Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “And that was how he learned that the Guardians have their secrets. Why do they not like us asking questions about the nature of the Network? Why will they never explain the technology behind the K-gates? Why did they bury the walls on Marapur? He wanted to share those secrets, and they would not allow it. They turned against him. They turned Anais against him. They had never approved of what she had made him into. They made her rob him of the gift she had given him. She deleted him from the Datasea. He was left with nothing but a handful of cloned bodies to live in. Even those died, one by one, hunted down by Railforce assassins on the orders of Anais Six, until there was just one left. It was a comedown, I can tell you. To have been a god, and then to be only human again…”

  The train passed through some evening world. Low sunlight pierced the blinds, flowing over Raven’s stern face. He was talking about himself, of course. Zen had known that from the start. Telling it as if it had happened to someone else, and maybe it had; maybe his time in the Datasea and his thousand interfaces had changed him so much that he was no longer the same person who had first met Anais, on the terraces beside the Amber River, where the songflowers sang.

  Remembering his eviction from the Datasea seemed to have jolted him out of the story. He was silent for a while. Then he said, “They almost destroyed me, Zen. In this one last body I crept onto the Dog Star Line to hide. I did not think at first that I could bear to live like this. I wanted to die, and I almost did. But then I thought of the things I’d learned in the Datasea. The secrets that the Guardians do not want to share. I thought I would tell everyone. But who would believe me, my word against the Shiguri Monad, and Anais Six, and the rest? And as soon as I showed myself, they would track down this last body, and destroy it like they did all the others. That is why I chose to stay hidden, to bide my time, to lay my plans in secret…”

  “What plans?”

  “Things need shaking up, Zen. Everything keeps repeating itself, century after century. Empires rise up and grow old, and there’s always some new would-be Emperor waiting in the wings to take their turn. Dark ages come and go. People are born and people die. It’s so pointless. The Guardians mean well, but they have shunted the whole human race onto a branch line of history, and we keep trundling round in circles. It’s time someone changed that.”

  The train pierced a K-gate. It seemed to rouse Raven from his thoughts. He looked down at Zen, and when he spoke again his voice, which had sunk to a whisper, was its normal flat self again.

  “Come, Zen Starling. Here’s where your adventure ends.”

  *

  He took Zen back down into the carriage. On the seats lay Zen’s old clothes. He climbed out of the ones Raven had given him and put them on, his foil jeans and ancient smart-coat. The only thing that had changed was the headset he found in the coat pocket. It was the double of the one he’d been wearing on the Noon train, and he started to put it on without thinking, imagining he’d hear Nova whisper in his ear. Then he remembered. Until Desdemor he had always been alone, and he had thought he liked being that way. Then, with Nova, he had found someone with whom he could share everything. Losing her again was more painful than anything he had ever known. He could not believe how much it hurt. This was the feeling people write all those songs about, he thought, all those poems and movies. Heartbreak. He had always thought they must be exaggerating.

  Quickly, making sure that Raven didn’t see, he pocketed the old headset too. Perhaps it still held a recording of her voice, at least, a few views of Tu’Va and Jangala to prove it hadn’t all been some strange dream.

  “What about making me rich?” he said. “What about what you promised to give me? Was that just a lie?”

  “I’m letting you live, Zen,” said Raven. “That’s your reward. If you ever try coming after me, I might take it away.”

  The Thought Fox banged through another gate and slowed, pulling into a darkened station. The light from the windows shone on a roof of ceramic tiles, a few Station Angels that danced and faded over a deserted platform. When the doors opened, Zen could smell burnt dust and stale air.

  He stepped out onto the platform. The Thought Fox closed its doors behind him and let out a long hiss, which may have been its own way of saying goodbye. He saw Raven for a moment, standing behind the glass, one hand raised in a sort of salute. The platform flickered like one of Nova’s movies. Then the train was gone, and dark descended. The noise of engines faded and then cut out completely as, somewhere up the line, a K-gate opened and the train passed through it. Dead leaves whispered along the platform, dancing in the wind of the train’s departure just as they had danced when it first opened its doors for him. And then he realized that they never had been leaves, only the tiny dried-up corpses of insects.

