4. The Cartographer

The second morning since the tides, and Marya leaves breakfast early, finding the grumbles of her fellow passengers to be even less appetizing than the food.

"Are they seeking to poison us with this coffee?" the Countess demanded. "Or perhaps to keep us from ever sleeping again?" They were served strong, short cups, with more assurances from the stewards that it is just a temporary measure, just until they take on more water, which will be soon, very soon, they were told.

Outside, the tundra stretches into the distance, though at breakfast the stewards had advised them not to look too closely, for risk of nausea. The landscape may appear to be wavering, writes Rostov, as if it has been painted upon a screen of the finest gauze, and another painting, not quite identical, has been laid on top of this, and then another, and at times it may seem that all can be glimpsed at once, producing a most infelicitous effect upon the observer. Of course, being told not to look makes her want to stare at it all the more, though she finds that Rostov is quite correct.

She had attempted to visit Grigori Danilovich—the Professor—but had been turned away, just as Weiwei had predicted. She tries not to let the frustration show on her face, but it is hard, when she is so sure that there is something he knows, something he did not want to tell her. Was it the mention of Artemis that he had reacted to? Or what happened on the last crossing?

In her cabin she closes the curtains and sits at the little table by the window to write in her journal, trying to resist the temptation to use the word infelicitous. She has always found it reassuring to see a narrative emerging, her thoughts finding an order as words on the page. She stops, and rubs at her fingers. The water rationing has meant that it is difficult to get them clean. It reminds her of when she was a child—however hard she scrubbed there would be a last, accusing spot of ink, leading her mother or governess to wonder why she could not pick up her embroidery or music—more suitable pursuits for a lady than writing.

She is already lagging behind in writing down the events of the past days, only just reaching Suzuki's talk, and her pen slows as she tries to describe the feeling of seeing the landscape's changes flash by, slide after slide. She had felt a sense of vertigo, a slipping of her certainties. How must the Cartographer himself feel, helpless to do anything but watch and record? She puts down her pen, trying to remember what he said about the changes, and scientific understanding; trying to read the expression on his face as he watched the Crows. She pushes her journal away and stands up. She needs to see him again.

A corridor runs along one side of the scientific carriage, and there is a window into part of Suzuki's workshop, but the blinds are down. She straightens her shoulders and taps on the glass door. When there is no answer she tries the handle, and finds that it opens easily.

"Mr. Suzuki?" As she steps inside, she has the sense that there was movement from within, only moments before. But all is still, and there is only a faint, damp smell.

She looks around the room; the laboratory, she supposes it should be called. What does it tell her of the man? Only what she knows already. On the tables are instruments that he had spoken of in the Captain's quarters; instruments for meteorological and magnetic observations, clever machines that tick away taking measurements of atmospheric temperature and humidity and barometric readings.

Along the far wall of the carriage stretches a bookcase, holding books in a number of different languages—Japanese, but also Chinese and Russian and English and French. She has never been able to resist the lure of a bookcase, and wanders over to it, running her hand over the titles until she sees one she recognizes, and smiles, despite herself. She takes out the familiar gray volume and sees that it is well read, its pages stained with thumb prints, some turned down at the corners.

"Please, feel free to borrow anything you like. Though I'm sure you have your own copy of that particular one."

She startles, almost dropping the book, and sees the Cartographer descending the spiral staircase.

"The door was unlocked." She suddenly feels guilty, intruding into his private space yet surprised, as well, by the flare of happiness she feels at seeing him.

"I should know better than to disturb a reader at their task," he says, reaching the bottom of the stairs. "I hope one day to see your own books sitting on shelves like these, and learn of new places."

She laughs. "You will have to be patient, I fear. My mother thought it unseemly to even think of visiting anywhere that hadn't been thoroughly approved of by the right people. Writing about it would be considered even less acceptable."

As would venturing here alone,she thinks, into this unfamiliar space, speaking so freely to a man she does not know.

"Even as we are about to enter a new century?" he asks.

"I believe she would have tried to cling onto the last one. But I should apologize, I did not mean to interrupt you in your work."

"Not at all, you are more than welcome. I have been too much alone with my charts and my notes and am happy for the company. I remember that you had mentioned your interest in the work done here. Let me show you, and please stop me if I become tedious. The Head Steward once said that if I spoke one more word on compasses and magnetism he would drive a fork through his own eye."

Marya smiles. He is more at ease, here in his laboratory, than among the passengers and crew, and she finds that she can breathe more easily too. He speaks warmly of the advances made in observation and measurement, showing her instruments for the recording of rainfall and pressure and temperature, showing her the charts and graphs with such care that she can't help but become caught up in his enthusiasm.

