Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  “This,” he said heavily, “is a collection of heliotypes taken nearly a hundred years ago. It was these helios, in large part, that put a stop to Torque experiments in New Crobuzon.”

  Yagharek reached out slowly and turned the pages. He did not speak.

  “This was supposed to be a secret research mission, to see the effects of the war a hundred years on,” continued Isaac. “Little group of militia, couple of scientists and a heliotypist went upcoast in a spy-dirigible, took some prints from the air. Then some of them were lowered into the remains of Suroch to take some up-close shots.

  “Sacramundi, the heliotypist, was so . . . appalled . . . he printed five hundred copies of his report at his own expense. Distributed it to bookshops gratis. Bypassed the mayor and Parliament, laid it out in front of the people . . . Mayor Turgisadi was screaming mad, but there was nothing he could do.

  “There was demonstrations, then the Sacramundi Riots of ’89. Pretty much forgotten now, but it damn-near brought the government down. A couple of the big concerns putting money into the Torque programme—Penton’s, that still owns the Arrowhead Mines, that was the biggest—anyway, they got scared and pulled out, and the thing collapsed.

  “This, Yag my son,” Isaac indicated the book, “is why we ain’t using Torque.”

  Yagharek slowly turned the pages. Sepia images of ruin passed before them.

  “Ah . . .” Isaac brought his finger down on a drab panorama of what looked like crushed glass and charcoal. The heliotype was taken from very low in the air. A few of the larger shards that littered the enormous, perfectly circular plain were visible, suggesting that the desiccated debris was the remains of once-extraordinary twisted objects.

  “Now this is what’s left of the heart of the city. That’s where they dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That’s what they said put an end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they’d been over for a year before that, since New Crobuzon bombarded Suroch with Torque bombs. See, they dropped the colourbombs twelve months later to try to hide what they’d done . . . only one went into the sea and two didn’t work, so with only one left, they only cleared the central square mile or so of Suroch. These bits you can see . . .” He indicated low rubble at the edge of the circular plain. “From thereon out the ruins are still standing. That’s where you can see the Torque.”

  He indicated that Yagharek should turn the page. Yagharek did so, and something clucked deep in his throat. Isaac supposed it was the garuda equivalent of a sudden intake of breath. Isaac looked briefly at the picture, then looked up, not too quickly, at Yagharek’s face.

  “Those things in the background like melting statues used to be houses,” he said levelly. “The thing you’re looking at, as far as they could work out, is descended from the domestic goat. Apparently they used to keep them as pets in Suroch. This could be second, tenth, twentieth generation post-Torque, obviously. We don’t know how long they live.”

  Yagharek stared at the dead thing in the heliotype.

  “They had to shoot it, he explains in the text,” Isaac went on. “It killed two of the militia. They had a go at an autopsy, but those horns in its stomach weren’t dead, even though the rest of it was. They fought back, nearly killed the biologist. Do you see the carapace? Weird splicing going on there.” Yagharek nodded slowly.

  “Turn the page, Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea what it used to be. Might have been spontaneously generated in the Torque explosion. But I think those gears there are descended from train engines.” He tapped the pages gently. “The . . . uh . . . best is yet to come. You haven’t seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what may once have been human.”

  Yagharek was meticulous. He turned every single page. He saw furtive shots that had been stolen from behind walls, and vertiginous views from the air. A slow kaleidoscope of mutation and violence, petty wars fought between unfathomable monstrosities over no-man’s-lands of shifting slag and nightmare architecture.

  “There were twenty militia, Sacramundi the heliotypist and three research scientists, plus a couple of engineers who stayed in the airship the whole time. Seven militia, Sacramundi and one chymist came out of Suroch. Some were Torque-wounded. By the time they got back to New Crobuzon one militiaman had died. Another had barbed tentacles where his eyes should be, and pieces of the scientist’s body were disappearing every night. No blood, no pain, just . . . smooth holes in her abdomen or arm or whatever. She killed herself.”

  Isaac remembered first hearing the story told as an anecdote by an unorthodox history professor. Isaac had chased it up, following a trail of footnotes and old newspapers. The history had been forgotten, transmuted into emotional blackmail for children—“Be good or I’ll send you to Suroch where the monsters are!” It took a year and a half before Isaac saw a copy of Sacramundi’s report, and another three before he could match the price asked for it.

