On the Train

by Harry Turtledove

  “And you’ll cost the dining cars money!” Yes, Zulman was angry, all right. And he had his reasons. Javan was trying to take a bite out of his profits. What could be more dreadful than that?

  “Sim, but the snack-sellers and the passengers will do better,” Javan said.

  “The passengers. The snack-sellers!” Zulman rolled his eyes in vast contempt. “The dining cars are part of The Railroad. They count for more than people like you, people who had to pay for their own tickets if they were going to ride The Train.”

  Javan looked toward the victualing-office official. That worthy blandly looked back. Her face showed none of what she was thinking. “There have been snack-sellers for as long as anyone can remember,” Javan said. “The Train needs them. Not everybody can afford to eat in the dining cars all the time. Some passengers can’t afford to eat in them at all.”

  “That’s not my fault,” Zulman said haughtily.

  “Where does the blame go, then?” The victualing-office official spoke for the first time since Javan came in. The question was one Javan had hoped she would ask.

  Zulman had an answer for it, too: “Why, with the passengers, of course! If they don’t have the money to keep themselves fed, they’ve got no business boarding The Train to begin with.”

  “There have been snack-sellers for a long time,” the official said. “This fellow is right about that.”

  “There haven’t been any with the nerve to barge into the victualing office before—that’s for sure,” Zulman said.

  “You’ve kept us split up, competing against each other,” Javan replied. “But now I can speak for all of us but two. And because I can, I can afford to buy in bulk here.”

  “Just because you can afford to doesn’t mean you’ve got any right to!” The boss steward was as hot as a salamander.

  “You do not decide that, Zulman.” The victualing-office official, by contrast, sounded as cool as the little office where she worked. “I do, and you had best keep it in mind.”

  “Sim, Pripessa,” Zulman said unwillingly. He might not have intended to, but he also gave Javan her name.

  She turned her dark, unfathomable gaze on Javan. “How much would you want to buy? What do you propose to pay for it?”

  He told her. The price he offered was less than what he was paying Zulman; the boss steward’s outraged hiss said he noticed that, too. Well, naturally he would. Javan had to make a lower offer. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t gain anything from this deal. Javan finished, “After all, we feed the passengers, too, whether the dining cars like it or not.”

  The dining cars, in the person of Zulman, plainly didn’t. “You’d never have the chance to do this if you hadn’t started scrounging for your lot while we were stuck during the war.”

  “Not just for the snack-sellers. For the dining cars, too,” Javan said.

  “Oh!” For the first time, a hint of warmth showed in the victualing-office official’s voice. “You’re that fellow—Javan.” She said his name as if she were reading it off some report she’d got. And so she must have been, inside her head.

  “That’s right, Pripessa.” Javan used her name, too. “I’m Javan.”

  “I remember hearing about you and what you were able to do. That was remarkable,” she said. A small, scratchy sound followed. For a moment, Javan wondered if mice or mirps were gnawing inside the walls. Then it realized it was Zulman, grinding his teeth. Pripessa went on, “We will try a direct sale to you, as representative of the snack-sellers. We will try it, and see how it goes.”

  “Pripessa!” Zulman exclaimed. “I protest this—this mistaken decision!”

  “You may do that,” she answered, her own tones dispassionate again. “In writing, in triplicate, as required by The Railroad’s regulations. If your protest is upheld, or if things do not work well with direct sale, we can return to the old system. If things do work well, however, and your protest is on the record, the fact will be noted in your promotion jacket. The regulations cover that, too, as I’m sure you recall.”

  If you wind up looking like an idiot, we’ll treat you like one from now on. Javan needed a moment to work out what she was saying, but he did. Zulman chewed on his lower lip. He wanted to hurt Javan. He didn’t want to hurt himself.

  “Well, perhaps we can await developments,” he said at last, in a voice like ashes.

  “That seems sensible,” Pripessa said, which meant You don’t have the nerve to stick out your neck, because you know it may get chopped. She swung her attention back to Javan: “I will need to see that you have what you need to get what you want.”

