Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  His anger was tempered with pity as he stared at the miserable figure before him. The man behind the feathers nervously clutched and unclutched his left arm with his right. He had to open that preposterous beak to breath.

  “ ’Stail,” Isaac swore softly.

  Derkhan had walked up to the bars.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  The man looked around again before answering.

  “Did thieving,” he said quickly. “Got caught trying to get an old painting of a garuda from some ancient cunt out in Chnum. Worth a fortune. Magister said since I was so impressed with garuda I could—” his breath caught for a moment “—I could be one.”

  Isaac could see how the feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one. When the Remade turned slightly to Derkhan, Isaac could see the ugly knot of hardened flesh on his back where those wings, torn from some buzzard or vulture, had been sealed together with the human muscles.

  Nerve endings bonded randomly and uselessly, and the wings moved only with the spasms of a long drawn-out death. Isaac’s nose wrinkled at the stench. The wings were rotting slowly on the Remade’s back.

  “Does it hurt?” Derkhan was asking.

  “Not so very much any more, miss,” the Remade answered. “Anyway, I’m lucky to have this.” He indicated the tent and the bars. “Keeps me eating. That’s why I’d be obliged more’n I can say if you’d refrain from telling the boss that you clocked me.”

  Did most who came here really accept this disgusting charade? wondered Isaac. Were people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this could ever fly?

  “We’ll say nothing,” said Derkhan. Isaac nodded curtly in agreement. He was full of pity and anger and disgust. He wanted to leave.

  Behind them, the curtain swished and a group of young women entered, laughing and whispering lewd jokes. The Remade looked over Derkhan’s shoulder.

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

  He moved away from Derkhan and Isaac, gazing at them pleadingly as he did so. Delighted screams and astonishment burst from the new spectators.

  “Fly for us!” yelled one.

  “Alas,” heard Isaac and Derkhan as they left the tent, “the weather in your city is too inclement for my kind. I have caught chill and temporarily cannot fly. But tarry and I will tell you of the views from the cloudless Cymek skies . . .”

  The cloth closed behind them. The speech was obscured.

  Isaac watched as Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

  “What are you going to turn in?” he asked.

  “ ‘Remade Forced by Magister’s Torture into Living as Zoo Exhibit.’ I won’t say which one,” she answered without looking up from her writing. Isaac nodded.

  “Come on,” he murmured. “I’ll get that candyfloss.”

  “I’m fucking depressed now,” said Isaac heavily. He bit at the sickly-sweet bundle he carried. Wisps of sugar fibres stuck to his stubble.

  “Yes, but are you depressed because of what’d been done to that man, or because you didn’t get to meet a garuda?” asked Derkhan.

  They had left the freakshow. They munched earnestly as they walked past the garish body of the fair. Isaac pondered. He was a little taken aback.

  “Well, I suppose . . . probably because I didn’t meet a garuda . . . But,” he added defensively, “I wouldn’t be half so depressed if it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like that. It’s the . . . fucking indignity of it that really sticks in the craw . . .”

  Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.

  “We could look around, you know,” she said. “There’s bound to be a garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here.” She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could hardly even see the stars.

  “Not now,” said Isaac. “I’m not in the mood. I’ve lost my momentum.” There was a long, companionable silence before he spoke again.

  “Will you really write something about this place in Runagate Rampant?”

  Derkhan shrugged, looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.

  “It’s a difficult job, dealing with the Remade,” she said. “There’s so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to link up, so people don’t . . . judge them as monsters . . . it’s really hard. And it’s not like people don’t know they’ve got fucking horrendous lives, for the most part . . . it’s that there’s a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve it, even if they pity them, or think it’s Gods-given, or rubbish like that. Oh, Godspit,” she said suddenly, and shook her head.

  “What?”

  “I was in court the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a sordid, pathetic, miserable crime . . .” She winced in remembrance. “Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath monoliths killed her baby . . . smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows what . . . because it wouldn’t stop crying. She’s sitting there in court, her eyes are just . . . damn well empty . . . she can’t believe what’s happened, she keeps moaning her baby’s name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.

  “Her baby’s arms are going to be grafted to her face. ‘So she doesn’t forget what she did,’ he says.” Derkhan’s voice curdled as she mimicked the Magister.

  They walked in silence for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.

  “I’m an art critic, Isaac,” Derkhan said eventually. “Remaking’s art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows . . . ! Not that they admit that’s what they’re for . . .

  “Remaking’s creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR.” She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. “It’s the same thing, Isaac. Art’s something you choose to make . . . it’s a bringing together of . . . of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That’s why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.

  “I don’t want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art.”

