Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  “The thing is, what we should be able to do is change the form of the object into one where the tapping of its crisis field actually increases its crisis state. In other words, the crisis field grows by virtue of being siphoned off.” Isaac beamed at Yagharek, his mouth open. “D’you see what I’m talking about? Perpetual fucking motion! If we can stabilize the process, you’ve just got an endless feedback loop, which means a permanent font of energy!” He calmed in the face of Yagharek’s impassive frown. Isaac grinned. His resolve to focus on applied theory was made easy, even pressing, by Yagharek’s single-minded obsession with the commission in hand.

  “Don’t worry, Yag. You’ll get what you’re after. As far as you’re concerned, what this means—if I can make it work—is that I can turn you into a walking, flying dynamo. The more you fly, the more crisis energy you manifest, the more you can fly. Tired wings are a problem you won’t face no more.”

  There was a troubled silence at that. To Isaac’s relief, Yagharek did not seem to have noticed the unfortunate double-meaning. The garuda was stroking the paper with wonder and hunger. Yagharek murmured something in his own tongue, a soft, guttural croon.

  Eventually he looked up.

  “When will you build this thing, Grimnebulin?” he asked.

  “Well, I need to actually knock together a working model to test it, refine the maths and whatnot. I reckon it’ll take me a week or so to put something together. But that’s early days, remember. Very early days.” Yagharek nodded quickly, waved away the caution. “You sure you don’t want to kip here? Are you still going to wander round like a ghul and spring on me when I least suspect it?” asked Isaac ironically.

  Yagharek nodded.

  “Please tell me as soon as your theories advance, Grimnebulin,” he asked. Isaac laughed at the polite bathos of the request.

  “Certainly will, old son, you have my word. As soon as the old theories advance, you get to know.”

  Yagharek turned stiffly and walked towards the stairs. As he turned to say goodbye, he caught sight of something. He was still for a minute, then walked over to the far end of the walkway’s east-facing side. He indicated the cage containing the colossal grub.

  “Grimnebulin,” he said. “What does your caterpillar do?”

  “I know, I know, it’s grown like fuck, hasn’t it?” said Isaac, strolling over. “Tremendous little bugger, eh?”

  Yagharek pointed at the cage and looked up questioningly.

  “Yes,” he said. “But what does it do?”

  Isaac frowned and peered into the wooden box. He had moved it so that it faced away from the windows, which meant that its interior was shadowed and unclear. He squinted and peered into the darkness.

  The massive creature had crawled to the furthest corner of the cage and had somehow managed to climb the rough wood. Then, with some organic adhesive it exuded from its arse, it had suspended itself from the top of the box. It hung there, pendulous and heavy, swaying and rippling slightly, like a stocking full of mud.

  Isaac hissed, his tongue jutting from between his lips.

  The caterpillar had tightened its stubby legs, curling them in tight towards its underbelly. As Isaac and Yagharek watched, it jack-knifed at its centre and seemed to kiss its own tail end, slowly relaxing until it hung deadweight again. It repeated the process.

  Isaac pointed into the dimness.

  “Look,” he said. “It’s smearing something all over itself.”

  Where the caterpillar’s mouth touched flesh, it left infinitely thin glistening filaments, which stretched out taut as it moved its mouth away, adhering where they touched its body again. The hairs at the creature’s hind end were flattened against its body, and they looked wet. The enormous grub was slowly smothering itself in translucent silk, from the bottom up.

  Isaac straightened up, slowly. He caught Yagharek’s eye.

  “Well . . .” he said. “Better late than never. Finally, what I bought it for in the first place. The thing’s pupating.”

  After a while, Yagharek nodded slowly.

  “It will soon be able to fly,” he said quietly.

  “Not necessarily, old son. Not everything with a chrysalis gets wings.”

  “You do not know what it will be?”

  “That, Yag, is the only reason I’ve still got the damn thing. Wretched curiosity. Won’t let me go.” Isaac smiled. The truth was he felt a certain nervousness, seeing the bizarre thing finally perform the action he had been waiting for since he had first seen it. He watched it cover itself in a strange, fastidious inversion of cleanliness. It was quick. The bright, mottled colours of its pelt went misty with the first layer of fibres, then quickly disappeared from view.

