China Miéville: Iron Council

There. There we will come to Iron Council. There we will come to the perpetual train, truly perpetual now perhaps poised always poised forever just about its wheels just about to finish turning. It waits. By its iron axles are devils of motion, waiting an eternal second.

Past guards patrolling a border. Where there are runnels beneath the wires we slip through, where there are none we cut or climb very careful, cushioned with rag. Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.

We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade. Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground. Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is onrushing it is immanent and we see it only in this one moment. Circle it.

The engine smokestack towered and flared, a belch of black, keeping its shape, swept back fast by the wind embedded in that moment. We come in close scant hairs from the protuberance of animal-head horns and the blades of the warriors who wait, stand close up, stare at the Councillors preparing with shouts set on them.

That one is Thick Shanks. That big, age-discoloured cactus-man, him at the engine’s window. He helped make Iron Council all the time ago. Here he is to bring it home.

There is a route from Councillor to Councillor, given names. Here is Spitter whose excited shout has left saliva spray in a parabolic fringe around his mouth; here is Leapfrog who has jumped from one carriage top toward another and hangs over the gap midway in her arc; here is the Gunner from whose rifle has emerged a bullet, ajut six inches from the barrel. The tradition is to stop, wave your hand between unmoving missile and gun.

Some of us knew these Councillors once. There is a woman who comes many times to speak to the same man, her father, come back to her, unmoving in history. She is not the only one who visits family.

The ivy-tower skirted with rust dust and smoke the cattletrucks made bunks and bedlam, panelled laboratory cars messhalls arsenals and church, here open-topped flatcars full of earth, gardens and a graveyard with its cenotaph, a cab whittled from driftwood and the bulbous triple-nucleated plasmic sac left where Torque warped those inside, the final engine with its snarl of metal teeth where the moment ended. These paused Council cars wait to salvage us.

We play around them; we come to them. Some come to pray. The ground around the Iron Council is a litter of written pleas.

The militia and their scientists and their thaumaturges try to send through violence, but the time golem only is, and is unhurt by their crude attacks. We come back again, again, again.

Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming. Women and men cut a line across the dirtland and dragged history out and back across the world. They are still with shouts setting their mouths and we usher them in. They are coming out of the trenches of rock toward the brick shadows. They are always coming.

CHINA MIÉVILLE was born in 1972. He is the author of King Rat, which was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Prize; Perdido Street Station, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; and The Scar, which won the Locus Award and was a finalist for the Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award, World Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives and works in London.