Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [61]
With a tired smile, Lilian handed him a cup filled with a coffee that was horrible, but still good in the way even horrible coffee can be when you badly need it.
“I almost listened to your last record,” Gabriel said to Lilian. “Unfortunately a Gentleman of the Night sat on it.”
“A Gentleman of the Night sat on me,” she answered, her smile now almost sad. Even if the brilliance of youth had gone from her face, she was still cute, in a harder, leaner, more angular way. “They’re such arses, aren’t they?”
Gabriel gulped the coffee quickly, sensing the impatience of the Scavengers, and slammed the mug back on the table in a display of pure Round Table attitude.
“If you want to follow us …” said Blankbate.
The Scavengers took them first through an armoury, where they armed themselves with sawn-off lever shotguns and cartridges, and then through a back door. The blizzard had worsened, and whirled madly like a trapped wolf. Gabriel offered his comforter and his leather Elsinore hat to Lilian, who took only the hat, with a smile, and tied the leather flaps under her chin. They walked through the mounting snow until they came to a kind of tube, four feet in diameter, that slithered along the Embankment. An open car on rubber wheels, almost cylindrical, was waiting at the entrance with the pensive loneliness of all things snowed upon.
It was, or so Gabriel assumed, the prototype for the Parcel Pneumatic Post that had never quite gone beyond the first experiments. A larger version of the telegram tubes network, this was, if Gabriel correctly remembered Brentford’s explanations, supposed to carry packages and crates, especially from the Fisheries, right through the heart of the city, six hundred yards away. Compressed-air engines at the end of the tube pushed and pulled the cars at an astounding 70 mph. How the Scavengers had come to inherit the use of this network Gabriel did not know, but he surmised that Brentford had lent a hand, while he still ran the Office of Striated Space. Whether it had been done without the consent of the Council or by flattering their fetish about the invisibility of trash, he had not the slightest idea.
Lilian, Gabriel, and Chipp crammed themselves as best they could into the cart, while Blankbate, before adding his considerable bulk, asked a sentinel to close the valve and operate the pump. The tube was dark, uncomfortable, cold, and smelled of rust, and once the pump started, Gabriel felt like a bullet shot through the barrel of a gun. But, thank God, it did not take long before they hit the other end of the tube, where the valve opened automatically.
They now found themselves in a large closed space, part workshop, part warehouse, which might have been the former Receiving and Delivering Station. It was icy cold, but judging by the howling wind above, any shelter was a blessing at the moment. Blankbate lit a hurricane lamp, and Gabriel could see, on the one side of the room unoccupied by either tunnel entrances or sorting tables, an almost invisible door.
Much to Gabriel’s surprise, this led to a ghost station of the disused Pneumatic Subway line. Of course, he had heard about this line but had almost forgotten its existence. Another half-baked idea, it had been part of a short-lived policy to double the size of the city via an underground network, which would have been another welcome refuge during the Wintering Weeks. It soon proved a failure, because boring through permafrost is, indeed, quite a bore and because lighting the whole underground would have definitely exceeded the capacity of the city’s somewhat testy wattage. The idea of a Pneumatic Train had eventually been exploited on the surface, both in the suspended tube that shot people all the way through the Pleasance Arcades and in the Elevated line, with its elegant cast-iron pillars, that ran along Barents Boulevard, but the subway itself had been a short-lived fad.
However, as Blankbate turned on a gas lamp on the wall, Gabriel could see that the boarding platform (or, as