Railhead (19 page)

The machinery of the place whirred and hummed. Readouts flickered on temperature gauges. The Motorik bustled about their tasks. The frost on the inner surface of the tube was thawing, the gel that filled it gurgling away through hidden pipes. Soon the body inside was visible. Golden eyes opened wide. The body shuddered and blinked in brief confusion as a partial copy of Anais Six downloaded itself out of the Datasea into its brain.

Anais Six had had this interface grown for a party, and then lost interest and never used it. Now it stirred at last. The thawing procedure was supposed to take hours, but as soon as it had control of its muscles, the interface forced its way out of the freezer tube, grabbed the party dress that one of the Motorik servants held ready for it, and strode away through the silent rooms, out into the garden. The air-car that would take it to the station city was already touching down.

A red train in a white world. A long viaduct, immensely high, spanning a gorge between two stony mountainsides. The mountains scarred with old mine workings and bandaged with snow. Fresh flakes flurrying down, gray against the snow-colored sky, then settling soft and white. In the middle of the viaduct was a silent station. Icicles fringed the canopies above the platforms, and trailed from a sign that read
WINTERREISE
.

There the
Damask Rose
stopped, just as exhausted as her passengers by the battle that they had left behind.

“What happens now?” asked Nova, in the silence.

Zen didn’t have any good answer to that. He needed air. He had been too busy to be scared while the bullets were buzzing around him, but now that the danger was over he felt appalled at how near to death he had been. He thumbed the door release and jumped down into the drifts beside the track. So still and quiet. The only sound the whisper of the snow. The gravity was lower than on Sundarban. He wondered if that was what made the flakes so big.

Crunching softly over the drifts, he walked along the platform to the front of the train, checking the loco for damage. There were some scars and scorch patterns. Some of Flex’s paint had been scraped off. A broken maintenance spider dangled from its hatch, clanking against the loco’s side when the breeze blew: a small, cold sound. Higher up, the
Rose
’s guns still jutted from their hatches, hissing and steaming as stray snowflakes touched them.

“Why do you have guns, train?” he asked.

“We were all fitted with them,” answered the
Damask Rose
. “I was built in troubled times. There was war on the Spiral Line. My sisters and I were fitted with weapons in case we were ever attacked.”

“And were you?”

“Not until today.”

“They will come after us, you know.”

“I know, Zen. We should move on, but I must wait and make repairs.”

“How long? They’ll be coming soon.”

“Just for an hour, maybe less.”

Zen turned away and looked down over the viaduct. Its long legs vanished below into a white cloud that filled the valley between the two mountains. Through the cloud he glimpsed the shapes of buildings: roofs collapsed under the weight of heaped snow, the streets between them choked with drifts. An old world, he thought, and empty; the mines scraped bare. A good place for fugitives to hide and lick their wounds. But not for long. There was only one K-gate between here and Sundarban. Pretty soon Railforce would be popping through it, and they’d be ready for the
Rose
and her little guns this time.

“Is Flex all right?” the train asked.

“He’s fine. He got shot in the shoulder, but it’s repairing.”

“He is a good painter. Do you like my angels?”

“They’re great. They really suit you.”

“What about the insect Monks? Did they survive?”

“No. They were scattered.”

“Good. I did not like them.”

“They saved Nova and me,” said Zen. “Without them, we’d never have got off Sundarban.” He felt guilty, because he hadn’t liked the Hive Monks either, and he was glad they were gone. Something moved in his hair. He groped for it and pulled it free. A white maggot. Disgusted, he almost hurled it over the parapet, before he remembered how it had got there. He searched his hair and clothes and found more of the grubs, which he took back aboard the train, cupped in his hands. There were hundreds of Monk bugs in the front carriage. They scurried in aimless streams over the floor and walls and seats, while winged females battered themselves against the lamps. Zen wondered how long it would take them to hatch enough eggs and rear enough maggots to turn themselves back into a Hive Monk, and whether that Hive Monk would still be Uncle Bugs.

Nova was sitting with Flex in the next carriage, away from the insects. It was a dining car, tables spread with crisp white cloths, laid with silver cutlery, tinkling glassware, traditional squeezy plastic sauce holders shaped like oversized tomatoes. Nova and Flex sat there in silence, but Zen guessed they were talking, in some wordless, Motorik way. It made him feel left out and faintly jealous. He noticed that Flex had changed back into a girl.

