Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great deal: they tire him.
He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?
Judah thinks of Ann-Hari and reads that progress at tracks’-end is picking up again. There are questions in Parliament. The TRT and Weather Wrightby are censured for strange dealings. Workers have died in some accident, a gradient has been levelled in a way the inspectors cannot explain, and the heat-ripples and the lifeless zone for yards to either side raise questions the TRT will not answer. No one will say sacrifice, no one will say dæmon, but there is a growing sense that Weather Wrightby is a visionary of money and engineering who will not let geography or climate or politics block him. His plans are embedded in his company’s name, and they are bigger by far than this road.
Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks his name. Something will happen.
Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.
– What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.
THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.
THE PITY IT’S A DITTY
TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE
And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.
– And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poor house do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.
It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.
A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.
How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.
But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly innard thing.
Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.
He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pennyhaugh, thanking him for his efforts, wishing him luck, telling him they will see each other again when Judah returns, which he does not believe.
There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.
It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit connects, and then, oh, from the rocks by the door a little figure comes dancing. The girl is quite still and watchful.
The little golem is the size of her hand, and it dances as Judah instructed it to dance when he set his hex, stored his energies, ready for the trigger. It dances toward her. It is made of money. It staggers and falls down and falls apart into coins and the little girl comes forward and picks the money up.
Judah watches her from a doorway. He has stored up a golem and its orders. Has made it wait, for the little snare. He does not know if anyone has done this before.
And he is in the swamps again. There is ice, and the rags of vine from the canopies are hardened, and the animals are sleeping and the swamp is quiet. Miles off is the work camp, and the work train.
The tracks have taken him past towns become corpses. Into lands not tamed but misshapen by the work and the workers, and on at last into the trees on constructed islands, isthmuses of displaced stone, into the fens. Judah goes deep, looking for those who were once his tribe.
He is laden: his new voxiterator and its cylinders, his camera, his guns. He is careful not to sound like a hunter, is careful to make noises as he walks. He sings the songs he has learnt from his stiltspear. He sings the song of the breakfast, the song of hello, the song of a good day. He walks with his hands showing.
When they come for him they are of tribes he does not know, and he sings the song of good neighbours and the song of may I come in? They surround him as trees and stiltspear in flickering and they display their teeth and their weapon-hands, and when he still does not run they hit him and when still he does not run they take him to their hidden village. Their clans and kith-groups have broken down: these are the last of their people.
Children come to stare at him. He looks at them and sees a final generation.
His goodness moves, but Judah knows they are a dead people and nothing will change that. They take him hunting-dams and sires together, no time for traditional divisions-and he hears their uh uh uh, their counterpointed breaths and patted rhythms. The water eddies then ceases to eddy.
He thrusts out the listening trumpet and captures their sound on wax. He listens to it; he winds his handle and hears their rhythm. Judah can see it. He can see its shape. He looks through a lens and is a geographer on the wax continent of the song, tracking chasms, the coiled valley, its peaks and arêtes. He winds slowly, hears the song in sluggish time.
To his shame Judah feels drab among the doomed people. He works as best he can in the horrible wet cold, noting all the layers of the stiltspear songs, every faint and ill-performed bark, but the environs oppress him. No bower in the woods, no green den, but a frosted huddle of mulch and constant war parties, stiltspear out to fight, haunted by the ghosts they will certainly become.
Judah will not watch them. His interior thing jackknifes. He has their soul in his wax. He leaves them, for the second time.
Back to the train. It has moved. He sees a thousand faces he has never seen before. The rails have forked. A town is growing. What a wonderful thing.
Tracks slick and train-polished. They coil into half-built sheds and empty sidings, into yards, past the warping wood of this half-built town they bifurcate. One line juts into the darkest part of the wetland and stops abruptly, hemmed by trees.