The perpetual train creeps forward with tiny turns of its wheels. Pushed and pulled by four hulks, diamond-stacks splaying and venting from yards up. Vastly bigger than the engines that ride New Crobuzon’s elevated railways. These wilderness versions wear cowcatchers, their headlamps burn vividly, and insects touch like fingertips against the glass. Their bells are like churchbells.
There comes an armoured car with a swaying guntower. An office on wheels, closed wagons for supplies, what seems a parlour, one at least that is blood-fouled, a rolling abattoir, and beyond that a very tall and windowed wagon painted with pinchbeck gilt, slathered with symbols of the gods and Jabber. A church. Four, five enormous carts with tiny doors and rows of little windows, triple-decked bunkrooms thronged with men. Under their own great weight the sleep-coaches sag in the middle as if they have sows’ bellies. There are flat cars, open and covered. And beyond them the crews. The music of hammers.
They are on a flat through the brush. The track-layers are speeding, closing the gap with the graders.
Judah is only one man walking beside the train. There is nothing to mark him except the sense that he is waiting. Judah is lifted. But there is sourness. He sees men and cactus-men muttering and the fear of the Remade tethered near their stockades. The foremen go armed. They did not used to.
Many miles ahead surveyors map out the land according to charts drawn a score of years before by Weather Wrightby and his crews, when the old man was a scout himself. Behind them, in the unland between the train and the explorers, graders make their fat raised line. And behind them the bridge-monkeys push trestles across impassable land, and the tunnellers keep cutting through their rocks.
All this is ahead. Judah carries ties.
This is how the laying goes. Early morning the hundreds of men wake to bells and breakfast in the dining car on coffee and meat from bowls nailed to tables, or eat in vague congregations along the tracks. First are the whole: the hard human labourers; cactus-men from New Crobuzon’s Glasshouse, a few renegades from Shankell.
Behind them, cuffed to their meal by guards, the Remade eat what is left. There are a few women among them, Remade with steam-driven integuments, iron-and-rubber or animal bulk. Those prisoners with boilers hexed to them are issued enough culm and low-grade coke to work.
The trains hang back. Horses or pterabirds or Remade bullocks drag carts from huge piles of rails along the line, to the last of the track, and back. The crews move for each other, industrial dancing. They quickstep in and down, and the hammering, and more rails come, and the carts refill and rejoin the extending road. Ten feet, hundreds of pounds of iron at a time, the road continues.
Jabber, what are we bringing? Judah thinks to see the work of all those many hundreds. What are we doing? He is awed by its raucous and casual splendour.
He sings songs to himself as he works, and invisibly he makes each cold rectangle of wood a limbless golem that for the tiny interval of its ablife strives to cross from the horse-hauled carriage of sleepers to the dust of the bed. Judah feels the thoughtless tugging from each piece, and it helps him. He carries more than he should. When the waterboys come from the train out of sight behind them there is a scramble to drink first, before dust and spit fouls the water. The many Remade wait.
Judah’s tent-mates like him. They listen to his stories of the swamps and tell him of labour troubles.
– Fuckin’ Remade been causin’ trouble too. Over food and that. And the whores’ prices goin’ up and up. Somebody said the money’s dryin’ back home. You know anything about that? Somebody told me prices are fallin’, money’s runnin’ out.
Behind the sleeper-men are the rail-layers and spikers, and behind them the intricate bulk of the train comes swaying snarling closer, tended like some steam-animal god.
Judah sees Remade chastised with whips, and the presence inside him spasms each time so he nearly falls. Once there is a fight between free workers and a Remade man with the pugnacity of the newly changed. The other Remade pull him away very quickly and only huddle under the whole men’s blows. Remade women bring the sleeper-men chow. Judah smiles at them, but they react like stone.
On paydays or thereabout a train comes like a miracle through the thawing swamp. Mostly the free men give over their money in Fucktown and in the stills and hooch-tents. Judah does not go out those nights. He lies in his tent and listens to the echoes of gunshots, fighting, the gendarmes, screams. He takes out his voxiterator and plays the breathy stiltspear songs. He annotates his notebooks.
End o’the Line is a newspaper printed on the work train. It is ill-spelt and salacious, and vulgarly partisan for the TRT who sanction it. All the men read it and argue about its worst points. Twice Judah sees people reading other journals surreptitiously.
He drifts back toward the train. He takes his turn hauling rails.
Judah draws the line. The metal is mercilessly heavy. In the flat light of the sky he feels himself watched by rocks. Each rail almost a quarter of a ton, four hundred rails to the mile. He lives by numbers.
Crews work in cadres, all convict Remade or all freemen, no mixing. With tongs or their own metal limbs they slide the rails out, five men or three cactus or big Remade to each, and lay them down with midwife gentleness. Gaugemen space the irons out, and they in turn are gone, and the spikers move in.
Judah makes each rail momentarily an absurdly shaped golem. No others on his team feel the faint fishlike flutters of the metal as it tries to help him. He lays down angles in the random land. He grows strong. Once he sleeps on the roof of the train to know what it is like. Men have tethered goats up there and even make carefully corralled fires.
A tinker-showman works the length of the road, performing. Judah watches him make his own tiny dancing dirt figures, but they are not golems. They are only matter tugged as if by hand at a little distance, direct manipulations. They have no bounded reality, no ablife, no mindless mind to follow instruction, any more than puppets do.
Slogans are written on the train and the rocks. Each morning they appear, some nothing but crudities to shock the earth, some personal, some polemical, screw you wrightby. Twice when the bell brings Judah out of sleep into the dark morning posters are slathered to the train and to trees.
Some are very simple: FAIR PAY, UNIONS, FREEDOM FOR THE REMADE, and below a little doubled r. Others are a mass of tiny writing. Judah tries to read them while the foremen tear them down.
RUNAGATE RAMPANT.
TRACKS’-END SUPPLEMENT 3.
The death toll on the TRT Railroad continues to rise, as safety is spurned in the rush for money. The rails go down on the bones of workers, free and Remade…
– What in Jabber’s name these fuckers on about? one man says. -Who ain’t for fair pay? And if there are them as wants guilds I ain’t got no problem, but free Remade? They’re fucking criminals, or don’t these dozy fuckers know that?
Judah is beguiled by the bravery of the dissidents. They creep at night when the gendarmes patrol. If they were caught they would not walk away. They would be made part of the landscape.
Runagate Rampant s are left under tables, on rocks. It is poor distribution, but it is all they have. Judah takes copies, and reads when he is alone.
He is only just aware of the dramas of the line. He works, hardly looking up at a rain-patter of shots down the rail. Later he hears that a joint war party of fReemade and striders, a long way east of their supposed territory, attacked the crews in the rear. They were driven off, but the gendarmes are concerned that so proud a race as striders are allying with the punk fReemade against the trains.