Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [107]
When he had pushed each carefully selected programme card into the input slot, each in considered order, he punched a brief sequence of buttons on the numbered keys wired up to the cleaning machine’s analytical engine.
The man closed the lid on the engine and resealed the construct’s body. He replaced the twisted screws which held the hatch in place. He rested his hands on the construct’s lifeless body for a moment. He heaved it upright, stood it on its treads. He gathered his tools.
The man stepped back into the center of the room.
“Um . . . ’Scuse me, squire,” he yelled.
There was a moment of silence, then Isaac’s voice boomed out.
“Yes?”
“I’m all done. Problems should be over. Just tell Mr. Serachin to load up the boiler with a bit of juice, then switch the old thing back on. Lovely models, the EKBS.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they are,” came the response. Isaac appeared at the railing. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked impatiently.
“No, guv, that’s about it. We’ll invoice Mr. Serachin within the week. Cheerio, then.”
“Right, bye. Thanks very much.”
“Don’t mention it, sir,” the man began, but Isaac had already turned and walked back out of sight.
The repairman walked slowly to the door. He held it open and looked back at where the construct lay face down in the shadows of the big room. The man’s eyes flickered momentarily upstairs to check that Isaac was gone, then he moved his hands to trace out some symbol like interlocking circles.
“Virus be done,” he whispered, before walking out into the warm noon.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“What am I looking at?” asked Yagharek. As he held the diagram he cocked his head in a shockingly avian motion.
Isaac took the sheet of paper from him and turned it the right way up.
“This, old son, is a crisis conductor,” Isaac said grandly. “Or at least, a prototype of one. A fucking triumph of applied crisis physico-philosophy.”
“What is it? What does it do?”
“Well, look. You put whatever it is you want . . . tapped, in here.” He indicated a scrawl representing a belljar. “Then . . . well, the science is complicated, but the gist of it . . . let’s see.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “This boiler’s kept very hot, and it powers a set of interlocking engines here. Now, this one’s loaded up with sensory equipment that can detect various types of energy fields—heat, elyctrostatic, potential, thaumaturgic emissions—and represents them in mathematical form. Now, if I’m right about the unified field, which I am, then all these energy forms are various manifestations of crisis energy. So the job of this analytical engine here is to calculate what kind of crisis energy field is present given the various other fields present.” Isaac scratched his head.
“It’s fucking complicated crisis maths, old son. That’s going to be the hardest part, I reckon. The idea is to have a programme that can say ‘well, there’s so much potential energy, so much thaumaturgic, and whatnot, that means the underlying crisis situation must be such-and-such.’ It’s going to try to translate the . . . uh . . . mundane, into the crisis form. Then—and this is another sticking point—the given effect that you’re after also has to be translated into mathematical form, into some crisis equation, which is fed into this computational engine here. Then what you’re doing is using this, which is powered by a combination of steam or chymistry and thaumaturgy. It’s the crux of the thing, a converter to tap the crisis energy and manifest it in its raw form. You then channel that into the object.” Isaac was becoming more and more excited as he talked about the project. He could not help himself: for a moment, his elation at the massive potential for his research, the sheer scale of what he was doing, defeated his resolve to see only the immediate project.
“The thing is, what we should be able to do is change the form of the object into one where the tapping