On the Train

by Harry Turtledove

  Javan noticed that without thinking about it much. He didn’t buy from the snack-seller. He had food for a couple of days inside his carpetbag. And the less he spent, the further the silver and the little bit of gold still in his pouch would stretch.

  The Train stopped once late that afternoon, at a town called Namila. Javan knew as much about Namila as he knew about Kambok. It was the next stop on The Railroad. He’d never been there before. He didn’t know anyone who had. He didn’t know anyone from Namila who’d settled in Pingaspor, either.

  Buildings in Namila were more angular than buildings in Pingaspor. They used more stone here, and less wood. The people were a little browner than Pingasporeans. Men and women here wore shirts and gauzy trousers cut fuller than the ones Javan had on.

  A conductor came through the third-class carriage while The Train loaded and unloaded in Namila. One of the passengers—a burly man with a long blond braid and a bushy, red-gold beard—asked him something. They went back and forth in what sounded like the same speech the snack-seller and the woman next to Javan had used.

  Taking his courage in both hands, Javan asked the conductor, “What language is that?”

  When the man smiled, he showed a mouthful of gold teeth. Javan wondered whether he’d been born like that or used them to carry his wealth around in a form that was hard to steal. “This is Traintalk, sonny,” he answered in slow, careful Pingasporean. “You just got on, huh?”

  “That’s right.” Javan nodded. “A few hours ago.”

  “Didn’t think I recognized you. You keep your ears open, that’s all. Traintalk’s easy to pick up. It’s got to be, so people from all over can learn it.” He nodded once, gruffly, as if to remind himself he had more important things to do. Then he went and did them—or at least he went away.

  Javan turned to the woman sitting beside him. “Traintalk?” he asked.

  She smiled and nodded. Her nod was much friendlier than the conductor’s. “Sim,” she said, and nodded again. “Sim.”

  He realized sim had to mean yes. “Sim,” he echoed, trying to say the vowel the same way she had. “Traintalk!”

  He wanted to learn everything at once. He knew he couldn’t, but he wanted to anyhow. He pestered the woman till she shook her head and spoke with finality: “Bou.” That plainly meant no. She thought the lesson was over. Even if she did, she’d taught him another word.

  A young woman from Namila walked through the third-class carriage. She didn’t stop, but went on to one farther back. Instead of using a carpetbag or a duffel, she carried her things in a pack she strapped over her shoulders.

  Javan’s eyes followed her. She wasn’t as pretty as Kiri—nowhere near. But Kiri had vanished behind him along with the rest of Pingaspor. The Namilan woman wasn’t homely, either. She gave Javan something to think about for a little while.

  The Train began to roll with that jerk he’d felt before. He took a bookreader out of his carpetbag. He had trouble paying attention to the story he’d picked, though. He kept peering out the window and getting distracted.

  Rain drummed down on the carriage’s roof. It got dark outside. A couple of people stood up as the lights in the carriage came on. One of them patted his belly, so Javan supposed they were on their way to a dining car. A different snack-seller came through. This fellow was selling spicy fish and grilled vegetables wrapped in flatbread. He did a brisk business.

  Those savory smells made Javan’s stomach growl. He dug into the carpetbag again. He spooned up noodles and smoked shrimp and nagwa beans: the tastes of home. Idly, he wondered whether the young woman from Namila had brought food along, and what they ate there.

  By the time he finished his supper, night had fully fallen. He tried the bookreader again, but it couldn’t hold his interest. He shifted on the hard bench. How was he supposed to sleep?

  With pantomime, he tried asking his seatmate. He learned how to say sleep in Traintalk, but her answer seemed to be You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

  She had a pillow that hissed itself full of air when she pressed a red spot on it. She still had to sleep sitting up, but it cradled her neck and the back of her head. Eyeing the pillow with sea-green jealousy, Javan realized he could have done a better job of readying himself for his journey.

