Iron Council

by China Miéville

  But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly innard thing.

  Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.

  He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pennyhaugh, thanking him for his efforts, wishing him luck, telling him they will see each other again when Judah returns, which he does not believe.

  There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.

  It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit connects, and then, oh, from the rocks by the door a little figure comes dancing. The girl is quite still and watchful.

  The little golem is the size of her hand, and it dances as Judah instructed it to dance when he set his hex, stored his energies, ready for the trigger. It dances toward her. It is made of money. It staggers and falls down and falls apart into coins and the little girl comes forward and picks the money up.

  Judah watches her from a doorway. He has stored up a golem and its orders. Has made it wait, for the little snare. He does not know if anyone has done this before.

  And he is in the swamps again. There is ice, and the rags of vine from the canopies are hardened, and the animals are sleeping and the swamp is quiet. Miles off is the work camp, and the work train.

  The tracks have taken him past towns become corpses. Into lands not tamed but misshapen by the work and the workers, and on at last into the trees on constructed islands, isthmuses of displaced stone, into the fens. Judah goes deep, looking for those who were once his tribe.

  He is laden: his new voxiterator and its cylinders, his camera, his guns. He is careful not to sound like a hunter, is careful to make noises as he walks. He sings the songs he has learnt from his stiltspear. He sings the song of the breakfast, the song of hello, the song of a good day. He walks with his hands showing.

  When they come for him they are of tribes he does not know, and he sings the song of good neighbours and the song of may I come in? They surround him as trees and stiltspear in flickering and they display their teeth and their weapon-hands, and when he still does not run they hit him and when still he does not run they take him to their hidden village. Their clans and kith-groups have broken down: these are the last of their people.

  Children come to stare at him. He looks at them and sees a final generation.

  His goodness moves, but Judah knows they are a dead people and nothing will change that. They take him hunting—dams and sires together, no time for traditional divisions—and he hears their uh uh uh, their counterpointed breaths and patted rhythms. The water eddies then ceases to eddy.

  He thrusts out the listening trumpet and captures their sound on wax. He listens to it; he winds his handle and hears their rhythm. Judah can see it. He can see its shape. He looks through a lens and is a geographer on the wax continent of the song, tracking chasms, the coiled valley, its peaks and arêtes. He winds slowly, hears the song in sluggish time.

  To his shame Judah feels drab among the doomed people. He works as best he can in the horrible wet cold, noting all the layers of the stiltspear songs, every faint and ill-performed bark, but the environs oppress him. No bower in the woods, no green den, but a frosted huddle of mulch and constant war parties, stiltspear out to fight, haunted by the ghosts they will certainly become.

  Judah will not watch them. His interior thing jackknifes. He has their soul in his wax. He leaves them, for the second time.

  Back to the train. It has moved. He sees a thousand faces he has never seen before. The rails have forked. A town is growing. What a wonderful thing.

  Tracks slick and train-polished. They coil into half-built sheds and empty sidings, into yards, past the warping wood of this half-built town they bifurcate. One line juts into the darkest part of the wetland and stops abruptly, hemmed by trees.

  Another disappears westward. Men come out of their clearing and they carry dripping hammers, and they carry nails, and they are as stained and sweating as if they have been at war. With each breath they wear and shed momentary scarves of vapour.

  As he enters the clearing where Junctiontown grows, Judah’s good thing kicks happy like a baby and he knows he will stay here, that he is back and will be part of what he sees, not a parasite in its trail. He came for the interventions, of which the song is one. And this, this buckling down of rails, is another.

  He is a veteran of the railroads, but he has never worked them before. The thing in him cajoles him. It wants him to join this great effort.

  Judah follows the rails out of wet trees into hills, and the iron is implacable. The yellow roadbed rises. There are people everywhere. Lines of horses, the smell of fires—grass, wood, lignite. Judah comes through tents, sees them pitched on the roofs of the perpetual train. Remade and cactacae drag ploughs of chain to flatten the ground. Gendarmes walk in crews.

  The perpetual train creeps forward with tiny turns of its wheels. Pushed and pulled by four hulks, diamond-stacks splaying and venting from yards up. Vastly bigger than the engines that ride New Crobuzon’s elevated railways. These wilderness versions wear cowcatchers, their headlamps burn vividly, and insects touch like fingertips against the glass. Their bells are like churchbells.

  There comes an armoured car with a swaying guntower. An office on wheels, closed wagons for supplies, what seems a parlour, one at least that is blood-fouled, a rolling abattoir, and beyond that a very tall and windowed wagon painted with pinchbeck gilt, slathered with symbols of the gods and Jabber. A church. Four, five enormous carts with tiny doors and rows of little windows, triple-decked bunkrooms thronged with men. Under their own great weight the sleep-coaches sag in the middle as if they have sows’ bellies. There are flat cars, open and covered. And beyond them the crews. The music of hammers.

  They are on a flat through the brush. The track-layers are speeding, closing the gap with the graders.

