Perdido Street Station (32 page)

"Many nights I
spend in silence and alone, but there are other times I talk to those
with minds still sharp under a patina of alcohol and loneliness and
drugs." Isaac wanted to say, "I’ve said we could work
out a place for you to stay," but he stopped himself. Isaac
wanted to see where this was heading. "There is a man, an
educated, drunken man. I am not sure he believes me real. He may
think me a recurring hallucination." Yagharek breathed deeply.
"I spoke to him about your theories, your crisis, and I was
excited.

And the man said to
me...the man said to me ‘Why not go all the way? Why not use
the Torque?’ "

There was a very long
silence. Isaac shook his head in exasperation and disgust.

"I am here to put
the question to you, Grimnebulin," Yagharek continued. "Why
do we not use the Torque? You are trying to create a science from
scratch, Grimnebulin, but Torquic energy exists, techniques to tap it
are known...I ask as an ignorant, Grimnebulin. Why do you not use the
Torque?"

Isaac sighed very
deeply and kneaded his face. Part of him was angry, but mostly he was
just anxious, desperate to put a stop to this talk immediately. He
turned to the garuda, and held up his hand.

"Yagharek..."
he began, and at that moment, there was a bang on the door.

"Hello?" a
cheerful voice yelled. Yagharek stiffened. Isaac leapt to his feet.
The timing was extraordinary.

"Who is it?"
yelled Isaac, bounding down the stairs.

A man poked his face
round the door. He looked amiable, almost absurdly so.

"Hullo there,
squire. I’ve come about the construct."

Isaac shook his head.
He had no idea what the man was talking about. He glanced up behind
him, but Yagharek was invisible. He had stepped out of sight away
from the edge of the platform. The man in the doorway handed Isaac a
card.

nathaniel
orriaben’s

construct
repairs and replacements

quality &
care at reasonable rates.

"Gent came in
yesterday. Name of...Serachin?" suggested the man, reading from
a sheet. "Told us his cleaning model...um...EKB4c was playing
up. Thought it might have a virus and whatnot. I was due tomorrow,
but I’ve just come back from another job local and I thought
I’d chance that someone was in." The man smiled brightly.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his oily coveralls.

"Right," said
Isaac. "Um...Look. Not the best time..."

"Righto! Your
decision, obviously. Only..." The man looked around him before
he went on, as if he was about to share a secret. Reassured that no
one would hear him who should not, he went on, confidentially. "Thing
is, squire, I may not be able to do the appointment tomorrow as
originally planned..." The face he offered was cod-apology of
the most exaggerated kind. "I can happily do my thing over in
the corner, won’t make a sound. Take me about an hour if I can
do it here, otherwise it’s a job for the repair shop. I’ll
know which in five minutes. Otherwise I shan’t be able to do it
for a week, I think."

"Oh, arse.
Right...Look, I’m in a meeting upstairs, and it’s
absolutely
vital
that you don’t interrupt us. Seriously.
Is that going to be all right?"

"Oh, absolutely.
I’m just going to take the screwdriver to the old cleaner and
then give you a little yell when I know what the score is, all
right?"

"Right. So I can
just leave you to it?"

"Perfecto."
The man was already heading towards the cleaning construct, carrying
a toolcase. Lublamai had turned the cleaner on that morning, and
punched in instructions for it to wash his study area, but it had
been a forlorn hope. The construct had puttered in circles for twenty
minutes, then stopped, leaning against the wall. It was still there,
three hours later, emitting unhappy little clicks, its three
attachment-limbs spasming.

The repairman strode
over to the thing, muttering and clucking like a concerned parent. He
felt the construct’s limbs, flipped a fob-watch out of his
pocket and timed the twitching. He scribbled something in a little
notebook. He swivelled the cleaning construct to face him, and gazed
into one of its glass irises. He moved his pencil slowly from one
side to another, watching the tracking of the sensory engine.

Isaac was half watching
the repairman, but his attention kept flickering back upstairs to
where Yagharek waited.
This business with the Torque,
Isaac
thought nervously.
It can’t wait.

"So you all right
there?" Isaac shouted nervously at the repairman.

