Railhead Read online

  “Oh, right…” (Zen didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to let her see that.)

  “They roost on the offshore reefs. People used to go out in boats, with special guns, to hunt them. And the ocean is called the Sea of Sadness—isn’t that pretty? Like something in a song.”

  Another wave burst, towering over them, collapsing across the promenade like a drunken fountain. Zen stepped back, but Nova just stood there, raising her face to the falling spray.

  “Is this all right for you?” he shouted, over the snore of the withdrawing wave. “All this water?”

  She only laughed, shaking her wet hair. “Think it’ll short-circuit me? I’m not a toaster, Zen! I have skin. Look! It’s waterproof, and it covers me all over.”

  “It’s not real skin,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s better. I’m a very advanced model.”

  “Did Raven make you?” he asked.

  “He started me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “So that makes him, like… your father or something?”

  She was silent for a while. They moved back, out of reach of the spray. She said, “It was in the storm season. In one of the old ballrooms at the hotel. He’s done it up as a workshop. A laboratory. One minute I wasn’t anything, and the next I was me. I was lying on a metal table and there was rain on the windows.

  “He said I was an experiment. Which does nothing for a person’s self-esteem, I can tell you. He said he was trying to build a Motorik that thought it was a human being. Only it didn’t work, because I knew what I was at once. I lay there in the rain-light and watched menus opening in my brain. I could feel all my subroutines coming online. Raven just puttered about watching me, with the shadows of the rain on the windows running down his face, and the lightning flashing from his eyes. I saw an old movie once about a mad scientist, and he looked exactly like Raven did that day. Which makes me his monster, I suppose. That’s not very good for my self-esteem either.”

  “Did Raven program you to be this way?”

  “To be what way?”

  “Well…”

  “Nobody programmed me, Zen Starling. I program myself. Raven gave me passwords. He showed me how to open my own menus and rewrite my code.”

  “Is that why you have freckles?”

  “Yes! It took ages to get the pigmentation just right. Do you like them?”

  “Not much.”

  “Motorik are meant to look perfect,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Like dolls. That’s why stupid people call us ‘wire dollies,’ I suppose. But I don’t want to look perfect. It’s so boring. I’m working on giving myself some pimples next. I wish I could make myself fat. Why don’t you like the freckles?”

  Zen felt embarrassed now. He wished he hadn’t called her a wire dolly. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. He hadn’t even realized Motorik had feelings. He said, “They make you look like you’re trying to be human.”

  “I am human,” she said. “I have a processor for a brain instead of a lump of meat, and my body is made of different substances, but I have feelings and dreams and things, like humans do.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  “That’s my business.”

  *

  They walked back toward the K-bahn. The station was on the ground floor of a building called the Terminal Hotel, a soaring glass wing whose thousand windows all reflected the storms and rings of Hammurabi. There seemed to be people in the lobby, but when Nova led him inside, Zen saw that they were just more Motorik. One came to meet the new arrivals, bowing. She was gendered female, with a long, wise face, a blue dress, silver hair in a neat chignon.

  “Mr. Starling? I am Carlota, the manager. Mr. Raven told us to expect you.”

  “Is this where he lives?” Zen asked.

  “When he has nowhere better to be,” said Nova. “He got the old place up and running again, woke up all these wire dollies to keep it working.”

  “Mr. Raven is a regular guest here at the Terminal,” said Carlota. (If she was offended at being called a wire dolly, she did not let it show.)

  “You’d better keep an eye on Mr. Starling, Carlota,” said Nova. “He’s a thief. Count the spoons. Keep the safe locked.”

  Carlota’s smile was patient and preprogrammed. “Come, sir,” she said. “I’ll show you to your room.”

