Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  He was unsure of the Council’s motivations, its reasons for remaining hidden. But it was enough to know that this weapon could not be wielded by the militia. And it was the best chance the city had. He could not deny it that.

  That was one thing.

  But more powerful by far, deep-ingrained in his gut, was something more base. A hatred. He looked up at Derkhan and remembered why he was her friend. His mouth twisted.

  I would not trust Rudgutter, he thought coldly, if the murdering bastard swore by his children’s souls.

  If the state found the moths, Isaac realized, it would do everything in its power to recapture them. Because they were so damned valuable. They might be dragged out of the night skies, the danger might be contained again, but they would be locked up once more in some laboratory, hawked in another foul auction, returned to their commercial purpose.

  Once again, they would be milked. And fed.

  No matter how ill-suited he was to tracking the slake-moths down and destroying them, Isaac knew he would try. He would not be party to the alternatives.

  They talked on, until the darkness began to leech from the eastern fringe of the sky. Tentative suggestions began to coalesce. They were all conditionals. But even hedged around with a hundred qualifications, the half-schemes grew and took shape. Slowly, a sequence of actions suggested itself. With a growing astonishment, Isaac and Derkhan realized that they had a kind of plan.

  As they talked, the Council sent its mobile selves into the depths of the dump. They rummaged unseen among the mounds of trash, to re-emerge carrying bent wire, battered saucepans and colanders, even one or two broken helmets, and great glinting piles of mirror, savage random jags.

  “Can you find a welder, or a metallo-thaumaturge?” asked the avatar. “You must make defensive helmets.” He described the mirrors that must be mounted before the lines of sight.

  “Yeah,” said Isaac. “We’ll return tomorrow night to make the helmets. And then . . . then we have a day to . . . to ready ourselves. Before we go in.”

  While the night was still fully ascendant, the various constructs began to creep away. They returned to their masters’ homes, early enough that their night’s journeys were unnoticed.

  The daylight had spread and the occasional guttural sound of the trains increased. The raucous and filthy early morning dialogue of the barge-families began, shouted across the water on the other side of the rubbish. The early shifts of workers began to trudge into the factories and abase themselves before the vast chains, the steam engines and juddering hammers of those profane cathedrals.

  There were only the five figures left in the clearing: Isaac and his companions; the ghastly lich that spoke for the Construct Council; and the looming Council itself, moving its segmented limbs sedately.

  Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek rose to go. They were exhausted and in varying degrees of pain, from knees and hands flayed by the barbed ground to Isaac’s still-shuddering head. They were smeared with muck and grime. They shed dust as thick as smoke. It was as if they burned.

  They stashed the mirrors and the material to make helmets in a place they would remember in the dump. Isaac and Derkhan looked around in confusion at the landscape so utterly changed by daylight, its threatening demeanour become pathetic, the half-glimpsed looming forms revealed as broken prams and torn mattresses. Yagharek picked his bound feet up high, stumbling a little, and walked unerringly towards the pathway from where they had come.

  Isaac and Derkhan joined him. They were utterly drained. Derkhan’s face was white, and she dabbed in miserable pain at her missing ear. As they were about to disappear behind the shifting walls of crushed rubbish, the avatar called out.

  When Isaac heard what the avatar said, he began to frown, and did not stop while he turned away and walked out of the Council’s presence with his companions, nor did he stop all the while he wound his way through the channels in the industrial midden and out into the slowly illuminated estates of Griss Twist. The Construct Council’s words stayed with him, and he thought them over, carefully.

  “You cannot hold on safely to everything you carry, der Grimnebulin,” the avatar had said. “In future, do not leave your precious things beside the railway.

  “Bring your crisis engine to me,” it had said, “for safekeeping.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “There is a gentleman and a . . . a young boy to see you, Mr. Mayor,” said Davinia, through the speaking tube. “The gentleman told me to tell you that Mr. Rescue sent him regarding the . . . plumbing in R&D.” Her voice faltered nervously over the obvious code.

