Iron Council - China Mieville [80]
He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?
Judah thinks of Ann-Hari and reads that progress at tracks’-end is picking up again. There are questions in Parliament. The TRT and Weather Wrightby are censured for strange dealings. Workers have died in some accident, a gradient has been levelled in a way the inspectors cannot explain, and the heat-ripples and the lifeless zone for yards to either side raise questions the TRT will not answer. No one will say sacrifice, no one will say dæmon, but there is a growing sense that Weather Wrightby is a visionary of money and engineering who will not let geography or climate or politics block him. His plans are embedded in his company’s name, and they are bigger by far than this road.
Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks his name. Something will happen.
Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.
—What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.
THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.
THE PITY IT’S A DITTY
TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE
And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.
—And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poorhouse do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.
It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.
A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.
How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.
But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly innard thing.
Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.
He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pennyhaugh, thanking him for his efforts, wishing him luck, telling him they will see each other again when Judah returns, which he does not believe.
There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.
It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit connects, and then, oh, from the rocks by the door a little figure comes dancing. The