  Isaac felt in his pocket for Runagate Rampant. It was dangerous even to hold a copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called “comprador scum”; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party; the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in a sandpit.

  At the end of the path paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food, discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing her. As they neared her she stood straighter and waved at them. She sauntered in their direction.

  Isaac saw that she had a toffee-apple gripped in her mandibles. Her inner jaw chewed with gusto.

  How was it, treasure? she signed.

  “An unmitigated arsing disaster,” Isaac huffed miserably. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He even risked grasping her hand briefly as they turned their backs on the fair.

  The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous im
broglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Across the city, through the shady alleys of Echomire and the hovels of Badside, in the lattice of dust-clogged canals, in Smog Bend and the faded estates of Barrackham, in towers in Tar Wedge and the hostile concrete forest of Dog Fenn, came the whispered word. Someone’s paying for winged things.

  Like a god, Lemuel breathed life into the message and made it fly. Small-time hoods heard it from drug dealers; costermongers told it to decayed gentlemen; doctors with dubious records got it from part-time bouncers.

  Isaac’s request swept through the slums and rookeries. It travelled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps.

  Where putrefying houses loomed over courtyards, wooden walkways seemed to self-generate, linking them together, connecting them to the streets and mews where exhausted beasts of burden hauled third-rate goods up and down. Bridges jutted like splinted limbs across cess-trenches. Isaac’s message was couriered across the chaotic skyline in the paths of the feral cats.

  Little expeditions of urban adventurers took the Sink Line train south to Fell Stop and ventured into Rudewood. They walked the deserted train tracks as long as they could, stepping from slat to wooden slat, passing the empty, nameless station in the outlands of the forest. The platforms had surrendered to green life. The tracks were thick with dandelions and foxgloves and wild roses that had shoved pugnacious through the railway gravel and, here and there, bent the tracks. Darkwood and banyan and evergreen crept up on the nervous invaders until they were surrounded, enclosed in a lush trap.

  They went with sacks and catapults and big nets. They hauled their clumsy urban carcasses through the tangled roots and thick tree-shadows, yelling and tripping and breaking branches. They tried to pinpoint the birdsong that disoriented them, sounding on every side. They made faltering, useless analogies between the city and this alien realm: “If you can find your way through Dog Fenn,” one might say fatuously and wrongly, “you can find your way anywhere.” They would spin, look for and fail to find the militia tower of Vaudois Hill, out of sight behind the trees.

  Some did not return.

  Most came back scratching at burrs, stung and torn and angry, empty-handed. They might as well have hunted ghosts.

  Occasionally they triumphed, and some frantic nightingale or Rudewood finch would be smothered with rough cloth to a chorus of ludicrously overblown cheers. Hornets buried their harpoons into their tormentors as they were swept into jars and pots. If they were lucky, their captors remembered to pierce airholes in the lids.

  Many birds and more insects died. Some survived, to be taken into the dark city just beyond the trees.

  In the city itself, children scaled walls to pull eggs from nests in decaying gutters. The caterpillars and maggots and cocoons they kept in matchboxes and bartered for string or chocolate were suddenly worth money.

  There were accidents. A girl in pursuit of her neighbour’s racing pigeon fell from a roof, breaking her skull. An old man scrabbling for grubs was stung by bees until his heart stopped.

  Rare birds and flying creatures were stolen. Some escaped. New predators and prey briefly joined the ecosystem in New Crobuzon’s skies.

  Lemuel was good at his job. Some would only have plumbed the depths: not he. He made sure that Isaac’s desires were communicated uptown: Gidd, Canker Wedge, Mafaton and Nigh Sump, Ludmead and The Crow.

  Clerks and doctors, lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of leisure . . . even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry. The main differences between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants, in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and the capacity they had not to get caught.

  From the parlours and dining rooms there were cautious murmurings of interest.

  In the heart of Parliament a debate was taking place about levels of business taxation. Mayor Rudgutter sat regally on his throne and nodded as his deputy, MontJohn Rescue, bellowed the Fat Sun party’s line, poking his finger aggressively across the enormous vaulted chamber. Rescue paused periodically to rearrange the thick scarf he wore around his neck, despite the warmth.

  Councillors dozed quietly in a haze of dust motes.

  Elsewhere in the vast building, through intricate corridors and passages that seemed designed to confuse, suited secretaries and messengers brushed busily past each other. Little tunnels and stairs of polished marble bristled from main thoroughfares. Many were unlit and unfrequented. An old man pulled a decrepit trolley along one such passage.