  “Let them in,” said Rudgutter instantly, recognizing the handlinger passwords.

  He was fidgeting in his seat, moving from side to side in agitation. The heavy doors to the Lemquist Room swung ponderously open, and a well-built, harrowed young man stumbled in, leading a terrified-looking child by the hand. The child was dressed in a collection of rags, as if he had just stepped off the street. One of his arms was covered with a large swelling, coated in filthy bandages. The man’s clothes were of decent quality, but a bizarre fashion. He sported a pair of voluminous trousers, almost like those worn by khepri. It made him look peculiarly feminine, despite his build.

  Rudgutter looked at him with an exhausted, angry glance.

  “Sit,” he said. He waved a sheaf of papers at the odd pair. He spoke rapidly. “One unidentified headless corpse, strapped to a headless dog, both complete with dead handlingers. One pair of handlinger hosts, strapped back to back, both drained of intellect. A—” he glanced down at the militia report “—a vodyanoi, covered in deep wounds, and a young human woman. We managed to extract the handlingers—killing the hosts, actual biological death, not this ridiculous half-thing—and we offered them some new hosts, put them in a cage with a pair of dogs, but they didn’t move. It’s as we suspected. Drain the host, you drain the handlinger with it.”

  He sat back and watched the two traumatized-looking figures before him.

  “So . . .” he said slowly, after a little silence. “I am Bentham Rudgutter. Suppose you tell me who you are, and where is MontJohn Rescue, and what happened.”

  In a meeting room near the top of the Spike, Eliza Stem-Fulcher looked across the table at the cactacae opposite her. His head towered over hers, rising neckless from his shoulders. His arms lay motionless across the table, enormous weighty slabs like the boughs of a tree. His skin was pocked and marked with a hundred thousand scratches and tears that had scarred, in the cactacae fashion, into thick knots of vegetable matter.

  The cactus pruned his thorns strategically. The insides of his arms and legs, his palms, wherever flesh might rub or press against flesh, he had plucked the little spines. A tenacious red flower remained on the side of his neck from the spring. Nodules of growth burst from his shoulders and his chest.

  He waited silently for Stem-Fulcher to speak.

  “It is our understanding,” she said carefully, “that your ground-based patrols were ineffectual last night. As were ours, I might add. We have yet to verify this, but it appears that there may have been some contact between the slake-moths and a small . . . aerial unit of ours.” She flicked through her papers briefly. “It seems increasingly clear,” she ventured, “that simply scouring the city will not yield results.

  “Now, for many reasons that we have discussed, not least our somewhat different working methods, we don’t believe it would be particularly fruitful to combine our patrols. However, it most certainly does make sense to co-ordinate our efforts. That is why we have extended a legal amnesty for your organization during this collaborative mission. In similar vein, we are prepared to offer a temporary waver of the strict rule against non-governmental aerostats.”

  She cleared her throat. We’re getting desperate, she thought. But then, so, I wager, are you.

  “We are prepared to loan two airships, to be used after discussion with us on suitable routes and times. This is in an effort to divide up our efforts to hunt, as
it were, in the skies. Our conditions remain as previously stated: all plans to be discussed and agreed in advance. In addition, all research into hunting methodology to be pooled.

  “So . . .” she sat back and dropped a contract across the desk. “Do you have authority with Motley to take this kind of decision? And if so . . . what do you say?”

  When Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek pushed open the door of the little shack by the railway and fell into its warm shadows, exhausted, they were only a little surprised to see Lemuel Pigeon waiting for them.

  Isaac was surly and foul. Pigeon was unapologetic.

  “I told you, Isaac,” he said. “Don’t get confused. Going gets hot, I’m gone. But here you are and I’m glad to see it, and our deal still stands. Assuming you still insist on hunting those fuckers, I’m going to own you, and until then you get my help.”

  Derkhan glowered, but she did not indulge anger. She was tense with excitement. She glanced at Isaac quickly and frowned.