  He found his way through silent passageways and cobwebbed turnstiles to an old emergency exit. It opened for him. He stumbled out into the hot metal stink, the waterfall thunder, the never-ending noisy dusk of Cleave.

  At first he wasn’t sure where he was. He put the new headset on, hoping to call up a map, and it was then that he found Raven’s gift. The headset was preloaded with false IDs and travel documents for him, and Ma, and Myka. There was a link to a bank in the local data raft. He blinked the link, and steadied himself against a wall as the details of his new accounts superimposed themselves over his vision, blotting out the dingy, spray-wet street with clouds of zeroes.

  Not really a gift, of course. He’d earned all that money by lifting the Pyxis. It was payment for services rendered. For a moment, he thought about snatching the headset off and throwing it into the nearest waterfall.

  He didn’t. But he thought about it.

  25

  Three days after the catastrophe at Spindlebridge, a young man, his sister, and their mother boarded a K-train at Cleave Station. The young people were carrying duffel bags and backpacks, as if they were going on holiday, perhaps to visit family in some other district, farther down the line. The mother seemed agitated; they had to coax her through the barriers onto platform two, where their train was waiting. The names on their travel documents were Mun, Minti, and Arundhati Kevala, and they traveled all the way to Golden Junction. There they disembarked, joining the crowds who were gathering for one of the local festivals. The mother still seemed troubled; the daughter looked around in wonder at the living skyscrapers and all the different K-bahn lines that wound between them; but the son barely glanced at them, as if he had traveled so widely that a provincial interchange like Golden Junction could not impress him. He kept watching the wallscreens, half hypnotized by the footage from Spindlebridge.

  A few hours afterward, the three boarded another K-train. The names on their IDs had changed: they were now called Jav, Chetna, and Satiya Panassar. They traveled back the way they had come, but got off at Summer’s Lease. A sleepy white city dozed there beside the K-bahn tracks, three big moons in the autumn sky. The Panassars transferred to a local train, which did not go through any K-gates, just chugged away across the city on a narrow gauge line. Slowly the white buildings grew lower. Hills appeared above the rooftops: arable fields where harvesting machines were working. The train crossed a viaduct and the sea came into sight. It shone under the autumn sun, dotted with clusters of domed islands like the tops of half-submerged mushrooms. They were algae colonies, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. Billions of them would have been seeded in the shallows when the planet was being terraformed; now only a few clumps were left, to remind everyone how Summer’s Lease had won its kindly atmosphere.

  The Panassars stepped off the train at a station where the air smelled of the sea. A jitney carried them through quiet streets to a house that had been bought in their name a few days earlier. A quiet and private house, set away from its neighbors in a ragged garden. Walls of glass and white ceramic. Dead leaves scudding on the surface of the swimming pool.

  “We’re home, Ma,” said Zen.
/>   “We’re safe,” said Myka. “They won’t find us here.”

  Their mother looked around, wary, but calm. She was like that always in new places, as if she had left her fears behind her, on the other side of the K-gates.

  *

  “We are safe, aren’t we, Zen?” his sister asked, later, when their mother was sleeping. They had been exploring the house, the large, sunlit rooms; Myka in a daze, running her rough hands over the perfect surfaces of the livewood furniture. When they stepped out onto the terrace where the pool waited, she looked at Zen as though she had woken from a dream. “Where did you get all this money? What did you do? Will someone be coming after you?”

  Zen shrugged. “You and Ma are safe, I think,” he said. “But I can’t stay.”

  “So someone will be coming? That man Malik?”