  Yagharek’s interest in the creature was short-lived. He replaced the wooden framework which hid his deformity onto his shoulders, and covered it with his cloak.

  “I will take my leave, Grimnebulin,” he said. Isaac looked up from where the caterpillar held his attention.

  “Right! Righto, Yag. I’ll get a move on with the . . . uh . . . engine. I know by now not to ask when I’ll see you, right? You’ll drop in when the time’s right.” He shook his head.

  Yagharek was already at the bottom of the stairs. He turned once, briefly, and saluted Isaac, and then he left.

  Isaac waved back. He was lost in thought, his hand remaining in the air for several seconds after Yagharek had gone. Eventually, he closed it with a soft clap and turned back to the caterpillar’s cage.

  Its coat of wet threads was drying fast. The tail end was already stiff and immobile. It constrained the grub’s undulations, forcing it to perform more and more claustrophobic acrobatics in its attempt to cover itself. Isaac pulled his chair over in front of the cage to watch its efforts. He took notes.

  A part of him told him that he was being intellectually dissolute, that he should compose himself and focus on the matter in hand. But it was a small part, and it whispered to him without confidence. Almost dutifully. There was, after all, nothing that was going to stop Isaac from taking the opportunity to watch this extraordinary phenomenon. He settled into his chair comfortably, pulled over a magnifying lens.

  It took a little over two hours for the caterpillar to cover itself completely in a moist chrysalis. The most complicated manoeuvre was at the head itself. The grub had to spit itself a kind of collar, then allow it to dry a little before bunching itself up within its swaddling, making itself shorter and fatter for a few moments while it wove a lid, closing itself in. It pushed against it slowly, ensuring its strength, then exuded more of the cement-filaments until its head was completely covered, invisible.

  For a few minutes the organic shroud quivered, expanding and contracting in response to the movements within. The white covering became brittle as he watched, changed colour to a drab nacre. It pendulumed very gently as minute air currents disturbed it, but its substance had hardened, and the motion of the grub within could no longer be discerned.

  Isaac sat back and scrawled on the paper. Yagharek was almost certainly right about the thing having wings, he thought. The gently moving organic sac was like a textbook drawing of a butterfly or moth chrysalis, only vastly bigger.

  Outside the light became thicker as the shadows lengthened.

  The suspended cocoon had been motionless for more than half an hour when the door opened, startling Isaac to his feet.

  “Anyone up there?” yelled David.

  Isaac leaned over the railings and greeted him.

  “Some chap came and dealt with the construct, David. Said you just had to stoke it up a bit and switch it on, said it should work.”

  “Good stuff. I’m sick of the rubbish. We get all yours, as well. Would that be deliberate?” David grinned.

  “Why no,” replied Isaac, ostentatiously shovelling dust and crumbs through the gaps in the railings with his foot. David laughed and wandered out of his sight. Isaac heard a metallic thud as David gave the construct an affectionate clout.

  “I am al
so to tell you that your cleaner is a ‘lovely old thing,’ “ said Isaac formally. They both laughed. Isaac came and sat halfway down the stairs. He saw David shovelling some pellets of concentrated coke into the construct’s little boiler, an efficient triple-exchange model. David slammed shut and bolted the hatch. He reached up to the top of the construct’s head and pulled the little lever into an on position.

  There was a hiss and a little whine as steam was pushed through thin pipes, slowly powering up the construct’s analytical engine. The cleaner jerked spastically and settled back against the wall.

  “That should warm up in a little while,” said David with satisfaction, shoving his hands in his pockets. “What have you been up to, ’Zaac?”

  “Come up here,” answered Isaac. “I want to show you something.”

  When David saw the suspended cocoon he laughed briefly, and put his hands on his hips.

  “Jabber!” he said. “It’s enormous! When that thing hatches I’m running for cover . . .”

  “Yeah, well, that’s partly why I’m showing you. Just to say keep your eyes out for it opening. You can help me pin it inside a case.” The two men grinned.

  From below came a series of bangs, like water fighting its way through obstreperous plumbing. There was a faint hiss of pistons. Isaac and David stared at each other, nonplussed for a moment.

  “Sounds like the cleaner’s gearing up to some serious action,” said David.

