Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “You’re doing fine,” said Nova. “I’m proud of you. Really.”

  Zen smiled. He knew that she was smiling too, back there among the sleeping Motorik. It felt intimate, this talk that they were having. As if she were lying there next to him. Which was a nice thought, he suddenly found. A memory of her came into his mind, laughing in the green-gold light of Desdemor while a wind from the Sea of Sadness blew her hair across her face. Yes, it was a very nice thought. He followed it a little way and then stopped, ashamed.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I need to get some sleep.”

  “Well, good night, Zen Starling,” she said, just before he took off the headset.

  He paused. “My name is Tallis Noon.”

  “Just testing.”

  “Good night, Nova.”

  “Good night.”

  18

  He slept late next morning. It didn’t matter. The Noons slept later still. Only Threnody seemed to be awake when he made his way along swaying corridors to the breakfast car. She was sitting alone at a table by a window. Her hair was still wet from a swim or a shower, and calligraphy scrolled down her screen-fabric dress, the words of some song or poem he’d never heard. He felt her watching him as he moved along the buffet, lifting this dish cover and that, wondering what Tallis Noon would eat for breakfast.

  “Good morning,” she called, when he turned her way. “Are you going to join me?”

  “What would Kobi think about that?”

  “It’s nothing to do with Kobi who I choose to have breakfast with. He’s asleep anyway. He drank too much at dinner.”

  Zen went and sat down at her table. Outside the window, an airless, black-and-white landscape was passing, dotted here and there with far-off lighted domes that looked like snow globes, each with a little city inside.

  “Are you enjoying our train?” asked Threnody.

  “Very much,” said Zen. She had completely forgotten promising to show him the collection, he realized. Still, that didn’t matter now. He asked, “How were the Slow River Falls yesterday?”

  “Slow. Like a waterfall made of molasses, but more boring.” She ate a mouthful of her breakfast, then said suddenly, “I expect you’re wondering what I see in Kobi?”

  Zen shrugged.

  “He’s an oaf. And he calls me Thren.” She laughed, and impersonated Kobi’s braying voice: “Thren! Thren!” Shook her head, looked at Zen under her blue fringe. “You must be wondering why I’d get engaged to him.”

  “None of my business,” said Zen.

  “Yes it is. You’re a Noon, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Well, you must care about the future of our family, then. In another few thousand years all our industrial worlds may be mined out, and since the Guardians can’t make any more K-gates, the only way to get to new worlds will be through space. Kobi’s family have been spacers for generations, mining asteroids and minor planets in the Sundarban system. An alliance with them will be very good for our family. And very good for me. I shall become the head of a whole new family branch, the Chen-Tulsi-Noons. We shall have our own seat in the senate.”

  “Sounds good,” said Zen, though he didn’t think it sounded worth marrying Kobi for. He’d always thought rich people were able to do whatever they liked, but Threnody was a lot like him in some ways, playing a role so she could get what she wanted. Only somewhere in her there was a remnant of the girl she’d been, who still daydreamed, now and then, of letting her family mind its own business and taking off along exotic branch lines with a raggle-taggle railhead like her cousin Tallis.

  When he stood up to leave the carriage, he saw that Kobi had already arrived, and was glowering at him across the buffet. He waved, and dodged quickly past him to the exit, halfway to the next carriage before Kobi reached Threnody’s table and said too loudly, “What was that Golden Junction monkey doing here, Thren?”

  *

  In the carriage that housed the Noon collection, the air was cool and still. As Zen stepped into the first big compartment, the walls lit up with fields of luminous color that shifted slowly up and down the spectrum. Lady Sufra was waiting there for him. Her eyes shone with amusement as he made his bow.

  “So, Tallis. What do you think of our Karanaths?”

  Nova whispered in his headset. “Quinta Karanath, a light-painter from the Orion Dynasty…”

  “They’re wonderful,” he said, blinking round at the light-blobs while he parroted the words Nova fed him. “They’re early works, aren’t they? She must have—”

  “He!”

  “He must have created these when he was still influenced by the hard-light abstractionists…”

  Sufra Noon seemed pleased. Zen sensed that he had passed a test. She said, “I’ve always loved these early pieces best. The use of color is so very daring.”

  Zen looked at the pictures. He started to say something, thought better of it, then said it anyway. “At the freight yards on Cleave there are these taggers who run out across the tracks to spray their designs on the trains. That’s what I call daring.”

  “I was forgetting what an original thinker you are, Tallis.”

  “The trains wear the best tags with pride, and carry them off through the K-gates to be seen on other worlds. There’s one tagger called Flex. The locos love her stuff.”

  “Flex? What an extraordinary name.” He had amused her again. “I shall be sure to look out for her work, next time I am at the station.”

  Zen wondered what Flex would paint on the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts if she was given the chance. Ivy and climbing roses, he imagined. Make the old locos look even older, give them the coats of moss and ferns that they ought to be clad in, if passage through the K-gates did not burn such things away. He smiled. How Flex would love this train…

  Lady Sufra was beckoning him through into another compartment, where the holoportraits of a hundred long-dead Noons turned to watch them. “Is there anything in particular that you wished to see?”