  9

  At the heart of the Great Network lay Grand Central. All the main lines of the galaxy met there, which meant that whichever corporate family controlled Grand Central controlled the whole Network. For the past few generations that had been the Noons. Portraits of the Noon Emperors and Empresses beamed down from holoscreens, and the smiling golden sun of Noon flapped on bright banners above a garden city, which covered half the planet, the buildings spread wide apart, diamondglass towers and golden station canopies rising from a sea of trees. The imperial palace, the senate, the K-bahn Timetable Authority, all the dull, complicated departments that kept the Great Network running had their headquarters on Grand Central. The Guardians themselves kept data centers here: deep-buried vaults of computer substrate from which those wise old AIs could keep watch over human affairs. The Imperial College of Data Divers was always standing by to pass on their advice and instructions to the Emperor, although the Guardians seemed content these days to let Mahalaxmi XXIII rule without their instructions and advice. The Network ran itself happily enough in these peaceful times.

  On Grand Central there were always silvery trains snaking from one K-gate to another across the long viaducts, and the sky was forever busy with drones and air-taxis. At morning and evening these were joined by green parakeets, which rose from the treetops to fly in raucous, swirling flocks between the towers. The buildings used magnetic fields to warn the flocks away, and the birds flowed around them like water around the prows of huge ships.

  The shadows of their wings fell upon Captain Malik, who stood at a window high in the Railforce tower, looking out over the parks and lakes and malls of the galactic capital. The peace and luxury of the place unsettled him. He belonged on colder, rougher, dirtier worlds, and he was angry at being ordered back to Grand Central.

  “Yanvar!”

  He turned from the window as Rail Marshal Delius came into the room. A tall woman, taller than him, very dark skinned, her white hair combed and lacquered into a high arch like the crest of an ancient warrior. Her face was a warrior’s, too: stern and handsome, but lovely when she smiled, which she did when she saw Malik. He let her hug him. A row of medals was pinned across her tunic. They reminded him of the coins that he and Rail Marshal Delius used to leave on the K-bahn rails when they were kids together in the rail yards on Lakshmi’s Lament. They’d creep out to the lines and lay the coins on them like offerings, then hide and wait for a K-train to come by…

  Lyssa Delius was one of the very few people Malik thought of as a friend. They had joined Railforce together, and fought side by side against the Empire’s enemies all over the Network. But he doubted her friendship could help him much now. A wrecked wartrain was a serious business. He had whiled away his journey from Cleave by trying to calculate how many millions the armored loco must have cost. The Empire would be looking for someone to blame, and Lyssa did not have the imagination to blame Raven. Like the rest of Railforce Command, she did not even believe that Raven existed.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” she told him. “I’m sorry to have to drag you here, but this is a serious business…”

  “It was a trainkiller,” said Malik. “It cut straight through our firewalls, killed my data diver…”

  “I read your report.” Delius sat down on a gray sofa and patted the cushion beside her, inviting him to sit down too. Malik stayed standing. She said, “Our technicians went through what was left of your train’s systems. They found no trace of any virus.”

  “If he can design a viru
s like that,” said Malik, “he can design it to leave no trace.”

  “Mmm,” said the Rail Marshal, with a half smile, but he knew that she didn’t believe him. He noticed that she’d had her scar fixed the half-moon scar on her forehead from that firefight on Bandarpet. A pity, he thought. Old soldiers should wear their scars with pride.

  “You were supposed to be on a routine patrol of the trans-Chiba branch lines—” she started to say.

  “I was. I was in Ambersai when I detected Raven’s Motorik, trailing a kid in the Bazar.”

  “Yes…” Lyssa Delius was embarrassed. Her smile looked like pain. “Yanvar, this theory of yours, that Raven is still at large—”

  “It’s more than a theory.”

  The Rail Marshal sighed. “Our data divers have spoken to the Guardians. They know nothing of Raven.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Not in so many words—you know how they are—but if he was still out there, they would tell us.”

  “Raven knows how to evade them,” said Malik. “They think that because he does not operate in the Datasea anymore, he is no danger. But he is.”

  “Oh, Yanvar,” said the Rail Marshal gently. “If you would report in more often, go to the right parties, meet people, you would probably be General Malik by now. Railforce needs good people like you, here on Grand Central. But you’re always out on the branch lines, chasing this… this… ghost. Raven is dead. We killed him, Yanvar. Twenty years ago.”

