Perdido Street Station (85 page)

With the thick
insulated wire under his arm, the avatar approached the constellation
of rubbish that Derkhan recognized as the Construct Council’s
head (with a slight unsettling jolt, as at a child’s book of
optical tricks, as if an ink drawing of a young woman’s face
had suddenly become a crone’s). It still lolled sideways,
without any sign of life.

The avatar reached up
over the grille that doubled as the Council’s metal teeth.
Behind one of the enormous lights Derkhan knew were its eyes, a
tangled knot of wire and tubing and rubbish burst out of a casing, in
which the stuttering valves of some vastly complex analytical engine
were working.

It was the first sign
that the great construct was conscious. Derkhan thought she saw light
glimmer faintly, waxing and waning, in the Council’s huge eyes.

The avatar pulled the
cable into position beside the analogue brain, one of the network
that made up the Council’s peculiar inhuman consciousness. He
untwisted several of the thick wires in the cable, and in the
explosion of metal from the Council’s head.

Derkhan looked away,
sickened, as the avatar placidly ignored the way the vicious metal
tore jagged holes in his hands, and sluggish, greying blood oozed
fitfully out and over his decaying skin.

He began to link the
Council to the cable, twisting finger-thick wires together into a
conducting whole, snapping connections into sockets that sputtered
with obscure sparks, examining the seemingly meaningless buds of
copper and silver and glass that flowered from the Construct
Council’s brain and from the rubber sheathing of the cable,
picking some, twisting and discarding others, plaiting the mechanism
into impossibly complex configurations.

"The rest is
easy," he whispered. "Wire to wire, cable to cable, at
every junction throughout the city, that is easy. This is the only
taxing part, here at source, to connect up correctly, to channel the
exudations, to mimic the operation of the communicators’
helmets for an alternative model of consciousness."

Yet despite the
difficulty, it was still light when the avatar looked up at her,
wiped his lacerated hands against his thighs, and said that he had
finished.

Derkhan watched the
little flashes and sparks that burst ominously from the connection
with awe. It was beautiful. It glittered like some mechanical jewel.

The Council’s
head—vast and still immobile, like a sleeping daemon’s—was
linked to the cable with a knot of connective tissue, an
elyctro-mechanical, thaumaturgic scar. Derkhan marvelled. Eventually
she looked up.

"Well then,"
she said hesitantly, "I’d best go and tell Isaac
that...that you’re ready."

**

With great sweeps of
dirty water, Pengefinchess and her companion kicked their way through
the eddying darkness of the Tar.

They stayed low. The
bottom was barely visible as uneven darkness two feet below them. The
cable unwound slowly from the great pile they had left at the bottom
of the river, by the edge of the wall.

It was heavy, and they
lugged it sluggishly through the filthy river.

They were alone in this
part of the water. There were no other vodyanoi: only a few hardy,
stunted fishes that skimmed nervously away at their approach. As
if,
thought Pengefinchess,
anything in the whole of Bus-Lag could
induce me to eat them.

Minutes passed and
their hidden passage continued. Pengefinchess did not think of
Derkhan or of what would happen that night, did not consider the plan
on which she had eavesdropped. She did not evaluate its probable
success. It was none of her concern.

Shadrach and Tansell
were dead, and it was time for her to move on.

In a vague way, she
wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though
very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a
great deal at stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand
potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy.

Ahead of her the slick
darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess
slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the
cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment
and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and
she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out
the Tar’s surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all
directions through the little waves.

They broke the surface
together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the
riverwall.

Rusting iron rings were
driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the
riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank
down around them.

Pengefinchess adjusted
her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly
male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language
of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had
been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand
each other.

"Your companions
know to find you here?" Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He
nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). "I
am done," she announced. "You must hold the cable alone.
You can wait for them. I am leaving." He looked at her, still
surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which
might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. "Be
fecund," she said. It was a traditional farewell.

She sank under the
surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

**

Pengefinchess swam
east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising
excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered,
suddenly, what she would do.

The current took her
towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused
current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the
submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by
vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the
pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream,
transferring into the Canker.

The current was
stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated,
briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

It was the effluent
from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk.
Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached
certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick
another route through the fouled river by the magicians’
quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she
might avoid contamination that way.

Eventually the water
seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’
convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

Pengefinchess felt
something almost like quiet joy.

She began to feel other
vodyanoi pass her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt
the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi’s
house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and
Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human
design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to
crumble in unsanitary fashion into the water. Those were the vodyanoi
slums.

Here, on the other
hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might
lead through some carefully crafted passage below the surface into a
riverside house all done in white marble. Its façade would be
tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side,
but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting
huge rooms above and below the water; canal passageways; sluices
refreshing the water every day.

