Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  The dreamshit was a mass of brown, sticky pellets that smelt like very burnt sugar.

  “What is this stuff?” Isaac asked Gazid. “I’ve heard of it, but I know arse-all about it.”

  “New thing, ’Zaac. Expensive stuff. Been around a year or so. It’s . . . heady stuff . . .”

  “What does it do?”

  “Couldn’t describe it really. Want to buy some?”

  “No!” said Isaac sharply, then hesitated. “Well . . . Not for me, anyway . . . How much would this packet cost, Lucky?”

  Gazid hesitated, doubtless wondering how much he could exaggerate.

  “Uh . . . about thirty guineas . . .”

  “Oh fuck off, Lucky . . . You’re such a piss-artist, old son . . . I’ll buy this off you for . . .” Isaac hesitated. “For ten.”

  “Done,” said Gazid instantly.

  Shit, thought Isaac. I’ve been stung. He was about to quibble, when he suddenly thought better of it. He looked carefully at Gazid, who was beginning to swagger again, even with his face slick and ugly with gore and mucus.

  “Righto, then. Deal. Listen, Lucky,” said Isaac evenly, “I might want more of this stuff, you know what I mean? And if we stay on good terms, there’s no reason not to keep you on as my . . . exclusive supplier. Know what I mean? But if anything came up to spread discord in our relationship, distrust and the like, I’d have to go elsewhere. Understand?”

  “ ’Zaac, my man, say no more . . . Partners, that’s what we are . . .”

  “Absolutely,” said Isaac heavily. He was not so foolish as to think he could trust Lucky Gazid, but at least this way Isaac could keep him vaguely sweet. Gazid was unlikely to bite the hand that fed him, at least not for a while.

  This can’t last, thought Isaac, but it’ll do for now.

  Isaac plucked one of the moist, sticky lumps from the packet. It was the size of a large olive, coated in a thick and rapidly drying mucus. Isaac pulled back the lid of the caterpillar’s box an inch or two and dropped the nugget of dreamshit inside. He squatted down to watch the larva through the wire front.

  Isaac’s eyelids flickered as if static coursed through him. For a moment, he could not focus his vision.

  “Whoa . . .” moaned Lucky Gazid behind him. “Something’s fucking with my head . . .”

  Isaac felt briefly nauseous, then aflame with the most consuming and uncompromised ecstasy he had ever felt. After less than half a second the inhuman sensations spewed instantaneously out of him. He felt as if they left by his nose.

  “Oh by Jabber . . .” Isaac yelped. His vision fluctuated, then sharpened and became unusually clear. “This little fucker’s some sort of empath, ain’t it?” he murmured.

  He gazed at the caterpillar feeling like a voyeur. The creature was rolling around the drug pellet as if it were a snake crushing its prey. Its mouthpart was clamped hugely onto the top of the dreamshit, and it was chewing it with a hunger that seemed lascivious in its intensity. Its side-split jaws oozed with spit. It was devouring its food like a child eating toffee-pudding at Jabber’s Feast. The dreamshit was rapidly disappearing.

  “Hell’s Ducks,” said Isaac. “It’s going to want a lot more than that.” He dropped another five or six little lozenges into the cage. The grub rolled happily around in the sticky collection.

  Isaac stood up. He regarded Lucky Gazid, who watched the caterpillar eating and smiled beatifically, swaying.

  “Lucky, old son, seems like you might’ve saved my little experiment’s bacon. Very much obliged.”

  “I’m a lifesaver, aren’t I, ’Zaac?” Gazid spun slowly in an ugly pirouette. “Lifesaver! Lifesaver!”

  “Yes, that’ll do, that’s what you are, old son, hush now.” Isaac glanced at the clock. “I really have to get a bit more work done, so do the decent thing and push off, eh? No hard feelings, Lucky . . .” Isaac hesitated and thrust out his hand. “Sorry about your nose.”

  “Oh.” Gazid looked surprised. He prodded his bloody face experimentally. “Well . . . whatever . . .”

  Isaac strode away towards his desk.

  “I’ll get your moolah. Hang on.” He rummaged in the drawers, eventually finding his wallet and drawing out a guinea. “Hold on, I’ve more somewhere. Bear with me . . .” Isaac knelt by the bed and began to throw piles of paper aside, collecting the stivers and shekels he unearthed.

