The dextrier slid through layers of air, creeping up into a thinner atmosphere. It opened its host’s mouth and rolled its tongue, nervous and ready to spitsear. It unfolded its host’s arms, held the pistol up and ready.
The sinistral probed the disturbed area. There was an alien hunger, a lingering gluttony. It was slick with the juices of a thousand other minds, saturating and staining the patch of psychosphere like cooking grease. A vague trail of exuded souls and that exotic appetite dribbled out through the sky.
to me to me sibling handlingers it is here I have found it, whispered the sinistral across the city. A shiver of shared trepidation rippled out from the sinistrals, the five epicentres, crossed and made peculiar patterns in the psychosphere. In Tar Wedge and Badside and Barrackham and Ketch Heath, there were rushes of air as the suspended figures flew across the city towards Ludmead as if pulled on strings.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Do not be alarmed by my avatar,” hissed the brainless man to Isaac and the others, his eyes still wide and unclear. “I cannot synthesize a voice, so I have reclaimed this discarded body that bobbed along the river that I may intercede with bloodlife. That—” the man pointed behind him at the enormous, looming figure of the construct that merged with the rubbish heaps “—is me. This—” he stroked his quivering carcass “—is my hand and tongue. Without the old cerebellum to confuse the body with its contrary impulses, I can install my input.” In a macabre motion, the man reached up and fingered the cable where it sank behind his eyes, into the clotting flesh at the top of his spine.
Isaac felt the huge weight of the construct behind him. He shifted uneasily. The naked zombie-man had stopped about ten feet from Isaac’s party. It waved its palsied hand.
“You are welcome,” it continued, in a trembling voice. “I know of your work from the reports of your cleaner. It is one of me. I wish to speak with you of the slake-moths.” The ruined man was staring at Isaac.
Isaac looked at Derkhan and Lemuel. Yagharek drew a little closer to them. Isaac looked up and saw that the humans in the corner of the tip were ceaselessly praying to the vast, automated skeleton. As he watched, Isaac saw the construct repairman who had visited his warehouse. The man’s face was a study of fervent devotion. The constructs around them were still and unmoving, all but the five guards behind them, the burliest of the construction models.
Lemuel licked his lips.
“Talk to the man, Isaac,” he hissed. “Don’t be rude . . .”
Isaac opened and closed his mouth.
“Uh . . .” he began. His voice was cold. “Construct Council . . . We’re . . . honoured . . . but we don’t know . . .”
“You know nothing,” said the shaking, bloody figure. “I understand. Be patient and you will understand.” The man backed slowly away from them over the uneven ground. He retreated in the moonlight towards his dark automated master. “I am the Construct Council,” he said, his voice quivering and emotionless. “I was born of random power and virus and chance. My first body lay here in the dump and ran its motor down, discarded because a programme had faltered. As my body lay decomposing the virus circulated in my engines and spontaneously, I found thought.
“I rusted quietly for a year as I organized my new intellect. What started as a burst of self-knowledge became ratiocination and opinion. I self-constructed. I ignored the dustmen all around me in the day as they piled the city debris up in bulwarks around me. When I was prepared I showed myself to the quietest of the men. I printed him a message, told him to bring a construct to me.
“Fearful, he obeyed and connected it to my output as I instructed, by a long and twisting cable. It became my first limb. Slowly it dredged the dump for pieces suitable for a body. I began to self-build, welding and hammering and soldering by night.
“The dustman was in awe. He whispered of me in taverns at night, of a legend, of the viral machine. Rumours and myths were born. One night in the midst of his grandiose lies he found another who had a self-organized construct. A shopping construct whose mechanisms had slipped, whose gears had faltered and who had been reborn with Constructed Intelligence, a thinking thing. A secret that the erstwhile owner could hardly believe.
“My dustman bade his friend bring the construct to me. That night those years ago I met it, another like me. I bade my worshipper open up the analytical engine of that other, my mate, and we connected.
“It was a revelation. Our viral minds connected and our steam-pistoned brains did not double in capacity, but flowered. An exponential blooming. We two became I.
“My new part, the shopping construct, left at dawn. It returned two days later, with new experiences. It had become separate. We had now two days of unconnected history. There was another communion, and we were I again.
“I continued to build me. I was helped by my worshippers. The dustman and his friend sought dissident religion to explain me. They found the Godmech Cogs, with their doctrine of the mechanized cosmos, and found themselves leaders of a heretic sect within that already blasphemous church. Their nameless congregation visited me. The shopping construct, my second self, connected and we became one again. The worshippers saw a construct mind that had wound itself into existence from pure logic, a self-generated machine intellect. They saw a self-creating god.
“I became the object of their adoration. They follow the orders I write for them, build my body from the materia around us. I bid them find others, create others, other godheads self-created to join the council. They have scoured the city and found more. It is a rare affliction: once in a million million computations, a flywheel skips and an engine thinks. I bettered the odds. I produced generative programmes to tap the mutant motor-power of a viral affliction and push an analytical engine into sentience.” As the man spoke, the enormous construct behind him brought its swinging left arm up and pointed ponderously at its own chest. At first, Isaac could not quite make out the particular piece of equipment it indicated among the many. Then he saw it clearly. It was a programme-card puncher, an analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other analytical engines. With a mind built around that, Isaac thought giddily, no wonder this thing’s a proselytizer.
