Perdido Street Station Part 58

The avatar reached up over the grille that doubled as the Council's metal teeth. Behind one of the enormous lights Derkhan knew were its eyes, a tangled knot of wire and tubing and rubbish burst out of a casing, in which the stuttering valves of some vastly complex a.n.a.lytical engine were working.

It was the first sign that the great construct was conscious. Derkhan thought she saw light glimmer faintly, waxing and waning, in the Council's huge eyes.

The avatar pulled the cable into position beside the a.n.a.logue brain, one of the network that made up the Council's peculiar inhuman consciousness. He untwisted several of the thick wires in the cable, and in the explosion of metal from the Council's head. Derkhan looked away, sickened, as the avatar placidly ignored the way the vicious metal tore jagged holes in his hands, and sluggish, greying blood oozed fitfully out and over his decaying skin.

He began to link the Council to the cable, twisting finger-thick wires together into a conducting whole, snapping connections into sockets that sputtered with obscure sparks, examining the seemingly meaningless buds of copper and silver and gla.s.s that flowered from the Construct Council's brain and from the rubber sheathing of the cable, picking some, twisting and discarding others, plaiting the mechanism into impossibly complex configurations.

"The rest is easy," he whispered. "Wire to wire, cable to cable, at every junction throughout the city, that is easy. This is the only taxing part, here at source, to connect up correctly, to channel the exudations, to mimic the operation of the communicators' helmets for an alternative model of consciousness."

Yet despite the difficulty, it was still light when the avatar looked up at her, wiped his lacerated hands against his thighs, and said that he had finished.

Derkhan watched the little flashes and sparks that burst ominously from the connection with awe. It was beautiful. It glittered like some mechanical jewel.

The Council's head-vast and still immobile, like a sleeping daemon's-was linked to the cable with a knot of connective tissue, an elyctro-mechanical, thaumaturgic scar. Derkhan marvelled. Eventually she looked up.

"Well then," she said hesitantly, "I'd best go and tell Isaac that . . . that you're ready."

With great sweeps of dirty water, Pengefinchess and her companion kicked their way through the eddying darkness of the Tar.

They stayed low. The bottom was barely visible as uneven darkness two feet below them. The cable unwound slowly from the great pile they had left at the bottom of the river, by the edge of the wall.

It was heavy, and they lugged it sluggishly through the filthy river.

They were alone in this part of the water. There were no other vodyanoi: only a few hardy, stunted fishes that skimmed nervously away at their approach. As if, As if, thought Pengefinchess, thought Pengefinchess, anything in the whole of Bas-Lag could induce me to eat them anything in the whole of Bas-Lag could induce me to eat them.

Minutes pa.s.sed and their hidden pa.s.sage continued. Pengefinchess did not think of Derkhan or of what would happen that night, did not consider the plan on which she had eavesdropped. She did not evaluate its probable success. It was none of her concern.

Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on.

In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fas.h.i.+on, that there was a great deal at stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy.

Ahead of her the slick darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out the Tar's surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all directions through the little waves.

They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.

Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.

Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been b.a.s.t.a.r.dized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.

"Your companions know to find you here?" Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). "I am done," she announced. "You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving." He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. "Be fecund," she said. It was a traditional farewell.

She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.

The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament's island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.

The current was stronger than the Tar's, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians' quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.

Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers' convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.

She began to feel other vodyanoi pa.s.s her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi's house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to crumble in unsanitary fas.h.i.+on into the water. Those were the vodyanoi slums.

Here, on the other hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might lead through some carefully crafted pa.s.sage below the surface into a riverside house all done in white marble. Its facade would be tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side, but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting huge rooms above and below the water; ca.n.a.l pa.s.sageways; sluices refres.h.i.+ng the water every day.

Pengefinchess swam on past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city pa.s.sed further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her escape with great pleasure.

She spread her arms and sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from her skin through the pores of the thin cotton s.h.i.+ft she wore. After days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.

Pengefinchess felt it swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.

I'll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I'll head for the Cold Claw Sea. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I'll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about.

She opened her enormous mouth, let the Canker gush through her. Pengefinchess swam on, through the suburbs, up and out of the city.

CHAPTER F FORTY-NINE.

Men and women in grubby overalls spread out from the Griss Twist dump.

They went on foot and in carts, singly, in pairs, and in little gangs of four or five. They moved in dribs and drabs, at un.o.btrusive speeds. Those on foot carried great swathes of cable over their shoulders, or looped between them and a colleague. In the backs of the carts the men and women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

They went out into the city at irregular intervals, over two or more hours, s.p.a.cing their departures according to a schedule worked out by the Construct Council. It was calculated to be random.