The man was opening his
case and taking out a large screwdriver. He looked up at Isaac.

"No problem, guv,"
he said, and waved his screwdriver cheerfully. He looked back at the
construct and shut it off at the switch behind the neck. Its
anguished creaks died in a grateful whisper. He began to unscrew the
panel behind the thing’s "head," a roughcast chunk of
grey metal at the top of its cylindrical body.

"Right then,"
said Isaac, and jogged back up the stairs.

Yagharek was standing
by Isaac’s desk, well out of sight of the floor below. He
looked up as Isaac returned.

"It’s
nothing," said Isaac quietly. "Someone to fix our
construct, which has gone belly-up. I’m just wondering if we’re
going to be heard..."

Yagharek opened his
mouth to reply, and a thin, discordant whistling sounded up from the
floor below. Yagharek’s mouth hung open for a moment, stupidly.

"Looks like we
needn’t have worried," Isaac said, and grinned.
He’s
doing that deliberately!
he thought.
So’s to let me know
he’s not listening. Polite of him.
Isaac inclined his head
in unseen thanks to the repairman.

Then his mind returned
to the business in hand, to Yagharek’s tentative suggestion,
and his smile vanished. He sat heavily on his bed, ran his hands
through his thick hair and stared up at Yagharek.

"You never sit,
Yag, do you?" he said quietly. "Now why’s that?"

He drummed his fingers
against the side of his head and thought. Eventually he spoke.

"Yag, old
son...You’ve already impressed me as to your...amazing library,
right? I want to throw two names out there, see what they mean to
you. What do you know about Suroch, or the Cacotopic Stain?"

There was a long
silence. Yagharek was looking slightly up, through the window.

"The Cacotopic
Stain I know, of course. That is always what one hears when the
Torque is discussed. Perhaps it is a bogeyman." Isaac could not
distinguish moods in Yagharek’s voice, but his words were
defensive. "Perhaps we should overcome our fear. And Suroch...I
have read your histories, Grimnebulin. War is always...a vile
time..."

As Yagharek spoke,
Isaac stood and walked to his chaotic bookshelves, flicking through
the stacked volumes. He returned with a slim, hardbacked folio book.
He opened it in front of Yagharek.

"This," he
said heavily, "is a collection of heliotypes taken nearly a
hundred years ago. It was these helios, in large part, that put a
stop to Torque experiments in New Crobuzon."

Yagharek reached out
slowly and turned the pages. He did not speak.

"This was supposed
to be a secret research mission, to see the effects of the war a
hundred years on," continued Isaac. "Little group of
militia, couple of scientists and a heliotypist went upcoast in a
spy-dirigible, took some prints from the air. Then some of them were
lowered into the remains of Suroch to take some up-close shots.

"Sacramundi, the
heliotypist, was so...appalled...he printed five hundred copies of
his report at his own expense. Distributed it to bookshops gratis.
Bypassed the mayor and Parliament, laid it out in front of the
people...Mayor Turgisadi was screaming mad, but there was nothing he
could do.

"There was
demonstrations, then the Sacramundi Riots of ‘89. Pretty much
forgotten now, but it damn-near brought the government down. A couple
of the big concerns putting money into the Torque programme—Penton’s,
that still owns the Arrowhead Mines, that was the biggest—anyway,
they got scared and pulled out, and the thing collapsed.

"This, Yag my
son," Isaac indicated the book, "is why we ain’t
using Torque."

Yagharek slowly turned
the pages. Sepia images of ruin passed before them.

"Ah..." Isaac
brought his finger down on a drab panorama of what looked like
crushed glass and charcoal. The heliotype was taken from very low in
the air. A few of the larger shards that littered the enormous,
perfectly circular plain were visible, suggesting that the desiccated
debris was the remains of once-extraordinary twisted objects.

"Now this is
what’s left of the heart of the city. That’s where they
dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That’s what they said put an
end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they’d
been over for a year before that, since New Crobuzon bombarded Suroch
with Torque bombs. See, they dropped the colourbombs twelve months
later to try to
hide what they’d done...
only one went
into the sea and two didn’t work, so with only one left, they
only cleared the central square mile or so of Suroch. These bits you
can see..." He indicated low rubble at the edge of the circular
plain. "From thereon out the ruins are still standing. That’s
where you can see the Torque."

