Perdido Street Station Part 42

The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.

The handlingers communed.

The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.

They sp.a.w.ned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.

There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts' minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.

They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children's games, no handlingers were ever found.

Many people in New Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in the city, were gone.

In the shadows of their motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of lower lifeforms.

They shared information. Rescue's told what it knew, gave orders. It repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the secret war.

The handlingers squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to conclusions.

After two, three minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way back into the gaping holes in their hosts' bodies. Each body spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.

As they had agreed, they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right handlinger, like Rescue's, and one left. Rescue himself was paired with the dog.

Rescue strode a little way through the gra.s.sland and tugged out a large bag. He removed five mirrored helmets, five thick blindfolds, several sets of heavy leather straps and nine primed flintlock pistols. Two of the helmets were specially made, one for the vodyanoi and an elongated one for the dog.

Each left-handlinger bent its host down to retrieve its helmet, each right-handlinger a blindfold. Rescue fitted his canine partner's helmet on its head, strapping it tight, before attaching his blindfold, tying it tight so that he could see nothing at all.

Each of the pairs moved away. Each blind right-handlinger held its partner tight. The vodyanoi held the debutante; the old woman the clerk; the Remade held the khepri; the street-child, bizarrely, clasped the muscled man protectively; and Rescue held on to the dog he could no longer see.

"Instructions waterclear?" said Rescue aloud, too far apart to speak the handlingers' real touch-tongue. "Remember training. Hard and bizarre, tonight, no question. Never tried before. Sinistrals, you must steer. Your onus. Open to your partner and never close tonight. Your battle rages. Keep with other sinistrals, too. Slightest sign of target, mental alarm, grab all the sinistrals up tonight. We'll join forces, there in minutes.

"Dextriers, obey without thinking. Our hosts must be blind must be blind. Can't look at the wings, not anyhow never. With mirror-helms we could see but not spitsear, looking wrongward. So we face forward, but without seeing. Tonight we carry our sinistral as our host carries us, without mind or fear or question. Understand?" There were muted sounds of acquiescence. Rescue nodded. "Then attach."

The sinistral of each pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and locked themselves to their partners' backs, facing behind them. Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs, over their dextriers' shoulders and out in front.

Rescue waited while an unseen sinistral attached the dog uncomfortably to his back. Its legs were splayed absurdly, but the animal's handlinger parasite ignored its host's pain. It moved its head expertly, checked that it could see over Rescue's shoulder. It yelped in a controlled, canine gasp.

"Everyone remember Rudgutter's code," shouted Rescue, "case of emergency after? Then hunt."

The dextriers flexed hidden organs at the base of their vivid, humanoid thumbs. There was a quick sough of air. The five ungainly pairs of host-and-handlingers soared straight up and out, away from each other at speed, disappearing towards Ludmead and Mog Hill, Syriac and Flyside and Sheck, swallowed up by the impure, streetlamp-stained night sky, the blind bearing the afraid.

CHAPTER T THIRTY-EIGHT.

It was only a short, covert journey from the hut on the railwayside to the Griss Twist dumps. Isaac and Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek drifted seemingly at random through a parallel map of the city. They made their way through backstreets. They flinched uneasily as they felt the smothering nightmares descend on the city.

At a quarter to ten, they were outside number two dump.

The Griss Twist dumps interspersed the deserted remnants of factories. Here and there one still operated, at half- or a quartercapacity, chucking out its noxious fumes by day and succ.u.mbing slowly to the ambient decay by night. The factories were hemmed in and laid siege to by the dumps.

Dump Two was surrounded by unconvincing barbed wire, rusted through, broken and torn, deep in the coil of Griss Twist, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Tar. It was the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral. A landscape not urban, not created by design or chance, an agglutination of waste remains left to rot, that had subsided and settled into random formations of rust, filth, metal, debris and moulding cloth, scintillas of mirror and china like scree, arcs from splintered wheels, the skittering waste-energy of half-broken engines and machines.

The four renegades punctured the fence with ease. Warily, they traced the tracks carved by the rubbish workers. Cartwheels had carved ruts in the fine rubble that was the dump's topsoil. Weeds proved their tenacity by spewing from every little clutch of nutrient, no matter how vile.

Like explorers in some antique land they wound their way, dwarfed by the stray sculptures of muck and entropy that surrounded them like canyon walls.

Rats and other vermin made little sounds.

Isaac and the others walked slowly through the warm night, through the stinking air of the industrial dump.

"What are we looking for?" hissed Derkhan.

