by Lev Grossman
“Oh, nonsense,” the heron said modestly.
“Go on! You must be down to a few hundred.”
The great bird sighed. “It’s true. At this point we’re almost extinct. People hunt us and steal our eggs. They dammed my river to make a power plant.”
For a moment nobody spoke.
“We’re fine,” the porcupine said. “Thanks for asking, everybody. No shortage of porcupines.”
“Everything’s changing,” the heron said. “Animals are on the move all over the world. We’re refugees, just like people. Look at the poor polar bear!”
“What about her?” Kate said miserably.
“She was waiting for the train,” the mamba said, “but her station was made of ice. It melted in the warm weather and she was left swimming by herself in the middle of the ocean. By the time you came, it was almost too late.”
Kate had slumped all the way down in her armchair. She felt like she was going to melt, too, into a puddle of shame. In that moment she wished she could un-hear everything the animals had just told her. She wished she’d stayed home and never gotten on the Silver Arrow. She’d thought she was escaping from her boring pointless life, but this was so much worse, and the worst part of all was that it was all her fault. When you’re a child the adult world looks so exciting, and it is, but it’s also so much sadder and more complicated than you expect. And you can’t just take the good parts, you have to take it all, even if it’s not what you wanted.
And once you do, there’s no going back.
“You must hate us,” she whispered. “You must hate us so much.”
“But we don’t,” the heron said. “Not really.”
And that was the strangest part: It was true. There was no hate in their voices.
“Hate is a human thing,” the fishing cat said.
“We can do anger,” the porcupine said. “Personally, I do it a lot. But not hate.”
“So you can see why we’re not that worried about the problem with the train,” the heron said.
“You mean—because we’re all going to die anyway?” Kate said.
“No. We’re not worried because there is nothing more terrifyingly effective and resourceful than a human being. In all the four billion years that there has been life on Earth, you are the most successful animal there ever was. You’re better than us at everything. If you want to fix this problem, you will, because when human beings want something, nothing gets in their way.”
“But we’re awful!” Kate moaned. “We’ve done such terrible, terrible things!”
“Yes,” the heron said. “You absolutely have. But as animals go, you exhibit an unusually wide variety of behaviors. Some humans are terrible, but others aren’t bad at all. Some are almost good.”
“A good human being,” the fishing cat said. “Imagine what one of those could do.”
“They could do anything,” the snake said quietly. “Anything at all.”
Kate raised her head. They were all looking at her: the snake with his black lidless eyes, the cat with her green ones. The porcupine’s eyes were jet beads. The heron’s were a striking burnt orange, and perfectly circular.
After everything humans had done to them, they still had hope. Whatever happened, the animals would never, ever give up. They couldn’t. They didn’t have that luxury. When Kate saw that, she knew that she couldn’t either. Grace Hopper used to have a clock on her wall that ran backward, to show that you could always do things differently, no matter what. Kate would be a different kind of human.
She wasn’t going home. She was going to get these animals where they needed to go. Back before the Silver Arrow, which seemed like a really long time ago now, she used to wish that life was like it was in books, that the whole world was in danger and it was up to her to save it.
She understood now that it was all true. The world really was in danger, and it really was up to her.
She stood up.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Kate said.
21
What Kate Could Do
“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO,” KATE SAID. “LITERALLY none.”
She was back in the cab with Tom. She’d felt good for a minute there, like she really was the hero of one of those stories, but now that feeling was gone. Her mind was a complete blank.
Tom was watching her.
“What?”
“Why don’t you ask me?” he said.
“Ask you what?”
“If I have any ideas.”
She had to admit it hadn’t occurred to her.
“To be honest, Tom,” Kate said, “I go to you when I need something either eaten or broken. I think of myself as the planning department around here.”
“Seems like you’re all out of plans, though.”
Kate opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, there was a click-bing from the Silver Arrow.
YOU KNOW, KATE
Hm. The train didn’t usually use Kate’s actual name.
“What?”
I JUST WANTED TO SAY
THAT THIS MIGHT BE ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS IN LIFE
THAT DOESN’T CALL FOR A SMART REMARK
Tom said nothing, just folded his arms and waited. Kate rolled her eyes.
Though it was true, she had spent a lot of time lately learning about animals and trains, and she hadn’t been paying much attention to her brother. And Tom had come all this way with her. He’d worked just as hard. He hadn’t quit either. He deserved to be listened to.
“Okay. Do you really have an idea?”
“Yes.”
“Is it like that idea you had that one time about jumping off the garage roof using a trash bag from the kitchen as a parachute? And you broke your collarbone?”
“This one,” Tom said, “is even better than that.”
Kate made a hurry-it-up gesture.
“First say I’m awesome and you’re glad I came on the trip with you.”
OMG. Doing the right thing could be downright unpleasant sometimes.
“Fine. You’re awesome and I’m glad you came on the trip with me.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “So while you’ve been hanging out with the animals in the library, I’ve been exploring the train.”