  He thought he recognized some of the thoughts flickering almost invisibly under Yagharek’s impassive skin. They were the ideas every unorthodox undergraduate had at some time entertained.

  “Yag,” Isaac said softly, “we ain’t going to use the Torque. You might be thinking ‘You still use hammers and some people are murdered with them.’ Right? Eh? ‘Rivers can flood and kill thousands or they can drive water turbines.’ Yes? Trust me . . . speaking as one who used to think the Torque was terribly exciting . . . it’s not a tool. It’s not a hammer, it’s not like water. It’s . . . the Torque is rogue power. We’re not talking crisis energy here, right? Get that right out of your head. Crisis is the energy underpinning the whole of physics. Torque’s not about physics. It’s not about anything. It’s . . . it’s an entirely pathological force. We don’t know where it comes from, why it appears, where it goes. All bets are off. No rules apply. You can’t tap it—well, you can try, but you’ve seen the results—you can’t play with it, you can’t trust it, you can’t understand it, you sure as godsdamn-fuck can’t control it.”

  Isaac shook his head in irritation. “Oh sure, there’ve been experiments and whatnot, they reckon they’ve got techniques to shield from some effects, heighten others, and some of them might even work a little bit. But there’s never been a Torque experiment that didn’t end in . . . well, in tears, at the very least. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one kind of experiment we should be doing with Torque, and that’s how to avoid it. Either stop it in its tracks, or run like Libintos with the drakows on his tail.

  “Five hundred years ago, a while after the Cacotopic Stain opened, there was a mild Torque storm that swept down from somewhere at sea, in the north-east. It hit New Crobuzon for a while.” Isaac shook his head slowly. “Nothing in the league of Suroch, obviously, but still enough for an epidemic of monstrous births and some very strange tricks of cartography. All the affected buildings were pulled down sharpish. Very sensible in my view. That’s when they drew up plans for the cloudtower—didn’t want to leave the weather to chance. But that’s broke now, and we’re fucked if we get any more random Torque currents. Fortunately, they seem to be getting rarer and rarer over the centuries. They sort of peaked around the 1200s.”

  Isaac waved his hands at Yagharek, warming to his task of denunciation and explanation.

  “You know, Yag, when they realized something was up down south in the scrubland—and it didn’t take them long to clock it was a massive Torque-rift—there was a lot of crap talked about what to call it, and the arguments still haven’t died, half a fucking millennium on. Someone named it the Cacotopic Stain, and the moniker stuck. I remember being told in college that it was a terrible populist description, because Cacotopos—Bad Place, basically—was moralizing, that the Torque was neither good nor bad, so on. Thing is . . . obviously, that’s right at one level, right? Torque’s not evil . . . it’s mindless, it’s motiveless. That’s what I reckon anyway—others disagree.

  “But even if that’s true, seems to me that western Ragamoll is precisely a Cacotopos. That’s a vast stretch
of land which is totally beyond our power. There’s no thaumaturgy we can learn, no techniques to perfect, which’ll let us do anything with that place. We’ve just got to stay the fuck out and hope it eventually ebbs away. It’s a huge fucking badland crawling with Inchmen—which admittedly live outside Torque-zones, as well, but seem particularly happy there—and other things I wouldn’t even bother trying to describe. So you’ve got a force that makes a total mockery of our sentience. That’s ’bad’ as far as I’m concerned. It could be the fucking definition of the word. See, Yag . . . it pains me to say this, it really does, I mean I’m a fucking rationalist . . . but the Torque is unknowable.”

  With a huge gush of relief, Isaac saw that Yagharek was nodding. Isaac nodded too, fervently.

  “Partly selfish, all this, you understand,” Isaac said, with sudden grim humour. “I mean, I don’t want to be arsing around with experiments and end up turning into some . . . I don’t know, some revolting thing. Just too bloody risky. We’ll stick to crisis, all right? On which topic, I’ve got some stuff to show you.”

  Isaac gently took Sacramundi’s report from Yagharek’s hands and returned it to the shelves. He opened a desk drawer and brought out his tentative blueprint.

