by Philip Reeve
“Everything’s all right,” she said, but he thought she sounded sad. “Come and talk to me, Zen. Talk to me with your mouth, not like this.”
*
She sat in the middle of the tracks, watching the old red train come closer. Sometimes she used her mind to move a set of points so that it could take a shortcut through the maze of rails. Sometimes she kindled Station Angels to dance along beside it and scramble playfully over its hull and over the roof of the one carriage it pulled, which was Raven’s old state car. Behind her the Sunbird waited quietly, still ashamed at its failure to explode, but starting to think about the new ambitions she had given it.
The Damask Rose came close, and stopped. Nova stood up. She had already made her decision, but she almost changed her mind again when Zen stepped out of the state car and walked toward her, turning up the collar of his coat against the rain.
He hugged her. “I was so worried about you,” he said. “I wanted to come through after you right away, but there was so much to do. Chandni was hurt and we had to get her to a hospital — she came through for us in the end, saved Threnody and me from Shiv Mako. Khoorsandi is still in chaos while the data raft reboots, but Threnody and her uncle are busy talking to lawyers and people, trying to establish our claim to the K-gate before any more Prells arrive. The Prells who are there seem okay though — that Laria, she’s all right. And all I could think about was you, but Station Angels kept drifting into the station, and the Rose said that was a sign you were okay…”
“It was!” said Nova. “They were my messages to you, and they brought back news. Otherwise I would have been worrying about you too. But the Angels watched the newsfeeds for me. I know all about the new company that’s been set up, Noon-Starling Lines, and how you’re going to be sending a trade expedition to the Greater Web. I’ve seen the gossip sites too. They’re saying that new business alliances are usually sealed by a marriage.”
Zen looked confused, then doubtful, then actually a little afraid. “Me and Threnody? That’s never going to happen! I’m just going to stay on Khoorsandi while the contracts are all signed, and see the expedition off. Then I thought we could go to Summer’s Lease, find Myka and my mom…”
Nova laughed, sort of. He was so young and beautiful, and she felt so lucky that he loved her. She hated the thought of what she had to do. But her mind had become so strange, and so full of things that she knew he could never understand. She said, “This stupid rain. I spent so long figuring out how to cry actual tears like a real girl, and now you can’t see them because of the rain.”
“Why are you crying?” Zen asked.
“Because I can’t come back to Khoorsandi with you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened to me, Zen. I’ve changed.”
“We’ve both changed,” said Zen. “We’ve been through a lot. But we’re safe now. We’ve won! We’re all right! Aren’t we?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t sure how to explain. “I’m becoming something…” she said. “My mind opens up like wings…” She shook her head again. It was useless trying to explain. “When I was on Khoorsandi, all I could think of was getting back here. And now that I’m here, I have to go on,” she said.
“Then you can. We’ll be sending lots of trains through. We’ll go on together, explore the whole Web of Worlds — it will be just like before…”
“No, it won’t,” she said. “When human trains start traveling onto the Web, the Guardians will come with them. They’ll want to make sure there’s no trace left of what they did. Wherever they find one of the Railmaker’s machines still working, they’ll shut it down and replace it with something of their own. And I need to talk to those machines before that happens, Zen Starling. There’s so much more that I need to learn from them. I have to go to the center of things. Look…”
She turned and pointed past the silver bulk of the Sunbird. The track it stood on stretched toward the dome wall, but sank into the ground before it reached it, vanishing into the mouth of a tunnel festooned with glowing coral.
“This is the oldest line in the whole hub,” she said. “The first line. I think it leads all the way back to where it all began. If I can get there, I might find the Railmaker itself. I think it might still be alive, some part of it, at least. But I have no idea what things are like, that deep in the Black Light Zone. I don’t know if humans can even survive there. So I have to go alone. The Sunbird is going to take me. It doesn’t want to be a bomb anymore. It’s developed this sudden urge to travel.”
The former Railbomb turned its engines on. The pulse of them made its battered cowling tremble. Beyond it, deep in the tunnel, the light of the waiting K-gate flickered like static.
“And when I’ve gone through,” said Nova, “I’m going to take the warhead out of the Sunbird and detonate it. I have to block that gate so that the Guardians can’t come through after me.”
“But that means you won’t ever be able to come back.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t. And I’m going to miss you so much, Zen Starling.”
Zen felt suddenly very small and lost, the way he had when he was little, watching the home he’d known dwindle behind him when his mother took him off down the K-bahn to a new one. “But I need you,” he said.
“I need you too.” She touched his face and smiled. “This is what it feels like, being human. Needing someone, and loving them so much that you want it to last forever. But it can’t, and it goes past you, and falls away into time, and you can’t hold on to it. Except for memories. I’ll hold onto those always. Do you remember that first night, at Yaarm in the Jeweled Garden, when the wind blew the curtain?”
He put his arms around her then and she kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him. She could taste rain on his mouth and the salt of his tears. She saved the taste and the warmth of him to her deepest memory. “Please stay,” he said. And she wanted to. But she knew that, if she did, there would never be a moment sweeter than this one. So she stood for a long time with her face close to his, looking into his eyes, breathing in the musk of him. And then, before her mind could change, she turned and walked quickly away through the rain.