“Great. How does that help?”
“Because,” Tom said, “it means that I’ve looked inside the mystery car, and you haven’t.”
Kate had completely forgotten it was there.
She’d seen it from the outside, of course. It wasn’t especially mysterious-looking. In fact, it looked exactly like an ordinary old-fashioned boxcar: wooden, not steel, and painted a pale, watery blue. But it had a small door on one side, and now that she looked closely, she saw that it had something painted on it, in faded white paint:
?
Tom waited outside while Kate opened the door and looked.
“Right?” Tom said.
Kate nodded. All that extra energy of his did come in handy sometimes.
“When you’re right,” she said, “you’re right.”
“We should probably talk about this with the Silver Arrow.”
“Maybe. Maybe not, though. It’s disappointingly sensible about things like this.”
They went back up to the engine together.
WELL?
“We’re backing up.” Tom put the engine in reverse.
WHY?
ARE WE GIVING UP?
“We’re not giving up,” Kate said. “We’re backing up.”
HOW FAR?
“Just enough,” Tom said. “Let’s say a mile.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough,” Kate said. “Do you trust us?”
There was a pause from the Silver Arrow. A long one. Finally it typed:
yes
“Wow,” Tom said. “I didn’t know you even had a font that small.”
MAYBE WE SHOULD PUT KATE BACK IN CHARGE THOUGH
“No, this is good,” Kate said. “You were right. Tom knew what to do.”
<
br /> AND I’M ALL FOR ENCOURAGING HIM BUT
“Good.”
After they’d backed up about a mile, Tom brought them to a stop. He gave the engine some steam, and the Silver Arrow started moving forward again. Faster. And faster. Soon they were really moving.
Tom hit the whistle:
FOOOOM! FOOOOOOOOOM!
The chuff-chuff of the engine was in double time and getting even faster, merging into a continuous roar. Kate looked outside. There was no stopping now, even if they wanted to.
“Go, Kate!” Tom shouted.
Kate sprinted back through the train to the mystery car.
“Find something to hang on to!” she called to the animals as she shot through the library.
What she’d seen inside the mystery car were two enormous metal cylinders bolted onto the arms of a massive steel girder shaped like a T. The cylinders were bright unpainted steel and flared out into huge cones pointing backward. It was pretty much impossible to mistake them for anything other than what they were: a pair of rocket engines.
“I knew Uncle Herbert should’ve gotten us a rocket!” Kate said to herself.
Unsurprisingly, the operation of rocket engines wasn’t something that the Silver Arrow had covered in their training sessions. Fortunately, these particular rocket engines didn’t seem too complicated. In between them on the T-shaped support was a single small red button. A label under the button read: PUSH ME THEN RUN AWAY
Kate pushed the button.
Immediately, powerful pneumatic mechanisms roared to life and shoved the cylinders outward in both directions, right out through the wooden sides of the boxcar, with a shuddering crash. Splinters flew everywhere. The rocket engines were now sticking out on either side of the train.
Kate ran away as fast as she could.
A calm voice began to count down from ten. Kate thought maybe it should’ve picked a higher number to count from, and if she ever had the chance, she would report that as a design flaw. She made it through the boxcars, through the candy car, across the flat car, and all the way to the library car before the rockets kicked in.
Kicked was the right word: It felt like a giant soccer player had reared back and booted the train right in the caboose. Or like it really was a silver arrow and it was being fired from a huge bow. Kate flew right off her feet and slammed into the back wall of the library.
She stuck there like Velcro: The train was accelerating so fast it pinned her against the wall. Everything else in the room that wasn’t nailed down joined them on the back wall. (Fortunately somebody had thought to nail down the furniture. Though not any of the cushions.) Fighting the g-forces, Kate could just turn her head far enough to see the world outside racing past in the window, faster and faster, even faster than they’d gone down the mountain. The whole train was shuddering and rocking with the force of the acceleration. She couldn’t see them, but the rockets were now shooting out bright blue-white spikes of flame behind them, shoving the train forward faster and faster and faster toward the edge of the cliff.
The pressing question in Kate’s mind was, did the rockets have enough power to push an entire steam train straight up a more-or-less vertical track? And if they did have enough power, where was that track going to take them?
The fields outside disappeared: The Silver Arrow had cleared the cliff. Now there was nothing but empty blue sky in the windows, and the train was still accelerating. Then it started tilting back, back and back and back as the track under it bent up toward the sky, back and farther back till every nerve in Kate’s body was screaming, Stop! Stop! For the love of all that is good and reasonable, stop!
