“Right!” he shouted again, and strode over to the first cage. The brace of doves inside puffed and billowed explosively from one side to the other as he tugged them over to a large window. He left the box facing the glass and fetched another, within which a vivid dragonfly-snake undulated like a sidewinder. He placed that one on top of the first. He grabbed a gauze cage of mosquitoes, and another of bees, and dragged them over too. Isaac woke cantankerous bats and aspises basking in the sun, pulled them over to the window overlooking the Canker.
He cleared all his remaining menagerie over to that pile. The animals looked out at the Ribs, which curved cruelly over the eastern city. Isaac piled all the boxes containing living things into a pyramid in front of the glass. It looked like a sacrificial pyre.
Eventually the job was done. Predators and prey fluttered and screeched next to each other, separated only by wood or thin bars.
Isaac reached awkwardly into the thin space in front of the cages and swung the great window open. It hinged horizontally, opening at the top of its five-foot height. As it opened onto the warm air, a great rush of city sounds washed in with the evening heat.
“Now,” yelled Isaac, beginning to enjoy himself. “I wash my hands of you!”
He looked around and strode back to the desk for a moment, returning with a long cane he had used many years before to point at blackboards. He poked it at the cages, knocking hooks out of eyes, fumbling till he undid latches, ripping holes in wire as thin as silk.
The fronts to the little prisons began to fall away. Isaac speeded up, opening all the doors, using his fingers where the cane was not delicate enough.
At first, the creatures within were bewildered. For many, it was weeks since they had flown. They had eaten badly. They were bored and frightened. They did not understand the sudden vista of freedom, the twilight, the smell of the air before them. But after those long moments, the first of the captives bolted for freedom.
It was an owl.
It hurled itself through the open window and sailed off towards the east, where the sky was darkest, out towards the wooded lands by Iron Bay. It glided between the Ribs on wings that hardly moved.
The escape was a signal. There was a storm of wings.
Falcons, moths, batkin, aspises, horseflies, parakeets, beetles, magpies, creatures of the upper air, little water-top skimmers, creatures of the night, the day and the gloaming burst from Isaac’s window in a shimmering explosion of camouflage and colour. The sun had sunk on the other side of the warehouse. The only light that caught the clouds of feather, fur and chitin was from streetlamps and shards of sunset reflected on the dirty river.
Isaac basked in the glory of the sight. He exhaled as if at a work of art. For a moment he looked around for a box-camera, but then he turned back and was contented just to stare.
A thousand silhouettes eddied in the air by his warehouse-home. They swirled together, aimless for a moment, then felt the currents of the air and were whisked away. Some went with the wind. Some tacked and fought the gusts and wheeled over the city. The peace of that first confused moment broke down. Aspises flew through the shoals of disoriented insects, their tiny leonine jaws closing on fat little bodies with a crunch. Hawks skewered pigeons and jackdaws and canaries. Dragonfly-snakes corkscrewed in thermals and bit at prey.
The flight-styles of the liberated animals were as distinct as their silhouetted forms. One dark shape flitted chaotically around the sky, sinking towards a streetlamp, unable to resist the light: a fell-moth. Another rose with a majestic simplicity and arced into the night: some bird of prey. This one opened momentarily like a flower then squeezed and jetted away with a squirt of discoloured air: one of the small wind-polyps.
Bodies of the exhausted and the dying fell out of the air with a little patter of flesh. The ground below would be discoloured with blood and ichor, Isaac realized. There were gentle splashes as the Canker claimed victims. But there was more life than death. For a few days, a few weeks, Isaac mused, the sky over New Crobuzon would be more colourful.
Isaac sighed beatifically. He looked around and ran over to the few boxes of cocoons and eggs and grubs. He shoved them over to the window, leaving only the big, dying, multicoloured caterpillar undisturbed.
Isaac grabbed handfuls of eggs and hurled them out of the window after the fleeing shapes. He followed them with caterpillars that twisted and jack-knifed as they fell towards the paved ground. He shook cages that rattled with delicate pupating shapes, and emptied them out of the window. He poured out a tank of waterborn larvae. For these young, it was a cruel liberation, a few seconds of freedom and rushing air.
