Perdido Street Station (56 page)

Like some eldritch
flower, a patch of organic darkness bloomed from nothing in the
centre of the room. It expanded into physical reality with the animal
ease of a stretching cat. It opened itself, and it stood to fill the
room, a colossal segmented thing, a massive spider-presence that
hummed with power and sucked the light out of the air.

The Weaver.

Yagharek and Isaac
dropped the bench simultaneously.

The militia stopped
pummelling Lemuel and turned, alerted by the changing nature of the
aether.

Everyone stopped and
stared, utterly aghast.

The Weaver had
manifested standing directly over two trembling officers. They let
out little cries of terror. One dropped his sword as his fingers
numbed. The other, more bravely but no less ineffectually, raised a
pistol in his violently shaking hand.

The Weaver looked down
at the two men. It raised its pair of human hands. As they cringed,
it brought one hand down on each of their heads, patting them like
dogs.

It raised its hand and
pointed up at the walkway, where Isaac and Yagharek stood dumbfounded
and afraid. Its unearthly singsong voice resonated in the suddenly
quiet room.

...OVER AND UP IN THE
LITTLE PASSAGE IT WAS IT WAS BORN THE CRINGING THUMB THE TWISTED RUNT
THAT FREED ITS SIBLINGS IT CRACKED THE SEAL ON ITS SWADDLING AND
BURST OUT I SMELL THE REMNANTS OF ITS BREAKFAST STILL LOLLING OH I
LIKE THIS I ENJOY THIS WEB THE WEFT IS INTRICATE AND FINE THOUGH TORN
WHO HERE CAN SPIN WITH SUCH ROBUST AND NAIVE EXPERTISE...

The Weaver’s head
moved with alien smoothness from one to the other side. It took in
the room in its multiple and glinting eyes. Still no humans moved.

From outside came
Rudgutter’s voice. It was tense. Angry.

"Weaver!" he
shouted. "I have a gift and a message for you!" There was a
moment of silence, and then a pair of pearl-handled scissors came
skittering through the door of the warehouse. The Weaver clasped its
hands in a very human motion of delight. From outside came the
distinctive sound of scissors being opened and closed.

...LOVELY LOVELY,
moaned the Weaver, THE SNIPSNAP OF SUPPLICATION AND YET THOUGH THEY
SMOOTH EDGES AND ROUGH FIBRES WITH COLD NOISE AN EXPLOSION IN REVERSE
A FUNNELLING IN A FOCUS I MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS
UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE
ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE
RIPPED UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS AND IN THE MINDS OF THESE
DESPERATE AND GUILTY AND BEREFT ARE EXQUISITE TAPESTRIES OF DESIRE
THE DAPPLED GANG PLAIT YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE
GOLD...

The Weaver’s
voice shivered in some crooning delight. Its legs moved suddenly at
terrifying speed, picking its intricate way through the room,
rippling through the space.

The militia crouching
over Lemuel dropped their staffs and scrabbled to get out of its way.
Lemuel looked up at its arachnid bulk through swollen eyes. He raised
his hands and tried to cry out in fear.

The Weaver hovered for
a moment before him, then looked up at the platform above. It stepped
up lightly and was instantly, incomprehensibly, on the walkway, a few
feet from Isaac and Yagharek. They stared in terror at the vast and
monstrous form. Those pointed spike-feet pranced towards them. They
were immobilized. Yagharek tried to move backwards but the Weaver was
too quick...SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE...it sang, and scooped Yagharek
up with a sudden motion, sweeping him under its humanlike arm where
he twisted and cried out like a terrified baby.

...BLACK AND
RUSSET...sang the Weaver. It tottered elegantly like a dancer on her
toes, moved sideways through twisted dimensions and was once more by
Lemuel’s cowering form. It grabbed him and bundled him dangling
beside Yagharek.

The militia stood back,
dumbfounded and terrified. Mayor Rudgutter’s voice sounded from
outside again, but no one listened.

The Weaver stepped up
and was once again on Isaac’s raised living space. It skittered
up to Isaac and grabbed him under its free arm...EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR
SWARMING...it chanted as it took hold of him.

Isaac could not resist.
The Weaver’s touch was cool and unchanging, quite unreal. Its
skin was as smooth as polished glass. He felt himself lifted with
breathtaking ease and enfolded, cosseted under that bony arm.

...DIAMETRICAL
NEGLIGENT FEROCIOUS...Isaac heard the Weaver say as it retraced its
impossible steps and was twenty feet away, standing by Derkhan’s
motionless body. The militia around her moved away in concerted fear.
The Weaver fumbled for her unconscious form and tucked her up next to
Isaac, who felt her warmth through his clothes.

Isaac’s head was
spinning. The Weaver moved sideways again and was across the room,
beside the construct. For a few minutes, Isaac had forgotten it even
existed. It had returned to its customary resting place in the corner
of the room, from where it had watched the militia attacks. It turned
the one feature on its smooth head, its glass lens, towards the
Weaver. The ineluctable spider-presence flicked the construct up onto
its dagger-limbs and tossed it nimbly up. The Weaver caught the
ungainly man-sized machine on its curving chitinous back. The
construct balanced precariously, but did not fall no matter how the
Weaver moved.