  “I have it,” Javan said, and showed her he was telling the truth. Not all the money was his, but it didn’t need to be. And, even paying a lower price than he had to the dining cars, he’d make more on this deal. That was what happened when you cut out the middlemen.

  Cut out, Zulman muttered, “If we were in Dongorland, I’d be certain you magicked her.”

  “We aren’t, and I didn’t.” After a heartbeat, Javan added, “And being sure isn’t the same as being right, either.”

  Pripessa smiled at that, which made Zulman even more unhappy. Then she gave Javan a brisk nod. “You do have it. I’ll order the supplies sent to the snack-sellers’ work car immediately.”

  “Thank you!” Javan said. It didn’t seem strong enough in Traintalk, the way swearing didn’t. He said it again, this time in Pingasporean. He had no idea whether Pripessa understood his birth-language. He didn’t much care, either. The way he said it, the way it sounded, got the message across fine.

  “You start out working for me,” Siilo said. “Now I working for you. Bordric, he working for you. The rest of the snack-sellers, they all working for you, too. How that happen?”

  “Not all of them,” Javan said. Such talk embarrassed him. He didn’t like thinking of it in those terms.

  Siilo waved aside the protest. “All who matter. The others—” He made as if to spit. The couple of snack-sellers who still wouldn’t buy through Javan balked because they had old grudges against Siilo. Well, he didn’t get along with them, either.

  “I’ve been lucky,” Javan said.

  “Lucky?” Siilo shook his head. “You see luck, you got to run with it. Otherwise, it don’t help you none. All this happen in Dongorland, people say you use spells to get where you’re at.”

  That made Javan laugh. “Zulman told me the same thing when I was in the victualing office talking Pripessa into letting me buy straight from her.”

  “Zulman say that?” Siilo asked in dismay. Javan nodded—it was nothing but the truth. Siilo’s lip curled. He had a low opinion of everyone who ran the dining cars. The higher anyone’s place in the hierarchy, the lower Siilo’s opinion. His opinion of Zulman, then, was very low indeed. After a moment, though, he brightened. “Must be so, eh, if even a dingleberry like that can see it?”

  “But it wasn’t in Dongorland. We’re on the way there now. It was back in Liho,” Javan reminded him. “And the only thing I know about magic is, I don’t know anything about magic.”

  “That what you say,” Siilo said. “Me, I don’t know much about magic, neither, but I know sometimes it slop over from where it usually work. Not often, maybe, but sometimes.”

  Javan remembered the old-time photographs of the dragons pulling The Train into Pingaspor. He’d thought about them the first time he saw dragons replacing the locomotive in Dongorland, but hardly at all since. Magic could get out where you didn’t expect it to, just as the mechanical arts could work well in a place like Marmorica, where you wouldn’t expect them to, either (unless you were Bordric, that is). They could, but they very seldom did.

  “I take it back,” Javan said. “I know one other thing about magic after all. If it does slop over, it’s never slopped over on me. I’m no wizard, and I don’t want to be one.”

  “It could be.” By the way Siilo said that, he didn’t believe a word of it. He even explained why, something he didn’t always do: “A wiza
rd who boast about what a big wizard he is, he not really much of a wizard. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re right, Siilo. Aren’t you always?” Javan answered. Siilo nodded; if he wasn’t always right, he wasn’t about to admit it, even to himself. By his way of thinking, though, a man could never show he wasn’t a wizard. If he did well, he had magic working for him. If he did not so well, he was disguising his magic so no one would suspect him. He couldn’t win.

  Then Siilo said, “You start out in third class with enough to get on The Train and no more, same like me. You gonna end up in first class, sleep on silk, eat till you too wide to go down third-class aisle. You don’t call that magic, what you do call it?”

  “I call it crap!” Javan ran a hand down his torso. He’d boarded The Train skinny, and skinny he remained. He was sure he would stay skinny forever. Skinny people always are.