He indicated that
Yagharek should turn the page. Yagharek did so, and something clucked
deep in his throat. Isaac supposed it was the garuda equivalent of a
sudden intake of breath. Isaac looked briefly at the picture, then
looked up, not too quickly, at Yagharek’s face.

"Those things in
the background like melting statues used to be houses," he said
levelly. "The thing you’re looking at, as far as they
could work out, is descended from the domestic goat. Apparently they
used to keep them as pets in Suroch. This could be second, tenth,
twentieth generation post-Torque, obviously. We don’t know how
long they live."

Yagharek stared at the
dead thing in the heliotype.

"They had to shoot
it, he explains in the text," Isaac went on. "It killed two
of the militia. They had a go at an autopsy, but those horns in its
stomach weren’t dead, even though the rest of it was. They
fought back, nearly killed the biologist. Do you see the carapace?
Weird splicing going on there." Yagharek nodded slowly.

"Turn the page,
Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea what it used to be.
Might have been spontaneously generated in the Torque explosion. But
I think those gears there are descended from train engines." He
tapped the pages gently. "The...uh...
best
is yet to come.
You haven’t seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what may
once have been human."

Yagharek was
meticulous. He turned every single page. He saw furtive shots that
had been stolen from behind walls, and vertiginous views from the
air. A slow kaleidoscope of mutation and violence, petty wars fought
between unfathomable monstrosities over no-man’s-lands of
shifting slag and nightmare architecture.

"There were twenty
militia, Sacramundi the heliotypist and three research scientists,
plus a couple of engineers who stayed in the airship the whole time.
Seven militia, Sacramundi and one chymist came out of Suroch. Some
were Torque-wounded. By the time they got back to New Crobuzon one
militiaman had died. Another had barbed tentacles where his eyes
should be, and pieces of the scientist’s body were disappearing
every night. No blood, no pain, just...smooth holes in her abdomen or
arm or whatever. She killed herself."

Isaac remembered first
hearing the story told as an anecdote by an unorthodox history
professor. Isaac had chased it up, following a trail of footnotes and
old newspapers. The history had been forgotten, transmuted into
emotional blackmail for children—"Be good or I’ll
send you to Suroch where the monsters are!" It took a year and a
half before Isaac saw a copy of Sacramundi’s report, and
another three before he could match the price asked for it.

He thought he
recognized some of the thoughts flickering almost invisibly under
Yagharek’s impassive skin. They were the ideas every unorthodox
undergraduate had at some time entertained.

"Yag," Isaac
said softly, "we ain’t going to use the Torque. You might
be thinking ‘You still use hammers and some people are murdered
with them.’ Right? Eh? ‘Rivers can flood and kill
thousands or they can drive water turbines.’ Yes? Trust
me...speaking as one who used to think the Torque was
terribly
exciting...it’s not a
tool.
It’s
not
a
hammer, it’s not like water. It’s...the Torque is
rogue
power.
We’re not talking crisis energy here, right? Get
that
right out
of your head. Crisis is the energy underpinning
the whole of physics. Torque’s not about physics. It’s
not
about
anything. It’s...it’s an entirely
pathological force. We don’t know where it comes from, why it
appears, where it goes.
All bets are off. No rules apply.
You
can’t tap it—well, you can try, but you’ve seen the
results—you can’t play with it, you can’t trust it,
you can’t understand it, you sure as godsdamn-fuck can’t
control it."

Isaac shook his head in
irritation. "Oh sure, there’ve been experiments and
whatnot, they reckon they’ve got techniques to shield from some
effects, heighten others, and some of them might even work a little
bit. But there’s
never
been a Torque experiment that
didn’t end in...well, in tears, at the very least. As far as
I’m concerned there’s only one kind of experiment we
should be doing with Torque, and that’s how to avoid it. Either
stop it in its tracks, or run like Libintos with the drakows on his
tail.