Marja sat down, bare shoulder touching his. She felt strangely warm, warmer than the fire almost.
“The firewall won’t let us into the city,” she said. “We don’t have anyone…human enough, not anymore. There was some talk about making one, but… the argument would last a century.” She sighed. “We like to argue, in the sky.”
Kosonen grinned. “I bet you fit right in.” He checked for the wrinkle before continuing. “So you need an errand boy.”
“We need help.”
Kosonen looked at the fire. The flames were dying now, licking at the blackened wood. There were always new colors in the embers. Or maybe he just always forgot.
He touched Marja’s hand. It felt like a soap bubble, barely solid. But she did not pull it away.
“All right,” he said. “But just so you know, it’s not just for old times’ sake.”
“Anything we can give you.”
“I’m cheap,” Kosonen said. “I just want words.”
The sun sparkled on the kantohanki : snow with a frozen surface, strong enough to carry a man on skis and a bear. Kosonen breathed hard. Even going downhill, keeping pace with Otso was not easy. But in weather like this, there was something glorious about skiing, sliding over blue shadows of trees almost without friction, the snow hissing underneath.
I’ve sat still too long, he thought. Should have gone somewhere just to go, not because someone asks.
In the afternoon, when the sun was already going down, they reached the railroad, a bare gash through the forest, two metal tracks on a bed of gravel. Kosonen removed his skis and stuck them in the snow.
“I’m sorry you can’t come along,” he told Otso. “But the city won’t let you in.”
“Otso not a city bear,” the bear said. “Otso waits for Kosonen. Kosonen gets sky-bug, comes back. Then we drink booze.”
He scratched the rough fur of its neck clumsily. The bear poked Kosonen in the stomach with its nose, so hard that he almost fell. Then it snorted, turned around and shuffled into the woods. Kosonen watched until it vanished among the snow-covered trees.
It took three painful attempts of sticking his fingers down his throat to get the nanoseed Marja gave him to come out. The gagging left a bitter taste in his mouth. Swallowing it had been the only way to protect the delicate thing from the plague. He wiped it in the snow: a transparent bauble the size of a walnut, slippery and warm. It reminded him of the toys you could get from vending machines in supermarkets when he was a child, plastic spheres with something secret inside.
He placed it on the rails carefully, wiped the remains of the vomit from his lips and rinsed his mouth with water. Then he looked at it. Marja knew he would never read instruction manuals, so she had not given him one.
“Make me a train,” he said.
Nothing happened. Maybe it can read my mind, he thought, and imagined a train, an old steam train, puffing along. Still nothing, just a reflection of the darkening sky on the seed’s clear surface. She always had to be subtle. Marja could never give a present without thinking about its meaning for days. Standing still let the spring winter chill through his wolf-pelt coat, and he hopped up and down, rubbing his hands together.
With the motion came an idea. He frowned, staring at the seed, and took the notebook from his pocket. Maybe it was time to try out Marja’s other gift—or advance payment, however you wanted to look at it. He had barely written the first lines, when the words leaped in his mind like animals woken from slumber. He closed the book, cleared his throat and spoke.
these rails
were worn thin
by wheels
that wrote down
the name of each passenger in steel and miles
he said,
it’s a good thing
the years
ate our flesh too
made us thin and light
so the rails are strong enough
to carry us still
to the city
in our train of glass and words
Doggerel, he thought, but it didn’t matter. The joy of words filled his veins like vodka. Too bad it didn’t work —
The seed blurred. It exploded into a white-hot sphere. The waste heat washed across Kosonen’s face. Glowing tentacles squirmed past him, sucking carbon and metal from the rails and trees. They danced like a welder’s electric arcs, sketching lines and surfaces in the air.
And suddenly, the train was there.
It was transparent, with paper-thin walls and delicate wheels, as if it had been blown from glass, a sketch of a cartoon steam engine with a single carriage, with spiderweb-like chairs inside, just the way he had imagined it.
He climbed in, expecting the delicate structure to sway under his weight, but it felt rock-solid. The nanoseed lay on the floor innocently, as if nothing had happened. He picked it up carefully, took it outside and buried it in the snow, leaving his skis and sticks as markers. Then he picked up his backpack, boarded the train again and sat down in one of the gossamer seats. Unbidden, the train lurched into motion smoothly. To Kosonen, it sounded like the rails beneath were whispering, but he could not hear the words.
He watched the darkening forest glide past. The day’s journey weighed heavily on his limbs. The memory of the snow beneath his skis melted together with the train’s movement, and soon Kosonen was asleep.
When he woke up, it was dark. The amber light of the firewall glowed in the horizon, like a thundercloud.
The train had speeded up. The dark forest outside was a blur, and the whispering of the rails had become a quiet staccato song. Kosonen swallowed as the train covered the remaining distance in a matter of minutes. The firewall grew into a misty dome glowing with yellowish light from within. The city was an indistinct silhouette beneath it. The buildings seemed to be in motion, like a giant’s shadow puppets.
Then it was a flaming curtain directly in front of the train, an impenetrable wall made from twilight and amber crossing the tracks. Kosonen gripped the delicate frame of his seat, knuckles white. “Slowdown!” he shouted, but the train did not hear. It crashed directly into the firewall with a bone-jarring impact. There was a burst of light, and then Kosonen was lifted from his seat.
It was like drowning, except that he was floating in an infinite sea of amber light rather than water. Apart from the light, there was just emptiness. His skin tickled. It took him a moment to realize that he was not breathing.
And then a stern voice spoke.
This is not a place for men, it said. Closed. Forbidden. Go back.
“I have a mission,” said Kosonen. His voice had no echo in the light. “From your makers. They command you to let me in.”
He closed his eyes, and Marja’s third gift floated in front of him, not words but a number. He had always been poor at memorizing things, but Marja’s touch had been a pen with acid ink, burning it in his mind. He read off the endless digits, one by one.
You may enter, said the firewall. But only that which is human will leave.
The train and the speed came back, sharp and real like a paper cut. The twilight glow of the firewall was still there, but instead of the forest, dark buildings loomed around the railway, blank windows staring at him.
Kosonen’s hands tickled. They were clean, as were his clothes: every speck of dirt was gone. His skin felt tender and red, like he had just been to the sauna.
The train slowed down at last, coming to a stop in the dark mouth of the station, and Kosonen was in the city.
The city was a forest of metal and concrete that breathed and hummed. The air smelled of ozone. The facades of the buildings around the railway station square looked almost like he remembered them, only subtly wrong. From the corner of his eye he could glimpse them moving , shifting in their sleep like stone-skinned animals. There were no signs of life, apart from a cluster of pigeons, hopping back and forth on the stairs, looking at him. They had sapphire eyes.