There are places where the pressures of ages & the jostling of continents against each other like slow uncomfortable bedfellows shoves such motherlodes airward, & the railsea is broken by the dangerous jags of salvage reefs, full of trash treasure. & there are these tunnels. Just like there are tunnels where trains can go. You know there are.
What the scholars want to do is work out what these things were. Salvors want to know what they were if & only if it helps sell them. & if it doesn’t, they don’t care. People who want to use them want to know what they were if it means they can be used. Although they’ll work out something to do with them one way or another. They’ll take some reclaimed thing & hit nails with it & call it a hammer if it comes to that.
“WHAT’S WRONG with doing that?” Sham said.
“Wrong?”
THERE’S NOTHING WRONG with that. There isn’t anything right with it either. There’s only one thing that everyone agrees on about salvage. Whether you’re digging it out of the ground or selling it or buying it, or studying it, or bribing someone with it, or wearing it, or looking for it, it catches the eye. Like foil for magpies.
Salvors don’t have to dress like they do. They want to. Those are their peacock feathers. That’s the one thing you can always say for salvage. It looks cool.
& really, who cares?
Who cares? Say you’re a salvor, or a pair of salvors, who doesn’t or don’t love salvage anymore. Maybe you don’t have to cast about to find out what it is you want instead. It’s enough, maybe, to know you don’t want what you thought you did. That’s enough to be getting on with.
“THE QUESTION IS,” said Caldera, “is this—” She shook the picture. “—the stuff you want to chase? Buried rubbish? Maybe there’s something better than that. Or maybe there’s something just else. Think about it. You’ve got an hour or two.”
“Till what?” Sham said. “What happens then?”
“Then we go. So by then you have to decide if you’re coming with us.”
FORTY
DAYBE FELL FROM NOWHERE ONTO SHAM’S SHOULDER. Caldera jumped. Sham didn’t even glance at the animal, humming & whickering in his ear.
“The key you left,” he said.
“For the nurses,” Caldera said. She headed back for the house. “They’re good people. We looked a long time. There’s money. Dad Byro’ll be taken to the sanatorium.” She closed her eyes. “Because we’ve got stuff to do. So.”
“You don’t even know where they went!”
“Byro did,” she said. “However confused he got, that he never told. We have his machine. It’s got secrets. & there’s what you told us.”
The Shroakes bustled from room to salvage-filled room, from room to open-to-the-sky-&-wall-less room, from room to whirring-clockwork-&-diesel-instrument-mazed room. They gathered things, pulled them on carts, lined them up in the kitchen. They pulled clothes from closets, tugged them to test for strength, fingered them to test for warmth, sniffed them to test for mildew.
“But wait,” Sham said. “I heard, someone told me, you’re going on Engineday. That’s not for ages!”
“That worked, then,” Dero said.
“Engineday,” said Caldera, “is when we put it about that we’d be going. Should give us a little while before anyone thinks to look, or comes after us.”
“Comes after you?” Sham said. “You really think …?”
“Indubitably,” Dero said.
“Yes,” Caldera said. “They will. Too many rumours about what our parents were looking for.” She rubbed her finger & thumb in a money motion.
“You said that weren’t it,” said Sham.
“It weren’t it. But rumours don’t care what was it or not. So—” She put her finger to her lips.
Sham’s mind was going like train wheels at their fastest. “Why do you want to go?” he said.
“Don’t you?” Caldera said.
“I don’t know!” Exploring. Finding something new. All that way. “But what about my, my family,” Sham said, then stopped. Hold on. Would Troose & Voam mind if he went?
Yes, they would mind. But not as much as if he were a miserable bad doctor for years.
“I think,” Sham said slowly, trying to think it through, “they wanted me to do well, maybe even get my own philosophy.”
“I thought it was just captains did that,” Dero said.
“You could be a captain from being a doctor. Although I don’t know if they thought it through that much.” What Troose & Voam knew well was that he’d had a space to be filled, Sham thought with a little ache for them.
“Dero,” said Caldera. “Go get it. Do you want to philosophise?” she said to Sham when her brother left. “Get obsessed with an animal? Give it a meaning? Make that your life?” There was nothing snide in her tone. She staggered under the load she carried. “There are places,” she said, “where rails go up off the beach into uplands.”
“Railrivers, yeah,” he said.
“Yes. Some go up the mountains. Right into the uplands.”
“& loop down again somewhere else. They all merge back into the railsea.”
“Some of them go into old dead cities up there.”
“& out again,” Sham said. Caldera looked at him.
“This is heavy,” she said. Her burden, not the story. Sham took it from her, carried it to the jetty. Where he stopped, & stared.
Something was approaching from between knolls in the railsea. The earth around it breaking with curious moles’ snouts. Here came Dero, in—well. In a train.
The engine was a snubby, tough-looking thing with a few small carriages behind it. There were glass portholes in its flanks. Daybe raced through the intervening air to investigate. The engine was armoured & chimneyless. There was no telltale exhaust at all, that Sham could see or smell. & these were not electrified rails. “How does it run?” he whispered.
Dero leaned out of the oncoming vehicle. He looked up at Daybe, who dipped in his turning & angled his wings. “Caldera,” Dero shouted.
She stood by Sham. “We’re off, then,” she said to him. She looked through gaps in the surrounding rocks, into the railsea. A complicated tangle of gauges, here, a tricksy piece of switching, there. “So. Would you like to come, Sham?”
& Daybe cawed, an uncharacteristic crowlike sound, just as if it had heard the idea & got excited. & Dero shouted, “Caldera, come on.”
“What if it’s terrible?” Sham blurted out. “What if it all ends in tears? It ain’t like there’s no warning. You were the one reminded me we’re supposed to shun it!”
Caldera did not reply. She & her brother turned, in the same moment, & stared at the house. Sham knew they were thinking of Dad Byro. Tears came up in Caldera’s eyes. They stayed there a moment. Then without a word, she pushed them down again.
Sham could be with them. & while he wouldn’t be a salvor, nor would he be a train doctor nor a moler either. He’d be something else.
But he wasn’t saying anything, & then it was a moment later & still he wasn’t saying anything. He heard himself saying nothing. Caldera looked at him, a long, a long moment. Then at last gave a sad shrug. The train approached. The switches on its route switched. Caldera turned away from Sham towards it.
The train accelerated faster than Sham would have imagined. It turned more tightly, too. He, contrariwise, was still.