by Philip Reeve
But it was too late. The train was moving. He met Nova’s eyes, and he saw that she was sad too.
“It will be all alone again,” she said. “It waited so long for someone to hear its call, and I came, but I only stayed for a few hours.” She was remembering how the interface had asked her what she would do if she ever needed to be in two places at once, and how she had said, “I’d have to choose,” thinking that the choosing would be easy. Now the choice was before her. She half wanted to leave a copy of her personality running here in the hub, while the original Nova went home with Zen. But then neither of them would be really her, and each would be forever wondering what the other was doing, and neither would feel human anymore. So she had to choose, and she had to choose to go with Zen, but it was not easy at all. It hurt.
All Zen could do was take her hand. They turned their faces to the windows, to the dreamlike vastness of the tower, the shining coral, the viaducts all ghostly in the mist. And then they were in a tunnel, and they saw odd flashes of uncolored light playing over the tunnel walls, and knew that somewhere not far ahead the Worm was burrowing a path for them through space-time.
The Damask Rose, who had been singing a soft and mournful song, sang louder and more happily, and went plunging after it.
40
Before Zen ever met Nova, back when he was just a railhead riding trains up and down the eastern branch lines, Khoorsandi had been one of the worlds he had dreamed of visiting. It lay at the end of a spur of the Orion Line: a small, dull moon whose moss-moors and knee-high forests were bathed in the brownish light of its mother planet, the gas-giant Anahita. But once every four years its orbit swung it close enough to Anahita that her gravitational field gave it an almighty wrench. Then it became clear that Khoorsandi’s dullness was an illusion, and that its landscape was really a jigsaw puzzle of granite and basalt rafts floating on a deep sea of fire. Vents and geysers opened, swarms of pop-up volcanoes shoved their snouts through the blazing moss, and the dwarf trees hastily scattered their flameproof seeds and died a fiery death.
The best place to view it all, and the only safe place to be in the fire season, was in the Spinal Mountains, which sat on a magma chamber old and cold enough that even Anahita’s urgent tugging could not wake it. There, among black basalt peaks, the Noon family had built a city called the Fire Station to serve the trains that came through Khoorsandi’s solitary K-gate.
But now, suddenly, there were two K-gates on Khoorsandi. Nova’s Worm had gnawed a new one at the opposite end of the mountain range and patiently started drawing a new set of rails toward the Fire Station. The local media outlets, which had all been waiting for volcano season to begin, noticed the odd seismograph readings that the event caused and sent drones to investigate. By the time the Damask Rose followed the Worm through the new gate, the local newsfeeds were already filled with whirling aerial footage of the giant machine lumbering across the granite uplands in a cloud of dust and vapor. Banner headlines scrolled across the images, saying things like NEW K-GATE FORMS! and AMAZING SCENES!
The Worm had laid its new rails along the top of a miles-high plateau overlooking the Plains of Fire. As the Damask Rose started along them, Zen braced himself for trouble. The sky above the train was crowded with drones, and among all the media camera platforms he was sure there would be more sinister machines — including a few that were the eyes and ears of the Guardians themselves. They might start dropping bombs on the Rose at any moment.
But nothing happened. Zen, Nova, and Threnody sat looking at one another in the state car. Uncle Bugs stood motionless beside them, like a very ugly table. The interface of Mordaunt 90 fell asleep again, tilting sideways until his golden head was resting on Threnody’s shoulder. Behind his eyelids his eyes twitched back and forth. He was uploading the contents of his memory to the version of Mordaunt 90 that existed in Khoorsandi’s Datasea.
The Datasea came swirling into Zen and Threnody’s headsets too, and into the part of Nova’s mind that acted like a headset. It was all so familiar, the chat sites and the ads: the endless, mindless, digital babble of home. They had not realized how much they’d missed it, out on the dataless Web.