  “Maybe.” Myka had told him about Malik’s visit to Cleave, but he did not really think Malik could trace them to Summer’s Lease. He remembered the Railforce man saying, “Raven hides his tracks well.” But he also remembered how many people had seen him on the Noon train, how many photographs he must appear in. And what about the report from Karavina that had alerted Lady Sufra? However small a report it was, however deeply buried beneath the news from Spindlebridge, someone else would see it one day. Sooner or later, the Noons would start searching for the boy who had claimed to be Tallis. Sooner or later, if he stayed here, they would find him.

  And it wasn’t just the fear of being found that meant he couldn’t stay. There was Nova.

  The headset that he had stolen from Raven had been badly damaged; its scrambled memory still held a few of Tallis Noon’s photos and a shaky, three-second video clip of Kobi Chen-Tulsi, made in the last seconds before the megafauna arrived, but no image of Nova had survived, and no recordings of Zen’s talks with her. It didn’t matter. He could still hear her voice in his head, and remember the feeling of closeness when he talked to her. He kept thinking of the broken Motorik that had blown past him when the Noon train derailed, torn in half but still calmly talking. What if Nova was still conscious, hurtling around and around Sundarban with the rest of the Spindlebridge debris, waiting to hit the atmosphere and burn?

  He had to help her. He had to try. He wasn’t sure how, but he was starting to form a plan.

  “You reckon a Moto could survive after someone put a harpoon through its body?” he asked his sister.

  Myka looked wary. “What’s that got to do with… And how would I know?”

  “You killed Motos, didn’t you? In the riots, back in Cleave?”

  “Not me. Not personally. I saw some killed. I don’t know if…” She went quiet for a while. Then she said, “You should ask Flex.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Zen, didn’t you ever work it out? Flex is a Moto.”

  “Flex? Really?”

  She laughed at him, enjoying his surprise.

  “I thought there weren’t any Motorik in Cleave…” he started to say. But, of course, the reason there weren’t any Motorik in Cleave was because angry rioters had smashed them up. Suddenly that explained things, like the way Flex kept herself bundled up and living all alone in the stacks, and maybe it gave him a clue about how Myka had saved Flex’s life.

  “I thought you hated Motos?” he said.

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” said Myka.

  Zen went inside, up the stairs to his mother’s new bedroom. She was sleeping like a child, lying on her side with her hands curled in front of her face. The room was quiet, and the sunlight came in softly through drawn blinds. She would be all right here, Zen thought. Everything had changed. Myka would be able to afford doctors for her, Motorik to help look after her, drugs to keep her fears at bay. He wished he could stay here and watch her getting better. There was a lot that he didn’t know about Ma, too.

  One day, she might be able to explain why she had stolen him from the Noons. But he would not be there to hear her.

  26

  Yanvar Malik was looking at a frozen girl when he heard the news. He was in a cold-prison on Karavina and the warden had just pulled the girl’s freezer unit out of the racks for him to see. He wasn’t sure what he could learn by looking at her, but he looked anyway: opened the inspection hatch and peered in.

  Her name was Chandni Hansa. She had been pretty in the mug shots, but they had shaved her head and now her face was gray and her lips were blue and she looked dead, although Malik knew she would thaw out all right in ten years when her sentence was up. She had stolen some money and a high-end headset from a boy she had met on the K-bahn, and probably the only reason she had been caught and sentenced and frozen so fast was that the boy had been a member of the Noon family, a distant relative of Emperor Mahalaxmi. The story had barely registered on the newsfeeds, but it had caught the attention of the cheap watchbot that Malik had set to trawl the Datasea for unusual stories about the Noons. Now here he was on Karavina.

  “Where’s the boy she robbed?” he asked.

  “Gone home to Golden Junction,” said the warden. She was a local woman, and Malik thought she should have been tall and willowy like the wraiths of mist that danced above Karavina’s vapor lakes, but she was short and square and grumpy.

  “She tell you anything before you froze her?”

