– Go home to New Crobuzon? A Remade. You want to go there? Or you go fReemade? Scrabble like a bandit. They miles from here, they don’t come so close. You be killed by gendarmes within twenty mile.
The boy is quiet for a minute. -I go south. I go north. West.
– South is the sea. Hundreds of miles away. You know how to fish? North into an empty plain and to the mountains? West? Boy, west is the cacotopic zone. You choose that?
– No…
– No.
– But if I stay I die…
– Maybe. Ann-Hari turns and looks at the boy, and Judah can see her seeing him, and the thing in Judah uncoils. -Plenty of us going to die on this road. Maybe you die, be buried like a freeman under the iron. Maybe not. She reaches out and holds the chain so she is all but touching him. His insect neck-legs quiver. -You alive now. Stay alive for me.
Judah cannot speak. He does not think she has ever seen the boy before.
Ann-Hari does not lie with him, though she will kiss him, for long breathless moments, which she does not do with anyone else. But when he wants more she charges with a principled resolution that disturbs him.
– I ain’t a client, he tells her. She shrugs. He can see it is not venality that motivates her.
Spring again, and there is a strong smell of burning metal by the points. It has been slow going in the cold, but now as men shed clothes the pace improves and the railmen get closer to the graders.
They are in the great vegas that surround Cobsea. The perpetual train comes with the growing heat into a merciless flat region of alkali dust that sets in eyes and mouths like rheum, that stinks like embalming fluid. It seems to hold warmth so the crews go from winter cold and are pitched into a dry heat. The train-town is bedraggled. The herds of beef-animals develop sores. Their meat is foul. There is a constant caravan of water carts going miles to siphon off the streams and rivers they find.
The land is alive. It hollows beneath them, reveals the craw and feeders of huge dust-sucking predators. The land bucks. There is an earthstorm, disks of rock careering skyward, buffeting the train. -We’re in the badlands now. Everyone is saying it.
Research crews return from the desert of skin-soft dust, whipping their camel into spitty terror, and in their cart lies a man stiff with the muck that coats them all, no, he is a statue, no, he is covered with accretions, tumours of stone. They embed him, a man-shape whose lips are trembling.
– It came out of the ground…
– We thought it was mist…
– We thought it was smoke from a fire…
It is smokestone that has vented up and quickly set. They have to chisel him free. Flesh comes with the carapace.
Days later, the perpetual train comes to the residue of that drift. There are languid striae of smoke, utterly still. Stone in impossible spindly shapes, wafting, insinuate billows, coil and smog recoil. Harder than basalt, rock fumes.
It has drifted across the roadbed, and the biggest men take their mallets to the new formations. They grip fossilized moments of wind, and it looks as if they clamber the sides of a cloud. The smokestone comes away in tiny shards, and over the hours they clear a path just wide enough for the tracks. They split a passage through fog.
They are harried by fReemade who raid with what seems rampaging petulance. The fReemade are not the enemy! says a new spate of handwritten posters, but it is hard for the workers to hear that as they see the aftermaths of the attacks.
Judah cannot understand what the fReemade want. They die in the raids, too. Judah does not see it, but he hears that a litter of fReemade bodies and their nearly dead are laid across the line for the perpetual train to dismember. They steal odds of iron, machinery, a few cattle. Can it be worth it?
The ground kinks toward higher rocks and trees. The grading crews are nearby, slowed by the sudden gnarlings in the way; they have met tunnellers who have been rasping out a hollow in granite for two years, and who have not yet come through.
A tide approaches, a rill of brown. It is a forestful of insects fleeing the graders and the cutters.
Men swear and try to cover themselves. The insects buffet the crews, millions of tough bodies: their chitin cuts. They are big as cactus thumbs. Mindlessly they fight the train. They immolate themselves in the gears and beneath the wheels, and the tracks become slippery with oily carnage. Pipes vent sand for traction.
From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.
Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tunnellers and the bridgemen, the train and track-layers meet the graders, the whore and mendicant followers meet the train, and everything stops.
Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tunnel. Judah climbs the rise. On the other side it is sheer, edging a ravine. He can see the nearly finished bridge, girders emerging two hundred feet below him, marking where the tunnel will break through. There are men suspended in baskets, tamping charges into the holes they drill, hauled away as fuses spit.
There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.
Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.
There is a huge celebration that night, the tunnellers and bridgemen delirious with new company. Judah drinks. He dances to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy with Ann-Hari, and she with him, and then with Shaun Sullervan, and with Thick Shanks. They smoke; they drink. Men are speechless from the cheap drugs and hexed moonshine they have concocted in stills.
There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tunnellers and the bridgemen who have been trapped so long in the badland that they have become part of it do not differentiate as his workmates do. That though the Remade here are billeted separately, and there is some effort made to segregate them, the punitive landscape here does not support divisions so strongly as among his own. It is as if the iron link to New Crobuzon conducts its prejudices. The iron-road Remade watch the local Remade. Judah sees them see, sees the gendarmes and the overseers see.
Judah and his team lay tracks into the tunnel, up to its clawed end. They move very slowly. The men who have lived like worms step aside into wax-smeared alcoves. They see by fires and lux hexes in the stone. Judah’s friends are cowed. They blink under the pale wide eyes of the diggers. The slap of their hammers is horrible and loud in that darkness.
There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they cannot join the tunnellers, and they cannot build the bridge, and they can only wait, play cards, fuck and fight.
The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.
Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.
What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.