Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [20]
“Manifest Station,” Jones said. A dark-windowed diesel train burst out of the building, close enough to make the bus shake. It helter-skeltered downward into the earth.
“Where’s it going?” Zanna said.
“Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities,” Jones said. “If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless…It’s a terminus.”
They hovered above a big yard at the side of the station containing twenty or thirty double-decker buses, with passengers milling around them. Each bus had a different sign where the numbers should be—faces, insects, flowers, random patterns. On their sides, where London buses carried adverts, were paintings, short stories in big print, pictures of chessboards with games in progress, musical scores.
But these were details. What made Zanna and Deeba stare and make little sounds of wonder was how the buses moved.
UnLondon’s terrain was difficult. There were thin tangled streets, sudden steep hills, deep pits, patches where roads seemed to be made of something too soft for wheels, on which pedestrians bounced. To deal with the various difficulties of their routes, the UnLondon buses had adapted.
They trundled on caterpillar treads. They rolled on enormously inflated rubbery wheels. They coasted on skirts of air like hovercrafts. In the sky was another aerobus, below a round balloon. Conductors leaned out of the vehicles, bristling with weapons.
A bus approached the terminus from a thicket of tall spindly towers. It picked its way over the roofs on four enormous lizard legs that sprouted from its wheel housings. The driver spun the wheel and tugged at levers, and the bus’s padded gecko feet closed gently around buttresses and splayed on slanting roofs, leaving no marks behind.
“Manifest Station Terminus,” Jones belted. “Who’s changing here?”
They winched Mrs. Jujube and two other passengers down in a basket. “This is the Scrollscrawl bus, and you want the Rusty Star Sigil bus,” Jones told one. “And you, sir, look for the Terrible Mouse Sigil.”
As the bus swung in position, Deeba looked up and made a little startled noise.
“What is it?” said Zanna.
“I thought I saw something,” said Deeba, pointing up. “Like…a crab. Moving on the ceiling.”
“Well…” Zanna looked around. “It’s gone now. This place is full of weird things.”
The basket dangled between a bus on stilts and another on what looked like giant ice skates. The three passengers got out. At the last moment a man wearing a toga ran and caught the basket; said good-bye to a companion, who hurried off; and got in.
He was big and heavy to haul. When he stepped onto the platform, there was a hissing. The milk carton was huddled behind Deeba, exhaling aggressively.
“Curdle,” Zanna muttered. “Deeba, keep your manky pet under control.”
The new passenger stared huffily at Curdle from behind his beard.
“See that?” Deeba whispered.
“That bloke does not like us.”
They went much higher this time, midway between the roofs and the strangely lit sky. UnLondon sprawled to the horizon. A few animal-footed buses crawled carefully over and around houses. Light from the empty sun gleamed on a million surfaces. It was a ragged and jagged landscape. Low clouds buzzed below their wheels, obscuring neighborhoods, moving in various directions purposefully.
“That?” Jones pointed at what looked like a shirt, racing madly through the air. “When washing blows away in London, if it stays in the air long enough, it blows all the way here. Then it’s free. Never has to come down.”
They passed a stepped pyramid, a corkscrew-shaped minaret, a building like an enormous U.
“I wish my mum was here,” Deeba whispered. She couldn’t even look up as the thought took her. “And my dad. Even my brother Hass.”