On the Train

by Harry Turtledove

  One of them carrying his scanty belongings in a flowery carpetbag came through the carriage from which Javan was watching. “What’s going on there, friend?” Javan asked him. Pingasporean felt strange in his mouth; he’d started getting used to Traintalk.

  The man was so new to The Train that he didn’t know enough to be surprised at hearing his own language. He rolled his eyes. “What’s going on?” he said. “The Namilans are thieves, that’s what. They’re thieves, and our rulers are robbers. And I’m out of all the mess, and I’m the luckiest man in the world because I am.”

  That didn’t make much sense. Javan wanted to ask him more, but the new passenger was hurriedly pushing down the aisle, looking for his seat. And thumps and bumps from farther back announced that the freight cars were already closing up. The handlers didn’t usually work so fast. They had to want to clear out of Pingaspor, too.

  Out of Pingaspor The Train went—ahead of schedule, which was a prodigy. As Javan walked through the carriages hawking Siilo’s snacks, he kept sneaking glances out the window. He saw more columns of soldiers, some on foot, some in trucks, moving steadily east, toward the border with Namila. He also saw things that had to be weapons: weapons he hadn’t dreamt that Pingaspor owned.

  A few of the people in the carriages also looked out at the advancing soldiers. Most passengers simply ignored the spectacle. Even most of the ones who did look took it as entertainment, as pageantry, not as anything that might prove important to them.

  Javan wished he could feel the same way. He might well have felt like that, had his home city not been involved. He kept wondering if he would recognize any of the soldiers. He didn’t. Going into uniform made them all look alike to him.

  “It’s just…out there,” said a man in a second-class carriage as they rolled past more men in fritzhats and tarncapes. “It can’t have anything to do with us. After all, we’re on The Train.”

  “That’s right,” the sleek woman across the aisle from him agreed. The rest of the passengers in the carriage who heard them—and who cared—nodded. Javan hoped the man was right, too. Who wouldn’t?

  Back in the converted freight car, though, Siilo looked and sounded worried. “Could be bad,” he said, taking meat off the grills with his tongs. “Could be very bad. I remember when I was maybe younger than you—”

  “A long time ago,” Javan broke in.

  “Sim. A long time ago.” If Javan had tried to get Siilo’s goat—and he had—he hadn’t succeeded. Siilo knew he wasn’t young any more. How could he not? He went on, “I was just on The Train. There was a big fight between two cities way over on the far side of the ocean. Big fight. Schedule didn’t come back together for a looong time.” He gave the word a mournful stretch.

  “You think that will happen here?” Javan asked. “A war…” His voice trailed away. He couldn’t remember the last time Pingaspor had fought a war. Nobody alive now in the city could. That might have been why the rulers seemed so eager to start one.

  Siilo’s narrow shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “What do I know? Not my city.” His tone mocked the way Javan had begged him for time off to get another look at Pingaspor. He aimed a bony forefinger at Javan’s chest as if it were a firespear. “Is your city. They crazy enough here to want big fight?”

  “I didn’t think so,” Javan said slowly. “But it does look that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure does.” Siilo whistled tunelessly between his teeth. He managed a smile, even if it looked forced. “All moons-shine, I hope. Anyway, pretty soon we be gone. We don’t got to worry about it then.”

  “True!” Javan was ashamed of the relief he heard in his own voice. That he was ashamed of it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  “So in the meantime, you go on and sell super extra delicious snacks. What else can you do?” Siilo raised a sly eyebrow. “Unless you want to hop off, put on uniform your own self, and start burning up young men from next city?”

  “No, thanks!” Javan heaped the tray high with snacks and got out of there as fast as he could.

  He wasn’t too quick to miss Siilo’s murmured, “No, you not so dumb.” Whether it made him feel better or worse or both at once he couldn’t have said.

  It was all foolishness to Luisa. “Namila couldn’t have done anything bad enough to make Pingaspor want to start killing people,” she said.