"What brought you to the train?" she asks, after a while.

"I wanted adventure," he says, slightly apologetically. "Though perhaps that is something you can understand." Then he says, "And the position of Cartographer has always been held by an outsider."

"An outsider?"

"Someone with loyalty to neither the Russian nor the Chinese empires."

"Oh, of course." The famous neutrality of the Company. "Yet Japan…" She tries to remember what she had heard about the country, closed to foreigners for so long.

"Though we can't travel the world, we can still be curious as to how the earth is shaped. I learned cartography from a master who had never left the small island of his birth, barely ten miles across. ‘Everything you need,' he used to say to me, ‘is here beneath your feet, but it will take ten lifetimes to understand it.' Yet I was impatient, I wanted to fill my lifetime with what was new, uncharted. I thought it was worth the sacrifice."

Yes—this is what she has read. That those who leave may not return. That Japan closed its doors at the end of the last century when the changes in Siberia began. That the sea alone was not thought enough to protect it.

She doesn't ask him what he left behind. What it was he sacrificed. She feels suddenly that for all his friendliness he is very alone, even in the way he holds himself—as if keeping a protective space around him.

"Perhaps I might see the observation tower?" she asks, if only to try to chase away the odd, hollow expression on his face.

"Of course," he says, his composure returning, and she follows him up the winding steps, which open into a circular room with a domed roof and glass all around, criss-crossed with iron bars. Despite the iron, the view is astonishing, as though they are flying across the landscape, untethered from the ground. The room itself is no less remarkable, filled with telescopes and magnifying glasses built into the windows, and neat piles of maps covering a large table. Suzuki stands as she looks closer at the maps' intricate detail—always the line of the rail, then around it, every rock and gully and rise labeled, and she realizes that there are maps drawn over other maps, again and again. Ghostly records, she thinks. Records of what has been changed or lost as the Wastelands make geography untrustworthy.

"It is important that it has been seen, and acknowledged," he says. "Even if it has vanished."

She sees the past overlaid with the uncertain present, as if Rostov's description of the landscape has found form in the Cartographer's maps. "There is a clergyman in First who believes that the changes are a sign of moral degradation," she says. "That we have brought this on ourselves through our godlessness."

"A common belief," says Suzuki, his brow wrinkling, "though not one I share. Ah, let me pour you some tea, I have saved a little water."

As he passes her the cup she notices ink stains on the backs of his hands, though he pulls down his sleeves to cover them. Unexpected, for a man so neat and precise, and she wonders, watching him, why he should have chosen to work here, in the midst of all this change and uncertainty. He is so self-contained, so controlled. Everything in the tower is in its place, deliberate. But perhaps that is just it—that by mapping the changes he can pin them down, impose a sense of order, even if it is lost before the ink is dry. She can understand the compulsion.

She sips the tea—it is strong, and bitter—and looks around at the telescopes and lenses set up around the circumference of the tower. There is only one covered by a heavy cloth.

"What's this?" she asks.

"Just a faulty model," he says, and she notices his hand twitch, as if he wants to stop her from looking, but she has already pulled on the cloth, giving in to the contrary streak that compels her to want anything she is told she cannot have. It reveals a compact brass device with a shining casing. She remembers seeing it in her father's workshop; he had been working on it constantly in the years before he died, and she has to fight to keep the recognition from her face. He had been so proud of it, and of the new techniques to make lenses specially adapted to the speed and movement of the train, with a mechanism small enough to make the telescope portable. But it was just a prototype, he had said. If all went to plan then the Fyodorov Glassworks would expand into the manufacture of lenses. It was not enough to simply see through glass, he told her: "We have to see with it, use it to expand our vision, to make the train a travelling observatory."

"It has never worked properly, I must get it looked at when we reach Moscow," says Suzuki, but there is a forced casualness in his voice, and Marya sees that there is a lock on the eyepiece. She tries not to let her frustration show, wishing that she could look more closely at this tangible link to her father. But Suzuki is already gesturing to another of the scopes. "This one gives a clearer view," he says, beginning to explain its use.

