Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “Of course you are marrying that fool Kobi!” shouted her sister. (Threnody was shocked. Priya had always been so quiet and sort of dull before. Becoming Empress seemed to have given her a temper.) “I know you never thought him much of a catch, Thren, but things are different now. I need that marriage! I need the support of the Chen-Tulsis. So go to him, and don’t do anything that might give his people an excuse to break off your engagement.”

  Threnody did not try to argue. She was slightly afraid that, if she did, Priya might start to think that she wanted to be head of the family too, and have her poisoned or drowned or something, like some unlucky princess in a historical threedie.

  So she went to find Kobi at his family’s house, where he was recovering from his injuries. The Chen-Tulsis had spent a lot trying to make the house look grand, but the money had been wasted, because it was on quite the wrong side of the city, too far from the K-bahn and too close to the spaceports. The thunder of shuttles taking off to fetch survivors from the Spindlebridge drummed across the landscaped grounds, and by night the glare of rocket exhaust reflected in the ornamental lagoon where the gene-teched coelacanths swam. Threnody thought it was a depressing place. But Kobi was pleased to see her, and she felt warily pleased to see him. He seemed quieter than before, and weaker, and nicer. Threnody supposed that being mauled half to death by heritage megafauna would do that to a person.

  She walked in the grounds with him, half listening to him talk while she used her headset to scan the data raft for news of her cousin Tallis. She was in mourning for her father and his family, but she could only summon up a sort of general sadness for them—she hadn’t met most of them till she boarded the Noon train; they had been strangers, really. Tallis, for some reason, had been different; she needed to know what had be-come of him. So every few hours she checked to see if his name had been added to the list of the dead or the list of those brought down from orbit.

  It never was. Tallis Noon seemed to have vanished.

  28

  Zen’s plans hit a snag as soon as he reached the K-bahn station. Summer’s Lease was Prell territory, and the Prells were strengthening security—getting ready to go to war with the Noons, if you believed the newsfeeds. There were new barriers going up at the entrance to the platforms, cameras poised to scan your retinas and flash your image to facial recognition pro-grams. As far as Zen knew, no one was looking for him yet, but he did not want to take that chance. He left the station and walked the streets that backed onto the railway until he came to a place where a footbridge arched over the K-bahn lines. He waited there until he heard the train leaving the station, the sound of its engines changing as it crossed the rail yards and gathered speed, entering the narrow cutting that would take it beneath the bridge.

  There were not many people about at that hour. The only other person on the bridge was an old lady walking her miniature triceratops. She glanced at Zen as she passed him, noticed some wild expression in his eyes, and turned to look back at him. He heard her call out something as he scrambled up onto the parapet of the bridge. The rails of the K-bahn shone below him, the ballast between them speckled with autumn leaves.

  The train was coming into view, a glimmer of reflected morning sky dancing on the carriage roofs. The 5:15 to Cleave. On the loco, as he’d hoped, Flex’s painted creatures.

  He stepped off the bridge.

  The lady with the triceratops screamed. Zen hit the roof of the rear carriage with a thump that left him gasping. The bridge was whisked away; the backs of buildings flickered by. He groped for something to cling onto as the train hit the long straight at the edge of the city and started to accelerate.

  The loco knew that he was there, of course. While he was still grabbing for handholds, a maintenance spider popped out of its trapdoor at the far end of the carriage and came swaying along the roof toward him. The spider didn’t have to worry about handholds: magnets or magic kept its feet geckoed to the train’s ceramic. As it drew closer to Zen, it raised a couple of manipulator arms and tested its pincers, readying itself to throw him off.

  Zen raised one hand and screamed at it. “I’m a friend of Flex! Nice tags you’re wearing, train! Flex did that! She’s a friend of mine!”

