Perdido Street Station (87 page)

Isaac and Yagharek
tensed. The garuda slid under the boarded-up window and raised his
avian eye quietly to a knothole. He scanned the street across from
the ruin.

"There is no one
there," he said flatly. Derkhan came over and stared through the
hole.

"Maybe he wasn’t
doing anything," she said eventually. "But I’d feel
safer a floor or two up, in case we hear someone come in."

It was much easier to
move, now that Isaac could force the crying Andrej at gunpoint
without fear of being seen. They made their way up the stairs,
leaving footprints in the charcoal surface.

On the top floor the
window frames were empty of glass or wood, and they could look out
across the short trek of slates at the staggered monolith of the
station. They waited while the sky grew darker. Eventually, in the
dim flicker of the orange gasjets, Yagharek clambered from the window
and dropped lightly onto the moss-cushioned wall beyond. He stalked
the five feet to the unbroken spine of roofs that connected the
clutch of buildings to the Dexter Line and to Perdido Street Station.
It sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters
of light like an earthbound constellation.

Yagharek was a dim
figure in the skyline. He scanned the landscape of chimneys and
slanting clay. He was not watched. He turned towards the dark window,
indicated the others to follow him.

**

Andrej was old and
stiff, and found it hard to walk along the narrow walkways they
forged. He could not jump the five-foot drops that were necessary.
Isaac and Derkhan helped him, supporting him or holding him fast with
a gentle, macabre assistance, while the other trained their flintlock
at his brain.

They had untied his
limbs so he could walk and climb, but they had left the gag in place
to stifle his wails and sobs.

Andrej stumbled
confused and miserable like some soul in the outlands of Hell,
shuffling nearer and nearer his ineluctable end with agonizing steps.

The four of them walked
across the roofworld parallel to the Dexter Line. They were passed in
both directions by spitting iron trains, wailing and venting great
coughs of sooty smoke into the dwindling light. They trooped slowly
onwards, towards the station ahead.

It was not long before
the nature of their terrain changed. The sharp-angled slates gave way
as the mass of architecture rose around them. They had to use their
hands. They made their way through little byways of concrete,
surrounded by windowed walls; they ducked under huge portholes and
had to scale short ladders that wound between stubby towers. Hidden
machinery made the brickwork hum. They were no longer looking ahead
to the roof of Perdido Street Station, but up. They had passed some
nebulous boundary point where the terraced streets ended and the
foothills of the station began.

They tried to avoid
climbing, creeping around the edges of promontories of brick like
jutting teeth and through accidental passageways. Isaac began to look
around, nervous and fitful. The pavement was invisible behind a low
rise of rooftops and chimney-pipes to their right.

"Keep quiet and
careful," he whispered. "There might be guards."

From the north-east, a
gouged curve in the station’s sprawling silhouette was a street
approaching them, half covered by the building. Isaac pointed at it.

"There," he
whispered. "Perdido Street."

He traced its line with
his hand. A short way ahead it intersected with the Cephalic Way,
along the length of which they were walking.

"Where they meet,"
he whispered. "That’s our pick-up point. Yag...would you
go?"

The garuda sped away,
making towards the back of a tall building a few yards ahead, where
rust-fouled guttering made a slanting ladder to the ground.

Isaac and Derkhan
plodded slowly onwards, pushing Andrej gently forward with their
guns. When they reached the intersection of the two streets they sat
heavily and waited.

Isaac looked up at the
sky, where only the high clouds still caught the sun. He looked down,
watching Andrej’s misery and imploring gaze creasing his old
face. From all around the city the night sounds were beginning.

"There’s no
nightmares yet," murmured Isaac. He looked up at Derkhan, held
out his hand as if feeling for rain. "Can’t feel anything.
They can’t be abroad yet."

"Maybe they’re
licking their wounds," she said cheerlessly. "Maybe they
won’t come and this—" her eyes flicked up towards
Andrej momentarily,"—this’ll all be useless."

"They’ll
come," said Isaac. "I promise you that." He would not
talk of things going wrong. He would not admit the possibility.

