Iron Council - China Mieville [91]
Everything is still. Only the bridge is being built, and now in the evenings when the bridge crews come off their work, some cross the ravine to their sister encampment, because they want to see the trouble. They come—hotchi in spines, apes trained and constrained by Remaking, Remade men given simian bodies. They come to see the strikes. They tour from one to another.
The newspapermen on the perpetual train, who have been despatching their stories when there are messengers, suddenly have something new to cover. One takes a heliotype of the picket of women.
—I don’t know what I’ll say, he says to Judah. —They don’t want me talking about tarts in The Quarrel.
—Take all the plates you can, says Judah. —This is something you should remember. This is important, he says, and it is his oddity, his beatific innard that speaks. His breath leaves him a moment at the thought that he can hear its words.
—We are all spiders’ children, says the mad old man.
There are handwritten Runagate Rampants on the rocks.
This is not three strikes, or two strikes and a half. This is one strike, against one enemy, with one goal. The women are not our opponents. The women are not to be blamed. No pay no lay they tell us, and that can be our slogan too. We will not lay another tie, another rail, until the money promised is ours. They say it, and we say it too. We say: No pay no lay!
When the overseers and gendarmes realise that the disparate groups are not tiring of the strike, will not exhaust themselves with recrimination, there is a change. Judah feels it when he rises and sees the foremen moving with new purpose.
It is already hot, he is already sweating, when unbreakfasted he goes to the tunnel mouth with others from the idle workforce. The tunnellers are arranged like a fighting unit, and they carry their picks. The foremen and gendarmes are before them, with a corps of tethered Remade.
—Come on now, says an overseer. Judah knows him. He is the man they bring in to do unpopular things. There is a delegation from the prostitutes, twelve women walking close together, headed by Ann-Hari. The tunnellers begin derisive calls. The women only watch. Behind them all the train wheezes like a bull.
The overseer stands before the Remade. He turns his back on the strikers and looks at the motley Remade in their integuments of foreign flesh and metal. Judah sees Ann-Hari whisper to Thick Shanks and another man, sees them nod without turning. They are staring at the Remade who have been gathered. One of them, a man with pipes that emerge from his body and enter it again, stares back at Thick Shanks and moves his head. He stands by a much younger man with chitined legs emerging from his neck.
—Pick up the picks, the foreman says to the Remade. —Go into the tunnel. Cut the rock. We’ll instruct you.
And there is a silence and no motion. The gendarmes have interposed between the strikers and the Remade.
—Take the picks. Go into the tunnel. Follow it to the end. Cut it.
There is silence again a while. The men of the perpetual train know how the Remade are being used, and some begin to shout scab, scab preemptively. But the shouts die because none of the Remade are moving.
—Take the picks.
When there is no movement still, the overseer strikes with his whip. It lands loudly and with the blossoming of a scream. A Remade drops, hands to his opened face. There are fear noises, and some of the Remade start and begin to move but one of them makes a low command and they shudder and hold, except one who breaks and runs for the tunnel and shouts, —I didn’t want to and I won’t, you can’t make me, it’s a stupid plan, it’s a stupid plan.
The others do not look at him and he goes into the dark. The young man with the insect-leg tumours is shaking. He is looking hard at the ground. Behind him, the piped man is saying something.
—Take the picks. The overseer moves closer to the Remade.
Something rises in Judah. There is muttering and an anger around him.
—Take the picks or I’ll have to intervene to stop troublemakers. Take the picks and go in or—
People