Railhead (15 page)

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 was 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.

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.

Somehow, among all the shouting and crashing, among the thrashing of severed Motorik limbs and gouts of gel and cries of, “Smash the wire dollies!” Flex found itself outside the con-tainer. The Iron Penguin closed huge claws around it and lifted it off its feet. Flex twisted round and looked through the machine’s windshield, into the face of the driver, an angry brown girl with
MYKA
stitched across the front of her greasy work cap.

Angry, but not that angry, it turned out. Myka could have snipped the Motorik into pieces with those claws, but although she’d been as outraged as all the others when she heard about the company’s plans to ship in putala labor, she felt suddenly less violent now that heads were being crushed and arms torn off and the blue gel, which served the wire dollies for blood, was pouring in such startling quantities out of the container. She met the eyes of the Motorik she had caught, and saw nothing in them but confusion. Nobody had bothered telling it that the world was going to be like this.

“Me neither,” she said disgustedly, and rather than slamming the claws shut, she opened them, turning the Penguin quickly at the same instant. Flex was flung out of the battle, over a hand-rail, and dropped several stories into a pile of garbage that had been slung out on the bank of Cleave River for the next flood to wash away.

There Flex lay, wondering about what had just happened and why. It hid in the heaps of refuse while the shouting died away above. Its brain had been damaged, it thought. It kept getting strange ideas. It found old tiles in the garbage, and started scratching marks on them with a bit of rusty wire. It looked at the marks and liked them. It discovered that they could be turned into pictures. It concentrated. It drew faces and hands. It drew the Iron Penguin and the girl who drove it. It drew the river, rushing by.

Night came to Cleave. The strip of stormy sky that showed between the canyon’s high walls turned black, and some of the shops and factories killed their lights. Flex went on drawing, until it heard someone come climbing down the ladder from the factory above.

It edged backward into a cleft of the canyon wall and watched as a flashlight beam swept the garbage mounds. It did not need a flashlight to see in the dark. It could see that the newcomer was Myka. It wondered if she regretted not destroying it when she had the chance. It wondered if she had come down here to find it and finish it off. It watched her stoop and pick up a tile. She looked at the tile for a long time, and Flex guessed that she had found the picture it had made of her. She looked around in case someone had left it there as a joke and was watching from the shadows, laughing. Flex stayed very still. Nothing moved but the ferns, which danced like slow green flames under the spray from the river.

“Moto?” she called. “You still down here?”

It felt the flashlight beam touch it. It saw the girl start as she noticed its pale face watching her through the ferns. She put the tile into one of the big pockets on the leg of her overalls and came crunching and slithering over the garbage. She said a word that Flex had not been programmed to recognize, probably a curse. She said, “What are we going to do with you?”

“Please, I would like to leave this place,” said Flex.

Myka snorted. “Good luck with that. They’re smashing all your sort. There are mobs outside the station, dragging wire dollies off the incoming trains, breaking them up, using their heads for lanterns. You’re going to have to stay hidden.”

“Thank you,” said Flex. “For not breaking me.”

“I wish I had,” said Myka. “I wish I could. If they find out I’ve helped you…”

“Sorry,” said Flex.

Myka picked up the tile that Flex had been working on when she came down the ladder. She looked at the picture scratched on it. She said, “I didn’t know Motorik could draw.”

“Neither did I.”

“Were you programmed for design work or something?”

“I do not think so.”

She put the tile down and looked at Flex’s face again. (Zen could imagine what her expression had been. Exasperated, but kindly. She had been looking after her mother and her kid brother since she was little, and now this stupid Moto needed looking after too.)

“You can’t stay here,” she told it. “I can show you a stairway that leads up into the stacks. Plenty of places to hide out in the stacks. But someone’s bound to see you, so you’re going to have to stop looking so… You’re going to have to look like a human being.”

“How?” asked Flex.

“Your skin’s too pale, and your eyes are too far apart, and…”

Flex dipped into the menus of its mind. Its white face darkened, taking on a brownish tone not far off Myka’s own. Its eyebrows thickened into a Myka-ish unibrow.

“Don’t overdo it,” Myka said. She looked at its clothes—the remnants of its papery gray overalls, which hung in rags now, baring its blank and sexless body. “Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked it. “Male or female? Most people are one or the other, in Cleave.”

“Which are you?” asked Flex.

“Female, of course.”

Flex found a setting in its menus labeled
GENDER
and selected
FEMALE
.

Myka went rummaging in the garbage heap and found some overalls, and a lady’s rain cape with plastic flowers for buttons. She made Flex put the clothes on, then sat back on her haunches and studied her. She told her to make her hair longer, and styled it roughly with her hands. “Well,” she said, “you’re an odd-looking girl, but at least people won’t think ‘wire dolly’ as soon as they see you. You’ll need to work at it, though. You need to watch people—you’re good at that, I can tell from the way you draw. Watch us and copy how we move. Listen, and copy how we talk. But don’t go talking to anybody except me, not unless you have to.”

“No, Myka.”

She led Flex along the riverside, along the rusted walkways, which jutted from the rock face there, up wet stairways, into the complicated alleys between the stacks. Before they parted she pinged something from her headset into Flex’s brain: a messaging address. “Anything you need,” she said, “you call me. I can bring you food, or whatever. But I guess your sort don’t need food?”

Flex did not need food, but she needed power. She made her way alone through the stacks, and into the rail yards. She recharged herself from the unit that drove the huge loco-motive turntable outside the station. In an access space between the tracks she made a small lair for herself. She listened with her mind to the big, calm minds of the trains as they came and went. She heard their songs. They knew that she was there, but they didn’t seem to care. On the walls of her den, where dirt and damp had stained the ceramic, she started scratching draw-ings. She drew trains and Iron Penguins and flowers and trucks and clothes. She drew Myka. She went out into the streets and watched people and came back and drew them. She delved into the Datasea and found other things to draw, things she didn’t even know the names of.

Every few days there was a message from Myka in her mind.
“You still there, Moto?”
or
“You need anything?”
One day she messaged back.
“Please, I would like things to draw with…”

“So Myka started bringing me paintsticks from the factory stores,” said Flex, smiling at the memory while the
Damask Rose
carried him farther and farther from Cleave. “I started drawing on the trains. And when people started to recognize my pictures, they came and found me, and asked me to paint signs for shops and decorate taxis and trucks. They paid me in paintsticks and free power. And Myka helped me buy stuff, clothes and things, so I’d fit in better. She came sometimes just to talk. She told me about you, and your ma. She said I was a good listener.”

And all this had been going on, thought Zen, while he’d been off on his thieving trips to Ambersai and Tusk, or hanging out at the Spatterpattern, or lying on his bed at Bridge Street, listening to Ma moan and fret. Myka would come home wet and tired and he’d always just assume she’d come straight from her dead-end job. He felt like a fool for not noticing that Flex was a Motorik; he felt a bigger one for never imagining that his sister might have this other life going on, this adventure of her own.

“Myka’s right,” he said. “There’s so much I don’t know about her.”

Flex smiled. “She’s good. Like you.”

“Me? I’m not good.”

“But you are going to all this trouble to help a Motorik, just like Myka helped me.”

“It’s different,” said Zen.

“When we get to Sundarban,” said Flex, “you’ll have to get into orbit to find Nova. How will you do that?”

“I have a plan,” said Zen.

Which wasn’t true. He had only a fragment of an idea, more of a desperate hope than a plan. It was going to be risky, and perhaps impossible, but he had to try. If he could steal Nova back from death, perhaps it would make up for all the deaths he’d caused at Spindlebridge.