I can dig my claws into the rim of a building’s crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.
PART TWO
Physiognomies of Flight
CHAPTER SIX
New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.
Aerostats oozed from cloud to cloud above it like slugs on cabbages. Militia-pods streaked through the heart of the city to its outlands, the cables that held them twanging and vibrating like guitar strings hundreds of feet in the air. Wyrmen clawed their way above the city leaving trails of defecation and profanity. Pigeons shared the air with jackdaws and hawks and sparrows and escaped parakeets. Flying ants and wasps, bees and bluebottles, butterflies and mosquitoes fought airborne war against a thousand predators, aspises and dheri that snapped at them on the wing. Golems thrown together by drunken students beat mindlessly through the sky on clumsy wings made of leather or paper or fruit-rind, falling apart as they flew. Even the trains that moved innumerable women and men and commodities around New Crobuzon’s great carcass fought to stay above the houses, as if they were afraid of the putrefaction of architecture.
The city thrust upwards massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St. Jabber’s Mound like scree.
The smoky black walls of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the sky. The building was knotted with obscure tubes and vast rivets. It throbbed with the ancient boilers deep within. Rooms used for uncertain purposes poked out of the main body of the colossal edifice with scant regard for buttresses or braces. Somewhere inside, in the Chamber, out of reach of the sky, Rudgutter and countless droning bores strutted. The Parliament was like a mountain poised on the verge of architectural avalanche.
It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.
The clouds swirled in the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station.
An industrial castle, bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station was the militia’s Spike, that loomed over the other turrets, dwarfing them, tugged in seven directions by taut skyrails. But for all its height the Spike was only an annex of the enormous station.
The architect had been incarcerated, quite mad, seven years after Perdido Street Station was completed. He was a heretic, it was said, intent on building his own god.
Five enormous brick mouths gaped to swallow each of the city’s trainlines. The tracks unrolled on the arches like huge tongues. Shops and torture chambers and workshops and offices and empty spaces all stuffed the fat belly of the building, which seemed, from a certain angle, in a certain light, to be bracing itself, taking its weight on the Spike, preparing to leap into the enormous sky it so casually invaded.
Isaac did not look with eyes clouded by romance. He saw flight wherever he looked in the city (his eyes were swollen: behind them buzzed a brain wired with new formulae and facts all furnished to slip gravity’s clutches), and he saw that it was not an escape to a better place. Flight was a secular, profane thing: simply a passage from one part of New Crobuzon to another.
He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic.
Isaac lay on his bed and gazed out of his window. He followed one flying speck after another with his eyes. Scattered around him on the bed, spilling onto the floor like a paper tide, were books and articles, typewritten notes and long sheaves of his excited scrawl. Classic monographs nestled under the musings of cranks. Biology and philosophy jostled for space on his desk.
He had sniffed his way along a contorted bibliographical trail like a bloodhound. Some titles could not be ignored: On Gravity or The Theory Of Flight. Some were more tangential, like The Aerodynamics Of The Swarm. And some were simply whims that his more respectable colleagues would surely frown at. He had yet, for example, to browse the pages of The Dweomers That Live Above The Clouds And What They Can Tell Us.
Isaac scratched his nose and sipped the beer balancing on his chest through a straw.
Only two days working on Yagharek’s commission, and the city was completely changed for him. He wondered if it would ever change back.
He rolled onto his side, rummaged around underneath him to shift the papers that were making him uncomfortable. He tugged free a collection of obscure manuscripts and a sheaf of the heliotypes he had taken of Teafortwo. Isaac held those prints in front of him, examined the intricacies of the wyrmen musculature that he had made Teafortwo show off.
Hope it’s not too long, Isaac thought.
He had spent the day reading and taking notes, grunting politely when David or Lublamai yelled greetings or questions or offers of lunch up to him. He had munched some bread and cheese and peppers which Lublamai had dumped on his desk in front of him. He had gradually shed layers of clothing as the day grew warmer and the little boilers on all the equipment heated the air. Shirts and kerchiefs littered the floor by his desk.
Isaac was waiting for delivery of supplies. He had realized early in his reading that for the purposes of this commission there was a massive hole in his scientific knowledge. Of all the arcana, biology was his weakest. He was quite at home reading about levitation and countergeotropic thaumaturgy and his beloved unified field theory, but the prints of Teafortwo had made him realize how little he understood the biomechanics of simple flight.
What I need’s some dead wyrmen . . . no, some live one to do experiments on . . . Isaac had thought idly, staring at the heliotypes the previous night. No . . . a dead one to dissect and a live one to watch flying . . .