  “I think there are some pots—”

  “Ceramics,” whispered Nova.

  “I mean ceramics.”

  “Oh yes, my great grandmother, the Lady Rishi, was a keen collector. Most of the objects here were hers. Vases from Chiba, and some little animal sculptures called Wade’s Whimsies, which are said to have come from Old Earth.”

  “Isn’t there something called the Pyxis?” asked Zen.

  One of Lady Sufra’s eyebrows rose and curled. “So you have heard of that ugly old thing? They gave you a most extensive education, out there on Golden Junction.”

  They went left and right through a narrow maze walled with shelves of Chiban vases until they came to a compartment devoted to family history. There were medals and ceremonial weapons, a battle suit. Holographs hung in the air like faded flags: scenes from history, famous stations. Zen barely noticed them, because in one corner of the room a cone of light shone down from somewhere in the ceiling, illuminating a low plinth. On the plinth stood the Pyxis, looking even smaller and less impressive than it had in Raven’s images.

  His hand had reached for it before he knew what he was doing. His fingers hit a curved surface. What he had taken for a cone of light was actually a cone of diamondglass.

  “Oh, we can’t let people touch it!” said Lady Sufra. “It’s a family heirloom.”

  Zen couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to touch the Pyxis. It didn’t look as valuable or as pretty as the rest of the collection. It was almost defiantly dull.

  “What is it, exactly?” he asked.

  “No one is certain,” said Lady Sufra. “The name means ‘box,’ but it doesn’t open; it’s solid. Art from some forgotten era, I suppose. My great grandmother obviously thought that it was important: she left strict instructions that it should never be removed from the train. Perhap
s it comes all the way from Old Earth, like the Whimsies, though they are much more interesting—let me show you…”

  She set a hand against the small of Zen’s back, starting to steer him toward another exhibit, but as he turned away from the Pyxis, he caught sight of one of the holograms. It was a historical view, like a glimpse through a window into some summery world where flags were fluttering and feather-trees cast their shadows over people dressed in the fashions of centuries ago, gathered beside a huge golden train. Uniforms and feathered hats; camera drones splashed with the decals of forgotten media outlets. Among the crowds moved strange un-human figures, which might have been avatars of the Guardians or just actors dressed up. And there, watching it all with a glass in one hand and an expression of faint mockery that Zen knew well, was someone he recognized.

  The same gray eyes, the same thin smile.

  Raven.

  He looked at the caption, a block of glowing letters to the left of the picture. “The Opening of the New Platforms at Marapur, Raildate 33-6-2702.” Nearly three centuries ago.

  So that couldn’t be Raven, it was just someone who looked like Raven…

  But not just a bit like Raven. Exactly like him. Zen enlarged that section of the image. Everything about that gaunt face was just as he remembered it, right down to the half-contemptuous half smile, eyes narrowed against the day, as if uncomfortable in sunlight.

  “A big moment for our family,” said Lady Sufra, turning back to see what Zen was looking at. “Look, there is Lady Rishi herself, standing beside the interface of Shiguri.”

  “It’s a reconstruction?” he asked.

  “Oh no. All the holos here are direct historical records, made at the time. It looks as though they had a nice day for it, doesn’t it?”

  Zen’s mind did complicated little dances, trying to find other explanations and stumbling always over the obvious one—that Raven had survived somehow, un-aging, for centuries.

  “Who—?” he started to say, but Lady Sufra had already seen what he was staring at.

  “That is Dhravid Raven. He was a curious character. An artist, an industrialist. I remember seeing him at the imperial palace on Grand Central, when I was a little girl.”

  “But he must have been very old by then?”

  “No, he looked exactly as he does in that holo. He was not human, you see. Oh, his body was human enough, but he was something else, something more.”

  “A Guardian?”

  “More than a human, but less than a Guardian. His mind existed in the Datasea, but he downloaded copies of himself into these cloned bodies, just as the Guardians used to. Of course, Guardians wore many different bodies, but Raven always looked the same. Easier, I suppose—like only wearing black.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was destroyed,” said Lady Sufra. “About twenty years ago. He offended the Guardians in some way, so they deleted him. My father, Ambit the Fourteenth, was Emperor at the time, and the Guardians made him send troops to scour the Network for Raven’s clones and kill them all. Good riddance, I thought. He was a bad piece of work by all accounts. Now come, there are some family portraits on the upper deck that I am sure will interest you…”

  He followed her up the stairs at the end of the carriage, but the portraits didn’t interest him. Nor did the Whimsies, or the netsuke, or the 4-D collages. He had to look at each of them and pretend to be interested and make the intelligent-sounding comments Nova told him to, and all the time the only things that he could think of were Raven and the Pyxis.

  19

  The Noons and their guests were gathering near the front of the train for a recital by a group of musicians called The Mandlebröt Set. The band was setting up its instruments in one of the forward carriages, which had a glass floor. It was unnerving to look down between your feet at nothing but the wheels and axles and the track blurring by. There were always a few passengers who were afraid to set foot in that part of the train.

