They worked forever. They did not sleep. They did not have eyes, so they did not need to close them.
The rattling in the dark was their song, the noise of their birth and the harbinger of their twilight. Here on Earth it was always rattling. Men had made the Mytro in their own image, and they had decidedly closed imaginations. If the Mytro had a shape, they knew it better than anyone, but they were forced, by men, by the Mytro, to maintain the charade.
They were called Nayzuns—the Nameless Ones. But they had names and they knew the Mytro like a governess knows her charge. The Nayzuns were made to know the shape, to build the shape, to complete the shape. In their dark world, the rails of the Mytro were not rails at all, but strings of energy connecting each living thing through the impossibility of space. They lived here in a massive Hangar at the edge of the Earth System. There were other systems, far away, but this one was theirs.
Now they all lifted their heads away from their work, like stalks of wheat bobbing away from a gust of wind. They glowed, gently and all at once, when something caught their attention. A few hours before, they had heard the rails tell of strangers on the Mytro. They had been listening for the strangers, and they had finally heard them, somewhere down the line. The strangers had broken a train with their weapons. If there was one thing that couldn't be condoned on the Mytro, it was an act of destruction. The Mytro was angry.
The broken train lurched into the Hangar, into their home.
A car with shattered windows slowed to a halt by 411's work area. Glass tinkled out of the metal frame and onto the ground, disappearing into the darkness. The lights inside the car were winking on and off, the oil-pumping mechanism that fed them failing intermittently, the tongues of flame dimming and rising.
411 was the train foreman. He called the younger ones to him, and they shuffled out of the dark.
411 knew that the oil tank had been ruptured somewhere and that oil was leaking onto the ground, the smell rich like dead, decaying leaves. Although 411 did not know this, the Mytro on Earth was built to calm the humans. It was a system designed to soothe the primitive minds of those who rode it. To show them the Mytro as it really was, a skein of light that connected the universe, would force them to face their own insignificance. The trains were easier.
The light from the car's front headlight was useless in the Hangar. The vaults of this room disappeared into darkness. No light penetrated the darkest quarters of the huge bay, and no thing with eyes had ever seen what was hidden there.
Whether the room even had a ceiling, really, was still in doubt. When the Nayzuns were created, they fell to the ground and began to work. When the Nayzuns died, the Mytro took them to a place where there was no mourning. But the Nayzuns rarely died these days. They were too busy, and they had not had a young one in many years. Instead, the Mytro simply brought them back in time to live out a few more years. It was a cruel fate—to work forever and never die—but the Nayzuns knew no other one.
411 had been working on Earth longer than most. His number was quite small as he had been created early in the history of the Mytro on this planet. He had seen it grow here on Earth, and he had seen the Mytro fail and disappear. He had seen it hidden away, then rediscovered. He loved it like his child, for he could have no children. The men above had no idea what sort of power they had right under their plodding feet.
411 looked down the track that was not a track. The train with the shattered windows swayed as the Mytro's machinery pitched it off the tracks. The car settled with a thump on 411's own small set of side tracks where it would be fixed. The younger Nayzuns were already hard at work, pulling out the broken windows and bringing new ones from the storage area. If there had been more light, they would have looked like gigantic, long-limbed spiders scrabbling over the varnished wood of the Mytro car, their pointed fingers brushing glass into dark holes near the work area and the pads of their hands softly scanning the surface of the train for imperfections.
The rails began to speak. There were men on the tracks now. They had an incomplete map, so they would soon be swallowed.
411 knew what this meant. Fools on the rails were dangerous. If they kept riding, they would break the tracks, and the Mytro would roar and erase them.
The Mytro was increasingly angry now, and cruel. Once, it tore down whole cities on a whim, brought floods and earthquakes where it could. It had, after all, the right-of-way.
411 remembered the Mytro, long ago, when men knew nothing of its powers. He remembered the first men that were sent howling down her tunnels.
The Mytro was their history entire. Their ancient stories, passed from father to child long ago, spoke of the Mytro as the Way. She appeared to them as a shining thread through the darkness, the one confirmation that the universe had a reason. There was matter and there was the Mytro. She had many names and many creatures claimed to control her, but now she was alone in her majesty.
