8. On Forms and Classifications

Henry Grey has slept badly, the pain in his stomach waking him in the middle of the night. Breakfast has done little to improve his mood, with under-cooked kippers and weak tea. But the atmosphere of the library carriage is soothing; the smell of the books, the thick green carpet muffling the relentless sound of the rails, the inviting depths of the armchairs. The only other occupant of the carriage is an elderly steward, sitting beneath a large engraving of the train's route. Grey examines the bookshelves. He notes with approval the selection of volumes on natural history, mostly English and French, and he quickly searches, as he does upon entering any bookshop or library, for the volume that bears his own name. Yes, here, on a lower shelf—On the Forms and Classifications of Mimicry in the Natural World. He picks it up to feel its solidity, the weight of all those hours lying unmoving on the grass to observe the bees in his garden and to prove, for the first time, that some were not bees at all but syrphidae, hoverflies—the weak taking on the guise of the strong, the mimicking of a more perfect form. This mimicry gave them advantages over predators and it was proof, he argued, that creatures strived to better themselves, to move gradually toward God's own image. He had been praised, lauded, invited to leave his Yorkshire cottage and to lecture in London and Cambridge. He closes his eyes and remembers the feeling of those rooms, hushed with expectation; that eager attention upon him. Then he opens the book to the engraving of his name and sees that someone has defaced it with scribbled words—A holy fool.

He slams it shut. When he spies Girard's treatise on adaptation and modification he grabs it from its prominent place and moves it to the darkest corner of the carriage. The steward watches him without comment.

After a while the door to the carriage opens and Alexei Stepanovich appears. Clean-shaven, the engineer could pass for a schoolboy; surely he should be slouched at the back of a classroom, daydreaming his sketches of engines, not carrying the safety of the train on his shoulders. Grey feels a stir of unease and turns away quickly. He hears the engineer say something to the steward in that strange mix of languages they seem to speak on the train, then the clank of a toolbox.

Grey searches the shelves until he finds the book he is looking for—A History of European Railway Bridges. Carefully, he takes an envelope from his jacket pocket and places it between the front pages. No one ever borrows this book, the engineer had told him, it is the perfect place. Grey presses the book shut, feeling the envelope fattening the pages inside. This is almost the last of his funds.

God had guided Henry Grey to the young engineer. Five months ago, broken and exhausted, Grey had been cast upon the unfriendly shores of the Trans-Siberia Company offices in Beijing, tramping the corridors in a desperate attempt to speak with someone in authority—with anyone who would hear his case that the train must be allowed to run again, that it was unthinkable that travellers such as he should be left with no swift means of return to Europe. But the offices had been filled with all manner of rabble, with crowds pushing and shoving, and door after door had been slammed in his face. The best he had managed was a meeting with a minor official who had inquired whether he could not simply travel back the way he had come. "Surely you are a man of means," he had said, "to have come all this way for your own enjoyment?"

Grey had wanted to weep. He had wanted to take the man by his lapels and shake him, but there had been a pain in his stomach that had been increasing daily, and he had barely managed to stumble from the mean little office before collapsing onto the marble floor.

When he had opened his eyes he had found a young man in the uniform of the Trans-Siberia Company kneeling beside him with a glass of water and a worried expression. As a stream of people had pushed past them, oblivious to his plight, the young man had insisted on taking him to the Foreigners' Hospital, where he had fallen into a period of restless sleep.

In half-waking dreams the train had carried him far into the Wastelands before stopping amidst a vast ocean of gently swaying grass. There had been a door that had opened at his touch, and he had stepped out into a silence and a peace that he knew to be God-given; insects humming in complex harmonics, majestic birds slowly circling in the air, and around him, a thousand beating wings. Eden, he had thought. Its profusion of forms the key to the wonders of Creation.

When his fever had eased, and he was able to sit up in bed, the doctors insisted that he must take better care of himself. He agreed, eagerly. He would treat his body and his mind with care, he promised, because they were gifts from God, and because a new certainty now burned within him. The Wastelands were not simply a means to an end, he realized; not just a danger to be endured, but an opportunity.

Over the next weeks, as he convalesced, he submerged himself in as much scholarly research on the Wastelands as he could find. Of course, much of it was the work of the Society, whose amateurish methods were all too apparent—a mere matter of speculation, for the most part; poorly referenced articles, and letters from rural clergymen. But more scientifically rigorous data was simply not available. Of course there had been expeditions, in the early days of the changes, far into the interior. It was human nature, after all—the desire to map, to collect, to understand. But none of the explorers ever returned, and soon all expeditions were halted. After that, it was only the Company that had access to the Wastelands, through their so-called Cartographer, and they guarded their findings jealously, doling out miserly snippets in an academic journal owned by the Company themselves. What discoveries must we be missing? he thought. What opportunities for learning, for understanding? What good is this secrecy to scientific progress?

A plan began to form in his mind. At the same time, he tracked down his rescuer, who turned out to be an engineer on the Trans-Siberian Express, earning his trust over bottles of sherry and discussions of the mechanics of the train.