  Javan wondered whether Namila had started killing people first. He had sense enough not to say that when he didn’t know one way or the other; he was learning. What he did say was, “It hasn’t got anything to do with you and me. It hasn’t got anything to do with The Train, either.”

  Luisa thought about that for a little while. Then she leaned toward him on their third-class bench and gave him a kiss. He’d never been happier than he was when she did. “Good for you,” she said. “Why did we come aboard, if it wasn’t to get away from such stupid stuff?”

  Right then, Javan couldn’t have said why he’d boarded The Train. He just knew he had. He also knew that, even if soldiers were moving out there in the nighttime, he’d worked hard all day. He felt it from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair.

  He started to say something else to Luisa, but yawned instead. He waited for her to laugh at him. Only a soft snore came from her. He wasn’t the only one who’d worked hard all day. Soon, his head cradled in the hollow of her shoulder, he fell asleep, too.

  The whistle screamed in the middle of the night. The Train’s brakes screamed, too. Javan and Luisa almost tumbled off the bench. “Emergency stop!” somebody shouted.

  “Think so, do you?” someone else asked—someone with the aplomb to stay sarcastic in the middle of, well, an emergency stop. With babies wailing, children shrilling, and men and women crying out in what must have been half a dozen different languages, that wasn’t easy.

  What would have happened if we didn’t stop fast enough? Javan wondered. How close did it come to happening anyhow? Those were good questions, weren’t they? Javan was just as glad not to have good answers to them.

  He looked out through the window. Nothing—it was as dark out there as if they were going through a tunnel under the mountains. Darker, in fact: in the tunnel, they had dim lamps every so often.

  And then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t dark any more for a little while. Something not nearly far enough away exploded, filling the halted carriage with harsh orange light. The children who hadn’t shrieked up till then all started at once. More than a few men and women shrieked with them. The roar of that enormous blast did its best to drown all the shrieks, and its best seemed much too good to Javan.

  He couldn’t have said why he didn’t start screaming himself. He might have been too scared to let out even a peep. Or he might not have wanted to show Luisa he was afraid. Later, it occurred to him that she must have had a pretty good idea of that—which had nothing to do with how he acted in the moment.

  Darkness slammed down again after the explosion. But it wasn’t darkness absolute, the way it had been before. A smaller blaze still burned to mark where the explosion had gone off. And there were other little flames in the night: tongues of red from firespears and storm rifles’ golden muzzle flashes.

  More booms shook the windows and made everyone shudder. These were farther away than the first one, so the flashes that went with them didn’t light up the carriage as savagely. All the same, Luisa asked, “What happens if one of those horrible things comes down on The Train?”

  Javan didn’t know, not in any detail. “Nothing good,” he said. Some questions, you didn’t need answered in detail.

  “I want to get off!” somebody shouted. Javan didn’t. He figured he was safer on The Train than he would be off it. Everyone the world around knew what The Train was. No one hurt it on purpose. If you were stupid enough to get off in the middle of a war…Anything could happen to you then, anything at all. It could, and it probably would.

  Boom. Boom! Boom. Boomety-boomety-boom! The explosions went on and on. Some nearer
, some farther away. Some so soft they were barely there. Some louder than anything had any business being.

  “I’ll never go to sleep in this,” Luisa said.

  “I know. I was thinking the same thing,” Javan answered.

  “How long do you think we’ll stay stuck here?” she asked.

  He spread his hands, palms up. “No way to guess. We stopped so fast…I just hope nothing’s happened to The Railroad. If the tracks are hurt, we can’t go anywhere till they get fixed.”

  “That would be awful. The schedule—” Luisa broke off. Some things were bigger than The Train and the schedule. Not many, but some. And war, cursed war, was one of those things. Javan had already realized that. Now it was hitting his spouse, too. In a smaller voice, Luisa said, “What happens if we’re stuck so long we start running out of food?”

  They’d start getting hungry pretty soon. The Train took on supplies at every stop. It was a city in its own right: not a big city, maybe, but a city. “We’ll have to get something from somewhere,” Javan said slowly.

