Perdido Street Station (89 page)

Andrej’s mind was
not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic
dream-consciousness of the Weaver.

x,
recorded the
engines, was unlike
y
and unlike
z.

But with underlying
structure
and
subconscious flow, with calculating rationality
and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional charge,
x,
the analytical engines calculated, was equal to
y plus
z.

The thaumaturgo-psychic
motors followed orders. They combined
y
and
z.
They
created a duplicate waveform to that of
x
and routed it
through the output on Andrej’s helmet.

The flows of charged
particles pouring into the helmet from the Council and the Weaver
were added together into a single vast slew. The Weaver’s
dreams, the Council’s calculations, were blended to mimic
subconscious and conscious, the working human mind. The new
ingredients were more powerful than Andrej’s feeble emanations
by a factor of enormous magnitude. The vastness of this power was
unabated as the new, huge current surged towards the flared trumpet
pointing up into the sky.

**

A little more than
one-third of a second had passed since the circuit had snapped into
life. As the enormous combined flow of
y + z
dashed towards
the outflow, a new set of conditions was fulfilled. The crisis engine
itself chattered into life.

It used the unstable
categories of crisis maths, as much a persuasive vision as objective
categorization. Its deductive method was holistic, totalizing and
inconstant.

As the exudations of
the Council and the Weaver took the place of Andrej’s outflow,
the crisis engine was fed the same information as the original
processors. It rapidly evaluated the calculations that had been
performed and examined the new flow. In its astonishingly complex
tubular intelligence, a massive anomaly became evident. Something the
strictly arithmetic functions of the other engines could never have
uncovered.

The form of the
dataflows under analysis was not just the sum of their constituent
parts.

y
and
z
were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was
x,
Andrej’s mind, the reference point for the whole model.
It
was integral to the form of each that they were totalities.

The layers of
consciousness within
x
were dependent on each other,
interlocking gears of a motor of self-sustaining consciousness. What
was arithmetically discernible as rationalism
plus
dreams was
really a
whole,
whose constituent parts could not be
disentangled.

y
and
z
were not half-complete models of
x.
They were qualitatively
different.

The engine applied
rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical
command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code
from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously
identical to and
radically divergent from
the original it
mimicked.

Three-fifths of a
second after the circuit had snapped into life, the crisis engine
arrived at two simultaneous conclusions:
x—y+z;
and
x^y+z.

The operation that had
been carried out was profoundly unstable. It was paradoxical,
unsustainable, the application of logic tearing itself apart.

The process was, from
absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion,
utterly riddled with crisis.

**

A massive wellspring of
crisis energy was instantly uncovered. The realization of crisis
freed it up to be tapped: metaphasic pistons squeezed and convulsed,
sending controlled spurts of the volatile energy shooting through
amplifiers and transformers. Subsidiary circuits rocked and juddered.
The crisis motor began to whirl like a dynamo, crackling with power
and sending out complex charges of quasivoltage.

The final command rang
in binary form through the crisis engine’s innards.
Channel
energy,
it said,
and amplify output.

**

Just less than one
second since the power had coursed through the wires and mechanisms,
the impossible, paradoxical flow of cobbled-together consciousness,
the combined flow of Weaver and Council, welled up and burst
massively out of Andrej’s conducting helmet.

His own rerouted
emanations wobbled in a loop of referential feedback, constantly
being checked and compared to the
y+z
flow by the analogue and
the crisis engines. Without outlet, it began to leak out, snapping in
peculiar little arcs of thaumaturgic plasma. It dribbled invisibly
over Andrej’s contorting face, mixing with the gobbing overflow
from the Weaver/Council emission.

The main aggregate of
that enormous and unstable created consciousness burst in huge gouts
from the helmet’s flanges. A growing column of mental waves and
particles burst out over the station, towering into the air. It was
invisible, but Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could feel it, a
prickling of the skin, sixth and seventh senses ringing dully like
psychic tinnitus.

Andrej twitched and
convulsed with the power of the processes rocking him. His mouth
worked. Derkhan looked away in guilty disgust.

The Weaver danced back
and forth on its stiletto feet, yammering quietly and tapping its
helmet.

"Bait..."
called Yagharek harshly and stepped back from the flow of energy.

"It’s hardly
started," yelled Isaac over the thudding of rain.

The crisis engine was
humming and heating up, tapping enormous and growing resources. It
sent waves of transforming current through thickly insulated cables,
towards Andrej, who rolled and jack-knifed in spastic terror and
pain.

The engine took the
energy siphoned from the unstable situation and channelled it,
obeying its instructions, pouring it in transformative form towards
the Weaver/Council flow. Boosting it. Increasing its pitch and range
and power. And increasing it again.

A feedback loop began.
The artificial flow was made stronger; and like an enormous fortified
tower on crumbling foundations, the increase of its mass made it more
precarious. Its paradoxical ontology grew more unstable as the flow
became stronger. Its crisis grew more acute. The engine’s
transformative power grew exponentially; it bolstered the mental flow
more; the crisis deepened again...

**

The prickling of
Isaac’s skin grew worse. A note seemed to sound in his skull, a
whine that increased in pitch as if something nearby spun faster and
faster, out of control. He winced.

...GOOD GRIEF AND GRACE
THE SPILLING SLOSH GROWS MINDFUL BUT MIND IT IS NO MIND...the Weaver
continued to murmur...ONE AND ONE INTO ONE WON’T GO BUT IT IS
ONE AND TWO AT ONCE WILL WE WON HOW WIN HOW WONDERFUL...

As Andrej rolled like a
victim of torture under the dark rain, the power that poured through
his head and into the sky grew more and more intense, increasing at a
frightening, geometric rate. It was invisible but sensible: Isaac,
Derkhan and Yagharek backed away from the squirming figure as far as
the little space would allow. Their pores opened and closed, their
hair or feathers crawled violently across their skin.

