On the Train

by Harry Turtledove

  “They scare me, too,” Javan answered. He hadn’t known a dragon’s tongue was prickly like a cat’s, and for the same reason: to rasp all the meat off the bones. On a dragon’s tongue, though, the prickles were as long as his fingers. After a moment, Javan went on, “I bet they scare everybody—everybody with any sense, anyhow. But they’re wonderful.”

  She didn’t come right out and call him a liar. She also didn’t look as if she believed him.

  Passengers had been boarding The Train by ones and twos. When a warning gong sounded, they streamed out of the depot and away from the dragons, which by then had stripped almost all the flesh from the bones in front of them—and had crunched the bigger bones for marrow.

  As Javan climbed up into his carriage, he asked a conductor, “Do the dragons ever eat their handlers by mistake?”

  “Their handlers? Bou!” The pudgy man in the blue kepi sounded shocked. Then he laid a finger by the side of his nose and went on in a low voice: “Every once in a while, though, an especially obnoxious passenger disappears.”

  “Oh, really?” Javan said.

  “Really,” the conductor assured him. “I wouldn’t tell you that if I didn’t know Siilo’s taken you under his wing. Siilo’s all right, Siilo is.”

  “I think so,” Javan answered.

  “You’d better, kid. You’d better.” The conductor’s double chin wobbled softly as he nodded in agreement with himself. “Don’t think you’re the first sprout he’s ever given a hand to. Yes, Siilo’s all right.”

  “Quit your gabbing, you two, and let me by,” a grouchy woman behind Javan said. Javan took his own place. The carriage was filling up fast now. Screams from the dragons warned that The Train was about to get rolling. They also woke the baby whose parents sat a couple of rows in back of Javan. The baby’s screams were tiny next to those from the dragons, but they were much closer and on a shriller, more annoying note. And they went on and on, which the dragons’ screams didn’t.

  Obnoxious passengers, the conductor had said. Javan couldn’t think of many more obnoxious than that loudmouthed baby. Unlike adults, the baby probably couldn’t help it. Javan understood as much. He still wondered if the brat might make a dragon a tasty snack, or if it was too small to notice.

  Well, he didn’t have to stay here and listen to it. He headed back to the converted freight car. He could listen to the chatter of the snack-sellers and their helpers instead. He could even join in if he felt like it—and if he found the time.

  Before long, he got lost in his work, the way he did more often than not. Siilo didn’t just take you under his wing. Once he got you there, he squeezed you and shaped you till you were the way he wanted you to be. He didn’t realize he was doing it. For a long time, you might not realize he was doing it, either. Whether you realized it or not, it happened all the same.

  As Javan had got used to cooking with the blue flame, so he got used to cooking with the salamander. It was friendlier than the blue flame had been—it was as long as he kept it happy, anyhow. In the parts of the world that worked by the mechanical arts, things were just things. Here in this magical land, things also had personalities. People born and raised in these lands had to take that for granted, and to find the mechanical arts strange and impersonal and intriguing. For Javan, it worked the other way around.

  One morning, he got to Siilo’s grill before the sun came up. He usually did—it wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty to do. He looked down into the grill, ready to greet the salamander. He’d grown fond of it, and of the ice elemental. Now that he knew them, he couldn’t imagine tormenting one with the other.

  But the salamander wasn’t there.

  Javan swore—in Pingasporean. You could cuss up a storm in Traintalk. The snack-sellers were fluently, even poetically, profane in it. But Javan was still new to the language. He didn’t get the satisfaction swearing in it that he did in his native tongue.

  He also didn’t get the grill started. The salamander wasn’t there, but neither was the gas jet with which he’d cooked before. Javan stood in front of the grill scratching his head. He’d beaten everybody else into the converted freight car, so he had no one to ask what to do.

  Siilo wouldn’t be happy if he came in to fill up his tray and found the grill cool. Javan remembered the old man talking about times when you couldn’t cook by gas or by some magical means. In that case…Javan rummaged in the cupboards over the grill. He did a few steps from a happy Pingasporean dance when he found neatly cut sticks of wood and, near them, skinny twigs that would do for kindling.