  “From where? How?” Luisa asked.

  “I don’t know. Somebody will have to take care of it—and no, I don’t know who, either,” Javan said. “Right now, the best I can do is hope we don’t get killed before we find out.”

  She didn’t ask him any more questions for the rest of the night.

  They didn’t get killed before the sun rose. Nothing the Pingasporeans and Namilans threw at each other came down on The Train. Whether that was good weapon design or merely good luck, Javan couldn’t have said.

  As soon as it started getting light outside, he went back to the converted freight car. He wasn’t surprised to find Siilo there ahead of him. The snack-seller’s face couldn’t have been longer. “Soon as I cook up what we got in the cold box, we done,” Siilo said. “Cooks won’t sell me no more. They say they can’t get no more. How they sell what they can’t get?”

  “Well.” Javan startled himself: the word sounded like a complete sentence. He found himself continuing, “Let me go outside and see how bad things are.”

  “If things good, we be moving,” Siilo said accurately. “Besides, you go outside, somebody burn you up with a firespear.”

  Javan remembered what he’d thought of the man who’d wanted to get off the night before. All the same, he said, “I’ll be fine if I stay close to The Railroad,” and hoped he was right.

  “Be careful of soldiers,” Siilo said.

  “I can talk to them,” Javan reminded him.

  Siilo snorted. “Be careful anyhow. Who says they listen?”

  With that thought to cheer him, Javan did get off The Train and walk up toward the locomotive. A few other passengers were looking around out there, or sketching or photographing the craters that marred the jungle to either side of The Railroad.

  And another crater had twisted and melted the tracks just a short spit in front of the engine. If The Train hadn’t made that emergency stop, it would have derailed. How many carriages would have flipped over? How many passengers would have got hurt? Or killed?

  Something roared by overhead, low, low, low. Rockets fell from under its wings. They flew with minds and fires of their own. When they burst, fresh craters scarred the undergrowth.

  A soldier came out of the bushes. Even after he did, his tarncape and the green and brown paint he’d smeared on his face made him hard to see. “You stupid idiots!” he yelled in Pingasporean, and gestured with his storm rifle. “Go back inside where you belong, before you get shot!”

  “What’s he mooing about?” a passenger who knew no Pingasporean asked in Traintalk.

  “He says we’ll be safer inside The Train,” Javan answered: a true but flavorless rendition.

  “He’s got his nerve! I am an important personage. How dare he tell me what to do?” the other passenger said indignantly.

  “He has a storm rifle. He dares,” Javan said. If the other passenger didn’t get that, in short order he’d be too dead to worry about anything else. For a wonder, he did. He jumped back aboard The Train as if a dragon were chasing him. Or maybe he found the soldier in the tarncape and the face paint more frightening still. After all, he would have seen dragons before.

  Javan got back on The Train, too. He went down to the converted freight car and told Siilo what he’d seen. The old man whuffled out air through his thin, scraggly mustache. “Not good. Very not good. We not go anywhere for a while, right?”

  “Sure doesn’t look that way,” Javan said.

  “How we going to eat? I done cook up everything I got. Pretty soon, dining cars done cook up everything they got. What we eat then? Our socks? Some of us don’t even got socks.”

  Luisa had said the same thing. As he had with her, Javan answered, “Somebody will take care of it.”

  “Somebody!” Siilo stopped whuffling and made a gross, rude noise. “Who?”

  When he was talking with Luisa, Javan had had no idea who that somebody might be. Since then, he’d had time to look around, and also time to think. All the same, his breath sighed out before he said, “Maybe me.”

  “You? You!” Siilo started to laugh. He started to, but he didn’t finish. His eyes narrowed, deepening the deltas of wrinkles at their outer corners. He was a crafty old man, all right. “Maybe you.” He sounded thoughtful, musing. “You a Pingasporean your own self, sure enough. You can talk with these soldiers, right?”

  “I can talk, yes,” Javan answered. “Like you said before, though, the only thing that worries me is whether they’ll listen.”

