Railhead

by Philip Reeve

Zen had been studying pictures and vids of that train. He had memorized the floor plans of the main carriages, the doors, and access hatches. None of that had prepared him for how beautiful it looked. He stood among trainspotters and excited children on the platform and simply stared as the train pulled in. Those huge twin locos, the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts, had been in the Noon family for centuries. Their curved and complicated cowlings had been in and out of fashion so many times that they had finally escaped it altogether and were just themselves: grand, ancient, honey-colored things with the worn beauty of old buildings. Behind them were the five huge double-decker carriages that formed the quarters of the Emperor and his inner circle. And behind those, curving away out of the station and across the viaduct, were lesser carriages, all just as beautiful.

  “Zen?” said Nova, in his head. She stood just behind him, ignored by the other sightseers. “I have sent a message to the Noon train to let them know that you are here, and that you wish to board.”

  He looked back at her, but she was playing the part of his meek Motorik servant, and would not meet his eye.

  He was playing a part too, of course. The rehearsal was over; the performance was about to begin. He was wearing a short jacket of smart vinyl, currently tuned to default black. A black knitted shirt, cut low enough to bare his collarbones. Narrow trousers. Square-toed boots. Catching his reflection in the Noon train’s windows, he felt pretty confident that he could pass as Tallis. He definitely didn’t look like Zen Starling anymore.

  He nodded to show Nova that he had understood, and started to move along the platform. Low-status guests like him would board farther back. Nova followed, carrying his bags. Carved friezes ran along the sides of the train, and children were scrambling up onto them from the platform, stroking the heads of sculpted animals. From the benign way the train’s maintenance spiders watched them, Zen could tell that the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts didn’t mind, and even welcomed these small visitors. He wondered what would happen to any child who tried using the Thought Fox as a plaything …

  “Tallis?” said someone nearby.

  All the way from Desdemor, Zen had been reminding himself, My name is Tallis Noon, my name is Tallis Noon, but the sight of the Noon train had driven it right out of his head. Nova saved him, pinging an alert at him through his headset and saying aloud in a soft, respectful voice, “Tallis?”

  He looked round, finally remembering who he was meant to be, and found a young woman at his side, smiling like he was the best thing she’d seen for weeks. A girl, really, he told himself, when he’d stopped being dazzled by that smile. No older than he was, but a lot better turned out. Her hair was short and fashionably turquoise. Her skintight shimmersuit flowed with patterns of peacock’s feathers, and her boots seemed to be coated with gold leaf.

  She smiled at Zen some more and said, “I’m Threnody.” She put her hands together and bowed her head. “We’re cousins of some sort, about a zillion times removed…”

  He had read a bio of her back in Desdemor. He wondered why she would bother coming down from her fabulous train to meet a random railhead.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, cousin Threnody,” he said.

  She took his arm and kept smiling as she led him through the cordon of guards and along the platform, past the big, shining wheels of the imperial train. Nova followed, carrying Zen’s bags. “Your message reached us as soon as your train came through the K-gate,” Threnody said. “I’m sorry everyone else is busy. There was a picnic this evening, and a hunt… Dusk is the prettiest time on Adeli, don’t you think?”

  Beyond the station, the fog-sea flickered with pale fire. He could see lights on the peaks that rose from it, and heard a tiny crackling, which might have been distant gunshots. Despite all his preparation he was feeling a little dazed; the beauty of the night, the train, the girl—this job was nothing like raiding stalls in Ambersai.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t send word ahead with an earlier train,” Threnody was saying. “The family would have arranged a proper welcoming committee.”

  “I didn’t want to make any fuss,” he said. “I didn’t know I was coming here anyway. Not for sure, I mean. I’ve been traveling, looking around…”

  “Careful with the accent,” said Nova, in his head. “You’re starting to sound like a comedian playing posh in the threedies…”

  Threnody Noon said, “You’ve really changed!” Which made Zen’s heart stop beating for a moment, because Raven had promised him that nobody on the Noon train knew Tallis Noon. Then she went on, “The last time we met we were both just babies. At the fire festivals on Khoorsandi? I’ve seen pictures. You were as fat as a dumpling.”

