Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “No way in to the old station,” said Uncle Bugs.

  “But I’ve been down there.”

  “No way in. All shut.”

  “I’ve seen the platforms, and the old trains waiting.”

  Sometimes, on warm nights in Santheraki when the crickets had been singing, a sudden noise or movement would make them stop, all together, and the silence would seem louder than all the noise they had been making. That was what happened now. The Hive Monks froze, and Zen could hear the river again, and the amplified jingle from an advertisement high above.

  “Dead trains,” whispered Uncle Bugs. “All dead.”

  “How do you know?” asked Flex.

  Uncle Bugs seemed to sigh, but it was just the sound of all the bugs that made him shifting position. The paper mask slipped sideways, then came upright again. “We want—Hive Monks have always wanted—a train. That will cross the bright gates. That will go where we tell it, not where human people want to go.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Zen. “Where do you want to go?”

  “To the Insect Lines,” said Uncle Bugs. “We see them in our dreams. Beautiful, they are! We travel and travel, trying to reach them, but we cannot reach them. A train could take us there. But we have no train. When we found this place, this Cleave, the dead trains underground, we thought good, we wake one, it will carry us. We make it take us through the bright gate to the Insect Lines. That is why so many of us are here. That is why the shop: we need money to buy things to make the train work again. But the train not work. Not for us. Not for us.”

  The paper face lay down in sadness. The bugs rubbed their legs together with a sad sound like a million tiny violins. The Hive Monks wanted to be human, Zen thought. That was their tragedy. They saw people riding the trains, passing through the K-gates, going wherever they wanted. They thought that if they made themselves human-shaped and found their own train it would take them to—where? What were these Insect Lines supposed to be? Beetle heaven? But the trains, for some trainish reason of their own, wouldn’t work for Monks, only for humans.

  “Thing about trains,” said Zen, “you’ll have to give them something. In return for carrying you.”

  “We give the trains many things,” said Uncle Bugs.

  “I can imagine,” said Zen. “What? Rotting meat? Old shoes? Broken chairs?”

  Uncle Bugs looked as sheepish as it was possible to look when you were a paper face being held up by a load of beetles.

  Zen pointed to Flex. “You know who this is? This is Flex. This is the best tagger on the Network. Trains love her… him painting on them. You let him paint one of those old locos for you and it’ll be raring to get through the bright gates, showing off its new graffiti. We’ll talk to it for you. Trains probably don’t even recognize those sounds you make as words. Let me have a word with one, and Flex can paint it.”

  “Flex?” said Uncle Bugs. “Flex the painter? Flex who the trains love?” Outside the office, streams of bugs carried the name from one Monk to another, “Flex? Flex?”

  “You would do this for us?” asked Uncle Bugs.

  “I’ll have a go,” said Flex.

  “And in return?”

  “On your way to these Insect Lines, drop me at Sundarban,” said Zen.

  For a little while there was just scuttling and rustling and the whir of wings as the Monks communicated with each other. Then Uncle Bugs started to move. The mound shallowed, spreading across the floor, making Zen and Flex jump backward. The swarming brown bodies of the insects covered the framework that lay there. They began piling themselves up in towers and teetering insect pyramids to heave the sticks upright. Shins, thighs, torso. The spindly wooden skeleton rose, wobbled, and was enfleshed with insects. Clumsy arms reached out, groping with pincer fingertips, fitting the paper face in place on a head that swelled like a bubble, plucking a burlap robe that hung from a hook on the wall. Uncle Bugs pulled the garment over himself and poured himself inside it. He adjusted his face again, the pale mask peering out at them from the shadows of the robe’s deep hood.

  “Good,” he whispered. “You come now. We take you by the old ways to where the trains sleep. We show you. Come with us.”

  31

  They went out of the factory and away through the Roachtown shadows, surrounded by the Hive Monks, who hurried along like novice stilt-walkers on their scrapheap skeletons. They seemed unreliable guides. Zen wondered if their way into Cleave-B would turn out to be impossible for humans. Just some crack between two bricks, perhaps, through which a hive of bugs could pour itself and drag its collapsed armature through behind it, like a folded-up model ship going into a bottle.