  Gazid reached into the packet of dreamshit which Isaac had left on the caterpillar’s box. He looked thoughtfully at Isaac, who was scrabbling under the bed with his face on the floor. Gazid plucked two dreamshit pellets from the sticky morass and glanced over to Isaac, to see if he was watching. Isaac was saying something in a conversational tone, his words muffled by the bed above him.

  Gazid sauntered slowly over towards the bed. He took a sweet wrapper from his pocket and twisted it around one of his dreamshit doses, dropped it into his pocket. An idiot grin grew and blossomed across his face as he stared at the second lump.

  “Should know what you’re prescribing, ’Zaac,” he whispered. “That’s ethical . . .” He giggled with delight.

  “What’s that?” shouted Isaac. He began to wriggle his way out from under the bed. “I’ve found it. I knew there was some money in the pocket of one of these trousers . . .”

  Lucky Gazid quickly peeled off the top of the ham roll that lay half-eaten on the desk. He slipped the dreamshit into a mustard-covered space under a lettuce leaf. He replaced the top of the roll and stepped away from the desk.

  Isaac stood and turned to him, dusty and smiling. He clutched a fan of notes and some loose change.

  “That’s ten guineas. ’Stail, you bargain like a fucking pro . . .”

  Gazid took the proffered money and backed down the stairs quickly.

  “Thanks then ’Zaac,” he said. “Appreciate it.”

  Isaac was somewhat taken aback.

  “Right then. I’ll contact you if I need any more dreamshit, all right?”

  “Yeah, you do that, big brother . . .”

  Gazid was all but scurrying out of the warehouse, pulling the door behind him with a cursory wave. Isaac heard a peal of absurd giggles from the retreating form, a thin wittering cluck that tailed out in the darkness.

  Devil’s Tail! he thought. I fucking hate dealing with junkies. What a screwed-up mess he is . . . Isaac shook his head and wandered back to the caterpillar’s cage.

  The grub was already starting on the second lump of sticky drug. Unpredictable little waves of insect happiness spilt over into Isaac’s mind. The sensation was unpleasant. Isaac backed away. As he watched, the grub broke off eating and delicately cleaned itself of the sticky residue. Then it resumed eating, soiling itself again, then preening again.

  “Fastidious little bugger, eh?” muttered Isaac. “Is that good, eh? You enjoying that? Hmmm? Lovely.”

  Isaac wandered over to his desk and picked up his own supper. He turned back to watch the twisting little multicoloured form as he took a bite of his hardening roll and sipped the chocolate.

  “So what the fuck are you going to turn into, then?” he muttered to his experiment. Isaac ate the rest of his roll, grimacing at the slightly stale bread and the musty salad. At least the chocolate was good.

  He wiped his mouth and returned to the caterpillar’s cage, steeling himself against the peculiar little empathic waves. Isaac squatted down and watched the starving creature gorge itself. It was difficult to be sure, but Isaac thought the grub’s colours were brighter already.

  “You’ll be a good little sideline to keep me from getting obsessed with crisis theory, eh? Won’t you, you little squirming bugger? Not in any of the textbooks, are you? Shy? Is that it?”

  A blast of twisted psyche hit Isaac like a crossbow bolt. He staggered and fell over.

  “Ow!” he screeched, and writhed to get away from the cage. “I can’t hack your empathic bleating, old son . . .” He picked himself up and walked towards the bed, rubbing his head. Just as he reached it, another spasm of alien
emotions pulsed violently in his head. His knees buckled and he fell by the bed, clawing at his temples.

  “Oh shit!” He was alarmed. “That’s too much, you’re getting way too strong . . .”

  Suddenly he could not speak. He snapped totally still as a third intense attack flooded his synapses. These were different, he realized, these were not the same as the querulous little psychic wails from the weird grub ten feet from him. His mouth was suddenly arid, and tasted of musty salad. Mulch. Compost. Old fruitcake.

  Lumpy mustard.

  “Oh no . . .” he muttered. His voice shook as realization gripped him. “Oh no, no, no, oh Gazid, you fucking prick, you shit, I’ll fucking kill you . . .”