They were silent for a
while. Isaac and Derkhan realized simultaneously that they were both
watching Andrej. He breathed slowly, his eyes flickering this way and
that, his fear become a paralysing backdrop.
We could take his gag
away,
thought Isaac,
and he wouldn’t scream...but then
he might speak...
He left the gag in place.

There was a scraping
sound near them. With calm speed, Isaac and Derkhan raised their
pistols. Yagharek’s feathered head emerged from behind the
clay, and they lowered their hands. The garuda hauled himself towards
them over the cracked extrusion of roof. Draped over his shoulder was
a great coil of cable.

Isaac stood to catch
him as he staggered towards them.

"You got it!"
he hissed. "They were waiting!"

"They were
becoming angry," said Yagharek. "They had come up from the
sewers an hour or more ago: they were fearful that we had been
captured or killed. This is the last of the wire." He dropped
the loops to the ground before them. The cable was thinner than many
of the other sections, about four inches in cross-section, coated
with thin rubber. There were perhaps sixty feet of wire remaining,
sprawled in tight spirals by their ankles.

Isaac knelt to examine
it. Derkhan, her pistol still trained on the cowering Andrej,
squinted at the cable.

"Is it connected?"
she asked. "Is it working?"

"I don’t
know," breathed Isaac. "We won’t be able to tell till
I link it up, make it a circuit." He hauled the cable up, swung
it over his shoulder. "There’s not as much as I’d
hoped," he said. "We’re not going to get very close
to the centre of Perdido Street Station." He looked around and
pursed his lips.
It doesn’t matter,
he thought.
Picking
the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the
dump and away from it before...betrayal.
But he found himself
wishing that they
could
plant themselves at the core of the
station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks.

He pointed a little way
away to the south-east, up a little slope of steep-sided, flat-topped
rooflets. They extended like an exaggerated slate stairwell,
overlooked by an enormous flat wall of stained concrete. The little
rise of roof hillocks ended about forty feet above them, in what
Isaac hoped was a flattened plateau. The huge L-shaped concrete wall
continued into the air above it for nearly sixty feet, containing it
on two sides.

"There," said
Isaac slowly. "That’s where we’ll go."

Halfway up the stepped
roofs, Isaac and his companions disturbed someone.

There was a sudden
raucous drunken noise. Isaac and Derkhan flurried for their pistols
in anxious motion. It was a ragged drunk who leapt up in a shockingly
inhuman motion and disappeared at speed down the slope. Strips of
torn clothes fluttered behind him.

After that Isaac began
to see the denizens of the station’s roof-scape. Little fires
sputtered in secret courtyards, tended by dark and hungry figures.
Sleeping men curled in the corners beside old spires. It was an
alternative, an attenuated society. Little vagrant hilltribes
foraging. A quite different ecology.

Way above the heads of
the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky. Noisy
predators. Grubby specks of light and dark, moving edgily in the
night’s cloud.

To Isaac’s
relief, the plateau at the top of the hill of layered slate was flat,
and about fifteen feet square. Large enough. He wagged his gun,
indicating that Andrej should sit, which the old man did, collapsing
slowly and precipitously into the far corner. He huddled in on
himself, hugging his knees.

"Yag," said
Isaac. "Keep watch, mate." Yagharek dropped the final twist
of the cable he had hauled up, and stood sentry at the edge of the
little open space, looking down across the gradient of the massive
roof. Isaac staggered under the full weight of the sack. He put it
down and began to unpack the equipment.

Three mirrored helmets,
one of which he put on. Derkhan took the others, gave one to
Yagharek. Four analytical engines the size of large typewriters. Two
large chymico-thaumaturgical batteries. Another battery, this one
metaclockwork, a khepri design.

Several connecting
cables. Two large communicators’ helmets, of the type used by
the Construct Council on Isaac to trap the first slake-moth. Torches.
Black powder and ammunition. A sheaf of programme cards. A clutch of
transformers and thaumaturgic converters. Copper and pewter circuits
of quite opaque purpose. Small motors and dynamos.

