Perdido Street Station (62 page)

Rescue stood, dressed
in his usual immaculate suit. He looked slowly around him. The
congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from
him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed
pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so,
except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There
was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young
debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk.

All the figures, human
and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one
item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was
twice the size as most, and even the dog sported an absurd little
waistcoat.

All eyes were
motionless, trained on Rescue. Slowly he unwound his scarf from his
neck.

As the last layer of
cotton fell from his body, a dark shape shifted underneath.

Something coiled
tightly around Rescue’s flesh.

Clamped to his neck was
what looked like a human right hand. The skin was livid purple. At
the wrist, the flesh of the thing tapered quickly into a foot-long
tail like a snake’s. The tail was wound around Rescue’s
neck, its tip embedded under his skin, pulsating wetly.

The fingers of the hand
moved slightly. They dug into the flesh of the neck.

After a moment, the
rest of the figures unrobed. The khepri unbuttoned her flapping
trousers, the old woman her outdated bustle. All removed some piece
of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its
snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played
their nerve-ends like a piano. Here it clung to the inside of a
thigh, here to a waist, here the scrotum. Even the dog fumbled with
its waistcoat until the urchin helped it, unbuttoning the
preposterous thing and unveiling another ugly hand-tumour clamped to
the dog’s hairy flesh.

There were five right
hands and five left, their tails coiling and uncoiling, their skin
mottled and thick.

The humans and xenians
and the dog shuffled closer. They made a tight circle.

At a signal from
Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a
viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and
dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open
spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The
entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The
blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive
worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.

The host bodies were
bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange
huddled greeting. They were utterly still.

The handlingers
communed.

**

The handlingers were a
symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and
secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.

They spawned rumours
and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the
spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a
murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and
stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how
handlingers were born.

There were many myths,
and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by
infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies
and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible.
The handlingers could only live the lives of others.

They kept hidden
through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an
unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some
well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger
menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets,
inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put
down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the
warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers were ever
found.

Many people in New
Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in
the city, were gone.

**

In the shadows of their
motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their
skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of
lower lifeforms.

They shared
information. Rescue’s told what it knew, gave orders. It
repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that
the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the
slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future
good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon
handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the
secret war.

The handlingers
squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to
conclusions.

After two, three
minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way
back into the gaping holes in their hosts’ bodies. Each body
spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths
snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.

As they had agreed,
they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right
handlinger, like Rescue’s, and one left. Rescue himself was
paired with the dog.

Rescue strode a little
way through the grassland and tugged out a large bag. He removed five
mirrored helmets, five thick blindfolds, several sets of heavy
leather straps and nine primed flintlock pistols. Two of the helmets
were specially made, one for the vodyanoi and an elongated one for
the dog.

Each left-handlinger
bent its host down to retrieve its helmet, each right-handlinger a
blindfold. Rescue fitted his canine partner’s helmet on its
head, strapping it tight, before attaching his blindfold, tying it
tight so that he could see nothing at all.

Each of the pairs moved
away. Each blind right-handlinger held its partner tight. The
vodyanoi held the debutante; the old woman the clerk; the Remade held
the khepri; the street-child, bizarrely, clasped the muscled man
protectively; and Rescue held on to the dog he could no longer see.

"Instructions
waterclear?" said Rescue aloud, too far apart to speak the
handlingers’ real touch-tongue. "Remember training. Hard
and bizarre, tonight, no question. Never tried before. Sinistrals,
you must steer. Your onus. Open to your partner and never close
tonight. Your battle rages. Keep with other sinistrals, too.
Slightest sign of target, mental alarm, grab all the sinistrals up
tonight. We’ll join forces, there in minutes.

"Dextriers, obey
without thinking. Our hosts
must be blind.
Can’t look at
the wings, not anyhow never. With mirror-helms we could see but not
spitsear, looking wrongward. So we face forward, but without seeing.
Tonight we carry our sinistral as our host carries us, without mind
or fear or question. Understand?" There were muted sounds of
acquiescence. Rescue nodded. "Then attach."

The sinistral of each
pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to
their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs
and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and
locked themselves to their partners’ backs, facing behind them.
Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs,
over their dextriers’ shoulders and out in front.

Rescue waited while an
unseen sinistral attached the dog uncomfortably to his back. Its legs
were splayed absurdly, but the animal’s handlinger parasite
ignored its host’s pain. It moved its head expertly, checked
that it could see over Rescue’s shoulder. It yelped in a
controlled, canine gasp.

"Everyone remember
Rudgutter’s code," shouted Rescue, "case of emergency
after? Then hunt."

The dextriers flexed
hidden organs at the base of their vivid, humanoid thumbs. There was
a quick sough of air. The five ungainly pairs of host-and-handlingers
soared straight up and out, away from each other at speed,
disappearing towards Ludmead and Mog Hill, Syriac and Flyside and
Sheck, swallowed up by the impure, streetlamp-stained night sky, the
blind bearing the afraid.