  He placed it in front of Yagharek, then hesitated and drew away slightly.

  “Yag, old son,” he said. “I really have to know . . . is that behind us, now? Are you . . . satisfied? Convinced? If you’re going to fuck about with Torque, for Jabber’s sake tell me now and I’ll bid you goodbye . . . and my condolences.”

  He studied Yagharek’s face with troubled eyes.

  “I have heard what you say, Grimnebulin,” said the garuda, after a pause. “I . . . respect you.” Isaac smiled humourlessly. “I accept what you say.”

  Isaac began to grin, and would have responded, except that Yagharek was looking out of the window with a melancholy stillness. His mouth was open for a long time before he spoke.

  “We know of the Torque, we garuda.” He paused lengthily between sentences. “It has visited the Cymek. We call it rebekhlajhnar-h’k.” The word was spat out with a harsh cadence like angry birdsong. Yagharek looked Isaac in the eye. “Rebekh-sackmai is Death: ‘the force that ends.’ Rebekh-kavt is Birth: ‘the force that begins.’ They were the First Twins, born to the worldwomb after union with her own dream. But there was a . . . a sickness . . . a tumour—” he paused to savour the correct word as it occurred to him “—in the earthbelly with them. Rebekh-lajhnar-h’k tore its way out of the worldwomb just behind them, or perhaps at the same time, or perhaps just before. It is the . . .” He thought hard for a translation. “The cancer-sibling. Its name means: ‘the force that cannot be trusted.’ “

  Yagharek did not tell the folk story in any incantatory, shamanic tones, but in the deadpan of a xenthropologist. He opened his beak wide, closed it abruptly, then opened it again.

  “I am an outcast, a renegade,” Yagharek continued. “It is . . . no surprise . . . if I turn my back on my traditions, perhaps . . . But I must learn when to turn to face them again. Lajhni is ‘to trust,’ and ‘to bind firm.’ The Torque cannot be trusted, and nor can it be bound. It is uncontainable. I have known that since I first knew the stories. But in my . . . I . . . I am eager, Grimnebulin. Perhaps I turn too quickly to things from which I would once have recoiled. It is . . . hard . . . being between worlds . . . being of no world. But you have made me remember what I have always known. As if you were an elder of my band.” There was one last, long pause. “Thank you.”

  Isaac nodded slowly.

  “Not at all . . . I’m . . . mighty relieved to hear all that, Yag. More than I can say. Let’s . . . say no more about it.” He cleared his throat and prodded the diagram. “I’ve some fascinating stuff to show you, old son.”

  In the dusty light under Isaac’s walkway, the repairman from Orriaben’s constructs teased the innards of the broken cleaning machine with screwdriver and solder. He kept up a mindless jaunty whistling, a trick that took no thought at all.

  The sound of the consultation above reached him as the faintest bass murmur, interspersed with an occasional cracked utterance. He looked up in surprise, briefly, at this latter voice, but quickly returned to the matter in hand.

  A brief examination of the mechanisms of the construct’s internal analytical engine confirmed the basic diagnosis. Apart from the usual age-related problems of cracked joints, rust and worn bristles—all of which the repairman quickly patched up—the construct had contracted some kind of virus. A programme card incorrectly punched or a slipped gear deep within the steam-driven intelligence engine had led to a set of instructions feeding back into themselves in an infinite loop. Activities the construct should have been able to carry out as a reflex, it had started to pore over, to attempt to extract more information or more complete orders. Seized by paradoxical instructions or a surfeit of data, the cleaning construct was paralysed.

  The engineer glanced up at the wooden floor above him. He was ignored.

  He felt his heart judder with excitement. Viruses came in a variety of forms. Some simply closed down the workings of the machine. Others led the mechanisms to perform bizarre and pointless tasks, the result of a newly programmed outlook on everyday information. And others, of which this was a perfect, a beautiful specimen, paralysed constructs by making them recursively examine their basic behavioural programmes.

  They were bedeviled by reflection. The seeds of self-consciousness.

  The repairman reached into his case and brought out a set of programme cards, fanned them expertly. He whispered a prayer.

