Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  It was not long before the nature of their terrain changed. The sharp-angled slates gave way as the mass of architecture rose around them. They had to use their hands. They made their way through little byways of concrete, surrounded by windowed walls; they ducked under huge portholes and had to scale short ladders that wound between stubby towers. Hidden machinery made the brickwork hum. They were no longer looking ahead to the roof of Perdido Street Station, but up. They had passed some nebulous boundary point where the terraced streets ended and the foothills of the station began.

  They tried to avoid climbing, creeping around the edges of promontories of brick like jutting teeth and through accidental passageways. Isaac began to look around, nervous and fitful. The pavement was invisible behind a low rise of rooftops and chimney-pipes to their right.

  “Keep quiet and careful,” he whispered. “There might be guards.”

  From the north-east, a gouged curve in the station’s sprawling silhouette was a street approaching them, half covered by the building. Isaac pointed at it.

  “There,” he whispered. “Perdido Street.”

  He traced its line with his hand. A short way ahead it intersected with the Cephalic Way, along the length of which they were walking.

  “Where they meet,” he whispered. “That’s our pick-up point. Yag . . . would you go?”

  The garuda sped away, making towards the back of a tall building a few yards ahead, where rust-fouled guttering made a slanting ladder to the ground.

  Isaac and Derkhan plodded slowly onwards, pushing Andrej gently forward with their guns. When they reached the intersection of the two streets they sat heavily and waited.

  Isaac looked up at the sky, where only the high clouds still caught the sun. He looked down, watching Andrej’s misery and imploring gaze creasing his old face. From all around the city the night sounds were beginning.

  “There’s no nightmares yet,” murmured Isaac. He looked up at Derkhan, held out his hand as if feeling for rain. “Can’t feel anything. They can’t be abroad yet.”

  “Maybe they’re licking their wounds,” she said cheerlessly. “Maybe they won’t come and this—” her eyes flicked up towards Andrej momentarily “—this’ll all be useless.”

  “They’ll come,” said Isaac. “I promise you that.” He would not talk of things going wrong. He would not admit the possibility.

  They were silent for a while. Isaac and Derkhan realized simultaneously that they were both watching Andrej. He breathed slowly, his eyes flickering this way and that, his fear become a paralysing backdrop. We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn’t scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.

  There was a scraping sound near them. With calm speed, Isaac and Derkhan raised their pistols. Yagharek’s feathered head emerged from behind the clay, and they lowered their hands. The garuda hauled himself towards them over the cracked extrusion of roof. Draped over his shoulder was a great coil of cable.

  Isaac stood to catch him as he staggered towards them.

  “You got it!” he hissed. “They were waiting!”

  “They were becoming angry,” said Yagharek. “They had come up from the sewers an hour or more ago: they were fearful that we had been captured or killed. This is the last of the wire.” He dropped the loops to the ground before them. The cable was thinner than many of the other sections, about four inches in cross-section, coated with thin rubber. There were perhaps sixty feet of wire remaining, sprawled in tight spirals by their ankles.

  Isaac knelt to examine it. Derkhan, her pistol still trained on the cowering Andrej, squinted at the cable.

  “Is it connected?” she asked. “Is it working?”

  “I don’t know,” breathed Isaac. “We won’t be able to tell till I link it up, make it a circuit.” He hauled the cable up, swung it over his shoulder. “There’s not as much as I’d hoped,” he said. “We’re not going to get very close to the centre of Perdido Street Station.” He looked around and pursed his lips. It doesn’t matter, he thought. Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before . . . betrayal. But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks.

  He pointed a little way away to the south-east, up a little slope of steep-sided, flat-topped rooflets. They extended like an exaggerated slate stairwell, overlooked by an enormous flat wall of stained concrete. The little rise of roof hillocks ended about forty feet above them, in what Isaac hoped was a flattened plateau. The huge L-shaped concrete wall continued into the air above it for nearly sixty feet, containing it on two sides.

  “There,” said Isaac slowly. “That’s where we’ll go.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Halfway up the stepped roofs, Isaac and his companions disturbed someone.

  There was a sudden raucous drunken noise. Isaac and Derkhan flurried for their pistols in anxious motion. It was a ragged drunk who leapt up in a shockingly inhuman motion and disappeared at speed down the slope. Strips of torn clothes fluttered behind him.

  After that Isaac began to see the denizens of the station’s roofscape. Little fires sputtered in secret courtyards, tended by dark and hungry figures. Sleeping men curled in the corners beside old spires. It was an alternative, an attenuated society. Little vagrant hilltribes foraging. A quite different ecology.

  Way above the heads of the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky. Noisy predators. Grubby specks of light and dark, moving edgily in the night’s cloud.

  To Isaac’s relief, the plateau at the top of the hill of layered slate was flat, and about fifteen feet square. Large enough. He wagged his gun, indicating that Andrej should sit, which the old man did, collapsing slowly and precipitously into the far corner. He huddled in on himself, hugging his knees.

  “Yag,” said Isaac. “Keep watch, mate.” Yagharek dropped the final twist of the cable he had hauled up, and stood sentry at the edge of the little open space, looking down across the gradient of the massive roof. Isaac staggered under the full weight of the sack. He put it down and began to unpack the equipment.