  He built the makings of a fire in the bottom of the grill. Then he stopped being happy again. How was he supposed to get it started? No lighter handy—no firestick, either. More rummaging produced a match safe. He’d seen matches a few times, although he couldn’t remember ever using one.

  Fortunately, the match safe had pictures on the side to show him what to do. He learned by experiment even so: he broke the first match he tried, and burned his fingers with the second one. That pulled some more Pingasporean profanity out of him. The third match went out before he could start the fire with it. On his fourth try, though, the kindling caught. He clapped his hands together and watched in fascination as the flames spread to the bigger sticks.

  Then he got to work. The other snack-sellers and helpers started coming in. Some of them started cooking with assurance; others fumbled almost as much as Javan had.

  Bordric, unsurprisingly, seemed ready for almost anything The Train might show him. He got his grill started twice as fast as Javan had. “I hate these in-between times,” the big, fair man grumbled. “You don’t know what the demon’s going to work, or whether anything will.”

  Someone tapped Javan on the shoulder. He jumped and whirled at the same time; he hadn’t known anybody was behind him. But there stood Siilo. Without a word, the snack-seller started loading skewers of meat and vegetables onto the tray strapped around his neck.

  Javan was miffed. “You would have said plenty if I didn’t have them ready for you,” he complained.

  Siilo looked astonished. “You bet I would! Is your job to have them ready. Your job, you understand? Nobody give you gold bracelet just because you do your job. Job is what you supposed to do. You don’t do it, I find somebody else who will. I find somebody else plenty quick. You better believe I do.”

  As soon as he’d filled the tray, he went away. He had his job to do, too, and he was going to do it. Javan stared after him. Little by little, he realized Siilo had paid him a compliment of sorts. If the old man had praised him, what would it have meant? Only that Siilo was surprised he’d done his job. But Siilo wasn’t surprised. Siilo expected him to do it. And if Javan did what was expected of him, why get excited about it?

  “My job,” Javan muttered. The word felt different in Traintalk: somehow weightier than it would have in Pingasporean. “My job,” he said again, and fed the fire more wood.

  Pretty soon, Javan was cooking over blue flames again. Then The Train passed through another land where magic replaced the mechanical arts. The dragons that drew The Train here were different from the ones in Dongorland: they were squatter, more metallic in color, with bronze wings that seemed too small to bear their weight.

  Nor did a smiling salamander heat Javan’s grill in Marmorica. No: what might have been a tiny sun blazed there. It went red and cool as the real sun set, and came back to life at dawn. In the nighttime hours, something that might have been a miniature frozen moon chilled the cooler. It went out at sunup, but the cooler held the chill all day.

  That tiny sun did what it needed to do, but Javan liked the salamander better. How were you going to make a little sun happy, or a little moon? You couldn’t—it was as simple as that.

  Bordric maintained that the little sun and moon and other such manifestations of Marmorica weren’t true magic at all, but mechanical arts that only the people living in those parts understood and could use. “What about the dragons?” Javan asked.

&n
bsp; “What about them?” Bordric said. “For all you know, for all I know, they really are made of metal.”

  “They eat meat,” Javan pointed out. He’d watched them do it. They were neater feeders than the dragons of Dongorland, but they might have been even more thorough: they demolished carcasses bones and all.

  “Yes, but who knows how it feeds them? Who but a Marmorican, I mean?” Bordric stuck out his bearded chin and looked stubborn. “When the mechanical arts go far enough, you cannot tell them apart from magic.”

  “Feh,” Javan said: a disgusted noise he’d picked up from a little old man in his carriage who always wore a small, knitted skullcap. “That’s a clerk’s way of thinking, or a bookkeeper’s.”

  He couldn’t get under Bordric’s skin. “It’s my way of thinking,” the snack-seller said, flipping meat-filled pasties with a spatula.

