Iron Council

by China Miéville

  She has never seen khepri before. —There are women here who’ve heads like bugs, she tells him. She visits the Ribs. —They’re bigger’n the biggest trees ever grew. They’re old and harder than stone, bones way up over the roofs, something dead and the whole city’s its grave.

  Ann-Hari takes New Crobuzon’s trains, the five rails and their offshoots, from Abrogate Green in the east to Terminus, to Chimer’s End, to Fell Stop and the Downs. —There’s a shanty all falling down below a hill and the forest comes right up to it and the rails go on into the wood but the trains won’t go there.

  There is a station in Rudewood on the useless tracks. It has > long been deserted. Judah knows of it, but has never seen it. Ann-Hari goes to the dangerous ghetto of Spatters, where the city’s few garuda live above the lowest of its subcitizens, and walks blithely through its stink and middened streets into the forest, and the overgrown remnants of the station, and comes back, taking the train to Dog Fenn to tell Judah. She is teaching him about New Crobuzon.

  She tells him about the Fuchsia House, about BilSantum Plaza and the Gargoyle Park, the domed cactus ghetto, the zoological gardens, and many of these things he last visited in his youth if ever. She tells him all the races that she sees. She loves the markets.

  Judah makes enough to eat, entertaining crowds with his hedge-magic golemetry. One day he makes a more sturdy figure from wood, with loose chain joints. He attaches strings to her limbs and now while his thaumaturgy makes her dance, he waggles a frame as if he is manipulating her. Judah makes noticeably more when punters think him a puppeteer than when they think he is animating matter.

  In rooms by the Kelltree Docks, they are woken each morning by the sirens of factories and the slow stampede of the workforce. Ann-Hari meets dealers. She comes home with wide eyes and the acid smell of shazbah on her. She stays away some nights. When she is with Judah she sleeps with him and takes money from him.

  She likes to walk. Judah walks miles with her, between onlooking houses, in the shadows of all the crossbred architecture. She asks him why things are built as they are, and he does not know the answers. Once he is with her as a khepri couple pass, their sashes plaited together, their headlegs rippling and sprays of bitter air emitted around them, their chymical whisperings. Judah feels Ann-Hari tense, and for the first time in his life he sees the strangeness of the khepri, hears the scissor-sounds their gnathic movements make. He sees the strangeness of everything.

  It is boomtime. There is money, and there is competition for pavement change. Judah dances his puppets beside singers and instrumentalists, tumblers and artists in chalk.

  It is winter but the city is freakishly warm. It is a languid season. In the red of tinted flares Judah’s golem performs for the students in Ludmead. The undergraduates are overwhelmingly young men, well-dressed uptown boys and a few studious clerks’ sons, but there are women among them, and even a few xenians. They walk by Judah’s high-stepping wooden dancer. He is only a little older than most of them.

  Some give him stivers, marks and shekels: most give him nothing. One young man attuned to the figure’s movements and the flows of thaumaturgons stops and sees that the marionette is a fake.

  —This is what I do, he says. —This is what we do here. I’m in the damned somaturgy programme. You got the face to come here and palm off your jury-rigged hexes?

  —Match me then, Judah says.

  Which is how the stiltspear sport of golem wrestling comes to New Crobuzon.

  The little crowd of students watch while the arrogant boy squints over his glasses at Judah, who is all ruddy and sinewed-muscled scrawn, dressed in third- and fourth-hand rags. Though they bray support for their classmate Judah senses their ambivalence, and realises these moneyed sons would almost rather their fellow, a middling boy from a journeyman family, lose to him the utter outsider. Sheer class sympathy almost makes him walk away, but money is being counted and his own odds are good: he bets on himself.

  He whispers to his golem, stutter-hisses at it like the stiltspear, and it takes the undergraduate’s earth-man apart. It is not a hard win.

  Judah counts his money. The loser swallows several times and approaches him. He has grace and intelligence. —Good win, he says. He even smiles. —You’ve some techniques, and some power to you. I never seen anyone conjure a golem like that.

  —I didn’t learn here.

  —I see that.

  —Try again? Another match?

  —Yes! Yes! Again! It is one of the other students. —Come back tomorrow, puppetman, and we’ll do it again, and we’ll find a better damn ’turge than Pennyhaugh to take you on.

  Neither Judah nor Pennyhaugh look at the interrupter. They only look at each other, and they smile together.

  It will never challenge the glad’ circuses, the illegal blood-halls of Cadnebar’s and its imitators, where enthusiasts of real brawl sports can watch knife bouts, two-on-cactus hack matches and bite fights. But Pennyhaugh and Judah become partners and systematise the games, and their league gains attention, and golem wrestling becomes a fashion.

  At first it is mostly students in the plasmic sciences come to the meets, then some of their professors. Then as word gets out autodidact somaturges and gutter hexers from the falling-down parts of town arrive. The sport is not particularly illegal but nor is it sanctioned, and like most such activities it is always on the point of being banned. It becomes a business very fast, and there are militia informers to pay off, and porters and university officials to keep happy. Pennyhaugh takes care of this.

  They are unlikely heroes, the enthusiasts: intense, nervous and studious. They meet in venues of increasing size. They specialise, stud their creations in blades or slabs of tin armour, or give them bodkin legs and serrated dorsal ridges. These are golemachs, fighting constructions, matched against each other weight for weight.

  Judah tops the rankings. He does not find it hard to win. His spare and coarse stiltspear techniques work. He loses a handful of times, but in that unforgiving laboratory he is quick to improve.

