Car Forty-One

Nobody on the train remembered why it could not stop, but everybody agreed that it couldn't, and on the train that was the same as a law. Joss was born in Car Forty-One, which was a sleeping car, which meant he was born to a family of sleepers. That was how it worked. The train was long, longer than anyone had counted, and every car had its people, and the people of a car did the work of that car forever. The sleeping cars kept the beds. The garden cars grew the food. The water cars ran the pipes. You were born into your car and you worked your car and one day you died and they gave you to the track, and the train went on, because the train always went on. It ran in a loop. Joss knew that much. The old people in Forty-One said so, and the old people in Forty-One were never wrong about anything except the things that mattered. The train ran a great loop through the dark and the snow and the empty places, and it never reached anywhere, because reaching somewhere would mean stopping, and the train could not stop. Joss was twelve when he started asking why. It was a bad question to ask. He worked that out fast. When he asked his mother why the train could not stop she got the closed-door look and told him to mind the beds. When he asked old Pirret, who was the oldest person in Forty-One and claimed to have once walked as far as Car Twelve, Pirret got quiet and said some questions were heavy and a boy should not pick up heavy things he could not put down. But Joss had a window seat. That was the thing. His bed in Forty-One was by a window, and a boy who sleeps by a window for twelve years sees a thing the old people had stopped seeing, which was the outside. And here was what Joss had seen, and what he could not stop thinking about, and what made him start asking the bad question. The loop was not a loop. He had counted. He had counted for two years, every landmark, every dead tower and broken bridge and strange black hill the train passed in the dark. If the train ran a loop, the landmarks should come round again. The same dead tower, every so often. The same bridge. They never came round again. In two years of counting, Joss had never once seen the same thing twice. The train was not running in a circle. The train was running in a straight line, and it had been running in a straight line for as long as anyone had been alive, and it was going somewhere, and nobody on the whole long train would say where. Joss decided, the winter he turned fourteen, that he was going to find the front of the train. It was the most forbidden thing a person could decide. You did not leave your car. You especially did not go forward. Forward was toward the engines — sixteen engines, the old people said, sixteen engines pulling the whole impossible weight of the world — and nobody went toward the engines, and nobody who minded the beds had ever met a single person who had. But somebody was driving the train. That was the thought Joss could not put down, the heavy thought, the one Pirret had warned him about. Somebody was driving it. A train did not run a straight line through the dark for a hundred years by itself. Somebody, sixteen cars up or sixty or six hundred, was at the front, deciding where the world went. And on the night Joss finally packed a bag and stood at the forward door of Car Forty-One with his hand on the cold latch, he understood the real shape of the bad question at last. It was not why can't the train stop. It was: who, exactly, does not want it to.