The Construct Council had sentience, but no feelings. It was assimilating new data, that was all. It was calculating possibilities.
He told it that the monkey-constructs had been destroyed and the avatar’s body spasmed particularly sharply, as the information flooded back down the cable into the hidden analytical engines of the Council. Without those constructs, it could not download the experience. It relied on Isaac’s reports.
As once before, Isaac thought he glimpsed a human figure fleeting in the rubbish around him, but the apparition was gone in an instant.
Isaac told the Council of the Weaver’s intervention, and then, finally, began to explain his plan. The Council, of course, was quick to understand.
The avatar began to nod. Isaac thought he could feel infinitesimal movements in the ground under him, as the Council itself began to shift.
“Do you understand what I need from you?” said Isaac.
“Of course,” replied the Construct Council in the avatar’s reedy quaver. “And I will be linked directly to the crisis engine?”
“Yes,” said Isaac. “That’s how this is going to work. I forgot some of the components of the crisis engine when I left it with you, which is why it wasn’t complete. But that’s just as well, because when I saw them, they gave me the idea for all this. But listen: I need your help. If this is going to work we need the maths to be exact. I brought my analytical engine with me from the laboratory, but it’s hardly a top-notch model. You, Council, are a network of damn sophisticated calculating engines . . . right? I need you to do some sums for me. Work out some functions, print up some programme cards. And I need them perfect. To an infinitesimal degree of error. All right?”
“Show me,” said the avatar.
Isaac pulled out two sheets of paper. He walked over to the avatar, holding them out. In the dump’s smell of oil and chymical mould and warming metal, the organic stink of the avatar’s slowly collapsing body was shocking. Isaac creased his nose in disgust. But he steeled himself and stood beside the rotting, half-alive carcass and explained the functions he had outlined.
“This page here is several equations I can’t get the answers to. Can you read them? They’re to do with the mathematical modelling of mental activity. This second page is more tricky. This is the set of programme cards I need. I’ve tried to lay out each function as exactly as I can. So here for example . . .” Isaac’s stubby finger moved along a line of complicated logic symbols. “This is ‘find data from input one; now model data.’ Then here we have the same demand for input two . . . and this really complex one here: ‘compare prime data.’ Then over here are the constructive, remodelling functions.
“Is that all comprehensible?” he said, stepping back. “And can you do it?”
The avatar took the papers and scanned them carefully. The dead man’s eyes moved in a smooth left-right-left motion along the page. It was seamless until the avatar paused and shuddered as data welled along the cable to the Construct’s hidden brain.
There was a motionless moment, and then the avatar said: “This can all be done.”
Isaac nodded in curt triumph. “We need it . . . well . . . now. As soon as possible. I can wait. Can you do that?”
“I will try. And then as evening falls and the slake-moths return, you will turn on the power, and you will connect me. You will link me up to your crisis engine.”
Isaac nodded.
He fumbled in his pocket and drew out another piece of paper, which he handed to the avatar.
“That’s a list of everything we need,” he said. “It’s all bound to be in the dump somewhere, or it can be rigged up. Do you have some . . . uh . . . some little yous somewhere that can track this stuff down? Another couple of those helmets you got for us, the ones communicators use; a couple of batteries; a little generator; stuff like that. Again, we need that now. The main thing is we need cable. Thick conducting cable, stuff that can take elyctrical or thaumaturgic current. We need two and a half, three miles of the stuff. Not all in one, obviously . . . it can be in pieces, as long as they can be connected easily one to the next, but we need masses. We have to link you up with our . . . with our focus.” His voice quietened as he said this, and his face set. “The cable has to be ready this evening, by six o’clock I think.”
Isaac’s face was hard. He spoke in a monotone. He looked at the avatar carefully.
“There’s only four of us, and one of those we can’t rely on,” he went on. “Can you contact your . . . congregation?” The avatar nodded slowly, waiting for an explanation. “See, we need people to connect those cables across the city.” Isaac tugged the list out of the avatar’s hands and began to sketch on the back: a jagged sideways Y for the two rivers, little crosses for Griss Twist, The Crow, and scribbles delineating Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth in between. He linked the first two crosses with a quick slash of pencil. He looked up at the avatar. “You’re going to have to organize your congregation. Fast. We need them in place with the cable by six o’clock.”