The Sunbird started to move, opening a hatch in its side as it went. She wanted to look back, but she didn’t, because she wanted her last memory of Zen to be his kiss. So she walked quickly with her head down, keeping pace with the train, feeling like the heroine of an old movie. And she wondered if this was why she had always wanted to fall in love in the first place — not for the love itself, but for the sweet aching sadness of its ending.
Music swelled around her like a soundtrack. It was the voice of the Sunbird, singing a new song, a song full of wonder at the size of the universe and the mysteries that lay ahead of it in the light of the black suns. She jumped nimbly up into the doorway it opened for her and went inside, and the door closed, and the Sunbird gained speed and shot underground toward the light of the gate. And suddenly, where there had been a train, there was nothing.
Zen stood and watched the gate for a long time. He wiped his eyes and waited for Nova to change her mind and for the Sunbird to bring her back, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. The Damask Rose asked him if he wanted to go after her, but he shook his head because he knew there was no point. She was on her way to places where he could not follow.
The Damask Rose did not ask him again. After a while she gently opened her doors. Zen stepped into the state car, and sat down, and the old red train carried him back to the Network Empire, where the rest of his life was waiting to begin.
GLOSSARY
Aliens —
Ever since human beings began to colonize the worlds of the Great Network, there have been rumors of alien life. Most sightings of aliens have been proven to be hoaxes or folk tales, but strange stories persist — the Ghosts of Vagh; the glass ruins supposedly discovered on Marapur;
the mummified “antelope-man” that is a family heirloom in the bio-castle of the Lee family on Ishima. Some people even claim that the annoying Hive Monks have extra-terrestrial origins. But the Guardians have made it very clear that they have never detected any trace of non-human intelligent life in any part of the galaxy. And the Guardians have never been known to lie.
Corporate Marines —
Most of the larger corporate families maintain a small army to police their stations and fend off hostile takeovers by rival families. During the First Expansion, these armies were often large and well trained, their ranks swollen by hired mercenaries. Since the coming of the Empire they have dwindled to small forces of Corporate Marines or “CoMa.” Some family CoMas are still tough fighting units, used to quell rebellions on outlying industrial worlds, but most are mainly used for ceremonial duties.
Datasea —
As human beings spread out across the galaxy during the First Expansion, the Datasea spread with them — a massive information system made from the interlinked internets of all the inhabited worlds. Human beings use only tiny portions of the “Sea,” the safely firewalled “data rafts,” which they access via wallscreens, dataslates, or headsets. The rest is the domain of the Guardians and other, lesser data-entities.
One of the most important functions of the K-bahn is to spread information through the Datasea; data stored in the mind of a train can be transferred instantaneously from world to world, rather than having to travel through space in the form of light or radio waves. It has sometimes been suggested that the Guardians built the Network not for humanity’s sake, but simply in order to enlarge the Datasea.
Flatcar Throne —
Legend has it that the first train to be sent through the Mars K-gate was a pioneer-class locomotive towing a flatcar to which various instruments were bolted to test that the gate, and the world on the far side of it, were safe for human beings. This flatcar has been preserved in the Hall of the Senate on Grand Central. The instruments have been replaced with a seat on which the emperor or empress sits when they attend meetings of the senate. The fact that it is not a very comfortable seat is meant to remind them that they represent all the citizens of the Network, not just the ones who can afford to ride first class.
Freezer Prisons —
During the First Expansion, on worlds that were still in the process of being terraformed, freezing criminals in coffins of cryogenic gel was a good way to keep them off the streets while saving the air, food, space, and security measures that a normal prison would use. They are also supposed to be more humane for the inmates, who pass their sentences in dreamless sleep — although they tend to be so disoriented by changes to society when they thaw out that there is a high rate of re-offending: some serious criminals have been in and out of the freezers for more than five hundred years.
Nowadays, of course, there is more than enough space for ordinary prison colonies, but like many other things from those early days, freezer prisons have become a tradition in the Network Empire, and any politician who suggests leaving prisoners unfrozen is accused of being soft on crime.
Guardians —
At some point in the 21st century CE, on humankind’s original homeworld, artificial intelligences were constructed that became far more intelligent than their makers. How many there were, and whether one was built first and constructed the others, or all twelve were created at once, is not known. Some stories claim that there were more than twelve, but that the weak ones were defeated and deleted by the stronger, or are in hiding, or simply have no interest in humanity. Even of the twelve, several have always remained aloof from human affairs. The others — the Mordaunt 90 Network, Sfax Systema, Anais Six, the Twins, Vohu Mana, and the Shiguri Monad — have guided human beings ever since. Their personalities are spread across the whole of the Datasea, their vast programs stored in deep data centers like the ones on Grand Central or separate hardware-planets. All scientific and technological advances since the creation of the Guardians have been revealed by the Guardians themselves, while several have been suppressed because the Guardians believe they are not in humanity’s interests.
