Perdido Street Station (81 page)

It had occurred to
Isaac that his taste was known to them now, that they would recognize
him as the destroyer of the egg-clutch. Perhaps he should have been
petrified with fear, but he was not. The railside shack had been left
alone.

Maybe they’re
afraid of me,
he thought.

He drifted on the
river. An hour passed, and the sounds of the city waxed unseen around
him.

**

The noise of bubbles
disturbed him.

He leaned up gingerly
on his elbow, his mind rapidly clicking back into focus. He peered
over the edge of the boat.

Yagharek was still
visible, his posture completely unchanged, on the riverbank. Now
there were some few passers-by behind him, ignoring him as he sat
there covered up and smelling of filth.

Close to the boat, a
patch of bubbles and disturbed water boiled up from below, snapping
at the surface and sending out a ring of ripples about three feet
across. Isaac’s eyes widened momentarily as he realized that
the circle of ripples was
exactly
circular, and contained,
that as each ripple reached its edge, it flattened impossibly,
leaving the water beyond it undisturbed.

Even as Isaac moved
back slightly, a smooth black curve breached in the dark, disturbed
water. The river fell away from the rising shape, splashing within
the limits of the little circle. Isaac was staring into the Weaver’s
face.

**

He snapped back, his
heart beating aggressively. The Weaver stared up at him. Its head was
angled so that only it emerged from the water, and not the looming
body which rose higher when it stood. The Weaver was humming,
speaking deep in Isaac’s skull.

...YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB
THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU
MIGHT BE...it Said in a continuous lilting monologue...RIVER AND DAWN
IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB...The words ebbed until they
could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

"I’m glad to
see you, Weaver," he said. "I remembered our appointment."
He breathed deep. "I need to talk to you," he said. The
Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac
struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into
sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

It was like a dialogue
with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it
could be done.

**

Yagharek heard the
subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some
way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

His eyes flickered
across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill
stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the
river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there
were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

Yagharek pulled his
knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty
feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally
still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some
minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the
old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring
intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

It must, Yagharek
realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

Yagharek strained to
hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the
lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind
him. They were curt, and cried easily.

Time passed but the sun
seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek
watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence
below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

And then, some time
after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in
the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking
ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

The anaemic morning
light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself
through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a
grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling
himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

He collapsed before
Yagharek, wheezing.

The schoolboys tittered
and whispered.

"I think...I think
it’ll come," said Isaac. "I think it understood."

**

It was past eight when
they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with
indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot
wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.

Derkhan had still not
returned. Pengefinchess slept in the corner, or pretended to.

Isaac gathered the
vital tubes and valves, the engines and batteries and transformers,
into a vile sack. He retrieved his notes, rifled through them briefly
to check them, then stashed them back into his shirt. He scrawled a
note for Derkhan and Pengefinchess. He and Yagharek checked and
cleaned their weapons, counted their meagre store of ammunition. Then
Isaac looked out of the ruined windows into the city which had woken
around them.

They must be careful
now. The sun had gained its strength, the light was full. Anyone
might be militia, and every officer would have seen their heliotype.
They drew their cloaks around them. Isaac hesitated, then borrowed
Yagharek’s knife and shaved bloodily with it. The sharp blade
skittered painfully on the nodules and bumps on his skin that were
the reason he had first grown a beard. He was ruthless and quick, and
soon stood before Yagharek with a pasty chin, inexpertly shorn of
whiskers, bleeding and patched with copses of stubble.

He looked ghastly, but
he looked different. Isaac dabbed at his bleeding skin as they set
out into the morning.

By nine, after minutes
of skulking, striding nonchalantly past shops and arguing
pedestrians, finding backstreet routes wherever they existed, the
companions were in the Griss Twist dump. The heat was unforgiving,
and seemed greater in these canyons of discarded metal. Isaac’s
chin stung and tingled.

They picked their way
over the wasteground towards the heart of the maze, towards the
Construct Council’s lair.

**

"Nothing."
Bentham Rudgutter clenched his fists on his desk.

"Two nights we’ve
had the airships up and searching. Nothing at all. Another crop of
bodies every morning, and not a godsdamn thing all night. Rescue
dead, no sign of Grimnebulin, no sign of Blueday..." He raised
bloodshot eyes and looked across the table at Stem-Fulcher, who
sucked gently at the pungent smoke of her pipe. "This is not
going well," he concluded.

Stem-Fulcher nodded
slowly. She considered.

"Two things,"
she said slowly. "It’s clear that what we need is
specially trained troops. I told you about Motley’s officers."
Rudgutter nodded. He rubbed and rubbed at his eyes. "We can
easily match those. We could easily tell the punishment factories to
run us off a squadron of specialist Remade, with mirrors and
backwards weapons and all, but what we need is
time.
We need
to train them up. That’s three, four months at the least. And
while we’re biding our time the slake-moths are just going to
keep picking off citizens. Getting stronger.

"So we have to
think about strategies for keeping the city under control. A curfew,
for example. We know the moths
can
get into houses, but
there’s no doubt that most of the victims are picked off the
streets.

