Jack

NOW THAT THINGS have
gone the way they have, everyone's got a story. Everyone'll tell you how they
or their friend, which you can see in the way they say it they want you to
think means them, knew Jack. Maybe even how they helped him, how they were part
of his schemes. Mostly though of course they know that's too much and it'll
just be how they or their friend was there one time and saw him running over
the roofs, money flying from his swag-bags, militia trying and failing to track
him down below. That sort of thing.
 
My mate saw Jack Half-a-Prayer once,
 
they'll
say,
 
just for a moment.
 
As if
they're being modest.

It's supposed to be
respect. They reckon they're showing their respect, with everything that's
happened. They ain't, of course. They're like dogs on his corpse and they
disgust me.

I tell you that so you
know where I'm coming from. Because I know how what I'm about to say might
sound. I want you to know where I'm coming from when I tell you that I
 
did
 
know
Jack. I did.

I worked with him.

I was lowly, don't get
me wrong, but I was part of the whole thing. And please don't think I'm talking
myself up, but I swear to you I ain't being arrogant. I'm nothing important,
but the work I did, in a little way, was crucial to him. That's all I'm saying.
So. So you can understand that I was pretty interested when I heard we'd got
our hands on the man who sold Jack out. That would be one way of putting it.
That would be mild. I made it my business to meet him, let's put it that way.

I remember the first
time I heard what Jack was up to, after he escaped. He was daring enough that
he got noticed.
 
Did you hear about that Remade done
that robbery?
 
someone said to me in a pub. I was
careful, couldn't show any reaction.

I'd felt something when
I met Jack, you know? I respected him. He wasn't boastful, but he had a fire in
him. Even so, I couldn't be sure he'd come to anything.

That first job, he got
away with hundreds of nobles and gave it away on the streets. He scored himself
the love of the Dog Fenn poor that way. That was what had people all excited,
told them he was something else than your average gangster. He weren't the
first to do that, but he was one of few.

What got me wasn't so
much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government
office. Where they store taxes.

Everyone knows what the
security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he'd have
done something like that without it being a
 
screw you.
 
He
was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that.

It was then, in that
pub, when I realised what he'd done, how he must have made that night-raid
work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new
body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I
realised he was something. That was when I knew that Jack Half-a-Prayer was no
ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.

Not many people see the
Remade like I do, or like Jack did.

You know it's true. To
most of you they're to be ignored or used. If you really
 
notice
 
them
you wish you hadn't. It wasn't like that for Jack, and not just because he
 
was
 
Remade.
I bet ― I know ― that Jack used to notice them, see them clear,
before anything was done to him. And that's the same for me.

People walk along and
see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the
punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but
I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this
 
woman ―
 
whose
hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings ― and he'd
have seen an
 
old man,
 
not
the sexless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in
their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy
stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see
people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals,
and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but
he'd have seen
 
them
 
under
the punishment.

People get broken when
they get Remade. I've seen it so many times. Suddenly, take a wrong turn by the
law and it ain't just the physical punishment, it ain't just the new limbs or
metal or the change in the body, it's that they wake up and they're
 
Remade,
 
the
same as they spat on or ignored for years. They know they're nothing.

Jack, when it was done
to him, never thought he was nothing. He'd never thought any of them were.

There was this one
time. A foundry in Smog Bend, and there was a man there, some middling
supervisor ― this was years after Jack got free, and I only heard all
this ― who was causing trouble. Informing on guilders trying to recruit.
There was gangs following organisers home, and scaring them so they'd not come
back, or maybe retiring them permanently.

I'm not clear on the details.
But the point is what Jack done.

One day the workers
troop in and they take their places by the gears, but there's no klaxon. And
they're waiting, but nothing happens. Now they're getting wary, they're getting
very antsy. They know it's that overseer who's due in that day, so they're nervous,
they ain't talking much, but they go looking. And there at the foot of the
steps up to the office, there's an arrow put together out of tools. On the
floor, pointing up.

So they creep up. And
on the landing there's another. And there's a whole gang of men now, and
they're following these arrows, soldered to the banisters, up on the walkway,
trooping round the factory, until pretty much the whole workforce is up there,
and they come to the end of the gangway, and there dangling is that supervisor.

He's unconscious. His
mouth's all scabbed. It's sewn up, with wire.

People know right then
and there what's happened, but when the man wakes up and gets unstitched he
starts raving, describing the man who done this to him, and then it's certain.