A small horse-drawn wagon containing four men set off, entering the flow of traffic over c.o.c.ks...o...b..Bridge and winding up towards the centre of Spit Hearth. They made their way without urgency, turning onto the wide, banyan-lined Boulevard St. Dragonne. They swayed with a muted clacking along the wooden slats that paved the street: the legacy of the eccentric Mayor Waldemyr, who had objected to the cacophony of wheels on stone cobblestones past his window.

The driver waited for a break in the traffic, then turned to the left and into a small courtyard. The boulevard was invisible, but its sounds were still thick around them. The cab stopped by a high wall of rich red brick, from behind which rose an exquisite smell of honeysuckle. Ivy and pa.s.sionflower sprouted in little bursts over the lip of the wall, bobbing above them in the breeze. It was the garden of the Vedneh Gehantock monastery, tended by the dissident cactacae and human monks of that floral G.o.dling.

The four men leapt down from the cart and began to unload tools and the bales of heavy cable. Pedestrians walked past them, watched them briefly and forgot them.

One man held the end of the cable high against the monastery wall. His workmate lifted a heavy iron bracket and a mallet, and with three quick strokes he had anch.o.r.ed the end of the cable into the wall, about seven feet above the ground. The two moved along, repeated the operation eight or so feet further to the west; and then again, moving along the wall at some speed.

Their movements were not furtive. They were functional and unpresuming. The hammering was just another noise in the montage of city sound.

The men disappeared around the corner of the square and moved off to the west. They dragged the huge bail of insulated wire with them. The other two men stayed put, waiting by the tethered end of the cable, its copper and alloy innards splaying like metallic petals.

The first pair took the cable along the twisting wall that dug inwards through Spit Hearth, around the backs of restaurants and the delivery entrances to clothing boutiques and carpenters' workshops, towards the red-light zone and The Crow, the bustling nucleus of New Crobuzon.

They moved the cable up and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains in the wall's structure, and joining twisting skeins of other pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The drab cable was invisible. It was one nerve fibre in the city's ganglions, a thick cord among many.

Inevitably, they had to cross the street itself, as it peeled away, curving slowly eastwards. They lowered the cable to the ground, approaching a rut that linked the two sides of the pavement. It was a gutter, originally for s.h.i.+t and now for rainwater, a six-inch channel between the paving slabs that sluiced through grilles into the undercity at the furthest end.

They laid the cable in the groove, attaching it firmly. They crossed quickly, standing aside occasionally while traffic interrupted them in their work, but this was not a busy street, and they were able to lay the cable without extensive interruption.

Their behaviour still did not merit attention. Running their cable back up the wall opposite-this time the boundary of a school, from the window of which came forth didactic barks-the unremarkable pair pa.s.sed another group of workmen. They were digging up the opposite corner of the street, replacing shattered flagstones, and they looked up at the newcomers and grunted some shorthand greeting, then ignored them.

As they approached the red-light zone, the Construct Council's followers turned into a courtyard, trailing their heavy coil. On three sides, walls rose above them, five or more floors of filthy brick, stained and mossy, years of smog and rain etched across them. There were windows at untidy intervals, as if they had been spilt from the highest point to fall irregularly between the roof and the ground.

Cries and oaths were audible, and laughed conversations, and the clattering of kitchenware. A pretty young child of uncertain s.e.x watched them from a third-floor window. The two men looked at each other nervously for a moment, and scanned the rest of the overlooking windows. The child's was the only face: they were otherwise un.o.bserved.

They dropped the loops of cable, and one looked up into the child's eyes, winked impishly and grinned. The other man dropped to one knee and peered through the bars of the circular manhole in the courtyard floor.

From the darkness below a voice hailed him curtly. A filthy hand shot up towards the metal seal.

The first man tugged his companion's leg and hissed at him-"They're here . . . this is the right place!"-then grabbed the rough end of the cable and tried to thrust it between the bars in the sewer's entrance. It was too thick. He cursed and fumbled in his toolbox for a hacksaw, began to work on the tough grille, wincing at the screech of metal.

"Hurry," said the invisible figure below. "Something's been following us."

When the cutting was done, the man in the courtyard shoved the cable hard into the ragged hole. His companion glanced down at the unsettling scene. It looked like some grotesque inversion of birth.

The men below grabbed at the cable, hauled it into the darkness of the sewers. The yards of wire coiled in the still, close courtyard began to unwind into the city's veins.

The child watched curiously as the two men waited, wiping their hands on their overalls. When the cable was pulled taut, when it disappeared sharply under the ground, pulled at a tight angle around the corner of the little cul-de-sac, then they sauntered quickly out of that shadowed hole.

As they turned the corner, one man looked up, winked again, then walked on and disappeared from the child's view.

In the main street the two men separated without a word, walking away in different directions under the setting sun.

At the monastery, the two men waiting by the wall were looking up.

On the building across the street, a concrete edifice mottled with damp, three men had appeared over the crumbling edge of the roof. They were hauling their own cable with them, the last forty or so feet of a much longer roll that now snaked away behind them, tracking their rooftop journey from the southern corner of Spit Hearth.