“Why do you keep switching?” he asked. “Male to female, female to male…”

Flex looked up at him and smiled. “Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

“I don’t think so…”

“It doesn’t make much difference really,” said Flex. “Not to Motorik. Only to how others see us. Inside, we’re not really male or female. We’re just us. Don’t you ever switch, Nova?”

Nova suddenly stood up, brushed past Zen, and left the train. He called after her, but she didn’t stop, just strode across the platform and into the old station. He started to go after her, then hesitated, looking back at Flex. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Flex smiled again, fingering the rent in the shoulder of her jacket where the Railforce bullet had torn through. “All repaired. I’m going to carry on painting,” she said. “I don’t mind the cold.”

Zen stepped out of the carriage, following Nova’s footprints across the snowy platform and into the station building. It was a collection of linked domes, grown from genetically engineered ivory. The light was cool and blue in there, filtering down through the snow on the skylights, but bio-lamps came on as he crossed the concourse, and the shops and food stalls opened their shutters hopefully, sensing business after all these years.

He found Nova on an upper level, looking out through high windows at the snow.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She wouldn’t turn to face him. “I thought I was so clever,” she said. “Tweaking my settings, shortening my nose, making freckles. I thought I was brilliant! But Flex was just a labor unit, and she’s passed for human among humans all these years. I couldn’t do that.” She stared at the reflection of her face in the glass, at the shadows of the snow that brushed across it. Zen watched her. He wondered what she would look like as a boy.

“I thought I was unique,” she said. “I thought I was the only Motorik who’d ever… But there must be loads of others. How many like Flex, on all the other stations? Thousands?”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? If there are more like you?” said Zen.

And guessed at once that it had been the wrong thing to say. He should have said, “You are unique.” He should have said, “You are the one and only Nova.” He wasn’t used to having to deal with other people’s feelings. It made him miss the old days, when he’d been alone and had nothing more to worry about than keeping ahead of the police and the Ambersai lathi boys.

Nova sniffed. She had no need to sniff, but she had seen movies, and knew it was something that people did when they’d been crying. “Where will we go?” she asked.

“Somewhere we can hide,” he said. He didn’t really believe there was any such place, but he wanted to comfort her, and himself too. “We’ll find some world where we can get far away from the K-bahn, and wait, and hope this all blows over.”

“What about Raven?” asked Nova.

“What about him? You don’t owe Raven anything. He left you behind!”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant—I wonder what he’s doing.”

“I expect he’s back on Desdemor,” said Zen bitterly. “I expect he’s happy enough now he’s got his little black ball.”

“What?”

“I forgot—you never saw it—the Pyxis was hollow; he made it open; there was this thing inside.”

“A black sphere?”

“Yes…” Zen was starting to feel uneasy. Because the way her eyes were widening made it seem that there had been a weight to what he’d said, and he did not know what. He hadn’t thought about the Pyxis or the sphere inside it since Raven dumped him in Cleave. He’d been too busy finding his way back to Nova to give much thought to it, or to the strange things that Raven had said on that last train journey.

“What’s wrong?”

Nova stared at him, or through him, and he knew she was searching her perfect memory for something. “That’s why he wanted it…” she said.

“What? What is it?”

“There’s a story from history. Raven told it to me once, and I didn’t even pay much attention; he told so many stories, but this one…”

“What?”

“He said that when the new station on Marapur was being built, the machines that were digging the foundations uncovered ruined walls, left over from some other time.”

“So?”

“Marapur was a newly settled world. It had only had a breathable atmosphere for a hundred years or so. How could there be old ruins there? It was a mystery. But before people could investigate, a Guardian arrived. It was an interface of the Shiguri Monad itself. It announced that the ‘walls’ were a natural geological formation, and built some machines of its own to help speed up the construction process. The walls were destroyed, and every reference to them in the Datasea deleted.”

Zen was tired, and having trouble understanding what this had to do with him, or why Nova was so worried about it. This wasn’t what he’d imagined their reunion would be like. He wasn’t quite sure what he had imagined, but not this. He walked to a dusty sofa in one of the abandoned food bars and sat down. Nova stayed by the window, and the snow fell past her.

“So there were these walls, only they weren’t walls, and the Guardians covered them up?” Zen said.

