Perdido Street Station (88 page)

He fingered the
circuit-valve, shaking it gently, praying that its mechanisms were
sound.

**

Isaac sighed and
brought out the thick sheaf of programme cards the Council had
printed. Each was labelled in the Council’s tottering
typewritten script. Isaac looked up quizzically.

"It’s not
yet ten, is it?" he said. Derkhan shook her head. "There’s
still nothing in the air, is there? The moths aren’t out yet.
Let’s be ready by the time they fly."

He looked down and
pulled the lever on the two chymical batteries. The reagents within
mixed. The sound of effervescence was dimly audible, and there was a
sudden chorus of chattering valves and barking outputs as current was
released. The machinery on the roofscape snapped into life.

The crisis engine
whirred.

"It’s just
calculating," said Isaac nervously, as Derkhan and Yagharek
glanced at him. "It’s not yet processing. I’m giving
it instructions."

Isaac began to feed the
programme cards carefully into the various analytical engines before
him. Most went to the crisis engine itself, but some to the
subsidiary calculating circuits connected by little loops of cable.
Isaac checked each card, comparing it with his notes, scribbling
quick calculations before feeding it into any of the inputs.

The engines clattered
as their fine ratcheting teeth slid over the cards, snapping into
carefully cut holes, instructions and orders and information
downloading into their analogue brains. Isaac was slow, waiting until
he felt the click that signalled successful processing before
removing each card and slotting in the next.

He kept notes,
scrawling impenetrable messages to himself on ragged ends of paper.
He breathed quickly.

Rain began to fall,
quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and
breaking open, as thick and warm as pus. The night was close, and the
glutinous rainclouds made it more so. Isaac worked fast, his fingers
feeling suddenly idiotic, too large.

There was a slow sense
of dragging, a weightiness that pulled at the spirit and began to
saturate the bones. A sense of the uncanny, of the fearful and
hidden, that rolled up as if from within, a billowing ink-cloud from
the depths of the mind.

"Isaac," said
Derkhan, her voice cracking, "you have to hurry. It’s
starting."

**

A swarm of nightmare
feelings pattered down among them with the rain.

"They’re up
and out," said Derkhan with terror. "They’re hunting.
They’re abroad. Hurry, you have to hurry..."

Isaac nodded without
speaking and continued with what he was doing, shaking his head as if
that might disperse the cloying fear that had settled on him.
Where’s
the fucking Weaver?
he thought.

"Someone watches
us from below," said Yagharek suddenly, "some tramp who did
not run. He does not move."

Isaac glanced up again,
then returned his attention to his work.

"Take my gun
there," he hissed. "If he comes up towards us, warn him off
with a shot. Hopefully he’ll keep his distance." Still his
hands rushed to twist, to connect, to programme. He punched numbered
keypads and wrestled roughcut cards into slots. "Nearly there,"
he murmured, "nearly there."

The sense of nocturnal
pressure, of drifting in sour dreams, increased.

"Isaac..."
hissed Derkhan. Andrej had fallen into a kind of terrified, exhausted
half-sleep, and he began to moan and thrash, his eyes opening and
shutting with bleary vagueness.

"Done!" spat
Isaac, and stepped back.

There was a silent
moment. Isaac’s triumph dissipated quickly.

"We need the
Weaver!" he said. "It’s supposed to...it said it
would be here! We can’t do anything without it..."

**

They could do nothing
except wait.

The stench of twisted
dream-imagery grew and grew, and brief screams sounded from random
points across the city, as sleeping sufferers called out their fear
or defiance. The rain fell thicker, until the concrete underfoot was
slick. Isaac laid the greasy sack ineffectually across various
sections of the crisis circuit, moving it in agitation, trying to
protect his machine from the water.

Yagharek watched the
glistening roofscape. When his head became too full of fearful dreams
and he grew afraid of what he might see, he turned on his heel and
watched through the mirrors on his helmet. He kept watch on the dim,
immobile figure below.

Isaac and Derkhan
dragged Andrej a little closer to the circuit
(again with that
ghastly gentleness, as if concerned for his well-being).
Under
Derkhan’s gun, Isaac retied the old man’s hands and legs,
and fastened one of the communicator helmets tight to his head. He
did not look at Andrej’s face.

The helmet had been
adjusted. As well as its flared output on the top, it had three input
jacks. One connected it to the second helmet. Another was connected
by several skeins of wires to the calculating brains and generators
of the crisis engine.

Isaac wiped the third
connection briefly free of filthy rainwater, and plugged into it the
thick wire extending from the black circuit-breaker, attached to
which was the massive cable extending all the way to the Construct
Council, south of the river. Current could flow from the Council’s
analytical brain, through the one-way switch, into Andrej’s
helmet.