  “Can you get us into the Glasshouse?” she said.

  She told him, briefly, about the immunity of the Construct Council from slake-moth attack. He listened in fascination as she described how the Council had swivelled the crane behind the moth’s back, released it and pinioned the thing mercilessly under tons of rubbish. She told him how the Construct Council was sure the moths were in Riverskin, hiding in the Glasshouse.

  Derkhan told him the tentative plans.

  “Today we have to find some way to make the helmets,” she said. “Then tomorrow . . . we go in.”

  Pigeon’s eyes narrowed. He began to scribble designs in the dust.

  “This is the Glasshouse,” he said. “There are five basic routes in. One involves bribery, and two almost certainly involve killing. Killing cactacae’s never a good idea, and bribery’s risky. They talk and talk about how they’re independent, but the Glasshouse survives on Rudgutter’s sufferance.” Isaac nodded and glanced at Yagharek. “That means there’s loads of informers. Secrecy’s safer.” Derkhan and Isaac leaned over him, watched his hieroglyphs take shape. “So let’s concentrate on the other two, see how they pan out.”

  After an hour of talk Isaac could not stay awake any longer. His head slumped as he listened. He began to drool on his collar. His tiredness spread out and infected Derkhan and Lemuel. They slept, briefly.

  Like Isaac, they rolled unhappily in the muggy air, sweating in the close air of the shack. Isaac’s sleep was more disturbed than theirs, and he whimpered several times in the heat. A little before noon, Lemuel pulled himself up and roused the others. Isaac awoke moaning Lin’s name. He was fuddled with exhaustion and bad sleep and misery, and he forgot to be angry with Lemuel. He hardly recognized that Lemuel was there.

  “I’m going to get some company,” said Lemuel. “Isaac, you better get ready to prepare those helmets that Dee tells me about. We’re going to need at least seven, I reckon.”

  “Seven?” mumbled Isaac. “Who’re you getting? Where you off to?”

  “As I’ve told you, I feel safer with a little protection,” said Lemuel, and smiled coldly. “I put the word out that there was a little protection work going, and I gather there’ve been a few responses. I’m off to assess ’em. And I will guarantee to bring a metalhexer for you before the evening sets in. One of the applicants, or failing that there’s a guy who owes me a favour in Abrogate Green. I’ll see you both at . . . um . . . seven o’clock, outside the dump.”

  He left. Derkhan moved closer to Isaac in his exhausted misery and put her arm around him. He sniffled like a child in her arms, the dream of Lin still clinging to him.

  A homegrown nightmare. A genuine misery from deep in his mind.

  The militia crews were busy fitting enormous mirrors of polished metal to the backs of the airship harnesses.

  It was impossible to refit the engine rooms or change the layout of the cabs, but they covered the front windows with thick black curtains. The pilot would spin the wheel blind, instructed by the yells from the officers halfway along the gantry, staring out of the rear windows above the enormous propellers, into the angled mirrors that offered a confusing but complete view of the sky before the dirigible.

  Motley’s hand-picked crew were escorted to the top of the Spike by Eliza Stem-Fulcher herself.

  “I gather,” she said to one of Motley’s captains, a taciturn Remade human whose left arm had been replaced with an unruly python that he fought to quieten, “that you know how to pilot an aerostat.” He nodded. She did not remark on the obvious illegality of that skill. “You’ll be piloting the Beyn’s Honour, your colleagues the Avanc. The militia have been warned. Keep an eye out for other air traffic. We thought you might want to get started this afternoon. The quarries tend to be inactive before the night, but we thought it might be an idea for you to get used to the controls.”

  The captain did not respond. All around him, his crew were checking their equipment, checking the angles of their helmets’ mirrors. They were stern and cold. They seemed less fearful than the militia officers Stem-Fulcher had left in the training room below, practising aiming through mirrors, firing behind their own backs. Motley’s men, after all, had dealt with the slake-moths more recently.

