Beneath Ceaseless Skies #101 Read online

  He climbed down a long way, chasing the crack in the column. When he reached the end of his rope, he was startled to hear the noise of the river, its current beating against the base of the pier. The crack continued on though, disappearing into the darkness, farther than his rope and his light would allow him to go.

  * * *

  Henry had found himself staring at the Director’s hairline while she read his report. The pale morning light from the bay windows in the office bleached her face, and he thought he could almost see a darker bump of scar tissue at top of her forehead, at the hairline of the wig she wore. The rumor was that the scar ran all the way down her back. In any other light, he would have dismissed the knot as a shadow. As a trick played by the eye and the mind.

  Like the sort inspired by trauma, false memories.

  The Director closed the report folio. “Mr. Olyphant is... no longer with the company,” she said. “Which leaves you without a mentor.”

  Henry cleared his throat but didn’t say anything.

  The Director watched him for a moment. “How is your arm?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said. The doctors had cut the cast off four days ago and the shoulder was still stiff, so he left his hand in his lap.

  “What should I do, Mr. Durant? Journeymen spend six years working with a more senior specialist before they are allowed to work alone. You’re two years short.” Her fingers tapped against the folio. “Yet, the incident in Denver with the Beregen Ulphander suggests you are capable.” The corner of an eyebrow moved. “Are you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She put the folio to one side and knit her fingers together. “I don’t second-guess my specialists,” she said, evenly. “They know what needs to be done, and I give them the means and the freedom to do so. While it is unfortunate that you were unable to salvage the Beregen, it speaks of your ability that you managed to retrieve the heart. I can see why Mr. Olyphant spoke highly of you.”

  “That was kind of him.”

  She stared at him, and he squirmed, finding her gaze uncomfortable. “However, Mr. Olyphant also recommended that I reassign you. That I keep you here, at a desk. Away from the trains. Why is that, Mr. Durant?”

  “Mr. Olyphant and I....” Henry licked his lips and considered his words. “We had a disagreement, Ms. Director. With all due respect, it was a matter of some foolishness—pride, mainly—and I’d rather not dwell on it.”

  “Keeping your eyes forward?” she suggested. “Like the trains. Always looking to what comes next. Is that it?”

  “Something like that,” Henry said.

  She nodded. “I like to meet with the men who will be retiring my trains. I like to look upon their faces and hear their voices. Their judgment and their... discretion... is critical to the company. Do you understand this, Mr. Durant?”

  “I do, ma’am.”

  “I believe you do, Mr. Durant.” She lifted her hand, and Henry stood up and, hiding the twinge of pain that flitted up his arm, he reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were warmer than her eyes led him to believe they would be. “Do you know the reason Mr. Olyphant gave for your transfer?” Her grip was solid, holding him tight.

  “I don’t,” Henry said, trying to hide how much she was hurting him.

  “He said you didn’t have the heart for the job.”

  He fought against the pain in his shoulder and squeezed her fingers. Harder than necessary. “Neither did he.”

  She let go, and picked up the fountain pen on her desk. “Well spoken, Mr. Durant,” she said, opening his folio again. On the top of the pile was the silver-edged card of the specialist. “Welcome aboard,” she said as she signed beneath the printed letters of his name.

  * * *

  Henry rubbed his hands over the heat register in the cab, trying to rub some feeling back into them. The wind had been cruel while he had been inspecting the stone pier, biting relentlessly at his knuckles. The heat from the train was making his bones ache.

  He didn’t know if the fracture line ran all the way down the foundation blocks sunk in the river, but it ran far enough. The bridge wouldn’t collapse today, probably not even in the next year, but it was only a matter of time. Every run would put pressure on the rail, and the crack would widen.

  The flaw was in the track. The bridge would have to be replaced, and based on what Henry had seen, the reconstruction would be expensive. And those ties, he thought, do you think they’ll leave those if they have to pull out the bridge?