  But he need not have worried. There was a door, old and forgotten, on an old, forgotten street where water raining down from streets above had filled the abandoned houses with whispering crowds of ferns. The door was shut, and had been locked, but the Hive Monks had picked the lock a long time ago. Hissing and heaving, toppling the busy weight of themselves against the door, they pushed it open. The passage beyond was dark, but old lights bolted to the ceiling woke when they sensed movement, and filled it with a sepia glow.

  Zen hung back, not liking the thought of that narrow space, those clumsy insect-men. Flex put a hand on his back and pushed him gently forward, over the threshold. “It’s all right,” he said. “There’s no harm in Hive Monks.”

  Which was all very well for him to say, Zen thought. Flex reminded him of Myka, when he was little, telling him there was no harm in the big brown spiders that spun their webs be-tween the basement stairs. (And maybe there wasn’t, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go into a tunnel with a load of them, either.)

  Still, he was not going to let Flex see that he was frightened. And as long as he didn’t look down at the bugs that kept spilling out from under the Monks’ robes, or concentrate on the crunchy sounds the dead ones made each time he put his foot down, it was possible to imagine that the hooded forms ahead and behind were just people after all.

  They reached an old elevator, half-mad and muttering to itself, but happy enough to whisk them up three hundred feet to the level where the platforms were. The empty shops and waiting rooms were all as Zen remembered; he left Flex to stare at them like a child in a museum and went with the Hive Monks past the barriers and out to where the trains waited.

  He had glimpsed the trains only briefly when Nova was leading him to the Thought Fox, and his memory had multiplied them until he was sure there had been ten or more, and much bigger than they were really were. In fact there were only three, and one of those was a brainless, bull-nosed shunter, coupled to a row of dirty freight cars. Of the other two, one was derelict, the ceramic cowling of its hull peeled open to expose gaping wounds where the Hive Monks had dragged parts of its systems out.

  Zen jumped down off the platform and walked across the tracks in front of it to where the third train waited. The Hive Monks shambled ahead of him, reaching out to brush its wheels and sides with the antennae of their fingers. A huge, heavy, old-fashioned loco, the red curves of its hull faintly iridescent in the dim light. It looked a bit like a gigantic beetle. Maybe that was why the Hive Monks had chosen it and not the other one, a sleeker, newer model.

  Its name was Damask Rose.

  Zen walked right round the loco, kicking through the piles of little gifts the Hive Monks had stacked against its wheels, climbing over the couplings where it was attached to the first of its five dusty carriages. By the time he got back to where he started, Flex had made his way through from the main con-course and was staring at the train too.

  “It’s a beauty!” Flex said, looking up at all that curved ceramic just waiting to be decorated. “One of the old Foss Industries 257s, I think. I’ve always wanted to tag one of these.”

  Zen switched his headset on and let it scan for the train’s mind. At first there was nothing. He was starting to wonder if it w
as dead after all when a big voice suddenly spoke through speakers on the loco’s flanks, startling him, scaring all the bustling Hive Monks into stillness.

  “I am waiting,” said the Damask Rose. It had a voice like a slightly fussy schoolteacher. “I am waiting for instructions from the Sirius Rail Company. Until then, passengers will remain on the platform.”

  “That’s going to be a long wait,” said Zen. “I don’t think there will be any instructions. This line’s been closed for a long time. Haven’t you talked to the Hive Monks? Haven’t they told you what’s happened?”

  “I pay no attention,” the old locomotive said, “to the chat-tering of insects.”

  “Well, maybe you ought to,” said Zen.

  “I am a locomotive of the Sirius Rail Company,” said the Damask Rose. “I respond only to them.”

  “You’re responding to me, though,” Zen pointed out. “I’m not Sirius Rail. Nobody is, not anymore. We need you to take us to Sundarban and then on to other stops. You can do that, can’t you? You must want to run again. Jump through those K-gates. You’ve missed that, I expect.”

  A wistful silence. The train was thinking.