  Like one of her own officers, she saw that a couple of the gangsters wore flamethrowers; hard backpacks of pressurized oil that burst through a flaming nozzle to ignite. They had been modified, as had her own man’s, to spray the burning oil directly backwards out of the pack.

  Stem-Fulcher stole another glance at several of Motley’s extraordinary Remade troops. It was impossible to tell how much original organic material was retained under the Remades’ metal layers. Certainly the impression was one of almost total replacement, with bodies sculpted with exquisite and unusual care to mimic human musculature.

  At first sight, nothing of the human was visible. The Remade had heads of moulded steel. They even sported implacable faces of folded metal. Heavy industrial brows and inset eyes of stone or opaque glass, thin noses and pursed lips and cheekbones glinting darkly like polished pewter. The faces had been designed for aesthetic effect.

  Stem-Fulcher had only realized that they were Remade, rather than fabulous constructs, when she had glimpsed the back of one’s head. Embedded behind the splendid metal face was a much less perfect human one.

  This was the only organic feature retained. Jutting out from the back end of those immobile metal features were mirrors, like a sweep of hair. They were held in front of the Remades’ real, human eyes.

  The body was at one hundred and eighty degrees to the human face, pistol-arms and legs and chest all facing the other way, with the metal head completing the illusion from the front. The Remade kept their bodies facing the same way as their unreversed companions at all times. They walked along corridors and into lifts with their arms and legs moving in a convincing automated analogue to a human stride. Stem-Fulcher had fallen deliberately behind them for a few steps, and watched their human eyes darting back and forth, their mouths twisted in concentration as they scanned what was ahead of them through their mirrors.

  There were others, she saw, Remade more simply, with greater economy, to the same purpose. Their heads had been twisted around in a half-circle, until they gazed out from their own backs over a twisted, painful-looking neck. They stared into their mirrored helmets. Their bodies moved perfectly, without fumbling, walking and manipulating weapons and armour with hardly stilted motion. There was something almost more offputting about their relaxed, organic motions below reversed heads than the solid artificial motion of their more thoroughly Remade comrades.

  Stem-Fulcher realized she was looking at the result of months or more of continual training, constantly living through mirrors. With bodies reversed as theirs were, it would have been a vital strategy. These troops, she pondered, must have been specifically designed and built with slake-moth husbandry in mind. Stem-Fulcher could hardly believe the scale of Motley’s operation. It would be no wonder, she thought ruefully, if, in
dealing with the slake-moths, the militia seemed a little amateurish by comparison.

  I think we were quite right to bring them on board, she reflected.

  With the passage of the sun, the air over New Crobuzon slowly thickened. The light was thick and yellow as corn-oil.

  Aerostats swam through that solar grease, eddying back and forth across the urban geography in a weird half-random motion.

  Isaac and Derkhan stood in the street beyond the dump’s wire. Derkhan carried a bag, Isaac carried two. In the light, they felt vulnerable. They were unused to the city day. They had forgotten how to live in it.

  They skulked as insignificantly as they could, and ignored the few passers-by.

  “Why the godsdamn did Yag have to piss off like that?” hissed Isaac. Derkhan shrugged.

  “He seems restless, all of a sudden,” she said. She thought, then continued slowly. “I know it’s bad timing,” she said, “but I find it . . . quite moving. He’s such a . . . an empty presence most of the time, you know? I mean, I know you get to talk to him in private, you know the . . . the real Yagharek . . . But most of the time he’s a garuda-shaped absence.” She corrected herself harshly. “No. He’s not garuda-shaped, is he? That’s the problem. He’s more of a man-shaped absence. But now . . . well, he seems to be filling up. I’m beginning to sense that he wants to do something or other, and doesn’t want to do something else.”

  Isaac nodded slowly.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “There’s definitely something changing in him. I told him not to leave and he just ignored me. He’s definitely becoming more . . . wilful . . . if that’s a good thing.”