What he had come to believe, explained Grey to Alexei, was that within the Wastelands he would find proof of his theory of mimicry—that within all things there is a striving toward a more perfect form. It was this striving that was behind the changes. The Wastelands, he explained, trying to keep his language simple so that the engineer would understand, can be understood in only one way—as a vast canvas for the illustration of God's teaching. A new Garden of Eden.

It had taken time, of course, to persuade the engineer of his way of thinking, and longer still to convince him of what needed to be done. How loyal the young man was, to a Company that saw him as no more than a cog in their machinery, who took his talent for granted—wasn't there so much more he could do? Couldn't he see the contribution he could make? That together, they could change the understanding of the world. "Our names will be remembered," he had said to the engineer. Isn't that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

Grey had him then—he had seen the awakening in his eyes. The next day Alexei had come to Grey's rented house, brimming with excitement, saying that he had worked out a way that it could be done—that he could cause the train to stop for just long enough to give Grey time to slip out and collect the specimens he needed. And that very day was when the Company announced the line would open again, and that the train would arrive in time for the Moscow Exhibition. More proof, if any were needed, that their plan was blessed.

Grey puts the book back on the shelf and wanders over to one of the tables, careful not to look up as he hears the engineer packing away his tool box and walking over to the bookshelf, as if wishing to browse the books himself. A door shuts. When Grey finally looks over, he sees that A History of European Railway Bridges has gone. He lets a warm, triumphant glow suffuse him. It is done. Yes, challenges lie ahead, but he will deal with them when the time comes. He will be guided. He has faith. He ponders upon the name of his theory. Grey's Natural Philosophy … No, no, too self-serving. New Edenic Thought… Yes, perhaps…

Grey comes out of his reverie to see that the young widow—Maria?—has entered the library and is asking questions of the steward, who stands eagerly to attention.

"… but how can you be sure it is safe?" she is asking. "Can the doors really be so strong? And the glass, can you know for certain that it will withstand… everything?" She flutters her fan in front of her face and the steward draws himself up even taller. Grey tuts.

"Nothing gets in through those doors, ma'am, you can depend on it, not the strongest creature what ever lived nor yet the cleverest lock picker. This train is better armored than all the bank vaults in all the world…"

"Nothing gets in or out without two sets of keys and a combination that changes every crossing," the engineer had said. "But I might know a way to get hold of them… On earlier crossings, not a chance. But now? Now I think there is a way."

Of course, getting out of the train is only the beginning.

"… and can guarantee that this glass would not shatter in an earthquake, ma'am."

"But there was a problem, wasn't there, on the—"

"Not going to happen again, ma'am. It was discovered who was to blame, very sad, he wasn't well. Now, new protocols—"

Grey coughs, pointedly. This is a library, after all.

"I do beg your pardon," says the young widow, and Grey waves his hand. He is inclined to be gracious this morning, now that his future is beckoning him from down the line, waiting for him. He steeples his fingers together and gazes out of the window at the grasslands. How filled with promise they are, beneath such a wide blue sky. He can almost feel the ground beneath his feet, the breeze in his hair, and all the wonders at his fingertips, about to be discovered. He takes a notebook from his jacket pocket and flicks through the pages of hand-drawn maps, copied meticulously from charts the engineer procured for him. All are carefully annotated, but only one is starred and marked with a red circle. Here. Out of all the miles of track, after careful consideration, here is the place he has chosen.

"Look! What's that?" At the opposite window the young widow makes no attempt to lower her voice. Grey sighs in exasperation, but of course cannot help but look. A pale-pinkish outcrop of rock, he thinks, at first, just beside the track, but it is moving—no, its surface is moving, as if it is alive with … He stands abruptly, and strides to the window where the widow is pressing her hands to the glass.

"It is a train," she whispers.

No,thinks Grey, it was a train, the shapes of its engine and carriages, though overturned and decayed, still recognizable. But now it is something else, beneath the lurching, scuttling mass of crab-like creatures, a whole colony of the things, their pale bodies clambering over one another so that the wreck seems oddly alive.

"It's best to try not to look," says the steward. "Or if you can't help yourself, keep hold of something while you do."

"What happened to it?" Grey wraps his fingers around the iron crucifix he keeps inside his breast pocket, next to his heart. The longer he looks at the wreck the more he thinks there is an order of sorts to the creatures' movements, like a hive of bees that revolve around their queen.

"The first crossings weren't always successful. There were accidents, derailments… And they had to just leave the engines there, of course, and now, well…"

"How do you bear it?" The widow's voice is unsteady. "Working here, being forced to see it. How do you keep coming back?"

The steward scratches his chin but he doesn't look out the window. "You get used to it," he says, unconvincingly.

"It is strange," says the widow; "though I have read about it so much, the Wastelands, I hadn't expected… It is the reminders of the human, of ourselves that…" She trails off.

Reminders of what can go wrong,thinks Grey.