  Three mirrored helmets, one of which he put on. Derkhan took the others, gave one to Yagharek. Four analytical engines the size of large typewriters. Two large chymico-thaumaturgical batteries. Another battery, this one metaclockwork, a khepri design. Several connecting cables. Two large communicators’ helmets, of the type used by the Construct Council on Isaac to trap the first slake-moth. Torches. Black powder and ammunition. A sheaf of programme cards. A clutch of transformers and thaumaturgic converters. Copper and pewter circuits of quite opaque purpose. Small motors and dynamos.

  Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish.

  Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare.

  His head wobbled under the weight of his helmet. He connected two of the calculating engines, linking them into a powerful network. Then he began a much harder job, connecting the rest of the various oddments into a coherent circuit.

  The motors were clipped to wires, and they to the larger of the analytical engines. The other engine he tinkered with internally, checking subtle adjustments. He had changed its circuitry. The valves within were no longer simply binary switches. They were attuned specifically and carefully to the unclear and the questionable; the grey areas of crisis mathematics.

  He snapped small plugs into receivers and wired up the crisis engine to the dynamos and transformers that converted one uncanny form of energy into another. A discombobulated circuit spread out across the flat little roofspace.

  The last thing he pulled from the sack and connected to the sprawling machinery was a crudely welded box of black tin, about the size of a shoe. He picked up the end of the cable—the enormous work of guerrilla engineering that stretched more than two miles to the huge hidden intelligence of the Griss Twist dump. Isaac d
eftly unwound the splayed wires and connected them to the black box. He looked up at Derkhan, who was watching him, her gun trained on Andrej.

  “That’s a breaker,” he said, “a circuit-valve. One-way flow only. I’m cutting the Council off from this lot.” He patted the various pieces of the crisis engine. Derkhan nodded slowly. The sky had grown nearly completely dark. Isaac looked up at her and set his lips.

  “We can’t let that fucking thing get access to the crisis engine. We have to stay away from it,” he explained as he connected the disparate components of his machine. “You remember what it told us—the avatar was some corpse pulled out of the river. Bullshit! That body’s alive . . . mindless, sure, but the heart’s beating and the lungs breathe air. The Construct Council had to take that man’s mind out of his body while he was alive. That was the whole point. Otherwise it would just rot.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe it was one of that crazy congregation sacrificing himself, maybe it was voluntary. But maybe not. Whichever, the Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if it’s . . . useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,” Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. “It’s just a . . . a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s trying to . . . maximize itself. It’ll do whatever it has to—it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill—to increase its own power.”

  Isaac stopped for a moment and looked up at Derkhan.

  “And you know,” he said softly, “that’s why it wants the crisis engine. It kept demanding it. Made me think. That’s what this is for.” He patted the circuit-valve. “If I connected the Council direct, it might be able to get feedback from the crisis engine, get control of it. It doesn’t know I’m using this, that’s why it was so keen on being connected. It doesn’t know how to build its own engine: you can bet Jabber’s arse that’s why it’s so interested in us.

  “Dee, Yag, d’you know what this engine can do? I mean, this is a prototype . . . but if it works like it should, if you got inside this, saw the blueprint, built it more solidly, ironed out the problems . . . d’you know what this can do?

  “Anything.” He was silent for a while, his hands working, connecting his wires. “There’s crisis everywhere, and if the engine can detect the field, tap it, channel it . . . it can do anything. I’m hamstrung because of all the maths. You’ve got to express in mathematical terms what you want the engine to do. That’s what the programme cards are for. But the Council’s whole damn brain expresses things mathematically. If that bastard links up to the crisis engine, its followers won’t be crazy any more.

  “Because you know they call it the God-machine . . . ? Well . . . they’ll be right.”

  All three of them were quiet. Andrej rolled his eyes from side to side, not comprehending a single word.

  Isaac worked silently. He tried to imagine a city in the thrall of the Construct Council. He thought of it linked up to the little crisis engine, building more and more of the engines on an ever-increasing scale, connecting them up to its own fabric, powering them with its own thaumaturgical and elyctro-chymical and steampower. Monstrous valves hammering in the depths of the dump, making the fabric of reality bend and bleed with the ease of a Weaver’s spinnerets, all doing the bidding of that vast, cold intelligence, pure conscious calculation, as capricious as a baby.

  He fingered the circuit-valve, shaking it gently, praying that its mechanisms were sound.

  Isaac sighed and brought out the thick sheaf of programme cards the Council had printed. Each was labelled in the Council’s tottering typewritten script. Isaac looked up quizzically.

  “It’s not yet ten, is it?” he said. Derkhan shook her head. “There’s still nothing in the air, is there? The moths aren’t out yet. Let’s be ready by the time they fly.”

  He looked down and pulled the lever on the two chymical batteries. The reagents within mixed. The sound of effervescence was dimly audible, and there was a sudden chorus of chattering valves and barking outputs as current was released. The machinery on the roofscape snapped into life.

  The crisis engine whirred.

