Free Railsea by China Miéville Page B

the Salaygo Mess & Streggeye itself. The
Medes
, if slowly, if by roundabout routes, was going home. Without Unkus Stone.
    “What d’you mean, he can’t come with us?” Sham had said.
    “Ah now, lad,” had said Unkus Stone, & added a short scream as someone shifted where they leaned on his bed & moved his still-very-tender legs.
    Sham & Vurinam & Dr. Fremlo & Yehat Borr & a few others had been in the sanatorium. The equipment around Unkus & the few other patients—here someone with injuries caused by crushing train-metal, there a blood-rabbit bite, one or two with bugs of the railsea—was battered. But it was not unclean, & the smell of the lunch the staff had brought Stone was not undelicious.
    “Can’t believe I’m awake,” Unkus said.
    “Neither can I,” said Fremlo.
    The laughter after that was uncomfortable.
    There was no way they could wait, Sham’s colleagues told him. He was being sentimental. There were moles to hunt. The bill for the sanatorium was paid for a while longer—topped up, might they point out, by the captain herself out of her own share. They had to get on.
    “I really do not like it here,” Vurinam said. He glanced to either side & lowered his voice. “People keep asking where we’re going, where we been. Bollons people are
nosy
. Someone even asked us if it was true we was salvors!” He raised his eyebrows. “Said they heard we’d found a wreck! & a treasure map!”
    Hmmm
, thought Sham, a little uneasily.
    “Shouldn’t just leave you,” Sham had said.
    “Ah now, lad.” & Unkus had given Sham an awkward pat on the arm. “I can get myself to the docks, get paid passage back when I’m better.”
    “It ain’t right.”
    It wasn’t just for Unkus that he wanted to stay, though Sham could not admit that. The longer they stayed in Bollons, he thought, the more chance he might persuade the captain to visit Manihiki. From where, it was his tentative judgement, the man, woman, children in those images came. He felt uncharacteristically certain that going there was what he wanted to do—to make that connection between those images, & that place.
    He had been running through increasingly baroque ideas of what he might say or hint to Captain Naphi to persuade her so far out of her intended path. He had nothing. & he was still astonished, could barely believe they were not in any case going.
    He couldn’t not, with an ecstasy of scandal, keep recallingthat picture. The secret of that line, that solitary line, leading, it seemed—& it still felt like curse words even just to think it!—out of the railsea. One of the first things he had done, back from the ordinator room in Bollons—whatever job the captain would have had him do forgotten by both of them—was to draw, as well as he could, all the images he had seen, from memory. Until he had a sheaf of scrappy ink renderings of memories of images of unlikely landscapes. They would have meant nothing to most who saw them, but to him were mnemonics, reminders, to conjure the railsea flatographs he had seen, that the captain had destroyed.
    Oh yes. She had, making sure he saw her do so, carefully crushed the memory in her tough, skinless hand, while Sham made an involuntary noise of protest. When she opened her tough hydraulic fingers again it was full of plastic dust. “Whatever that silliness was,” she had said, “it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants.”
    Naphi had put a mechanical finger to her lips. “Be quiet,” she’d said. The instruction had covered both the noise of the clumsiness of his awe, & the potential saying of what he’d seen to others.
    “Captain,” he’d whispered. “What was …?”
    “I’m a moler,” Naphi had said. “You are a doctor’s assistant. Whatever you saw or thought you saw, it has nothing to do with your life & aims, whatever they might be, any more than it does with mine. So we don’t speak of it.”
    “That was Manihiki,” he said. “Where they came from. We