Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  “. . . offered to underwrite,” continued Derkhan doggedly. “Accordingly, I move that we drink up and eat up and hightail to Sobek Croix.”

  There was loud, chaotic agreement. Those who had finished their food and drink gathered their bags. Others tucked with renewed gusto into their oysters or salad or fried plantain. Trying to organize a group of any size to do anything in synchronicity was an epic struggle, Lin reflected wryly. It would be some time before they set off.

  Isaac and Derkhan were hissing to each other across the table in front of her. Her antennae twitched. She could pick up some of their murmurs. Isaac excitedly talking politics. He channelled his diffuse, undirected, pointed social discontent into his discussions with Derkhan. He was posing, she thought with amused pique, out of his depth, trying to impress the laconic journalist.

  She could see Isaac pass a coin carefully across the table, and receive a plain envelope in return. Undoubtedly the latest issue of Runagate Rampant, the illegal, radical news-sheet for which Derkhan wrote.

  Beyond a nebulous dislike of the militia and the government, Lin was not a political being. She sat back and looked up at the stars through the violet haze of the suspended lantern. She thought about the last time she had been to a fair: she remembered the mad palimpsest of smell, the catcalls and screeches, the rigged competitions and cheap prizes, the exotic animals and bright costumes, all packed together in a seedy, vibrant, exciting whole.

  The fair was where normal rules were briefly forgotten, where bankers and thieves mingled to ooh, scandalized and titillated. Even Lin’s less outrageous sisters would come to the fair.

  One of her early memories was of creeping past ranks of gaudy tents to stand next to some terrifying, dangerous, multicoloured ride, some giant wheel at the Gallmarch Fair twenty years ago. Someone—she never knew who, some khepri passer-by, some indulgent stallholder—had handed her a toffee-apple, which she had eaten reverentially. One of her few pleasant memories of childhood, that sugared fruit.

  Lin sat back and waited for her friends to finish their preparations. She sucked sweet tea from her sponge and thought of that candied apple. She waited patiently to go to the fair.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Come try, come try, come try your luck!”

  “Ladies, ladies, tell yer fellers to win you a bouquet!”

  “Spin in the Whirligig! It’ll spin your mind!”

  “Your likeness affected in only four minutes! No faster portraiture in the world!”

  “Experience the hypnagogic mesmerism of Sillion the Extraordinary!”

  “Three rounds, three guineas! Stand for three rounds against ‘Iron Man’ Magus and take home three Gs! No cactus-people.”

  The night air was thick with noise. The challenges, the shouts, the invitations and temptations and dares sounded around the laughing party like bursting balloons. Gasjets, mixed with select chymicals, burnt red, green, blue and canary yellow. The grass and paths of Sobek Croix were sticky with spilt sugar and sauce. Vermin scampered from the skirts of stalls into the dark bushes of the park clutching choice morsels. Gonophs and cutpurses slipped predatory through the crowds like fish through weeds. Indignant roars and violent cries sounded in their wake.

  The crowd was a moving stew of human and vodyanoi, cactus, khepri, and other, rarer breeds: hotchi and strider and stiltspear and races the names of which Isaac did not know.

  A few yards out from the fair, the darkness of the grass and trees was absolute. The bushes and boughs were fringed with bunting of ragged paper, discarded and ensnared and slowly shredded by the wind. Paths criss-crossed the park, leading to lakes and flower beds and acres of untended growth, and the old monastic ruins at the centre of the huge common.

  Lin and Cornfed, Isaac and Derkhan and all the others strolled past enormous contraptions of bolted steel, garishly painted iron and hissing lights. Delighted squeals sounded from little cars swinging on flimsy-looking chains above them. A hundred different manically cheerful tunes sounded from a hundred engines and organs, an unsettling cacophony that ebbed and flowed around them.

  Alex munched honeyed nuts; Bellagin salted meat; Thighs Growing a watery mulch delicious to cactus-people. They threw food at each other, caught it in their mouths.

  The park was thronging with punters, throwing hoops over poles, firing children’s bows at targets, guessing under which cup the coin was hidden. Children screamed with pleasure and misery. Prostitutes of all races, sexes and descriptions sashayed exaggeratedly between the stalls or stood by the beerhalls, winking at passers-by.

  The party disintegrated slowly as they passed into the heart of the fair. They hovered a minute while Cornfed showed off his archery. He ostentatiously offered his prizes, two dolls, to Alex and a young, beautiful whore who cheered his triumph. The three disappeared arm in arm through the crowd. Tarrick proved adept at a fishing game, pulling three live crabs from a big swirling tub. Bellagin and Spint had their futures read in the cards, squealing in terror when the bored witch turned over The Snake and The Old Crone in succession. They demanded a second opinion from a wide-eyed scarabomancer. She gazed theatrically at the images skittering across the carapaces of her pattern beetles as they bumbled through their sawdust.

  Isaac and the others left Bellagin and Spint behind.

  The remnants of the party turned a corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend: The Circus of Weird.

  “Now,” said Isaac ponderously. “Reckon I might have a little look at this . . .”