  Marmorica wasn’t as big as Dongorland: or rather, The Railroad didn’t pass through so much of it. Pretty soon, Javan was going through the cabinets above the grill, looking for that match safe again. He was proud of himself for getting the first match lit this time. Then, a moment later, he was furious at himself because he burned his hand with it. Firesticks were much more predictable.

  He was dicing tubers a few days later when The Train slowed down to load and unload at yet another city’s depot. “Kambok!” the conductors called. “This stop is Kambok!”

  Javan almost sliced his fingers. He jerked his left hand away from the knife just in time. Siilo came in to fill up his tray a few minutes later. “New people coming on!” he said happily. “They taste what I sell, they keep buying from me as long as they ride!”

  All the other snack-sellers were thinking exactly the same thing, of course. The converted freight car was as crowded as Javan had ever seen it. Men and women yelled at one another. But Javan’s mind was running on a different track altogether. “I’m going to need to ask something from you,” he told Siilo.

  “Eh? What’s that?” The old man cupped a hand behind his ear to show he hadn’t heard.

  “I’m going to need to ask something from you,” Javan repeated.

  Siilo did hear him that time. “Oh, you are, are you?” The snack-seller did his best to sound ominous. “What you want now?”

  “Some time off at our next stop,” Javan said.

  “You think so, do you?” Siilo clapped a hand to his forehead to show his opinion of that. “Why you care even a fart’s worth about a nowhere place like Pingaspor?”

  A little stiffly—well, more than a little stiffly—Javan answered, “It’s my city. It’s where I got on. This is The Train’s first time back since I got on.”

  “Oh.” A long pause followed. Siilo looked sheepish, an expression Javan wasn’t used to seeing on his worn features. At last, he said, “All right. Go ahead. You do. Never mind me. Sometimes I stick my foot in my face so I can find out what it taste like.”

  “Thank you, Siilo.” Javan left it right there. Yes, he could have had a softer boss—Siilo worked him as if he were a device shaped by the mechanical arts. Siilo also worked himself just as hard, or maybe harder. Javan had to take that seriously. And he’d seen he could also have had a rougher boss. The old man hardly ever hit him. When Siilo did, Javan couldn’t think of a time he hadn’t deserved it. And Siilo didn’t hit very hard even when he did hit. Some of the other helpers in the converted freight car weren’t so lucky.

  From what Luisa said, the serving girls and laundresses had the same kinds of troubles, although they didn’t always show up the same way. “Women telling you what to do are bad enough,” she told Javan. “They screech at you when you mess up. Sometimes they pull your hair. And you mostly can’t get back at them. If they catch you, you lose your job. Maybe they throw you off The Train in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Bad enough?” Javan echoed when she said that. “The men are worse?”

  She beamed at him. “You were listening!” she exclaimed—by the way her voice chimed, she might have announced a miracle.

  “I always listen to you, Luisa,” Javan had said seriously.

  He’d been serious enough to fluster her, in fact, but not serious enough to derail her. “Yes, the men are worse, or some of them are,” she said. “They don’t scream or slap you around most of the time, but some of them think they can put their hands wherever they want if you make a mistake. If you make a big mistake, some of them expect you to keep them happy so you can stay out of trouble.”

  “They’d better not expect that kind of thing from you!” Javan’s hands had curled into fists. “I’ll make them sorry if they do.”

  “The one I really have to worry about is a woman who likes girls,” Luisa said. “But she doesn’t like me that way, or she hasn’t tried anything if she does like me that way.”

  “She’s foolish not to,” Javan said, and that got him kissed.

  As The Train pulled into Pingaspor, though, everything that had happened in his journey round the world receded into the background of his thoughts. He pressed his nose up against the glass of his third-class carriage. The familiar look of the people and the familiar look of the skyline brought tears to his eyes. There were the Needle of Victory, the great statue of the Patriot without a Name, the Wisdom Stupa, and so many more buildings he’d taken for granted while he lived here. And there was the bulk of the depot straight ahead. The Train chugged and squealed to a halt.

  Javan’s nose mashed against the glass harder than ever. His breath clouded it as the air scoops brought smells long familiar but now overlain with others to his nostrils. He stared out avidly across the platform. Had anyone come to see how he was doing? Was anyone he knew getting on The Train?