Eventually, when the last tiny shape had disappeared below, Isaac closed the window. He turned back and surveyed the warehouse. He heard a faint drone of wings, and saw a few airborne shapes circulating the lamps. An aspis, a handful of moths or butterflies, and a couple of small birds. Well, he thought, they’ll find their own way out, or they won’t last long and I can clear them out when they starve.
Littering the floor in front of the window were some of the runts and the dying, the weaklings, that had fallen before they could fly. Some were dead. Most crawled feebly this way and that. Isaac set to cleaning them out.
“You have the advantage that you are (a) rather beautiful; and (b) rather interesting, old chum,” he said to the huge, sickly grub as he worked. “No, no, don’t thank me. Just consider me a philanthrope. And also, I don’t understand why you don’t eat. You’re my project,” he said, jettisoning a dustpan full of feebly crawling bodies into the night air. “I doubt you’ll last the night, but fuck it, you’ve appealed to my pity and my curiosity and I’ll have one last stab at rescuing you.”
There was a shuddering bang. The door to the warehouse had been hurled open.
“Grimnebulin!”
It was Yagharek. The garuda stood in the dimly lit space, legs apart and arms clutching at his cloak. The jutting shape of his wooden wing disguise swayed unrealistically from side to side. It was not properly attached. Isaac leaned over the rail and frowned.
“Yagharek?”
“Have you forsaken me, Grimnebulin?”
Yagharek was shrieking like a tortured bird. His words were almost impossible to understand. Isaac gesticulated at him to calm down.
“Yagharek, what the fuck are you talking about . . . ?”
“The birds, Grimnebulin, I saw the birds! You told me, you showed me, they were for your research . . . what has happened, Grimnebulin? Are you giving up?”
“Hang on . . . how in the name of Jabber’s arse did you see them fly away? Where’ve you been?”
“On your roof, Grimnebulin.” Yagharek was quietening. He was calmer. He radiated a massive sadness. “On your roof, where I perch, night after night, waiting for you to help me. I saw you release all the little subjects. Why have you given up, Grimnebulin?”
Isaac beckoned him up the stairs.
“Yag, old son . . . Damn, I don’t know where to start.” Isaac stared up at the ceiling. “What the arse were you doing on my roof? How long have you hung about up there? ’Stail, you could’ve kipped down here, or something . . . that is absurd. Not to say a bit eerie, thinking of you up there while I work or eat or shit or whatnot. And—” he held up his hand to cut off Yagharek’s response “—and I have not given up on your project.”
He was silent for a while. He let the words sink in. He waited for Yagharek to calm, to return from the miserable little hollow he had carved for himself.
“I haven’t given up,” he repeated. “What’s happened is quite good, actually . . . We’ve entered a new phase, I think. Out with the old. That line of research has been . . . ah . . . terminated.”
Yagharek bowed his head. His shoulders shuddered slightly as he breathed out lengthily.
“I do not understand.”
“Right, well, look, come over here. I’m going to show you something.”
Isaac led Yagharek over to the desk. He paused momentarily to tu
t at the huge caterpillar that sagged on its side in the box. It stirred weakly.
Yagharek did not spare it a glance.
Isaac pointed to the various bundles of paper that propped up overdue library books and teetered on his desk. Drawings, equations, notes and treatises. Yagharek began to sift slowly through them. Isaac guided him.
“Look . . . See all the damn sketches everywhere. Wings, for the most part. Now, the starting point for the research was the wing. Seems sensible, don’t it? So what I’ve been about is understanding that particular limb.
“The garuda who live in New Crobuzon are useless for us, by the way. I put up notices in the university, but apparently there’re no garuda students this year. I even tried to argue for the sake of science with a garuda . . . uh . . . community leader . . . and it was a bit of a disaster. Let’s put it that way.” Isaac paused, remembering, then blinked himself back to the discussion. “So instead, let’s look to the birds.