  “Plumbing the depths of human squalor, ’Zaac?” asked a young artist’s model whose name Isaac could not remember. Besides Lin, Isaac and Derkhan, only a few others of the original group were left. They looked mildly surprised at Isaac’s choice.

  “Research,” Isaac said grandly. “Research. Fancy joining me, Derkhan? Lin?”

  The others took the hint with reactions ranging from careless waves to petulant flounces. Before they all disappeared, Lin signed rapidly to Isaac.

  Not interested in this. Teratology more your thing. Meet you at the entrance in two hours?

  Isaac nodded briefly and squeezed her hand. She signed goodbye to Derkhan and trotted off to catch up with a sound-artist whose name Isaac had never known.

  Derkhan and Isaac stared at each other.

  “. . . and then there were two,” sung Derkhan, a snatch of a children’s counting song about a basket of kittens that died, one by one, grotesquely.

  There was an additional charge to enter the Circus of Weird, which Isaac paid. Though hardly empty, the freakshow was less crowded than the main body of the fair. The more monied the punters inside looked, the more furtive their air.

  The freakshow brought out the voyeur in the populace and the hypocrisy in the gentry.

  There seemed to be some kind of tour starting, which promised to view each exhibit in the Circus in turn. The bawls of the showman bade the assembled stick close together and prepare themselves for sights such as mortal eyes were not meant to see.

  Isaac and Derkhan hung back a little and followed the troupe. Isaac saw that Derkhan had a notebook out and a pen poised.

  The bowler-hatted Master of Ceremonies approached the first tent.

  “Ladies and gents,” he whispered loudly and huskily, “in this tent lurks the most remarkable and terrifying creature ever seen by mortal man. Or vodyanoi, or cactus, or whatever,” he added in a normal voice, nodding graciously to the few xenians in the crowd. He returned to his bombastic tones. “Originally described fifteen centuries ago in the travelogues of Libintos the Sage, of what was then just plain ol’ Crobuzon. On his trips south to the burning wastes, Libintos saw many marvellous and monstrous things. But none more terrifying than the awesome . . . mafadet!”

  Isaac had been sporting a sardonic smile. But even he joined the mass gasp.

  Have they really got a mafadet?
he thought as the MC drew back the curtain from the front of the little tent. He pushed forward to see.

  There was another, louder gasp, and people at the front fought to move back. Others shoved to take their place.

  Behind thick black bars, tethered by heavy chains, was an extraordinary beast. It lay on the ground, its huge dun body like a massive lion’s. Between its shoulders was a fringe of denser fur from which sprouted an enormous serpentine neck, thicker than a man’s thigh. Its scales glistened an oily, ruddy tan. An intricate pattern wound up the top of that curling neck, expanding to a diamond shape where it curved and became an enormous snake’s head.

  The mafadet’s head lolled on the ground. Its huge forked tongue flicked in and out. Its eyes glistened like jet.

  Isaac grabbed Derkhan.

  “It’s a fucking mafadet,” he hissed in amazement. Derkhan nodded, wide-eyed.

  The crowd had drawn back from the front of the cage. The showman grabbed a barbed stick and poked it through the bars, goading the enormous desert creature. It gave forth a deep, rumbling hiss and batted pathetically at its tormentor with a massive forepaw. Its neck coiled and twisted in desultory misery.

  There were small screams from the crowd. People surged at the little barrier before the cage.

  “Back, ladies and gents, back, I beg of you!” The showman’s voice was pompous and histrionic. “You are all in mortal danger! Don’t anger the beast!”

  The mafadet hissed again under his continued torments. It wriggled backwards along the floor, crawling out of range of the vicious spike.

  Isaac’s awe was waning fast.

  The exhausted animal squirmed in undignified agony as it sought the rear of the cage. Its threadbare tail lashed the stinking goat carcass presumably provided for its nourishment. Dung and dust stained the mafadet’s pelt, along with blood that oozed thickly from numerous sores and nicks. Its sprawled body twitched a little as that cold, blunt head rose on the powerful muscles of the snake-neck.

  The mafadet hissed and, as the crowd hissed in turn, its wicked jaws unhinged. It tried to bare its teeth.

  Isaac’s face curled.

  Broken stubs jutted from the creature’s gums where cruel fangs a foot long should have glinted. They had been smashed out of its mouth, Isaac realized, for fear of its murderous, poisonous bite.

  He gazed at the broken monster whipping the air with its black tongue. It laid its head back down.

  “Jabber’s arse,” Isaac whispered to Derkhan with pity and disgust. “Never thought I’d feel sorry for something like that.”

  “Makes you wonder what state the garuda’s going to be in,” Derkhan replied.

  The barker was hurriedly drawing the curtain on the miserable creature. As he did so he told the crowd the story of Libintos’s trial by poison at the hands of the Mafadet King.

  Nursery tales, cant, lies and showmanship, thought Isaac contemptuously. He realized that the crowd had only been given a snatch of a view, a minute or less. Less chance anyone will notice how moribund the poor thing is, he mused.

  He could not help but imagine the mafadet in full health. The immense weight of that tawny body padding through the hot dry scrub, the lightning strike of the venomous bite.

