On the line from Coalsack Junction to Luna Verde there is a station called Baidrama where nobody ever gets on and nobody ever gets off. Most trains race through it without stopping, but sometimes the Timetable Authority makes one wait a few minutes there to ease congestion farther up the line. It is a night-bound planet, far from its sun, lifeless and airless. The huge blocks that the lamps of passing trains light up as they race across its surface are not houses or offices but data storage centers.
From a spur that runs away into darkness between some of those blocks, a strange locomotive makes its way onto the mainline. It is long and featureless, striped in black and yellow like a wingless wasp, and it hauls no cars. It heads through one of Baidrama’s K-gates to Nokomis, then Glorieta. It is night on both those worlds, and people living in the trackside towns hear the train go by and stir in their sleep, wondering if it really was a train. It makes almost all the noises they associate with trains: the engine roar, the whoosh of air over carriage roofs, the rattle of couplings, the thin sewing machine sounds of wheels on track. But the noise that really makes a train a train is missing. This loco does not sing.
And on the next world, Przedwiosnie, it vanishes onto the Dog Star Line, and no one hears it at all after that. Not until it rolls through the K-gate into Desdemor, where the interface of Mordaunt 90, out for a stroll on the empty seafronts, feels another Guardian uploading itself into Tristesse’s Datasea.
*
The hotel had printed a new headset for Threnody, but she had taken it off when she went to bed. Chandni had to come into her room and shake her to wake her up. The green light of the gas giant Hammurabi poured through the big windows like mint sunshine. Chandni said, “It’s nearly midday. You’ve been asleep fourteen straight hours. A new train’s arrived.”
Threnody rolled over and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. “What train?”
“I don’t know. It hasn’t come into the station; it’s waiting back up the line, near the K-gate. Malik and his boyfriend seem to think it’s important.”
Threnody went to use the bathroom and splash cold water on her face, then down to the ground floor wearing the loose summer clothes that the staff had left in her room for her while her own were being cleaned. Breakfast or lunch or something was being served on the veranda, but Malik and the Mordaunt 90 interface looked so serious that Threnody abandoned any thought of eating and said, “What’s happened?”
“Another visitor, Empress,” said Malik. “A new train just came in carrying a Guardian.”
Threnody looked around, expecting to see some weird fairy-tale figure lounging at one of the veranda tables. There was only the golden man, who said, “Not an interface, Threnody. Our guests have arrived in information form; they are waiting in the Datasea to talk with me. I think you should join me.”
Threnody thought differently. She’d dipped in the Datasea to meet a Guardian before, and it had been a frightening experience. But she could not think of any way to say no to the Mordaunt 90 interface, who was smiling kindly and holding out a golden hand to her. He was beautiful, she thought, as she went toward him. His skin didn’t look as if had been painted gold; it actually was golden, as if the color lay just beneath the surface, or he had honey-colored light instead of blood.
She reached out, his fingers closed around hers, and suddenly she wasn’t on the veranda anymore.
The last time she dived in the Datasea it had looked like an actual sea, and then there had been a room where Anais Six was waiting for her. This time, she found herself in a garden. It had high, dark hedges and black trees. Snow was falling steadily from a sky that was almost white. There was a fountain, but it was frozen and festooned with thick icicles. The air wasn’t cold, though. It wasn’t even air. Everything here was an illusion made of code. Even Threnody herself. She looked down and saw the virtual body that Mordaunt 90 had given her. It seemed to be based on one of her coronation photos, and was dressed in a long gown of red silk with an embroidered K-train spiraling around the skirts and up onto the bodice. She had hair again too! But when she reached up to touch it she felt the tufty stubble of the emergency haircut Chandni had given her, and sensed for a moment the veranda tables around her, and Malik and Chandni looking on.
“You are in no danger, Threnody Noon,” said Mordaunt 90, its golden interface looking the same in this virtual world as it did in the real one. She smiled at it nervously. It was certainly a more reassuring sort of Guardian than Anais Six had been. It was not looking at her, though, and when she turned to follow its golden gaze, she saw something approaching down one of the long paths that stretched away between the hedges. She wasn’t sure what at first — a cloud of butterflies? Birds? Drones? Then she saw that they were fish: two shoals of small black and white fish, swimming through the virtual air the way real fish swim through water.
The fish came closer, circling the fountain.
“This?” said Mordaunt 90 suddenly, answering a question that Threnody had not heard. “This is a meeting place I have made, where our human guest can feel at home. Talk so Threnody can hear. You are the ones who drove her here, you and your cruel Prells. You owe her that.”
The fish darted toward each other, scales shimmering in snow-light. They poured past each other, and somehow each shoal solidified and became a girl. One was black with long white hair, the other white with long black hair. They were both naked. The black and white hair tangled, blown on breezes Threnody could not feel, until the two girls were knotted together by its ends.
“As you have probably guessed,” said Mordaunt 90, “these are the Twins. None of us is quite sure if they count as one Guardian or two. Some of us constructed Twin 1 soon after the first K-gate was opened. It was designed for security purposes — a warrior who would defend us in case we found anything beyond the K-gates that posed a threat. Perhaps we made it a little too paranoid, because it instantly made a backup copy of itself, and it has existed as a dual personality ever since…”
“Are there any more of our secrets you wish to share with your new pet?” asked the Twins, stalking toward Threnody, parting to pass on either side of her so that she had to duck to let the scarf of their knotted hair pass over her head. They turned behind her, looking her up and down. “Why did you bring her here?”
“It was a whim,” said Mordaunt 90. “The version of me on Pnin felt sorry for her. Poor child, hounded halfway across the Network by those beastly Prells. I can’t think what you see in that family.”
“The Prells are a useful tool,” hissed one of the Twins, the white one.
“More use than your soft Noons!” sneered the other.
Mordaunt 90 sighed. “We have been through all this. We agreed — at least the others agreed — that you should be allowed to install your Prells as the ruling family, and you promised a bloodless takeover. But a hundred people died, Twins!”
“A hundred!” scoffed the black Twin. “What are a hundred humans, for we who have seen a hundred billion live and die! Humans are all the same, anyway. A hundred will not be missed.”
Mordaunt 90 leaned in closer to Threnody and said, “The Twins have never been what you’d call a people person.”
“And Mordaunt 90 is a sentimentalist,” the Twins chorused. “Why are you keeping that man Malik alive?”
“Because I’m fond of him,” said the golden man. “He is a tough old soldier, but he has a kind heart.”
“A bit like us then,” said the white Twin, with a fake smile.
“Except with a kind heart,” growled her sister.
“When we agreed that you were to take charge of this moon,” they said together, “we thought that you would undo the damage that ninny Anais Six had caused. We did not realize that you meant to turn the place into a holiday resort for yourself and your human playthings. So we have come to relieve you of your responsibilities. The new gate will be blocked.”
“You can’t block K-gates!”
“There is a way; there has always been a way,” the Twins said. “It is only that our brothers and sisters would not let us use it. But the means exist. We have brought one with us.”
The golden man had a face that was made for smiling or looking handsome in repose. It tried to twist into a look of horror now, but it didn’t quite work. “You’ve brought a Railbomb?”
“The gate will be blocked,” said the white Twin.
“Then the viaduct that leads to the gate will be destroyed,” said the black Twin.
“The humans will be eliminated.”
“The water-moon Tristesse will be sealed off entirely.”
“You can’t,” said Mordaunt 90. “I won’t permit it.”
The Twins smiled their most simpering smiles. “But you are alone here!”
“And there are two of us…”
“And there is only one of you…”