Iron Council - China Mieville [105]
Judah sees everything as a city. New Crobuzon has taught him that. He watches the train skirt a curling crust of land and sees the curve and edge of river walls, the warehouse walls by the Tar. He sees a half-fallen tree and remembers a drunken New Crobuzon man leaning at the same angle.
We don’t choose what we remember, Judah thinks, what stays with us. He carries New Crobuzon with him, even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary.
—Smokestone won’t do it, Uzman says. The perpetual train sighs. —The militia’ll break that down, fly over that. It ain’t about the smokestone, it’s the cacotopic stain. That’s what’ll hide us.
The next day a sortie of the gendarmes kills fifty of the council’s stragglers and are gone before any Remade can counterattack. Wyrmen scream that they were shot at. In their rough inventive grammar they say what they have seen, spread their wings to show bullet holes in their tough skin.
It is hot. They come into a stretch of space, an upland of good thick earth.
—What are they? There is a panic. —Something’s come for us!
Animals are keeping pace with the train, snapping at the wheels. No not animals or if animals ones that melt and re-form and emerge from the ground and through which light shines. Bullets go through them ignored.
Judah watches them with building pleasure once his fear goes. Each time the train moves on again the little length of its track, the things return.
Demons of motion. They are not attacking but playing. Delighting like porpoises, they dive out of the earth and roll around the turning wheels. They eat the rhythm, the ka ka ka of turning iron on iron. After millennia of snapping up only the quickstep of plains hunters and prey, the demons are drunk on the heavy beat. They evanesce out of colours in the near-shapes of foxes and rockrats, the only animals they have seen. They learn the newcomers, and as hours pass the motion demons mimic humans and cactacae inexpertly, to the track-layers’ delight.
—Look, lookit, it’s you, that’s your ugly bonce, that is.
The skittish things manifest and dive wheelward to eat more. If Councillors detrain, demons pullulate about their feet, eating the echoes of their steps. One woman dances, and the air goes alive with the rapture of motion-demons now-seen-now-unseen gorging on her tempo. Soon the perpetual train is girdled with shuffling figures: Remade, the freeanole women who were once whores, cactacae overcoming their grimness. They dance by the train, keeping pace in capers, in barley-mows and lilly-gins. Their feet are thronged by demons catching the light. It is a contest: the most complex, repeated, perfect rhythms are the best food.
The sunlight is the colour of the grass it dries. Judah smiles at the train and the dancers, and at the motion demons. It is a strange pastoral, a harvest procession it looks like, amid scruffs of pampas grass and the dead creeks, the big train shunting in spasms toward worshippers who lay down its way. As if the tracks are a leash, they haul it in like some tamed wilderness animal, and around the suddenly docile iron beast are hundreds of celebrants kicking up summer dust. The kinetophages tremble around their ankles like spume. Judah thinks of the energy they find in rhythm. Pulse-magic. What strange calories there are in repeated sounds.
Judah looks and loves the iron council. He unfolds a tripod. He is not a good heliotypist, but he knows as he frames the shamble of legs and iron and late sun that this one will come out clean. Movement-blurred and developed crudely in the tiny darkroom, but above what will be a ghost-mass of legs and demons he knows that the perpetual train and the smiles and bodies of the dancers will be clear. He has fixed them in sepia ink, frozen them like the stiltspear