  He could have, but he hadn’t. He had to make the best of what he had brought along. If he rolled up some clothes…

  He passed a perfectly awful night. He wasn’t used to sleeping sitting up. He wasn’t used to sleeping in a carriage whose motion he could feel. And he really wasn’t used to sleeping in a carriage full of talking, snoring, farting strangers. He would have sworn he never closed his eyes at all—but sunrise ahead of The Train caught him by surprise.

  He yawned and stretched. He felt stiff as a corpse. His back crackled like a shaken sack of nutshells. And his mouth fell open when he looked out the window. All he saw was ocean.

  He’d never seen—he’d never dreamt of—so much water all in one place before. Of course The Train girdled the world, so of course it crossed both land and sea. He knew as much—who didn’t? But to know it and to experience it proved two very different things.

  A flying fish flapped up alongside The Train. It paced Javan’s carriage for a little while, staring in with an unwinking yellow gaze. Then it banked away and flew off in pursuit of food or love or whatever else its fishy heart desired.

  How deep was the water under the tracks here? On what sort of pylons did The Railroad rest? Javan could ask himself the questions, but couldn’t answer them. If magic ruled this part of the world, maybe it held up the tracks.

  If The Train girdled the world, how did ships cross from the northern hemisphere to the southern and the other way around? That question Javan had answered for him before midday. He could not see how The Railroad climbed above the ocean, but he could see that it did. A three-masted sailing ship—it was a schooner, but Javan knew nothing of schooners—sailed toward The Railroad, heading north. He could tell that it would pass under the tracks with room to spare.

  What happened when a storm blew up? If there were storms on land, weren’t there bound to be storms at sea?

  Down from its height came The Train. Land—not a lot of land—replaced water. The Train chuffed to a halt. “Liho! This stop is Liho!” conductors called in several languages. One of the tongues was Traintalk; Javan recognized it now. “You can get out and stretch your legs here, folks.”

  The little island of Liho belonged to The Railroad. The Train took on coal and water and supplies. Javan eyed the locomotive. It was stubbier than it had been in Pingaspor, with a taller smokestack. Maybe they’d changed engines at a stop during the night. Maybe, but Javan didn’t think so. He was sure he would have noticed. Maybe the engine had just…changed.

  People from The Train streamed toward the eatery built into the depot. Fredarvi, the sign above it said in characters Javan could read—and, presumably, in other writing systems as well. He wondered what it meant. Maybe it was a Traintalk word, one he hadn’t learned yet.

  The warm, damp breeze wafted savory smells his way. He fought temptation, fought and lost. He’d have to start eating things he hadn’t brought from Pingaspor sooner or later. Why not sooner? He joined the stream going into the Fredarvi eatery.

  A boy on the edge of manhood—a boy not too much younger than Javan, in other words—led him to a table and set a menu in front of him. A couple of minutes later, a serving woman bustled up and spoke to him in Traintalk. He spread his hands to show he couldn’t follow. But the menu had pictures. He pointed at some things that looked good. She nodded and hurried away.

  Faster than he’d expected, the food came. It tasted as good as it looked—he could think of no higher praise. He started to tear into it like a starving forest cat, afraid The Train would leave without him unless he hurried. Then he noticed the other passengers were going slower. They ate as if they knew they had time.

  He paid for his lunch with silver wire. It was cheaper than he�
��d expected, too. And he learned how to say thank you in Traintalk.

  A gong sounded. A voice spoke from the air, in one language after another: “The Train leaves in ten minutes. Take your seats, please. All aboard!” Javan understood the Pingasporean announcement. And he caught the words for The Train in Traintalk.

  He sighed when he sat down on the shiny wooden bench in the third-class carriage. The chair in the Fredarvi eatery had been softer and better molded to his backside. But the eatery stayed here, on the little island of Liho in the middle of the sea. The Train—The Train was going places.

  How big was this sea? Javan saw nothing but water from the time The Train left Liho till the sun set behind the caboose. He ate supper out of his carpetbag, and sighed again. When he remembered that delicious lunch, what he’d brought along seemed dull.

