First the city authorities would come aboard & bargain for what salvage they wanted. Then high-rolling clients, the Streggeye rich. & finally, if the salvor crews were feeling generous & had a few days, they would run a market.
Their antique & reclaimed wares were set on stalls on the dockside, according to various taxonomies. Pitted & oxidized mechanisms from the Heavy Metal Age; shards from the Plastozoic; printouts on thin rubber & ancient ordinator screens from the Computational Era: all choice arche-salvage, from astoundingly long ago. & the less interesting stuff, too, that discarded or lost anything from a few hundred years ago to yesterday—nu-salvage.
There might even be a table or two of items from the third salvage category. The physically disobedient impossible scobs, that looked & behaved like nothing should. Sham remembered one such object—or was it three? A Strugatski triskele, the salvor had called it, waving it around to attract interest. Three curved black rods equidistant from each other in a Y-shape. The man had held one, & above it jutted the others, & in the centre, where they should join, was nothing. They did not touch, though they stayed together no matter how you shook them.
What that was was a piece of alt-salvage. Something made not only epochally long ago but unthinkably far away, way beyond the farthest reaches of the upsky. Brought to the railsea, used, & discarded by one of the visitors from other worlds, remnants brushed from cosmic laps, during the long-ago years when this planet had been a busy layby, a stopover point for the same brief visits that had accidentally stocked the upsky with its animals. This world had been a tip. Frequented by vehicles en route from one impossibly far place to another, with trash to dump.
The thought of striking out to salvage-reefs unknown, the burrowing, the mining, dustdiving, the picking through shorelines of ancient trash—these activities quickened Sham’s blood. But then what? He had questions. Where did salvage end up? What happened when you’d found it? Who used it for what when whoever sold or bartered it did, to whomever?
&, though it was harder to think of, a last thing gnawed at him & he could not leave it alone—when he thought of salvage, why did Sham start awed & end up deflated?
TWENTY-THREE
THERE WAS A WRECK IN A BAYFUL OF FIDDLY RAILS AT Streggeye’s eastern rim, just out of town. It was a few hundred yards from shore, a stalled & rusting engine & cart that had long ago lost power—a bad captain, a drunk crew, inadequate switchers. It was too ruined to fix, worth nothing as nu-salvage. It mouldered, full of rust-dwelling birds, cawing in outrage as Daybe flew around their home.
Timon, Shikasta & Sham were alone on the pebbly beach. They sat near a gorge where a stream of water & a railriver—a line, a long loop of track—emerged from inland & joined the railsea. They threw stones at the old engine offshore. Timon & Shikasta talked. Sham, still surprised at being in their company, watched the animal dwellers of shallow coastline earth. Meerkats, groundhogs, the tiniest moldywarpes. Shikasta, as bossy as she had been at school, but now unaccountably noticing him, looked at Sham until he blushed.
“So you going to be a moler’s doctor, Sham?” Timon said. Sham shrugged. “Going to turn out like your boss? No one knowing if you’re a man or a woman?”
“Shut up,” Sham said uncomfortably. “Fremlo’s Fremlo.”
“I thought you wanted to go into salvage.” Timon said.
“Talking of,” interrupted Shikasta, “want to see something cool? He’s right, salvage was the only thing ever made you perk up. So I wanted to show you something.” From her bag she took a thing that looked somewhat like a switcher’s remote control. It was black plastic or ceramic, a peculiar shape. It glimmered with lights. Bits poked from it according to absolutely no sense. It came out with a murmur as if of troubled flies.
Sham’s eyes widened. “That’s salvage,” he gasped.
“It is,” said Shikasta proudly. She brought out a box of things the size of grapes, soldered with ugly circuitry.
“That’s alt-salvage,” Sham said. Junk from another world. “How’d you get it?”
“Off a trainmate.” Shikasta, like Sham, was working on the railsea—a transport vehicle, in her case. “She got it from someone else, who got it off someone else, & on & on, leading back to Manihiki. She said I could have a go on it.”
“Oh my That Apt Ohm,” said Timon. “You blatantly stole it.”
Shikasta looked prim. “Borrowing ain’t stealing,” she said. “I wanted to show you,” she said. “Can you make your bat come here?”
“Why?” said Sham.
“I ain’t going to hurt it,” she said. She held up one of the grapey things. There was a clip on it.
Sham stared at Daybe, circling in the air. Somewhere in the back of his brain were stories he’d heard, about some of the capabilities of some of the things left in some of the seams of some of the salvage. Somewhere was a little idea.
He enticed Daybe in with a strip of biltong. “You better not hurt my bat,” he said.
“It ain’t your bat,” Shikasta said. “You’re its boy.” She snapped the thing on Daybe’s right leg. Immediately it chirruped in rage & shot into the air, peeing on her arm as it went, to her yelled disgust.
Daybe zipped in complicated jackknifes, loop-the-loops, corkscrews, twisting its body, trying to dislodge the thing. Shikasta wiped bat wee off her hand. “Right,” she said.
Her box whistled & cooed. It clicked in complicated staccato time with Daybe’s ill-tempered aerobatics. The blue-lit screen glowed, an electric fog in which appeared a dot that echoed Daybe’s aerial motions. The bat veered into the distance, the noise from the machine grew quieter: closer, louder.
“Is that …?” said Sham.
“Yes it is,” said Shikasta. “It’s a tracker. It knows where the signal thing is.”
“How does it work? How far?”
“It’s salvage, ain’t it?” Shikasta said. “No one knows.”
They all three ducked as Daybe came at them. The receiver squealed, then moaned as the bat flapped away.
“Where did you—or your trainmate—get it?” said Sham.
“Manihiki. Where all the best salvage is. There’s a new place in the Scabbling Street Market.” She said that exotic name carefully, clearly enjoying it, like a spell. “These things are really useful. Like, if someone steals something & you’ve got one of these in it, you might be able to follow. So they ain’t cheap.”
“Or if there’s something you’re spending your life chasing …” said Sham slowly. Something that gets close enough to you, sometimes, for you to see. But that keeps slipping away again.
“You ain’t seen one before, have you?” Shikasta smiled. “I thought you’d like it.”
If you spent your life like that, chasing some taunting quarry, what wouldn’t you do for one of these? Sham thought. You’d go out of your way, wouldn’t you, to get one, he thought.
You’d go to Manihiki to buy one.
TWENTY-FOUR
CAPTAIN NAPHI?”
If she was surprised to see Sham, she showed no sign of it. It was plausible, he supposed, that he might have simply wandered into her favourite café. That he had not tracked down several of his comrades from the Medes & asked them where they thought he might find her.