  He clutched the edge of the bed with hands that trembled violently. He was sweating and his skin looked like stone.

  Get into bed, he thought desperately. Get under the covers and ride it out, thousands of people do this every day for pleasure for Jabber’s sake . . .

  Isaac’s hand crawled like a drugged tarantula across the folds of the blanket. He couldn’t work out the best way of getting under the covers, because of the way they folded in on themselves and around the sheet: both sets of cloth ripples were so similar that Isaac was suddenly convinced that they were all part of the same big undulating cloth unity and that to bisect it would be ghastly, so he rolled his bulk on top of the covers and found himself swimming in the intricate twisting folds of cotton and wool. He swam up and down, waving his arms in an energetic, childish doggy paddle, hacking and spitting and smacking his lips with a prodigious thirst.

  Look at you, you cretin, spat one section of his mind in contempt. How dignified is this?

  But he paid no attention. He was content to swim gently in place on the bed, panting like a dying animal, tensing his neck experimentally and prodding his eyes.

  He felt a build-up of pressure in the back of his mind. He watched a big door, a big cellar door, set into the wall of the most ignored corner of his cerebellum. The door was rattling. Something was trying to get out.

  Quick, thought Isaac. Bolt it . . .

  But he could feel the increasing power of whatever was fighting to escape. The door was a boil, bursting with pus, ready to rupture, a hugely muscled blank-faced dog, straining ominously and silently against chains, the sea pounding relentlessly against a crumbling harbour wall.

  Something in Isaac’s mind burst open.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  sun pouring in like a waterfall and I rejoice in it as blooms burst from my shoulders and my head and chlorophyll rushes invigoratingly through my skin and I raise great spined arms

  don’t touch me like that I’m not ready you pig

  Look at those steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work so!

  is this

  I am proud to be able to tell you that your father has consented to our match

  is this a

  and here I swim under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my webbed feet push towards

  is this a dream?

  light skin food air metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow darkness

  Is this a dream?

  But Isaac knew this was not a dream.

  A magic lantern was flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images. This was no zöetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling orgiastically and he . . .

  “Oh Jabber . . .” He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast, they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more moments of life were occurring at once.

  The light was bright, when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous, symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be, grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin. Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds. He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were memories. These were dreams.

  Isaac was spattered by a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness. Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.

  His body was nothing but a boneless sac of mental effluent. Somewhere way away, he heard it moan and rock on the bed with a liquid gurgling.

  Isaac reeled. Somewhere in the flickering onslaught of emotion and bathos he discerned a thin, constant stream of disgust and fear that he recognized as his own. He struggled towards it through the sludge of imagined and replayed dramas of consciousness. He touched the tentative dribble of nausea that was indisputably what he was feeling at that moment, held fast, centred himself in it . . . Isaac clung to it with radical fervour.

  He held to his core, buffeted by the dreams around him. Isaac flew over a spiky town, a six-year-old girl laughing delightedly in a language he had never heard but momentarily understood as his own; he bucked with inexpert excitement as he dreamed the sex dream of a pubescent boy; he swam through estuaries and visited strange grottoes and fought ritualistic battles. He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming cactacae mind. Houses morphed around him with the dreamlogic that seemed to be shared by all the sentient races of Bas-Lag.

  New Crobuzon appeared here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps between streets that were traversed in seconds.

  There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard.

  The sea of dreams in which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.

  Less of a sea, he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of a consommé. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally. If I throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out, he thought.

  The memories and dreams came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.

  He rolled in a surf of sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming out their guilty, illicit desires.

  Isaac spiralled in a little whirlpool of anx
iety dreams. A human girl about to enter her exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi watercræfter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable to recall a single line of his speech.

  My mind’s a cauldron, Isaac thought, and all these dreams are bubbling over.

  The slop of ideas came quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker, trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.

  It was no use. The dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized that his dream was true.

  All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own.

  There was a frantic chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.

  Abruptly, all the dreams stopped.

  Isaac opened his eyes too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.

  The dreams had stopped. Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.

  “By . . . Jabber’s . . . arse . . .” he whispered. The effort made his head ache.

  This was absurd. He had no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything, his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was . . . he struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock . . . it was half past seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way onto the bed.