Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  “Not till I’ve put more distance between me and the Railbomb,” said the Ghost Wolf, but it was already slowing, rolling to a stop on scorched wheels.

  “Death!” sang the Railbomb, piercing the K-gate behind it, and did the thing it had been longing to do for the whole of its short life.

  The explosion filled the tunnel with a violent light, hot as a newborn sun. Rock flashed into vapor. The mountains shrugged. A vast red fist of flame punched its way out into the startled sky, wearing splintered crags like brass knuckles. For six hundred miles around the tunnel mouth, the ground jumped like a drum skin. Then the thunder came, outpacing the rolling dust clouds to go rumbling away around the curve of the world.

  The Ghost Wolf’s cabin electrics had failed. Dust blinded the windows. Threnody and Chandni and the interface sat in darkness, listening to the rattles and thuds as bits of mountain that had been on exciting pleasure trips into the high atmosphere remembered they were geology rather than weather, and came tumbling down again, rebounding off the Ghost Wolf’s armor.

  “What’s out there?” asked Threnody. “Did anyone get a look? Did you see which world it is?”

  Nobody had.

  “I think I picked up some kind of signals,” said the Ghost Wolf, “but I couldn’t make heads or tails of them, and the dust is blocking reception now.”

  “What part of the Network are we on?” Threnody asked the interface. “If there are Prells around…”

  “We are not on the Network,” said the interface. “We are elsewhere.”

  The bombardment was slowing. The things hitting the hull now sounded more like gravel than boulders. A few shy sunbeams peeped in through the windows.

  Chandni said, “You realize we’ve forgotten to bring anything to eat, again.”

  19

  “Are you going to swim?”

  “I don’t think we both need to. You swim, and I’ll watch.”

  They were walking down a steep path to the shore. Behind them, the last sunlight lit the crags. Ahead, the worldwide ocean spread out, glittering and inky blue. The path led to a horseshoe-shaped tide pool and a jetty of Railmaker glass. Zen went to the end of the jetty and started taking off his clothes, dropping them on the glass at his feet. The sea didn’t scare him. He had learned to swim on the beaches of Santheraki, the year he had lived there with his mother and Myka when he was eleven. Nova smiled, thinking of that, imagining what he must have been like back then. He had told her all about it, everything about his past, while they’d been riding the Web of Worlds. Quite often he forgot something that he had told her, and told her again, but Nova didn’t mind; she wanted to know everything. It felt wonderful to know so much about someone, to have them trust you with all their memories and dreams. Especially Zen, who had never really trusted anyone before.

  He pulled off his headset and put it on top of his carelessly heaped clothes, glancing back at Nova with a quick, half-nervous grin. He looked beautiful, standing naked there at the jetty’s end, his lean brown body dark against the twilight sea. “Be careful,” she started to say, but he was already diving, plunging into the slow upward heave of an oncoming wave.

  They had been together for nine months. Nine whole months since that beautiful first night on Yaarm. They had almost forgotten who they had been before they came through Raven’s gate. Whole days went by when they did not think about Raven or the Noon train job, or ask themselves if things might have gone differently.

  It had been difficult at times. Neither of them had been in love before, and all that they knew about it came from stories. Stories usually ended with people falling in love. What happened next? They had nothing in common except for the adventures that had brought them together. Nova liked things neat and tidy, which Zen didn’t care about at all. She liked to know things, while Zen seemed happy to stay ignorant. She was filled with curiosity about how the Web of Worlds had come to be, and kept trying to find out more about its history, but Zen was only interested in the present, and seemed quite glad that they had come too late to meet the mysterious Railmakers.

  If they had still been in the Network Empire, Nova thought, they would have split up after a week or two. Their differences would have made them fight, and there would have been the pressure of what other people thought too; humans and Motorik were not supposed to like each other, let alone fall in love. But there were no other humans here to judge them, and they had needed each other too much to fight. She had learned to ignore all the things about Zen that she didn’t like. When you loved someone, she was discovering, you loved all of them, the good parts and the bad. Sometimes, when she was with Zen, she had the feeling that nobody had ever loved anyone as much as she loved him. That made her feel special and unique and more human than she had ever felt before, because she was pretty sure that all humans felt that way when they were in love.

  He surfaced several feet offshore, sleek as a seal with his wet hair plastered flat. He called out to Nova and waved. “They’re here!” The sun had set, but she could see him clearly, lit by a soft pastel-colored light that streamed up through the waves from somewhere beneath him. She ran to the end of the jetty in time to see a huge animal passing below him, turning over as it soared through the water. Pulses of blue and amber light flickered along its flanks and the long trailing banners of its fins. “They’re big,” Zen shouted, diving again. And, although she knew the Night Swimmers were friendly, Nova felt grateful for the floor of clear Railmaker glass that separated him from the deeps.

