Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [104]
Yagharek stared at the dead thing in the heliotype.
“They had to shoot it, he explains in the text,” Isaac went on. “It killed two of the militia. They had a go at an autopsy, but those horns in its stomach weren’t dead, even though the rest of it was. They fought back, nearly killed the biologist. Do you see the carapace? Weird splicing going on there.” Yagharek nodded slowly.
“Turn the page, Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea what it used to be. Might have been spontaneously generated in the Torque explosion. But I think those gears there are descended from train engines.” He tapped the pages gently. “The . . . uh . . . best is yet to come. You haven’t seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what may once have been human.”
Yagharek was meticulous. He turned every single page. He saw furtive shots that had been stolen from behind walls, and vertiginous views from the air. A slow kaleidoscope of mutation and violence, petty wars fought between unfathomable monstrosities over no-man’s-lands of shifting slag and nightmare architecture.
“There were twenty militia, Sacramundi the heliotypist and three research scientists, plus a couple of engineers who stayed in the airship the whole time. Seven militia, Sacramundi and one chymist came out of Suroch. Some were Torque-wounded. By the time they got back to New Crobuzon one militiaman had died. Another had barbed tentacles where his eyes should be, and pieces of the scientist’s body were disappearing every night. No blood, no pain, just . . . smooth holes in her abdomen or arm or whatever. She killed herself.”
Isaac remembered first hearing the story told as an anecdote by an unorthodox history professor. Isaac had chased it up, following a trail of footnotes and old newspapers. The history had been forgotten, transmuted into emotional blackmail for children—“Be good or I’ll send you to Suroch where the monsters are!” It took a year and a half before Isaac saw a copy of Sacramundi’s report, and another three before he could match the price asked for it.
He thought he recognized some of the thoughts flickering almost invisibly under Yagharek’s impassive skin. They were the ideas every unorthodox undergraduate had at some time entertained.
“Yag,” Isaac said softly, “we ain’t going to use the Torque. You might be thinking ‘You still use hammers and some people are murdered with them.’ Right? Eh? ‘Rivers can flood and kill thousands or they can drive water turbines.’ Yes? Trust me . . . speaking as one who used to think the Torque was terribly exciting . . . it’s not a tool. It’s not a hammer, it’s not like water. It’s . . . the Torque is rogue power. We’re not talking crisis energy here, right? Get that right out of your head. Crisis is the energy underpinning the whole of physics. Torque’s not about physics. It’s not about anything. It’s . . . it’s an entirely pathological force. We don’t know where it comes from, why it appears, where it goes. All bets are off. No rules apply. You can’t tap it—well, you can try, but you’ve seen the results—you can’t play with it, you can’t trust it, you can’t understand it, you sure as godsdamn-fuck can’t control it.”
Isaac shook his head in irritation. “Oh sure, there’ve been experiments and whatnot, they reckon they’ve got techniques to shield from some effects, heighten others, and some of them might even work a little bit. But there’s never been a Torque experiment that didn’t end in . . . well, in tears, at the very least. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one kind of experiment we should be doing with Torque, and that’s how to avoid it. Either stop it in its tracks, or run like Libintos with the drakows on his tail.
“Five hundred years ago, a while after the Cacotopic Stain opened, there was a mild Torque storm that swept down from somewhere at sea, in the north-east. It hit New Crobuzon for a while.” Isaac shook his head slowly. “Nothing in the league of Suroch, obviously, but still enough for an epidemic of monstrous births and some very strange tricks