Perdido Street Station (63 page)

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 shushings.

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, crushing the minds of the sleeping citizenry
under a mass of portent and alien symbols.

Isaac could feel the
awful dreams oppressing him, pushing 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 space 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 shivered at the
patience collected in that rubbish land.

The ground quivered.

Instantly the humans in
the corner of the enclosed space 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 shifted
a little to adjust, remained standing.

Isaac and his
companions moved closer together.

"What the
godsdamned fuck
is
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.

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,
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 fashioned 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
shining with astonishment under his hood.
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
massive 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 massive 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 massive 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 worshippers
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 passed
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 chain-tendons, 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 impassive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into
position behind them.

Isaac turned in alarm,
then quickly looked back at the man crawling towards him.

The man’s
expression of horrified concentration did not falter as he opened his
arms in a paternal gesture.

"Welcome all,"
he said in his quivering voice, "to the Construct Council."

**

Montjohn Rescue’s
body soared at speed through the air. The nameless
dextrier-handlinger that was parasitic upon him—a parasite that
thought of itself, after all these years, as Montjohn Rescue—had
subdued the fear at flying blind. It rushed through the air with its
body held vertically, hands folded carefully, a pistol in one. Rescue
looked as if he was standing and waiting for something while the
night sky sped around him.

The soft presence of
the sinistral-handlinger in the dog behind him had opened the door
between their minds. It kept up a sinuous flow of information.

fly left go low
speed up higher up and right now left faster faster dive drift hover,
the sinistral said, and stroked the inside of the dextrier’s
mind to calm it. Flying blind was new and terrifying, but they had
practised yesterday, unseen, away in the foothills, where they had
been transported by militia dirigible. The sinistral had quickly
trained itself to convert left into right and to leave nothing
unsaid.

The Rescue-handlinger
was aggressively obedient. It was a dextrier, the soldier-caste. It
channelled enormous powers through its host—flight and
spitsearing, massive strength. But even with the power this
particular dextrier had as handlinger representative to the Fat Sun
bureaucracy, it was subservient to the noble-caste, the seers, the
sinistrals. To be otherwise was to risk massive psychic attack. The
sinistrals could punish by closing down the assimilation gland of the
wayward dextrier, killing its host and rendering it unable to take
another, reducing it to a blind, clutching handthing, without a host
through which to channel.

The dextrier thought
with a hard, fierce intelligence.

It had been vital that
the Rescue-handlinger won the debate with the sinistrals. If they had
refused to go along with Rudgutter’s plans, the dextrier would
not have been able to go against them: only sinistrals could decide.
But to antagonize the government would have spelt the end for the
handlingers in the city. They had power, but they existed on
sufferance in New Crobuzon. They were simply outnumbered by such a
massive factor. The government suffered them only so long as they
performed services. Rescue-dextrier was sure that any
insubordination, and the government would announce that it had
discovered the murderous, parasitic handlingers were loose in the
city. Rudgutter might even let slip the whereabouts of the host-farm.
The handlinger community would be destroyed.

So there was a certain
joy in Rescue-dextrier as it flew.

Even so, it did not
relish this weird experience. To bear a sinistral through the air was
not unprecedented, although this kind of joint hunting had never been
attempted before; but to fly without sight was utterly terrifying.

The dog-sinistral cast
its mind out like fingers, like antennae that crept out in all
directions for hundreds of yards. It scanned for weird soundings in
the psychosphere, and whispered gently at the dextrier, telling it
where to fly. The dog stared in the mirrors of its helmet and
directed its carrier’s flight.

It kept links extended
with all of the other hunting pairs.

anything feeling
anything?
it questioned. Cautiously, the other sinistrals told it
that no, there was nothing. They continued searching.

Rescue-handlinger felt
the warm wind buffet its host’s body in childish slaps.
Rescue’s hair whipped from side to side.

The dog-handlinger
wriggled, tried to shift its host-body into a more comfortable
position. It was borne over a twisting tide of chimneys, the
nightscape of Ludmead. The Rescue-handlinger was sweeping up towards
Mafaton and Chnum. The sinistral flicked its canine eyes momentarily
away from its mirror-helm. Receding behind it, the leviathan ivory
bloom of the Ribs defined the skyline, dwarfing the raised railways.
The white stone of the university swept below them.

At the outer fringe of
the sinistral’s mental reach, it felt a peculiar prickling in
the city’s communal aura. Its attention flickered back up, and
it was staring into the mirrors.

slow slow ahead and
up,
it told the Rescue-handlinger.
something here stay with
me,
it breathed across the city to the other hunting sinistrals.
It felt them hover and give the order to slow, felt the other pairs
draw to a halt and wait for his report.

The dextrier eased up
through the air towards the twitching patch of psychaether.
Rescue-handlinger could feel the sinistral’s unease
communicated through its link, and it clamped down hard not to be
contaminated by it.
weapon!
it thought,
that’s me. no
thinking!

The dextrier slid
through layers of air, creeping up into a thinner atmosphere. It
opened its host’s mouth and rolled its tongue, nervous and
ready to spitsear. It unfolded its host’s arms, held the pistol
up and ready.

The sinistral probed
the disturbed area. There was an alien hunger, a lingering gluttony.
It was slick with the juices of a thousand other minds, saturating
and staining the patch of psycho-sphere like cooking grease. A vague
trail of exuded souls and that exotic appetite dribbled out through
the sky.

to me to me sibling
handlingers it is here I have found it,
whispered the sinistral
across the city. A shiver of shared trepidation rippled out from the
sinistrals, the five epicentres, crossed and made peculiar patterns
in the psychosphere. In Tar Wedge and Badside and Barrackham and
Ketch Heath, there were rushes of air as the suspended figures flew
across the city towards Ludmead as if pulled on strings.

"Do not be alarmed
by my avatar," hissed the brainless man to Isaac and the others,
his eyes still wide and unclear. "I cannot synthesize a voice,
so I have reclaimed this discarded body that bobbed along the river
that I may intercede with bloodlife. That—" the man
pointed behind him at the enormous, looming figure of the construct
that merged with the rubbish heaps "—is me. This—"
he stroked his quivering carcass "—is my hand and tongue.
Without the old cerebellum to confuse the body with its contrary
impulses, I can install my input." In a macabre motion, the man
reached up and fingered the cable where it sank behind his eyes, into
the clotting flesh at the top of his spine.