  The train sighed beneath him, and Henry nodded. It’s your frame, isn’t it? The 212s were from the days when locomotives had been built by hand. You’re too heavy for the way they make bridges now, aren’t you?

  It made sense now: why the company wanted to retire this regal queen; why the rail yard workers stared at him with such venom. There was nothing wrong with the train; the fault lay with everything else.

  The Director knew he would do his job. That’s why she had sent him out here. He was the proper tool.

  * * *

  “Why are you here?” The foreman stared at Henry with eyes smeared with smoke and alcohol, confused by Henry’s presence in the yard workers’ dark and windowless bar, and that confusion fed the still-festering anger.

  “I just want a minute of your time,” Henry said, sitting down across from the hunched man, setting down the two mugs of beer he’d bought. He pushed one toward the foreman.

  “Why?” the foreman snapped. “I know what you did.”

  Henry’s satchel was heavy against his hip. He couldn’t sit comfortably in the old chair with it wedged against him, but he didn’t dare set it down on the floor.

  The patrons of the bar—mostly railroad workers—were already staring at him. Did they know what he had in the bag? Could they feel its pulse like he did?

  “You think a beer is enough?” the old foreman asked, glaring at Henry.

  “No, I don’t,” Henry said. “Not after what I did.” He leaned forward. “But I have something that might help... ease your pain.”

  “What do you know about pain?” Unconsciously, the foreman’s hand drifted toward the beer.

  “Very little,” Henry said. “Or maybe just enough. I’ll leave that for you to decide.” He clutched at the bag reflexively, sparing a quick glance at the room. “I don’t have much time....”

  The foreman’s eyes flickered past Henry’s shoulder. “They’ll kill you if you stay too long.”

  “I know,” Henry said. “Before one of them gets it into his head to come over here, can we talk? Will you listen?”

  The foreman’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t say anything. His hand closed around the mug of beer.

  Henry took that as a sign to stay. “There was nothing wrong with that train,” he said, and when the foreman didn’t say anything, he continued. “It was the track. The company is going to condemn the track at Desolation Pass—soon—and there won’t be any reason to rebuild the track, not when there’s no train making the run anymore. That’s what the report is going to say. She’s no good—too old and too heavy—to run anywhere else.”

  The foreman leaned forward slightly. “She?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘she’s no good.’”

  “The train,” Henry replied. “I meant the train. It won’t be good for anything else.”

  “Hmmm,” the foreman said as he picked up the mug and sipped from it slowly. “That’s the company line then?”

  “That’s what will go in my report.”

  “Are you going to write it?”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  The foreman stared at him for a long time, searching his eyes. When he found something that satisfied him, he drank from the beer again, smacking his lips as he gave some thought to what he was going to say.

  “Ridership has been declining for years, and it got bad last year,” he said. “The company sent out a team of number runners and they crawled up everyone’s asshole for a month. Doing a ‘cost anal
ysis’ of this whole hub. Part of some systemic program to save money.” His jaw worked at the invisible thing in his mouth for a moment, finding it more and more distasteful. “We’re all just little fucking cogs, you know. Doing our little part in the machine. They used a lot of fancy phrasing in their analysis: ‘cost-effectiveness curvature,’ ‘investment recirculation,’ ‘terminal declination.’ That’s what they called her run, said it was in ‘terminal declination.’ They turned her into a number. Those sons of bitches made the V-Star nothing but a fucking number. Each month she runs, she costs the company that much money. And each month, it would increase by five percent. How long do you think they were going to let that number grow?”

  “Not long,” Henry said matter-of-factly. He said it without malice, because he knew it was true.

  “Shorter than that,” the old foreman said. He seemed about to say something else, caught himself, and then sighed. All the bluster drained out of him, and for a moment, Henry saw someone younger in his face, a boy who had been in love once and who had chased that love for the rest of his life.

  Who still wished he could chase it now.

  “I need your help,” Henry said.