  The spider was slaved directly to the train’s brain; the loco was watching him through its lenses. It hesitated while the train went clattering across a long white bridge that spanned an inlet of the sea. Beyond the inlet, a sheer cliff, the tracks vanishing into a tunnel. Wind tore at Zen’s clothes and pressed against his eyes. He blinked away the tears and tried to gauge the distance to the tunnel mouth. A mile maybe, narrowing fast. And inside the tunnel, maybe five more miles to the K-gate. If he was still outside the train when he went through that, there would be nothing left of him but smoke…

  The spider started moving again. It caught hold of Zen and swung him under its body so that its legs were all around him like a mobile cage as it went scuttling back along the train roof, leaping from carriage to carriage, making for the loco.

  The tunnel swallowed them with a sudden woof of reflected sound. There was a rushing darkness, then light ahead—a colorless glow that shifted like candlelight but somehow illuminated nothing. It was the curtain of energy inside the K-gate, and for a moment Zen thought that he could hear it, a strange, high singing that harmonized with the song of the speeding train. He remembered Raven saying, “Why do the Guardians not like us asking questions about the nature of the Network? Why will they never explain the technology behind the K-gates… ?”

  The spider made a last leap. A hatch on the rear of the loco opened, and it carried Zen inside. The hatch shut, and an instant later he felt the strange lurch as the train tore through K-space.

  “Ahh!” said the loco. The K-gates were what it lived for: that rush, that release. For a moment it had forgotten the boy inside it.

  Zen lay on smooth ceramic and tried to work out which of the small lights in the blackness around him were just afterimages and which were part of the loco’s systems. He had never realized there was enough space for a person inside a loco; he had thought it would be all engines and computers. Perhaps this crawl-way was left over from when the train was being built, back when it still had need of people. Somewhere above him a big fan was purring. Somewhere the huge motor throbbed like a heart.

  “Any friend of Flex is a friend of mine, traveler,” said the voice of the train, after a few more miles.

  “Thanks, train,” said Zen. “I’m going to Cleave. I’ll give her your regards.”

  “I am called Gentlemen Take Polaroids,” said the train.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Zen.

  “I stop twice between here and Cleave,” said the train. “If you like, you can get off and sit in a carriage.”

  Zen thought it over. “I’d sooner stay here, if that’s all right. And when we get to Cleave, maybe you could let me off outside the station?”

  He lay in the dark and thought of the bright rails rushing beneath him. The movements of the train woke memories of the crash on Spindlebridge. He heard again the klaxons and the screams, and felt the awful forces pulling at his body. He tried telling himself again that it hadn’t been his fault. He’d been hired to pinch a box, and he had pinched it. The rest was Raven’s doing. Zen was just as much his victim as the others.

  Sometimes, he could almost make himself believe that.

  29

  In the rail yard outside Cleave Station the Gentlemen Take Polaroids paused to take on fuel, and Zen slipped out, stepped through a gate that one of the train’s spiders opened for him in the trackside fencing, and set off into the city. Myka had told him where to go. Down mean and greasy stairs between the waterfalls, along clanging walkways into the maze of the industrial stacks, where huge factory flues reached up the canyon walls toward the distant surface like gigantic organ pipes. At last he opened a packing-crate door and went through it into a vaulted,
thundery space beneath the railway.

  It was full of dreams. The walls, the roof, even parts of the floor were covered with visions of elsewhere. Birds with hu-man faces, fish with legs, crowned rainbows and tattooed cities, improbable flying machines, faces wise and foolish. All only paint, sprayed and brushed onto the old ceramic brickwork. Only paint—so how did they seem so alive?

  “Zen?” Flex was sitting on a bunk at the vault’s far end, face lit by the glow from a small screen. “I heard you’d left. Hadn’t thought I’d see you again.”

  Even now that he knew Flex was Motorik, it was difficult to believe she was not human—or he, perhaps. Last time he’d seen her, Zen had been pretty sure she was a girl. Now she had a squarer jaw, a deeper voice, different ways of moving. It was still hard to be sure, but if Zen had been forced to guess, he would have said he was male.

  “How’s Myka?” asked Flex.

