Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  They had never been three equally united, she says, without spite or rancour. Always she, then Tansell and Shadrach together, who found in each other something, some calm passionate connection she could not and did not want to touch.

  Tansell was mad with grief at the end, she says, unthinking, exploding, a mindless eruption of thaumaturgic misery. But had he been clear in his brain, she says, he would have done no different.

  So she is on her own again.

  Her testimony ends. It demands response, like some ritual liturgy.

  She ignores Isaac, cosseted in agony. She looks to Derkhan and to me.

  We fail her.

  Derkhan shakes her head, wordless and sad.

  I try. I open my beak and the story of my crime and my punishment and my exile wells up in my throat. It almost emerges, it almost bursts through the crack.

  But I batten it down. It is not connected. It is not for tonight.

  Pengefinchess’s history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base story of base things. I am silent.

  But then, as we prepare to give up on words and let what happen will, Isaac raises his sluggish head and speaks.

  First he demands food and water that we do not have. Slowly his eyes narrow and he begins to talk like a sentient creature. In a remote misery, he describes the deaths he has seen.

  He tells us about the Weaver, the dancing mad god, and its fight with the moths, the eggs that burnt, the weird sing-song declamations of our unlikely and untrustworthy champion. In cold and clear words Isaac tells us what he thinks the Construct Council is become, and what it wants and what it might be (and Pengefinchess gulps deep in her throat in her astonishment, her protuberant eyes bulging more as she learns what has happened to the constructs in the city’s dump).

  And the more he talks the more he talks. He talks of plans. His voice hardens. Something has come to an end in him, some waiting, some soft patience that died with Lin and now is buried, and I feel myself become stone as I hear him. He inspires me to rigour and purpose.

  He talks of betrayals and counter-betrayals, of mathematics and lies and thaumaturgy, dreams and winged things. He expounds theories. He talks to me of flight, something I had half forgotten I might ever have, which I want again, as he mentions it, I want with all of me.

  As the sun crawls like a sweating man to the apex of the sky, we remnants, we dregs, examine our weapons and our collected debris, our notes and our stories.

  With reserves we did not know we could summon, with an astonishment I feel as if through a veil, we make plans. I coil my whip around my hand tight and sharpen my blade. Derkhan cleans her guns, and murmurs to Isaac. Pengefinchess sits back and shakes her head. She will go, she warns us. There is nothing that might incite her to stay. She will sleep a little, then bid us farewell, she says.

  Isaac shrugs. He pulls compact valved engines from where he has stashed them in the piled-up rubbish of the shed. He pulls sheafs and sheafs of notes, sweat-stained, smeared, barely legible, from inside his shirt.

  We begin to work, Isaac more fervently than any of us, scribbling frantically.

  He looks up after hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this, he says. We would need a focus.

  And then another hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

  We have to do this, he says, and still, we need a focus.

  He tells us what we must do.

  There is silence, and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and discard them. Our criteria are confused—do we choose the doomed or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

  Our morality becomes rushed and furtive.

  But the day is more than half gone, and we must choose.

  Her face set hard but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged with the vile task.

  She takes what money we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for what we need.

  Outside it begins to darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets of paper.

  The thick sun illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with dusk.

  None of us fear the night’s crop of dreams.

  PART SEVEN

  Crisis

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The streetlights flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker. It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft, which bobbed on the cool swell.

  It was one of many that littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water, the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

  This one was half covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

  Hidden in the shadow of the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was naked and quite still.

  He had lain there for some time. Yagharek had come with him to the river’s edge. They had crept for more than an hour through the uneasily shifting city, through the familiar streets of Brock Marsh and up through Gidd, on under rail-lines and past militia towers, eventually reaching the southern fringes of Canker Wedge. Less than two miles from the centre of the city, but a different world. Low, quiet streets and modest housing, small apologetic parks, frumpy churches and halls, offices with false fronts and façades in a cacophony of muted styles.

  Here there were avenues. They were nothing like the wide banyan-fringed thoroughfares of Aspic, or the Rue Conifer in Ketch Heath, magnificently lined with ancient pine trees. Still, in the outskirts of Canker Wedge were stunted oaks and darkwoods that hid the architecture’s failings. Isaac and Yagharek, his feet wrapped in bandages again, his head hidden in a newly stolen cloak, had been thankful for the cover of leafy darkness as they made for the river.

