Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

Feeney had been to Ankh-Morpork and was proud to have undertaken his basic training in Pseudopolis Yard under Sergeant Detritus. He recognized that Boney was slightly more intelligent than the notorious Corporal Nobby Nobbs and so he didn’t grumble. And now he was glad to see his constable waiting for him just outside the main goblin cave where he had an office, regarded by the local goblins as something of a shrine.

These days there was a flourishing colony of goblins in Overhang Minor. The goblins were purveyors of fine pots, and Feeney knew that the production of pots was generally a quiet pastime and didn’t involve very much banging. The small cave that passed as an office was, and you have to be careful about this sort of thing, definitely not manned but goblined. And the sound coming from the great cavern beyond it was not about pots, that was certain. It was metallic, heavy metal. Well – and Feeney stumbled here slightly, mentally at least – goblins were free, and if people wanted to bang metal around in the privacy of their great caverns, then they could. He blinked. It was the new world. If you didn’t get your head around it, it could turn you upside down.

Feeney was polite and had been smart enough to pick up some of the goblin lingo, which really helped. It was a sunny day and it was an easy trip to the Overhangs and, yes, on the hill above the cavern there was a clacks station, goblined by goblins. After delivering his papers and force orders, Feeney sat down for a quiet word with his fellow officer and broached, in a careful way, the subject of the goblins banging things around in a context of disturbing the peace. Since there were very few humans living anywhere near the goblins’ settlement, Chief Constable Feeney put the complaints down to the humans’ residual dislike of goblins doing anything whatsoever anywhere, but he did advise that maybe moving whatever it was they were doing further into their caves might be a very good idea.

The crackling voice of Boney said, ‘No worries, boss, hang. We are copacetic on this one. No problems here.’

‘Well, that’s good to know, but why all the banging and clanging, Boney?’

‘Chief, you know plenty goblins go to Ankh-Morpork and work for Sir Harry King, the shit magnet, on the railway. Know how it is, yess? Comes back every month with wages. Never had wages before! Sometime they comes with diagrams … And ideas and scheming attics.’

Boney watched his superior officer with a certain level of concern, and heard Feeney say, ‘They are stealing … ideas?’

There was silence and Feeney knew he had made a faux pas, but Boney laughed and said, ‘Nosir, improving! We like Sir Harry, veeery good employer, but we plan to build own goblin railway. Quick to get around and easy-no-problem – has found best way to build railway is not build. Digging! Dig underground. Underground goblin-size railway, yess? Will bring all goblins together from every caverns. So many caverns in bowels of world. It’s no fuss. Goblins needed all over. How would nice Miss Adora Belle Dearheart do, if no goblins on clacks? We can be trusted – well, as muches as we trust you stinking humans. Wonderful railways underground, narrow gauge, of course. You see? We even have lingo! No rain and no snow, no bothering donkeys, no frightening old ladies underground. Hang! At last goblins’ own world in tunnels under big-man human world. We goblins up in the light now. No turning back.’

Feeney thought about this on the ride home as his horse trotted gently towards the sunset. He wasn’t a philosopher and couldn’t even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?

And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong … and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring. And then he gave up, because he was nearly home and his mum had promised him Man Dog Suck Po with mashed carrots, and it wasn’t even a Sunday.

Building the longest railway the world had yet seen was a matter of daily grind, and nightly grind too, and each week took Moist further away from the city. Visits home to enjoy the fruits of his labourfn54 became even rarer.

Scattered along the thousand-mile route new railway yards were springing up, each one a constant hive of activity with wagons coming and going all hours of the day and night. And while the company made sure the workforce was well provisioned, since, as Harry King had told the Ankh-Morpork Times, railway workers seriously needed a good meal and a good sleep in a comfortable bed after a day of heavy labour, in the end whether or not the bed was warm or comfortable didn’t in fact really matter because a lad would sleep the moment he fell into it, just as soon as the former occupant, waving his billy can, had hurried off for his shift.

It was all about speed and occasionally pure machismo, or whatever it was called in the languages of trolls, goblins and golems and, of course, the real hard-core steel men from the mountains who fought amongst themselves over nothing.