  With the bustling noise of Parliament’s main entrance hall receding behind him, he dragged the trolley behind him up steep stairs. The corridor was barely wider than his trolley: it was a long, uncomfortable few minutes until he had reached the top. He stopped and wiped sweat from his forehead and around his mouth, then resumed his trudging plod along the ascending floor.

  Ahead of him the air lightened, as sunlight tried to finger its way around a corner. He turned full into it, and his face was splashed with light and warmth. It gushed in from a skylight and, beyond that, from the windows of the doorless office at the corridor’s end.

  “Morning, sir,” croaked the old man as he reached the entrance.

  “Good morning to you,” came the reply from the man behind the desk.

  The office was small and square, with narrow windows of smoked glass that looked out over Griss Fell and the arches of the Sud Line railway. One wall was flush with the looming dark bulk of Parliament’s main edifice. Set into that wall was a small sliding door. A pile of crates teetered in the corner.

  The little room was one of the chambers that jutted from the main building, high over the surrounding city. The waters of the Gross Tar surged fifty feet below.

  The delivery man unloaded his trolley of parcels and boxes in front of the pale middle-aged gentleman sitting before him.

  “Not too many today, sir,” he murmured, rubbing his moaning bones. He went slowly back the way he came, his trolley jouncing lightly behind him.

  The clerk sifted through the bundles and rattled out brief notes on his typewriter. He made entries in an enormous ledger labelled “ACQUISITIONS,” skimming the pages between sections and recording the date before each item. He opened up the packages and recorded the contents in a typewritten day-list and in the big book.

  Militia reports: 17. Human knuckles: 3. Heliotypes (incriminating): 5.

  He checked for which department each collection of items was bound, and he separated them into piles. When one pile had grown big enough, he put it in a crate and carried it over to the door in the wall. It was a four-by-four-foot square, which hissed with a rush of siphoned air and opened at the behest of some hidden piston when he tugged a lever. At its side was a little slot for a programme card.

  Beyond it a wire cage dangled beneath Parliament’s obsidian skin, with one open side flush with the doorway. It was suspended above and on either side by chains that swung gently, rattled and disappeared into an eddying darkness that loomed off without remission in all directions that the clerk could see. The clerk lugged the crate up into the passageway and slid it along into the cage, which pitched a little under the weight.

  He released a hatch which closed sharply, enclosing the crate and its contents with woven wire on all sides. Then he closed the sliding door, reached into his pocket and pulled out the thick programme cards he carried, each clearly marked: Militia; Intelligence; Exchequer; and so on. He slid the relevant card into the slot beside the door.

  There would be a whirr. Tiny, sensitive pistons reacted to the pressure. Powered by steam driven up from the vast basement boilers, gentle little cogs rotated the length of the card. Where their spring-loaded teeth found sections cut from the thick board, they slotted neatly inside for a moment, and a minuscule switch was thrown further along the mechanism. When the wheels had
completed their brief passage, the combination of on-off switches translated into binary instructions that raced in flows of steam and current along tubes and cables to hidden analytical engines.

  The cage jerked free of its moorings and began a swift, swinging passage beneath the skin of Parliament. It would travel the hidden tunnels up or down or sideways or diagonally, changing direction, transferring jerkily to new chains, for five seconds, thirty seconds, two minutes or more, until it arrived, slamming into a bell to announce itself. Another sliding door opened before it, and the crate was pulled out into its destination. Far away, a new cage swung into place outside the clerk’s room.

  The Acquisitions clerk worked quickly. He had logged and sent on almost all the assorted oddities before him within fifteen minutes. That was when he saw one of the few remaining parcels shaking oddly. He stopped scribbling and prodded it.

  The stamps that adorned it declared it newly arrived from some merchant ship, the name obscured. Neatly printed across the front of the package was its destination: Dr. M. Barbile, Research and Development. The clerk heard a scraping. He hesitated a moment, then gingerly untied the string that bound it and peered inside.

  Inside, in a nest of paper shavings that they nudged fitfully, were a mass of fat grubs bigger than his thumb.

  The clerk recoiled and his eyes widened behind his glasses. The grubs were astonishingly coloured, beautiful dark reds and greens with the iridescence of peacock feathers. They floundered and wriggled to keep themselves on their stubby, sticky legs. Thick antennae poked from their heads, above a tiny mouthpiece. The hind part of their body was covered in multicoloured hairs that bristled and seemed coated in thin glue.

  The fat little creatures undulated blindly.

  The clerk saw, too late, a tattered invoice attached to the back of the box, half-destroyed in transit. Any invoiced package he was supposed to record as whatever was listed, and send on without opening.

  Shit, he thought nervously. He unfolded the torn halves of the invoice. It was still quite legible.