Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [286]
He fingered the circuit-valve, shaking it gently, praying that its mechanisms were sound.
Isaac sighed and brought out the thick sheaf of programme cards the Council had printed. Each was labelled in the Council’s tottering typewritten script. Isaac looked up quizzically.
“It’s not yet ten, is it?” he said. Derkhan shook her head. “There’s still nothing in the air, is there? The moths aren’t out yet. Let’s be ready by the time they fly.”
He looked down and pulled the lever on the two chymical batteries. The reagents within mixed. The sound of effervescence was dimly audible, and there was a sudden chorus of chattering valves and barking outputs as current was released. The machinery on the roofscape snapped into life.
The crisis engine whirred.
“It’s just calculating,” said Isaac nervously, as Derkhan and Yagharek glanced at him. “It’s not yet processing. I’m giving it instructions.”
Isaac began to feed the programme cards carefully into the various analytical engines before him. Most went to the crisis engine itself, but some to the subsidiary calculating circuits connected by little loops of cable. Isaac checked each card, comparing it with his notes, scribbling quick calculations before feeding it into any of the inputs.
The engines clattered as their fine ratcheting teeth slid over the cards, snapping into carefully cut holes, instructions and orders and information downloading into their analogue brains. Isaac was slow, waiting until he felt the click that signalled successful processing before removing each card and slotting in the next.
He kept notes, scrawling impenetrable messages to himself on ragged ends of paper. He breathed quickly.
Rain began to fall, quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and breaking open, as thick and warm as pus. The night was close, and the glutinous rainclouds made it more so. Isaac worked fast, his fingers feeling suddenly idiotic, too large.
There was a slow sense of dragging, a weightiness that pulled at the spirit and began to saturate the bones. A sense of the uncanny, of the fearful and hidden, that rolled up as if from within, a billowing ink-cloud from the depths of the mind.
“Isaac,” said Derkhan, her voice cracking, “you have to hurry. It’s starting.”
A swarm of nightmare feelings pattered down among them with the rain.
“They’re up and out,” said Derkhan with terror. “They’re hunting. They’re abroad. Hurry, you have to hurry . . .”
Isaac nodded without speaking and continued with what he was doing, shaking his head as if that might disperse the cloying fear that had settled on him. Where’s the fucking Weaver? he thought.
“Someone watches us from below,” said Yagharek suddenly, “some tramp who did not run. He does not move.”
Isaac glanced up again, then returned his attention to his work.
“Take my gun there,” he hissed. “If he comes up towards us, warn him off with a shot. Hopefully he’ll keep his distance.” Still his hands rushed to twist, to connect, to programme. He punched numbered keypads and wrestled roughcut cards into slots. “Nearly there,” he murmured, “nearly there.”
The sense of nocturnal pressure, of drifting in sour dreams, increased.
“Isaac . . .” hissed Derkhan. Andrej had fallen into a kind of terrified, exhausted half-sleep, and he began to moan and thrash, his eyes opening and shutting with bleary vagueness.
“Done!” spat Isaac, and stepped back.
There was a silent moment. Isaac’s triumph dissipated quickly.
“We need the Weaver!” he said. “It’s supposed to . . . it said it would be here! We can’t do anything without it . . .”
They could do nothing except wait.
The stench of twisted dream-imagery grew and grew, and brief screams sounded from random points across the city, as sleeping sufferers called out their fear or defiance. The rain fell thicker, until the concrete underfoot was slick. Isaac laid the greasy sack ineffectually across various sections of the crisis circuit, moving it in agitation,