  “Raven is no ghost. He’s planning something. He made contact with this kid from Cleave, a small-time thief named Zen Starling. I brought the boy aboard the train for questioning. That’s when the trainkiller hit.”

  “And where is this boy now?”

  “He escaped,” said Malik.

  “You have searched Cleave?”

  “He’s not in Cleave.”

  “Then how did he leave? Bearing in mind that your train was blocking the tunnel that leads to Cleave’s only K-gate?”

  “There is a second K-gate there. Cleave-B, on the old Dog Star Line. That’s how Raven moves. That’s where he hides.”

  “And do you have any actual—”

  “There is no evidence, Lyssa. But I know it’s true. If you give me another train, and let me take it onto the Dog Star Line…”

  She looked away, sighing. When they were kids she would wait in the shadows with Malik, simmering with giggles, until the K-train passed. Then they would scurry back to the rails and find the coins they’d balanced there transformed: crushed thin as leaves by the weight of the wheels, and scoured to a high shine. Some similar change had come over Lyssa Delius in the forty years since then. She was no longer the girl he had grown up with. They were not alike anymore, he realized. Age and ambition had smoothed the hard edges off her; she was happy here in this civilized city, playing politicians’ games. But Malik was made of hard edges: a violent, vengeful man. He wanted to hurt people, and he needed a war to let him do it. He needed a train.

  “Let me hunt Raven down.”

  Lyssa Delius looked at him, and he knew what she would say before she said it. “I’m sorry, Yanvar. No more ghost hunting. Your team has already been reassigned. If it wasn’t for me—if I hadn’t put in a good word for you—you would be facing serious punishment. As it is, you will take six months’ leave, and report for psychological evaluation.”

  She stopped in surprise as a sudden clattering sound filled the room like gunfire. Malik looked behind him. One of those wheeling flocks of parakeets had mistaken the window of the Rail Marshal’s office for empty sky and flown straight into the diamondglass.

  “Our magnetic field must be on the blink again,” said Lyssa Delius. “You see, Yanvar? That’s the trouble with peacetime. The Emperor keeps cutting our funding. We can’t even afford bird repellers, let alone to keep you out there, wrecking K-trains, following this hunch…”

  Malik went to the window. Dead birds were tumbling toward the treetops, leaving the glass smeared with blood and feathers. He took the Railforce badge from the breast of his jacket and set it carefully on the sill.

  “I’ll find Raven on my own,” he said.

  Lyssa Delius called his name as he walked to the elevator. He did not look back.

  10

  That night, Zen was woken by the wind howling around the glass blade of the Terminal Hotel. The suite Carlota had put him in was roughly the size of Cleave. His bed was about as big as the apartment on Bridge Street. He lay in it and listened to the wind, and the boom of the surf, and the hooting of the rays. He found a headset in the drawer of the bedside table, ripped open the plastic bag it came in, and clipped it on, but the local data raft was empty.

  Not only was Desdemor not on the Network anymore, it wasn’t even connected to the Datasea. Zen had never imagined that anywhere could feel so lonely.

  When dawn came the sky was full of broken, hurrying clouds and the canals shone like wet lead. Zen went down to breakfast. Nova was alone in the hotel’s huge restaurant, trying to decide which corner of a triangle of toast to put into her mouth first. A holomovie hung in front of her like a curtain of light: something so old that it wasn’t even in color, let alone 3-D, and all the actors were white. Their strange voices filled the big room with words Zen couldn’t understand. A man was saying, “The problemshathreeliddlpeeple doanamowndooahilluhbeansh in thish crazy world…”

  “I like old movies,” Nova said.

  “Can’t you just stream them straight into your brain?”

  “Yes, but they’re better this way. This one was made on Earth, thousands and thousands of years ago, before the Guardians opened the K-gates and brought us to the stars.”