  “It’s just calculating,” said Isaac nervously, as Derkhan and Yagharek glanced at him. “It’s not yet processing. I’m giving it instructions.”

  Isaac began to feed the programme cards carefully into the various analytical engines before him. Most went to the crisis engine itself, but some to the subsidiary calculating circuits connected by little loops of cable. Isaac checked each card, comparing it with his notes, scribbling quick calculations before feeding it into any of the inputs.

  The engines clattered as their fine ratcheting teeth slid over the cards, snapping into carefully cut holes, instructions and orders and information downloading into their analogue brains. Isaac was slow, waiting until he felt the click that signalled successful processing before removing each card and slotting in the next.

  He kept notes, scrawling impenetrable messages to himself on ragged ends of paper. He breathed quickly.

  Rain began to fall, quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and breaking open, as thick and warm as pus. The night was close, and the glutinous rainclouds made it more so. Isaac worked fast, his fingers feeling suddenly idiotic, too large.

  There was a slow sense of dragging, a weightiness that pulled at the spirit and began to saturate the bones. A sense of the uncanny, of the fearful and hidden, that rolled up as if from within, a billowing ink-cloud from the depths of the mind.

  “Isaac,” said Derkhan, her voice cracking, “you have to hurry. It’s starting.”

  A swarm of nightmare feelings pattered down among them with the rain.

  “They’re up and out,” said Derkhan with terror. “They’re hunting. They’re abroad. Hurry, you have to hurry . . .”

  Isaac nodded without speaking and continued with what he was doing, shaking his head as if that might disperse the cloying fear that had settled on him. Where’s the fucking Weaver? he thought.

  “Someone watches us from below,” said Yagharek suddenly, “some tramp who did not run. He does not move.”

  Isaac glanced up again, then returned his attention to his work.

  “Take my gun there,” he hissed. “If he comes up towards us, warn him off with a shot. Hopefully he’ll keep his distance.” Still his hands rushed to twist, to connect, to programme. He punched numbered keypads and wrestled roughcut cards into slots. “Nearly there,” he murmured, “nearly there.”

  The sense of nocturnal pressure, of drifting in sour dreams, increased.

  “Isaac . . .” hissed Derkhan. Andrej had fallen into a kind of terrified, exhausted half-sleep, and he began to moan and thrash, his eyes opening and shutting with bleary vagueness.

  “Done!” spat Isaac, and stepped back.

  There was a silent moment. Isaac’s triumph dissipated quickly.

  “We need the Weaver!” he said. “It’s supposed to . . . it said it would be here! We can’t do anything without it . . .”

  They could do nothing except wait.

  The stench of twisted dream-imagery grew and grew, and brief screams sounded from random points across the city, as sleeping sufferers called out their fear or defiance. The rain fell thicker, until the concrete underfoot was slick. Isaac laid the greasy sack ineffectually across various sections of the crisis circuit, moving it in agitation, trying to protect his machine from the water.

  Yagharek watched the glistening roofscape. When his head became too full of fearful dreams and he grew afraid of what he might see, he turned on his heel and watched through the mirrors on his helmet. He kept watch on the dim, immobile figure below.

  Isaac and Derkhan dragged Andrej a little closer to the circuit (again with that ghastly gentleness, as if concerned for his wellbeing). Under Derkhan’s gun, Isaac retied the old man’s hands and legs, and fastened one of the communicator helmets tight to his head. He did not look at Andrej’s face.

  The helmet had been adjusted. As well as its flared output on the top,
it had three input jacks. One connected it to the second helmet. Another was connected by several skeins of wires to the calculating brains and generators of the crisis engine.

  Isaac wiped the third connection briefly free of filthy rainwater, and plugged into it the thick wire extending from the black circuit-breaker, attached to which was the massive cable extending all the way to the Construct Council, south of the river. Current could flow from the Council’s analytical brain, through the one-way switch, into Andrej’s helmet.

  “That’s it, that’s it,” said Isaac tensely. “Now we just need the fucking Weaver . . .”

  It was another half an hour of rain and burgeoning nightmares before the dimensions of the roofspace rippled and shucked wildly, and the Weaver’s crooning monologue could be heard.

  . . . AS THEE AND ME CONCURRED THE FAT FUNNELSPACE THE CLOT AT CITYWEB CENTRE SEES US CONFLAB . . . came the unearthly voice in all of their skulls, and the great spider stepped out lightly from the kink in the air and danced towards them, its shining body dwarfing them.

  Isaac gave a barking breath, a sharp moan of relief. His mind juddered with the awe and terror the Weaver induced.

  “Weaver!” he shouted. “Help us now!” He held out the other communicating helmet to the extraordinary presence.

  Andrej had looked up and was shying away in a paroxysm of terror. His eyes bulged with the pressure of his blood and he began to retch behind his mask. He wriggled as fast as he could towards the edge of the roof, a terrible inhuman fear jack-knifing his body away.

  Derkhan caught him and held him fast. He ignored her gun, his eyes empty of everything but the vast spider that loomed over him, peering down with slow portentous movements. Derkhan could hold him easily. His decaying muscles flexed and twisted ineffectually. She dragged him back and held him.