Pengefinchess swam on
past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city passed
further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her
escape with great pleasure.

She spread her arms and
sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from
her skin through the pores of the thin cotton shift she wore. After
days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away
through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a
moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.

Pengefinchess felt it
swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing
her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.

I’ll go
up-coast,
Pengefinchess decided,
round the edge of the
mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of
Wormseye Scrub. I’ll head for the Cold Claw Sea.
With the
sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in
her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done,
something she might one day tell stories about.

She opened her enormous
mouth, let the Canker gush through her. Pengefinchess swam on,
through the suburbs, up and out of the city.

Men and women in grubby
overalls spread out from the Griss Twist dump.

They went on foot and
in carts, singly, in pairs, and in little gangs of four or five. They
moved in dribs and drabs, at unobtrusive speeds. Those on foot
carried great swathes of cable over their shoulders, or looped
between them and a colleague. In the backs of the carts the men and
women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

They went out into the
city at irregular intervals, over two or more hours, spacing their
departures according to a schedule worked out by the Construct
Council. It was calculated to be random.

A small horse-drawn
wagon containing four men set off, entering the flow of traffic over
Cockscomb Bridge and winding up towards the centre of Spit Hearth.
They made their way without urgency, turning onto the wide,
banyan-lined Boulevard St. Dragonne. They swayed with a muted
clacking along the wooden slats that paved the street: the legacy of
the eccentric Mayor Waldemyr, who had objected to the cacophony of
wheels on stone cobblestones past his window.

The driver waited for a
break in the traffic, then turned to the left and into a small
courtyard. The boulevard was invisible, but its sounds were still
thick around them. The cab stopped by a high wall of rich red brick,
from behind which rose an exquisite smell of honeysuckle. Ivy and
passionflower sprouted in little bursts over the lip of the wall,
bobbing above them in the breeze. It was the garden of the Vedneh
Gehantock monastery, tended by the dissident cactacae and human monks
of that floral godling.

The four men leapt down
from the cart and began to unload tools and the bales of heavy cable.
Pedestrians walked past them, watched them briefly and forgot them.

One man held the end of
the cable high against the monastery wall. His workmate lifted a
heavy iron bracket and a mallet, and with three quick strokes he had
anchored the end of the cable into the wall, about seven feet above
the ground. The two moved along, repeated the operation eight or so
feet further to the west; and then again, moving along the wall at
some speed.

Their movements were
not furtive. They were functional and unpresuming. The hammering was
just another noise in the montage of city sound.

The men disappeared
around the corner of the square and moved off to the west. They
dragged the huge bail of insulated wire with them. The other two men
stayed put, waiting by the tethered end of the cable, its copper and
alloy innards splaying like metallic petals.

The first pair took the
cable along the twisting wall that dug inwards through Spit Hearth,
around the backs of restaurants and the delivery entrances to
clothing boutiques and carpenters’ workshops, towards the
red-light zone and The Crow, the bustling nucleus of New Crobuzon.

They moved the cable up
and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains
in the wall’s structure, and joining twisting skeins of other
pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors
and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The
drab cable was invisible. It was one nerve fibre in the city’s
ganglions, a thick cord among many.

Inevitably, they had to
cross the street itself, as it peeled away, curving slowly eastwards.
They lowered the cable to the ground, approaching a rut that linked
the two sides of the pavement. It was a gutter, originally for shit
and now for rainwater, a six-inch channel between the paving slabs
that sluiced through grilles into the undercity at the furthest end.

They laid the cable in
the groove, attaching it firmly. They crossed quickly, standing aside
occasionally while traffic interrupted them in their work, but this
was not a busy street, and they were able to lay the cable without
extensive interruption.

Their behaviour still
did not merit attention. Running their cable back up the wall
opposite—this time the boundary of a school, from the window of
which came forth didactic barks—the unremarkable pair passed
another group of workmen. They were digging up the opposite corner of
the street, replacing shattered flagstones, and they looked up at the
newcomers and grunted some shorthand greeting, then ignored them.

As they approached the
red-light zone, the Construct Council’s followers turned into a
courtyard, trailing their heavy coil. On three sides, walls rose
above them, five or more floors of filthy brick, stained and mossy,
years of smog and rain etched across them. There were windows at
untidy intervals, as if they had been spilt from the highest point to
fall irregularly between the roof and the ground.

Cries and oaths were
audible, and laughed conversations, and the clattering of
kitchenware. A pretty young child of uncertain sex watched them from
a third-floor window. The two men looked at each other nervously for
a moment, and scanned the rest of the overlooking windows. The
child’s was the only face: they were otherwise unobserved.