  *

  They had come a long way since Yaarm. Down all the shiny lines to Priina-Réae: the countless gates, the untold alien stations. They’d stopped at Yashtey in the Tides of Gmylm, and Semiimiliiip, and Groosht. They had seen the morvah nurseries on Iehíín where some of the Web’s strange living locomotives were hatched and young ones trundled around on training rails, trying out their new wheels. They had traveled the New Porcelain Line all the way to the Rainbow Half-Worlds, then struck out along the spur called Makers’ Ladder until it had brought them here, to Night’s Edge, a waterworld where only one mountain range rose high enough to break the surface of the ocean. The Railmakers had left a K-gate at one end of the long, rocky landmass, three more at the other, and one of their stations in the middle. A colony of Deeka lived there, acting as middlemen for trade between visiting trains and the Night’s Edge natives, the immense, whalelike Night Swimmers.

  There were two of the Swimmers beneath Zen now, and he suddenly saw that there were others beneath them: tiny moving lights that must be more of the creatures coming up from some immense depth. The lights seemed to ripple as the glass floor of the tide pool trembled to their subsonic calls. Zen spread out his arms and legs and drifted. The Night Swimmers were curious about humans, just like everyone he had met on the Web of Worlds. But unlike the others, the Swimmers felt they couldn’t really start to understand a new race until they had seen them swim.

  So he hung there for a moment, naked in the darkening sea, letting the things below get a good look at him with whatever they used for eyes. All around him now the light of the watchers in the deep shone upward through the waves.

  He wondered how he was doing. How did the Ambassador for Humans compare to all the other races who had found their way to Night’s Edge and displayed themselves in this ancient pool? Better than the Hath, he thought; those friendly tents would have just skated across the wave-tops like living flotsam. The Herastec would have swum like horses with their three legs flailing and their horned heads held high out of the water. The Deeka would have done better; they were half at home in water. And the Ones Who Remember the Sea were basically just octopuses, which was cheating…

  He swam toward the entrance of the pool, where the two arms of rock that encircled it ended and the waves rolled in from the open sea. But he was getting cold, so he decided that the Night Swimmers had seen enough and turned back toward the glass jetty.

 
“Did you see them? The Night Swimmers? They’re the size of trains!”

  “I think they might have been trains once,” said Nova, crouched beside his heap of clothes, frowning down through the water. “A Deeka I talked to back at V’rey said they evolved from morvah that were stranded here after the Blackout. It seems possible.”

  That was so Nova, thought Zen, as he scrambled out of the water. Always coming up with theories, always asking questions…

  “You should go in,” he said. “There are tons of them, circling way down deep; you can’t see from up here. Go in and swim.”

  “Better not,” said Nova. She wished she could, but if she stripped off and dived in, then the Night Swimmers, and anyone looking down from the walkways and terraces on the cliffs above, might notice that her body had none of the same details as Zen’s. She had never managed to personalize it in the same way she had her face, so it was still a standard-issue Motorik body with no nipples, no navel, none of those cute patterns of moles. Aliens would probably just attribute that to differences between the human sexes, but she did not want to risk them guessing the truth. People on the Web of Worlds were wary of machines.

  Luckily, that meant that they didn’t have any very complex ones of their own, and nobody seemed able to figure out that Nova was not a female human, or that the Damask Rose was anything more than a strange, inferior sort of morvah that needed a mechanical housing to protect it. The Damask Rose was not happy about that, but she played along, making sure her maintenance spiders only crept out to do their work on lonely stretches of line where they would not be seen, or making Zen and Nova do it themselves. She was learning the wordless, hooting songs of the morvah, and sometimes joined in with them. In her siding on Night’s Edge she was singing soft duets with a morvah of the Herastec as Zen and Nova walked back up the sloping paths to the station. Behind them, the rainbow glow in the tide pool faded as the Night Swimmers sank back into the depths.

  20

  They had made new friends on their journeys: fellow travelers whom they met from time to time at different stations. As they crossed the footbridge above Night’s Edge’s main platforms, a Herastec trading pair called out a whinnying greeting. They were Koth/Atalaí, who had been on Yaarm when the Damask Rose first arrived.

  Nova had long since upgraded Zen’s headset to translate the Web’s trade language and several other alien tongues, so he was able to understand what the Herastec were saying; their words appeared like glowing subtitles superimposed across his view of them as they came cantering up the ramp onto the bridge, towing their wares in spherical baggage carts.

  “Ambassadors for Humans! Nova/Zen! It is good to meet again upon the rails! Have you opened the gateway to your own Network yet? Remember, we are eager to trade with your people!”

  “Not yet,” said Nova, as she always did. “Soon, I hope.”

  “You are on your way home now perhaps?” asked one of the Herastec. (Which one was Koth and which was Atalaí, Zen could not tell, and perhaps it did not matter. Herastec pair-bonds were so strong that, once they had mated, the two became almost one. Anyway, they all looked pretty much the same in their black glass masks.)

  “There is a fast line from this world back to Yaarm,” said the other. “You can go home and tell all humans that the people of the Web are waiting eagerly to meet and trade.”

