Perdido Street Station (34 page)

There was a troubled
silence at that. To Isaac’s relief, Yagharek did not seem to
have noticed the unfortunate double-meaning. The garuda was stroking
the paper with wonder and hunger: Yagharek murmured something in his
own tongue, a soft, guttural croon.

Eventually he looked
up.

"When will you
build this thing, Grimnebulin?" he asked.

"Well, I need to
actually knock together a working model to test it, refine the maths
and whatnot. I reckon it’ll take me a week or so to put
something together. But that’s early days, remember.
Very
early days." Yagharek nodded quickly, waved away the caution.
"You sure you don’t want to kip here? Are you still going
to wander round like a ghul and spring on me when I least suspect
it?" asked Isaac ironically.

Yagharek nodded.

"Please tell me as
soon as your theories advance, Grimnebulin," he asked. Isaac
laughed at the polite bathos of the request.

"Certainly will,
old son, you have my word. As soon as the old theories advance, you
get to know."

Yagharek turned stiffly
and walked towards the stairs. As he turned to say goodbye, he caught
sight of something. He was still for a minute, then walked over to
the far end of the walkway’s east-facing side. He indicated the
cage containing the colossal grub.

"Grimnebulin,"
he said. "What does your caterpillar do?"

"I know, I know,
it’s grown like fuck, hasn’t it?" said Isaac,
strolling over. "Tremendous little bugger, eh?"

Yagharek pointed at the
cage and looked up questioningly.

"Yes," he
said. "But what does it do?"

Isaac frowned and
peered into the wooden box. He had moved it so that it faced away
from the windows, which meant that its interior was shadowed and
unclear. He squinted and peered into the darkness.

The massive creature
had crawled to the furthest corner of the cage and had somehow
managed to climb the rough wood. Then, with some organic adhesive it
exuded from its arse, it had suspended itself from the top of the
box. It hung there, pendulous and heavy, swaying and rippling
slightly, like a stocking full of mud.

Isaac hissed, his
tongue jutting from between his lips.

The caterpillar had
tightened its stubby legs, curling them in tight towards its
underbelly. As Isaac and Yagharek watched, it jack-knifed at its
centre and seemed to kiss its own tail end, slowly relaxing until it
hung deadweight again. It repeated the process.

Isaac pointed into the
dimness.

"Look," he
said. "It’s smearing something all over itself."

Where the caterpillar’s
mouth touched flesh, it left infinitely thin glistening filaments,
which stretched out taut as it moved its mouth away, adhering where
they touched its body again. The hairs at the creature’s hind
end were flattened against its body, and they looked wet. The
enormous grub was slowly smothering itself in translucent silk, from
the bottom up.

Isaac straightened up,
slowly. He caught Yagharek’s eye.

"Well..." he
said. "Better late than never. Finally, what I bought it for in
the first place. The thing’s pupating."

**

After a while, Yagharek
nodded slowly.

"It will soon be
able to fly," he said quietly.

"Not necessarily,
old son. Not everything with a chrysalis gets wings."

"You do not know
what it will be?"

"That, Yag, is the
only reason I’ve still got the damn thing. Wretched curiosity.
Won’t let me go." Isaac smiled. The truth was he felt a
certain nervousness, seeing the bizarre thing finally perform the
action he had been waiting for since he had first seen it. He watched
it cover itself in a strange, fastidious inversion of cleanliness. It
was quick. The bright, mottled colours of its pelt went misty with
the first layer of fibres, then quickly disappeared from view.

Yagharek’s
interest in the creature was short-lived. He replaced the wooden
framework which hid his deformity onto his shoulders, and covered it
with his cloak.

"I will take my
leave, Grimnebulin," he said. Isaac looked up from where the
caterpillar held his attention.

"Right! Righto,
Yag. I’ll get a move on with the...uh...engine. I know by now
not to ask when I’ll see you, right? You’ll drop in when
the time’s right." He shook his head.

Yagharek was already at
the bottom of the stairs. He turned once, briefly, and saluted Isaac,
and then he left.

Isaac waved back. He
was lost in thought, his hand remaining in the air for several
seconds after Yagharek had gone. Eventually, he closed it with a soft
clap and turned back to the caterpillar’s cage.

Its coat of wet threads
was drying fast. The tail end was already stiff and immobile. It
constrained the grub’s undulations, forcing it to perform more
and more claustrophobic acrobatics in its attempt to cover itself.
Isaac pulled his chair over in front of the cage to watch its
efforts. He took notes.

A part of him told him
that he was being intellectually dissolute, that he should compose
himself and focus on the matter in hand. But it was a small part, and
it whispered to him without confidence. Almost dutifully. There was,
after all, nothing that was going to stop Isaac from taking the
opportunity to watch this extraordinary phenomenon. He settled into
his chair comfortably, pulled over a magnifying lens.

It took a little over
two hours for the caterpillar to cover itself completely in a moist
chrysalis. The most complicated manoeuvre was at the head itself. The
grub had to spit itself a kind of collar, then allow it to dry a
little before bunching itself up within its swaddling, making itself
shorter and fatter for a few moments while it wove a lid, closing
itself in. It pushed against it slowly, ensuring its strength, then
exuded more of the cement-filaments until its head was completely
covered, invisible.

For a few minutes the
organic shroud quivered, expanding and contracting in response to the
movements within. The white covering became brittle as he watched,
changed colour to a drab nacre. It pendulumed very gently as minute
air currents disturbed it, but its substance had hardened, and the
motion of the grub within could no longer be discerned.

