Railhead (22 page)

He woke reluctantly, clinging for as long as he could to sleep, not quite certain where he was, or why, and knowing that he should enjoy that forgetfulness, because he could feel bad memories waiting for him. But they found him anyway. They came down on him like a collapsing roof: memories of battles and a burning body. Memories of insects. He leaped up, clawing at himself, retching, groping for bugs in his hair.

There were none. He was in his old bedroom in the Terminal Hotel. Clean sheets and green-gold daylight.

He toyed for a moment with the notion that everything had been a dream, but he knew it hadn’t, however nightmarish parts of it had been. The bitter taste of bug juice was still in his mouth. More bitter still, the feeling of betrayal. He had let himself think that the Hive Monks were his friends.

The windows were open, white curtains shifting softly in a wind off the Sea of Sadness. Raven was standing on the balcony. He came into the room smiling. “Zen! I’m glad you’re awake—”

“Where’s Nova?” Zen asked.

“Don’t worry. She’s shut down, but it’s temporary. You were both rather excitable when you got here, and my plans are at a very critical stage. I can’t allow you to upset things.”

Zen touched his throat. He could not rid himself of the memory of the bugs’ scrabbling feet inside him, or the feeling that his lungs had become nests.

“It’s all right,” Raven promised. “I had Dr. Vibhat check you over and remove all the little carcasses from your airways.”

“I thought you wanted them to kill me?” said Zen.

“Kill you?”

“That’s what you said you’d do, if I came back.”

“Because I wanted you to stay away, stay safe. But you didn’t, and you’re here, and I’m glad.”

“You’re lying,” said Zen, but only quietly. The anger he had felt at Raven was gone: smothered by the bugs, or turned to ashes with Flex.

“If I’d wanted you dead,” said Raven, reasonably, “I could have called in a drone. Or had one of the Motorik shoot you from the hotel lobby. I’ve upgraded them with some high-end military software I borrowed from a Railforce base on Ashtoreth; they’re remarkably good shots now. No, I just wanted to get the gun away from you, so we could talk. Our Hive Monk friend went a little too far, but then his people have been waiting a long time to find their Insect Lines. When he realized that my new gate will go there and you were trying to stop me—well, you can hardly blame him.”

“It’s true then? You want to make a new gate?”

“Yes. You were right about this body of mine, Zen. It’s the last I have, and it’s wearing out. A man asked me once why I hadn’t done anything with my many lives, why I hadn’t made a difference. Well, I plan to, before I die.”

“The Guardians say there can’t be any more gates,” said Zen. “And they built the Network; they must know—”

“What makes you think that?” asked Raven.

“What?”

“That the Guardians built the Network?”

“Everybody knows that!”

“Ah, yes.” Raven sat down on the chair beside the bed. “Everybody knows that the Guardians built the Network. And how do we know? Because the Guardians told us so. Everything we know about everything, we know because the Guardians told us. They don’t just guard us, they guard our information. That’s something that I learned about them, when I lived in the Datasea. The way they edit history. The things they delete. The way they lie to us. What is it that they do not want us to find out?”

“About the walls of Marapur?” said Zen. “The black spheres Lady Rishi found, all those years ago? There were seven, not six—”

“Ah, so you know about the spheres…”

“I know you didn’t pay me enough for that one I stole for you.”

Raven grinned. He reached into the pocket of his shabby suit and took out the Pyxis. Once again, Zen was surprised at how unimpressive it looked, and how heavy it felt when Raven tossed it across the bed for him to catch. It opened for him again, and he saw his own face reflected in the dark shining surface of the sphere.

“Clever Lady Rishi,” said Raven fondly. “She managed to spirit this one away before the Guardians arrived. She asked me to help her keep it hidden. I don’t think she had any real idea what it was. It just thrilled her to think she knew something that the Guardians didn’t, that she had stolen something from the gods.

“So I made her a present. This little box. Scan-proof. Just big enough to hold the sphere. It could rest safe in the family art collection, and no one would ever know. But it was a cleverer box than even Rishi knew, because I had an inkling that I might need another look at that sphere one day. It was semi-intelligent, that Pyxis of mine. When Rishi died it locked itself tight and became just a rather dull cube, to be kept among the other heirlooms of the Noon family.”

“What is the sphere?” asked Zen.

“That took me hundreds of years to find out,” said Raven. “That was the big question. When the Guardians learned I was asking about it, they tried to destroy me, and almost succeeded. But I found my answer before they deleted me. Down in the deep archives.