“As well as the walls they found six spheres. The Guardians took those too. They said they were just blobs of volcanic glass.”

“It’s still not much of a story,” said Zen, though he could see where it was going now.

“It’s not much of a story because it doesn’t have an ending,” said Nova. “Only perhaps it does now. I never thought about it before. I think Raven stopped me from thinking about it. I think he put a block in my mind so I wouldn’t ask certain questions. That’s why I didn’t make the connection.”

“What connection?”

“The station on Marapur was a Noon project. The person in charge of the work there was Lady Rishi Noon. Zen, what if there weren’t six spheres? What if there were seven? What if Lady Rishi managed to get hold of one before the Guardians found it?”

“And she hid it in the Pyxis? Why would she—?” But Zen already sensed the answer to that one. The Guardians knew everything. How sweet it would be to trick them, to have one secret that they did not know. “But the thing I saw inside the Pyxis wasn’t a blob of volcanic glass.”

“No.” She turned from the window and came to sit beside him. “Raven believed… He told me once that the spheres were the seeds of K-gates.”

Zen laughed again. “What, put them in a pot and water them and up pops a gate?”

“Not like that. It was a metaphor. I think he meant, the spheres were storage devices that held the secret of making K-gates.”

“He said something to me about the Guardians keeping secrets,” Zen remembered. “He said that was why they tried to destroy him, because he found out about them. But you can’t make new K-gates. If Raven used this sphere to open another one it would wreck the whole Network. He’d be stuck on Desdemor. Why would he want that? It would be like sawing off the branch he’s sitting on…”

“Maybe he’s got some other use for the sphere. It must be incredibly powerful. Imagine the math it would take, to open a hole through space-time. Maybe it will do other things too.”

Zen was considering a simpler bit of math. “He didn’t pay me enough,” he said. “The house on Summer’s Lease and the money in my account, it seemed like a lot. It
was
a lot, for me. But if the sphere is so powerful… He should have given me more, much more.”

He imagined Raven, safe on Desdemor, haunting the bars and ballrooms of his dead hotel like a vampire lounge singer. A flame of pure, white anger lit in him. Raven had tricked him and used him and taken him for granted. He had treated Nova like a machine and Zen like a fool. And now, thanks to Raven, here they were, stuck on this dead line, with half of Railforce gearing up to come after them.

And then he caught sight of a glimmer of hope. One last angle he could work. A mad, risky idea, but as hard to resist as an unwatched necklace on a goldsmith’s stall.

“What if we had this sphere thing?” he said.

“But we don’t,” Nova pointed out.

“We stole it from the Noon train. We could steal it again.”

“From Raven? It’s too dangerous…”

“What have we got to lose?” argued Zen. He knew it was dangerous, but it was the only idea he had; if he let her shoot it down, what were they left with? “Do you really think the Noons are just going to let us go? They’re probably moving wartrains onto the Dog Star Line right now. The only way this is going to end is with you shut down and me dead or frozen. Unless we have something to bargain with.”

“Like the sphere—”

“Yes! We take it, go to them, say look, we’re sorry, we realized what this thing is, how important it is to the Guardians, and we fetched it back for you. No! We’ll
hide
it somewhere on one of these dead worlds, and only tell them where if they promise we’ll go free…”

“That is a rash plan,” said Nova. “It is unlikely to succeed.”

Zen knew it. “It’s still better than waiting here for the Bluebodies to come and get us,” he said. He went to the window, leaned against the glass. Outside, snowflakes rode the up-drafts, whirling like his thoughts. “They won’t let us go. They’ll come in wartrains, armed to the teeth, with tech that will track us wherever we hide. The
Damask Rose
hurt their people on Sundarban, killed some probably. They’ll shoot on sight. But Raven’s got no reason to harm us.”

“Perhaps we have to go,” said Nova, as if she was trying to convince herself. “If we’ve given him all this power and we’re the only ones who know about it, perhaps it’s up to us to stop him, before he uses it for something awful…”

But Zen didn’t care about that. He wasn’t out to save the day, like some hero in a threedie. He just wanted to save himself and Nova, and this was his one slim chance of doing it. He turned from the window, trying not to let her see how much it scared him, hoping that if he acted like he had a plan, a plan would come to him. “That’s what happens now. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go to Desdemor, and steal the Pyxis back.”