Isaac felt a sudden,
murderous pain in his head. He cried out in agony, felt hot blood
pumping across his face. He heard Lemuel scream a moment later,
echoing him.

Through eyes bleary
with confusion and blood, Isaac saw the room flicker around him as
the Weaver paced through interlocking planes. It appeared beside all
the militiamen in turn and moved one of its bladed arms too fast to
see. As it touched them, each of the men screamed, so that a weird
virus of agonized sound seemed to pass around the room at whiplash
speed.

The Weaver stopped in
the centre of the warehouse. Its elbows were pinioned, so that its
captives could not move. With its forearms it dropped red-stained
things across the floor. Isaac raised his head and looked around the
room, trying to see through the burning pain below his temple.
Everyone in the room was crying out, cringing, clapping their hands
to the sides of their faces, trying without success to staunch gouts
of blood with their fingers. Isaac looked down again.

The Weaver was
scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.

Below its gently moving
hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The
gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a
pair of scissors.

The Weaver looked up,
impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.

...FERVENT AND
LOVABLE...it whispered, and disappeared.

**

What was an
experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges
between the three.

The Weaver, the
great spider, came among us.

In the Cymek we call
it
furiach-yajh-hett:
the dancing mad god. I never thought to
see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and
the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like
flies in a web.

The dancing mad god
moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us
to it—we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that
tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal
scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us
all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.

Its knife-hands
flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was
spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power.
Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the
furiach-yajh-hett
ran in circles of delight.

And then it tired
and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.

Into another space.

I shut my eyes.

I moved in a
direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of
that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along
powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality,
with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself
catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the
alien plane.

For a moment the
god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for
knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver
of time, I opened my eyes.

For a terrible
eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad
god was treading.

My eyes itched and
watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand
sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before
them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing
but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.

I saw, or thought I
saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any
desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and
heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming
away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and
dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate
knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.

Its substance was
known to me.

The crawling
infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand
of that eternally complex tapestry...each one resonated under the
step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of
bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or
murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’
motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s
laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a
third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses
to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of
possible spaces.

Every intention,
interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and
reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it
engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history
and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and
birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that
limitless, sprawling web.

It is without
beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It
is a work of such beauty that my soul wept.

It crawled with
life. There were others like our bearer, more of the dancing mad
gods, glimpsed across an infinity of webwork.

There were other
creatures, too, terrible intricate shapes I will not recall.

The web is not
without flaw. In innumerable places the silk is torn and the colours
ruined. Here and there the patterns are strained and unstable. As we
passed these wounds, I felt the dancing mad god pause and flex its
spinneret, repairing and restaining.

A little way off was
the tight silk of the Cymek. I swear I caught its oscillations as the
worldweb flexed under the weight of time.

Around me was a
little localized tangle of metareal gossamer...New Crobuzon. And
there rending the woven strands in the centre was an ugly tear. It
spread out and split the fabric of the city-web, taking the multitude
of colours and bleeding them dry. They were left a drab and lifeless
white. A pointless emptiness, a pallid shade a thousand times more
soulless even than the eye of some sightless cave-born fish.

As I watched, my
pained eyes wide with insight, I saw that the rip was widening.

I was so afraid of
the spreading rent. And I was dwarfed by the enormity of it all, of
the whole of the web. I shut my eyes tight.

I could not close
down my mind. It scrambled, unbidden, to remember what it had seen.
But it could not contain it. I was left only with a sense of it all.
I remember it now as a description. The weight of its immensity is no
longer present in my head.

That is the
etiolated memory that captivates me now.

I have danced with
the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

In the Lemquist Room,
Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue held a council of war.

They had been up all
night. Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher were tired and irritable. They
sipped huge bowls of strong coffee as they pored over papers.

Rescue was impassive.
He fingered his swaddling scarf.

"Look at this,"
said Rudgutter, and waved a piece of paper at his subordinates. "This
arrived this morning. It was couriered in person. I had the
opportunity to discuss its content with the authors. It was not a
social call."

Stem-Fulcher leaned
over, reaching for the letter. Rudgutter ignored her and began to
reread it himself.

"It’s from
Josiah Penton, Bartol Sedner
and
Mashek Ghrashietnichs."
Rescue and Stem-Fulcher looked up. He nodded slowly. "The heads
of Arrowhead Mines, Sedner’s Bank of Commerce and the Paradox
Concerns have taken the time to write a letter
together.
So I
think we can add a long list of lesser names below theirs, in
invisible ink, hm?" He smoothed the letter. "Messrs.
Penton, Sedner and Ghrashietnichs are
‘most concerned,’
it says here, at
‘scurrilous reports’
reaching
their ears. They have wind of our crisis." He watched as
Stem-Fulcher and Rescue glanced at each other. "It’s all
rather garbled. They aren’t at all sure what’s happening,
but none of them have been sleeping well. In addition to which,
they’ve got der Grimnebulin’s name. They want to know
what’s being done to counter, ah...‘this threat to our
great city-state.’ " He put the paper down as Stem-Fulcher
shrugged and opened her mouth to answer. He cut her off, rubbing his
eyes with exasperated exhaustion.