Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  Jutting directly from the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their infancy. But now the weight of accumulated filth made the old wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings, spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired, and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

  Blocks of compressed garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of slag.

  The huge cranes which took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man’s-land—flat scrub and baked earth—but that had rapidly disappeared as the rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly from the vulgar geology of the dump.

  It was as if the trash was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

  Derkhan and the vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see the Council’s hide. They left a trail of cable that became invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

  The hillocks of garbage subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire, where the dump was open to the river.

  Across the squalid water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the fence’s hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

  Opposite her, Spit Hearth welled up fatly to the river’s edge. There was no unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan’s preparations unfold.

  A few feet from the edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and scanned the gently moving surface.

  The sun was slowly approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the river was varnished with reddening light.

  “Penge!” Derkhan hissed. “You there?”

  After a moment, there was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the current.

  Slowly, Pengefinchess raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd, desperate relief.

  “All right then,” said Pengefinchess. “Time for my last job.”

  Derkhan nodded with absurd gratitude.

  “She’s here to help,” Derkhan said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed suspicion. “This cable’s too big and heavy for you to manage yourself. If you get in, then I’ll feed it down to you both.”

  It took a few seconds for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

  Pengefinchess eyed him suspiciously as he kicked closer to her.

  Derkhan looked quickly around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and tugged it to the edge of the water.

  She began to feed it down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water. Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up, launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

  Pengefinchess reached up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

  Derkhan watched its halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted against a broken concrete pillar.

  There was nothing on the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be tugging masses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out across the top of the water.

  Eventually the cable was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the operation under way.

  Minutes passed. Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

  It was a vodyanoi, raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back, squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a message.

  The river was very wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess. She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

  It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council’s vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection.

  But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan marked her passing.

  The arm and bow disappeared. Pengefinchess submerged again.

  Derkhan turned her back on the river and headed back into the Council’s labyrinth.

  She followed the trail of decaying cable through the twists of the junkyard scenery, into the Council’s presence. The avatar stood waiting by the diminished coil of rubber-swathed wire.

  “Is the crossing successful?” he asked as soon as he saw her. He stumbled forwards, the cable that burst from his brainpan rattling behind him. Derkhan nodded.

  “We’ve got to get things ready here,” she said. “Where’s the output?”

  The avatar turned and indicated for her to follow him. He stopped for a moment and picked up the other end of the cable. He staggered under its weight, but he did not complain or ask for help, and Derkhan did not volunteer.

  With the thick insulated wire under his arm, the avatar approached the constellation of rubbish that Derkhan recognized as the Construct Council’s head (with a slight unsettling jolt, as at a child’s book of optical tricks, as if an ink drawing of a young woman’s face had suddenly become a crone’s). It still lolled sidewa
ys, without any sign of life.

  The avatar reached up over the grille that doubled as the Council’s metal teeth. Behind one of the enormous lights Derkhan knew were its eyes, a tangled knot of wire and tubing and rubbish burst out of a casing, in which the stuttering valves of some vastly complex analytical engine were working.

  It was the first sign that the great construct was conscious. Derkhan thought she saw light glimmer faintly, waxing and waning, in the Council’s huge eyes.

  The avatar pulled the cable into position beside the analogue brain, one of the network that made up the Council’s peculiar inhuman consciousness. He untwisted several of the thick wires in the cable, and in the explosion of metal from the Council’s head. Derkhan looked away, sickened, as the avatar placidly ignored the way the vicious metal tore jagged holes in his hands, and sluggish, greying blood oozed fitfully out and over his decaying skin.

  He began to link the Council to the cable, twisting finger-thick wires together into a conducting whole, snapping connections into sockets that sputtered with obscure sparks, examining the seemingly meaningless buds of copper and silver and glass that flowered from the Construct Council’s brain and from the rubber sheathing of the cable, picking some, twisting and discarding others, plaiting the mechanism into impossibly complex configurations.

  “The rest is easy,” he whispered. “Wire to wire, cable to cable, at every junction throughout the city, that is easy. This is the only taxing part, here at source, to connect up correctly, to channel the exudations, to mimic the operation of the communicators’ helmets for an alternative model of consciousness.”