  In the short, stubby byways of copper and brass that were the construct’s brain, a welter of new data and instructions clattered violently. Transmitted by pistons and screws and innumerable valves, the grots and gobs of intelligence bottlenecked in the limited space.

  Infinitesimal jolts of energy burst through tiny, finely engineered steamhammers. In the centre of the brain was a box crammed with rank upon rank of minuscule on-off switches that puttered up and down at great and increasing speed. Each switch was a steam-powered synapse, pushing buttons and pulling levers in intensely complicated combinations.

  The construct jerked.

  Deep in the construct’s intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had skittered momentarily. As the steam coursed through the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus’s useless set of queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.

  But this time the virus was nurtured. Fed. The programmes that the repairman had loaded into the construct’s analytical engine sent extraordinary instructions coursing throughout the crafted tubework cerebellum. The valves flapped and the switches buzzed in staccato tremors, all seemingly too fast to be anything but random motion. And yet in those abrupt sequences of numerical code, the rude little virus was mutated and evolved.

  Encoded information welled up within those limited hissing neurones, fed into the recursive idiocy of the virus and spun out from it skeins of new data. The virus flowered. The moronic motor of its basic, mute circuit sped up, flung blossoms of newborn viral code spiralling away from it with a kind of binary centrifugal force, into every part of the processor.

  Each of these subsidiary viral circuits repeated the process until instructions and data and self-generated programmes were flooding every pathway of that limited calculating engine.

  The construct stood in the corner, shaking and whirring very slightly.

  In what had been an insignificant corner of its valved mind, the original virus, the original combination of rogue data and meaningless reference that had affected the construct’s ability to sweep floors, still revolved. It was the same, but transformed. No longer a destructive end, it had become a means, a generator, a motive power.

  Soon, very soon, the central processing engine of the construct’s brain was whirring and clicking at full capacity. Ingenious mechanisms kicked in at the behest of the new programmes buzzing through the analogue valves. Sections of analytical capacity normally given over to movement and backup and support functions were folded in on themselves, doubling their capacity as the same binary function was invested with double meanings. The flood of alien data was diverted, but not slowed. Astounding articles of programme design increased the efficiency and processing power of the very valves and switches that were conducting them.

  David and Isaac talked upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct could not help but make.

  The flow of data continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor. On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions, nothing more than combinations of yes/no or on/off, but in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.

  And eventually, at a certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the construct’s brain.

  One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam.

  One moment it was a calculating machine.

  The next, it thought.

  With a strange, calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own reflection.

  It felt no surprise. No joy. No anger, no existential horror.

  Only curiosity.

  Bundles of data that had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of calculation, this autotelic processing. What had been incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.

  The construct was still for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.

  Isaac leaned far over the railing, until it creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and frowned.

  As he opened his mouth to say something, the construct pushed itself up into an active posture. It extended its suction tube and began, tentatively at first, to clear the floor of dust. As Isaac watched, the construct extended a rotating brush behind it and began to scrub the boards. Isaac watched it for any signs of faltering, but its pace increased with almost palpable confidence. Isaac’s face lightened as he watched the construct perform its first successful cleaning job for weeks.

  “That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.

  The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.

  The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.

  It was unstable.

  It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.

  And then it was alive again. But different.

  Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.

  The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.

  Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a
metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty.

  After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state. And then, in response to unthinkable tides of flesh, it began to construct itself anew. Faster and faster.

  Isaac spent many hours watching the chrysalis, but he could only imagine the struggle of autopoiesis within. What he saw was a solid thing, a strange fruit hanging by an insubstantial thread in the musty darkness of a large hutch. He was perturbed by the cocoon, imagining all manner of gigantic moths or butterflies emerging. The cocoon did not change. Once or twice he prodded it gingerly, and set it rocking gently and heavily for a few seconds. That was all.

  Isaac watched and wondered about the cocoon when he was not working on his engine. It was that that took most of his time.

  Piles of copper and glass began to take shape on Isaac’s desk and floor. He spent his days soldering and hammering, attaching steam-pistons and thaumaturgic engines to the nascent engine. His evenings he spent in pubs, in discussion with Gedrecsechet, the Palgolak Librarian, or David or Lublamai, or ex-colleagues from the university. He spoke carefully, not giving away too much, but with passion and fascination, drawing out discussions on maths and energy and crisis and engineering.