The Nayzuns were her workers, bent to her. She fed them. They did not eat as humans did, but what the Mytro fed them was sufficient, and the others often brought nourishment on her rails that they could not get here. The Mytro turned them into beasts of burden, useful in all ways and specifically designed to survive only under its care.
So were they slaves? 411 did not think so, but now his way of life was being threatened. The humans were back.
Now, for the second time in a century, humans wanted to take the Mytro and have it for themselves. These men had maps, and they had knowledge of the Mytro that was dangerously incomplete. Their hunt would imperil everyone, including the Nayzuns.
The men were in the tunnels now, their anger and fear and desire cascading through the skeins like a terrible song plucked on a spider's web. He signaled to 227 farther down the tunnel to move away. The train barreled through, the Mytro complaining in its voice of rattling, squealing, and hissing steam. The Mytro spoke through the machines. It spoke through steel and brass and wood. The Mytro was angry.
The Nayzuns swarmed the train. In the dark, the scents of the intruders were as clear as the smell of fire. The girl's was sharp and floral. The men smelled like anger and fear. Over it all was gunpowder, the propellant that had caused the Mytro so much trouble in the past. 411 could still remember the day a dead human rolled into the Hangar. The Nayzuns had swarmed the train and then froze. They wanted so much to touch this human, a woman who had been stabbed, but they could not. The Mytro wanted them to have no contact with the humans. Humans had diseases, they had death, and, more importantly, humans had free will. The Nayzuns let the car roll back into the dark, and the Mytro swallowed the woman, taking her far from the Hangar, into parts of the skein they had never seen.
The girl's scent intrigued 411. He knew the girl was in grave danger, but he could do nothing. He walked down the center of the car, feeling for damage. The terrible smell of gunpowder was deeper here. The younger Nayzuns deferred to him and seemed to melt away as he passed. 411 was a sub-conductor. He could stop the trains at any time, but he knew it was not his place. The humans owned this stretch of track, and they would have to solve this problem themselves.
By the headlight of the shattered train, 411 looked like a stick man drawn by a lazy child, a mantis with long arms and longer legs, stretched out taut as a guitar string. His face, if he could be said to have a face, was one with his neck and he had only a mouth. His visage was horrific and angelic at once. He and his kind had been mistaken for demons for centuries. One man, long ago, fell down into the Mytro and returned to Earth, telling stories of demons manning the bellows of hell. After that, the Nayzuns rarely left the Hangar.
But something was drawing 411 to this girl. Was it her scent? Was it the crying of the rails when she was traveling? The rails felt a need to protect her. 411 stopped to listen. The Mytro would tell him what to do.
Suddenly, a wind blew up along the tracks and ruffled the Nayzuns like a gale. The rails again.
Find her, the rails sang.
411 spoke: I am at your command. But do I go to the humans?
Find her, the rails sang. She is important to us. She has the Keys. 411 wondered why the Mytro wanted her. Was the Mytro looking for sacrifices? 411 thought of the man he was hiding. The Mytro didn't yet know about this man, miraculously. Were the two connected?
411 whistled to 227 and the other Nayzun approached.
Something is the matter, said 411, his voice the whisper of a wire brush on steel.
227, an older Nayzun, had been repairing the tunnel walls with a dark material that glittered with starlight. 227 nodded.
What will you do? asked 227. You must bring his Key to us.
I will go up the tracks. Keep working. I will return.
Most Nayzuns never saw the inside of the stations. Only the old ones could do that, and that was where 411 had met the man and where 411 learned of his power. The young Nayzuns were relegated to simple work like tunnel repair, cleaning, and the like. They never felt the comfort of a cool wicker chair or a journey that wasn't predicated on their work.
227 turned toward the wall abruptly and continued to patch the tunnel walls. Nayzuns rarely stood on ceremony or engaged in small talk. Everything they could have said they had said. Their race was old and quiet as a night-shackled forest.
411 stood against the wall and waited for the next train to come. He hitched himself to it, spinning behind it like a wraith, and rattled through the dark of the tunnels to where he had heard the shots. He didn't have to ask the Mytro to take him there. The Mytro knew where to take him.