Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  Isaac did not look at them. He held out the helmet to the Weaver beseechingly.

  “We need you to put this on,” he said. “Put this on now! We can take them all. You said you’d help us . . . to repair the web . . . please.”

  The rain sputtered against the Weaver’s hard shell. Every second or so, one or two random drops would sizzle violently and evaporate as they struck it. The Weaver kept talking, as it always did, an inaudible murmur that Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could not understand.

  It reached out with its smooth, human hands, and placed the helmet on its segmented head.

  Isaac closed his eyes in brief exhausted relief, then opened them again.

  “Keep it on!” he hissed. “Fasten it!”

  With fingers that moved as elegantly as a master tailor’s, the spider did so.

  . . . WILL YOU TICKLE AND TRICK . . . it gibbered . . . AS THINKLINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON AND ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY CRAFTSMAN . . . and as the Weaver continued to croon with incomprehensible and dreamlike proclamations, Isaac saw the last fastening snap tight under its terrifying jaw, and he snapped on the switches that opened the circuit-valves on Andrej’s helmet, and he pulled the succession of levers that geared up the full processing power of the analytical calculators and the crisis engine, and he stepped back.

  Extraordinary currents surged through the machinery assembled before them.

  There was a very still moment, when even the rain seemed to pause.

  Sparks of various and extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.

  A massive arc of power suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment and pain.

  Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek watched him, paralysed.

  As the batteries sent great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit, flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.

  The communicator helmet began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the æther.

  But they were diverted.

  They were processed, read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and switches.

  An infinitely small moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry. First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry through Andrej’s helmet.

  Isaac had seen how the slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not sated.

  The Weaver’s whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly, and drew taste . . . but no sustenance.

  The Weaver thought in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image and desire and cognition and emotion.

  For the slake-moths, it was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum. Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.

  The extraordinary squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the wires into the sophisticated engines.

  Just behind it came the particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.

  In extreme contrast to the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.

  To the slake-moths it was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as nutrition. Like ashes.

  The Council’s mind poured into the machine—and there was a moment of fraught activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles was one way.

  It was assimilated, passing through the analytical engine.

  A set of parameters was reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.

  Within a seventh of a second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.

  The machine examined the form of the first input x, Andrej’s mental signature.

  Two subsidiary orders rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously. Model form of input y one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental current from the Weaver; Model form of input z, and they did the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.

  The two lines of programming coalesced again into a tertiary order: Duplicate waveform of input x with inputs y and z.

  The commands were extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its programme cards.

  The mathematico-analytical maps of mentality—even simplified and imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were—became templates. The three were compared.

  Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.

  Andrej’s mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream-consciousness of the Weaver.

  x, recorded the engines, was unlike y and unlike z.

  But with underlying structure and subconscious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional charge, x, the analytical engines calculated, was equal to y plus z.

  The thaumaturgo-psychic motors followed orders. They combined y and z. They created a duplicate waveform to that of x and routed it through the output on Andrej’s helmet.

  The flows of charged particles pouring into the helmet from the Council and the Weaver were added together into a single vast slew. The Weaver’s dreams, the Council’s calculations, were blended to mimic subconscious and conscious, the working human mind. The new ingredients were more powerful than Andrej’s feeble emanations by a factor of enormous magnitude. The vastness of this power was unabated as the new, huge current surged towards the flared trumpet pointing up into the sky.

  A little more than one-third of a second had passed since the circuit had snapped into life. As the enormous combined flow of y+z dashed towards the outflow, a new set of conditions was fulfilled. The crisis engine itself chattered into life.

  It used the unstable categories of crisis maths, as much a persuasive visio
n as objective categorization. Its deductive method was holistic, totalizing and inconstant.

  As the exudations of the Council and the Weaver took the place of Andrej’s outflow, the crisis engine was fed the same information as the original processors. It rapidly evaluated the calculations that had been performed and examined the new flow. In its astonishingly complex tubular intelligence, a massive anomaly became evident. Something the strictly arithmetic functions of the other engines could never have uncovered.

  The form of the dataflows under analysis was not just the sum of their constituent parts.

  y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej’s mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities.