  Zen laughed as lightly as he could, and said that he didn’t remember, which of course he didn’t.

  “So you’re from Golden Junction?” asked Threnody, and, without leaving time for him to answer, “I’ve never visited the eastern branch lines, it must be so interesting. Do you have Station Angels out there? We don’t get them in the central Network; I’d love to see one—is it true they look like actual angels?”

  She was steering him toward a carriage a little way down the train, and one of those white boarding stairs where uniformed Motorik waited. They were stupid-looking security goons, but behind those masklike faces their minds would be linked to whole carriages full of hardware. If Zen’s face or the way that he walked didn’t match whatever records of Tallis Noon that hardware held, his visit would end here. The gun drones circling the station could probably laser him off the platform like a splodge of chewing gum.

  But Threnody Noon didn’t even give the Motos a chance to scan him. “Family guest,” she called, adding some command in a corporate code, and the nearest of the goons saluted and stepped aside so that she could lead Zen aboard the train.

  “Don’t they want to check me?” he asked, surprised.

  “Anyone can see you’re a Noon, Tallis,” she said, laughing. “We can always bend the rules for family.”

  Zen shrugged, and laughed with her. So far, this imposter business mainly seemed to consist of laughing to order, which he felt he could cope with. He had a nasty moment a few seconds later, when he looked back from the top of the stairs and saw the security goons stop Nova, but Threnody told him that they were just scanning his bags and checking his Motorik’s mind for viruses.

  They didn’t find any. Nova had made sure her upgrades and personality tweaks were well hidden. As for the bags, there was nothing in most of them but crumpled clothes, and a few items that Raven had added to make it seem like they’d come from Golden Junction. The only one the goons bothered opening was the long leather case that held the ray gun.

  “I was hoping to find time for some shooting,” said Zen.

  “That’s a pretty old-fashioned gun, isn’t it?” asked Threnody.

  “It was my grandfather’s. It’s a ray gun.”

  “We’ll be stopping at Jangala soon. I don’t know if there are any rays there, but there’ll be all sorts of other things to shoot in the hunting reserve…”

  The goons closed the gun case. Nova picked it up along with the rest of the bags, and came up the stairs to join Zen and Threnody on the open balcony at the rear of the carriage.

  “What’s wrong with your Motorik’s face?” Threnody asked.

  “They’re meant to be freckles,” Zen said. “She thinks they make her look more human.”

  “She sounds glitchy. Would you like a new one?”

  “Oh, I’m used to Nova,” he said.

  She gave him a smile that meant “suit yourself,” and turned to go into the carriage. The door had no handle, only a gilded, smiling sun mounted in its center. Threnody tapped the sun lightly between its eyebrows and the door opened so suddenly and so silently that it was as if it had simply vanished. Zen smelled the perfumed air of the Noon train. He looked past Threnody into the pillared carriage.
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br />   “It’s beautiful!” said Nova, in his head.

  “It’s beautiful,” he agreed, aloud. At first he was not sure why he felt sad and then he knew. Just for a moment, he had believed that he was really Tallis Noon, and that this beautiful girl was really welcoming him aboard this beautiful train. That would have suited him pretty well. It was the life he’d have had if his mother had never stolen him from the Noons.

  But there was no point feeling sorry for himself. No one was going to hand him riches on a silver plate. He was going to have to take them for himself. He was good at that. He was going to rob these people, and get away clean.

  He stepped into the train.

  15

  He had arrived at a good moment. Later he would wonder if Raven had arranged that somehow, but probably it was just luck. Most of the imperial family and their guests were at the picnic, on one of those wooded mountaintops that rose from the fog-sea. Zen had a chance to see the central carriages of the Noon train empty, except for the Motorik staff and the silent cleaning machines, which didn’t count. Threnody’s voice echoed as she led him from one carriage to another: carriages walled with gold mosaic, with livewood bark, with horn. Carriages of glass, like rolling greenhouses, filled with moss and small trees, where pretty dragonflies darted and hovered.