“Why do you not perform the operation here?” asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely.
“It wouldn’t work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city’s focal point, where all the lines converge.
“We have to go to Perdido Street Station.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Carrying a bloated sack of discarded technology between them, Isaac and Yagharek crept back through the quiet streets of Griss Twist, up the broken brick stairwell of the Sud Line. Like shambling city vagrants in clothes ill-suited to the sweltering air, they trudged a path through the skyline of New Crobuzon, back to their collapsing hideout by the railway line. They waited for a squealing onrush of train to pass, blowing energetically from its flared chimney, then picked their way through fences of wavering air poured upwards from the scalding iron tracks.
It was midday, and the air wrapped them like a heated poultice.
Isaac put down his end of the sack and tugged at the rickety door. It was pushed open from inside by Derkhan. She slipped through to stand in front of him, half closing the door behind her. Isaac glanced up and could see someone standing ill-at-ease in a dark corner.
“Found someone, ’Zaac,” whispered Derkhan. Her voice was taut. Her eyes were bloodshot and nearly tearful in her dirty face. She pointed briefly back into the room. “We’ve been waiting.”
Isaac had to meet the Council; Yagharek would inspire awe and confusion but no confidence in those he approached; Pengefinchess would not go; so hours ago, it was Derkhan who had been forced out into the city on the grisly and monstrous errand. It had turned her into some bad spirit.
At first, when she left the hut and walked into the city, made her way quickly through the tarry darkness that filled the streets, she had cried in a drab fashion to ease the pressure of her tortured head. She had kept her shoulders skulking high, knowing that of the few figures she saw quickly pacing their way somewhere, a high proportion were likely to be militia. The heavy nightmare tension of the air drained her.
But then as the sun rose and the night sank slowly into the gutters, her way had become easier. She had moved more quickly, as if the very material of the darkness had resisted her.
Her task was no less horrendous, but urgency bleached her horror until it was an anaemic thing. She knew that she could not wait.
She had some way to go. She was making for the charity hospital of Syriac Well, through four or more miles of intricately twisting slum and collapsing architecture. She did not dare take a cab, in case it was driven by a militia spy, an agent out to catch perpetrators like her. So she paced as quickly as she dared in the shadow of the Sud Line. It raised itself higher and higher above the roofs as it passed further and further from the city’s heart. Yawning arches of dripping brick soared over the squat streets of Syriac.
At Syriac Rising Station, Derkhan had broken away from the tracks of the rails and borne off into the snarl of streets south of the undulating Gross Ta
r.
It had been easy to follow the noise of costermongers and stallholders to the squalor of Tincture Prom, the wide and dirty street that linked Syriac, Pelorus Fields and Syriac Well. It followed the course of the Gross Tar like an imprecise echo, changing its name as it went, becoming Wynion Way, then Silverback Street.
Derkhan had skirted its raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.
It was an old and sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement flounces: gods and dæmons eyed each other across the tops of windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’ chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.
Once more a place of healing, they said.
Without funds or drugs, with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.
Derkhan had made her way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.
And there . . . there she had hunted.
She remembered stalking up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about her dying father who had gone missing—stomped off into the night to die—who she had heard might be here with these angels of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her father, she explained, was close to death.
The monk had pointed her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.
And Derkhan had passed through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient was dying and that no they were still not dead.
Derkhan looked down and flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription. Lungrot, she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. Then in another hand: Laudanum unavailable.
In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which, if Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went on, stretched the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would have ended the pain, one way or another.
Derkhan began to do what she had come for.
She examined the patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had been hazily aware of the criteria with which she gazed—of sound mind, and not so ill they will not last the day—and she had felt sick to her soul. The nun had seen her, had approached with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she sought.
Derkhan had ignored her, had continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of a tired old man whose notes gave him a week to live. He slept with his mouth open, dribbling slightly and grimacing in his sleep.
There had been a ghastly moment of reflection when she had found herself applying strained and untenable ethics to the choice—Who here is a militia informer? she wanted to shout. Who here has raped? Who has murdered a child? Who has tortured? She had closed down the thoughts. That could not be allowed, she had realized. That might drive her mad. This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice.
Derkhan had turned to the nun who followed her emitting a constant stream of blather it was no effort to ignore.
Derkhan remembered her own words as if they had never been real.
