Chapter 1: The Creation

As the world settled down, and soldiers and nurses returned from war, and influenza burned itself out, and funerals slowed to a trickle, in an old brick warehouse a massive frame of iron was taking on its shape.

It looked like nothing in particular at first, but as weeks passed it grew more and more magnificent.

This sort of engine doesn't have consciousness until they are first steamed. But there is a something there, even in the dim, even as they sit silent and soulless and dumbly waiting, even as they are built. A subconscious, if you will.

It wasn't even an engine yet, and it certainly had no soul, but as it was constructed, as it grew, each new part slotted into place gave it, night by night, a fresh wordless insight of the engine world. Awareness gathered round it speck by speck, like dust, or light, or oil.

Even before it became an engine, it had some knowledge of motion, rails, of sunlight, of thundering din, of the fathomless phases of the moon, of water, of coal, and, most of all, of fire. Even before it could scarcely be called an it, it yearned for fire—yearned without pain, yearned without impatience, the way that the earth itself yearns faithfully and anciently for the sun.

It became aware of others before it was a self. The men who welded it were shadow and murmur, and they would always afterwards be its nearest kin. There were other engines round too—in the large, dim, windswept, littered yard, with others being built, and others already mere pieces of what had once been, and one or two, during the process of its construction, that were real, working engines. But they were very remote. An engine's first contact with life is through humans. Other engines are companions, and companions can be very near, and very dear, and become another kind of family, often one far more important than the first. But an engine's first family, the one where there are no do-overs, the one that marks them forever, is not iron and steam, but flesh and blood.

When they first lit his fire, he didn't steam very well. But he was he then, waiting to be fully born, already fully content. Indeed he would not be so content as that for a very long time.

In those days, the designing engineer would almost always be present at the first steaming, and his would be the first face the engine ever saw. If you ever want to know the name of an engine's designer, ask them. Be prepared for them to wax a good while on the topic. There's no engine but wants to think their designer is the most brilliant in the world, and who longs to delight them as they are delighted by them.

This engine awoke from the primordial unconscious to the face of a handsome man, pinching snuff, seated to the side, glassy-eyed, not looking at him at all.

The human always speaks first. But it took a good quarter of an hour, and when the man did, he called to one of the voices behind the engine—inside the engine. "Any good?"

"Nothin'!"

The man swore and left without another word.

The third time they tried to light him up, the engineer was again there, as he was the fifth time, when he deemed the engine well-steamed enough to speak to his creation, thus granting the engine his ability to speak in turn.

"Eh? You with us?"

"Yes, I am." The engine was still new enough to wonder at the fact, and the wonder kept fear at bay, though the latter crept a little closer day by day.

"Aha!" said the engineer, who apparently did not realize that he had thus far succeeded four attempts earlier.

The engine stared at his maker. The man was dressed in shirtsleeves and rather shabby. The engine didn't exactly know this. He only felt a vague absence, and he tried to fill it with his still very limited vocabulary.

"What's your name?"

"Sir Nigel Gresley," said the man, with a sardonic smile. The engine didn't understand his expression, but it nevertheless poisoned all smiles for him for some years afterwards.

Still, even such limited interaction as this allowed the engine to start to grasp other faces and bodies and voices around him. Soon he even noticed the other engines. By the time he was first taken out for a run, he realized that he was quite different from the two that were currently operational, and even sensed a difference between himself and some of those who were still and cold, though they shared some resemblances.

"I'm awfully big," said the engine to himself. Then, more loudly: "Sir? What am I?"

There was a pointed groan from inside his cab. The man who usually steamed and operated him was actually rather kind to him, relative to the rest, but the engine still scarcely had a heart for anyone but his creator, who only made a rude gesture to the driver and said the engine had the great good fortune to be a Jersey Lilly of the G.C.R.

"That's my railway," observed the engine, grasping the significance of the letters as intuitively as he grasped the natural motions of his wheels and axles.

"No, old fellow. You have a different destiny. I have a special buyer for you."

The engine was very pleased, even as the driver observed to the engine that he should have to break five miles an hour first before he should be sent out anywhere.

The first special buyer, after weeks of negotiation that left Sir Nigel more and more bad-tempered, fell through. A second was procured almost before the first deal fell apart, but then this one did too.

The workmen in the damp and windy yard were rough and bluff, but not cruel. They told the engine to stay cheerful; talks with a third buyer were already afoot.

But the engine was already a year old. This is well past infancy for an engine. Some engines, who are put to work big jobs straight away, are already quite grown-up by then. He was idle and silent, and had mostly learned to feel disappointment, to feel sadness, to feel cold—he was often cold, for his fire was seldom lit—and, most of all, to feel loneliness.