“Each construct that is brought into the fold of me becomes I,” said the man. “I am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions are made in my valve-mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me. My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man is a limb, the anthropoid construct giant is nothing but an aspect. My cables and connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the self-organized machine.”
As the man spoke, the various constructs gathered in the little space began to troop a little closer to the fearful rubbish-figure sitting regally in the chaos. They stopped at seemingly random places and reached down with a suction pad, or a hook, or a spike or claw, and picked up one of the mess of seemingly discarded cables and wires that were strewn everywhere in the dump. They fumbled with the doors to their input sockets, flipped them open and connected.
As each construct connected the empty-skulled man would jerk and his eyes would glaze for a moment.
“I grow,” he whispered. “I grow. My processing power fattens exponentially. I learn . . . I know of your troubles. I have connected to your cleaner. It was collapsing. I have brought it into the intelligence. It is one of I now, completely assimilated.” The man pointed back at the rough outlines of hips in the giant construct-skeleton. With a start, Isaac realized that the flattened metal outline that bulged slightly from the body like a cyst was the reshaped body of the cleaning construct.
“I learnt from it as from no other me,” said the man. “I am still calculating the variables implied by its fragmentary vision from the Weaver’s back. It has been my most important I.”
“Why are we here
?” hissed Derkhan. “What does this damned thing want from us?”
More and more constructs were downloading their experiences into the Council’s mind. The avatar, the ragged man who spoke for it, hummed tunelessly as the information flooded its banks.
Eventually, all the constructs had completed their connection. They took the cables from their valves and moved back again. When they saw this, several of the human watchers came nervously forward, bearing programme cards and analytical engines the size of suitcases. They grabbed the cables the constructs had dropped, connected them to their calculating machines.
After two or three minutes this process was also complete. When the humans had stepped back, the avatar’s eyes whipped up until only white showed under his lids. His lidless head shook as the Council assimilated everything.
After a minute or so of wordless shivering, he suddenly snapped to. His eyes opened and stared alertly around him.
“Bloodlife congregation!” he shouted to the assembled humans. They rose quickly. “Here are your instructions and your sacraments.” From the stomach of the great construct behind him, from the output slots of the original programme-printer, slipped card after card, all punched meticulously. They fell into a wooden crate that sat above the construct’s sexless groin like a marsupial’s pouch.
In another part of the trunk, embedded at an angle between an oil-drum and a rusting engine, a typewriter stuttered at breakneck speed. A great coiling ream of paper spewed forth, printed closely, and below it a pair of scissors shot out on a tight spring like a predatory fish. They snapped closed, cutting off a sheet from the ream, then bounced back, thrust out again and repeated the operation. Little sheets of religious instruction fluttered down from the blades to lie alongside the programme cards.
One at a time the congregation came nervously up to the construct, making obeisance at every step. They stepped up the little slope of rubbish between the mechanical legs, reached into the crate and brought out a piece of paper and a sheaf of cards, checking the numbers to make sure they had them all. Then they backed quickly away and disappeared into the rubbish, returning to the city.
It seemed that there was no valedictory ceremony to this worship.
Within minutes, Yagharek and Isaac and Derkhan and Lemuel were the only organic lifeforms left in the hollow, apart from the ghastly half-living empty-headed man. The constructs remained all around them. They were quite still as the three humans shifted uneasily.
Isaac thought he saw a human figure standing on the tallest mound of rubbish in the dump, watching the proceedings, silhouetted profound black against New Crobuzon’s sepia-stained half-dark. He focused and there was nothing. They were completely alone.
He looked frowning at his companions, then moved forward towards the cadaverous figure with the pipe emerging from its head.
“Council,” he said. “Why did you tell us to come here? What do you want from us? You know of the slake-moths . . .”
“Der Grimnebulin,” the avatar interrupted. “I grow powerful, and more so daily. My computational power is unprecedented in the history of Bas-Lag, unless I have a rival in some far-off continent of which we know nothing. I am the networked total of a hundred or more calculating engines. Each feeds the others and is fed in turn. I can evaluate a problem from a thousand angles.
“Each day I read the books my congregation bring me, through my avatar’s eyes. I assimilate history and religion, thaumaturgy and science and philosophy within my data banks. Every piece of knowledge I gain enriches my calculations.
“I have spread my senses. My cables grow longer and reach further. I receive information from cameras fixed around the dump. My cables connect to them now like disembodied nerves. My congregation is dragging them slowly further out, into the city itself, to connect to its apparatuses. I have worshippers in the bowels of Parliament, who load the memories of their calculating engines onto cards and bring them to me. But this is not my city.”
Isaac’s face creased. He shook his head. “I don’t . . .” he began.