“There’s a lot of speculation going on,” said Nova, scanning the newsfeeds much faster than the humans could. “Some people say aliens opened the new gate. Some people think the Guardians must have done it. Some are worried that it’s going to destabilize the Network, or let bug-eyed invaders through… But the Guardians are saying nothing. I don’t think they know what to say. I think we’ve taken them by surprise. I’m going to release a few clips of video, views of the alien stations and the people we met there — that should get them even more excited.”
“Should we talk to the media?” asked Zen, feeling suddenly shy.
“Wait till we get to the Fire Station,” Threnody said. “They like it better if they can see you.”
But the media could see them already. Impertinent paparazzi drones flew close to the Rose’s windows to snatch images of her passengers. The train closed her curtains, but by the time she pulled into the Fire Station twenty minutes later, all Khoorsandi seemed to know that the former Empress Threnody was on board.
Threnody hurried back through the train to the cabinet where Chandni was imprisoned. She didn’t open the door, just put her face close to it and said, “Chandni? I’m going to leave you on the train, till things are settled. The Rose can look after you; her maintenance spider can bring you food and things.”
Chandni just grunted. She didn’t sound happy. But why would she? She was locked in a cabinet.
At the edge of the rail yards the Worm stood dormant, cordoned off behind high barriers and watched by armed guards. The Rose went carefully past it, off the line that it had made and onto older rails. The familiar minds of K-bahn switching systems talked to her and guided her onto one of the outer platforms under the arching golden station canopy. People ran along beside her as she slowed to a stop there — actual people, Zen thought, without a Herastec or a Chmoii among them. But a lot of them were Railforce troops. When the Rose opened her doors and he stepped out after Nova and Threnody a whole squad of Bluebodies was waiting, and Nilesh Noon in an awesome ceremonial hat, who said sternly, “Lady Threnody Noon, as Stationmaster of Khoorsandi it is my duty to arrest you in the name of the Network Empire.”
A buzz of excited talk came from the crowd that had gathered behind the rank of impassive, blue-armored troops. Threnody looked at her uncle. He was panting as if he’d run there to meet her, and his gorgeous tunic had the buttons done up wrong. “Uncle Nilesh?” she said. “You’re not really going to arrest me, are you?”
“Of course he isn’t!” shouted someone else, fighting her way through the line of Bluebodies from behind and running across the platform to wrap Threnody in a hug. It was Kala Tanaka. Uncle Nilesh grinned and said, “Arrest you? My own niece? Of course I won’t, and the Railforce people here are loyal to our family. If Elon Prell wants you arrested, he can damn well come here and do it himself.”
“Which he probably will,” said Kala Tanaka, letting go of Threnody and stepping back to look at her odd companions. “Word of this is spreading across the Network as fast as trains can carry it. Grand Central has probably heard of it by now.”
“But what is it?” asked Uncle Nilesh. “What is this machine? The new gate — can it really be a new gate? And there is footage now of… places… creatures. Where have you come from, niece?”
Threnody looked past him at the paparazzi drones hanging like clouds of gnats under the station canopy. “We’ve come from the far side of the galaxy, from a network called the Web of Worlds. Khoorsandi isn’t the end of the line anymore. It’s a hub the Noon family can use to trade with whole new civilizations. Look, we have brought back an ambassador of the Neem from the Nestworld Zzr’zrrt…”
At which point she stepped aside so that Uncle Bugs could come spidering out of the carriage
behind her, and the rest of her speech was lost in the gasps and screams of the crowd and the frantic buzzing of the drones as they jostled to snatch close-ups.
41
Laria Prell hurried through the nighttime corridors of the imperial palace, doing up her jacket as she went, finger-combing her short hair. She was not enjoying being stationed on Grand Central. The gravity was higher than on the small worlds she was used to, and she didn’t like the summer heat. It had taken her a while to get to sleep that night, and no sooner had she drifted off than she was being woken, summoned to the Emperor’s conference chamber for an emergency meeting.