"I don't know," said Isaac. "The d.a.m.ned construct said we'd find our way where we had to go. f.u.c.king had it with enigmas."

Some late-waking seagull sounded in the air above them. They all started at the sound. The sky was not safe, after all.

Their feet dragged them. It was like the tide, a slow movement, without any conscious direction, which pulled them inexorably in one direction. They found their way to the heart of the rubbish maze.

They turned a corner of the ruinous trashscape and found themselves in a hollow. Like a clearing in the woods, an open s.p.a.ce forty feet across. Around its edges were strewn huge piles of half-ruined machinery, the remnants of all manner of engines, ma.s.sive pieces that looked like working printing presses, down to minuscule and fine pieces of precision engineering.

The four companions stood in the centre of the s.p.a.ce. They waited, uneasy.

Just behind the north-western edge of the mountains of waste, huge steam-cranes lolled like great marsh lizards. The river welled thickly just beyond them, out of sight.

For a minute, there was no movement.

"What's the time?" whispered Isaac. Lemuel and Derkhan looked at their watches.

"Nearly eleven," said Lemuel.

They looked up again, and still nothing moved.

Overhead, a gibbous moon meandered through the clouds. Its was the only light in the dump, a wan, flattening luminescence that bled the depth from the world.

Isaac looked down and was about to speak, when a sound issued from one of the innumerable trenches that sliced through the towering reef of rubbish. It was an industrial sound, a clanking, siphoning wheeze like some enormous insect. The four waiting figures watched the end of the tunnel, a confused sense of foreboding building in them.

A large construct stamped out into the empty s.p.a.ce. It was a model designed for labour, heavy jobs. It stomped past them on swinging tripedal legs, kicking stray stones and gobbets of metal out of its way. Lemuel, who was nearly in its path, moved back warily, but the construct paid him no heed at all. It continued walking until it was near the edge of the oval of empty s.p.a.ce, then stopped and stared at the northern wall.

It was still.

As Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan, there was another noise. He swivelled quickly, to see another, much smaller construct, this one a cleaning model driven by khepri-designed metaclockwork. It cruised on its little caterpillar treads, stationing itself a little way from its much bigger sibling.

Now, the sounds of constructs were coming from all around the canyons of garbage.

"Look," hissed Derkhan, and pointed to the east. From one of the smaller caverns in the muck, two humans were emerging. At first Isaac thought he must be mistaken, and that they must be lithe constructs, but there could be no doubt that they were flesh and bone. They scrambled over the crushed detritus that littered the earth.

They paid the waiting renegades no heed at all.

Isaac frowned.

"Hey," he said, just loud enough to be heard. One of the two men who had entered the clearing shot him a wrathful glance and shook his head, then looked away. Chastened and astonished, Isaac was silent.

More and more constructs were arriving in the open s.p.a.ce. Ma.s.sive military models, tiny medical a.s.sistants, automatic road-drills and household a.s.sistants, chrome and steel, iron and bra.s.s and copper and gla.s.s and wood, steam-powered and elyctrical and clockwork, thaumaturgy-driven and oil-burning engined.

Here and there among them darted more humans-even, Isaac thought, a vodyanoi, quickly lost in the darkness and moving shadows. The humans congregated in a tight knot by the side of what was almost an amphitheatre.

Isaac, Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek were completely ignored. They moved together instinctively, unsettled by the bizarre silence. Their attempts to communicate with their fellow organic creatures met either contemptuous silence or irritated shus.h.i.+ngs.

For ten minutes, constructs and humans dripped steadily into the hollow at the heart of Dump Two. Then the flow stopped, quite suddenly, and there was silence.

"D'you think these constructs are sentient?" whispered Lemuel.

"I'd say so," said Isaac quietly. "I'm sure it'll become clear."

Barges in the river beyond sounded their klaxons, warned each other out of the way. Unnoticed as it came, the terrible weight of nightmares had settled again on New Crobuzon, crus.h.i.+ng the minds of the sleeping citizenry under a ma.s.s of portent and alien symbols.

Isaac could feel the awful dreams oppressing him, pus.h.i.+ng in on his skull. He was aware of them suddenly, waiting in the silence in the city dump.

There were about thirty constructs and perhaps sixty humans. Every human, every construct, every creature in that s.p.a.ce except Isaac and his companions bided their time with supernatural calm. He felt that extraordinary stillness, that timeless waiting, like a kind of cold.

He s.h.i.+vered at the patience collected in that rubbish land.

The ground quivered.