  Yet despite the difficulty, it was still light when the avatar looked up at her, wiped his lacerated hands against his thighs, and said that he had finished.

  Derkhan watched the little flashes and sparks that burst ominously from the connection with awe. It was beautiful. It glittered like some mechanical jewel.

  The Council’s head—vast and still immobile, like a sleeping dæmon’s—was linked to the cable with a knot of connective tissue, an elyctro-mechanical, thaumaturgic scar. Derkhan marvelled. Eventually she looked up.

  “Well then,” she said hesitantly, “I’d best go and tell Isaac that . . . that you’re ready.”

  With great sweeps of dirty water, Pengefinchess and her companion kicked their way through the eddying darkness of the Tar.

  They stayed low. The bottom was barely visible as uneven darkness two feet below them. The cable unwound slowly from the great pile they had left at the bottom of the river, by the edge of the wall.

  It was heavy, and they lugged it sluggishly through the filthy river.

  They were alone in this part of the water. There were no other vodyanoi: only a few hardy, stunted fishes that skimmed nervously away at their approach. As if, thought Pengefinchess, anything in the whole of Bas-Lag could induce me to eat them.

  Minutes passed and their hidden passage continued. Pengefinchess did not think of Derkhan or of what would happen that night, did not consider the plan on which she had eavesdropped. She did not evaluate its probable success. It was none of her concern.

  Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on.

  In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a great deal at stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy.

  Ahead of her the slick darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out the Tar’s surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all directions through the little waves.

  They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.

  Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.

  Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.

  “Your companions know to find you here?” Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). “I am done,” she announced. “You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving.” He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. “Be fecund,” she said. It was a traditional farewell.

  She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

  Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.

  The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.

  The current was stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

  It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians’ quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.

  Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’ convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

  Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.

  She began to feel other vodyanoi pass her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi’s house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to crumble in unsanitary fashion into the water. Those were the vodyanoi slums.

  Here, on the other hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might lead through some carefully crafted passage below the surface into a riverside house all done in white marble. Its façade would be tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side, but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting huge rooms above and below the water; canal passageways; sluices refreshing the water every day.

  Pengefinchess swam on past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city passed further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her escape with great pleasure.

  She spread her arms and sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from her skin through the pores of the thin cotton shift she wore. After days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.

  Pengefinchess felt it swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.

  I’ll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I’ll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day
tell stories about.

  She opened her enormous mouth, let the Canker gush through her. Pengefinchess swam on, through the suburbs, up and out of the city.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Men and women in grubby overalls spread out from the Griss Twist dump.

  They went on foot and in carts, singly, in pairs, and in little gangs of four or five. They moved in dribs and drabs, at unobtrusive speeds. Those on foot carried great swathes of cable over their shoulders, or looped between them and a colleague. In the backs of the carts the men and women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

  They went out into the city at irregular intervals, over two or more hours, spacing their departures according to a schedule worked out by the Construct Council. It was calculated to be random.

  A small horse-drawn wagon containing four men set off, entering the flow of traffic over Cockscomb Bridge and winding up towards the centre of Spit Hearth. They made their way without urgency, turning onto the wide, banyan-lined Boulevard St. Dragonne. They swayed with a muted clacking along the wooden slats that paved the street: the legacy of the eccentric Mayor Waldemyr, who had objected to the cacophony of wheels on stone cobblestones past his window.

  The driver waited for a break in the traffic, then turned to the left and into a small courtyard. The boulevard was invisible, but its sounds were still thick around them. The cab stopped by a high wall of rich red brick, from behind which rose an exquisite smell of honeysuckle. Ivy and passionflower sprouted in little bursts over the lip of the wall, bobbing above them in the breeze. It was the garden of the Vedneh Gehantock monastery, tended by the dissident cactacae and human monks of that floral godling.

  The four men leapt down from the cart and began to unload tools and the bales of heavy cable. Pedestrians walked past them, watched them briefly and forgot them.

  One man held the end of the cable high against the monastery wall. His workmate lifted a heavy iron bracket and a mallet, and with three quick strokes he had anchored the end of the cable into the wall, about seven feet above the ground. The two moved along, repeated the operation eight or so feet further to the west; and then again, moving along the wall at some speed.