  Judah is only one man walking beside the train. There is nothing to mark him except the sense that he is waiting. Judah is lifted. But there is sourness. He sees men and cactus-men muttering and the fear of the Remade tethered near their stockades. The foremen go armed. They did not used to.

  Many miles ahead surveyors map out the land according to charts drawn a score of years before by Weather Wrightby and his crews, when the old man was a scout himself. Behind them, in the unland between the train and the explorers, graders make their fat raised line. And behind them the bridge-monkeys push trestles across impassable land, and the tunnellers keep cutting through their rocks.

  All this is ahead. Judah carries ties.

  This is how the laying goes. Early morning the hundreds of men wake to bells and breakfast in the dining car on coffee and meat from bowls nailed to tables, or eat in vague congregations along the tracks. First are the whole: the hard human labourers; cactus-men from New Crobuzon’s Glasshouse, a few renegades from Shankell.

  Behind them, cuffed to their meal by guards, the Remade eat what is left. There are a few women among them, Remade with steam-driven integuments, iron-and-rubber or animal bulk. Those prisoners with boilers hexed to them are issued enough culm and low-grade coke to work.

  The trains hang back. Horses or pterabirds or Remade bullocks drag carts from huge piles of rails along the line, to the last of the track, and back. The crews move for each other, industrial dancing. They quickstep in and down, and the hammering, and more rails come, and the carts refill and rejoin the extending road. Ten feet, hundreds of pounds of iron at a time, the road continues.

  Jabber, what are we bringing? Judah thinks to see the
work of all those many hundreds. What are we doing? He is awed by its raucous and casual splendour.

  He sings songs to himself as he works, and invisibly he makes each cold rectangle of wood a limbless golem that for the tiny interval of its ablife strives to cross from the horse-hauled carriage of sleepers to the dust of the bed. Judah feels the thoughtless tugging from each piece, and it helps him. He carries more than he should. When the waterboys come from the train out of sight behind them there is a scramble to drink first, before dust and spit fouls the water. The many Remade wait.

  Judah’s tent-mates like him. They listen to his stories of the swamps and tell him of labour troubles.

  —Fuckin’ Remade been causin’ trouble too. Over food and that. And the whores’ prices goin’ up and up. Somebody said the money’s dryin’ back home. You know anything about that? Somebody told me prices are fallin’, money’s runnin’ out.

  Behind the sleeper-men are the rail-layers and spikers, and behind them the intricate bulk of the train comes swaying snarling closer, tended like some steam-animal god.

  Judah sees Remade chastised with whips, and the presence inside him spasms each time so he nearly falls. Once there is a fight between free workers and a Remade man with the pugnacity of the newly changed. The other Remade pull him away very quickly and only huddle under the whole men’s blows. Remade women bring the sleeper-men chow. Judah smiles at them, but they react like stone.

  On paydays or thereabout a train comes like a miracle through the thawing swamp. Mostly the free men give over their money in Fucktown and in the stills and hooch-tents. Judah does not go out those nights. He lies in his tent and listens to the echoes of gunshots, fighting, the gendarmes, screams. He takes out his voxiterator and plays the breathy stiltspear songs. He annotates his notebooks.

  End o’the Line is a newspaper printed on the work train. It is ill-spelt and salacious, and vulgarly partisan for the TRT who sanction it. All the men read it and argue about its worst points. Twice Judah sees people reading other journals surreptitiously.

  He drifts back toward the train. He takes his turn hauling rails.

  Judah draws the line. The metal is mercilessly heavy. In the flat light of the sky he feels himself watched by rocks. Each rail almost a quarter of a ton, four hundred rails to the mile. He lives by numbers.

  Crews work in cadres, all convict Remade or all freemen, no mixing. With tongs or their own metal limbs they slide the rails out, five men or three cactus or big Remade to each, and lay them down with midwife gentleness. Gaugemen space the irons out, and they in turn are gone, and the spikers move in.

  Judah makes each rail momentarily an absurdly shaped golem. No others on his team feel the faint fishlike flutters of the metal as it tries to help him. He lays down angles in the random land. He grows strong. Once he sleeps on the roof of the train to know what it is like. Men have tethered goats up there and even make carefully corralled fires.

  A tinker-showman works the length of the road, performing. Judah watches him make his own tiny dancing dirt figures, but they are not golems. They are only matter tugged as if by hand at a little distance, direct manipulations. They have no bounded reality, no ablife, no mindless mind to follow instruction, any more than puppets do.

  Slogans are written on the train and the rocks. Each morning they appear, some nothing but crudities to shock the earth, some personal, some polemical, screw you wrightby. Twice when the bell brings Judah out of sleep into the dark morning posters are slathered to the train and to trees.

  Some are very simple: FAIR PAY, UNIONS, FREEDOM FOR THE REMADE, and below a little doubled r. Others are a mass of tiny writing. Judah tries to read them while the foremen tear them down.

  RUNAGATE RAMPANT.

  TRACKS’-END SUPPLEMENT 3.