Which was good, she supposed, because it must mean that there was an emergency, and there might be a chance for her to see some action after all. She just wished that whatever had happened could have happened in the daytime.
Her uncle — it still felt strange to think of him as the Emperor — was in the big meeting room at the heart of the Durga. Some other family officers were there with him, but surprisingly few, which made Laria wonder what she had done to warrant being asked to such an exclusive meeting. But before she could do more than salute, her eyes were drawn to the big holoscreens that hung above the livewood conference table. That was her first sight of the images that had started flooding into Grand Central’s data rafts a few hours before, carried on the night train from Khoorsandi. The bony archway forming out of light and dust in some high valley, the huge, spiny biotech vehicle crawling out of it, dragging its shining trail of rails…
“How can there be a new K-gate?” she asked, reading the scrolling banners. “That’s not possible, is it?”
“Of course it’s not possible,” snapped her uncle. “Everyone knows that the Network is complete. This is a hoax. Doctored footage, and an old train made up to look like a… whatever that big spiky thing is meant to be!”
“But who would do such a thing?” wondered Laria.
The Emperor grunted again. “Khoorsandi is a Noon world,” he said. “I’m guessing there are people there who don’t like us Prells being top dogs. People who will try any stunt to spread… well…”
“Instability,” growled another voice. Laria, looking away from the screens to see who dared interrupt her uncle while he was speaking, noticed for the first time the Mako brothers standing in the shadows behind him.
“Instability,” her uncle agreed. “That’s why the Twins are concerned.”
For a moment, Laria thought he meant the Mako twins, but of course he meant the actual Twins. Elon Prell was a man who talked with Guardians; the Twins themselves shared their concerns with him, and they might be watching him right now. She tried to stand even more rigidly straight and look even more intelligent and attentive as he continued.
“Laria, I want you to take a wartrain to Khoorsandi and find out what’s going on. Most of our wartrains are tied up keeping the peace on the branch lines, but the Twins themselves have provided us with a high-speed locomotive, very advanced. You’ll take a small squad — we don’t want any fighting, not with half the media in the Empire watching. Just establish a presence, and take a look at this new gate and the thing that’s supposed to have made it.”
Laria felt herself blush. “But, Emperor, I don’t know anything about K-gates, or hoaxes…”
“You don’t need to,” said her uncle. “My envoys here will handle that side of things.”
The Mako brothers stepped forward. Their ivory faces creased into helpful smiles that made them look no friendlier at all.
42
The Fire Station was a low-rise city, full of steep, stepped streets and quaint white houses. When the scrum at the station grew too intense, Nilesh Noon had removed the Damask Rose’s passengers to a hotel complex called the Phoenix that stood on a terraced hillside just outside the station. The Damask Rose was left on her siding, locked and guarded, and Chandni Hansa was left inside her. “We will move her to more suitable quarters when the fuss dies down,” said Kala Tanaka, “and you can decide what to do with her then. I knew that young lady would be trouble the day I fetched her from the freezers.”
They were in the car that was taking them to the Phoenix, just Threnody and Kala and Uncle Nilesh and the interface. Nilesh twisted around to look out of the rear window at the car behind, which was carrying Zen, Nova, and Uncle Bugs. “The Starling boy will be trouble too,” he said. “It is him, isn’t it? The one who sabotaged your father’s train?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Threnody.
“Things usually are, but once the news sites figure out who he is… When they find that you’re friendly with the young man who killed your father…”
“He didn’t,” said Threnody. “It was an accident. And we need Zen. He and Nova know more than anybody about the alien network.”
Nilesh and Kala exchanged a look. They had not been aboard the Noon train when it crashed, but they had friends who had, and some of them had died.
“I promised him,” said Threnody, and there was a hard new light in her eyes that they had not seen before.
Kala said, “Very well. I’ll figure out a story to tell the media.”