This scope faces the front of the train. She puts her eye to the lens and there, a dozen or so carriages ahead of them, she sees the watch tower. It is a mirror image of the Cartographer's observation tower, but alongside the scopes there are what she knows to be guns, there is a man with his finger always close to the trigger, watching the sky, waiting to shoot anything that threatens the passage of the train. And near him, she recognizes the small, neat form of the Captain. It is only the second time that Marya has seen her, and she wonders how much of her time she spends up there, away from the passengers and the bustle and the everyday tedium of the train. She looks stronger, more grounded here than she had done at dinner. She stands with her hands on the railing, looking straight ahead, as if she is urging the train onward, driving it over the plains.

"If you adjust the dial you can see farther." He reaches out to show her, though he is careful, she sees, not to stand too close. She uses the dial and what she first sees as a greenish, blueish blur, as if looking through a steamed-up window, resolves into a clear blue sky and below it a forest, where she can make out individual branches, silvery and thin and reaching upward as if to carry their leaves further toward the light.

A soaring, wide-winged bird appears, so suddenly that it feels as if she has conjured it into being.

"It's so clear… so close." Close enough to see the iridescence on the bird's reddish-brown feathers, a sudden shimmer of copper when they catch the sun. A bird of prey, its wingspan must be as wide as her outstretched arms. She thinks about the two-headed eagle, the imperial emblem, looking to the West and the East at the same time, one pair of eyes always open, always watchful.

From up here, she can see another line, branching away from the one they are on. She tries to follow it but it is swallowed up by the trees. She knows that other lines had been built back when the Company had grander ideas about exploration—visions of research stations in the interior, of trains travelling the length and breadth of the Wastelands. But the lines were soon abandoned, along with all those ideas, when it was decided the risks were too great.

"Do you ever imagine what it would be like," she asks, not taking her eye from the lens, "to follow those lines?"

"I try not to. The crew call them ghost rails. A rather dramatic name, I know, and the Company would rather we did not use it, but it seems to have stuck."

"And of course I know Rostov's thoughts about the dangers of the imagination."

"Ah yes, that it is best to think as little as possible. Advice I try to take, of course."

Advice that she had been expected to take all her life—don't think so much, don't ask questions all the time. Don't imagine.

In the distance a shadow is filling the sky. A moving, pulsing shadow, like an inkblot forming and reforming, twisting and turning in midair. Suzuki says something in Japanese that sounds like it might be a curse.

"It's beautiful." She can't help it. Birds. Hundreds of birds; no—thousands. The lone bird she had seen against an empty sky has become a rushing, seething mass, turning one way into a shadow then another into a gleaming, iridescent jewel.

"Is this normal?" she demands.

He looks through another of the scopes. "We have seen murmurations before, a relatively common phenomenon among this mutation, but a gathering in these numbers is…"

Mutation. A bird becomes another bird, a species changes behavior, color, size. How did Rostov put it? Rapid and geographically restricted transformation. It is hard to take her eyes from the birds. "What is it doing? They, I mean." But she's not sure anymore whether the birds are many or one.

"There's nothing to worry about," says the Cartographer, quickly, though he doesn't take his eye from the telescope. She has seen it before, this absolute concentration, when she had visited her father's workshop; when she had glimpsed the excitement he felt. She feels a wave of grief so strong that she has to clutch the scope for support. The pulsing cloud of birds moves across the sky, elongating then contracting then tumbling down like a drop of water, only to catch itself in midair and open like the wings of a butterfly. How do they know how to move, these birds? As if they are one mind working together. She imagines herself within it, her own wings spread wide, moving in a dance she only partly understands.

And the room darkens. At all the windows, feathers and eyes and sharp beaks. Beating wings on the glass. She and the Cartographer are at the heart of the murmuration.

"Look away, now!" Suzuki shouts to her, but his voice seems to come from a great distance, and she can't look away, there are bright-yellow eyes watching her, countless eyes, but all one; that same guiding mind, so utterly, utterly unfamiliar and yet irresistible. She can't look away; she doesn't want it to look away, and she is dimly aware of him stepping in front of her, his arms stretched out as if to encircle her without touch, but she doesn't want to be sheltered, she wants to see. Even amidst the confusion of feathers and claws she thinks of her father saying, Look closely, and she darts out from the Cartographer's protecting arms. She puts her eye back to the scope.

A single yellow eye looks back.

Then there is the sound of an explosion, from above them, and the movement of the birds changes, swirls away, as if the tower is a plaything the murmuration has held in its grip for a moment, then dropped. Light floods back into her lens and smoke drifts into the air from the gun tower and the dark shape of the birds twists and stretches off to the north. She feels Suzuki's hand on her back, guiding her away from the scope, his voice in her ear, but she can't make any sense of it, she can't make sense of anything but the eye in the lens. A mind, watching.