The flippant idea had suddenly taken a more serious shape. He had sat and pondered for a while at his desk, before taking off into the darkness of Brock Marsh.
The most notorious pub between the Tar and the Canker lurked in the shadow of a huge Palgolak church. It was a few dank streets back from Danechi’s Bridge, which joined Brock Marsh to Bonetown.
Most of the denizens of Brock Marsh, of course, were bakers or street-sweepers or prostitutes, or any of a host of other professions unlikely ever to cast a hex or look into a test-tube in their lives. Similarly, the inhabitants of Bonetown were, for the most part, no more interested in grossly or systematically flouting the law than most of New Crobuzon. Nevertheless, Brock Marsh would always be the Science Quarter: Bonetown the Thieves’ District. And there where those two influences met—esoteric, furtive, romanticized and sometimes dangerous—was The Moon’s Daughters.
With a sign depicting the two small satellites that orbited the moon as pretty, rather tawdry-looking young women, and a façade painted in deep scarlet, The Moon’s Daughters was shabby but attractive. Inside, its clientele consisted of the more adventurous of the city’s bohemians: artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia informants jostling under the ey
es of the pub’s proprietor, Red Kate.
Kate’s nickname was a reference to her ginger hair, and, Isaac had always thought, a damning indictment of the creative bankruptcy of her patrons. She was physically powerful, with a sharp eye for who to bribe and who to ban, who to punch and who to ply with free beer. For these reasons (as well, Isaac suspected, as a small proficiency with a couple of subtle thaumaturgical glamours), The Moon’s Daughters negotiated a successful, precarious trail evading any of the competing protection rackets in the area. The militia raided Kate’s establishment only rarely and perfunctorily. Her beer was good. She did not ask what was being discussed in huddles and knots at corner tables.
That night, Kate had greeted Isaac with a brief wave, which he had returned. He had gazed around the smoky room, but the person he had been seeking was absent. He had made his way to the bar.
“Kate,” he shouted over the din. “No sign of Lemuel?”
She shook her head and handed him, unbidden, a Kingpin ale. He paid and turned to face the room.
He was rather thrown. The Moon’s Daughters was Lemuel Pigeon’s office, as near as dammit. He could usually be relied on to be here every night, wheeling, dealing, taking a cut. Isaac guessed he was out on some dubious job or other. He paced through the tables aimlessly, looking for someone he knew.
Over in the corner, grinning beatifically at someone, wearing the yellow robes of his order, was Gedrecsechet, the librarian of the Palgolak church. Isaac brightened and headed towards him.
He was amused to see that the forearms of the scowling youth arguing with Ged were tattooed with the interlocking wheels that proclaimed her a Godmech Cog, doubtless attempting to convert the ungodly. As Isaac drew closer the argument became audible.
“. . . if you approach the world and God with one iota of the rigour and the analysis you claim, you’d see that your pointless sentientomorphism would simply be untenable!”
Ged grinned at the spotty girl and opened his mouth to reply. Isaac interrupted.
“Pardon me, Ged, for butting in. Just wanted to say to you, young Flywheel, whatever you call yourself . . .”
The Cog tried to protest, but Isaac cut her off.
“No, shut up. I’ll say this very clearly . . . piss off. And take your rigour with you. I want to talk to Ged.”
Ged was giggling. His opponent was swallowing, trying to maintain her anger, but she was intimidated by Isaac’s bulk and cheerful pugnacity. She gathered herself to go with a semblance of dignity.
As she stood, she opened her mouth with some parting shot she had clearly been preparing. Isaac pre-empted her.
“Speak and I’ll break your teeth,” he advised amiably.
The Cog closed her mouth and stalked off.
When she was gone from view both Isaac and Ged burst into laughter.
“Why do you put up with them, Ged?” howled Isaac.
Ged, crouched like a frog before the low table, rocked back and forth on his legs and arms, his big tongue flapping in and out of his huge loose mouth.
“I just feel sorry for them,” he tittered. “They’re so . . . intense.”
Ged was generally held to be the most anomalously goodhumoured vodyanoi anyone had ever met. He had absolutely none of the glowering snappiness typical of that cantankerous race.
“Anyway,” he continued, calming down a little, “I don’t mind the Cogs nearly as much as some. They don’t have half the rigour they think they do, of course, but at least they’re taking things seriously. And at least they’re not . . . I don’t know . . . Compline or Godling Brood, or something.”
Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once. His congregation were human and vodyanoi in roughly equal proportions. He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information.