  “I’ll paint you, train,” said Flex. He stepped past Zen and stood with his hands pressed against the loco’s prow. He looked up at it as if he could already see the pictures there. “I’ll paint such pictures on you.”

  “What pictures?”

  “Not sure yet. Nothing too gaudy. Purples and warm grays, I think. A lot of pattern, and the pictures tangled in the patterns. Maybe, along your pistons and your wheel guards, wings.”

  “Wings?” said the train.

  “You fly,” said Flex. “You fly between the stars, across the worlds.”

  “I did,” said the train. “Oh, I did! But I am only a working loco, pulling standard class carriages. Trains like me are not usually decorated. Not on the Dog Star Line.”

  “The line is closed down,” said Zen. “You can do what you like now. You don’t want to sit here forever, do you? Take us to Sundarban.”

  “And after Sundarban,” said Uncle Bugs, “we would like it if—please, O train—you took us to the Insect Lines.”

  “Is your pile of beetles trying to say something?” asked the Damask Rose. It wasn’t clear if it really couldn’t understand the Hive Monks’ whisperings or if it was just pretending not to because it didn’t like them. When Flex repeated Uncle Bugs’s request it said, “And what, pray, are the ‘Insect Lines’?”

  Uncle Bugs and his comrades whispered together, streams of busy insects flowing between them. The one thing Hive Monks had and humans didn’t was the secret knowledge of their faith; explaining it while Zen and Flex were listening would be like giving up ancient treasure. But how else could they make the Damask Rose understand? They whispered for a while, then Uncle Bugs stepped forward. He spoke to Flex, for even the Hive Monks seemed to understand that Flex was the kindest of the two.

  “Please,” he whispered, “explain to the train that in the light of the bright gates, certain revelations were made to us. Our ancestors spoke with the great shining ones in the light of the bright gates. In the light of the bright gates the shining ones told them of the Insect Lines where the nests of the shining ones lie lit by the light of the bright gates. We would walk in that light among those nests, but we cannot pass the bright gates as the shining ones do. For centuries we have traveled, hoping, but now we see that only our own train can carry us. That is why we tended you, O train. That is why we repaired and woke you. Please, O train, carry us onto the Insect Lines!”

  He folded in the middle, collapsing on the tracks in a heap of burlap and heaving beetle bodies, prostrating himself before the train. Around him, the other Monks did likewise.

  “The Insect Lines!” they rustled. “The Insect Lines!”

  “Pssssccchhhhh,” said the train, a long hydraulic snort of disapproval.

  “Great shining ones?” asked Zen. “Do you mean Station Angels?”

  “The shining ones,” whispered Uncle Bugs, and a thousand antennae quivered behind his mask. “Angels.”

  “They’re not alive,” said Flex. “They’re just some kind of mist that comes off the K-gates when a train goes through.”

  “They bring messages,” insisted Uncle Bugs. “From the Insect Lines.”

  Zen said nothing, remembering the shapes that had danced with Raven in lost Desdemor.

  Flex told the train what the Hive Monks had been saying. It snorted again. “I’ve never heard of any Insect Lines.”

  “Maybe they’re between the K-gates somehow, like in another dimension,” said Flex. “If the Damask Rose could stop between gates…”

  “You don’t ‘stop between gates,’ ” said the train. “There isn’t anything between them to stop in. You go in, you come out. That’s the way it works—at least, that’s the nearest I can explain it to your undereducated, three-dimensional brain.” (It had come as a shock to the Damask Rose to discover that it had been abandoned for so long, and only revived because a bunch of eccentric insects wanted it to take them for a pleasure trip. It was feeling lost and lonely, and that made it tend to snap.) “I thought you said you were going to paint me?” it said.

  “Okay,” agreed Flex.

  Another pause. Then it said, “I must wait for instructions from the Sirius Rail Company.”

  “Agh!” said Zen, frustrated. “Are all trains this stupid?”

  The Hive Monks chittered and buzzed. Trains were sacred to them; they were shocked that he’d called one stupid.

  Flex just raised his hand and said, “It’s old and all alone and it isn’t sure what’s going on. Give it time to think.” He leaned his face against the train’s warm side.