“Now, that leads us to a whole new problem. The little beggars, the humming birds and wrens and whatnot are all interesting and useful in terms of . . . y’know . . . broad background, the physics of flight and what have you, but basically we’re looking at the big boys. Kestrels, hawks, eagles if I’d got hold of any. Because at this stage I’m still thinking analogously. But I don’t want you to think I’m close-minded . . . I’m not studying the mayfly or whatever just out of interest, I’m trying to work out if I can apply it.
“I mean, I’m presuming you’re not fussy, right, Yag? I’m presuming that if I graft onto your back a pair of bat or bluebottle wings, or even a wind-polyp’s flightgland, you’re not going to be fussy. Might not be pretty, but it’s just about getting you into the air, right?”
Yagharek nodded. He was listening fiercely, sifting through the papers on the desk as he did so. He was intent on understanding.
“Right. So it seems reasonable, even given all that, that it’s the big birds we should be looking at. But of course . . .” Isaac rummaged among the papers, grabbed some pictures from the wall, handed sheafs of the relevant diagrams to Yagharek. “Of course, that turns out not to be so. I mean, you can get so far on the aerodynamics of birds, all useful stuff, but it’s actually very misleading to be looking at them. Because the aerodynamics of your body are so fucking different, basically. You ain’t just an eagle with a scrawny human body attached. I’m sure you never thought you were . . . I don’t know how your maths and physics are, but on this sheet here—” Isaac found it and passed it over “—are some diagrams and equations which show you why big birds’ flight ain’t the direction to be looking. Lines of force all wrong. Not strong enough. That sort of thing.
“So, I turn to the other wings in the collection. What if we tacked on dragonfly wings or what have you? Well, first of all there’s the problem of getting hold of insect wings big enough. The only insects big enough already aren’t going to just hand ’em over. And I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy fucking off into the mountains or wherever to ambush an assassin beetle. Get our arses kicked.
“What about building them to our specifications? Then we can get the size right and the shape. We can compensate for your . . . awkward form.” Isaac grinned and continued. “Trouble is, material science being what it is, we might be able to make them exact enough, and light enough, and strong enough, but I honestly doubt it. I’m working on designs that might work, but might not. I don’t think the odds are good enough.
“Also, you’ve got to remember that this whole project is dependent on you getting Remade by a virtuoso. I’m glad to say I don’t know any Remakers, which is the first thing, and the second is they’re usually more interested in humiliation, industrial power or aesthetics than in something as intricate as flight. There are shitloads of nerve endings, loads of muscles, ripped-up bones and the like floating around in your back, and they’d have to get every one exactly right if you were going to have the slightest chance of getting airborne.”
Isaac had steered Yagharek into a chair. He pulled up a stool and sat opposite him. The garuda was completely silent. He gazed at Isaac with powerful concentration, then at the diagrams he held. This was how he read, Isaac realized, with this intensity and focus. He was not like a patient waiting for a doctor to get to the point: he was taking in every single word.
“I should say that I’m not totally finished with this. There’s one person I know who’s adept at the sort of bio-thaumaturgy you’d need to have working wings grafted to you. So I’m going to go round and pick his brains about the chances of success.” Isaac grimaced and shook his head. “And let me tell you, Yag old son, that if you knew this geezer you’d know how damn noble that is. There’s no sacrifice I won’t make it for you . . .” He paused lengthily.
“So there’s the chance this chap could say ‘Yes, wings, no problem, bring him round and I’ll do it on Dustday afternoon.’ That is possible, but you employ me for my scientific nous, and I’m telling you that it’s my professional opinion that that won’t happen. I think we have to think laterally.
“My first forays down this route were to look at the various things that fly without wings. Now, I’ll spare you the details of my schemes. Most of the plans are . . . here, if you’re interested. A subcutaneous self-inflating mini-dirigible; a transplant of mutant wind-polyp glands; integrating you with a flying golem; even something as prosaic as teaching you basic physical thaumaturgy.” Isaac indicated the notes on each of these plans as he mentioned them. “All unworkable. Thaumaturgy’s unreliable and exhausting. Anyone can learn some basic hexes, given application, but constant countergeotropy on demand would take a damn sight more energy and skill than most people have got. Do you have powerful sortilege in the Cymek?”