  Siilo certainly stayed skinny. The old man’s shoulders seemed hardly wider than one of the rails down which The Train ran. “All right, maybe you don’t get so real fat,” he allowed. “But what about the rest?”

  “I told you what about it—it’s crap,” Javan replied. “Luisa and I have to figure out how to buy a second-class ticket for Irini when she gets big enough to need one. Even if we scrape up enough for that, we won’t have much left over. First class? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “You find a way. You do it. People like you, they do it. You still a baby your own self, same like your Irini. By the time you old like me” —Siilo plucked at the long white hairs sticking out of his chin— “you pile up more silver than you know what to do with. You bet you do.”

  Javan made what he fondly imagined to be a magical pass. Nothing happened afterwards, of course, not least because he didn’t believe anything would. “You call me a wizard, and here you make like a soothsayer yourself.”

  “Fine. Don’t listen to me. But don’t forget, neither. By the time you find out I’m right, I be way too dead to go, ‘Ha! I tell you so!’”

  The Train lost its schedule before it got to the city of Dongor. By the way folk used to the mechanical arts thought, it was nobody’s fault, nothing like the war between Pingaspor and Namila. A big earthquake had bent and twisted a length of The Railroad into impassability.

  Folk used to the mechanical arts talked learnedly about plate tectonics. They talked about fault lines, and slip-strikes, and P-waves and S-waves. They built as well as they could, so the inevitable earthquakes that did come would hurt them less.

  In Dongorland, people didn’t see things that way. Oh, they built as well as they could, too. But to them, quakes were fights—maybe even wars—between different groups of stone elementals dwelling deep underground. When Dongorians spoke of the living rock, they meant it in ways more literal than those of folk in the rest of the world.

  In Pingaspor, savants charted faults and measured crustal stresses. In Dongorland, wizards used different instruments (crystal balls?—Javan had no idea) to get a picture of how the stone elementals’ battles fared. And what they could foretell from what they sensed was about as accurate as the information the Pingasporean earth savants gleaned from their seismographs.

  Little quakes kept rattling The Train while it waited for repairs to be finished. The salamanders in the snack-sellers’ grills no longer smiled; all that shaking made them nervous. It made Javan nervous, too. If you were a human being (or, as the salamanders proved, even if you weren’t), how could it do anything else?

  But the local wizards said one side in the subterranean war had won such a smashing victory over the other that there wouldn’t be any more major battles for a while—only skirmishes. The repairs went on. So did the aftershocks—the victory had been smashing up on top of the ground, too. Javan stayed nervous, but he didn’t get hurt.

  Passengers didn’t get hungry here as they had in the middle of the war zone, though. The Railroad could haul supplies up from behind The Train in a way it hadn’t been able to there. It brought carcasses for the dragons (yes, this was Dongorland), food for the dining cars, and, to Javan’s delight, a separate shipment for the snack-sellers.

  When Zulman found out about that, he ground his teeth again, which only delighted Javan more. And with the shipment to the snack-sellers came a note.

  It was written in Pingasporean. That delighted Javan one more time. I am following how things are going on The Train, it read. By all reports, you are doing as well as I could have hoped, or even better. I have found someone from your city to write this for me and let you know I still have my eye on you. The signature was not in a script Javan could read. If it didn’t say Pripessa, though, he would have been mightily amazed.

  At last, with the bent and ruined rails replaced and the roadbed repaired, the dragons could draw The Train forward toward the city of Dongor once more. The enormous beasts seemed glad to pull. They’d had plenty to eat while The Train waited for The Railroad to get back into working order, but they weren’t the sort of creatures that enjoyed staying in any one place for a long time.

  There was another brief delay not far in front of the city. The quake had knocked down a bridge. The river spirits and the earth elementals who had supported the piers squabbled over which group of them had the right to uphold the repaired span.

  Eventually, with the help of wizards from the city, they reached some kind of compromise. Javan never did find out all the details. But those details were nothing he desperately needed to know. All he needed to know was when The Train could proceed, and how much he had to get for the snack-sellers until that time came.