  “Oh, all these popsicles tell us some story about how it’s not their fault,” said the woman. “She said some man put her up to it. Found her on Przedwiosnie and told her to board such-and-such a train and get friendly with this Tallis Noon kid and bring him here for a few weeks. Paid her, she says. But if that’s the case, she shouldn’t have got greedy and started stealing Tallis’s stuff, should she?”

  “Did she describe this man who hired her?”

  “She said he was tall-ish. White-ish.”

  Malik kept looking in through the peephole, down into the little icy world where the young thief lay like a frozen princess in a story. She’d had a story of her own, of course, just like Zen Starling had. Raven had come to her and made her an offer, and she’d done what he asked. She had lured Tallis Noon to Karavina, out of the way, so that Zen Starling could impersonate him somewhere else, to do—what?

  The warden gasped. She’d been checking her headset while Malik was busy with his thoughts, and the newsfeeds had just updated. She didn’t look grumpy anymore. She stared at Malik like a startled child; he could see what she had looked like when she was ten. She said, “I think something terrible has happened! Oh Guardians! The Emperor’s train—the Noon train—Spindlebridge…”

  “Raven,” said Malik. He left her there with Chandni Hansa, and went running through the stunned streets to the station to find himself a train to Sundarban.

  27

  The Emperor was dead. The Noon family and the imperial civil servants had kept a lid on the story for as long as possible, but it escaped at last, as captive stories do. Mahalaxmi XXIII had been in his private carriage at the front of the train, and had died when it left the tracks and plowed through a factory complex. All across the Network, on the newsfeeds and gossip sites and in the streets and stations, nobody was talking about anything else.

  Even the Guardians, who usually paid so little heed to human affairs these days, were startled by the news that was spreading through the Datasea. The Mordaunt 90 Network, the Twins, Sfax Systema, Anais Six—one by one they turned their attention toward Sundarban and Spindlebridge. The people who first programmed those vast intelligences, on Old Earth all those years ago, had charged them with guiding and protecting humanity, and it was a job the Guardians took seriously. They had always done their best to keep human society stable. It had shocked them, when the first human beings found their way onto the Great Network, how quickly the corporate families began to fight with one another, the furious small wars that raged for control of new branch lines and important interchanges. An Emperor, carefully guided, subtly supervis
ed, had been their way to keep the peace.

  But the Emperor was dead, and so was his brother Gaeta and his wife, Milla; his sister Sufra and his young son Prem. His daughter Priya, shuttled down from Spindlebridge on the replacement spacecraft service, went on the Sundarbani media to announce that she was now Empress. But her uncle Tibor, at Grand Central, was claiming that he was Mahalaxmi’s natural heir, and the other corporate families were grumbling that perhaps it was someone else’s turn to rule the Network. There was a rumor that the Prell family, ancient rivals of the Noons, were readying armored trains and placing their Corporate Marines on standby.

  Out on the obscure branch lines, in dusty or frozen half-terraformed worlds where Emperors of any name were unpopular, the rebels of Human Unity watched the news unfold, and weighed their chances.

  *

  When Threnody finally made it down from Spindlebridge—shocked, tearstained, weary—she went straight to the family estate in the mountains. She would rather have gone back to Malapet, to her mother and the comforting boredom of home, but the journey would take weeks with the Silver River Line shut down, and anyway, Priya said it was too dangerous to travel. She had convinced herself that their uncle Tibor had been responsible for the disaster on the Spindlebridge. Now she was camped out in the luxurious crescent-shaped hunting lodge at the heart of the estate, surrounded by lawyers and paparazzi drones and Corporate Marines and Railforce officials, having noisy meltdowns about Tibor’s treachery. When she saw Threnody, she said, “What are you doing here? You should be with your fiancé, while he recovers from his injuries…”

  “What about my injuries?” asked Threnody, who had sprained a wrist during the crash. “And if you think I’m still marrying that fool Kobi—”