  The foreman’s eyes focused on the bag. “What the hell for?” he asked, some of the old anger coming back to his face. “You’ve already kill—” He didn’t finish. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words out loud.

  “I...” Henry started. “I am what you think I am—or rather, I was, I think—and I’ve been very good at it for a long time. But....” Henry pulled his satchel into his lap, tugging at the straps. He opened it, showing the foreman the still-warm key within. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

  The foreman stared uncomprehendingly at the heart of the Victorian Starlight for a moment, and then woke himself with a shiver. Chugging half of the remaining beer in a long throat-working swallow, he pushed back from the table. “I know,” he said with a nod. “Let me show you something.”

  * * *

  “They sent out a company man to manage the project,” the foreman explained as they walked through the abandoned tunnel. “When the second set of milestones were missed, the city council started to get pressured for some sort of oversight.”

  Henry recognized the curved shape of the incomplete track. Three rails. “I didn’t know the city was working on a subway system,” he said.

  “They aren’t. Not anymore. It was badly designed, and managed by a bunch of idiot accountants who didn’t understand a thing about building a full-coil rail system. By the time the company man arrived, the project had spent all of its budget, including a discretionary fund, and had only managed to complete a quarter of the track.”

  “What did the company man do?”

  The foreman stopped, and peered at Henry in the dim light of his lamp. “He performed an audit and retired the project.”

  Henry nodded. The company reduced it to a number, and they didn’t like what it was.

  The foreman continued on, the light from his lamp blooming as they entered a larger space. There was a raised platform and the slender stalks of pillars, rising up to a domed roof.

  “They weren’t very good at their skimming and record-forging,” the foreman said. “But discovering the paper trail didn’t change the fact that the money was gone. All that was left was slip-shod work done with substandard materials.” He spat on the dusty ground. “It was more cost-effective to board it up and walk away. Forget it was ever started.” He raised his lantern. “So they did.”

  In the gloom, Henry saw there was a train waiting at the station. Its lines were sleek, but the dark and the damp had given it a layer of grime and moss.

  “A Vascoy-Telsa 12,” he breathed. “They’re fully coiled.”

  “Was fully coiled,” the foreman corrected. “They took the key, and scavengers took the rest.”

  Henry’s hand strayed to his bag. He thought he felt a pulse from within, but it was most likely his own heart, leaping at the suggestion.

  * * *

  “Put your hand here,” Pastor Olyphant had said, tapping the ornate handle sticking out of the glass assembly. Henry’s fingers trembled as he laid his hand on the glowing crystal of the train’s key. “This is what powers the engine. This is what makes it work, what makes it breathe. This is the heart of the train, and this is the key that allows it to move.”

  “It’s warm,” Henry said, feeling silly for saying something so obvious, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  Olyphant tapped him on the chest. “So are you.”

  “I’m not—” Henry stopped. “It’s not the same thing,” he corrected.

  Olyphant aped some surprise. “Why not?”

  “We’re alive. This train isn’t.”

  “Did I say it was?”

  “You just said it was. You said–”

  “No, I said you were warm too. Just like it is.”

  Henry dropped his hands from the key. “I don’t understand.”

  “You have to be careful, Henry,” Olyphant said. “It is easy to think of them as simple machines, as constructs made from steel and wood. That it is only the coils that make them warm. But they’re more than that. They’re willful, Henry. They want to run. They want to be useful.”

  Olyphant put his hand on the glowing key. “And it is your job to tell them otherwise.” With a sudden twisting movement, he pulled the key free of the assembly.

  The train shuddered, and Henry stumbled into the wall of the cab. His bare hand against the metal skin of the train, he could feel the undulating vibration running through the engine, all the way from the smoke box to the end of the tender. His chest was frozen in a moment of empathy, and when the last tremor left the engine, he gasped.

  The lights were out, and the firebox was dark. The flame had been snuffed out, as if smothered by a heavy blanket. Henry, shivering from the now cold touch of the wall, hastily removed his hand.