  The Guardians brought us to the stars, not you, robo-girl, thought Zen. He said, “Since when do Motorik eat toast?”

  “I can process organic material to supplement my power supply,” said Nova, as if she were quoting from her own instruction manual. She nibbled the toast carefully so that the crumbs did not fall on her clothes. “It’s a special modification. Raven says he likes company when he’s eating, and not the sort of company that just sits and watches.” She looked away from him suddenly, as if she’d heard something. All Zen could hear was the rain on the windows, the booming sea—but Motorik ears were sharper than human ones.

  “The K-gate just opened,” she said. “Raven is back.”

  “Where has he been?”

  “I don’t know. He goes to lots of places.”

  “Why? What does he do there?”

  She shrugged, eyes on her movie. “I don’t know.”

  Raven came into the breakfast room a few minutes later. He made no attempt to explain where he had been, or why, just said, “So are you settling in, Zen? Nova looking after you? I thought it would be nice for you two kids to spend a bit of time together. I worry about Nova, you know. She tells me not to, but I do. She needs someone her own age to talk to.”

  Nova blushed.

  “Is that why you brought me here?” asked Zen. “I thought there was something you wanted me to steal.”

  Raven frowned a little, as if hurt that his guest did not want to make small talk. “Well, yes…”

  “So what is it?”

  “Oh, only a little box. About so big.” Raven held up his hand, thumb and forefinger spread three inches apart.

  “What’s in this box?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Okay,” Zen said. “Where is it?”

  “In a private museum on the Noon train.”

  Zen looked at him to see if he was joking.

  He wasn’t joking.

  “So you think I can get onto the Noon train and just start stealing stuff?”

  “I think you’re the only person I could send to steal it, Zen.” Raven smiled, and left Zen to think about that while he ordered breakfast from the Motorik waite
rs.

  *

  Zen had never seen the Noon train, but he had heard of it. Everybody had. When the senate was not in session on Grand Central, Mahalaxmi XXIII, Emperor of the Great Network, Chief Executive of the Noon family, traveled constantly from world to world, making sure that all the people of the Network had a chance to see him. He made these journeys aboard his private train: three miles long, pulled by twin engines and Guardians knew how many auxiliary power cars.

  “Only two types of people can board that train,” said Raven. “Members of the imperial family, and trusted guests. It takes a long time to win the Emperor’s trust, and I want the box now. So if I’m going to get hold of it, I need a Noon family member on my side. Trouble is, those Noons tend to stick together. They’re too rich to bribe, too clever to trick, too dangerous to blackmail.”

  Zen still didn’t understand. “So how can I help you?”

  “Your mother never told you who she is?” asked Raven. “Who you are?”

  “No. She doesn’t talk about things like that.”

  Raven thought for a moment. “Back in ’65, young Mora Noon, from the Golden Junction branch of the Noon family, was married to one of the sons of the Lee Consortium. It was a big deal, in every sense. A grand wedding at the Noon Summer Palace on Far Cinnabar. Nine days of celebrations. Of course, once she was married, Mora was expected to produce a child. But someone as rich and important as Mora Noon doesn’t have time to be pregnant. So the family geneticists implanted the fetus in a surrogate mother. A poor relation called Latika Ketai, the illegitimate daughter of some Noon or other, who worked on their country estates.”

  Zen’s mother’s name was Latika. She’d sung old Cinnabari folksongs to him when he was little. He started to see where Raven’s story was headed.

  Raven spread his hands. “Something went wrong,” he said. “I guess she got fond of you. Decided that, after all the trouble she’d gone to giving birth to you, you should be hers to keep. So she ran. Skipped out with you, got to a K-bahn station, vanished into the Network. She must have kept traveling for weeks, changing lines whenever she could. The Noons sent people after her of course. Noon DNA is valuable; the corporate families guard their bloodlines jealously. But somewhere along the way Latika managed to convince them you were both dead, and they stopped looking for you. It took me a long time to pick up your trail myself.”