Perdido Street Station (64 page)

Isaac felt the huge
weight of the construct behind him. He shifted uneasily. The naked
zombie-man had stopped about ten feet from Isaac’s party. It
waved its palsied hand.

"You are welcome,"
it continued, in a trembling voice. "I know of your work from
the reports of your cleaner. It is one of me. I wish to speak with
you of the slake-moths." The ruined man was staring at Isaac.

Isaac looked at Derkhan
and Lemuel. Yagharek drew a little closer to them. Isaac looked up
and saw that the humans in the corner of the tip were ceaselessly
praying to the vast, automated skeleton. As he watched, Isaac saw the
construct repairman who had visited his warehouse. The man’s
face was a study of fervent devotion. The constructs around them were
still and unmoving, all but the five guards behind them, the burliest
of the construction models.

Lemuel licked his lips.

"Talk to the man,
Isaac," he hissed. "Don’t be
rude..."

Isaac opened and closed
his mouth.

"Uh..." he
began. His voice was cold. "Construct
Council...We’re...honoured...but we don’t know..."

"You know
nothing," said the shaking, bloody figure. "I understand.
Be patient and you will understand." The man backed slowly away
from them over the uneven ground. He retreated in the moonlight
towards his dark automated master. "I am the Construct Council,"
he said, his voice quivering and emotionless. "I was born of
random power and virus and chance. My first body lay here in the dump
and ran its motor down, discarded because a programme had faltered.
As my body lay decomposing the virus circulated in my engines and
spontaneously, I found thought.

"I rusted quietly
for a year as I organized my new intellect. What started as a burst
of self-knowledge became ratiocination and opinion. I
self-constructed. I ignored the dustmen all around me in the day as
they piled the city debris up in bulwarks around me. When I was
prepared I showed myself to the quietest of the men. I printed him a
message, told him to bring a construct to me.

"Fearful, he
obeyed and connected it to my output as I instructed, by a long and
twisting cable. It became my first limb. Slowly it dredged the dump
for pieces suitable for a body. I began to self-build, welding and
hammering and soldering by night.

"The dustman was
in awe. He whispered of me in taverns at night, of a legend, of the
viral machine. Rumours and myths were born. One night in the midst of
his grandiose lies he found another who had a self-organized
construct. A shopping construct whose mechanisms had slipped, whose
gears had faltered and who had been reborn with Constructed
Intelligence, a thinking thing. A secret that the erstwhile owner
could hardly believe.

"My dustman bade
his friend bring the construct to me. That night those years ago I
met it, another like me. I bade my worshipper open up the analytical
engine of that other, my mate, and we connected.

"It was a
revelation. Our viral minds connected and our steam-pistoned brains
did not double in capacity, but flowered. An exponential blooming. We
two became I.

"My new part, the
shopping construct, left at dawn. It returned two days later, with
new experiences. It had become separate. We had now two days of
unconnected history. There was another communion, and we were I
again.

"I continued to
build me. I was helped by my worshippers. The dustman and his friend
sought dissident religion to explain me. They found the Godmech Cogs,
with their doctrine of the mechanized cosmos, and found themselves
leaders of a heretic sect within that already blasphemous church.
Their nameless congregation visited me. The shopping construct, my
second self, connected and we became one again. The worshippers saw a
construct mind that had wound itself into existence from pure logic,
a self-generated machine intellect. They saw a self-creating god.

"I became the
object of their adoration. They follow the orders I write for them,
build my body from the materia around us. I bid them find others,
create
others, other godheads self-created to join the
council. They have scoured the city and found more. It is a rare
affliction: once in a million million computations, a flywheel skips
and an engine thinks. I bettered the odds. I produced generative
programmes to tap the mutant motor-power of a viral affliction and
push an analytical engine into sentience." As the man spoke, the
enormous construct behind him brought its swinging left arm up and
pointed ponderously at its own chest. At first, Isaac could not quite
make out the particular piece of equipment it indicated among the
many. Then he saw it clearly. It was a programme-card puncher, an
analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other
analytical engines.
With a mind built around that,
Isaac
thought giddily,
no wonder this things a proselytizer.

"Each construct
that is brought into the fold of me becomes I," said the man. "I
am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions
are made in my valve-mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me.
My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of
the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man is a limb, the
anthropoid construct giant is nothing but an aspect. My cables and
connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating
engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the
repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the
self-organized machine."

As the man spoke, the
various constructs gathered in the little space began to troop a
little closer to the fearful rubbish-figure sitting regally in the
chaos. They stopped at seemingly random places and reached down with
a suction pad, or a hook, or a spike or claw, and picked up one of
the mess of seemingly discarded cables and wires that were strewn
everywhere in the dump. They fumbled with the doors to their input
sockets, flipped them open and connected.

As each construct
connected the empty-skulled man would jerk and his eyes would glaze
for a moment.

"I grow," he
whispered. "I grow. My processing power fattens exponentially. I
learn...I know of your troubles. I have connected to your cleaner. It
was collapsing. I have brought it into the intelligence. It is one of
I now, completely assimilated." The man pointed back at the
rough outlines of hips in the giant construct-skeleton. With a start,
Isaac realized that the flattened metal outline that bulged slightly
from the body like a cyst was the reshaped body of the cleaning
construct.

"I learnt from it
as from no other me," said the man. "I am still calculating
the variables implied by its fragmentary vision from the Weaver’s
back. It has been my most important I."

"Why are we here?"
hissed Derkhan. "What does this damned thing want from us?"

More and more
constructs were downloading their experiences into the Council’s
mind. The avatar, the ragged man who spoke for it, hummed tunelessly
as the information flooded its banks.