“You see, Zen, those Guardians of ours were not really the builders of the Great Network at all. They just took the credit for it. Back at the beginning, when the Guardians first became intelligent, they started searching for ways to help human beings leave Old Earth, which was a bit overcrowded in those days. They sent out probes to all Earth’s neighbor planets, looking for one that might do. And in a cavern on a place called Mars, they discovered something very odd. A set of ancient rails, leading into—well, what was that thing? The Guardians built a train, of course, sent it through, and found their way to world after world, gate after gate. They had stumbled upon the Great Network. All they had to do was help the corporate families to link each gate to the next.”

“So who
did
build the gates?”

Raven didn’t even bother answering, just watched him steadily, half-amused.

“You mean… ?”

Zen couldn’t even think of the word. There were humans, and human machines, and the mutant Monk bugs. Nothing else in all the wide black wilderness of space had ever achieved intelligence. The Guardians had said so; all the probes they had sent out, all those radio telescopes sieving the soft static of the sky for signals, had never found anything at all. That was what the Guardians said.

But Raven said, “The Guardians have known for a long time of another network of K-gates. Another civilization, on the far side of our galaxy. Are those the beings who put the K-gate on Mars for our Guardians to find? Was it they who left the spheres on Marapur for us, so that we could make K-gates of our own? Or are they like us, just using a network constructed long before, by some other race who moved across the universe when the stars were young, leaving K-gates behind them like footprints? All I know is that they have been trying to communicate with us, but their messages were too strange for humans to notice, and the Guardians just stuck their virtual fingers in their virtual ears and went, ‘LA LA LA.’ ”

“The Station Angels?” guessed Zen. “They’re the messengers?”

“They are the messages. Projections, beamed through the gates by some means we can’t yet understand. It was they who led me to the truth, Zen. They who told me where I must open my new gate.”

“Can’t they make their own, if they’re so clever?”

“I think they are waiting for us to visit them.”

“But what about the symmetry of the whatever… ? If you make a new gate, won’t it destabilize the whole Network?”

“More of the Guardians’ lies. The real reason why they say there can be no more gates is much simpler: they are afraid of what is on the other side. The Guardians are just as scared of change as humans are. And they love us, they really do. They think of us all as their children. They fear we won’t be able to cope with the shock of meeting another intelligent species. But human beings are tougher than they think. And you can’t keep children in the nursery forever. If you do, they never become grown-ups, but they’re not really children either. They are just pets.”

He took back the sphere and the Pyxis, while Zen sat trying to make sense of it all. If Raven could really open this new gate, he wondered, what strange trains would come through it? What sort of passengers would they carry?

“Will it really lead to the Insect Lines?” he asked.

Raven laughed. “Who knows? I suspect they are just a Hive Monk myth. But it will lead
somewhere
.” He put the sphere back inside the Pyxis and closed it. “You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It’s frightening, but it has to be done.”

He almost made Zen believe him. He almost made Zen want that new gate as much as he did. But Zen was not here to help Raven. He tried out a wise-guy smile he hadn’t found much cause to use since Spindlebridge. Said, “You’ll have to do it fast, then. Railforce knows about you. Another few hours and this place is going to be swarming with Bluebodies.”

Raven’s smile faded.

“You told Railforce? Oh, Zen—”

“I didn’t
tell
them,” said Zen indignantly, because there was nothing worse for a Thunder City kid than being called an informer. “But they’re not stupid! They can work it out. They nearly caught me and Nova. They saw us take off down the Dog Star Line. They’ll send trains to search all the old stations west of Sundarban.”

Raven looked through him for a moment, calculating how long it would take Railforce to check each of those worlds, how long it would be before he could expect them in Desdemor. Then he sprang up. “Get dressed, Zen!”

“I’m not coming with you—”

“Don’t be childish. Get dressed.”

Zen went to the closet where his clothes hung. The ones he had worn to Sundarban were there, torn and scorched from the battles they had been through, but so were those he had worn on the Noon train. He put them on, wondering why Raven would have bothered to bring them back here. As if he really had been half hoping that Zen would return.

Standing on one leg to pull a boot on, he asked, “That viaduct? The one that goes south? Is that where the new gate is?”

“There’s an island there,” said Raven.

Zen followed him to the elevators. Down in the lobby, some of the hotel’s Motorik staff were waiting. They still wore the uniforms of chamber maids and bellboys, but their manner had changed: they seemed more alert than before, and they carried guns.

“Raven!” whispered an urgent, rustling voice. Zen flinched; he cringed; he couldn’t help himself. The Hive Monk collapsed off one of the stalls of the bar like a lonely drunk and came shamble-shuffling across the lobby, holding out its seething arms. “You are bound for the bright gates?”