Yagharek shook his head slowly. “Some whispers to call prey to our claws; some symbols and passes that encourage bones to knit and blood to clot: that is all.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. So best not to rely on that. And trust me when I tell you that my other . . . er . . . offbeat plans were unworkable.
“So I’ve been spending all my time working on stuff like this, and getting nowhere, and I realized that whenever I stop for a minute or two and just have a think, the same thing comes into my head. Watercræft.”
Yagharek frowned, drawing his already heavy brows into an overhanging crag of almost geological aspect. He shook his head to show his confusion.
“Watercræft,” Isaac repeated. “You know what that is?”
“I have read something of it . . . The skill of the vodyanoi . . .”
“Bang on, old son. You’ll see the dockers doing it sometimes, in Kelltree or Smog Bend. A whole gang of them can shape quite a bit of the river. They dig holes in the water down to where spilt cargoes lie on the bottom, so the cranes can hook them. Fucking amazing. In rural communities they use it to cut trenches of air through rivers, then drive fish into them. They just fly out of the flat side of the river and flop onto the ground. Brilliant.” Isaac pursed his lips in appreciation. “Anyway, these days it’s mostly just used to arse about, make little sculptures. They have little competitions and whatnot.
“The point is, Yag, that what you’ve got there is water behaving very much as it shouldn’t. Right? And that’s what you want. You want heavy stuff, this thing here, this body—” he poked Yagharek gently in the chest “—to fly. Are you with me? Let’s turn our minds to the ontological conundrum of persuading matter to break habits of aeons. We want to make elements misbehave. This isn’t a problem of advanced ornithology, it’s philosophy.
“ ’Stail, Yag, this is stuff I’ve been working on for years! It’d almost turned into a kind of hobby. But then this morning I looked again at some notes I’d made early on in your case, and I linked it up with all my old ideas, and I saw that this was the way to go. And I’ve been wrestling with it all day.” Isaac shook a piece of paper at Yagharek, a piece of paper on which was a triangle containing a cross.
Isaac grabbed a pencil and wrote word
s at the three points of the triangle. He turned the diagram to face Yagharek. The top point was labelled Occult/thaumaturgical; the bottom left Material; the bottom right Social/sapiential.
“Righto, now, don’t get too bogged down with this diagram, Yag old son, it’s supposed to be an aid to thought, nothing more. What you’ve got here is a depiction of the three points within which all scholarship, all knowledge, is located.
“Down here, there’s material. That’s the actual physical stuff, atoms and the like. Everything from fundamental femtoscopic particles like elyctrons, up to big fuck-off volcanos. Rocks, elyctromagnetism, chymical reaction . . . All that sort of thing.
“Opposite, that’s social. Sentient creatures, of which there’s no shortage on Bas-Lag, can’t just be studied like stones. By reflecting on the world and on their own reflections, humans and garuda and cactacae and whatnot create a different order of organization, right? So it’s got to be studied in its own terms—but at the same time it’s also obviously linked to the physical stuff that makes everything up. That’s what this nice line is here, connecting the two.
“Up top is occult. Now we’re cooking. Occult: ‘hidden.’ Takes in the various forces and dynamics and the like that aren’t just to do with physical bits and bobs interacting, and aren’t just the thoughts of thinkers. Spirits, dæmons, gods if you want to call them that, thaumaturgy . . . you get the idea. That’s up at that end. But it’s linked to the other two. First off, thaumaturgic techniques, invocation, shamanism and so on, they all affect—and are affected by—the social relations that surround them. And then the physical aspect: hexes and charms are mostly the manipulation of theoretical particles—the ‘enchanted particles’—called thaumaturgons. Now, some scientists—” he thumped his chest “—think they’re essentially the same sort of thing as protons and all the physical particles.
“This . . .” said Isaac slyly, his voice slowing right down, “is where stuff gets really interesting.
Perdido Street Station Page 17