  The layers of consciousness within x were dependent on each other, interlocking gears of a motor of self-sustaining consciousness. What was arithmetically discernible as rationalism plus dreams was really a whole, whose constituent parts could not be disentangled.

  y and z were not half-complete models of x. They were qualitatively different.

  The engine applied rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously identical to and radically divergent from the original it mimicked.

  Three-fifths of a second after the circuit had snapped into life, the crisis engine arrived at two simultaneous conclusions: x=y+z; and x=/y+z.

  The operation that had been carried out was profoundly unstable. It was paradoxical, unsustainable, the application of logic tearing itself apart.

  The process was, from absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion, utterly riddled with crisis.

  A massive wellspring of crisis energy was instantly uncovered. The realization of crisis freed it up to be tapped: metaphasic pistons squeezed and convulsed, sending controlled spurts of the volatile energy shooting through amplifiers and transformers. Subsidiary circuits rocked and juddered. The crisis motor began to whirl like a dynamo, crackling with power and sending out complex charges of quasivoltage.

  The final command rang in binary form through the crisis engine’s innards. Channel energy, it said, and amplify output.

  Just less than one second since the power had coursed through the wires and mechanisms, the impossible, paradoxical flow of cobbled-together consciousness, the combined flow of Weaver and Council, welled up and burst massively out of Andrej’s conducting helmet.

  His own rerouted emanations wobbled in a loop of referential feedback, constantly being checked and compared to the y+z flow by the analogue and the crisis engines. Without outlet, it began to leak out, snapping in peculiar little arcs of thaumaturgic plasma. It dribbled invisibly over Andrej’s contorting face, mixing with the gobbing overflow from the Weaver/Council emission.

  The main aggregate of that enormous and unstable created consciousness burst in huge gouts from the helmet’s flanges. A growing column of mental waves and particles burst out over the station, towering into the air. It was invisible, but Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could feel it, a prickling of the skin, sixth and seventh senses ringing dully like psychic tinnitus.

  Andrej twitched and convulsed with the power of the processes rocking him. His mouth worked. Derkhan looked away in guilty disgust.

  The Weaver danced back and forth on its stiletto feet, yammering quietly and tapping its helmet.

  “Bait . . .” called Yagharek harshly and stepped back from the flow of energy.

  “It’s hardly started,” yelled Isaac over the thudding of rain.

  The crisis engine was humming and heating up, tapping enormous and growing resources. It sent waves of transforming current through thickly insulated cables, towards Andrej, who rolled and jack-knifed in spastic terror and pain.

  The engine took the energy siphoned from the unstable situation and channelled it, obeying its instructions, pouring it in transformative form towards the Weaver/Council flow. Boosting it. Increasing its pitch and range and power. And increasing it again.

  A feedback loop began. The artificial flow was made stronger; and like an enormous fortified tower on crumbling foundations, the increase of its mass made it more precarious. Its paradoxical ontology grew more unstable as the flow became stronger. Its crisis grew more acute. The engine’s transformative power grew exponentially; it bolstered the mental flow more; the crisis deepened again . . .

  The prickling of Isaac’s skin grew worse. A note seemed to sound in his skull, a whine that increased in pitch as if something nearby spun faster and faster, out of control.

  He winced.

  . . . GOOD GRIEF AND GRACE THE SPILLING SLOSH GROWS MINDFUL BUT MIND IT IS NO MIND . . . the Weaver continued to murmur . . . ONE AND ONE INTO ONE WON’T GO BUT IT IS ONE AND TWO AT ONCE WILL WE WON HOW WIN HOW WONDERFUL . . .

  As Andrej rolled like a victim of torture under the dark rain, the power that poured through his head and into the sky grew more and more intense, increasing at a frightening, geometric rate. It was invisible but sensible: Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek backed away from the squirming figure as far as the little space would allow. Their pores opened and closed, their hair or feathers crawled violently across their skin.

  Still the crisis loop continued and the emanation increased, until it could almost be seen, a shimmering pillar of disturbed æther two hundred feet high, the light from stars and aerostats bending uncertainly around and through it as it towered like an unseen inferno over the city.