  After a while, the woman beside him inflated her clever pillow and went to sleep. Javan went through another miserable night—maybe not quite so bad as his first, but anything but good. He had another fit of envy when he remembered the reclining seats in the second-class carriages. You could lean back and relax in one of those.

  And that was only second class! What was first class like? He hadn’t been in one of those carriages. He could imagine real beds in them. He could imagine smiling pretty girls climbing into those beds with men, and smiling handsome men climbing into them with women. That would make sure a passenger slept well, all right.

  He could imagine anything he pleased—and he did, till at last he dozed off. Then a baby two rows behind him started to scream. He woke with a start. The mother sang a soft lullaby in Traintalk. The baby went on screaming. Javan wanted to bang his head against the window frame. If he knocked himself cold, he might get some rest. He didn’t think he was likely to otherwise.

  The lavatory car that served the third-class carriages had two shower stalls for men on one side of the aisle and two for women on the other. Many passengers stayed on The Train for a long time. They needed to get clean.

  If you wanted, you could wash up in the middle of the night. You were less likely to have to wait then. Javan did that several times right after he boarded The Train. It wasn’t as if he were sleeping much anyhow.

  But, little by little, he started to get used to things. He was as proud of the first time he slept through the night as a mother is when her newborn does it in a cradle. If he slept during the night, though, he had to wash during the day with most of the other people.

  More often than not, that meant he had to queue up and wait his turn. He didn’t like standing in line, but what else could you do? People who were able to talk to one another passed the time that way. Javan soaked up Traintalk like a blotter. He started to be able to do some talking himself.

  One day, he came out of a shower stall and started back to his carriage just as the young woman who’d boarded at Namila a few hours after he did was about to go into one. He nodded to her. “Hello,” he said. “Day is good?”

  “Day is good, sim, thank you.” She nodded back. “Hello.” She was as much a beginner as he was.

  “Hello.” He said it again, and then, plunging, “Name is to—uh, for—you?”

  “Luisa. Name is Luisa,” she said. “Name is for you?”

  “Luisa.” He repeated that, too. Then he jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Name is Javan.”

  “Javan,” she said gravely. “Hello, Javan.” She stepped into her stall. The latch clicked behind her.

  Javan squeezed up the aisle and back toward his carriage. Some of the older people waiting in line smiled at the byplay between him and Luisa. Some of them talked about it, too. Luckily for Javan, he couldn’t follow what they were saying yet.

  Luisa wasn’t the only thing on his mind. He had to eat. He’d come aboard with some money, but not a lot. Food on The Train wasn’t expensive, but it did cost something. If his silver wire left his pouch and nothing came in…That story had only one ending, and it wasn’t happy.

  People played cards and dice on The Train. It helped make time pass, and it redistributed the wealth. When some of Javan’s scanty wealth got redistributed to the big man with the blond braid and the bushy beard, he decided he had to find a different way to keep going.

  That evening, when one of the snack-sellers came through the carriage, Javan asked him, “You need helper?”

  The man shook his head. “Bou.” He paused, considering. “But maybe Siilo does. He’s kind of old and creaky.”

  “Siilo. With the white goatee?” Javan used his fingers to show the few wispy hairs the man proudly let sprout from his chin.

  Laughing, the snack-seller nodded. “Sim, that’s Siilo. You ask. Maybe he’ll say yes. Maybe he’ll tell you to—” Javan didn’t quite get what Siilo might tell him to do, which had to be just as well.

  He waited a little while, hoping Siilo might bring his tray through the carriage. When the man with the straggly chin beard didn’t, Javan went looking for him. He caught up with him two carriages farther back. “You need helper?” he asked brusquely—he still wasn’t good enough in Traintalk to be anything but brusque.

  Siilo looked him over. Then he pointed to the end of the carriage. “Go wait in vestibule. Let me finish working this carriage. Then we talk.”

  Javan understood just enough of that to do as he was told. The vestibule was tiny and gloomy. When Siilo joined Javan there, the snack-seller’s tray kept prodding the younger man.