"That’s it,
that’s it," said Isaac tensely. "Now we just need the
fucking
Weaver..."

**

It was another half an
hour of rain and burgeoning nightmares before the dimensions of the
roofspace rippled and shucked wildly, and the Weaver’s crooning
monologue could be heard.

...AS THEE AND ME
CONCURRED THE FAT FUNNELSPACE THE CLOT AT CITYWEB CENTRE SEES US
CONFLAB...came the unearthly voice in all of their skulls, and the
great spider stepped out lightly from the kink in the air and danced
towards them, its shining body dwarfing them.

Isaac gave a barking
breath, a sharp moan of relief. His mind juddered with the awe and
terror the Weaver induced.

"Weaver!" he
shouted. "Help us now!" He held out the other communicating
helmet to the extraordinary presence.

Andrej had looked up
and was shying away in a paroxysm of terror. His eyes bulged with the
pressure of his blood and he began to retch behind his mask. He
wriggled as fast as he could towards the edge of the roof, a terrible
inhuman fear jack-knifing his body away.

Derkhan caught him and
held him fast. He ignored her gun, his eyes empty of everything but
the vast spider that loomed over him, peering down with slow
portentous movements. Derkhan could hold him easily. His decaying
muscles flexed and twisted ineffectually. She dragged him back and
held him.

Isaac did not look at
them. He held out the helmet to the Weaver beseechingly.

"We need you to
put this on," he said. "Put this on now! We can take them
all. You said you’d help us...to repair the web...please."

The rain sputtered
against the Weaver’s hard shell. Every second or so, one or two
random drops would sizzle violently and evaporate as they struck it.
The Weaver kept talking, as it always did, an inaudible murmur that
Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could not understand.

It reached out with its
smooth, human hands, and placed the helmet on its segmented head.

Isaac closed his eyes
in brief exhausted relief, then opened them again.

"Keep it on!"
he hissed. "Fasten it!"

With fingers that moved
as elegantly as a master tailor’s, the spider did so.

...WILL YOU TICKLE AND
TRICK...it gibbered...AS THINK-LINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL
AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF
BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON AND ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY
CRAFTSMAN… and as the Weaver continued to croon with
incomprehensible and dreamlike proclamations, Isaac saw the last
fastening snap tight under its terrifying jaw, and he snapped on the
switches that opened the circuit-valves on Andrej’s helmet, and
he pulled the succession of levers that geared up the full processing
power of the analytical calculators and the crisis engine, and he
stepped back.

**

Extraordinary currents
surged through the machinery assembled before them.

There was a very still
moment, when even the rain seemed to pause.

Sparks of various and
extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.

A massive arc of power
suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable
corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment
and pain.

Isaac, Derkhan and
Yagharek watched him, paralysed.

As the batteries sent
great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit,
flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback
loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.

The communicator helmet
began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and
amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They
raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards
the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the aether.

But they were diverted.

They were processed,
read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and
switches.

An infinitely small
moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry.
First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the
helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from
the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the
Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through
the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry
through Andrej’s helmet.

**

Isaac had seen how the
slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across
the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not
sated.

The Weaver’s
whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not
like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly,
and drew taste...but no sustenance.

The Weaver thought in a
continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were
no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the
lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the
Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the
secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage
bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and
consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its
consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image
and desire and cognition and emotion.

For the slake-moths, it
was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and
delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum.
Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.

The extraordinary
squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the
wires into the sophisticated engines.

Just behind it came the
particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.

**

In extreme contrast to
the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council
thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a
multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed
information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A
will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind
contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.

To the slake-moths it
was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of
all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as
nutrition. Like ashes.

The Council’s
mind poured into the machine—and there was a moment of fraught
activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the
dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of
the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles
was one way.

It was assimilated,
passing through the analytical engine.

A set of parameters was
reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.

Within a seventh of a
second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.

The machine examined
the form of the first input
x,
Andrej’s mental
signature.

Two subsidiary orders
rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously.
Model form of input
y
one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental
current from the Weaver;
Model form of input z,
and they did
the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful
brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the
output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.

The two lines of
programming coalesced again into a tertiary order:
Duplicate
waveform of input x with inputs y and z.

The commands were
extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating
machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its
programme cards.

The
mathematico-analytical maps of mentality—even simplified and
imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were—became templates. The
three were compared.

Andrej’s mind,
like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s
or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly
convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness,
the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the
recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the
rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of
consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.