In recent centuries, the Guardians have withdrawn from human affairs. Some have busied themselves exploring the far reaches of space, while others pursue strange hobbies in the deep Datasea. The events surrounding the crash of the Noon Train and the coming to power of the Empress Threnody Noon seemed to rekindle their interest in human history.
Hive Monks —
Some people claim that Monk bugs, which form the mobile colonies known as “Hive Monks,” are an alien species that originated on one of the far-flung worlds of the Network. It seems more likely that they are simply a type of insect that migrated from Old Earth along with human beings, and has mutated as a result of exposure to K-gate radiation while clinging to the outsides of trains. When a colony of the bugs grows large enough, it forms a kind of simple intelligence, which seems to make it want to mimic human beings. The cowled, shambling Hive Monks have been a feature of life on the Great Network for thousands of years. Attempts to stop them from boarding K-trains have always been abandoned, because when a Hive Monk becomes agitated or is subjected to physical violence it often disintegrates into an unintelligent swarm, causing far more inconvenience to trains, station staff, and passengers than it would as a hive. For this reason they are allowed to ride the trains as they please. It is estimated that there are more than ten million Hive Monks, all constantly traveling from station to station on a quest to discover the “Insect Lines” — a mythical network inhabited solely by creatures like them, where their legends say the first Hive Monks originated.
Interface —
A cloned body, with a partly cybernetic brain and nervous system, into which a Guardian may download a partial copy of its personality if it wishes to experience life as a human, or just go to a party. In the early centuries of the Empire no coronation ceremony or society ball was complete without a Guardian or two in attendance, but as the Guardians slowly withdrew from human affairs they used interfaces less and less. Some interfaces look more or less human, but generally the Guardians liked something a bit more flashy: Mordaunt 90 Network famously liked to appear as a centaur, while Vohu Mana would sometimes arrive in the guise of a small flying dog named Pugasus.
K-Bahn —
The railway that links the Network Empire. Fusion-powered, intelligent locomotives haul passengers, freight, and information between the inhabited worlds, using the system of K-gates to pass instantaneously from one world to another.
Maintence Spiders —
Robots, slaved to the minds of locomotives, which act as the locos’ hands and eyes, allowing them to conduct running repairs on themselves and their carriages. They can vary widely in size and appearance, but most have between three and ten multijointed legs.
Network Empire —
The Empire is a revival of an ancient form of government from Old Earth. A single human being is chosen to be the ruler of the Network. The emperor or empress has little real power, since they are watched over by the Guardians, who will intervene to stop them from doing anything that is likely to cause instability. Their purpose is to act as a symbolic link between the Guardians and humanity, and to ensure that the corporate families and the representatives of the different stations and cities of the Network meet to negotiate their differences in the Imperial Senate rather than fighting. However, the Guardians have never objected to an emperor advancing his own power and interests, ensuring that the family of the current emperor or empress is usually the most powerful of the corporate families.
Pnin —
An industrial world on the Dog Star Line, developed by the Albayek family. The station city there was one of the largest examples of bio-architecture in the entire Network Empire, and was home to a number of factories that made structures from modified plant and crustacean DNA. Following the “cabbagegate” incident on Chi
ba, industrial biotech fell out of fashion, and the facilities on Pnin were shut down and quickly went to seed, until the world was abandoned along with the rest of the Dog Star Line. There is a rumor that small colonies of settlers still live there, in the mountain regions far from the K-bahn line, where they fight running battles with mutated bio-machines.
Radical Daylight —
One of the most popular b-funk bands of the late Noon dynasty, the Daylight came out of the art schools of Golden Junction, but their breakthrough album, Ain’t There a Band Like the Radical Daylight? topped the charts across the Network. They split up during the recording of the follow-up, Crash Rhapsodies, but lead singer Paloma Coma went on to have a successful acting career and played the role of Anais Six in Deeta Kefri’s 2-D movie She Was the Thunder, He Was the Rain.
Railwar —
War is a difficult business on the Great Network. A world may be conquered by a tyrant or a rebel group, but to attack neighboring worlds, it has to send trains and troops through a K-gate, and while a surprise attack may succeed, worlds farther down the line will soon hear of it and fortify their own K-gates with weapons that can destroy a hostile train as soon as it arrives. During the Second Expansion era there was something of an arms race, which saw the development of armored assault trains capable of launching fleets of war drones within seconds of passing through a gate, but they were soon matched by mobile weapon platforms like the Bahadur walking gun, and the advantage remained with the defenders. However, breakaway worlds that tried to blockade their own gates against Railforce trains quickly found that there was not much point, as they simply cut themselves off from the Network. As a result, large-scale war had fallen almost completely out of fashion by the reign of the Empress Threnody II.
Station Angels —
A phenomenon seen at stations on the outer edges of the Network. Strange light-forms sometimes emerge from the K-gates along with trains and survive for up to thirty minutes before they fade. Their exact nature is uncertain, but they are not dangerous. Theories that they are some form of alien life have been dismissed by the Guardians themselves, and various attempts to capture or communicate with them have failed. They appear to play some role in the religion of the Hive Monks, who sometimes swarm in excitement when a Station Angel appears.