Perdido Street Station (38 page)

"Oh dear gods..."
he whispered through dry and quivering lips. "Oh Jabber...what
have I done?"

**

The New Crobuzon
militia did not like to be seen. They emerged in their dark uniforms
at night, to perform duties such as fishing the dead from the river.
Their airships and pods meandered and buzzed over the city with
opaque ends. Their towers were sealed.

The militia, New
Crobuzon’s military defence and its internal correction agents,
only appeared in their uniforms, the infamous full-face masks and
dark armour, the shields and flintlocks, when they were acting as
guards at some sensitive locus, or at times of great emergency. They
wore their colours openly during the Pirate Wars and the Sacramundi
Riots, when enemies attacked the city’s order from without or
within.

For their day-to-day
duties they relied on their reputation and on their vast network of
informers—rewards for information were generous—and
plain-clothed officers. When the militia struck, it was the man
drinking cassis in the cafe, the old woman weighed down with bags,
the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached
over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth,
who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into
criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might
be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone
would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who
would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with
him or her into the crowd, or a militia tower.

And afterwards, no
witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their
civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man
or any of them again, in that part of the city.

It was policing by
decentralized fear.

It had been four in the
morning when the prostitute and her client had been found in Brock
Marsh. The two men walking the dark alleys with their hands in their
pockets and their heads jaunty had paused, seeing the crumpled shape
in the dim gaslight. Their demeanour had changed. They had looked
about them, then trotted into the cul-de-sac.

They found the
stupefied pair lying across each other, their eyes glazed and vacant,
their breath ragged and smelling of cloying citrus. The man’s
trousers and pants were dropped around his ankles, exposing his
shrivelled penis. The woman’s clothes—her skirt complete
with the surreptitious slit many prostitutes used to finish their
work quickly—were intact. When the newcomers had failed to wake
them, one man had remained with the mute bodies and the other had run
off into the darkness. Both men had pulled dark hoods over their
heads.

Some while later a
black carriage had pulled up, drawn by two enormous horses, Remade
with horns and fangs that glinted with slaver. A small corps of
uniformed militia had leapt to the ground and, without words, had
pulled the comatose victims into the darkness of the cab, which had
sped off towards the Spike that towered over the centre of the city.

The two men remained
behind. They waited until the carriage had disappeared over the
cobbles of the labyrinthine quarter. Then they looked about them
carefully, taking stock of the sparse harvest of lights that glinted
from the backs of buildings and outhouses, from behind crumbling
walls and through the thin fingers of fruit trees in gardens.
Satisfied that they were unobserved, they slipped off their hoods and
thrust their hands back into their pockets. They melted suddenly into
a different character, laughing quietly with each other and chatting
urbanely as, innocuous again, they resumed their graveyard-shift
patrol.

In the catacombs under
the Spike, the limp pair of foundlings were prodded and slapped,
shouted at and cajoled. By early morning they had been examined by a
militia scientist, who scribbled a preliminary report.

Heads were scratched in
perplexity.

The scientist’s
report, along with condensed information on all other unusual or
serious crimes, was sent up the length of the Spike, stopping at the
highest floor but one. The reports were couriered briskly the length
of a twisting, windowless corridor, towards the offices of the home
secretary. They arrived on time, by half past nine.

At twelve minutes past
ten, a speaking tube began to bang peremptorily in the cavernous
pod-station that took up the whole floor at the very top of the
Spike. The young sergeant on duty was on the other side of the room,
fixing a cracked light on the front of a pod that hung, like tens of
others, from an intricate cat’s cradle of skyrails which looped
and criss-crossed each other below the high ceiling. The tangled
rails allowed the pods to be moved around each other, positioned on
one or other of the seven radial skyrails that exploded out through
the enormous open holes spaced evenly around the outside wall. The
tracks took off above the colossal face of New Crobuzon.

From where he stood,
the sergeant could see the skyrail enter the militia tower in Sheck a
mile to the south-west, and emerge beyond it. He saw a pod leave the
tower, way over the shambolic housing, virtually at his own
eye-level, and shoot off away from him towards the Tar, which
trickled sinuous and untrustworthy to the south.

He looked up as the
banging continued, and, realizing which tube demanded attention, he
swore and rushed across the room. His furs flapped. Even in summer,
it was cold so high above the city, in an open room that functioned
as a giant wind tunnel. He pulled the plug from the speaking tube and
barked into the brass.

"Yes, Home
Secretary?"

The voice that emerged
was small and distorted by its journey through the twisting metal.

"Get my pod ready
immediately. I’m going to Strack Island."

**

The doors to the
Lemquist Room, the mayor’s office in Parliament, were huge and
bound in bands of ancient iron. There were two militia stationed
outside the Lemquist Room at all times, but one of the usual perks of
a posting in the corridors of power was denied them: no gossip, no
secrets, no sounds of any kind filtered to their ears through the
enormous doors.

Behind the
metal-girdled entrance, the room itself was immensely tall, panelled
in darkwood of such exquisite quality it was almost black. Portraits
of previous mayors circled the room, from the ceiling thirty feet
above, spiralling slowly down to within six feet of the floor. There
was an enormous window that looked out directly at Perdido Street
Station and the Spike, and a variety of speaking tubes, calculating
engines and telescopic periscopes stashed in niches around the room,
in obscure and oddly threatening poses.

Bentham Rudgutter sat
behind his desk with an air of utter command. None who had seen him
in this room had been able to deny the extraordinary surety of
absolute power he exuded. He was the centre of gravity here. He knew
it at a deep level, and so did his guests. His great height and
muscular corpulence doubtless added to the sense, but there was far
more to his presence.

Opposite him sat
Montjohn Rescue, his vizier, wrapped as always in a thick scarf and
leaning over to point out something on a paper the two men were
studying.