  —You’ve a rare talent, Judah, says Pennyhaugh.

  Pennyhaugh cannot beat Judah, but he can train him. He does not understand the alien stiltspear, but he can test them, and marry them to what he does know. He straps Judah to a thaumatograph, tests his cathexis, that concentrate furrowing of mind.

  —You’re strong, he says to Judah.

  Twice Ann-Hari comes to watch the bouts. She cheers for Judah and smiles when he wins, but the sport does not interest her. She is more for engines. She goes to the termini of the railway lines, to watch trains slow. She goes to those factories that will let her in and wanders among the workers, watching their machines.

  Judah likes winning. His skill excites him. For a while he and Pennyhaugh try the most antiquated sting, pretending to lose until his odds rise, but Judah is notorious fast.

  He is a star, Swamp-Taught Low. Another is Lothaniel Durayne, a professor of somaturgy who fights his feline tar-golems as Loth the Catman. They relish these stage names. There is the Dandler, a quiet woman Pennyhaugh says is likely a militia scientist. She gives her golemachs whipping chain tails. This troika exchange the top rank between them, but Judah keeps it most.

  The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.

  As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pennyhaugh and Judah amass good money. Golem wrestling is noticed by New Crobuzon’s press, and there are many newcomers. Judah is growing bored. He only fights Loth and the Dandler now. He watches how they animate their constructions. He listens to their hexes. He fights enough to make money, but mostly he fights to learn.

  Every time his golems move, Judah feels his connection to the stiltspear. —I want to know everything about this, Judah says. Pennyhaugh brings him to the university library, and shows him relevant texts. He reads the titles: Theories of Somatur
gy, The Limits of Plasmic Range, Beyond the Abvital Debate. —I want to know everything, he says.

  It is a sweet winter. Judah takes Ann-Hari ice-skating. She likes the way he is recognised by some they pass. —Swamp-Taught! one says. It makes Judah less happy.

  They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. Ann-Hari is not looking at him. Her eyes pass over his and she smiles, and it is a real smile, but she is not looking at him.

  Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.

  When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.

  Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fenn children run after him, with a few skinny cactus youths and leaping vodyanoi, and beg him to make golemachs for them. Sometimes he animates a squeezed-together handful of coins and lets it totter toward them, for them to watch and pick apart.

  Ann-Hari has no interest in learning to read, but when she discovers that he plumbs the newspapers for the progress of the Transcontinental Railroad Trust, she demands Judah read to her every day she is with him (there are more and more days that she does not come home).

  — . . . a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. —Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress . . .

  —What is Myrshock? Ann-Hari says. Judah stares. She knows nothing of the railroad’s shape, or its future.

  He makes her a map. —Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. —New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.

  Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging Ann-Hari’s. He thinks of the men all the time; he thinks of what he’s seen, that community of hammer-swingers, intervening in the land.

  The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.

  —The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. —They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?

  —No, says Ann-Hari.

  Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.

  She shrugs. —No, they don’t.

  Judah studies. With Pennyhaugh to guide him, he not only grows his capacities but begins to understand what he is doing. His approach remains gut and intuitive, but the laborious and esoteric texts make a kind of sense to him, and better his ability.

  — . . . what we do is an intervention, Pennyhaugh lectures Judah from his notes, —a reorganisation. The living cannot be made a golem—because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the static is to the active AM.

  Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.

  They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pennyhaugh keeps them in business, Judah thinks of other things.

  Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?

  He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.

  It is days since Judah has seen Ann-Hari. He realises suddenly that she has not merely found someone else to be with for some days but has gone. He knows where.

  She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history—its accreted stones and struggle—could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are Ann-Hari’s home.

  Ann-Hari has gone home to the rails and the perpetual train. She knows no prostitute militia will punish her. The X on Judah’s mirror in her lipstick is a kiss good-bye. She helped him see the city again and he is grateful for that. He discovers that she took a deal of money from him.

  The golem fights bore him. Pennyhaugh is gone more and more, liaising with bureaucrats in Parliament, which protrudes like a verdigrised nail from the meeting of the rivers. And the fights slow, and stop, and Pennyhaugh is more distracted, and has more money, and one night he takes Judah to a restaurant more sumptuous than any he has ever entered before, a sedate place in Ludmead where Judah in his street-finery feels absurd, and Pennyhaugh says to him, —There’s another way, you know, there’s another, ah, market for your golem skills.

  Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pennyhaugh is a government man now. Judah is without work, without the library. He is quickly forgotten.

  For some weeks Pennyhaugh sends him letters suggesting they meet. Judah declines in his ugly hand, just often enough not to be rude.

  In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.

  What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

  Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great deal: they tire him.

  He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?

  Judah thinks of Ann-Hari and reads that progress at tracks’-end is picking up again. There are questions in Parliament. The TRT and Weather Wrightby are censured for strange dealings. Workers have died in some accident, a gradient has been levelled in a way the inspectors cannot explain, and the heat-ripples and the lifeless zone for yards to either side raise questions the TRT will not answer. No one will say sacrifice, no one will say dæmon, but there is a growing sense that Weather Wrightby is a visionary of money and engineering who will not let geography or climate or politics block him. His plans are embedded in his company’s name, and they are bigger by far than this road.

  Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks
his name. Something will happen.

  Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.

  —What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.

  THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.

  THE PITY IT’S A DITTY

  TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE

  And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.

  —And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poorhouse do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.

  It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.

  A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.

  How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.