Meeting with a winder

I now realise that Torneira is a very dangerous place. Me getting shot is treated as an occupational hazard for pedestrians in this city. It's hot and humid most days, and the red-faced citizens have a reputation for angry disputation settled with the occasional (small calibre) bullet (big guns aren't allowed). I learn later that Ugly (the engine pilot) didn't kill anyone so he got a fine(!). Had he killed someone he would have had to pay the bereaved family part of his income for the rest of his life, which wouldn't have amounted to much, as revenge is fast food served hot here. Vendetta burger with fries.

Whilst I was laid up, Bêbe considered buying me a gun from the little street vendor girl on the corner (her wares spread out on a tatty rug in front of her), but tells me she remembered my complete incompetence in Gethsemet, and thought better of it, and the pea-shooters you get round here are more for show. Thanks Bêbe.

So, it's with some trepidation that we venture out for the first time after my confinement. The hole in me is healed, but I reckon it would twinge a bit if it ever rained.

We're on our way to see a winder, Bêbe thinks she might be able to do something about the ticker tags that keep us in the tourist quarter, as fat taxi man is no use now (I don't know why, Bêbe says shut up when I ask).

The winders look after the clockwork engines that underpin the automated tiger economy in Torneira: they tend the automatons that lurch about on metal spider legs; they change the oil and tighten the mainsprings on these whirring machines that variously lift, or stamp, or build the concrete towers leaning over narrow streets.

The automatons are not all clockwork - their brains are actual spiders kept in little tins, legs tethered to tiny gears and armatures, that link to bigger gears and scrabbling legs, waldo-like. They are conditioned to perform with complex pleasure pain programmes fed in to their surgically altered mouth-parts as chemical dotted tape. Some are small (no bigger than my hand) and in swarms crawl over the faces of the towers, maintaining, dismantling or building in little bits. They come in all sizes up to some the size of buses, with mainspring housings humped over their back in fat thoraxes. All of them, from tiny skittering messagers on wire legs, to the big slow, yellow-painted excavators, move in that disturbing spider way (dismembered hands) and all of them give me the creeps, as I'm an arachnophobe. Bêbe says not to mention this when we see the winder.