The cable trail they left wound among the rooftop shacks of squatters. It joined the legions of pipes that made erratic paths among the pigeon hutches. The cable was squeezed around spires and tacked like some ugly parasite onto slates. It bowed slightly across streets, twenty, forty or more feet above the ground, next to the little bridges thrown up across the divides. Here and there, where the gap was six feet or less, the cable simply spanned the drop, where its bearers had leapt across.

The cable disappeared south-eastwards, plunging suddenly down and through a slimy storm-drain, into the sewers.

The men made their way to the fire-escape of their building, and began to descend. They hauled the thick cable down to the first floor, looked down over the monastery garden and the two men watching on the ground.

Ready?" shouted one of the newcomers, and made a throwing motion in their direction. The pair looking up, nodded. The three on the fire-escape paused, and swung the remnants of the cable in time.

When they threw it, it wriggled in the air like some monstrous flying serpent, descending with a heavy smack into the arms of the man who ran to catch it. He yelped, but held it, kept the end high above his head and pulled it as tight as he could across the divide.

He held the heavy wire against the monastery wall, positioning himself so that the new length of cable would link up snugly with the piece already attached to the Vedneh Gehantock garden wall. His companion hammered it into place.

The black cable crossed the street above the pedestrians' heads, descending at a steep angle.

The three on the iron fire-escape leaned over, watching the frantic engineering of their fellows. One of the men below them began to twist together the huge snarls of wire, connecting the conducting material. He worked quickly, until the two bare ends of fibrous metal were conjoined in an ugly, functional knot.

He opened his toolkit and brought forth two little bottles. He shook them both briefly, then opened the stopper on one and dripped it quickly across the thicket of wires. The viscous liquid seeped in, saturating the connection. The man repeated the operation with the second bottle. As the two liquids met there was an audible chymical reaction. He stood back, stretched his arm to continue pouring, closing his eyes as smoke began to billow out from the rapidly heating metal.

The two chymicals met and mixed and combusted, spewing out noxious fumes with a quick burst of heat intense enough to weld the wires into a sealed mesh.

When the heat had lessened, the two men began the final job, laying ragged strips of sacking across the new connection and cracking the seals on a tin of thick, bituminous paint, slathering it on thickly, covering the bare metal seal, insulating it.

The men on the fire-escape were satisfied. They turned and retraced their steps, returning to the roof, from where they dissipated into the city as quick and untraceable as smoke in a breeze.

All along a line between Griss Twist and The Crow, similar operations were taking place.

In the sewers, furtive men and women picked their way through the hiss and drip of the subterranean tunnels. Where possible, these large gangs were led by workers who knew a little of the undercity: sewage workers; engineers; thieves. They were all equipped with maps, torches, guns and strict instructions. Ten or more figures, several with lengths of heavy cable, would pick their way together along their allotted route. When one piece of slowly unrolling wire ran out, they would connect another and continue.

There were dangerous delays as parties lost each other, blundering towards lethal zones: ghul-nests and undergang lairs. But they corrected themselves and hissed for help, making their way back towards their comrades' voices.

When they finally met the tail end of another team in some main node of tunnel, some medium hub of sewer, they connected the two huge ends of wire, welding them with chymicals or heat-torches or backyard thaumaturgy. Then the cable was attached to the enormous arterial clutches of pipes that travelled the lengths of the sewers.

Their job done, the company would scatter and disappear.

In un.o.btrusive places, with extended backstreets or great stretches of interlinked roofs, the cable would poke from underground and be taken by the crews working above the streets. They unrolled the cable over hillocks of rank sedge behind warehouses, up stairways of damp brick, over roofs and along chaotic streets, where their industry was invisible in its ba.n.a.lity.

They met others, the cable lengths were sealed. The men and women dispersed.

Mindful of the likelihood that some crews-especially those in the undercity-would become lost and miss their rendezvous points, the Construct Council had stationed spare crews along the route. They waited in building sites and by the banks of ca.n.a.ls with their serpentine load beside them, for word that some connection had not been made.

But the work seemed charmed. There were problems, lost moments, wasted time and brief panics, but no team disappeared or missed its meeting. The spare men remained idle.

A great sinuous circuit was constructed through the city. It wound through more than two miles of textures: its matt-black rubber skin slid under faecal slime; across moss and rotting paper; through scrubby undergrowth, patches of brick-strewn gra.s.sland, disturbing the trails of feral cats and street-children; plotting the ruts in the skin of architecture, littered with granulated clots of damp brickdust.

The cable was inexorable. It moved on, its path deviating briefly here and there with whiplash curves, scoring a path through the hot city. It was as determined as some sp.a.w.ning fish, fighting its way towards the enormous rising monolith at the centre of New Crobuzon.