  There were no great conglomerations of heavy industry along the Canker. The factories and workshops and warehouses and docks studded the sides of the slower Tar, and the Gross Tar which the conjoined rivers became. It was not until the last mile of its distinct existence, where it passed Brock Marsh and a thousand laboratory outflows, that the Canker became fouled and dubious.

  In the north of the city, in Gidd and Rim, and here in Canker Wedge, residents might row the waters for pleasure, an unthinkable pastime further south. So it was that Isaac had made his way here, where the river traffic was quiet, to obey the Weaver’s instructions.

  They had found a little alley between the backs of two rows of houses, a thin sliver of space that sloped down towards the eddying water. It had not been hard to find a deserted boat, though there were not a fraction as many as there were by the industrial riversides of the city.

  Leaving Yagharek watching from beneath his ragged hood like some motionless tramp, Isaac had picked his way down to the edge of the river. There was a fringe of grass and a band of thick mud between him and the water, and he shucked his clothes as he went, collecting them under his arm. By the time he reached the Canker he was nude under the waning darkness.

  Without hesitating, steeling himself, he had walked on into the water.

  It had been a short, cold swim to the boat. He had enjoyed it, luxuriating in the feeling, the black river washing him clean of sewer-filth and days of grime. He had trailed his clothes behind him, willing the water to suffuse their fibre
s and clean them, too.

  He had hauled himself over the side of the boat, his skin prickling as he dried. Yagharek was barely visible, motionless, watching. Isaac arranged his clothes around him and pulled the tarpaulin a little way over him, so that he lay covered by shadows.

  He watched the light arrive in the east and shivered as breezes raised paths of gooseflesh on him.

  “Here I am,” he murmured. “Naked as a dead man on the river’s dawn. As requested.”

  He did not know if the Weaver’s dreamlike pronouncement, that it had hummed that ghastly night in the Glasshouse, had been any kind of invitation. But he thought that by responding to it he might make it one, changing the patterns of the worldweb, weaving it into a conjuncture that might, he hoped, please the Weaver.

  He had to see the magnificent spider. He needed the Weaver’s help.

  Halfway through the previous night, Isaac and his comrades had become aware that the night’s tension, the unsettled sick feeling in the air, the nightmares, had returned. The Weaver’s attack had failed, as it had predicted. The moths were still alive.

  It had occurred to Isaac that his taste was known to them now, that they would recognize him as the destroyer of the egg-clutch. Perhaps he should have been petrified with fear, but he was not. The railside shack had been left alone.

  Maybe they’re afraid of me, he thought.

  He drifted on the river. An hour passed, and the sounds of the city waxed unseen around him.

  The noise of bubbles disturbed him.

  He leaned up gingerly on his elbow, his mind rapidly clicking back into focus. He peered over the edge of the boat.

  Yagharek was still visible, his posture completely unchanged, on the riverbank. Now there were some few passers-by behind him, ignoring him as he sat there covered up and smelling of filth.

  Close to the boat, a patch of bubbles and disturbed water boiled up from below, snapping at the surface and sending out a ring of ripples about three feet across. Isaac’s eyes widened momentarily as he realized that the circle of ripples was exactly circular, and contained, that as each ripple reached its edge, it flattened impossibly, leaving the water beyond it undisturbed.

  Even as Isaac moved back slightly, a smooth black curve breached in the dark, disturbed water. The river fell away from the rising shape, splashing within the limits of the little circle.

  Isaac was staring into the Weaver’s face.

  He snapped back, his heart beating aggressively. The Weaver stared up at him. Its head was angled so that only it emerged from the water, and not the looming body which rose higher when it stood.

  The Weaver was humming, speaking deep in Isaac’s skull.

  . . . YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU MIGHT BE . . . it said in a continuous lilting monologue . . . RIVER AND DAWN IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB . . . The words ebbed until they could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

  “I’m glad to see you, Weaver,” he said. “I remembered our appointment.” He breathed deep. “I need to talk to you,” he said. The Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

  It was like a dialogue with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it could be done.

  Yagharek heard the subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

  His eyes flickered across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

  Yagharek pulled his knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

  It must, Yagharek realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

  Yagharek strained to hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind him. They were curt, and cried easily.