Isaac worshipped no gods. He did not believe in the omniscience or omnipotence claimed for a few, or even the existence of many. Certainly there were creatures and essences that inhabited different aspects of existence, and certainly some of them were powerful, in human terms. But worshipping them seemed to him rather a craven activity. Even he, though, had a soft spot for Palgolak. He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.
Palgolak’s library was at least the equal to that of the New Crobuzon University. It did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or the night, and there were very, very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter into their library.
Which was what Ged was gently complaining about. The New Crobuzon Palgolak Library had the best collection of religious manuscripts known in the world of Bas-Lag, and it attracted pilgrims from a huge variety of religious traditions and factions. They thronged the northern ends of Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth, all the worshipping races of the world, in robes and masks, sporting whips, leashes, magnifying glasses, the whole gamut of religious paraphernalia.
Some of the pilgrims were less than pleasant. The viciously anti-xenian Godling Brood, for example, was growing in the city, and Ged saw it as his unfortunate sacred duty to assist these racists who spat and called him “toad” and “riverpig” in between tracing passages from their texts.
Compared to them, the egalitarian Godmech Cogs were a harmless sect, even if their belief in the mechanicity of One True God was aggressively asserted.
Isaac and Ged had had many long arguments over the years, mostly theological, but also over literature and art and politics. Isaac respected the friendly vodyanoi. He knew him to be fervent in his religious duty of reading and, accordingly, hugely knowledgeable about any subject Isaac could think of. He was always at first a little circumspect with opinions about the information he shared—“Only Palgolak has enough knowledge to offer analysis,” Ged would proclaim piously at the start of an argument—until three or so drinks had obscured his religious non-dogmaticism and he would hold forth at the top of his voice.
“Ged,” Isaac asked. “What can you tell me about the garuda?”
Ged shrugged, and he grinned with pleasure at imparting what he knew.
“Not very much. Bird-people. Live in the Cymek, and the north of Shotek, and the west of Mordiga, reputedly. Maybe also on some of the other continents. Hollow bones.” Ged’s eyes were fixed, focused on the remembered pages of whatever xenthropological work he was quoting. “Cymek garuda are egalitarian . . . completely egalitarian, and completely individualistic. Hunters and gatherers, no sexual division of labour. No money, no rank, although they do have sort of uninstitutional ranks. Just means you’re worthy of more respect, that sort of thing. Don’t worship any gods, although they do have a devil-figure, which may or may not be a real eidolon. Dahnesch, it’s called. Hunt and fight with whips, bows, spears, light blades. Don’t use shields: too heavy to fly with. So they sometimes use two weapons at once. Have the occasional rumble with other bands or species, probably over resources. You know about their library?”
Isaac nodded. Ged’s eyes glazed with an almost obscene look of hunger.
“Godspit, I’d love to get to that. It’ll never happen.” He looked glum. “Desert’s not really vodyanoi territory. Bit dry . . .”
“Well, seeing as you know so arsing little about them, I might as well just stop talking to you,” said Isaac.
To Isaac’s astonishment, Ged’s face fell.
“Joke, Ged! Irony! Sarcasm! You know fucking loa
ds about them. At least compared to me. I’ve been browsing Shacrestialchit, and you’ve just exceeded the sum of my knowledge. Do you know anything about . . . uh . . . their criminal code?”
Ged stared at him. His huge eyes narrowed.
“What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian . . . well . . . Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it’s exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love . . .”
“How do you steal someone’s choice?”
“No idea. I suppose if you nick someone’s spear, they don’t have the choice of using it . . . What about if you lie about where some tasty lichen is, so you deprive others of the choice of going for it . . . ?”
“Maybe some choice-thefts are analogies of stuff we’d consider crimes and some have absolutely no equivalent,” said Isaac.
“I’d imagine so.”
“What’s an abstract individual and a concrete individual?”
Ged was gazing at Isaac in wonder.
“My good arse, Isaac . . . you’ve made friends with some garuda, haven’t you?”
Isaac raised one eyebrow, and nodded quickly.
“Damn!” Ged shouted. People at the surrounding tables turned to him with brief surprise. “And a Cymek garuda . . . ! Isaac, you have to make him—him? her?—come and talk to me about the Cymek!”
“I don’t know, Ged. He’s a bit . . . taciturn . . .”
“Oh please oh please . . .”
“All right, all right, I’ll ask him. But don’t get your hopes up. Now tell me what the difference is between a fucking abstract and concrete individual.”
“Oh, this is fascinating. I suppose you aren’t allowed to tell me what the job is . . . ? No, didn’t think so. Well, put simply, and as far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.
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