  There was Kiri! Although her breasts remained pert and lovely, he was amazed at how ordinary she seemed to him. It wasn’t just because she walked hand-in-hand with chubby, silly Uharto, either—at any rate, Javan told himself it wasn’t. What Kiri saw in Uharto, Javan couldn’t imagine, but he didn’t waste much time worrying about it.

  A couple of Pingasporeans did board The Train, but they were both older people, people Javan didn’t recognize. The man got into a second-class carriage. The woman went straight into first class. How much silver wire did that cost? Not just more than Javan had. Plenty to sink a good-sized boat, unless he missed his guess.

  At last, Kiri noticed his face in the window. She pointed at him. Javan waved. Kiri fluttered her fingers back at him, but at the same time she said something to Uharto. They both went into gales of laughter. Through the glass, Javan couldn’t hear what she said. He didn’t need long to realize that was bound to be just as well.

  When a series of little jerks rippled along The Train’s couplings and it began to roll out of the Pingaspor depot, Javan fogged the window glass with another sigh. This one was a sigh of relief, not a sigh of longing and homesickness like most of the earlier ones.

  Out of the depot went The Train. Javan’s view expanded. There was the silver Ocarina. There was that face carved into the distant cliff. Whose face it was, Pingasporeans never tired of arguing about.

  And there was Siilo, coming through the cars tirelessly calling his wares. Seeing Javan still looking out the window, the old man with the wispy beard paused long enough to say, “I was maybe wrong. Not such a terrible bad place, Pingaspor. Plenty worse ones along The Railroad, I bet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Javan said. “If this isn’t nowhere, you can sure see it from here.”

  When The Train left Liho on its way across the rest of the great ocean, Siilo started complaining about how much his ankle bothered him as he went from one carriage to another, walking with his tray from sunup to sundown. Siilo always complained, of course; Javan wouldn’t have known what to make of his boss in a cheery mood. And an old man’s aches and pains gave Siilo a running start on things to grumble about.

  But this felt different. Most of the time, Siilo’s grousing meant the same thing as steam hissing out through a safety valve. As long as Siilo grous
ed, as long as the steam hissed out, everything was fine. When silence fell, that was when an explosion might be on the way.

  Here, though, Siilo actually had something to complain about. The ankle was swollen; Javan could see as much. Walking on it had to hurt. Walking on it as much as the old man did had to hurt a lot.

  Finally, Javan asked him, “Do you want to tend the grill for a while and let me go through the carriages selling the snacks?”

  He waited for his boss to cuss him up, down, and sideways. And, sure enough, Siilo puffed up as if he were about to. But then he didn’t. Instead, he asked, “You think you know Traintalk good enough?”

  “What do you think?” Javan returned. He wasn’t perfectly fluent in The Train’s stripped-down native tongue, but he got along pretty well.

  “Mm…It could be.” Siilo found another question: “You think you really able to sell?”

  “Sim. I do.” Javan hoped he sounded confident—more confident than he felt.

  Siilo sent him a ferocious glare. “You start costing me, I go back out there my own self and I stick you in front of grill again.”

  “I already figured that out.” Now Javan hoped he sounded calm. If Siilo did order him back to the converted freight car, when would he get another chance to escape it? Not till the old man died, chances were. Maybe not even then. If you couldn’t do the work, you hurt not only yourself but everyone else who depended on you.

  “Well, all right. We try. We see how you do,” Siilo said. “Maybe I get me a stool, so I don’t stand on this stupid leg all the time while I cook.” When Javan heard that, he realized Siilo wasn’t feeling good at all.

  He said, “When I go through the carriages, I’ll tell them I’m selling Siilo’s snacks. That will make them want to buy.”

  For the first time since he’d proposed going out in Siilo’s place, something approaching approval replaced worry on his boss’ wrinkled face. “Sim, you do that. I was going to tell you to, but you already think of it for yourself. That good. Maybe you lazy, but could be you not stupid.”