That man was lucky he
didn't get killed, is my thinking. There was no more trouble there for a while,
I hear. That changed things. I think they called that one Jack's Whispering
Stitch. It's things like that make you see why people respected Jack
Half-a-Prayer. Loved him.

This is the greatest
city in the world. You hear that all the time, because it's true. But it's sort
of an untrue truth, for a lot of us.

I don't know where you
live. If it's Dog Fenn, then knowing that Parliament's a building like nothing
else, or that we've riches in the coffers that would make the rest of the world
jealous, or that the scholars of New Crobuzon could outthink the bloody gods
― knowing all of that doesn't do so much. You still live in Dog Fenn, or
Badside, or what have you.

But when Jack ran, the
city was the greatest for Badside too.

You could see it
― I could see it ― in the way people walked, after Jack'd done
something. I don't know how it was uptown in The Crow ― I expect the
well-dressed there sneered, or made a show of not caring -but where the houses
lean in to each other, where the bricks shed pointing, in the shadow of the
glass cactus ghetto, people walked tall. Jack was everyone's: men and women,
cactus-people, khepri and vod. The wyrmen made up songs about him. The same people
that would spit in the face of a Remade beggar cheered this fReemade. In
Salacus Fields they'd toast Jack by name.

I wouldn't do that, of
course ― not that I didn't want to, but you can imagine, in the business
I'm in, I have to be careful. I'm involved, so of course I can't be seen to be.
In my head, though, I'd raise a glass with them.
 
To Jack,
 
I'd
think.

In the short time I
worked with Jack I never used his given name, nor he mine. It's in the nature
of the work, obviously, that you don't use real names. But then, what could be
more his name than Jack? Remaking is the ruin of most, but it was the making of
him.

It's hard to make sense
of Remaking, of its logic. Sometimes the magisters pass down sentences that you
can understand. One man kills another with a blade, take his killing arm and
replace it, suture a motorknife in its place, tube him up with the boiler to
run it. The lesson's obvious. Or those who are made heavy engines for industry,
man-cranes and woman-cabs and boy-machines. It's easy to see why the city would
want them.

But I can't explain to
you the woman given a ruff of peacock feathers, or the young lad with iron
spiderlimbs out his back, or those with too many eyes or engines that make them
burn from the inside out, or legs made of wooden toys or replaced with the arms
of apes so they walk with mad monkey grace. The Remakings that make them
stronger, or weaker, or more or less vulnerable, Remakings almost unnoticed,
and those that make them impossible to understand.

Sometimes you'll see a
xenian Remade, but it's rare. It's hard to work with cactacae vegetable flesh,
or the physiognomy of vodyanoi, I'm told, and there are other reasons for the
other races, so for the most part magisters'll sentence them to other things.
For the most part, it's humans who are Remade, for cruelty or expediency, or
opaque logics.

There ain't no one the
city hates so much as the renegades, the fReemade. Turning your Remaking on the
Remakers, that ain't how it's supposed to be.

Sometimes, you know,
I'll admit it's frustrating, to have to keep all my thoughts to myself.
Especially during the day, while I'm in at work. Don't get me wrong, I like my
colleagues, some of them, they're good lads, and for all I know some would even
agree with the way I look at things, but you just can't risk it. You have to
know when to keep secrets.

So I stay well out of
it. I don't talk politics, I just do what I'm told, stay well out of any
discussions.

When you see, when you
see how people looked up after Jack had struck, though, my gods. How could
anyone not be for that? People needed him, they needed that, that release. That
hope.

I couldn't believe it
when I heard my crew'd got hold of the man who got Jack caught. I had to keep
myself under control at work, not let anyone see I was excited. I was waiting
to get my hands on the rat.

For a lot of people,
the most exciting, the best thing he ever done was an escape. Not his first
escape ― that I can't help thinking would have been some tawdry affair.
Impressive for all that but a desperate bloody crawl, his new Remaking still
atwitch, all grimy, all stained by the grease of his shackles, and stonedust,
lying in some haul of rubbish where the dogs couldn't smell him, till he was
strong enough to run. That, I think, would have been as messy as any other
birth. No, the escape I'm talking about was the one they call Jack's
Steeplechase.

Even now people can't
decide whether it was deliberate or not, whether he let it out to the militia
that he'd be there, that he'd be stealing weapons from one of their caches, in
the city centre, in Perdido Street Station, just so they'd come for him and he
could show he could get away from them. Me I don't think he'd be so cocky. I
think he just got caught, but being who he was, being what he was, he made the
best of it.