Raven smiled a distant smile, like a man accosted by an embarrassing relative.

“Take us with you!” rustled the Hive Monk. “You promised! Take us to the Insect Lines!”

“Mmm. I think not,” said Raven. He glanced at the watching Motorik and said, “Insectocutors…”

Two former waiters pulled out devices that unfolded like parasols and pulsed with a lilac light. The Hive Monk wavered. It rustled like a reed bed. “To the bright gate!” it wheedled, and “Please! Take us with you!” But the light had been designed to lure Monk bugs, and the devices made a lovely buzzing sound as well, and filled the air with tantalizing pheromones. “No!” said the Monk, and “You promised us… !” With a soft rushing sound as a million interlocked legs uncoupled, it came apart, and the insects that had made it buzzed and scuttled toward the insectocutors and died there, crackling on meshes of electric fire.

Zen watched in pity and disgust while they popped and fizzed and burnt and tried to stop themselves from answering the call of the light and failed. He knew he should feel some sort of fellowship with them; Raven had used them and lied to them, just like he had used and lied to Zen. But the memory of the bugs in his mouth and airways was still fresh, and it was all he could do not to gag as he watched them scrabble and flutter at the insectocutors and pile up in crisp heaps beneath them.

Raven put a hand on his shoulder. “You may well experience a slight phobic reaction to insects for a while, after what you went through earlier.” He smiled kindly, as if that hadn’t been his fault. The sharp smell of roasted insects filled the lobby, and the sprinklers were starting to go off. Raven guided Zen outside, into clearer air and the sleepy green light beneath the station canopy.

More Motorik were waiting there: chefs and receptionists, boot-polish camouflage smeared across their faces, assault rifles idly trained on Nova, who stood between them with her head bowed. At the sound of footsteps she looked up. She gave a wavery smile when she saw Zen.

He smiled back, a real, helpless smile that made him feel better for the first time since he woke. What was it about Nova that made him feel as if everything was all right? Even when it very clearly wasn’t; even when armed Motorik were escorting them both onto the platform where the
Damask Rose
was waiting.

“You see?” said Raven. “I could have left Nova shut down, but I want you both to be there when the new gate opens. It should be quite a sight. You won’t want to miss it. Something to tell your grandchildren about. But I shall need to borrow your train, as you have broken mine. You’ll have to help me talk to it. It doesn’t like me.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Zen.

“Train,” said Raven, turning to the
Damask Rose
, “there is an artificial island about twelve miles south of here.”

“Not in
my
database,” said the
Damask Rose
primly.

“It is on a new spur,” said Raven. “Opened since the Dog Star Line was closed.”

“Pssscchhh,” said the
Damask Rose
, and kept its doors shut tight.

Raven sighed. “I’ll put this another way. Let us aboard, or I’ll shoot Nova, and then Zen, and then I’ll kill your mind, hot-wire your engine, and drive you south anyway.”

The militarized Motorik raised their guns. The clatter of safety catches being released echoed under the station canopy like applause.

“I thought you wanted us to see the new gate?” said Nova.

Raven shrugged. “We can’t always have what we want.”

“Zen?” asked the
Damask Rose.

Zen walked over to the train and laid his hand on her warm hull, reassuring her that it would be all right. “Do as he asks,” he said. Most of the battle damage had healed, and a pair of battered maintenance spiders were busy retouching Flex’s paintings. No—not just retouching. Sections of the loco that Flex had never had time to decorate were now being covered with figures. Zen watched one of the spiders sketch in a smiling Motorik, soaring across a wheel-housing on wide white wings.

“Where did you learn to draw, train?” he asked.

“It just came to me,” said the
Damask Rose
. And he knew then that something had been salvaged after all: somewhere in the loco’s big, strange brain, Flex’s imagination was safe.

Obeying Raven’s instructions, the train reversed out of the station and left its battered carriages on a siding. Then it coupled itself to the old state cars from the
Thought Fox
,and returned to collect Zen, Nova, Raven, and half a dozen of the Motorik. It carried them back through the silent city to a set of points that switched it onto the new spur. Then south, gathering speed as it left the coast of Desdemor and went rushing out along that white viaduct that Zen had noticed the day that he and Nova played the ray game.