  “You going to get off soon?” the snack-seller demanded in angry, suspicious tones. His tray prodded Javan again. This time, Javan was convinced Siilo poked him on purpose. Fiercely, Siilo went on, “You get off soon, I don’t waste my time on you. I find somebody who stay around a while.”

  People did make short hauls on The Train. They went somewhere a quarter of the world away for business, or for schooling. Or they had family or friends scattered along The Railroad. Javan envied people like that. They knew where they were going, and why.

  But he wasn’t a person like that. The world ahead, the time ahead, remained a continual surprise for him. All he wanted to see was what happened next. “Not get off soon,” he said in his still-fragmentary Traintalk. “I ride.”

  “You sure?” Siilo plainly did his best to look into Javan’s head and read what was printed on the folds of his brain. “You tell me lies, I break you in half, you hear? I not so young, but I plenty strong. Mean, too.” He inflated his scrawny chest.

  Though Javan wasn’t a big man (few Pingasporeans were), the top of Siilo’s head didn’t come up to his eyes. The snack-seller had to be three times his age. Somehow, though, the thought of an angry Siilo didn’t make him laugh the way it should have.

  “Sure,” Javan said. “Sim, I sure.”

  “All right.” Siilo sounded as if he hoped it was. “Next question is, you work or you just screw around?”

  “I work.” Javan did his best to sound positive. He threw back a question of his own: “You pay?”

  “Not much,” Siilo answered bluntly. “Food—enough to keep you going, not enough to make you fat. You steal from me, you never work for nobody on The Train, not never again. You hear? You follow?”

  “I hear. I follow.” The thought of stealing had crossed Javan’s mind. So had the thought that Siilo would be watching him. If you ran out of money on The Train, and if you couldn’t get any by working, what would you do? What could you do? Sooner or later—probably sooner—you’d have to get off. And if having to get off The Train wasn’t the worst defeat in the world, Javan couldn’t imagine what would be.

  “All right.” Again, Siilo didn’t seem sure it was. “You work good, maybe—maybe, I say—you get a little money, too. A bargain?”

  “A bargain,” Javan said, wondering what he was getting into.

  “Good.” Siilo held out his hand. Javan clasped it. The snack-seller’s grip was firm. He might be skinny, but he was no weakling. After the handshake, he asked, “You cook?”

  “Little bit.” Javan held his thumb and forefin
ger close together.

  Siilo laughed again. “You will eat your own cooking, that what you do. You get better plenty fast then. I show you what I know. Not hard. But you got to pay attention. You make stuff so bad I can’t sell it, you don’t eat at all that day.”

  “You cook, maybe? I carry tray?” Javan asked.

  “Bou.” Siilo dismissed the notion with a wave. “Your Traintalk not good enough yet. You learn some more, then maybe we see. Eh?”

  “Sim.” Javan sighed out the agreement. He had to hope he wouldn’t pass too many days with an empty belly.

  Siilo bought meat and produce from the cooks who fixed fancier meals for the dining cars. When he brought Javan along to show him how they haggled, the cooks made a great show of being friendly. They put their well-fed arms around Javan’s shoulder. They popped snacks into his mouth.

  Siilo laughed that old man’s cynical laugh again. “You never trust these bastards. They screw you good if you give ’em the chance. Now they just try to soften you up.”

  “Oh, what a sour fool you are, Siilo!” one cook said.

  “What a liar, too!” another added. The more they protested, the more Javan believed Siilo.

  The snack-sellers couldn’t use the cooks’ fancy kitchens. Instead, they were crowded together in a converted—a barely converted—freight car. Each one had his or her grill and tiny counter. Iceboxes kept food fresh. Chains and stout locks on the iceboxes kept food safe.

  Siilo showed Javan how to adjust the blue flame that heated the grill. It seemed simple enough. Javan was rash enough to say so. “Simple enough now, yes,” Siilo answered; the man with the white, wispy beard seemed to hold on to his patience with both hands. “But you got to cook with coal, with wood, with whatever we can get. Sometimes…” His voice trailed away.