Jack by China Miéville Read Free Book Online Page B

Remaking, of its logic. Sometimes the magisters pass down sentences that you
can understand. One man kills another with a blade, take his killing arm and
replace it, suture a motorknife in its place, tube him up with the boiler to
run it. The lesson's obvious. Or those who are made heavy engines for industry,
man-cranes and woman-cabs and boy-machines. It's easy to see why the city would
want them.
    But I can't explain to
you the woman given a ruff of peacock feathers, or the young lad with iron
spiderlimbs out his back, or those with too many eyes or engines that make them
burn from the inside out, or legs made of wooden toys or replaced with the arms
of apes so they walk with mad monkey grace. The Remakings that make them
stronger, or weaker, or more or less vulnerable, Remakings almost unnoticed,
and those that make them impossible to understand.
    Sometimes you'll see a
xenian Remade, but it's rare. It's hard to work with cactacae vegetable flesh,
or the physiognomy of vodyanoi, I'm told, and there are other reasons for the
other races, so for the most part magisters'll sentence them to other things.
For the most part, it's humans who are Remade, for cruelty or expediency, or
opaque logics.
    There ain't no one the
city hates so much as the renegades, the fReemade. Turning your Remaking on the
Remakers, that ain't how it's supposed to be.
     
    Sometimes, you know,
I'll admit it's frustrating, to have to keep all my thoughts to myself.
Especially during the day, while I'm in at work. Don't get me wrong, I like my
colleagues, some of them, they're good lads, and for all I know some would even
agree with the way I look at things, but you just can't risk it. You have to
know when to keep secrets.
    So I stay well out of
it. I don't talk politics, I just do what I'm told, stay well out of any
discussions.
    When you see, when you
see how people looked up after Jack had struck, though, my gods. How could
anyone not be for that? People needed him, they needed that, that release. That
hope.
    I couldn't believe it
when I heard my crew'd got hold of the man who got Jack caught. I had to keep
myself under control at work, not let anyone see I was excited. I was waiting
to get my hands on the rat.
     
    For a lot of people,
the most exciting, the best thing he ever done was an escape. Not his first
escape ― that I can't help thinking would have been some tawdry affair.
Impressive for all that but a desperate bloody crawl, his new Remaking still
atwitch, all grimy, all stained by the grease of his shackles, and stonedust,
lying in some haul of rubbish where the dogs couldn't smell him, till he was
strong enough to run. That, I think, would have been as messy as any other
birth. No, the escape I'm talking about was the one they call Jack's
Steeplechase.
    Even now people can't
decide whether it was deliberate or not, whether he let it out to the militia
that he'd be there, that he'd be stealing weapons from one of their caches, in
the city centre, in Perdido Street Station, just so they'd come for him and he
could show he could get away from them. Me I don't think he'd be so cocky. I
think he just got caught, but being who he was, being what he was, he made the
best of it.
    He ran for more than an
hour. You can go a long way in that time, over the roofs of New Crobuzon.
Within fifteen minutes news had spread and I don't know how, I don't know how
it is that the news of him running moved faster than he did himself, but that's
the way of these things. Soon enough, as Jack Half-a-Prayer tore into view over
some street, he'd find people waiting, and as far as they dared, cheering.
    No I never saw it but
you hear about it, all the time. People could see him on the roofs, waving his
Remaking so people would know it was him. Behind him squads of militia.
Falling, chasing, falling, more emerging from attics, from stairways, from all
over, wearing their masks, pointing weapons, and firing them, and Jack leaping
over chimneypots and launching himself