  The death toll on the TRT Railroad continues to rise, as safety is spurned in the rush for money. The rails go down on the bones of workers, free and Remade . . .

  —What in Jabber’s name these fuckers on about? one man says. —Who ain’t for fair pay? And if there are them as wants guilds I ain’t got no problem, but free Remade? They’re fucking criminals, or don’t these dozy fuckers know that?

  Judah is beguiled by the bravery of the dissidents. They creep at night when the gendarmes patrol. If they were caught they would not walk away. They would be made part of the landscape.

  Runagate Rampants are left under tables, on rocks. It is poor distribution, but it is all they have. Judah takes copies, and reads when he is alone.

  He is only just aware of the dramas of the line. He works, hardly looking up at a rain-patter of shots down the rail. Later he hears that a joint war party of fReemade and striders, a long way east of their supposed territory, attacked the crews in the rear. They were driven off, but the gendarmes are concerned that so proud a race as striders are allying with the punk fReemade against the trains.

  With the weeks and the miles and tons comes spring and the slow lengthening of days. The land around the iron road becomes sparse. Judah huddles with his crew behind an overturned cart while a strider family hurls indistinct missiles. The guntower of the perpetual train swivels and lays down craters like flowers.

  Judah reads Runagate Rampant.

  The borinatch, striders, have reason to hate the TRT. Their land is being stolen by the businesses of New Crobuzon, and the state and militia will not be far behind. Who has not heard the stories of Nova Esperium and the carnage of the natives? Each dead railworker is a tragedy, but the blame lies not with the borinatch, whose revenge is misplaced but whose fears are real. The blame lies with Weather Wrightby, and the Mayor, and the moneyed classes of New Crobuzon suckling at the teat of corruption. We say: For a people’s railway, and peace with the natives!

  Fucktown is close. Judah is not a customer there, preferring his own right hand or the guilty shut-eyed clutching of men on men in the hollows each Chainday night to the boredom of the whores.

  Each week in the stockades where the Remade are kept there is a concession to conviviality, drunken parties where Remade women are given to Remade men and cheap drink is given to all under the aegis of the overseers. Judah watches the Remade women in the aftermath being bathed in the cold river, screaming at the temperature and drinking purgative to stop pregnancies. One guard oversees this. He is gentle with them. He dresses their bite marks and bruises, and punishes the Remade men who hurt too much or often. —It ain’t right how some of them women is used, he says.

  It is common for the wages train to be delayed. A day or two and there are only grumbles, but sometimes as long as a week goes without money. Three times when this happens there is a strike. By some chaos of democracy the track-layers put down their tools and block the train until they have their shekels in their pockets. They are nonplussed by their own mass, by their numbers. Hundreds of muscled men, the tall green brawn of cactacae emerging from them. The prostitutes, the surgeons, clerks, scholars, off scouts, and hunters come to watch them.

  Judah stands among them, ashudder with excitement. He is unlocked by this, and is briefly at one with the thing inside him. An intervention, he thinks. He is never among the first wave to put his tools down—like Thick Shanks the cactus spiker who Judah thinks is a Runagater, like Shaun Sullervan the pugnacious alltradesman—but he is always among the second.

  In response to the picketing, the Remade are worked hard. The foremen assure the strikers once that every effort is being made to expedite the money, and then they turn to the Remade, who are made to make up for the strike. The chained and altered men rock from blows, from the hexes of thaumaturge-guards; they drip under the weight of their own limbs as well as the loads they carry.

  —Fucking useless, one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. —What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

  The free men and c
actus workers watch the punitive work, and cannot stop the road unrolling. They wince and watch.

  —Stupid scab bastards, a cactus-man says.

  They pity the Remade, but cannot forgive them breaking the strikes. The pay train always arrives in the end.

  An absurd orgy of speculation, the financiers swimming like grease-whales in a slick of stolen and invented cash, prices for land and the stocks of the TRT soaring. It will not last. As returns slow, as the stench of TRT corruption and government collusion grows overpowering, the weakness at the base will show. When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!

  The Remade draw a line. One of them is beaten by the guards and dies, and though he is not the first he was old enough and liked enough that many Remade refuse to work the next day, and carry the corpse in a raucous funeral. The unprecedented situation is digested; messages are expedited back and forth along the track.

  The intransigent Remade are ranged alongside the train. The gendarmes take up positions. The guntower on the perpetual train turns.

  Oh my gods, Judah thinks.

  —Anyone willing to return to work now, raise your hand, a captain says. The Remade are confused. He does not wait more than five seconds before turning his back. He signals someone and the tower fires.

  A shell arcs into the mid of the Remade. Later, Judah will realise its load must have been reduced, not to send burning shrapnel into the train itself. Now all he hears and sees is the fire and explosion, the circle of bloody clearance in the Remade.

  A strong accomplished man drives a spike down in three strikes. Many men take four swings: cactacae and the most augmented steam-strong Remade two. There are three prodigious and respected cactus-men who can push a spike home in one blow. There is one Remade woman who can do this, too, but in her the ability is judged grotesque.