Where the new line followed the course of the River Ankh as it narrowed towards its source high in the Ramtops, barges came up or down the river with wood for sleepers, iron ore, coal and other supplies. The smelters worked through the night casting rails and if you were lucky enough to be in the right place and sufficiently protected you could see them open their guts and spill the glowing liquid steel: dancing and living like a creature from the underworld. If you were not lucky and stood too close then quite probably you would end up in that underworld facing the deity of your choice.

And all was fuelled by money, money, money, eager investors turning gold into steel and coal in the hope that it would turn back into even more gold.

The company was building bunkers everywhere along the tracks and it truly came home to Moist that when it came to the railways the engines and carriages and so forth were just the show up front, the iron horse, which needed to be fuelled and watered. And all of this was done by people almost the same colour as the coal, momentarily spotted as you went past, and then forgotten. He knew, because he had attended all the meetings and listened, that running a railway was a lot of small puzzles which, if you opened them, presented you with another sequence, full of constraints, and lists of things that definitely had to be done before anything else could happen. In short, the railway was complexity on wheels. It was amazing that Mr Simnel’s sliding rule didn’t glow as red-hot as the furnaces he worked.

And in Swine Town the workshops were turning out more and more engines: little tank engines that trundled up and down the ever-growing compound, shunting trains and carriages together; night trains, slow and heavy, that picked up wagon after wagon from the watercress farmers and others who needed to get their produce to the cities by dawn; the new Flyer Mark II, which had a roof to the footplate and wonderful new green livery; all now with names such as Spirit of Scrote and King of Pseudopolisfn55.

The scream of steam was no longer an intrusion, just one of the noises of Ankh-Morpork, like the explosions in the Alchemists’ Guild, and, as one old man said to his wife, ‘You don’t need a clock to tell you the time when you know the sound of the seven o’clock to Quirm.’ It seemed only weeks since Iron Girder had first puffed gently around Harry King’s compound, but now, inside a year, branch lines were springing up all across the Sto Plains, connecting little towns and villages in every direction.

And near these little towns and villages spanking new houses for the new railway staff were beginning to appear. Houses with baths! And hot running water! Admittedly the privies were outside, but nevertheless the plumbing was well maintained.fn56 You could say that for Harry: if something was to be done then it was to be done properly, and doubly so if Effie was around.fn58

It was as if there had been a space waiting to be filled. It was steam-engine time, and the steam engine had arrived, like a raindrop, dripping precisely into its puddle, and Moist and Dick and Harry and Vetinari and the rest of them were simply splashes in the storm.

Then one day at the Ankh-Morpork terminus, as Moist was setting out yet again to the Sto Plains, a lady got into his carriage, introduced herself as Mrs Georgina Bradshaw and sat down, gripping her expensive-looking bag with both hands. When Moist got up to offer her his forward-facing seat as railway etiquette apparently demanded, she said, ‘Oh, my dear sir, don’t worry about me, but thank you. I know a gentleman when I see one.’

‘Moist von Lipwig at your service, ma’am.’

‘Oh – are you the Mister Lipwig? Mister Lipwig the railwayman? I’ve heard all about you.’

‘Yes, I am, I suppose,’ said Moist, ‘when no other contender is available.’

&nbs

p; ‘Isn’t this fascinating?’ continued Mrs Bradshaw. ‘I’ve never been on a train before. I’ve taken the precaution of bringing some pills in case I feel nauseous. Has that ever happened to you?’

‘No, madam, I quite like the rhythm of the railway,’ said Moist. ‘But tell me, where did you get those precious pills?’

‘It was a gentleman called Professor Dibbler, a purveyor of nostrums against the railway illnesses. He was quite persuasive.’

Moist couldn’t help his smile and said, ‘I imagine he was. Madam, Mister Dibbler is at best nothing more than a charming scamp, I’m afraid. And I’m quite certain his nostrums will be nothing more than expensive sugar and miscellaneous substances. I fear he’s in the vanguard of the pedlars of patent medications which tax my patience.’

She laughed. ‘Well put, sir. I’ll consider that tuppence ha’penny down the drain.’