This man is dying, she had said. The nun’s noise had quieted, and she had nodded. Can he walk? Derkhan had asked.
Slowly, the nun said.
Is he mad? Derkhan had asked. He was not.
I’m taking him, she had said. I need him.
The nun had begun to vent outrage and astonishment and Derkhan’s own carefully battened down emotions had broken free momentarily and tears had flooded her face with appalling speed, and she had felt as if she would howl in misery so she closed her eyes and hissed in wordless animal grief until the nun was silent. Derkhan had looked at her again and shut down her own tears.
Derkhan had pulled her gun from inside her cloak and held it at the nun’s belly. The nun looked down and mewed in surprise and fear. While the nun still gazed at the weapon in disbelief, with her left hand Derkhan had pulled out the pouch of money, the remnants of Isaac’s and Yagharek’s money. She had held it out until the nun saw it, and realized what was expected and held out her hand. Then Derkhan poured the notes and gold-dust and battered coins into it.
Take this, she had said, her voice trembling and careful. She pointed randomly about the ward at the moaning, tossing figures in the beds. Buy laudanum for him and calciach for her, Derkhan had said, cure him and send that one quietly to sleep; make one or two or three or four of them live, and make death easier for one or two or three or four or five or I don’t know, I don’t know. Take it, make things better for how many you can, but this one I must take. Wake him up and tell him he has to come with me. Tell him I can help him.
Derkhan’s pistol wavered, but she kept it trained vaguely on the other woman. She closed the nun’s fingers around the money and watched her eyes crease and widen in astonishment and incomprehension.
Deep inside her, in the place that still felt, that she could not quite close down, Derkhan had been aware of a plaintive defence, an argument of justification—See? she felt herself assert. We take him but all these others we save!
But there was no moral accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could only ignore that anxious discourse. She stared deep and fervent into the nun’s eyes. Derkhan closed her hand tight around the nun’s fingers.
Help them, she had hissed. This can help them. You can help them all except him or you can help none of them. Help them.
And after a long, long time of silence, of staring at Derkhan with troubled eyes, of looking at the grubby currency and at the gun and then at the dying patients on all sides, the nun put the money into her white overall with a shaking hand. And as she moved away to waken the patient, Derkhan watched her with a terrible, mean triumph.
See? Derkhan had thought, sick with self-loathing. It wasn’t just me! She chose to do it too!
His name was Andrej Shelbornek. He was sixty-five. His innards were being eaten by some virulent germ. He was quiet and very tired of worrying, and after two or three initial questions, he followed Derkhan without complaint.
She told him a little about the treatments they had in mind, the experimental techniques they wished to try on his brutalized body. He said nothing about this, about her filthy appearance, or anything else. He must know what’s going on! she had thought. He’s tired of living like this, he’s making it easy on me. This was rationalization of the lowest kind, and she would not entertain it.
It was swiftly clear that he could not walk the miles to Griss Fell. Derkhan had hesitate
d. She pulled a few torn notes from her pocket. She had no choice but to hail a cab. She was nervous. She had lowered her voice into an unrecognizable snarl as she gave directions, with her cloak hiding her face.
The two-wheeled cab was pulled by an ox, Remade into a biped to fit with ease into New Crobuzon’s twisted alleyways and narrow thoroughfares, to turn tight corners and retreat without stalling. It lolloped on its two back-curved legs in constant surprise at itself, with a stride that was uncomfortable and bizarre. Derkhan sat back and closed her eyes. When she looked up again, Andrej was asleep.
He did not speak, or frown or seem perturbed, until she had bade him climb the steep slope of earth and concrete shards beside the Sud Line. Then his face had creased and he had looked at her in confusion.
Derkhan had said something blithely about a secret experimental laboratory, a site above the city, with access to the trains. He had looked concerned, had shaken his head and looked around to escape. In the dark below the railway bridge, Derkhan had pulled out her flintlock. Although dying, he was still afraid of death, and she had forced him up the slope at gunpoint. He had begun to cry halfway up. Derkhan had watched him and nudged him with the pistol, had felt all her emotions from very far away. She kept distant from her own horror.
Inside the dusty shack, Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out for help. He was astonishingly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.
There was a half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth, and it seemed that he would say something to assuage the old man’s fears, to assure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration. Andrej’s shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac, eager to be reassured.
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