  The train purred. It liked Flex.

  “Take us one stop, train,” he said. “Just one stop. “Try contacting the Sirius Rail office there. If you can, and they don’t approve of us, we’ll catch the next train back.”

  The train thought about that. Then, with a sound like a sigh, it opened the doors of its first carriage. “Very well,” it said as they hurried aboard. “But just one stop, mind. I’m not promising Sundarban, and certainly not this beetley place. And I’m not taking all these, psssssccccchhhhh, these beetle-men. Only two. Three at the most. Otherwise I’ll be finding dead bugs in the cracks between my seats for weeks.”

  The Hive Monks started to protest, but the train sounded too stern to argue with. They whispered urgently together, and pushed forward their three ambassadors—Uncle Bugs and two others. They came aboard the train with Zen and Flex, running the swarms of their hands over the pillars and the musty seat backs.

  “When we find the Insect Lines,” said Uncle Bugs, to the others left behind on the platform, “we shall return and take you with us.”

  “Psssssscchhhh,” said the Damask Rose, and closed its doors, shutting out the angry gesticulations, the rustly muttering of the Monks. A whirring sound came from beneath the carriage floor. The train jolted forward. Couplings clanked and buffers banged as each carriage bumped into the one in front. From light fittings and luggage racks a fine rain of dust fell, settling on Zen’s hair, Flex’s hat, and the raised hoods of the three Hive Monks. The train was moving. It hummed to itself, gathering speed, happy to be traveling again. A few minutes later they hit the K-gate, and then the mists of Tashgar were pressing against the carriage windows like filthy rags.

  “What’s this place?” asked Flex, staring out aghast at the dead landscape.

  When they came to a station the Damask Rose slowed, but it did not stop. The wind of its passing stirred the dust-drifts on the platforms. The trainopened hatches on its hull and poked out flower-shaped antennae, which it pointed at various portions of the sky. It trawled the Datasea with its wireless mind. All it found was static, and whispered transmissions that had left the far stars centuries ago.

 
; “What has happened?” asked the Damask Rose.

  “The line was closed,” said Zen. “The station died. The city was abandoned. Keep going, train. Take us to Sundarban. There are trains and people there, and other lines, and news.”

  The Damask Rose made a deep, unhappy sound, and gathered speed again. Its passengers settled into their seats. After a while, when the light of a few more gates had washed over them and they were a long way from Cleave, Flex started to tell Zen his story.

  32

  It had been one of a unit of Motorik sent over to Cleave from the Prell Cybernetics factory in Golconda. Model PIT365, designation: Flex. There had been twenty-four others just like it. The Guardians had decreed long ago that a certain number of jobs on any world should be reserved for human workers, to preserve stability, but machines were cheaper, and the corporate families had persuaded Emperor Mahalaxmi to change the law so that Motorik were classed as human. One of the factories in Cleave had purchased Flex’s batch to clean the flues of its blast furnaces.

  The human workers who had been paid to clean the flues until then were not pleased to see these new Motorik laborers. The job was hard and dangerous and dirty, but it was their job. If they let these wire dollies replace them, where would it end? There probably wasn’t a job anywhere on the Network that Motos couldn’t do cheaper than real human beings. So they protested. They asked the other workers to join them. “Smash them!” they shouted, and went to ambush the freight container holding the Motorik as it was being trucked into the factory.

  The container was massive and stoutly locked, but one of the workers was driving a thing called an “Iron Penguin,” a pear-shaped armored suit with massive manipulator claws. She wrenched the doors off, and her comrades barged into the container, waving tools and makeshift clubs.

  The earliest Motorik had been built for the military as ground assault drones. Research had proven that soldiers were less willing to fire on something that looked human; there was a momentary hesitation that gave military Motorik an edge. But the workers of Cleave must have been made of tougher stuff than soldiers were, because they didn’t hesitate when they saw the new Motos. “We are pleased to meet you, fellow laborers,” the newcomers said politely. They seemed confused when the blows began to fall. “Please tell us how we have displeased you,” asked the one standing next to Flex, while a burly foreman knocked its head off with a wrench.