  “She’s well. Sends her love.” Zen looked around him. When Myka used to tell him about Flex living rough, Zen had imagined somewhere messy: as messy as his place would be if he lived that way. But the arch was tidy. No food or cooking gear, of course. No comforts except for that simple bunk. Just a few boxes of paints and stuff lined up along a ledge, some trainspottery trophy photos of famous locos, the Galactic Unlimited and the Hightown Crow. Bio-glow lamps threw Flex’s shadow over the paintings on the wall.

  “They’re amazing,” said Zen.

  Flex beamed. “They’re just practice. I try things out here, then I paint on the trains.”

  “The one I came in on says hello, by the way. It was called Gentlemen Take Polaroids.”

  “Good old Polaroids,” said Flex with a smile.

  “Sorry I nearly got you caught that night, in the rail yards…”

  “Sorry I left you there,” said Flex. “I thought you were right behind me…”

  Zen shrugged to show it didn’t matter, but he was glad Flex felt guilty about that. It made it easier to ask another favor.

  “I need your help again,” he said. “Not for me, for a friend. She’s someone like you.”

  “A tagger?” asked Flex.

  “A Motorik.”

  Flex’s expression changed. He was better at pretending to be human than Nova, and his expressions were easier to read. He was afraid.

  “Did Myka tell you about me?” he asked.

  Zen laughed. “Oh no. I worked it out for myself, a long time ago.” He meant, I’ve been keeping your secret safe, just like my sister. You can trust me. You owe me.

  “Myka saved me during the riots,” said Flex. “She helped me hide till I could pass as human…”

  “You should tell me the whole story sometime,” said Zen. “But I’m in a hurry. This friend of mine, she’s badly damaged. You heard what happened on the Spindlebridge? She was there. A drone harpooned her and pulled her out into space. But she could survive that, couldn’t she?”

  Flex nodded slowly, carefully skirting around all the other questions that one raised, about what Zen’s friend had been doing annoying drones on the Spindlebridge in the first place. He said, “We keep our central processing units in our heads, like you. There are subsystems in the torso, but they should self-repair, and space wouldn’t be a problem—a lot of Motorik work in vacuum environments, on comet mines and such. But I don’t see how you think I can help her.”

  “I need to get to Sundarban,” said Zen, “and I can’t just take the K-bahn. There’s all sorts of new security stuff at the stations, and Sundarban will be worse.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I was thinking maybe you could get me down into the old Cleave-B station.”

  Flex looked doubtful. “The Dog Star Line? I’ve heard it’s down there… The trains don’t like to talk about it.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Zen. “It’s there all right. Rails, trains, everything. But I don’t know how to get to it.”

  “Me neither,” said Flex. “I think that stuff was all closed up pretty tight.” He hummed to himself, thinking. For a moment Zen thought he was going to refuse, and won-dered if he would have to threaten him. That would be easy enough to do—“If you don’t help me, Flex,” he’d say, “I’ll run outside and tell the proud workers of Cleave that there’s a wire dolly hiding out in the stacks.” He just didn’t want to have to say it.

  Luckily, Flex seemed intrigued by his story of the hidden station. “There are trains down there? Really?”

  “Some. I saw them. Dead, or sleeping.”

  “The only people who might know a way in are the Hive Monks.”

  “Why would they know?”

  “Cuz they’re always rustling about down there, in and out of the deep tunnels,” said Flex. “Some of those passages under the K-bahn are so ankle-deep in dead bugs, it’s like wading through breakfast cereal.”

  “The old station was the same,” said Zen, mentally crossing breakfast cereal off a list of things he would ever want to eat again. “Dead bugs everywhere. So you reckon they know a way in?”

  “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Has Uncle Bugs pulled himself together yet?”

  “His shop is still closed. If he’s back together, he must be hiding out with the other Monks, down in Roachtown.”

  “I don’t want to go to Roachtown!”