Everything was
battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked
like nothing at all. Rubbish.

Isaac squatted beside
it and began to prepare.

**

His head wobbled under
the weight of his helmet. He connected two of the calculating
engines, linking them into a powerful network. Then he began a much
harder job, connecting the rest of the various oddments into a
coherent circuit.

The motors were clipped
to wires, and they to the larger of the analytical engines. The other
engine he tinkered with internally, checking subtle adjustments. He
had changed its circuitry. The valves within were no longer simply
binary switches. They were attuned specifically and carefully to the
unclear and the questionable; the grey areas of crisis mathematics.

He snapped small plugs
into receivers and wired up the crisis engine to the dynamos and
transformers that converted one uncanny form of energy into another.
A discombobulated circuit spread out across the flat little
roofspace.

The last thing he
pulled from the sack and connected to the sprawling machinery was a
crudely welded box of black tin, about the size of a shoe. He picked
up the end of the cable—the enormous work of guerrilla
engineering that stretched more than two miles to the huge hidden
intelligence of the Griss Twist dump. Isaac deftly unwound the
splayed wires and connected them to the black box. He looked up at
Derkhan, who was watching him, her gun trained on Andrej.

"That’s a
breaker," he said, "a circuit-valve. One-way flow only. I’m
cutting the Council off from this lot." He patted the various
pieces of the crisis engine. Derkhan nodded slowly. The sky had grown
nearly completely dark. Isaac looked up at her and set his lips.

"We can’t
let that fucking thing get access to the crisis engine. We have to
stay away from it," he explained as he connected the disparate
components of his machine. "You remember what it told us—the
avatar was some corpse pulled out of the river. Bullshit! That body’s
alive...
mindless, sure, but the heart’s beating and the
lungs breathe air. The Construct Council had to take that man’s
mind out of his body while he was
alive.
That was the whole
point. Otherwise it would just rot.

"I don’t
know...maybe it was one of that crazy congregation sacrificing
himself, maybe it was voluntary. But maybe not. Whichever, the
Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if
it’s...useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,"
Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. "It’s
just a...a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s
trying to...
maximize
itself. It’ll do whatever it has
to—it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill—to increase
its own power."

Isaac stopped for a
moment and looked up at Derkhan.

"And you know,"
he said softly, "that’s why it wants the crisis engine. It
kept demanding it. Made me think. That’s what this is for."
He patted the circuit-valve. "If I connected the Council direct,
it might be able to get feedback from the crisis engine, get control
of it. It doesn’t know I’m using this, that’s why
it was so keen on being connected. It doesn’t know how to build
its own engine: you can bet Jabber’s arse that’s why it’s
so interested in us.

"Dee, Yag, d’you
know what this engine can do? I mean, this is a prototype...but if it
works like it should, if you got inside this, saw the blueprint,
built it more solidly, ironed out the problems...d’you know
what this can do?

"
Anything."
He was silent for a while, his hands working, connecting his wires.
"There’s crisis everywhere, and if the engine can detect
the field, tap it, channel it...it can do anything. I’m
hamstrung because of all the maths. You’ve got to express in
mathematical terms what you want the engine to do. That’s what
the programme cards are for. But the Council’s whole damn
brain
expresses things mathematically. If that bastard links up to the
crisis engine, its followers
won’t be crazy any more.

"Because you know
they call it the God-machine...? Well...they’ll be right."

All three of them were
quiet. Andrej rolled his eyes from side to side, not comprehending a
single word.

Isaac worked silently.
He tried to imagine a city in the thrall of the Construct Council. He
thought of it linked up to the little crisis engine, building more
and more of the engines on an ever-increasing scale, connecting them
up to its own fabric, powering them with its own thaumaturgical and
elyctrochymical and steampower. Monstrous valves hammering in the
depths of the dump, making the fabric of reality bend and bleed with
the ease of a Weaver’s spinnerets, all doing the bidding of
that vast, cold intelligence, pure conscious calculation, as
capricious as a baby.