  Garuda circling above, blades flashing.

  The crowd were being shepherded towards the next enclosure. Isaac was not listening to the roar of the guide. He was watching Derkhan jot quick notes.

  “This for RR?” whispered Isaac.

  Derkhan looked around them quickly.

  “Maybe. Depends what else we see.”

  “What we’ll see,” hissed Isaac furiously, dragging Derkhan with him as he caught sight of the next exhibit, “is pure human viciousness! I fucking despair, Derkhan!”

  He had stopped a little way behind a group of dawdlers who were gazing at a child born without eyes, a fragile, bony human girl who cried out wordlessly and waved her head at the sound of the crowd. She sees with Inner Sight! proclaimed the sign over her head. Some before the cage were cackling and yelling at her.

  “Godspit, Derkhan . . .” Isaac shook his head. “Look at them tormenting that poor creature . . .”

  As he spoke, a couple turned from the exhibited child with disgust in their faces. They turned as they left and spat behind them at the woman who had laughed the loudest.

  “It turns, Isaac,” said Derkhan quietly. “It turns quickly.”

  The tour guide strode the path between the rows of little tents, stopping here and there at choice horrors. The crowd was breaking apart. Little clots of people milled away under their own volition. At some tents they were stopped by attendants, who waited until a sufficient number had congregated before unveiling their hidden pieces. At others the punters walked right in, and shouts of delight and shock and disgust would emanate from within the grubby canvas.

  Derkhan and Isaac wandered into a long enclosure. Above the entrance was a sign rendered in ostentatious calligraphy. A Panoply of Wonders! Do You Dare Enter the Museum of Hidden Things?

  “Do we dare, Derkhan?” muttered Isaac as they passed into the warm dusty darkness within.

  The light ebbed slowly into their eyes from the corner of the makeshift room. The cotton chamber was full of cabinets in iron and glass, stretching out before them. Candles and gasjets burned in niches, filtered through lenses that concentrated them into dramatic spots, illuminating the bizarre displays. Punters meandered from one to another, murmuring, laughing nervously.

  Isaac and Derkhan wandered slowly past jars of yellowing alcohol in which broken body parts floated. Two-headed foetuses and sections of a kraken’s arm. A deep red shining jag that could have been a Weaver’s claw, or could have been a burnished carving; eyes that spasmed and lived in jars of charged liquid; intricate, infinitesimal paintings on ladybirds’ backs, visible only through magnifying lenses; a human skull scuttling in its cage on six insectile brass legs. A nest of rats with intertwined tails that took it in turns to scrawl obscenities on a little blackboard. A book made of pressed feathers. Druds’ teeth and a narwhal’s horn.

  Derkhan scribbled notes. Isaac gazed avariciously about him at the charlatanism and cryptoscience.

  They left the museum. To their right was Anglerina, Queen of the Deepest Sea; to their left Bas-Lag’s Oldest Cactus-Man.

  “I’m getting depressed,” said Derkhan.

  Isaac agreed.

  “Let’s find the Bird-Man Chief of the Wild Desert quickly, and fuck off. I’ll buy you some candyfloss.”

  They wound through the ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small. Isaac suddenly pointed above them, at the sign that had come into view.

  King Garuda! Lord of the Air!

  Derkhan tugged at the heavy curtain. She and Isaac exchanged glances, and entered.

  “Ah! Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!”

  The querulous voice burst out of the shadows. Isaac squinted through the bars before them. A dark, shambolic figure stood painfully and lurched out of the darkness at the back of the tent.

  “I am a chief of my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard.”

  The voice was pained and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the alien sounds that burst from Yagharek’s throat. The speaker stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and died in an aghast whisper.

  The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy off it like a pudgy schoolboy’s. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human ey
es, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.

  Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt from them as they shuddered.

  The creature’s beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth, he realized.

  “Let me tell you of the times I have soared into the air with my prey . . .” began the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to cut it off.

  “Please gods, enough!” he shouted. “Spare us this . . . embarrassment . . .”

  The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

  There was silence for a long time.

  “What’s the matter, guvnor?” whispered the thing behind bars eventually. “What’d I do wrong?”

  “I came here to see a fucking garuda,” rumbled Isaac. “What d’you take me for? You’re Remade, mate . . . as any fool can see.”

  The big dead beak clicked together as the man licked his lips. His eyes darted left and right nervously.

  “Jabber’s sake, squire,” he whispered pleadingly. “Don’t go complaining. This is all I got. You’re obviously a gentleman of education . . . I’m as close as most get to garuda . . . all they want’s to hear a bit about hunting in the desert, see the bird-man, and that way I earn.”

  “Godspit, Isaac,” whispered Derkhan. “Go easy.”

  Isaac was crushingly disappointed. He had been preparing a list of questions in his mind. He knew exactly how he had wanted to investigate the wings, which muscle-bone interaction currently intrigued him. He had been prepared to pay a good rate for the research, had prepared to get Ged to come down to ask questions about the Cymek Library. To be faced instead with a scared, sickly human reading from a script that would have disgraced the lowest playhouse depressed him.