  “If you want to find a way into Cleave-B, you’ll have to,” said Flex. He thought for a moment—perhaps remembering how badly things had turned out the last time he helped Zen Starling. Then kindness or curiosity got the better of him. He said, “I’ve been down there before. I can show you.”

  30

  Roachtown was a district down in Cleave’s depths, full of dead factories and the roar of the river. It flooded regularly, so no one lived there. No one but the Hive Monks, who found their way to Cleave from all across the Network and came rustling pon-derously down the wet stairways to gather in the big, derelict bio-buildings. There they made homes for themselves out of the debris that the river washed up or the human residents of Cleave threw down from high above. There they quietly did whatever disgusting things Hive Monks got up to when no one was around to see.

  Zen tied strings around his trouser legs before he started the long walk down Roachtown Stair. Tied them round his wrists, too. “Where there’s Monks there’s bugs,” he said. “There’ll be squillions of them that haven’t formed a colony yet and will be running about mindless. I don’t want them running up inside my clothes.”

  “They wouldn’t really do that,” Flex said. “I don’t think they would.”

  Then he tied string around his legs and wrists too, just in case.

  Down the long stair they went, until the bridges and the busy air traffic of the gorge were far above them and Cleave River was rushing past a hundred feet below. The old factories clustered along a wet ledge like Halloween pumpkins left out in the rain. Lights showed dimly through a few windows. Uncertain hands had painted a sign on the wall that read:

  ROACHTOwN Pop. 100,000,000,000

  They went carefully along the slippery pavement into the first of the factories. The sound of the river was quieter in there. In its place was another sound: the white noise of insects, whisper of feet and scrape of carapace. The shadows seethed with bugs: males scuttling across the rough floors, the larger, winged females blundering through the air. A shape that wanted to look human levered itself up out of a broken armchair and shambled toward them, like a beekeeper engulfed by his swarm. Cicada voices chittered, “Welcome.”

  “We’re here to see Uncle Bugs,” said Flex. “Zen Starling here wants to know if he’s all right.”

  The Hive Monk whispered and fidgeted. Under its hood, its face was the face of a broken Motorik, antennae bristling from empty eyeholes and a twisted, gaping mouth. It said, “Someone scattered Uncle Bugs. Wreck smash. Long time it take he to come together.”

&nbs
p; “That wasn’t Zen,” said Flex. “We’re just here to see how he is.”

  “Good old Uncle Bugs!” said Zen, though he was having trouble keeping the smile on his face. This wasn’t like Uncle Bugs’s shop—and Uncle Bugs’s shop was bad enough. This place was vile.

  Other Hive Monks had appeared out of the shadows. Streams of insects flowed from under the hems of their robes, or whirred from the darkness beneath their hoods. The Monks were exchanging parts of themselves, exchanging thoughts.

  The Monk who had first spoken raised one arm like the clumsy puppet that he was and made a gesture. Beckoning, Zen guessed. Come with me, human visitors. Deeper into Roachtown. He shuffled away, and they followed.

  They passed a ziggurat of broken toasters, a wall of lost left shoes. They came to a small room that must have been a supervisor’s office once, when the factory was still a factory. Inside was a thing that looked at first like a big beanbag, then like an ants’ nest, then like a stranded octopus. A waist-high mound, constantly moving. It was made of bugs, and streams of bugs like busy tentacles extended from it, fumbling with a thing of twigs and string that lay on the floor. Tiny mandibles wove and tied, trimmed and carried. Other bugs dragged some pale and plate-like object from a corner and carried it to the top of the mound. It was the paper face of Uncle Bugs.

  “Zen Starling,” said the mound.

  Zen waved. “Came to see how you are,” he said. He wished he had brought chocolates or grapes or something. What did Hive Monks eat? No, best not to even think about that…

  “A drone shot me, Zen Starling,” said the mound. “With a gun. Bang! Taken me all this time to find my mind again. Got to make a new skellington, too.”

  “I know,” said Zen. “I’m sorry about that. But I’ve come to ask for your help.”

  “What help?”

  “The old station. Flex says you know a way in.”