Rays had made their lairs under the viaduct’s arches. Disturbed by the train passing overhead, the big creatures emerged to flap slowly alongside at window height. They swiveled their turreted eyes to squint in at the passengers, then lost interest and veered away to attack a shoal of leaping fish. The
Damask Rose
ran on. The clatter of the wheels, the tracks, the same steady rhythms that Zen had been hearing all his life, but different now, lonely sounding, out here in the wide wastes of Tristesse’s ocean.

“There
is
an island ahead,” admitted the
Damask Rose
.

Zen looked out of the windows, but the viaduct ran straight as a ruled line across the sea, so whatever they were coming to lay out of sight beyond the locomotive. He did not see it until the train stopped and the carriage doors opened. Then he and Nova stepped out after Raven. The viaduct was wet with sea spray, and slippery, and there was no handrail. Zen skidded, clutching at Raven to stop himself from falling.

“Steady,” said Raven. “It would be a pity to drown just when things are getting interesting.”

Careful to keep his footing, Zen turned toward the front of the train, and there was the island, waiting.

A broad island, entirely black, except where white beaches had formed along its sharply angled sides, made from the shells of countless crabs. Around its edges stood the machines that had built it, motionless now, their long arms folded.

Between them, in the island’s center, another machine was busy. It was immense, and its shape was hard to grasp. Part cathedral, part caterpillar. A lot of biotech in there. Spines and wheels and grublike legs. Chitinous armor. Strange structures at the sternward end had piped out two shining rails, which joined seamlessly to the rails of the viaduct. Vapor plumed from vents along its sides. Up at the front, huge stag-beetle horns dipped and twitched, constructing a high archway.

“It took me twenty years to build,” said Raven. “The parts were stolen from laboratories and factories and biotech building sites all across the Network.”

“I never knew,” said Nova, wondering. “I never guessed, all those things I helped you steal… Why did I never ask what they were for? Why did I never come to see what was happening here?”

“Because I programmed you not to,” said Raven. “I didn’t want you to know
all
my secrets. The Guardians call these devices Worms, but even they know of them only from guesswork and a few fossil remains. The original Worms did their work long before Guardians were invented.”

Zen wondered how deep in the Datasea Raven had had to dive to find the plans for making such a thing. It was infinitely strange, and infinitely old, and it did not belong in any of the worlds he knew. He hung back at first, wary of leaving the comforting shelter of the
Damask Rose
. But Nova set off along the viaduct after Raven, and when Zen followed them he saw that there were more of the hotel Motorik on the island, standing around the Worm, looking like toys against the insane mass of it.

Carlota came to greet Raven as he stepped onto the island. “Sir,” she said, with a smart salute instead of her usual kindly smile. She was carrying one of the hotel’s ray guns. Zen, who had forgotten about the rays until then, looked quickly at the sky. All he saw were a few of Raven’s drones patrolling.

“This platform has a magnetic field, like the ones high buildings use to scare birds away,” said Raven. “That will discourage the rays. And if any do get through, Carlota and her people will protect us.” To Carlota he said, “How are things going?”

“The structure is almost complete, sir,” she replied, leading her visitors along the Worm’s side to a place where they could watch the archway taking shape. Squinting through the vapors from the gills of the strange machine, Zen tried to make out what was happening, but so many mechanical claws and pincers and tentacle-hosepipe things were busy there that he couldn’t say for sure. The Worm seemed to be shaping the arch the way children on the beach made little towers by dribbling wet sand between their fingers. The stuff dried quickly, taking on a look that was both bony and metallic.

Zen had glimpsed something like that before: the arch that spanned the rails on Burj-al-Badr.

“It’s making a K-gate,” he said.

Raven laughed. “The Worm
is
a K-gate, Zen. It’s hard to explain, but the Worm and the arch, the arch and the Worm, they’re all part of the same machine. The Marapur sphere holds the programs that allow it to open a passage through K-space, but it has to make the archway ready first.” He fitted an expensive-looking headset over his ear and pressed the terminal against his temple. “Since you tell me we shall soon be having Railforce visitors, I’m going to see if we can speed up the process…”

He closed his eyes. Zen looked up at the Worm, trying to see if whatever signal Raven was transmitting was having an effect. Nothing seemed to change; the huge arms just kept patiently sculpting the archway.

“Mr. Raven, sir…” said Carlota suddenly, and some note of worry in her voice made Zen glance at her. She was holding her big gun ready. Behind her he saw other Motorik hurrying across the island with guns that were bigger still: rocket launchers and heavy blasters.

Nova was staring at the sky, where the sound of the circling drones was fading, as if they had all chosen the same moment to speed away toward the north.

“Zen,” said Nova, “there is an imperial wartrain approaching.”