Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [27]
The city thrust upwards massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St. Jabber’s Mound like scree.
The smoky black walls of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the sky. The building was knotted with obscure tubes and vast rivets. It throbbed with the ancient boilers deep within. Rooms used for uncertain purposes poked out of the main body of the colossal edifice with scant regard for buttresses or braces. Somewhere inside, in the Chamber, out of reach of the sky, Rudgutter and countless droning bores strutted. The Parliament was like a mountain poised on the verge of architectural avalanche.
It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.
The clouds swirled in the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station.
An industrial castle, bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station was the militia’s Spike, that loomed over the other turrets, dwarfing them, tugged in seven directions by taut skyrails. But for all its height the Spike was only an annex of the enormous station.
The architect had been incarcerated, quite mad, seven years after Perdido Street Station was completed. He was a heretic, it was said, intent on building his own god.
Five enormous brick mouths gaped to swallow each of the city’s trainlines. The tracks unrolled on the arches like huge tongues. Shops and torture chambers and workshops and offices and empty spaces all stuffed the fat belly of the building, which seemed, from a certain angle, in a certain light, to be bracing itself, taking its weight on the Spike, preparing to leap into the enormous sky it so casually invaded.
Isaac did not look with eyes clouded by romance. He saw flight wherever he looked in the city (his eyes were swollen: behind them buzzed a brain wired with new formulae and facts all furnished to slip gravity’s clutches), and he saw that it was not an escape to a better place. Flight was a secular, profane thing: simply a passage from one part of New Crobuzon to another.
He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic.
Isaac lay on his bed and gazed out of his window. He followed one flying speck after another with his eyes. Scattered around