Reach out to the mind of the Creditor
To commune, one must first understand. Before, bargains and debts allowed a narrow window in which the Creditor might both act, and make its intentions known. But the Creditor has no such obligation to you.
The onus, then, falls to you. To comprehend. To render yourself comprehensible. To commune with one whose bones are clay and older than the First City, one who is divided and ambivalent about being whole again. To understand the Creditor, one must dig deep.
额,但是还是有点none of my business
俺本身就是沦敦的master,你们工人工会要搞城市就搞呗,我不太有所谓你们搞成啥样,为啥还一定要下到地底和Creditor打交道。。
这条线的动机写的确实真的不行。。
It would shape the struggling creatures of the Union and make out of them a moon for London; a shining silver city, a mirror reflecting revolt.
原来银城是这样来的。。。
We are close
Time speeds up. People come and go in the chambers of the cult too quickly to be seen. Instead you hear them in aggregate – and all the other things that are also the city. Its walls, its streets, its animals both verminous and otherwise. Its governing bodies and its informal clubs. Its stories of itself. It is not too young to have those.
已然迫近
时间在加速。人们在教团的密室中来去匆匆,快到无法被看见。于是,你听到的是它们的汇集之声——以及所有其他同样构成这座城市的事物:
它的墙垣,它的街道。它的动物,无论害兽还是其他。其统治机构,及其民间社团。它为自己讲述的故事。它并非年幼到连这些都尚未拥有。
The roots go deep and deeper
The TLU, formed in defiance of Hell and the scant wage of the Moloch Line. Furnace's grandfather, binding himself with oaths to his fellow labourers, refusing any work that did not pay all as it should, and making the first union, more than the sum of its people. (Like and unlike a city.)
The whole history of oath-takers and oath-breakers, oaths of marriage and of alliance in war. The need for promises to make individuals into a larger, safer body; the need to enforce; the spear of Wotan, the Styx, Zeus Horkios; the cedar at the crossroads.
And growing up through those roots, a saprophyte on decaying faith: civil laws, contracts, corporations, holding the shape of things when the original honour is gone.
根须深扎,愈扎愈深
铺轨工工会(TLU),为反抗地狱与摩洛克铁路(Moloch Line)的微薄薪资而成立。熔炉(Furnace)的祖父,与他的工友们立下誓言,约束彼此,拒绝任何未能给予所有人应得报酬的工作,并缔造了第一个工会——一个超越其成员总和的存在。(既像又不像一座城市。)
这是立誓者与违誓者的全部历史,是婚姻的盟誓与战争的盟约。是将个体塑造成一个更庞大、更安全之共同体的承诺之必要;是强制执行之必要;是沃坦之矛,是斯堤克斯冥河,是誓约之神宙斯;也是十字路口的那棵雪松。
而从这些根须中生长起来的,是一种攀附于腐朽信仰的腐生物:民法、契约、公司——当最初的荣誉荡然无存之际,它们维系着事物的形态。