"Two days,"
said Rescue in a strange, unmodulated voice, quite different from the
one he used for oratory.

"And what?"
said Rudgutter, stroking his immaculate goatee.

"The strike goes
up. Currently, you know, it’s delaying loading and unloading by
between fifty and seventy per cent. But we’ve got intelligence
that in two days the vodyanoi strikers plan to paralyse the river.
They’re going to work overnight, starting at the bottom,
working their way up. A little to the east of Barley Bridge. Massive
exercise in watercraeft. They’re going to dig a trench of air
across the water, the whole depth of the river. They’ll have to
shore it up continuously, recraefting the walls constantly so they
don’t collapse, but they’ve got enough members to do that
in shifts. There’s no ship that can jump that gap, Mayor.
They’ll totally cut off New Crobuzon from river trade, in both
directions."

Rudgutter mused and
pursed his lips.

"We can’t
allow that," he said reasonably. "What about the human
dockers?"

"My second point,
Mayor," continued Rescue. "Worrying. The initial hostility
seems to be waning. There’s a growing minority who seem to be
ready to throw in their lot with the vodyanoi."

"Oh, no no no no,"
said Rudgutter, shaking his head like a teacher correcting a normally
reliable student.

"Quite. Obviously
our agents are stronger in the human camp than the xenian, and the
mainstream are still antagonistic or undecided about the strike, but
there seems to be a caucus, a conspiracy, if you will...secret
meetings with strikers and the like."

Rudgutter spread his
enormous fingers and looked closely at the grain of the desk between
them.

"Any of your
people there?" he asked quietly. Rescue fingered his scarf.

"One with the
humans," he answered. "It is difficult to remain hidden on
the vodyanoi, who usually wear no clothes in the water."
Rudgutter nodded.

The two men were
silent, pondering.

"We’ve tried
working from the inside," said Rudgutter eventually. "This
is far the most serious strike to threaten the city for...over a
century. Much as I’m loath to, it seems we may have to make an
example..." Rescue nodded solemnly.

One of the speaking
tubes on the mayor’s desk thumped. He raised his eyebrows as he
unplugged it.

"Davinia?" he
answered. His voice was a masterpiece of insinuation. In one word he
told his secretary that he was surprised to have her interrupt him
against his instructions, but that his trust in her was great, and he
was quite sure she had an excellent reason for disobeying, which she
had better tell him immediately.

The hollow, echoing
voice from the tube barked out tiny little sounds.

"Well!"
exclaimed the mayor mildly. "Of course, of course." He
replugged the tube and eyed Rescue. "What timing," he said.
"It’s the home secretary."

The enormous doors
opened briefly and slightly, and the home secretary entered, nodding
in greeting.

"Eliza," said
Rudgutter. "Please join us." He gesticulated at a chair by
Rescue’s.

Eliza Stem-Fulcher
strode over to the desk. It was impossible to tell her age. Her face
was virtually unlined, its strong features suggesting that she was
probably somewhere in her thirties. Her hair, though, was white, with
only the faintest peppering of dark strands to suggest that it had
once been another colour. She wore a dark civilian trouser suit,
cleverly chosen in cut and colour to be strongly suggestive of a
militia uniform. She drew gently on a long-stemmed white clay pipe,
the bowl at least a foot and a half from her mouth. Her tobacco was
spiced.

"Mayor. Deputy."
She sat and pulled a folder from under her arm. "Forgive me
interrupting unannounced, Mayor Rudgutter, but I thought you should
see this immediately. You too, Rescue. I’m glad you’re
here. It looks as if we may have...something of a crisis on our
hands."

"We were saying
much the same thing, Eliza," said the mayor. "We’re
talking about the dock strike?"

Stem-Fulcher glanced up
at him as she drew some papers from the folder.

"No, Mr. Mayor.
Something altogether different." Her voice was resonant and
hard.

She threw a crime
report onto the desk. Rudgutter put it sideways between himself and
Rescue, and both twisted their heads to read it together. After a
minute Rudgutter looked up.

"Two people in
some sort of coma. Odd circumstances. I presume you are showing me
more than this?"

Stem-Fulcher handed him
another paper. Again, he and Rescue read together. This time, the
reaction was almost immediate. Rescue hissed and bit the inside of
his cheek, chewing with concentration. At almost the same time,
Rudgutter gave a little sigh of comprehension, a tremulous little
exhalation.

The home secretary
watched them impassively.

"Obviously, our
mole in Motley’s offices doesn’t know what’s going
on. She’s totally confused. But the snatches of conversation
she’s noted down...see this? ‘The
moss
are
out...?’ I think we can all agree that she misheard that, and I
think we can all agree on what was really said."

Rudgutter and Rescue
read and reread the report wordlessly.

"I’ve
brought the scientific report we commissioned at the very start of
the SM project, the feasibility study." Stem-Fulcher was
speaking quickly, without emotion. She dropped the report flat on the
desk. "I’ve drawn your attention to a few particularly
relevant phrases."

Rudgutter opened the
bound report. Some words and sentences were circled in red. The mayor
scanned them quickly
extreme danger...in case of escape...no
natural predators

...utterly
catastrophic...

...breed...

Mayor Rudgutter reached
out and unplugged his speaking tube again.

"Davinia," he
said. "Cancel all appointments and meetings for today...no, for
the next two days. Apologies wherever necessary. No disturbances
unless Perdido Street Station explodes, or something of that
magnitude. Understood?"

He replaced the plug
and glared at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue.

"What by
damn,
what in
Jabber’s name,
what the
godshit
was
Motley
playing at?
I thought the man was supposed to be a
professional..."

Stem-Fulcher nodded.