Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [281]
But the work seemed charmed. There were problems, lost moments, wasted time and brief panics, but no team disappeared or missed its meeting. The spare men remained idle.
A great sinuous circuit was constructed through the city. It wound through more than two miles of textures: its matt-black rubber skin slid under faecal slime; across moss and rotting paper; through scrubby undergrowth, patches of brick-strewn grassland, disturbing the trails of feral cats and street-children; plotting the ruts in the skin of architecture, littered with granulated clots of damp brickdust.
The cable was inexorable. It moved on, its path deviating briefly here and there with whiplash curves, scoring a path through the hot city. It was as determined as some spawning fish, fighting its way towards the enormous rising monolith at the centre of New Crobuzon.
The sun was sinking behind the foothills to the west, making them magnificent and portentous. But they could not challenge the chaotic majesty of Perdido Street Station.
Lights flickered on across its vast and untrustworthy topography, and it received the now-glowing trains into its bowels like offerings. The Spike skewered the clouds like a spear held ready, but it was nothing beside the station: a little concrete addendum to that great disreputable leviathan building, wallowing in fat satisfaction in the city-sea.
The cable wound towards it without pause, rising above and falling beneath New Crobuzon’s surface in waves.
The west-facing front of Perdido Street Station opened onto BilSantum Plaza. The plaza was thronging and beautiful, with carts and pedestrians circulating constantly around the parkland at its centre. In this lush green, jugglers and magicians and stall-holders kept up raucous chants and sales pitches. The citizenry were blithely careless of the monumental structure that dominated the sky. They only noticed its façade with offhand pleasure when the low sun’s rays struck it full on, and its patchwork of architecture glowed like a kaleidoscope: the stucco and painted wood were rose; the bricks went bloody; the iron girders were glossy with rich light.
BilSantum Street swept under the huge raised arch that connected the main body of the station to the Spike. Perdido Street Station was not discrete. Its edges were permeable. Spines of low turrets swept off its back and into the city, becoming the roofs of rude and everyday houses. The concrete slabs that scaled it grew squat as they spread out, and were suddenly ugly canal walls. Where the five railway lines unrolled through great arches and passed along the roofs, the station’s bricks supported and surrounded them, cutting a path over the streets. The architecture oozed out of its bounds.
Perdido Street itself was a long, narrow passageway that jutted perpendicularly from BilSantum Street and wound sinuously east towards Gidd. No one knew why it had once been important enough to give the station its name. It was cobbled, and its houses were not squalid, though they were in ill-repair. It might once have described the station’s northern boundary, but it had long been overtaken. The storeys and rooms of the station had spread out and rapidly breached the little street.
They had leapt it effortlessly and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond, transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time.
Perdido Street was still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and out of shadow.
The tramp of heavy boots often sounded from above.