“Mine is an interstitial existence,” the avatar interrupted urgently. The man’s voice was dead of all inflexion. It was eerie and alienating. “I was born of an error, in a dead space where the citizens discard what they do not want. For every construct that is part of me there are thousands that are not. My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
“If the city comes to a stop, the variables will ebb almost to nothing. The flow of information will dry. I do not wish to live in an empty city. I have fed the variables of the slake-moth problem into my analytical network. The outcome is straightforward. Unchecked, the prognosis for bloodlife in New Crobuzon is extremely bad. I will help you.”
Isaac looked to Derkhan and Lemuel, took in Yagharek’s shadow-hidden eyes. He looked back at the shivering avatar. Derkhan caught his eye. Tread carefully, she mouthed exaggeratedly at him.
“Well, we’re all . . . damned grateful, Council . . . uh . . . how . . . Can I ask what you intend to do?”
“I have calculated that you will best believe and understand if I show you,” said the man.
A pair of massive metal clamps snapped into position on Isaac’s forearms. He yelled out in surprise and fear and tried to turn. He was held by the largest of the industrial constructs, a model with hands designed to connect to scaffolding, to hold up buildings. Isaac was a strong man, but he was quite incapable of breaking free.
He cried out to his companions to help him, but another of the huge constructs stepped ponderously between him and them. For an unclear moment, Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek hovered confusedly. Then Lemuel broke and ran. He raced away down one of the long trenches in the rubbish, peeling away to the east, out of sight.
“Pigeon, you bastard,” screamed Isaac. As Isaac struggled, he saw with amazement that Yagharek moved before Derkhan. The crippled garuda was so quiet, so passive, such a cypher of a presence, that Isaac had discounted him. He would follow, and he might do as he was asked. That was all.
And yet here was Yagharek now leaping up in a spectacular sideways motion, sliding round the side of the guarding construct, scrambling for Isaac. Derkhan saw what he was doing and moved the other way, causing the construct to dither between them, then stride purposefully towards her.
She turned to run, but a steel-sheathed cable whipped up like a predatory snake from the trash-undergrowth and whiplashed around her ankle, pulling her to the ground. She fell hard across the shattered ground, cried out in pain.
Yagharek was scrabbling heroically with the construct’s clamps, but it was quite ineffectual. The construct simply ignored him. One of its fellows moved in behind Yagharek.
“Yag, dammit!” shouted Isaac. “Run!” But he spoke too late. The newcomer was a similarly enormous industrial construct, and the wire-mesh that looped down and ensnared Yagharek was much too hard to break.
Out of the fray, the bloody man, that flesh-extension of the Construct Council, raised his voice.
“You are not being attacked,” he said. “You will not be harmed. We start here. We lay bait. Please do not be alarmed.”
“Are you out of your godsdamned mind?” shouted Isaac. “What the fuck d’you mean? What are you doing?”
The constructs in the heart of the rubbish-maze were moving back to the edges of the empty space, the Construct Council’s throne room. The cable that had ensnared Derkhan tugged her across the shattered ground. She fought it, shouting and gritting her teeth, but she had to rise and stumble with it to stop the laceration of her flesh. The construct holding Yagharek lifted him effortlessly and stalked away from Isaac. Yagharek thrashed violently, his hood falling from his face, his fierce avian eyes sending cold looks of utter rage in all directions. But he was powerless before that ineluctable artificial force.
Isaac’s captor pulled him into the centre of the widening space. The avatar danced around him.
“Try to relax,” he said. “This w
ill not hurt.”
“What?” roared Isaac. From the opposite side of the little amphitheatre, a little construct made its jerky, childish way across the rubble. It carried a weird-looking piece of apparatus, a rude helmet with what looked like a funnel expanding up out of it, the whole connected to some portable engine. It leapt up to Isaac’s shoulders, gripping painfully with its toes, and shoved the helmet on his head.
Isaac struggled, and shouted, but pinioned as he was by those mighty arms he could not possibly break free. It was not long before the helmet was fastened to him tightly, yanking his hair and bruising his scalp.
“I am the machine,” said the naked dead man, dancing nimbly from rock to engine debris to broken glass. “What is discarded here is my flesh. I fix it more quickly than your body mends bruises or broken bones. Everything is left here for dead. What is not here now will be brought here soon, or my worshippers will bring for me, or I can build. The equipment on your head is a piece like those used by channellers and seers, communicators and psychonauts of all kinds. It is a transformer. It can channel and redirect and amplify psychic discharge. At the moment, it is set to augment and radiate.
“I have adjusted it. It is much stronger than those at use in the city.
“You remember the Weaver warned you that the slake-moth you raised is hunting you? It is a crippled one, a stunted outcast. It cannot track you without help.”
The man looked at Isaac. Derkhan was shouting something in the background, but Isaac was not listening, could not take his eyes from the looming eyes of the avatar.
“You will see what we can do,” said the man. “We are going to help it.”
Isaac did not hear his own howl of outrage and fear. A construct reached forward and turned on the engine. The helmet vibrated and hummed so hard and loud that Isaac’s ears hurt.
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