"Then we need to
dampen speculation in the press about what’s going on. Barbile
wasn’t the only scientist working on that project. We need to
be able to stamp out any dangerous kind of sedition, we need to
detain all the other scientists involved.

"And with half the
militia engaged in slake-moth duties, we can’t risk another
dock strike, or anything similar. It could cripple us quickly. We owe
it to the city to put an end to any unreasonable demands. Basically,
Mayor, this is a crisis bigger than any since the Pirate Wars. I
think it’s time to declare a state of emergency. We need
extraordinary powers.

"We need martial
law."

Rudgutter pursed his
lips mildly, and considered.

**

"Grimnebulin,"
said the avatar. The Council itself remained hidden. It did not sit
up. It was indistinguishable from the mountains of filth and garbage
around it.

The cable that entered
the avatar’s head emerged from the floor of metal shavings and
stone debris. The avatar stank. His skin was patched with mould.

"Grimnebulin,"
he repeated in his uncomfortable, wavering voice. "You did not
return. The crisis engine you left with me is incomplete. Where are
the Is that went with you to the Glasshouse? The slake-moths flew
again last night. Did you fail?"

Isaac held his hands up
to slow the questioning.

"Stop," he
said peremptorily. "I’ll explain."

Isaac knew that it was
misleading to think of the Construct Council having emotions. As he
told the avatar the story of that appalling night in the cactus
Glasshouse—that night of so-partial victory at such horrendous
price—he knew that it was not anger or sadness that caused the
man’s body to shake, his face to spasm in random grotesqueries.

The Construct Council
had sentience, but no feelings. It was assimilating new data, that
was all. It was calculating possibilities.

He told it that the
monkey-constructs had been destroyed and the avatar’s body
spasmed particularly sharply, as the information flooded back down
the cable into the hidden analytical engines of the Council. Without
those constructs, it could not download the experience. It relied on
Isaac’s reports.

As once before, Isaac
thought he glimpsed a human figure fleeting in the rubbish around
him, but the apparition was gone in an instant.

Isaac told the Council
of the Weaver’s intervention, and then, finally, began to
explain his plan. The Council, of course, was quick to understand.

The avatar began to
nod. Isaac thought he could feel infinitesimal movements in the
ground under him, as the Council itself began to shift.

"Do you understand
what I need from you?" said Isaac.

"Of course,"
replied the Construct Council in the avatar’s reedy quaver.
"And I will be linked directly to the crisis engine?"

"Yes," said
Isaac. "That’s how this is going to work. I forgot some of
the components of the crisis engine when I left it with you, which is
why it wasn’t complete. But that’s just as well, because
when I saw them, they gave me the idea for all this. But listen: I
need your help. If this is going to work we need the maths to be
exact.
I brought my analytical engine with me from the
laboratory, but it’s hardly a top-notch model. You, Council,
are a network of damn sophisticated calculating engines...right? I
need you to do some sums for me. Work out some functions, print up
some programme cards. And I need them
perfect.
To an
infinitesimal degree of error. All right?"

"Show me,"
said the avatar.

Isaac pulled out two
sheets of paper. He walked over to the avatar, holding them out. In
the dump’s smell of oil and chymical mould and warming metal,
the organic stink of the avatar’s slowly collapsing body was
shocking. Isaac creased his nose in disgust. But he steeled himself
and stood beside the rotting, half-alive carcass and explained the
functions he had outlined.

"This page here is
several equations I can’t get the answers to. Can you read
them? They’re to do with the mathematical modelling of mental
activity. This second page is more tricky. This is the set of
programme cards I need. I’ve tried to lay out each function as
exactly as I can. So here for example..." Isaac’s stubby
finger moved along a line of complicated logic symbols. "This is
‘find data from input one; now model data.’ Then here we
have the same demand for input two...and this really complex one
here: ‘compare prime data.’ Then over here are the
constructive, remodelling functions.

"Is that all
comprehensible?" he said, stepping back. "And can you do
it?"

The avatar took the
papers and scanned them carefully. The dead man’s eyes moved in
a smooth left-right-left motion along the page. It was seamless until
the avatar paused and shuddered as data welled along the cable to the
Construct’s hidden brain.

There was a motionless
moment, and then the avatar said: "This can all be done."

**

Isaac nodded in curt
triumph. "We need it...well...now. As soon as possible. I can
wait. Can you do that?"

"I will try. And
then as evening falls and the slake-moths return, you will turn on
the power, and you will connect me. You will link me up to your
crisis engine."

Isaac nodded.

He fumbled in his
pocket and drew out another piece of paper, which he handed to the
avatar.

"That’s a
list of everything we need," he said. "It’s all bound
to be in the dump somewhere, or it can be rigged up. Do you have
some...uh...some little yous somewhere that can track this stuff
down? Another couple of those helmets you got for us, the ones
communicators use; a couple of batteries; a little generator; stuff
like that. Again, we need that now. The main thing is we need cable.
Thick conducting cable, stuff that can take elyctrical or
thaumaturgic current. We need two and a half, three
miles
of
the stuff. Not all in one, obviously...it can be in pieces, as long
as they can be connected easily one to the next, but we need
masses.
We have to link you up with our...with our focus." His voice
quietened as he said this, and his face set. "The cable has to
be ready this evening, by six o’clock I think."