*
The Imperial Suite occupied the whole top floor of the hotel: seven bedrooms leading off one big, central living room. The manager promised that Threnody and her guests would have the best views of the fire fields. But when Zen stood on the balcony and looked out over the rooftops, he saw no fire at all. Nothing but black rock and brown moss stretching away to the near horizon, where the rings of Anahita curved across the evening sky.
“I thought there were supposed to be volcanoes,” he said.
“Not yet,” said Nova, coming out onto the balcony just behind him. “Fire Festival will begin soon. The whole landscape will ignite.”
“Do you think we’ll still be alive by then?” said Zen. It was unnerving to know that the Guardians themselves were discussing his fate in the depths of the Datasea. At any moment they might decide to crush all knowledge of the new gate, and they would start by getting rid of him and Threnody and Nova. There were probably lasers and things being aimed at him right now by some of those black specks that hung in the sky above the hotel.
But Nova said, “Every second that goes by makes it more likely that they’ll let us live.” She stood behind Zen and wrapped her arms around him the way she liked to, and rested her pointy synthetic chin upon his shoulder. “And if we don’t,” she said, “it was wonderful. Seeing the Web of Worlds with you. All those stations. All the things we’ve done. I love you so much, Zen Starling.”
There was a little throat-clearing cough behind them. Threnody was looking out onto the balcony. “The interface is awake…”
*
The interface had been up and about since they got their stuff out of the Damask Rose’s carriages and moved to the hotel, but he had not been exactly awake. He had moved like a sleepwalker from the train to the waiting car. When the paparazzi drones asked him what the Guardians thought about the new gate, he had not ignored them, he simply hadn’t heard. Since they reached the suite in the Phoenix he had been flopped on one of the enormous sofas in the lounge, staring blankly at the ceiling. But when Zen and Nova came in off the balcony, they saw that he had revived and was looking curiously around the room.
It was a curious room — livewood walls and plump, soft furnishings, dominated by a big bronze hanging of the face of Pyra, an ancient fire goddess whom the Khoorsandi tourist board had made up. Zen and Nova thought it was glorious. Threnody thought it was unbelievably tacky. Uncle Bugs didn’t seem to have an opinion on it — he was in his own room, trying to order a bucket of well-rotted vegetable peelings from room service. What the interface of Mordaunt 90 thought, they never knew, because he stood up smiling and said, “I have been in debate with my brothers and sisters in the Datasea.”
“All this time?” asked Zen. “It’s been hours. I thought Guardians
talked fast. Shared whole worlds of information in a heartbeat…”
“We do,” said the interface. “But we had a lot to discuss.”
He was himself again, in charge of things, a mouthpiece for the vast mind of Mordaunt 90. They all missed the bumbling, childlike interface they had come to know.
“And what have they decided?” asked Nova.
“They haven’t,” he said. “Not yet. Zen, Threnody — they want to meet you.”
He stretched out his hands to them, his golden hands. Zen and Threnody took them, and there they stood, quite still, until Nova realized their minds had fled away after his into the Datasea. She felt a little envious of Threnody, a little offended that she had not been asked to go too. Of course, she thought, the Guardians would not trouble talking to a simple Motorik.
But perhaps she was not that simple, after all. Something had changed when she connected herself to the Railmaker’s tower, and she wasn’t quite sure what it meant. She could still hear the broken song that had whispered to her out of the Black Light Zone. It could not possibly be coming across all those millions of light-years of space to reach Khoorsandi, so it must be inside her now.
She waited for a few minutes, but Zen and Threnody just stood there, holding the interface’s hands. The interface smiled at Nova, as if to promise her that they would be all right. So she turned and went outside again onto the balcony. The building was moving slightly, adjusting as mild quakes rippled through the bedrock beneath the station city. A bank of brownish cloud was building up on the horizon, and the air smelled faintly of smoke. Nova leaned on the balcony and thought wistfully about what she had left behind: the hub, and the tower, and all the lines that led from it, and the places they might go to.