  Siilo smiled a crooked smile. “Show them money. Everybody listen to money. Oh, you bet! Money talk loud, talk plainer even than Traintalk.”

  “I suppose,” said Javan, who wasn’t so sure. And he had his reasons, too: “But does it talk louder and plainer than firespears?”

  “It can,” Siilo said. With that, Javan had to be content. Then Siilo added, “You don’t spend your own money for this. You buying for me, so I can keep going.” He gave Javan more silver wire than the young man had thought he would get. “Do best you can with it. Try not to get killed.”

  Out Javan went. Along with the money, he carried his ticket. Without it, he knew he would have been one of those chillingly anonymous Pingasporean soldiers. He could use it to show men who were soldiers why he wasn’t one…again, if they felt like paying attention.

  The air was hot and sticky. The smells seemed familiar and strange at the same time: familiar because he’d grown up with them, strange because lately he’d fallen out of being used to them. He wondered how far from The Railroad he’d have to go to find a farm. Belatedly, he also wondered whether the soldiers would already have stripped it bare.

  Too late to worry about that now. He had to hope they wouldn’t have. He also had to hope they wouldn’t shoot him or conscript him for the fun of it. Not all the sweat rivering down his face had to do with the heat.

  He followed the first little path he found. Guns rattled and explosions thundered off to the east. Did that mean the men from his city were advancing against the Namilans? It meant nothing was exploding by The Train right this minute. Javan approved of that.

  “Halt!” a rough voice barked. “Hands up!”

  Javan raised his hands. He didn’t see the Pingasporean soldier till the man moved. Then he spied the storm rifle pointing straight at his midriff. He stood very still.

  The soldier stared at him, eyes wide in a painted face. “What are you doing in that crazy getup, man?” he said. “Asking to get killed?”

  “I’m off The Train.” Javan pointed back to it without lowering his left hand. “I’m trying to buy some food. We’re getting hungry in there.”

  “You talk just like me,” the soldier said suspiciously. “Maybe you’re trying to run away from the front and you worked out this dumb stunt to fool us. If you’re off The Train, you’ll have a ticket, won’t you?” He sounded proud of his own cleverness.

  “I do have a ticket. Can I show it to you?” Javan did
n’t reach for it till the soldier grudgingly nodded. Then he held it out to the man from his city.

  The soldier snatched it, studied it, and, to Javan’s vast relief, handed it back. “I don’t want to decide. If I screw up, I’ll get it bad. So I’m gonna take you to my captain. Let him figure it out.” He gestured with the storm rifle. “C’mon.”

  Come Javan did. His nose caught a new smell. For a moment, he thought a failed cold box stood open somewhere nearby. Then, gulping, he realized that was the smell of death.

  When they finally found him, the captain proved to be a short, chunky man. For a moment, that was all Javan saw. But then the features masked by face paint started to look familiar. “Uharto!” he blurted.

  “Javan!” Uharto sounded as surprised as Javan. “What are you doing here? You were on The Train.”

  “I am on The Train,” Javan agreed, and pointed back towards it. As he had with the soldier who’d captured him, he explained why he’d got off. After he finished, he took a chance and asked, “How’s Kiri doing?”

  “She’s fine,” Uharto answered automatically. Then he drew himself up to his full height, such as it was. “She’s going to have a baby—my baby.”

  “Good for her! Good for you!” If Javan hadn’t found Luisa, he never would have been able to bring that out so quickly and naturally. But he had, and so he could.

  Afterwards, he saw that the honest congratulations helped tip Uharto his way. The officer’s teeth gleamed in his darkened face as he smiled. “Thank you, Javan,” he said. He scribbled in a pad, handed the sheet to Javan, and then turned to the soldier who’d brought his acquaintance to him. “I’m giving him a safe-conduct. You help him get whatever he needs, Hanouk. Bad enough The Train’s stuck here, but that’s the cursed Namilans’ fault. But we don’t want The Railroad pissed off at us, too.”