Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  “So anyway,” he continued, “one of my disgusting friends was using this bizarre drug and I wanted to know more about it. Obviously shouldn’t have asked someone so high-minded.”

  Vermishank was chuckling soundlessly. He laughed without opening his mouth. His face remained set in a sour smirk. He kept his eyes on Isaac. The only sign that he was laughing was the little shucking motion of his shoulders and his slight rocking back and forth.

  “Ha,” he said eventually. “Touchy-touchy, Isaac.” He shook his head. Isaac patted his pockets and fastened his jacket, ostentatiously getting ready to go, refusing to feel silly. He turned his back and walked to the door, debating the merits of a parting shot.

  Vermishank spoke while he considered.

  “Dreamsh . . . Ah, that substance is not really my area, Isaac. Pharmacology and whatnot something of a biological backwater. I’m sure one of your old colleagues might be able to tell you more. Good luck.”

  Isaac had decided against saying anything. He did, however, wave behind him in a pusillanimous motion that he could convince himself was contemptuous, but could just about pass for gratitude and farewell. You arsing coward, he scolded himself. But there was no getting away from it, Vermishank was a useful repository of knowledge. Isaac knew it would take a lot for him to be really, unrepentantly rude to his former boss. That was just too much expertise to close the door on.

  So Isaac forgave himself his half-hearted retaliation and grinned, instead, at his own floundering reaction to the awful man. At least he had learnt what he had come there to learn. Remaking was not an option for Yagharek. Isaac was pleased, and he was honest enough to recognize the ignobility of the reasons. His own research had been reinvigorated by the problem of flight, and if the prosaic flesh-sculpting of applied bio-thaumaturgy had won out over crisis theory, his research would have stalled. He did not want to lose his new momentum.

  Yag old son, he reflected, it’s just as I thought. I’m your best shot, and you’re mine.

  Before the city there were canals that wound between rock formations like silicate tusks, and patches of corn in the thin soil. And before the scrub there were days of glowering stone. Gnarled granite tumours that had sat heavy in the belly of the land since its birth, their thin earth-flesh stripped from them by air and water in a mere ten thousand years. They were ugly and terrifying as innards always are, those rock promontories, those crags.

  I walked the path of the river. It was nameless between the hard ridged hills: in days it would become the Tar. I could see the freezing heights of real mountains miles to the west, colossi of rock and snow that reared as imperiously over the local jags of scree and lichen as those lower peaks reared over me.

  Sometimes I thought the rocks shaped like looming figures, with claws and fangs and heads like clubs or hands. Petrified giants; unmoving stone gods; mistakes of the eye or the wind’s chance sculptures.

  I was seen. Goats and sheep poured scorn on my stumbling. Screaming birds of prey shouted their contempt. Sometimes I passed shepherds who stared at me, suspicious and rude.

  There were darker shapes at night. There were colder watchers under the water.

  The rock teeth broke earth so slowly and slyly that I was walking that gouged valley for hours before I knew it. Before that were days and days of grass and scrub.

  The earth was easier on my feet, and the massive sky easier on my eye. But I would not be fooled. I would not be seduced. It was not the desert sky. It was a pretender, a surrogate, that tried to lull me. Drying vegetation stroked me with every wash of wind, lusher by far than my home. In the distance was the forest that I knew extended north to the edge of New Crobuzon, east to the sea. In secret places among its thick trees jutted vast, obscure, forgotten machines, pistons and gears, iron trunks among the wood, rust their bark.

  I did not approach them.

  Behind me where the river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade, breaking it off in the flesh of some rushing, sucking predator that loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the muck. I do not know if it died.

  Before the wetland and the river were days of drying grass and foothills, that I was warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I saw none.

  There were villages that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on their behalf to their harvest gods. There were villages that kept me out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the grass with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

  I slept alone, hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept, leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

  Those sprawling downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

  I walked with temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

  I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

  One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me.

  I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest.

  I had been a harder creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left Myrshock, where my ship had landed, without spending even one night there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I felt oppressed.

  I hurried through the city seeking nothing but supplies and assurance that I was right to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept my gold, only my weapon.

  I was eager to leave the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish, oily paddleship crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

  And before the waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town. Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more than I lost, rampaging like a fighting cockerel at night and hoarding pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly, even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought passage on a merchant ship.

  I
set out across the continent to become whole.

  The desert came with me.

  PART THREE

  Metamorphoses

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

  They murmured to each other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way. They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

  “Bloody useless bloody thing,” they muttered in disgust. Half-hearted attempts were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by gods or nature or chance.

  In the Canker Wedge zoo, animals shifted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of lustful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable behaviour.

  Now, as light stayed longer every day, the bears and hyaenas and bony hippos, the lonely alopex and the apes, lay still—tensely, it seemed—for hours, watching the passers-by from their scrubbed-brick cells and their muddy trenches. They were waiting. For the southern rains that would never reach New Crobuzon, but were encoded in their bones, perhaps. And when the rains had not come, they might settle down and wait for the dry season that, similarly, did not afflict their new home. It must be a strange, anxious existence, the keepers mused over the roars of tired, disoriented beasts.

  The nights had lost nearly two hours since winter, but they seemed to have squeezed even more essence into the shorter time. They seemed particularly intense, as more and more illicit activity strove to fit the hours from sundown to dawn. Every night the enormous old warehouse half a mile south of the zoo attracted streams of men and women. The occasional leonine roar might breach the thumping and the constant blare of the crotchety, wakeful city entering the old building, sounding above the throng. It would be ignored.

  The bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign still read the length of the building: Cadnebar’s Soaps and Tallow. Cadnebar’s had gone bust in the slump of ’57. The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken and sold as scrap. After two or three years of quiet mouldering, Cadnebar’s had been reborn as the glad’ circus.

  Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its Parliament was not like Maru’ahm’s, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.

  And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport.

  Except, of course, at Cadnebar’s.

  Illegal it might have been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment. Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians, industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of course, that doubled as cockfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another, with glad’-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar’s was legendary.

  Every night, the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals.

  The sport at Cadnebar’s was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

  As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar’s Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant.

  The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.

  In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

  Lin and Isaac snatched furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms.

  Lin had stroked his arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was tentatively very proud. She had found a space that she could not and did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece that he mustn’t ask her about. It was not as if she had disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with a little less vigour than she had two months ago.

  She teased Isaac about his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of dreamshit, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug. Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Isaac’s part, the creature sounded extraordinary.

  Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

  It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of subject,
along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks.

  Lin wanted to displace Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

  Every day that she saw Mr. Motley, he pulled her—unwilling as she was—into his city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped hints of gangland massacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for. But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her. It must be deliberate.

  The statue grew thighs and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonishing piece, as befitted its subject.

  Despite her attempts to insulate her mind, Mr. Motley’s blithe chat crept in, past her defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she would find herself idly wondering who was more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer’s End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import.