People wiser in the ways of trains know that for every happy train there is a train of sorrow. For every holiday special there is a packed commuter, for every young hopeful there is a freeloader clinging to the bogies and for every reunion there is a final parting. Trains of farewell. Trains of fatalism, and passivity. Trains of exile. Trains of extermination. Death trains, on which we all must ride, carried at ever higher speeds by forces over which we have no control, directed by rails we did not set, into the tunnel that never ends. And the communication cord is snapped.
The wisest in the ways of trains count a third category; trains of no emotional content. Freight trains. Bulk carriers. Vast, slow-moving ore trains, big enough to be visible from orbit. Trains made up of grain silos, cement wagons, chemical tankers, lumber racks, agricultural machinery flatbeds, grazer cars, hydrocarbon processors, container pallets, paper mills; trains of oils and minerals and big red rocks. Trains of silk and straw and exotic fruit. Trains of glass and tin; tea and spices. Trains with no cargo of human feeling. These, such people say, are the truest trains, for they expose the soft anthropomorphism of those who must project feelings all around them. A train is nothing but a big chunk of inter-related metal parts wrapped around a hydrogen fusion/superheat steam boiler combo. Classically structured, a piece of pure operating logic. Any emotional freight is the property of its passengers and crew.
As example, they will say, here is a train. It’s coming on down the line. Let’s start at the front and see if there is anything about it that could teach us about happiness and sorrow.
We start with a pair of nipples, silver, quite erect. From them we move back over the areolas, the proud, firm and outsized breasts to the curved-back torso of a woman, chin proudly aloft, hair streaming out behind her. We note that the silver woman has wings for arms, and that they are folded back around the boiler cap. Back along the swelling curve of the boiler to the cyclops eye of the headlamp, over the tiers of outlook galleries and catwalks to the gold-plated anti-glare glazing of the driving bridge where the Engineer stands, hand on the thrust bar, eye on the quartersphere ball, thence by the black and silver livery of Bethlehem Ares Railroads to the streamlined wedge of the main stack. A moment’s pause to peep down the steam flues in the raving heart of the machine. On, over the fluid humps of the reheat coil and the Deep-Fusion homesteads, to the ornately filigreed hydro-helium tanks and the water tender with their turrets and watch-houses, the last outpost of the Engineer Domiety before we pass from driver to driven: the train proper. We enter here the territory of the Stuards; from single sleek, slim-line executive express cars to ten kilometres of ore trucks, from pilgrims clacking their beads to polymer processors, all are their responsibility, all are tended with equal attention. Today this service is hauling an organic chemical processor: the first fifteen cars we fly over are stacked with logs from the great polar taigas of Treeves and Raskolnikov. A beltway feeds them one by one to the chipping plant in car sixteen and from there into the bacterial fermentories, reactor plants and cracking towers of the middle section of the train. We glide over cylinders and chimneys and cooling ducts, rivers of pipework and power conduits, separator grids, pumps, distillation columns, wash-backs and vents jetting waste gasses. Brute industry. No emotion here. Now we follow the loops of colour-coded piping to the storage section of the factory-train where each separated fraction is channelled into the appropriate receiving tank. Some bear large and flagrant warning symbols, others are wreathed in mist from cooling tubes, others still carry prominent pressure release valves and little vent-flaps that flutter and chirp as the whole ensemble makes its ponderous way across the unhedged grainlands of central Axidy.
Happy, sad?
This train is not done yet. There is the auxiliary power van, and the raised cupola of Shipment Control, from which the Stuards can look out over the whole length of the train and ascertain in an instant if something is wrong with their charge. After aux and con we pass swiftly over Ballasted Brake vans 1 and 2, the abode of the abject Bassareenis, to the final car, the caboose. Passing over its gilded lion-head crest, we come to a long glass blister. We glimpse greenery. It seems to be some sort of conservatory. Onward. We fly out over the Stuards’ verandah a little way down the track that strikes undeviating across the plain. Turn, look back at the foreshortened length of the great train driving across the geometric farmland. There it is. The great train, Catherine of Tharsis. Happy? Sad? Can’t tell, can you? It’s magnificent, but it’s metal. Meaningless.
But let’s turn round, go back to that blister of glass and greenery. Hover a moment. Stoop lower. Look carefully. It is indeed a caboose-top roof garden, accessed by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, protected from the three-hundred kilometre-per-hour winds of express speed by a slender geodesic. Within is a lush little jungle of foliage plants; some flowers; a small water feature; wind-chimes; darting ornamental humming birds, like flying jewellery; a little lawn as smooth as snooker baize and a tiled patio area with casual cast-aluminium seating. A young man is sitting on one of the chairs. He is slightly built, with the pallor of the Deep-Fusion Domiety, a childhood encased in metal, close to perilous energies. A worm of goatee shadows his chin. He looks ten, eleven of this world’s double-years. On an occasional table beside him is a peeled apple, a pocket knife, and a red telephone. He cuts a slice from the apple, eats it, tries to pay attention to the yellow paperback in his hand.
Romereaux Deep-Fusion finds he has been spending more time in Marya Stuard’s conservatorium recently, reading yellow novels, mostly being away from other people. Friends and relatives now crowd him. There is not enough room, there is always someone around, someone wanting to talk to you, someone pushing past you, someone there. No space for yourself, except up here. And the books are yellow and stupid, but no more so than anything else. His job, his life-role, bores him. Tuning tokamaks, configuring containment fields, controlling plasma flows, manipulating ignition lasers; ten generations of Deep-Fusioneers may have nurtured the fire in the beast, but why the eleventh? Romereaux has discovered that he resents that he was never given a choice about it. You are born to tend tokamaks, that’s fact, son. It’s not just him. There’s a discontent going up and down the corridors, through the carriage couplings and along the gosport tubes. The contracts are signed, the loads hauled, the engines fused up and the brasses polished, but there’s no spirit in it. Haul, heave, haul again. The rails go on forever. You will never get anywhere on them, just round and round the round round world. Tempers are short, patience shorter. Good reason to stay away from your brothers and colleagues when a bump in a companionway can lead to a fist fight. Romereaux can’t remember the last time he heard Madre Mercedes strike up with her asbestos gloves on the calliope. Not since things started going bad. That is what he says; but what he means is since Sweetness went away.
In engineering terms, he thinks of her as a very small bolt, in a difficult place, unobtrusive, easy to miss. But that bolt is made of gold, and it’s the one that holds the whole thing together. Lose it, and…She rode away that morning and lit up a whole other world of places to go and lives to lead. All of a sudden, everyone had choices. You don’t have to go where the rails take you. You can move in at least two dimensions. You can get off the train. First Sweetness, then Grandmother Taaclass="underline" if the lofty Engineers are so rotten within one girl can topple them, why do we cling so tenaciously to our traditions and laws? Will they save us, and what from? Are they worthy of saving?