The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [55]
Skinner snorted and sulked in her chair while Karine and Valentine bustled about, closing the copper shields over doors and windows. The psychestorm had essentially trapped her at Raithower House for the entire night. At least there are beds upstairs. Though Mr. Stitch did not require sleep, he had at least been thoughtful enough to provide a row of narrow, uncomfortable cots for his employees in the event of emergency.
The psychestorms usually blew in out of the mountains far to the north, from the area around the Castle If. They picked up volatile, sublimated flux from the clouds that the great Trowth mining-engines threw up, and then proceeded to rain it all back down on the city. The storms had been extremely dangerous, at first, but the Committee for Public Safety had been instrumental in setting up their “Program of Preparedness” to help citizenry cope with the mind-poisoning weather.
The storm would roll over the city in a few hours, and then crash to pieces on the enormous sea-wall around the harbor. In the meantime, anyone caught out in the street could be swept up in dangerous whorls of synaesthesia or delirium tremens. In wealthy neighborhoods, like the Banks or North Ferry, heavy copper shutters that had been corroded green with time and salt were fixed over doors and windows. In poorer neighborhoods, people gathered to wait out the storm in pubs that often had better shielding. During a psychestorm, even the poor and degenerate were admitted, if reluctantly, behind the copper barriers. The only poor souls refused entry were the dangerously contagious scravers, who were revealed by their coughing and their virulent green mucous.
The Brothers of the Mad Wind, who believed that the psychestorms were the purest reverberations of the Word, would choose one among their number to stand out in the streets in Fishtown. They prayed that the wind would deliver divine secrets; usually, it just delivered another madman.
In places like Mudside and Bluewater, sharpsies and indigeae would huddle under large sheets of copper that the Committee had been passing out for years. It was a compromise between the need to protect even the undesirables from the psychestorms—because a lunatic sharpsie was even more of a threat to public safety than a sane one—and the need to not spend very much money. The sheets worked: the sharpsies had built large, makeshift shelters out of theirs, the indigea had lined their roofs. As a general rule, they were far less susceptible to the dangers of the psychestorm than humans or sharpsies.
In Lantern Slope, where the Indige Shipping Concern flew in the limited amounts of phlogiston while the major pipelines were disrupted by the ettercap war, indige and trolljrmen stevedores reigned in the huge, copper-hulled airships. The levitite at the cores of the airships could not be deactivated, instead slowly decaying over time, so the ships had to be brought to ground by huge iron chains attached to complex block-and-tackle systems. Somewhere in the shimmering, indigo-stone homes of the few wealthy indigea in the city, the headmen of the Shipping Concern gnashed their teeth and clenched their fists as they suffered the unavoidable delay in their business.
In South End, Philip Crowe sat in his bedroom, with the copper shutters on his windows open just a crack. He could see flashes of green from the flickering lightning spill onto the floor, and thunder rumbled. The wind began to pick up, screaming, bringing the sound of ruptured senses with it. Philip sat patiently, and waited for the madness to come to him.
When Valentine and Karine had finished with the windows, Valentine returned to his chair. Thunder boomed outside, and echoed strangely in Skinner’s thoughts.
“Do you want to play a game, or something? Do you…I mean, can you play chess, or anything like that?”
The thunder was followed by a strange echo in her thoughts. “Not now, Valentine. I’m not in the mood.” The thunder echoed strangely.
“We could play The Minister’s Cat, or something.”
“No.” Strangely. “I need to go upstairs.” The upstairs