  Some of the buildings in the suburbs of Dongor had fallen down, and some in the city itself. And frightened salamanders, knocked out of their stoves and heaters by the force of the stone elementals fighting far below them, started fires that might have done more damage than the earthquake itself.

  A brick wall at the depot had collapsed in the quake. Convicts in glowing orange tunics worked with shovels and hods to clear away the rubble. The tunics literally glowed: some sorcerous effect, no doubt. The Train reached the depot a little after sundown, and the orange light the clothing shed lent its color to the platform. No one wearing anything like that could escape—not for long, anyhow.

  The convicts with the hods lugged the broken brickwork over to large, plain carpets floating at the edge of the platform. They dumped the bricks onto the carpets and went back for more, moving as slowly as their guards would let them.

  Javan smiled, recognizing that shabby work rate. He hadn’t busted his tail when he was working on The Railroad, either. He hadn’t even been a convict then, just a kid putting in his time on the corvée. But it wasn’t as if he’d been working for himself. He’d been out there because he had no other choice, and he’d performed like it.

  His smile quickly slipped. Now he worked hard all the time. He got the rewards for that, but he needed them, too. If he didn’t work hard, he wouldn’t eat much. He’d wear old, worn-out clothes. He and Luisa wouldn’t enjoy their soft second-class seats (and enjoy his he did). They’d never be able to afford that second-class ticket for Irini.

  Luisa was starting to think out loud about having another baby. Two more second-class tickets? Javan wasn’t sure they’d be able to afford those no matter how hard he worked. But he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t be able to, either. He’d already managed more than he’d ever dreamt he could when he boarded The Train.

  He’d also managed more than Siilo had dreamt he could. That made him stand very straight and puff out his chest as far as it would go. His own father was back in Pingaspor. Javan didn’t often think about him; he was busy leading his own life here. But Siilo filled some of the place his father had held in his home city.

  When a carpet was filled with bricks and mortar and whatever other rubbish the convicts brought, a wizard would make passes—passes he believed in—and guide it down the alleyway toward wherever it would eventually dump its cargo. The convicts’ orange tunics cast a sinister, almost demonic, light
on the wizards’ features. Beneath that glow, though, the wizards looked about as excited as Bordric did while he was grilling sausages.

  Javan thought that was a shame. Here these fellows were, doing things that would have been reckoned nearly miraculous in Pingaspor. But they did these things every day. They might as well have been leading ox carts or driving trucks.

  And chances were they couldn’t grill up even a halfway decent plate of sausages. Who didn’t have a special set of talents, whether you called them magic or not?

  More passengers than usual boarded at the Dongor depot. Javan wondered whether they were planning to settle in some place where the mechanical arts held sway. If they hoped such places were immune to disaster, they would end up disappointed.

  Or perhaps they simply wanted to get on The Train and ride it for as long as their money and their wits held out. That was what Javan had had in mind when he came aboard, as much as he’d had anything in mind at all. You got on. You found some way to keep yourself fed while The Train made its steady way round and round the world. You didn’t worry about what would happen farther along The Railroad. When it happened, whatever it turned out to be, you found some way to deal with it. And you went on riding till the next it came along.

  Some people, on The Train and off it, wondered what the point of a ride like that was. Javan was more interested in getting along than in fine points of philosophy. He had no idea what the point to riding The Train was, or whether there was any. Most of the time, he didn’t much worry about it, either.

  Round and round, round and round. Often, a circuit of the world on The Train seemed pretty much like the one that had come before it or the one that came right after. Often, but not always. Every once in a while, you came back to discover that the city where you’d boarded had lost its collective mind. Or an earthquake knocked everything all out of kilter.

  Or you helped your spouse to the first-aid car and, before too long, the midwife put your daughter in your clumsy arms. Yes, that circuit would stick in your mind for the rest of your days. Javan wondered if he’d recall the birth of his second child so vividly.