It was only a short,
covert journey from the hut on the railway-side to the Griss Twist
dumps. Isaac and Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek drifted seemingly at
random through a parallel map of the city. They made their way
through backstreets. They flinched uneasily as they felt the
smothering nightmares descend on the city.

At a quarter to ten,
they were outside number two dump.

The Griss Twist dumps
interspersed the deserted remnants of factories. Here and there one
still operated, at half- or a quarter-capacity, chucking out its
noxious fumes by day and succumbing slowly to the ambient decay by
night. The factories were hemmed in and laid siege to by the dumps.

Dump Two was surrounded
by unconvincing barbed wire, rusted through, broken and torn, deep in
the coil of Griss Twist, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous
Tar. It was the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral. A
landscape not urban, not created by design or chance, an
agglutination of waste remains left to rot, that had subsided and
settled into random formations of rust, filth, metal, debris and
moulding cloth, scintillas of mirror and china like scree, arcs from
splintered wheels, the skittering waste-energy of half-broken engines
and machines.

The four renegades
punctured the fence with ease. Warily, they traced the tracks carved
by the rubbish workers. Cartwheels had carved ruts in the fine rubble
that was the dump’s topsoil. Weeds proved their tenacity by
spewing from every little clutch of nutrient, no matter how vile.

Like explorers in some
antique land they wound their way, dwarfed by the stray sculptures of
muck and entropy that surrounded them like canyon walls.

Rats and other vermin
made little sounds.

Isaac and the others
walked slowly through the warm night, through the stinking air of the
industrial dump.

"What are we
looking for?" hissed Derkhan.

"I don’t
know," said Isaac. "The damned construct said we’d
find our way where we had to go. Fucking had it with enigmas."

Some late-waking
seagull sounded in the air above them. They all started at the sound.
The sky was not safe, after all.

Their feet dragged
them. It was like the tide, a slow movement, without any conscious
direction, which pulled them inexorably in one direction. They found
their way to the heart of the rubbish maze.

They turned a corner of
the ruinous trashscape and found themselves in a hollow. Like a
clearing in the woods, an open space forty feet across. Around its
edges were strewn huge piles of half-ruined machinery, the remnants
of all manner of engines, massive pieces that looked like working
printing presses, down to minuscule and fine pieces of precision
engineering.

The four companions
stood in the centre of the space. They waited, uneasy.

Just behind the
north-western edge of the mountains of waste, huge steam-cranes
lolled like great marsh lizards. The river welled thickly just beyond
them, out of sight.

For a minute, there was
no movement.

"What’s the
time?" whispered Isaac. Lemuel and Derkhan looked at their
watches.

"Nearly eleven,"
said Lemuel.

They looked up again,
and still nothing moved.

Overhead, a gibbous
moon meandered through the clouds. Its was the only light in the
dump, a wan, flattening luminescence that bled the depth from the
world.

Isaac looked down and
was about to speak, when a sound issued from one of the innumerable
trenches that sliced through the towering reef of rubbish. It was an
industrial sound, a clanking, siphoning wheeze like some enormous
insect. The four waiting figures watched the end of the tunnel, a
confused sense of foreboding building in them.

A large construct
stamped out into the empty space. It was a model designed for labour,
heavy jobs. It stomped past them on swinging tripedal legs, kicking
stray stones and gobbets of metal out of its way. Lemuel, who was
nearly in its path, moved back warily, but the construct paid him no
heed at all. It continued walking until it was near the edge of the
oval of empty space, then stopped and stared at the northern wall.

It was still.

As Lemuel turned to
Isaac and Derkhan, there was another noise. He swivelled quickly, to
see another, much smaller construct, this one a cleaning model driven
by khepri-designed metaclock-work. It cruised on its little
caterpillar treads, stationing itself a little way from its much
bigger sibling.

Now, the sounds of
constructs were coming from all around the canyons of garbage.

"Look,"
hissed Derkhan, and pointed to the east. From one of the smaller
caverns in the muck, two humans were emerging. At first Isaac thought
he must be mistaken, and that they must be lithe constructs, but
there could be no doubt that they were flesh and bone. They scrambled
over the crushed detritus that littered the earth.

They paid the waiting
renegades no heed at all.

Isaac frowned.

"Hey," he
said, just loud enough to be heard. One of the two men who had
entered the clearing shot him a wrathful glance and shook his head,
then looked away. Chastened and astonished, Isaac was silent.

More and more
constructs were arriving in the open space. Massive military models,
tiny medical assistants, automatic road-drills and household
assistants, chrome and steel, iron and brass and copper and glass and
wood, steam-powered and elyctrical and clockwork, thaumaturgy-driven
and oil-burning engined.

Here and there among
them darted more humans—even, Isaac thought, a vodyanoi,
quickly lost in the darkness and moving shadows. The humans
congregated in a tight knot by the side of what was almost an
amphitheatre.