  “There are two kinds of specialists,” Olyphant said, wiping some moisture from his cheek, “those who hear nothing when they do their job, and those who know how to listen. Which one are you going to be, Henry?”

  “I.... I don’t know,” Henry said as truthfully as he could. Though, deep in his heart, he knew otherwise.

  There was a void there, a silence not unlike the emptiness he had felt in the cab of the train.

  * * *

  “She has strong lines. Nice curves, too.”

  Henry recognized the voice, and allowed himself a tiny smile before he straightened and leaned out of the narrow cab of the Vascoy-Telsa 12. “I thought they might send you,” he said to the man standing on the platform.

  Pastor Olyphant had misplaced his hair in his retirement, either lost it entirely or proactively shorn it away. His head was smooth and tanned, and his long coat seemed new, as if it had been bought specifically for the trip to the perpetual damp of the west coast. He leaned to his left, favoring his left leg, and Henry knew the damp of the tunnels was making Olyphant’s old injury ache.

  “Does she run?” Olyphant asked.

  Henry nodded. “There’s only about a mile of track, but it’s a loop. I let her go a couple hours a week. Keeps the coils conditioned.”

  Olyphant limped up to the edge of the platform and put his hand on the smooth side of the train. His eyes closed and a smile pulled at his mouth. “Yes,” he whispered. “I can hear you.”

  Henry felt an flush rise in his flesh, and he knew it was irrational. Of course Olyphant would hear the train. Henry would have been disappointed if he hadn’t.

  “I’m living down south,” Olyphant said. “Where it’s warm year round, and there’s no rails. The company is trying, of course, they want to run trains everywhere, but it’s a land of hills and mud. So hard to get a track down.” He ran his hand along the flank of the train. “It’s very peaceful.”

  Henry swallowed heavily. “I’m sorry they brought you back. I had hoped they’d—”

  “Forget about you?” Olyphant inter
rupted him. He opened his eyes and smiled at Henry. “You aren’t that naïve, Henry.”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “They want what is theirs, Henry. What you failed to return.”

  “Why? They’ll just destroy it, won’t they? Like all the other keys we retire. Isn’t that what happens to them?”

  “It’s just business, Henry. It’s what they’ve always done. It’s what we’ve always done.”

  “Not me. Not anymore.”

  “So you save this one. Why?” Olyphant lifted his hand from the side of the train. “Is she grateful? Does she tell you everyday how wonderful you are to have saved her? It’s just a machine, Henry. Like you said. You and me and all the rest. We’re just well-formed tools.”

  Henry stared out at the track. He couldn’t see more than a hundred feet before the line curved into the darkness of the tunnel, but he knew it all in his head. Every inch of the rail that he and the others had rescued and brought down here. And beyond that, the other tunnels they had started to survey and repair. Eventually, she would run all the way from one end of the city to the other. It wasn’t the same run she had before, not nearly, but it would be enough.

  She had said as much when they had repaired the electric engine and placed her key assembly in it. It was life enough.

  “Maybe I was wrong about that,” Henry said.

  Olyphant sighed and ran his hand along the train’s flank again. “Maybe,” he said softly.

  “Are you supposed to retire me too?” Henry asked.

  Olyphant shrugged, but Henry noticed he didn’t remove his hand from the train. “Maybe,” he said eventually. “Maybe not. And maybe we’ve all been wrong, about a great many things. Do you think that if we’re wrong enough times that eventually we’ll get something right?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Olyphant smiled. “Anything is, I suppose.”

  “They shouldn’t have sent you,” Henry said.

  Olyphant nodded and raised his face to look at Henry. “No, they shouldn’t have.”

  “Will you carry a message for me?” Henry asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell the Director that I’ve done my own cost analysis. I can say, with a great deal of assurance, that it will be prohibitively expensive for them to retrieve a key they don’t know still exists. Tell them whatever else you like, my old friend, but let them know that you are my messenger. If they send anyone else, I cannot guarantee them the same safe passage.”