  His fingers working at astonishing speed, the man loosened various valves and dials in the construct’s core. He levered open the protective covering on the programme input slot. He checked that there was enough pressure in the generator to power the receiving mechanism of the metal brain. The programmes would load into the memory, to be actualized throughout the construct’s processors when it was switched on. Quickly, he slid first one card, then another and another into the opening. He felt the ratcheting spring-loaded teeth rotate their way along the stiff board, slotting into the little holes that translated into instructions or information. He paused between each card to make sure that the data loaded correctly.

  He shuffled his little deck like a cardsharp. He sensed the minuscule jerks of the analytical engine through the fingertips of his left hand. He felt for faulty input, for broken teeth or stiff, unoiled moving parts that would corrupt or block his programmes. There were none. The man could not forebear from hissing triumphantly. The construct’s virus was entirely the result of information-feedback, and not any kind of hardware failure. That meant that the cards with which the man was plying the engine would all be read, their instructions and information loaded into the sophisticated steam-engine brain.

  When he had pushed each carefully selected programme card into the input slot, each in considered order, he punched a brief sequence of buttons on the numbered keys wired up to the cleaning machine’s analytical engine.

  The man closed the lid on the engine and resealed the construct’s body. He replaced the twisted screws which held the hatch in place. He rested his hands on the construct’s lifeless body for a moment. He heaved it upright, stood it on its treads. He gathered his tools.

  The man stepped back into the center of the room.

  “Um . . . ’Scuse me, squire,” he yelled.

  There was a moment of silence, then Isaac’s voice boomed out.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m all done. Problems should be over. Just tell Mr. Serachin to load up the boiler with a bit of juice, then switch the old thing back on. Lovely models, the EKBS.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure they are,” came the response. Isaac appeared at the railing. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked impatiently.

  “No, guv, that’s about it. We’ll invoice Mr. Serachin within the week. Cheerio, then.”

  “Right, bye. Thanks very much.”

 
“Don’t mention it, sir,” the man began, but Isaac had already turned and walked back out of sight.

  The repairman walked slowly to the door. He held it open and looked back at where the construct lay face down in the shadows of the big room. The man’s eyes flickered momentarily upstairs to check that Isaac was gone, then he moved his hands to trace out some symbol like interlocking circles.

  “Virus be done,” he whispered, before walking out into the warm noon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “What am I looking at?” asked Yagharek. As he held the diagram he cocked his head in a shockingly avian motion.

  Isaac took the sheet of paper from him and turned it the right way up.

  “This, old son, is a crisis conductor,” Isaac said grandly. “Or at least, a prototype of one. A fucking triumph of applied crisis physico-philosophy.”

  “What is it? What does it do?”

  “Well, look. You put whatever it is you want . . . tapped, in here.” He indicated a scrawl representing a belljar. “Then . . . well, the science is complicated, but the gist of it . . . let’s see.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “This boiler’s kept very hot, and it powers a set of interlocking engines here. Now, this one’s loaded up with sensory equipment that can detect various types of energy fields—heat, elyctrostatic, potential, thaumaturgic emissions—and represents them in mathematical form. Now, if I’m right about the unified field, which I am, then all these energy forms are various manifestations of crisis energy. So the job of this analytical engine here is to calculate what kind of crisis energy field is present given the various other fields present.” Isaac scratched his head.

  “It’s fucking complicated crisis maths, old son. That’s going to be the hardest part, I reckon. The idea is to have a programme that can say ‘well, there’s so much potential energy, so much thaumaturgic, and whatnot, that means the underlying crisis situation must be such-and-such.’ It’s going to try to translate the . . . uh . . . mundane, into the crisis form. Then—and this is another sticking point—the given effect that you’re after also has to be translated into mathematical form, into some crisis equation, which is fed into this computational engine here. Then what you’re doing is using this, which is powered by a combination of steam or chymistry and thaumaturgy. It’s the crux of the thing, a converter to tap the crisis energy and manifest it in its raw form. You then channel that into the object.” Isaac was becoming more and more excited as he talked about the project. He could not help himself: for a moment, his elation at the massive potential for his research, the sheer scale of what he was doing, defeated his resolve to see only the immediate project.