Iron Council - China Mieville [79]
Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.
She shrugs. —No, they don’t.
Judah studies. With Pennyhaugh to guide him, he not only grows his capacities but begins to understand what he is doing. His approach remains gut and intuitive, but the laborious and esoteric texts make a kind of sense to him, and better his ability.
— . . . what we do is an intervention, Pennyhaugh lectures Judah from his notes, —a reorganisation. The living cannot be made a golem—because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the static is to the active AM.
Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.
They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pennyhaugh keeps them in business, Judah thinks of other things.
Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?
He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.
It is days since Judah has seen Ann-Hari. He realises suddenly that she has not merely found someone else to be with for some days but has gone. He knows where.
She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history—its accreted stones and struggle—could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are Ann-Hari’s home.
Ann-Hari has gone home to the rails and the perpetual train. She knows no prostitute militia will punish her. The X on Judah’s mirror in her lipstick is a kiss good-bye. She helped him see the city again and he is grateful for that. He discovers that she took a deal of money from him.
The golem fights bore him. Pennyhaugh is gone more and more, liaising with bureaucrats in Parliament, which protrudes like a verdigrised nail from the meeting of the rivers. And the fights slow, and stop, and Pennyhaugh is more distracted, and has more money, and one night he takes Judah to a restaurant more sumptuous than any he has ever entered before, a sedate place in Ludmead where Judah in his street-finery feels absurd, and Pennyhaugh says to him, —There’s another way, you know, there’s another, ah, market for your golem skills.
Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pennyhaugh is a government man now. Judah is without work, without the library. He is quickly forgotten.
For some weeks Pennyhaugh sends him letters suggesting they meet. Judah declines in his ugly hand, just often enough not to be rude.
In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.
What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?
Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great