  Isaac felt as if his gums were rotting, as if his teeth were trying to escape his jaw.

  The Weaver danced on in delight.

  An enormous beacon was scorched into the æther. A huge and rapidly growing column of energy, a pretend consciousness, the map of a counterfeit mind that swelled and fattened in a fearful curve of growth, impossible and vastly there, the portent of a nonexistent god.

  Across New Crobuzon, more than nine hundred of the city’s best communicators and thaumaturges paused and looked suddenly in the direction of The Crow, their faces twisted with confusion and nebulous alarm. The most sensitive held their heads and moaned with inexplicable pain.

  Two hundred and seven began to jabber in nonsense combinations of numerological code and lush poetry. One hundred and fifty-five suffered massive nosebleeds, two of them ultimately unstaunchable and fatal.

  Eleven, who worked for the government, scrabbled from their workshop at the top of the Spike and ran, with handkerchiefs and tissues ineffectually stopping the bloody slick from their noses and ears, towards Eliza Stem-Fulcher’s office.

  “Perdido Street Station!” was all they could say. They gabbled it like idiots for some minutes, to the home secretary and the mayor who was with her, shaking them with frustration, their lips twitching for other sounds, blood spattering their bosses’ immaculate tailoring.

  “Perdido Street Station!”

  Way out above the wide empty streets of Chnum; swooping slowly past the curve of temple towers in Tar Wedge; skirting the river above Howl Barrow and soaring widespread over the pauper slum of Stoneshell, intricate bodies moved.

  With sluggish strokes and drooling tongues, the slake-moths sought prey.

  They were hungry, eager to gorge themselves and ready their bodies and breed again. They must hunt.

  But in four sudden, identical and simultaneous movements—separated by miles, in different quadrants of the city—the four slake-moths snapped their heads up as they flew.

  They beat their complex wings and slowed, until they were almost still in the air. Four slobbering tongues lolled and lapped at the air.

  In the distance, over the skyline that glimmered with grots of filthy light, on the outskirts of the central mass of building, a column was rising from the earth. Even as they licked and tastesmelled it, it grew and grew, and their wings beat back frantically as the wafts of flavour came over them, and the incredible succulent stench of
the thing boiled and eddied in the æther.

  The other smells and tastes of the city dissipated into nothing. With an amazing speed, the extraordinary flavour-trail doubled its intensity, suffusing the slake-moths, making them mad.

  One by one they emitted a chittering of astounded, delighted greed, a single-minded hunger.

  From all the way across the city, from the four compass points, they converged in a frenzy of flapping, four starving exultant powerful bodies, descending to feed.

  There was a tiny putter of lights on a little console. Isaac edged closer, keeping his body low, as if he could duck under the beacon of energy pouring from Andrej’s skull. The old man lolled and twitched on the ground.

  Isaac was careful not to look at Andrej’s sprawling form. He peered at the console, making sense of the little play of diodes.

  “I think it’s the Construct Council,” he said over the drab rainfall sound. “It’s sending instructions to get round the firewall, but I don’t think it’ll be able to. This is too simple for it,” he said, and patted the circuit-valve. “There’s nothing for it to get control of.” Isaac visualized a struggle in the femtoscopic byways of wiring.

  He looked up.

  The Weaver was ignoring him and them all, drumming its little fingers against the slick concrete in complicated rhythms. Its low voice was impenetrable.

  Derkhan was staring in exhausted disgust at Andrej. Her head jerked gently back and forward as if she was rocked by waves. Her mouth moved. She spoke in silent tongues. Don’t die, thought Isaac fervently, staring at the ruined old man, seeing his face contort as bizarre feedback rocked him, you can’t die yet, you have to hold on.

  Yagharek was standing. He pointed up, suddenly, into a far quadrant of the sky.

  “They have changed course,” he said harshly. Isaac looked up and saw what Yagharek was indicating.

  Far away, halfway to the edge of the city, three of the drifting dirigibles had turned purposefully. They were hardly visible to human eyes, darker blots against the night sky, picked out with navigation lights. But it was clear that their fitful, random motion had changed; that they were powering ponderously towards Perdido Street Station, converging.