But rockets don’t come with brakes. These didn’t even have an OFF button. One of the wooden bars gave way, and Kate was pelted with a shelf’s worth of books. They kept going up and up, blasting up through the clouds, and then Kate could feel something even crazier happening: The track kept curving back past the vertical, back in the direction of upside-down—but the rockets were driving them so hard that centrifugal force kept them stuck to the track. The track kept curving till it did a complete roller-coaster loop, and for one delirious, transcendent moment they were completely upside down, with Kate’s head pointed at the earth, and she went weightless, and in that moment all her fear suddenly evaporated into nothing and she laughed out loud with the awesomeness of it all.
And then they were past it and roaring down the downslope, still at high speed but no longer accelerating. Kate and the books and everything else slid down the wall and back to the floor, where they belonged.
Her whole body felt limp and spent. The noise of the rocket engines faded and then stopped. She managed to get on her feet and stagger to the window. Outside, underneath them, there were only clouds.
They were on a railroad in the sky.
“Is everybody okay?” she whispered.
Click-bing.
OMG THAT WAS AMAZING
22
The Train Station in the Sky
THE SILVER ARROW WAS ROLLING ALONG ON TOP OF A cloud.
Click-bing.
IF THIS IS DEATH, IT REALLY ISN’T THAT BAD
It was a long way down. Ahead and behind, train tracks curved off through the sky into the distance, looking very thin and precarious.
Kate made her way forward, wondering what was up here in the clouds that could be worth all that. She found herself stepping lightly and carefully, as if she might somehow fall out of the train at any moment.
But now she could see a station ahead of them. It looked like an ordinary country train station—a long, narrow platform with a railing and a little shelter—except that it was floating a mile in the air, and it was completely made of clouds. It was like somebody had decided to build an entire station out of fluffy white cotton wool.
She found the animals in the dining car.
“I wonder whose stop this is,” Kate said.
“Not my natural habitat,” the porcupine said.
“It’s not even mine,” the heron said.
“I think I might know,” the fishing cat said.
She looked over at the baby pangolin, who had survived the rocket ride unscathed and apparently fast asleep, curled up safely in a scaly little ball.
“The pangolin’s?” Kate said. “Pangolini? Whatever? I don’t understand. Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” the snake said. “But it’s somewhere very magic.”
Kate picked up the pangolin, and he opened his wise, dark eyes and looked up at her. He’d definitely grown since that first day when she’d mistaken him for a pine cone, but he still weighed hardly anything. She carried him forward to the passenger car and opened the door.
She felt around with her foot, the way you would with thin ice, but the cloud platform was perfectly solid. Very carefully, she stepped out onto it. It was soft but bouncy, like a firmly stuffed cushion. It would’ve been fun to jump around on it, but for some reason Kate wasn’t in a jumping mood. This was a strangely solemn place.
Tom climbed down after her, followed by the other animals. There was nobody here to meet them. A cool wind blew. It gave Kate a floaty, dizzy feeling to be up this high.
This couldn’t be right. Were they supposed to just leave the little pangolin up here in the middle of the sky all by himself? Alone, like she’d found him? She sat down cross-legged on the platform, in the shadow of the huge train, with the pangolin in her lap. The others stood around her.
Usually there was a sign telling you where the station was, but the sign here just read SOMEDAY.
“What does that mean?” she said. “Someday? That’s not a place.”
“It means there is no place for him,” the fishing cat said. “Not now. Not yet. There’s nowhere in the world we can take him that’s safe enough. He’ll just have to stay up here till things get better.”
Kate looked down at the pangolin in her lap, with his silly, lost little pine-cone face, and a tear fell onto one of his brown scales. He licked Kate’s nose with h
is weirdly long pink tongue. It seemed incredible to Kate that anybody would ever do anything to hurt him. She wanted to hold him and keep him safe forever.
But it wasn’t that people wanted to hurt him, she thought. Not really. They just weren’t paying attention to him. They didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about baby pangolins, they were just thinking about themselves.
But you have to think about them. You can’t forget them. Kate resolved that always, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would remember baby pangolins. She saw now what she was supposed to do. She gave the pangolin a kiss and placed him all by himself on the platform.
“Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”
The baby pangolin gave her a last look, sniffed, then unrolled and began bumbling around happily, just the way he always did.
Kate stepped back into the passenger car, where the others were already waiting, and even as she did, the cloud station began to change shape. It was softening and melting, turning itself into a soft little island for the pangolin. It would keep him safe till there was somewhere real for him to go.
The train gave a mighty hiss and puff and pulled away from the station in the sky.
Some problems in this world just don’t have answers. Not yet.
23
Never, Ever
KATE KNEW WHAT WAS COMING NEXT, BUT SHE WASN’T sure she was ready for it.
They rode through the sky all day. As the sun set, the track gradually bent down toward the earth until sometime in the night it touched down on a mountain peak. The Silver Arrow was hurrying now—it kept fretting that it was late in the season to be on this route. They didn’t stop till the morning, when they reached a small, neat station with a corrugated-tin roof and vines hanging down all around it. The air was humid and smelled like exotic flowers and growing things. The heat hadn’t come up yet, but you could tell it was going to be a hot day.