Still the crisis loop
continued and the emanation increased, until it could almost be seen,
a shimmering pillar of disturbed aether two hundred feet high, the
light from stars and aerostats bending uncertainly around and through
it as it towered like an unseen inferno over the city.

Isaac felt as if his
gums were rotting, as if his teeth were trying to escape his jaw.

The Weaver danced on in
delight.

An enormous beacon was
scorched into the aether. A huge and rapidly growing column of
energy, a pretend consciousness, the map of a counterfeit mind that
swelled and fattened in a fearful curve of growth, impossible and
vastly there, the portent of a nonexistent god.

Across New Crobuzon,
more than nine hundred of the city’s best communicators and
thaumaturges paused and looked suddenly in the direction of The Crow,
their faces twisted with confusion and nebulous alarm. The most
sensitive held their heads and moaned with inexplicable pain.

Two hundred and seven
began to jabber in nonsense combinations of numerological code and
lush poetry. One hundred and fifty-five suffered massive nosebleeds,
two of them ultimately un-staunchable and fatal.

Eleven, who worked for
the government, scrabbled from their workshop at the top of the Spike
and ran, with handkerchiefs and tissues ineffectually stopping the
bloody slick from their noses and ears, towards Eliza Stem-Fulcher’s
office.

"Perdido Street
Station!" was all they could say. They gabbled it like idiots
for some minutes, to the home secretary and the mayor who was with
her, shaking them with frustration, their lips twitching for other
sounds, blood spattering their bosses’ immaculate tailoring.

"Perdido Street
Station!"

Way out above the wide
empty streets of Chnum; swooping slowly past the curve of temple
towers in Tar Wedge; skirting the river above Howl Barrow and soaring
widespread over the pauper slum of Stoneshell, intricate bodies
moved.

With sluggish strokes
and drooling tongues, the slake-moths sought prey.

They were hungry, eager
to gorge themselves and ready their bodies and breed again. They must
hunt.

But in four sudden,
identical and simultaneous movements—separated by miles, in
different quadrants of the city—the four slake-moths snapped
their heads up as they flew.

They beat their complex
wings and slowed, until they were almost still in the air. Four
slobbering tongues lolled and lapped at the air.

In the distance, over
the skyline that glimmered with grots of filthy light, on the
outskirts of the central mass of building, a column was rising from
the earth. Even as they licked and taste-smelled it, it grew and
grew, and their wings beat back frantically as the wafts of flavour
came over them, and the incredible succulent stench of the thing
boiled and eddied in the aether.

The other smells and
tastes of the city dissipated into nothing. With an amazing speed,
the extraordinary flavour-trail doubled its intensity, suffusing the
slake-moths, making them mad.

One by one they emitted
a chittering of astounded, delighted greed, a single-minded hunger.

From all the way across
the city, from the four compass points, they converged in a frenzy of
flapping, four starving exultant powerful bodies, descending to feed.

**

There was a tiny putter
of lights on a little console. Isaac edged closer, keeping his body
low, as if he could duck under the beacon of energy pouring from
Andrej’s skull. The old man lolled and twitched on the ground.

Isaac was careful not
to look at Andrej’s sprawling form. He peered at the console,
making sense of the little play of diodes.

"I think it’s
the Construct Council," he said over the drab rainfall sound.
"It’s sending instructions to get round the firewall, but
I don’t think it’ll be able to. This is too simple for
it," he said, and patted the circuit-valve. "There’s
nothing for it to get control of." Isaac visualized a struggle
in the femtoscopic byways of wiring.

He looked up.

The Weaver was ignoring
him and them all, drumming its little fingers against the slick
concrete in complicated rhythms. Its low voice was impenetrable.

Derkhan was staring in
exhausted disgust at Andrej. Her head jerked gently back and forward
as if she was rocked by waves. Her mouth moved. She spoke in silent
tongues.
Don’t die,
thought Isaac fervently, staring at
the ruined old man, seeing his face contort as bizarre feedback
rocked him,
you can’t die yet, you have to hold on.

Yagharek was standing.
He pointed up, suddenly, into a far quadrant of the sky.

"They have changed
course," he said harshly. Isaac looked up and saw what Yagharek
was indicating.

Far away, halfway to
the edge of the city, three of the drifting dirigibles had turned
purposefully. They were hardly visible to human eyes, darker blots
against the night sky, picked out with navigation lights. But it was
clear that their fitful, random motion had changed; that they were
powering ponderously towards Perdido Street Station, converging.

"They’re on
to us," said Isaac. He did not feel fearful, only tense and
weirdly sad. "They’re coming. Godspit and shit! We’ve
got about ten, fifteen minutes before they get here. We just have to
hope the moths are quicker."

"No. No."
Yagharek was shaking his head with quick violence. His head was
cocked. His arms moved quickly, motioning them all to silence. Isaac
and Derkhan froze. The Weaver continued its insane monologue, but it
was subdued and hushed. Isaac prayed that it would not become bored
and disappear. The apparatus, the constructed mind, the crisis would
all collapse.

The air around them all
was welting, splitting like troubled skin, as the force of that
unthinkable and burgeoning blast of power continued to grow.

Yagharek was listening
intently through the rain.

"People are
approaching," he said urgently, "across the roof."
With practised movements, he plucked his whip from his belt. His long
knife seemed to dance into his left hand and pose, glinting in the
refracted sodium lights. He had become a warrior and a hunter again.

Isaac stood and drew
his flintlock. He checked hurriedly that it was clean and he filled
the pan with powder, trying to shield it from the rain. He felt for
his little pouch of bullets and his powder horn. His heart, he
realized, was beating only very slightly faster.