Instantly the humans in the corner of the enclosed s.p.a.ce fell to their knees, heedless of the sharp detritus around their feet. They gave obeisance, murmuring some complex chant in time, tracing some sacred hand movement like interlocking wheels.

The constructs s.h.i.+fted a little to adjust, remained standing.

Isaac and his companions moved closer together.

"What the G.o.dsd.a.m.ned f.u.c.k is is this?" hissed Lemuel. this?" hissed Lemuel.

There was another subterraneous tug, a juddering as if the earth wanted to slough off the rubbish heaped onto it. In the north wall of discarded and cast-off produce, two enormous lights came slamming silently on. The gathering was pinned in the cold light, spots so tight nothing spilt from their edges. The humans murmured and made their sign all the more fervently.

Isaac's mouth dropped slowly open.

"Sweet Jabber protect us," he whispered.

The wall of rubbish was moving. It was sitting up sitting up.

The bedsprings and old windows, the girders and steam engines from ancient locomotives, the air-pumps and fans, the pulleys and belts and shattered powerlooms were falling like an optical illusion into an alternative configuration. He had been staring at it for ages, but only now that it slowly, ponderously, impossibly moved moved, did Isaac see it. That was an upper arm, the knot of guttering; that broken child's buggy and the enormous inverted wheelbarrow were feet; that little inverted triangle of roof-beams was a hip-bone; the enormous chymical drum was a thigh and the ceramic cylinder a calf . . .

The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe.

It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fas.h.i.+oned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.

It cannot stand! thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek's eyes were s.h.i.+ning with astonishment under his hood. thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek's eyes were s.h.i.+ning with astonishment under his hood. It isn't solid enough to, it can't stand, it can only wallow in the muck! It isn't solid enough to, it can't stand, it can only wallow in the muck!

The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A ma.s.sive proliferation of wires and tubes of metal and thick rubber spewed from valves and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. The creature reached up with an arm powered by a ma.s.sive steamhammer piston. Those lights, those eyes, swivelled from the air and looked down on the constructs and the humans below. The lights were streetlamp bulbs, jets powered by huge cylinders of gas visible in the construct's skull. The grille of a ma.s.sive air-vent had been riveted to the lower half of its face to mimic the slatted teeth of a skull.

It was a construct, an enormous construct, formed of cast-off pieces and stolen engines. Thrown together and powered without the intervention of human design.

There was the hum of powerful engines as the creature's neck swivelled and optical lenses swept the illuminated crowd. Springs and strained metal creaked and snapped.

The human wors.h.i.+ppers began to chant, softly.

The enormous composite construct seemed to catch sight of Isaac and his companions. It strained its constrained neck out to its limits. The gaslight beams swung down and pinioned the four.

The light did not move. It was completely blinding.

Then, abruptly, it was shut off. From somewhere close by, a thin and tremulous voice sounded.

"Welcome to our meeting, der Grimnebulin, Pigeon, Blueday and Cymek visitor."

Isaac cast his head around, blinking furiously, his eyes bleached and unseeing.

As the fog of old light cleared from his head, Isaac caught blurred sight of a man stumbling uncertainly towards them on the broken ground. Isaac heard Derkhan breathe in sharply, heard her swear in disgust and fear.

For a moment he was confused, and then as his eyes acclimatized to the moon's half-hearted glow and he saw the approaching figure clearly for the first time, he emitted a horrified noise at the same moment as Lemuel. Only Yagharek, the desert warrior, was silent.

The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticced as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to slow gangrene.

But what caused the watchers to shudder and exclaim was his head. His skull had been sheered cleanly in two just above his eyes. The top was completely gone. There was a little fringe of congealed blood below the cut. From the wet hollow inside the man's head snaked a twisting cable, two fingers thick. It was surrounded with a spiral of metal, which was bloodied and red-silver at the bottom, where it plunged into the empty brainpan.

The cable hauled up into the air, dangling down into the man's skull. Isaac followed it slowly up with his eyes, dumbfounded and aghast. It swept back at an angle till it was twenty feet above the ground, and there it rested in the curling metal hand of the giant construct. It pa.s.sed through the thing's hand and disappeared ultimately somewhere in its bowels.

The constructed hand seemed to be made of some giant umbrella, torn apart and rewired, attached to pistons and chaintendons, opening and closing like some vast cadaverous claw. The construct played out the cable a little at a time, allowing the man to stumble towards the waiting interlopers, literally at the end of his tether.

As the monstrous puppet-man approached, Isaac moved backwards instinctively. Lemuel and Derkhan, even Yagharek followed suit. They backed unseeingly into the impa.s.sive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into position behind them.