Iron Council - China Mieville [34]
There were still constructs and difference engines in the city, but far fewer, strictly licenced. An economy of golems had half replaced them, making a few thaumaturges rich. Griss Twist’s dumps were still bone-white and blackened wreckage. They were out of bounds, and New Crobuzon’s children would climb or creep in and take souvenirs, and tell each other that the dumps were haunted by the ghosts of the machines. But the most lasting result of the crisis, Ori thought, was that the militia still went unhidden. It was only months after the Construct War that the recession riots had begun, and few of the militia had ever afterward gone back to plainclothes disguise.
Ori could not decide if it was better or worse. There were those among the rebels who argued each way, that emerging was an expression of militia strength or of weakness.
The paper Spiral Jacobs had showed Ori was a heliotype, taken long ago, of two men standing on the rooftops by Perdido Street Station. A poor print, washed out by light and feathery with age, its exposure too slow, its subjects wearing motion-coronas. But recognisable. Spiral Jacobs white-bearded, looking old even then, wearing the same madman’s grin. And beside him a man whose face was turning and hazed, who raised his arms to the camera, stretched the fingers of his left hand. His right arm was unfolding, was a brutal and massive mantis claw.
Early the next morning, as the tramps were ushered out of the centre, Ori was waiting.
“Spiral,” he said as the man came out scratching and wrapped his blanket around him. The old man blinked in daylight.
“Doubler! You the doubler!”
It cost Ori a day’s wages. He had to pay for a cab to take the weak old man to Flyside, where Ori did not know anyone. Spiral prattled to himself. Ori bought breakfast in a square below the Flyside Militia Tower, with the skyrails hundreds of feet overhead linking the tower to the Spike in the city’s heart. Spiral Jacobs ate for a long time without speaking.
“Too much yammering, not enough hammering, Spiral. Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue. “—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist.
“Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.
“Is that what Jack said?”
Spiral Jacobs stopped chewing and looked up slyly.
“Jack? I’ll Jack you,” he said. “What you want to know about Jack?” The accent, that indistinct trace of something foreign, resonated for a second more loudly.
“He hammered not yammered, didn’t he, Jack did?” Ori said. “Ain’t that right? Sometimes you want someone to hammer, to do something, don’t you?”
“We had half a prayer with Jack,” said the old man, and smiled very sadly, all the madness momentarily gone. “He was our best. I love him and his children.”
His children?
“His children?”
“Them as came after. Bully for them.”
“Yes.”
“Bully for them, Toro.”
“Toro?”
In Spiral Jacobs’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still swam there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face. He’s sounding me out, thought Ori. He’s testing me for something.
“If I’d been there a little older, I’d’ve been Jack’s man,” Ori said. “He’s the boss, always was. I’d have followed him. You know, I saw him die.”
“Jack don’t die, son.”
“I saw him.”
“Aye like that maybe, but, you know, people like Jack they don’t die.”
“Where is he now, then?”
“I think Jack’s looking and smiling at you doublers, but there’s others, friends of ours, mates of mine, he’s thinking, ‘Bully for them!’ “ The old man clucked laughter.
“Friends of yours?”
“Aye, friends of mine. With big plans! I know all about it. Once a friend of Jack’s, always, and a friend of all his kin too.”
“Who are you friends with?” Ori wanted to know, but Jacobs would say nothing. “What plans? Who are your friends?” The old