  Time passed but the sun seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

  And then, some time after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

  The anaemic morning light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

  He collapsed before Yagharek, wheezing.

  The schoolboys tittered and whispered.

  “I think . . . I think it’ll come,” said Isaac. “I think it understood.”

  It was past eight when they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.

  Derkhan had still not returned. Pengefinchess slept in the corner, or pretended to.

  Isaac gathered the vital tubes and valves, the engines and batteries and transformers, into a vile sack. He retrieved his notes, rifled through them briefly to check them, then stashed them back into his shirt. He scrawled a note for Derkhan and Pengefinchess. He and Yagharek checked and cleaned their weapons, counted their meagre store of ammunition. Then Isaac looked out of the ruined windows into the city which had woken around them.

  They must be careful now. The sun had gained its strength, the light was full. Anyone might be militia, and every officer would have seen their heliotype. They drew their cloaks around them. Isaac hesitated, then borrowed Yagharek’s knife and shaved bloodily with it. The sharp blade skittered painfully on the nodules and bumps on his skin that were the reason he had first grown a beard. He was ruthless and quick, and soon stood before Yagharek with a pasty chin, inexpertly shorn of whiskers, bleeding and patched with copses of stubble.

  He looked ghastly, but he looked different. Isaac dabbed at his bleeding skin as they set out into the morning.

  By nine, after minutes of skulking, striding nonchalantly past shops and arguing pedestrians, finding backstreet routes wherever they existed, the companions were in the Griss Twist dump. The heat was unforgiving, and seemed greater in these canyons of discarded metal. Isaac’s chin stung and tingled.

  They picked their way over the wasteground towards the heart of the maze, towards the Construct Council’s lair.

  “Nothing.” Bentham Rudgutter clenched his fists on his desk.

  “Two nights we’ve had the airships up and searching. Nothing at all. Another crop of bodies every morning, and not a godsdamn thing all night. Rescue dead, no sign of Grimnebulin, no sign of Blueday . . .” He raised bloodshot eyes and looked across the table at Stem-Fulcher, who sucked gently at the pungent smoke of her pipe. “This is not going well,” he concluded.

  Stem-Fulcher nodded slowly. She considered.

  “Two things,” she said slowly. “It’s clear that what we need is specially trained troops. I told you about Motley’s officers.” Rudgutter nodded. He rubbed and rubbed at his eyes. “We can easily match those. We could easily tell the punishment factories to run us off a squadron of specialist Remade, with mirrors and backwards weapons and all, but what we need is time. We need to train them up. That’s three, four months at the least. And while we’re biding our time the slake-moths are just going to keep picking off citizens
. Getting stronger.

  “So we have to think about strategies for keeping the city under control. A curfew, for example. We know the moths can get into houses, but there’s no doubt that most of the victims are picked off the streets.

  “Then we need to dampen speculation in the press about what’s going on. Barbile wasn’t the only scientist working on that project. We need to be able to stamp out any dangerous kind of sedition, we need to detain all the other scientists involved.

  “And with half the militia engaged in slake-moth duties, we can’t risk another dock strike, or anything similar. It could cripple us quickly. We owe it to the city to put an end to any unreasonable demands. Basically, Mayor, this is a crisis bigger than any since the Pirate Wars. I think it’s time to declare a state of emergency. We need extraordinary powers.

  “We need martial law.”

  Rudgutter pursed his lips mildly, and considered.

  “Grimnebulin,” said the avatar. The Council itself remained hidden. It did not sit up. It was indistinguishable from the mountains of filth and garbage around it.

  The cable that entered the avatar’s head emerged from the floor of metal shavings and stone debris. The avatar stank. His skin was patched with mould.

  “Grimnebulin,” he repeated in his uncomfortable, wavering voice. “You did not return. The crisis engine you left with me is incomplete. Where are the Is that went with you to the Glasshouse? The slake-moths flew again last night. Did you fail?”

  Isaac held his hands up to slow the questioning.

  “Stop,” he said peremptorily. “I’ll explain.”

  Isaac knew that it was misleading to think of the Construct Council having emotions. As he told the avatar the story of that appalling night in the cactus Glasshouse—that night of so-partial victory at such horrendous price—he knew that it was not anger or sadness that caused the man’s body to shake, his face to spasm in random grotesqueries.