  None of these carriages looked much like any train Zen had seen before. They were no wider than a usual train—just twenty feet wall-to-wall—but they had been decorated by the best designers on the Network, and the best designers on the Network knew how to make a twenty-foot-wide carriage look much bigger. Only the rows of windows told you that you were not in a luxurious house, and even the windows were mostly curtained, or screened with blinds. Some of the carriages were open-plan, with chairs and tables dotted across an expanse of carpeted or livewood floor. In others, you walked along corridors, past the doors of smaller, private rooms. Floors of marble, ceilings of biotech tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl, stairways spiraling to bedrooms and observation domes on upper decks.

  Threnody led him up one of the stairways, to the cabin that was to be his. “It’s one of the smaller guest compartments, I’m afraid. I hope you like it. The bedroom is in there… Bathroom over here… Put the bags down, Nova, and report to the Motorik section, carriage fifty-nine.”

  Nova did as she was told. As she walked away along the train, her voice came whispering into Zen’s head again. “Keep your headset on. If you need me, all you have to do is whistle. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

  Threnody waited while he unpacked a few of his things. Then they returned to the lounge carriages, the garden carriages. He tried to tell Threnody about his travels—he had prepared a whole store of anecdotes—but she preferred to talk about the family and the various friends and relatives who were traveling with them. “The Albayek-Noons from Seven Badger Mountain are on board—they’re always fun, though Ruichi is giving himself terrible airs now that he’s signed the engagement contract with the Foss boy. And Uncle Tibor was here, but he’s gone back to Grand Central…”

  “So how many passengers altogether?” asked Zen.

  “About nine hundred, at the moment, I think.”

  That was good, he thought. With so many guests coming and going, who would worry about one extra? And they had so much stuff that they probably wouldn’t even notice when he helped himself to the Pyxis. Maybe he could grab a few things for himself while he was at it, fill his pockets with ornaments before he left, just in case Raven didn’t pay up…

  “Which carriage is the art museum in?” he asked. (He already knew, because Raven had made him study 3-D maps of the whole train, but he didn’t want to sound like someone who had been studying 3-D maps of the whole train.)

  “Oh, farther back somewhere,” said Threnody, not much interested in any work of art that she couldn’t actually wear.

  “I’d like…” he said, and then—because it sounded more Noonish somehow—“I’d love to have a look at the collection while I’m here!”

  Threnody wrinkled her nose. Even when wrinkled it looked better than most noses. She said, “It’s only old pots and holographs and stuff. I’ll show you round some time if you like.”

  “No time like the present…” Zen started to say, but, just then, swift shadows came darting across the curtained windows. Expensive skycars were swooping over the viaduct, settling onto the platforms of Adeli Station like rare birds. The rest of the family had returned.

  The train began to fill with them. They came aboard in groups, talking and laughing, grabbing flutes of spiced wine from Motorik waiters who appeared silently to meet them. Noon elders, splendid in their robes and turbans, discussing business and telling each other the latest scandals. Officers of the CoMa, the family’s Corporate Marines, strutting in their ornate uniforms. Provincial Stationmasters and their families, traveling on the Noon train as the Emperor’s guests, as awed as Zen by all this splendor. Young Noons in hunting gear, boisterous as puppies. Zen wondered what it must be like to be one of them and have nothing to worry about except potting expensive bioteched animals in the family reserves. It seemed to suit them. They seemed happier and better looking than any of the kids he knew in Cleave.

  He moved through the suddenly busy carriages with Threnody, while she introduced him to this relative and that. This was her aunt, Lady Sufra Noon. This was her Uncle Gaeta, her cousin Neef. This was her half sister, Priya, proud and nervous as a high-bred racehorse, wearing a dress made of light, the straps of her biotech sandals twining up her brown legs like silver ivy. This proud little kid in his miniature CoMa uniform was her half brother, Prem. Oh, and here was their father, Mahalaxmi XXIII, Chief Executive of the Noon Family, Emperor of the Great Network, Master of the Thousand Gates, known to his adoring subjects as the Father of the Rails and to the less adoring ones as the Fat Controller.