  Zen pretended to be one of them. He was in no mood for music. He made his way back down the train, through lounges where elderly Noons sat reading holoslates, through buffet cars full of chatter and a recreation carriage where a rowdy game of train-quoits was in progress, until he reached the biggest and most densely planted of the garden carriages. There were no formal beds here, just a path of ceramic paving slabs winding over moss, through whispery groves of bamboo. If you ignored the glimpses of an industrial world rushing past outside, it looked almost real.

  So did Nova, who stood waiting for him there.

  “Meeting is dangerous,” she said. “We should talk over the headset.”

  “Why?” he asked. “You’re my Moto, aren’t you? I can talk to you if I like.” He was angry, and he needed to talk face to face. She was the only person he could talk to honestly on this train.

  “You saw that holo Lady Sufra showed me?” he said. “It was Raven, wasn’t it?”

  She looked away. Nodded.

  “Sufra said he was a Guardian…”

  “He’s not. Not exactly.”

  “… or something like a Guardian, some sort of…” Zen made grabbing gestures, trying to snatch the words he needed from the air. “He lived for hundreds of years. Dozens of cloned bodies. And all the time the real Raven was a program running in the Datasea…”

  “The Guardians tried to destroy him,” said Nova. “They deleted every copy of him, and they had the Emperor send an assassination squad to kill his clones, and then they deleted every reference to him, so that it would be as if he had never existed.”

  That explained why Zen’s swift search of the local data raft had thrown up almost no mention of Raven. “But they didn’t delete references to that train of his,” he said. “The history sites say that during the Spiral Line Rebellion, Railforce sent armored trains to seize stations that supported the rebels. The Thought Fox bombed the station city at Ukotec into dust, and sent its drones and maintenance spiders out into the ruins to slaughter the survivors. It even murdered its own crew when they tried to stop it. That’s why it ended up abandoned—because it was mad, and it didn’t care who it killed. Did you know that?”

  Nova wouldn’t even look at him. She said, “The Thought Fox respects Raven. He has it under control.”

  “Barely! Don’t you remember in Cleave, how it shot up Uncle Bugs for no reason at all? If even his train is a war criminal, what does that make Raven?”

  Nova was always surprising him. She surprised him now: her wide eyes, the almost-human way she flinched from the anger in him. “You mustn’t wonder about Raven,” she said. “Don’t ask about him—”

  “Why are you so loyal to him? He’s programmed you to be loyal, I suppose?”

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of what he’d do to you, if you let him down. He needs the Pyxis. You have to get it for him. That’s all you should be thinking about.”

  The music from the glass-floored carriage came faintly through speakers somewhere: slow washes of sound that built and wavered and faded. The scurrying patter of small drums. Kotos, and soft gongs. The locos were singing along. Zen thought how nice it would have been to be alone in that garden with a real girl, Threnody maybe, instead of with a Motorik, discussing an impossible burglary.

  He said, “I thought the Pyxis was just going to be sitting on a shelf. But it’s stuck under a diamondglass cone. I’ll have to smash it to get the thing out!”

  “It’s all right,” said Nova. “There is a plan. Raven planned for this.”

  “Okay. Tell me Raven’s plan.”

  She spoke flatly, as if she were reading something, as if she were just a machine, reciting a message it didn’t understand. “Before it gets to Sundarban, the train must pass through the Spindlebridge. Spindlebridge is a space habitat built between two K-gates in—”

  “I know what the Spindlebridge is.”

&
nbsp; “While it is there, you will go to the collection, and I will upload a powerful virus into the train’s systems. It will disable all alarms, door locks, everything. You will take the Pyxis and leave the train. The Spindlebridge is in orbit around Sundarban. There are spacecraft—shuttles—housed in hangars on Spindlebridge’s hull. We will take one, fly to the surface, and meet Raven.”

  Zen just looked at her. “That’s Raven’s plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t see fit to tell me before?”

  “He told me, and now I’m telling you. He said not to discuss it until you were here. He didn’t want you to worry about it. He said he didn’t want to distract you from your performance.”

  “He thought it might me worry me, did he? He thought I might be a bit nervous about stealing a spaceship?”

  “I’m sorry, Zen—”

  “Can you fly a spaceship?”

  “They fly themselves, mostly.”

  “This virus he wants you to use,” he said. “Is that like the one that he hit Malik’s train with, back in Cleave?”

  In a very small, reluctant voice, she said, “It’s called a trainkiller.”

  Zen imagined it nested there behind her worried eyes, chains of dangerous code curled in her brain like sleeping snakes. He shook his head. “No. We can’t do that. Not to the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts—”

  “I don’t want to do it,” said Nova. “But that’s what Raven—”

  “Well Raven isn’t here!” shouted Zen. “I’m running this thing, and I say we have to find another way!”

  He had never stolen from anyone he knew before. The Ambersai shopkeepers he had robbed had been strangers; they’d had more stuff than him, so he’d never felt bad about taking some of it. Well, the Noons had more stuff than him too—more stuff than all the shopkeepers in Ambersai together. A few days ago he would have said that they deserved to be robbed. But he liked Lady Sufra. He liked Threnody. He liked this beautiful train, those old locos. He didn’t want to do any of them more harm than he had to.