the place, all treats for a kid from Thunder City. But mostly it was the old thrill of dressing up and turning into someone new.

  *

  He spent each day in Desdemor preparing for the role of Tallis Noon. At dinner time he usually ate with Raven, and Raven made him stay in character, asking him what sights he’d seen on his way to meet the Noon train, what route he’d taken. Sometimes Raven took off in the Thought Fox on his mysterious travels, and then the Motorik were Zen’s dinner companions—Nova, Carlota, and the hotel’s physician, a dignified old Moto called Dr. Vibhat. They weren’t much help with Zen’s rehearsals. Nova was the only one who noticed when he made mistakes, and she seldom bothered to correct him. When Raven was there it was tougher, and Zen rose to the challenge, enjoying the game.

  “And how are things at home, Tallis? How is your aunt Kalinda?”

  “Still breeding those pterodactyls of hers. She found the genetic template in the deep archives. Uncle Bhasri says he’s glad she has a hobby, but they’re ruining the hanging gardens.”

  “Not bad, Zen. But you should work on your accent.”

  Zen worked on his accent. He worked on his look, too. He had a haircut from the hotel barber, and got Dr. Vibhat to alter his earlobes, which had been slightly larger than Tallis Noon’s. He wore his new clothes every day, and even slept in them sometimes to crumple the newness out of them. He slung them on the floor, and crammed them into the battered traveling bags, which Nova fetched for him from the Terminal Hotel’s lost property room. He wore them while he lounged on the hotel sofas, reading the texts that Raven gave him, watching the vids and holos, filling his head with the history of Golden Junction and the life and times of Tallis Noon. He dropped the fancy headset off his balcony and ran down to check that it still worked. It did: when he fitted it back under his hair and pressed the receiver against his temple, Nova’s voice came whispering through the bones of his skull. When he double-blinked to activate the visual feed it transmitted images straight from his eyes to her clever mind.

  “How are the clothes?” she asked.

  Zen looked down at himself. Smartfiber trousers and the toes of his cherry-red boots. It felt odd to know that she was seeing what he was seeing, as if she were a passenger in his mind.

  “Still too smart,” he said. “Let’s go to the beach.”

  *

  So they went together, through the maze of Desdemor’s canals, past dead shops and silent hotels. Each path they tried took them to another beach. Seaweed hung like bunting on the ornate railings of the promenades. Stairways led down into wave-slopping caverns, which, at low tide, became more promenades, automatic pop-up cafés unfolding from the ground like flowers. Zen liked the green-gold light, the clear air, the ocean. He even liked the Motorik girl padding along ahead of him, pointing out the sights.

  He’d grown used to Nova. He’d even caught himself thinking sometimes that she was sort of pretty. He had squashed those thoughts fast—Zen Starling wasn’t one of those sad, strange, lonely types who fancied Motos. But he liked her company, and she served as a stand-in for all the real girls he’d meet when he was far away and rich.

  “Tell me about when you were little,” she said, inside his head.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m interested.” She turned and faced him, smiling, speaking aloud now. “That’s the difference between people like you and people like me. I’ve always been like I am now, but you were little once. The child you were is still inside you somewhere, peeking out through your eyes.”

  Zen snorted. “Not me. I had to grow up fast. I don’t remember much.”

  But he did. The memories had been all around him during these days in Desdemor. He told her some of them as they walked on. He told her about his acting lessons, and the model trains he used to build and paint, and the view from the first bedroom window he remembered. He had never told anyone about that stuff before. He started telling her about Ma and Myka, but those were not comfortable memories; it made him miss the times when he had been too small to notice Myka’s anger or Ma’s madness. He had loved them then, but that had faded somehow, and he knew he was a disappointment to them. He talked about games he remembered instead.

  “I used to play a game sometimes,” said Nova, as if she were remembering some childhood of her own.

  They stood on the promenade. The tide was out, the wet sand reflecting the green crescent of Hammurabi. “I’d walk way out there on the sand and start dancing,” she said. “Flinging my arms about, whirling and twirling, laughing and shouting… And then the rays would notice me, and come swooping down. And I’d wait till the very last moment, then I’d drop flat and lie completely still, and the stupid things would go whooshing over me and flap about the beach, wondering where I’d gone. And I’d lie there still as a statue, laughing at them. They only strike at things that move. It’s a funny instinct for predators to have evolved, but of course they didn’t evolve, they were designed. Poor rays.”

  Zen had not yet seen the rays up close, although he had heard them calling. With no hunters to keep the population down, they were spreading inland from the offshore reefs, nesting in the penthouses of the abandoned towers at the southern end of the island.

  “Let’s try it,” he said, in his best Golden Junction drawl.

  “I don’t think Raven would…” Nova started to say, but he had already scrambled over the railings, dropped down onto the sand, and started running toward the far white lacework of the surf. He thought that was what Tallis Noon would have done.

  She ran with him. Each stride took them one or two yards. Their deep footprints filled quickly with water, a chain of little mirrors stretching away behind them to the promenade. They ran past tide pools and the wrecks of pleasure boats half buried in the sand. They were almost at the sea’s edge when Nova shouted, “Zen!”

  He looked round, and was startled by how close the ray was, how large, how silently it had come swooping down from its aerie in the old towers. Brown, it was, with patterns on its wide wings like the markings on spiders’ backs. (The creamy speckles still held a blurred echo of some gene-tech outfit’s corporate logo.) Its hooked beak opened to let out a fierce hoot, designed to freeze Zen’s blood, or maybe announce to the flock following behind it that Zen was its prey and they would have to make do with the leftovers.

  Then Nova crashed into him, knocked him flat. She didn’t say
anything, but her voice came into his head like the voiceover on a video, or the voices his mother heard. “Lie still, remember!”

  So he lay as still as he could, half his face pressed into the wet sand, tasting the salt of Tristesse’s ocean, smelling the hot leather stink of the ray as it swooped overhead, lashing its barbed tail. He wasn’t pretending to be Tallis anymore. The shock had jolted him out of character.

  Other rays followed the first, hooting in confusion as if to ask where their prey had gone. They flew away along the beach. The first one circled for a time, puzzled by those still forms on the sand, but too stupid to understand that they were the same running figures it had been hunting a few seconds earlier. After a while it gave one last disgruntled hoot and flew away after the rest of its flock.

  When he was sure that the rays were gone, Zen sat up. From out there on the sand he could see the whole of Desdemor, the white facades of the waterfront buildings stretching southward like sea cliffs. At the southern end of the city, where he had never been, a high viaduct went out across the sea, reaching away and away into the haze that hid the horizon.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “I thought Desdemor was the end of the line?”

  Nova shook her head. “It’s the end of the K-bahn, but a single track line runs through the city and out across that bridge.”

  Zen shaded his eyes, looking at the viaduct.

  “So there’s another island out there somewhere?”

  “I suppose so. It’s not on the maps. I expect it used to be a hunting resort or something.”