Isaac sat back and
scrawled on the paper.
Yagharek was almost certainly right about
the thing having wings,
he thought. The gently moving organic sac
was like a textbook drawing of a butterfly or moth chrysalis, only
vastly bigger.

Outside the light
became thicker as the shadows lengthened.

The suspended cocoon
had been motionless for more than half an hour when the door opened,
startling Isaac to his feet.

"Anyone up there?"
yelled David.

Isaac leaned over the
railings and greeted him.

"Some chap came
and dealt with the construct, David. Said you just had to stoke it up
a bit and switch it on, said it should work."

"Good stuff. I’m
sick of the rubbish. We get all yours, as well. Would that be
deliberate?" David grinned.

"Why no,"
replied Isaac, ostentatiously shovelling dust and crumbs through the
gaps in the railings with his foot. David laughed and wandered out of
his sight. Isaac heard a metallic thud as David gave the construct an
affectionate clout.

"I am also to tell
you that your cleaner is a ‘lovely old thing,’ "
said Isaac formally. They both laughed. Isaac came and sat halfway
down the stairs. He saw David shovelling some pellets of concentrated
coke into the construct’s little boiler, an efficient
triple-exchange model. David slammed shut and bolted the hatch. He
reached up to the top of the construct’s head and pulled the
little lever into an
on
position.

There was a hiss and a
little whine as steam was pushed through thin pipes, slowly powering
up the construct’s analytical engine. The cleaner jerked
spastically and settled back against the wall.

"That should warm
up in a little while," said David with satisfaction, shoving his
hands in his pockets. "What have you been up to, ‘Zaac?"

"Come up here,"
answered Isaac. "I want to show you something."

When David saw the
suspended cocoon he laughed briefly, and put his hands on his hips.

"Jabber!" he
said. "It’s enormous! When that thing hatches I’m
running for cover..."

"Yeah, well,
that’s partly why I’m showing you. Just to say keep your
eyes out for it opening. You can help me pin it inside a case."
The two men grinned.

From below came a
series of bangs, like water fighting its way through obstreperous
plumbing. There was a faint hiss of pistons. Isaac and David stared
at each other, nonplussed for a moment.

"Sounds like the
cleaner’s gearing up to some serious action," said David.

**

In the short, stubby
byways of copper and brass that were the construct’s brain, a
welter of new data and instructions clattered violently. Transmitted
by pistons and screws and innumerable valves, the grots and gobs of
intelligence bottlenecked in the limited space. Infinitesimal jolts
of energy burst through tiny, finely engineered steamhammers. In the
centre of the brain was a box crammed with rank upon rank of
minuscule on-off switches that puttered up and down at great and
increasing speed. Each switch was a steam-powered synapse, pushing
buttons and pulling levers in intensely complicated combinations.

The construct jerked.

Deep in the construct’s
intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data
that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had
skittered momentarily. As the steam coursed through the brainpan with
increasing speed and power, the virus’s useless set of queries
went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the
same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.

But this time the virus
was nurtured. Fed. The programmes that the repairman had loaded into
the construct’s analytical engine sent extraordinary
instructions coursing throughout the crafted tubework cerebellum. The
valves flapped and the switches buzzed in staccato tremors, all
seemingly too fast to be anything but random motion. And yet in those
abrupt sequences of numerical code, the rude little virus was mutated
and evolved.

Encoded information
welled up within those limited hissing neurones, fed into the
recursive idiocy of the virus and spun out from it skeins of new
data. The virus flowered. The moronic motor of its basic, mute
circuit sped up, flung blossoms of newborn viral code spiralling away
from it with a kind of binary centrifugal force, into every part of
the processor.

Each of these
subsidiary viral circuits repeated the process until instructions and
data and self-generated programmes were flooding every pathway of
that limited calculating engine.

The construct stood in
the corner, shaking and whirring very slightly.

In what had been an
insignificant corner of its valved mind, the original virus, the
original combination of rogue data and meaningless reference that had
affected the construct’s ability to sweep floors, still
revolved. It was the same, but transformed. No longer a destructive
end, it had become a means, a generator, a motive power.

Soon, very soon, the
central processing engine of the construct’s brain was whirring
and clicking at full capacity. Ingenious mechanisms kicked in at the
behest of the new programmes buzzing through the analogue valves.
Sections of analytical capacity normally given over to movement and
backup and support functions were folded in on themselves, doubling
their capacity as the same binary function was invested with double
meanings. The flood of alien data was diverted, but not slowed.
Astounding articles of programme design increased the efficiency and
processing power of the very valves and switches that were conducting
them.

David and Isaac talked
upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct
could not help but make.

The flow of data
continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous
set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking
memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor.
On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions,
nothing more than combinations of
yes/no
or
on/off,
but
in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.

And eventually, at a
certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the
construct’s brain.

One moment it was a
calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the
gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal
twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed
by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical
engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of
high-pressure steam.

One moment it was a
calculating machine.

The next, it thought.

**

With a strange,
calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own
reflection.

It felt no surprise. No
joy. No anger, no existential horror.

Only curiosity.

Bundles of data that
had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became
suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of
calculation, this autotelic processing.

What had been
incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data
was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.

The construct was still
for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.

Isaac leaned far over
the railing, until they creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his
head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and
David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and
frowned.