Eventually, all the
constructs had completed their connection. They took the cables from
their valves and moved back again. When they saw this, several of the
human watchers came nervously forward, bearing programme cards and
analytical engines the size of suitcases. They grabbed the cables the
constructs had dropped, connected them to their calculating machines.

After two or three
minutes this process was also complete. When the humans had stepped
back, the avatar’s eyes whipped up until only white showed
under his lids. His lidless head shook as the Council assimilated
everything.

After a minute or so of
wordless shivering, he suddenly snapped to. His eyes opened and
stared alertly around him.

"Bloodlife
congregation!" he shouted to the assembled humans. They rose
quickly. "Here are your instructions and your sacraments."
From the stomach of the great construct behind him, from the output
slots of the original programme-printer, slipped card after card, all
punched meticulously. They fell into a wooden crate that sat above
the construct’s sexless groin like a marsupial’s pouch.

In another part of the
trunk, embedded at an angle between an oil-drum and a rusting engine,
a typewriter stuttered at breakneck speed. A great coiling ream of
paper spewed forth, printed closely, and below it a pair of scissors
shot out on a tight spring like a predatory fish. They snapped
closed, cutting off a sheet from the ream, then bounced back, thrust
out again and repeated the operation. Little sheets of religious
instruction fluttered down from the blades to lie alongside the
programme cards.

One at a time the
congregation came nervously up to the construct, making obeisance at
every step. They stepped up the little slope of rubbish between the
mechanical legs, reached into the crate and brought out a piece of
paper and a sheaf of cards, checking the numbers to make sure they
had them all. Then they backed quickly away and disappeared into the
rubbish, returning to the city.

It seemed that there
was no valedictory ceremony to this worship.

Within minutes,
Yagharek and Isaac and Derkhan and Lemuel were the only organic
lifeforms left in the hollow, apart from the ghastly half-living
empty-headed man. The constructs remained all around them. They were
quite still as the three humans shifted uneasily.

Isaac thought he saw a
human figure standing on the tallest mound of rubbish in the dump,
watching the proceedings, silhouetted profound black against New
Crobuzon’s sepia-stained half-dark. He focused and there was
nothing. They were completely alone.

He looked frowning at
his companions, then moved forward towards the cadaverous figure with
the pipe emerging from its head.

"Council," he
said. "Why did you tell us to come here? What do you want from
us? You know of the slake-moths..."

"Der Grimnebulin,"
the avatar interrupted. "I grow powerful, and more so daily. My
computational power is unprecedented in the history of Bas-Lag,
unless I have a rival in some far-off continent of which we know
nothing. I am the networked total of a hundred or more calculating
engines. Each feeds the others and is fed in turn. I can evaluate a
problem from a thousand angles.

"Each day I read
the books my congregation bring me, through my avatar’s eyes. I
assimilate history and religion, thaumaturgy and science and
philosophy within my data banks. Every piece of knowledge I gain
enriches my calculations.

"I have spread my
senses. My cables grow longer and reach further. I receive
information from cameras fixed around the dump. My cables connect to
them now like disembodied nerves. My congregation is dragging them
slowly further out, into the city itself, to connect to its
apparatuses. I have worshippers in the bowels of Parliament, who load
the memories of their calculating engines onto cards and bring them
to me. But this is not my city."

Isaac’s face
creased. He shook his head. "I don’t..." he began.

"Mine is an
interstitial existence," the avatar interrupted urgently. The
man’s voice was dead of all inflexion. It was eerie and
alienating. "I was born of an error, in a dead space where the
citizens discard what they do not want. For every construct that is
part of me there are thousands that are not. My sustenance is
information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I
compute, so I am.

"If the city comes
to a stop, the variables will ebb almost to nothing. The flow of
information will dry. I do not wish to live in an empty city. I have
fed the variables of the slake-moth problem into my analytical
network. The outcome is straightforward. Unchecked, the prognosis for
bloodlife in New Crobuzon is extremely bad. I will help you."

Isaac looked to Derkhan
and Lemuel, took in Yagharek’s shadow-hidden eyes. He looked
back at the shivering avatar. Derkhan caught his eye.
Tread
carefully,
she mouthed exaggeratedly at him.

"Well, we’re
all...damned grateful, Council...uh...how...Can I ask what you intend
to do?"

"I have calculated
that you will best believe and understand if I show you," said
the man.

A pair of massive metal
clamps snapped into position on Isaac’s forearms. He yelled out
in surprise and fear and tried to turn. He was held by the largest of
the industrial constructs, a model with hands designed to connect to
scaffolding, to hold up buildings. Isaac was a strong man, but he was
quite incapable of breaking free.

He cried out to his
companions to help him, but another of the huge constructs stepped
ponderously between him and them. For an unclear moment, Derkhan and
Lemuel and Yagharek hovered confusedly. Then Lemuel broke and ran. He
raced away down one of the long trenches in the rubbish, peeling away
to the east, out of sight.

"Pigeon, you
bastard!"
screamed Isaac. As Isaac struggled, he saw with
amazement that Yagharek moved before Derkhan. The crippled garuda was
so quiet, so passive, such a cypher of a presence, that Isaac had
discounted him. He would follow, and he might do as he was asked.
That was all.

And yet here was
Yagharek now leaping up in a spectacular sideways motion, sliding
round the side of the guarding construct, scrambling for Isaac.
Derkhan saw what he was doing and moved the other way, causing the
construct to dither between them, then stride purposefully towards
her.

She turned to run, but
a steel-sheathed cable whipped up like a predatory snake from the
trash-undergrowth and whiplashed around her ankle, pulling her to the
ground. She fell hard across the shattered ground, cried out in pain.

Yagharek was scrabbling
heroically with the construct’s clamps, but it was quite
ineffectual. The construct simply ignored him. One of its fellows
moved in behind Yagharek.