Iron Council - China Mieville [65]
There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.
And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.
The Remade are always various. All Judah’s life. Their bodies made impossible. On the roadbed there is a man whose front pullulates with scrawny arms, each from a corpse or an amputation. Chained to him a taller man, his face stoic, a fox stitched embedded in his chest from where it snarls and bites at him in permanent terror.
Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man—or is it a woman?—whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists.
The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.
—My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.
—My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. —I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?
Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. —Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.
The man nods and purses his lips. —And will you show us their homestead? he says. —I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?
If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.
—I’ll show you.
—Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?
—Yes. I did.
The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.
—We have so many problems, he says. —The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. —None of this surprises me.
—Welcome back, he says. —Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.
Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.
A corner and a new workforce is there.