  “The recordings you traded with us have been very profitable,” said the first. “Casablanca is a big success with the Chmoii. They keep asking if there is a sequel…”

  Koth/Atalaí were traders in entertainment. They bought dramas and stories and songs and strange, alien art forms and sold them all over the Web, recorded on little crystalline wafers that had to be read by a special viewing device. Nova had a whole collection of old movies stored in one of the attics of her mind, and she had traded some of these with Koth/Atalaí, curious to see what aliens would make of human love stories and sci-fi. She was glad that the Chmoii liked Casablanca; it had always been one of her very favorites. “I don’t think there ever was a Casablanca 2,” she said, “but they might enjoy Forbidden Planet…”

  Together they went on up the winding pathways of the city. Zen offered to help pull the Herastec’s luggage, but it was surprisingly heavy. The Herastec seemed untroubled by the weight; they leaned patiently into their harnesses and the trolleys trundled along behind them. They had come to Night’s Edge to record the songs of the Night Swimmers — sequences of weird subsonic rumbling noises that went on for weeks, and were popular with the sort of people who liked listening to the sort of music that their friends weren’t even sure was music. Koth/Atalaí had arranged for a Deeka submersible to take them down into one of the deep ocean trenches for a recording session the following night.

  “And you, Nova/Zen?” they asked. “You are bound for Yaarm and your own dear homeworlds, yes?”

  “We don’t know where we’re going,” Nova replied, hoping to avoid a return to the awkward subject of when she and Zen would be going home. “There is so much of the Web that we still have not seen. The line to Yaarm is not the only line that passes through Night’s Edge…”

  “Ah, but you don’t want to take the others,” said one of the Herastec. “One goes only to a string of scruffy places, the homeworlds of the Kraitt. You would not like the Kraitt. They are as likely to be raiders as traders. They are…” (Zen’s headset struggled to find a translation for the scornful snorting sound, and settled upon “hooligans.”)

  “And what about the other lines?” asked Nova.

  “One goes through some empty worlds to Iaheí-Iahaa, but you could get there more speedily via Yaarm,” said Koth/Atalaí. “As for the other, no one takes it. It leads to another Kraitt place, then some Neem Nestworlds, and then…”

  “We don’t want to go there,” said Zen. The Neem were a mysterious race who kept to themselves, but he had glimpsed some from a distance on Yashtey and they had looked like something from his nightmares: crab-spider-insect things the size of small ponies, scuttling about on nasty, segmented legs. He didn’t want to travel any line that passed through their stations.

  “And after the Nestworlds?” asked Nova. “Where does the line go then?”

  Koth/Atalaí tossed their heads uneasily. “Nowhere, Nova/Zen. It may have gone somewhere once, in the days of the Railmakers, but now it is impassable, for it leads into the Black Light Zone, and no morvah will venture there. Night’s Edge is as close to the Zone as we like to go. Look, you can see it from here…”

  The Herastec stopped and pointed to the sky. The moon was sinking, and the stars shone in their bright constellations over the endless sea. But at one point, low on the horizon, there were no stars. It looked as if a cloud hung there, blocking them out, but Nova knew the night was cloudless. She was looking at a wide region of space where there simply were no stars.

  There was something, though. She could sense it, like a sound at the very edge of hearing. Not quite a signal, not a voice exactly, but something, singing to her out of that darkness.

  And then it was gone, and Zen was saying, “The Black Light Zone? That has something to do with the Railmakers, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s where the Railmakers’ homeworlds must have been,” said Nova. “It’s the region at the very heart of the Web. It must all have started there. There must be great hubs there from which lines once reached out to stations like this. But when the Railmakers died — when the Blackout came, whatever that was — well, the legend is that the suns that lit the Railmakers’ homeworlds just went out.”

  “How could that happen?” Zen asked.

  The Herastec were tossing their heads nervously. They did not talk of the Blackout. “It happened so very long ago, Zen/Nova, and it was so very bad, that nobody now remembers.”

  “But the morvah remember. They will not pass through any gate that leads into the Black Light Zone. As the old song about the Railmakers says, ‘Los
t are their lodges, lost every line, and no train runs where the black suns shine.’ ”

  “But let us not talk about the Blackout. Let us find friends, and eat and drink.”

  They moved on, the wheels of the baggage carts squeaking slightly on the pavement. Nova looked back at that black hole in the sky, but it was slipping below the horizon. Whatever it was that had whispered to her from it was silent now.

  21

  The Blackout had left a long shadow of fear across the Web of Worlds. Zen and Nova had noticed it before. People might joke about it sometimes; they might say, “Blackout take it!” when they dropped a drink, or when a wheel fell off a baggage cart, but the fear was real. The civilizations of the Web had grown up in the ruins left by an event too terrible to understand, a disaster that had swallowed up the Railmakers themselves. That was why they were so uneasy about any machine more complicated than a simple computer — the Railmakers were said to have had incredible machines, and no one wanted to be too much like the Railmakers, in case another Blackout came and swallowed them up too.

  For the same reason, the buildings that stood at the heart of every station — the ancient Railmaker buildings, covered in that glowing weed — always stood empty. Children dared each other to creep a little way into the silent halls, and adults built lesser buildings against the outer walls, but no one wanted to live in a place the Railmakers had built. Just in case.