Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [284]
Isaac knelt to examine it. Derkhan, her pistol still trained on the cowering Andrej, squinted at the cable.
“Is it connected?” she asked. “Is it working?”
“I don’t know,” breathed Isaac. “We won’t be able to tell till I link it up, make it a circuit.” He hauled the cable up, swung it over his shoulder. “There’s not as much as I’d hoped,” he said. “We’re not going to get very close to the centre of Perdido Street Station.” He looked around and pursed his lips. It doesn’t matter, he thought. Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before . . . betrayal. But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks.
He pointed a little way away to the south-east, up a little slope of steep-sided, flat-topped rooflets. They extended like an exaggerated slate stairwell, overlooked by an enormous flat wall of stained concrete. The little rise of roof hillocks ended about forty feet above them, in what Isaac hoped was a flattened plateau. The huge L-shaped concrete wall continued into the air above it for nearly sixty feet, containing it on two sides.
“There,” said Isaac slowly. “That’s where we’ll go.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Halfway up the stepped roofs, Isaac and his companions disturbed someone.
There was a sudden raucous drunken noise. Isaac and Derkhan flurried for their pistols in anxious motion. It was a ragged drunk who leapt up in a shockingly inhuman motion and disappeared at speed down the slope. Strips of torn clothes fluttered behind him.
After that Isaac began to see the denizens of the station’s roofscape. Little fires sputtered in secret courtyards, tended by dark and hungry figures. Sleeping men curled in the corners beside old spires. It was an alternative, an attenuated society. Little vagrant hilltribes foraging. A quite different ecology.
Way above the heads of the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky. Noisy predators. Grubby specks of light and dark, moving edgily in the night’s cloud.
To Isaac’s relief, the plateau at the top of the hill of layered slate was flat, and about fifteen feet square. Large enough. He wagged his gun, indicating that Andrej should sit, which the old man did, collapsing slowly and precipitously into the far corner. He huddled in on himself, hugging his knees.
“Yag,” said Isaac. “Keep watch, mate.” Yagharek dropped the final twist of the cable he had hauled up, and stood sentry at the edge of the little open space, looking down across the gradient of the massive roof. Isaac staggered under the full weight of the sack. He put it down and began to unpack the equipment.
Three mirrored helmets, one of which he put on. Derkhan took the others, gave one to Yagharek. Four analytical engines the size of large typewriters. Two large chymico-thaumaturgical batteries. Another battery, this one metaclockwork, a khepri design. Several connecting cables. Two large communicators’ helmets, of the type used by the Construct Council on Isaac to trap the first slake-moth. Torches. Black powder and ammunition. A sheaf of programme cards. A clutch of transformers and thaumaturgic converters. Copper and pewter circuits of quite opaque purpose. Small motors and dynamos.
Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish.
Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare.
His head wobbled under the weight of his helmet. He connected two of the calculating engines, linking them into a powerful network. Then he began a much harder job, connecting the rest of the various oddments into a coherent circuit.
The motors were clipped to wires, and they to the larger of the analytical engines. The other engine he tinkered with internally, checking