  A strangely unreal moment. The jowly and intelligent face, which had solemnly smiled at Zen from a thousand grubby banknotes, smiled solemnly now at him in real life, close enough that he could smell the imperial sweat beneath the expensive imperial perfume. Electric-blue hummingbirds no larger than Zen’s thumb hovered around the Emperor on blurred wings, settling sometimes to perch like ornaments on the epaulets of his tunic. They studied Zen so intently with their black eyes that he realized they were not birds at all, but camouflaged security drones. Surely they would see straight through his disguise? Surely Mahalaxmi would guess that this hand he was shaking belonged to a Thunder City urchin?

  But no; he just nodded, welcoming Zen as he must have welcomed a hundred other distant relations that week. “How are things at Golden Junction, Tallis? You must tell me all about it,” he said, and moved on in his cloud of blue birds without waiting for a reply. Zen didn’t interest him, and Zen was glad of that. He wasn’t there to be interesting. He wanted to be just another face in the crowd.

  But one of the guests was interested in him. This was a lad of Zen’s own age, tall and chunky, with a mane of hennaed hair, and the violet eyes that were fashionable that season. He didn’t like Zen at all. “Who’s your new friend, Threnody?” he asked, and squared up to Zen like he was getting ready for a fight while she explained. Zen wondered what he could have done to offend him. Had he met the real Tallis Noon before, as Threnody had? Had Tallis pulled his stupid hair when they were children? Zen could see how tempting that might be.

  Then Nova, in his head, said, “He’s Kobi Chen-Tulsi. The Chen-Tulsis run mining operations on a couple of Sundarban’s moons. Kobi is scheduled to be married to Threnody Noon next autumn.”

  That explained the way Kobi was glaring at him, thought Zen. Threnody and this rich, pretty boy of hers had had an argument. That’s why she hadn’t joined the hunting party, and that’s why she had come to meet him at the station. She had just been using Zen to make Kobi jealous.

  It seemed to be working.

  “Golden Junction?” sneered Kobi.
(Threnody had just told him where cousin Tallis came from, and he was making the most of it.) “I didn’t know the Noons still had assets way out there. There’s nothing there, is there?”

  Zen just smiled like he wanted to be friends and said, “Not much. Not compared with this train. It’s amazing! Did the hunt go well? Threnody tells me you’re an excellent shot.”

  Kobi looked puzzled for a moment. Angrily puzzled, as if he thought Zen might be mocking him. He was a simple creature, thought Zen. Just a big dog, snarling to defend his territory. But he had shown Zen one useful thing, at least. The Noons of Golden Junction were seen by this lot as hopeless hicks. Country cousins, clinging onto the outermost twigs of the family tree. Nobody on the Noon train would think it strange if Tallis seemed nervous amid all this splendor.

  He moved aside to make sure that Threnody and Kobi had a chance to talk, and hopefully sort out whatever it was that they had fought about. Lifting the blind on the nearest window, he saw that the station had vanished. The train had started moving so gently that he had not even noticed it set off. Now it was snaking its way through mountains, above valleys of flickering fog.

  “Are you all right?” asked Nova, in his head.

  “I’m fine,” he lied, knowing she was probably monitoring his heart rate and things and knew exactly how nervous he had been. “Security is pretty laid-back, considering he’s the Emperor and everything.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Nova. “That gnat bite on your wrist?”

  Zen hadn’t even noticed that he had been scratching it. “What about it?”

  “That wasn’t a gnat. A micro-drone took a sample of your blood the moment we came aboard, so the train could check you had the Noon security tags written into your DNA.”

  “And what if I hadn’t?”

  “It would have—well, you did, so why worry about it? Just relax. Enjoy yourself. I’m enjoying myself. I love this train.”

  Zen smiled. He loved it too. What railhead wouldn’t? Above the chatter of the Noons and their guests he caught a sound, a high double note, a duet that echoed from the mountainsides as the train went by. The Wildfire and the Time of Gifts were filling the fog-lit night with trainsong.