Iron Council - China Mieville [101]
In the mountain’s stomach, the train punches through the last veil of stone. The tunnel that has been so hadal dark is gusted full of light.
The train rolls on to the skeletal bridge that has been so quickly made to meet it. The train shudders and lists. The bridge moves. The train reels, drunkard. Judah does not breathe.
It moves firmer, continues across that so-spindly accretion of girders. The train passes high over the dreadful valley, breathing smoke above it, over the yards of swaying make-do bridge to the original structure, and the movement stops.
The train crosses. It is on the earth, on the other side of the mountain.
The rebels step over the awful trellis, children crying as their mothers hold them. With each wind the people are still, but they all of them come across, and no one falls.
They are the cactus-men, the freeanole humans, one two scarab-head khepri, camp followers and drifters, a flock of the wyrmen low in the sky staring with the enthusiasm of dogs, stranger races, renegade llorgiss and a mute hotchi, and hundreds and hundreds of the Remade, in every shape of flesh. They are firemen, engineers and brakemen, those who were clerks, the few overseers who changed sides early enough, the hunters, bridge-builders, the scouts and scientists who will not leave their laboratory, the prostitutes, tunnellers, plebeian magicians, verity-gaugers and low-grade hexers, the workless nomads who scavenge the tracks, now become something, and hundreds, hundreds of the track-layers.
Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron council. The motion of the council begins.
It is the same motion that has brought them so far. It is exactly the same. The carts full of rails and ties unload and the crews drop them in position and they are spaced and the rails are taken out and hauled and dropped and hammered with careful rhythm, one two three, down. Ahead race the grading crews; but this long flat land has only a few extrusions that are cleared easily, and they do not sweep away all the bric-a-brac of stones and nature that they would have done before.
It is just the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency is drunken. The pace faster by orders of magnitude. The ties are thrown down much farther apart, only just enough to hold the train. These rails will not last. They are not meant to. The roadbed they are building is only a sketch, a ghost in the land. The train creeps like a child.
As the rails come clear, ground clean by the weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. They are pulled by mules past the storage and workshop cars where hundreds more are stacked, past the railroad and the train itself, to the front, into the glare of the engine’s lamp eyes. And there they are unloaded. And the track-layers lay them down again.
Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.
They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.
—The gendarmes are coming.
Judah goes back with the demolishers.
—I want to do this with a golem, he says. He touches the flimsy bridge, sends his power out conducted by the metal, makes it ab-live. No one is listening to him. —I want to make this rail a golem. I want to make the rails conductors for it.
He can hear the crack of unsettling metal as the tracks try to stretch and become a giant man. He shudders. He has not the