Free Railsea by China Miéville Page A

then almost instantly at a picture of some huge harbour, way larger than any he had ever seen, teeming with trains of countless kinds. It made him gasp, but then that went, too, & now an image from a traintop, rattling on the tangles of the railsea. Then the woman, again, back to the camera, standing before gauges & dials in the engine.
    Clickclick
, the captain scrolled. Sham was being driven crazy by her ability to sit without speaking. & on-screen wereimages of the railsea itself & its islands. Tracks among & through thickets of old trees. A forest, no other word for it, not on any humpback island but part of the railsea itself. It had been autumn when the shot was taken, & banks of leaves piled up on the rails ahead.
    A desert, flat sand, sparse tracks. Rocks like fangs under the overcast sky. Where,
where
, had these people been?
    Playing moles frozen midleap ahead of the train’s prow, pursuing leg-sized earthworms. The sett of a huge bull badger. A little lake rimmed with rails. Hedgehog tangles in tree roots. & at the very limit of the camera’s capabilities, a hulking & hermetic track-riding presence. Sham held his breath. Some train, not like anything he had seen before but abruptly familiar nonetheless.
    He realised what the silhouette reminded him of. A fanciful & speculative image, as all such images were, from some book of religious instruction, of an angel. A sacred engine, rolling the rails to save them.
    Sham gaped. Wasn’t it bad luck to see an angel? Some were rumoured to maintain the rails in deep railsea reaches—& trainsfolk were supposed to turn fast away should they ever come close enough to see such interventions. Should he look away now? How could he?
    Wait wait!
Sham thought, but the captain had moved on. A new picture was below him now, a rearing great talpa. The captain’s turn to freeze. But the moldywarpe’s fur was dark. On she scrolled.
    Where had this train been going?
    Geography that made Sham furrow his brow. Strange, distinctive rock formations like giant melted candles. Overhangs above railsea lines.
    & suddenly. Railsea. But not.
    Land stretched like some pegged-out dead animal in an Anatomy & Butchery class. Flat & dusty & specked with broken brown stones & little bits of matter that might be salvage, but mean stuff if it was. A lowering downsky, storm clouds growling like guard dogs. A glowing upsky above. The prow of the train was visible like a fat arrow in the middle of the shot, pointing at an oddly foreshortened horizon. The line it was riding was an unnaturally straight stretch, the two rails bisecting the view all the way to where perspective knitted them together. & to either side of it—
    —either side of that line the train was riding—
    —was nothing.
    No other rails at all.
    Empty earth.
    Sham leaned forward. He was trembling. Saw the captain leaning forward herself, in time with him.
    Empty earth & one straight line.
One line in the railsea
. Couldn’t be.
There’s not nor can there be any way out of the tangle
. A single line could not be. There it was.
    “Stonefaces come between us & all harm,” Sham whispered, & clutched his bat, because it felt like an unholiness, all that nothing, because for goodness sake what was the world between islands but the railsea?
    All that nothing. Sham got his own little camera out. Fumble, fumble, not looking at its screen, & trembling, he took a picture of that picture, the most amazing image he had ever seen.
    All that nothing!
It made him reel. He staggered, fell hard & loud against another ordinator. The captain turned to himas he put his camera back in his pocket. She fingerstabbed the keyboard & the image disappeared.
    “Control yourself,” Naphi said in a low voice. “Pull yourself together, right now.”
    Sham’s head was still all full of that impossible rail, surrounded by all that equally impossible railless nothing.

SEVENTEEN
    A WAY AGAIN . E ATING UP LINES, EATING UP THE tie-&-rail miles between Bollons &