When he did go out, it was to the little test line by the forest. Several different people tried to man his footplate and firebox, and get him up to speed. The engine himself wanted it very badly. When he was with his original driver, they often achieved fifty-five kilometers an hour, which was as high as they could safely run on such a short stretch (and, perhaps, too high). Finally, however, Sir Nigel decided that the engine needed to be able to run better no matter who was at his controls, and ordered that his boiler and firebox be switched out with another great new engine on site.

The two engines saw each other at a great distance. They never tried to speak to each other. The swap was made, and both were wordlessly curious to know who would come out ahead.

It was the older of the two engines who clearly "won" the exchange. He ran far better after the switch, and soon longed to be able to go out beyond the testing line. He longed for sunshine, longed for company, and most of all longed to be able to see just how fast he could go. "You're a Lord Nelson of the S.E.R. now," Sir Nigel told him, with satisfaction. He had another buyer on the hook. The engine didn't know quite why a buyer had to be on a hook, but he was too excited by this strange feeling of hope to puzzle it out for long.

He soon never saw the second engine anymore. Not in one piece.

That buyer fell through as well.

Another cold winter passed. Then another greyish summer. The engine spent a good deal of time cold and sleeping. Whenever his original driver was around, though—he was often in and out—and whenever Sir Nigel wasn't—which he often wasn't—then the driver would light his fire, even if there was nowhere to go.

The driver's name was Reginald… at least, it was Reginald in the same way Sir Nigel's name was Sir Nigel. The engine had begun to have his doubts, about the second. The other men mostly called Sir Nigel boss or sir, but sometimes another name or two would slip out. The engine never could remember those other names later, though he was on one occasion questioned pretty sharply about the matter. He had been rather precocious in noticing at all. Engines normally don't take such interest in human names, and this engine was far more curious to know if and when he should ever get one himself. He asked Reginald once, and Reginald had been rather surprised, but told him that it should be when he finally got sent to a railway.

Reginald would later doubt he had done the right thing in steaming up the lonely engine, and still more in having sometimes spoken with him. With so much time to think, and so little to do, it seemed to him that the engine started to become a little unnatural.

If he had been left cold, he should have done far less thinking, and perhaps not become so subtle…

Or perhaps he had been that way by manufacture. Reginald would have shared culpability there, too, however, as he had helped in the creation, and perhaps he hadn't been quite so steady a hand, with his welding.

Anyway, Reginald was rather sharp-tongued, and for the first year or two of his life the engine believed that Reginald must not care much for him, despite all those nice fires. (Having not yet been put to work nor ever seen a railway, the engine really had no idea why anyone should or should not get him into steam. Events—and lack of events—simply seemed to happen to him, all as random as rain.)

The workshop started to fill up with activity again. When Reginald steamed the big engine, the latter had the dizzy, disoriented sense that the workshop had done this before, other times, while he had sat cold and silent. It would be full and lively for two months or so, building or overhauling an engine. But he saw no other engines now, and he couldn't remember how long it had been since the last rush of workmen.

This time, however, they were working on him.

The engine went resigned and blank. He did not know what to feel about it. The faces were unfamiliar. He could not quite remember the previous craftsmen, but he still missed them very much. They had been kin. These were just strangers, and they were crawling all over him.

Soon they let his fire die again and lifted him into the air by two cranes, where he was hoisted for the better part of a week, while they worked his undercarriage extensively. It was frightening and uncomfortable. Then they replaced a big hunk of his frame, another swap, and that was stranger and more frightening still, and left him in a different, even larger shape than before. He spent days in the air, being all newly-welded together.

But it was all well worth it, for, when they returned him to the rails, he discovered that he had two new wheels!

"You're now a Pacific of no railway in particular," said Reginald dryly. "Congratulations."

"Oh, this feels fine!" the engine cried.

"The rails or the trailing wheels?"

"Both!" The engine had never been encouraged to ask for anything, but he could hardly help it. He'd not known it was possible to feel so sound and so right. "Oh, let's go for a test run right away! Please? Please?"

The engine realized that Reginald must rather like him after all, when he saw the look on his face. "Oh, very well," the driver grumbled, in a vain attempt to hide it, "it's not like I ever wanted to knock off home, anyway. I reckon I just live here. Well, I'll light your fire, then, and make arrangements. Try not to quite burst your boiler while you wait. And thank the men! It's not been an easy job."

The engine was far too shy of the unfamiliar men to obey. But he saw that they had overheard, as they were grinning, and rather pleased with themselves, as they (at least in part) re-organized the workshop.

Reginald and the man he had shanghaied into helping him tend the firebox were still rather dissatisfied with the results of all that work. The rebuild certainly had not been done by experts. But the engine only noticed the improvements. His new wheel arrangement felt right. The test drive ended all too soon, and he was too excited and under-used to sleep, but it was still a happy sleepless night, and a happy sleepless few days, waiting on news about the prospective buyer.

In the end, though, the buyer decided that his railway did not need a Pacific. Sir Nigel was most upset. In deference to his designer, the engine tried to pretend he was equally upset. But he was, at most, merely impatient to try his wheels again.