Below the skittering clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.
The perplexing organic shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes, then opened them again. He had to see the thing.
It drew closer, dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.
Even from that distance and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon . . . this was a freak, malformed.
This was the slake-moth that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.
This unnatural birth was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.
“Oh sweet Jabber,” whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, “Devil’s Tail . . . Gods help me . . .”
In a curling upsurge of industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.
It crouched, its back curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel arms—flawed, but still vicious and powerful—with the killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.
All around it, constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue, flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.
Derkhan moaned and the moth shuddered.
Isaac tried to yell to her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.
The waves of Isaac’s mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.
The slake-moth quivered with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.
For a moment, Isaac tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw up strategies for escape.
But he was so tired, so befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late. Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.
The rippling tide of colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.
Isaac saw the slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in their narcotic display.
And then his mind slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets effervesced up from within him.
This was not like the dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience. These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no he to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the recall and the symbol. Isaac was the memory of parent-love, the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions, the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the dreaming
the dreaming
it
it stopped
stopped suddenly and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.
He blinked fervently as his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.
He heard Derkhan’s voice coming to the end of some announcement.
“. . . incredible!” she shouted. “Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into focus.
He stumbled forward onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood from his face.
It took a moment for him to make sense of the scene before him.
Derkhan and Yagharek were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.
In front of Isaac were several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous shattered thing.
Towering over the Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river, over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the centre of the space.
Directly below it, burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.
The mound of dense rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the shattered slats of the crate.
Below it, twisting and scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.
“Isaac, did you see it?” hissed Derkhan.
He shook his head, his eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.
“What happened?” he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.
“You were under nearly a minute,” Derkhan said urgently. “It got you . . . I was screaming at you, but you were gone . . . and then . . . and then the constructs stepped forward.” She looked, wondering. “They were walking towards it, and it could sense them . . . and it seemed confused and . . . and flustered. It moved back a little and stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at the constructs as well as you, but they kept coming!”
Derkhan stumbled forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.
Derkhan sank to the floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.
“It couldn’t get them! They kept coming and it was . . . it was backing away . . . It kept its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was fearful . . . confused. And while it was moving back, the crane was moving! It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was waiting . . . and the crate came down on it.”
She turned and looke
d at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground. The slake-moth keened piteously.
Behind her, the Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid it.
“It cannot sense my mind. I am invisible to it,” the man said. “And when it hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and relentless slide . . . and that is all.
“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.
“There is nothing in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it.” The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. “I can kill it.”
Derkhan stared at Isaac.
“A thinking machine . . .” she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.
“Why did you subject me to that?” he said shakily, seeing the blood which still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.
“It was my calculation,” he said simply. “I computed it as most likely to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening.”
Isaac shook his head in exhausted disgust.
“See . . .” he spat. “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic . . . No allowances for variables like headaches . . .”
“Isaac,” said Derkhan fervently. “We’ve got them! We can use the Council as . . . as troops. We can take the moths out!”
Yagharek had come to stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking hard.
“Damn,” he said very slowly. “Minds without dreams.”
“The others will not be so easy,” said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.
“There are two,” said the avatar. “They have been brought here by the dying call of this their sibling.”
“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”
“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”
Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.
They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.
“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”
After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.
Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.
The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.
There was a sublime stillness in the dump.
With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.
“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”
Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.
“I know where they are,” said the avatar.
The others stared at him in astonishment.
“I know where they hide,” he said. “I know where they nest.”
“How?” hissed Isaac. “Where?” He grasped the avatar’s arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where his brain had been torn.
The avatar’s skin was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.
Those eyes, with their unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish, regarded him.
“All of me have tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do not correspond to any city-race.
“There are complex patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.
“The moths are living in the Glasshouse, above the cactus people, in Riverskin.”
“Damn,” hissed Isaac, after a silence. “Are they animals? Or are they cunning? It’s inspired, whichever. Best damn place I can think of.”
“Why?” said Yagharek unexpectedly.
Isaac and Derkhan looked at him.
“New Crobuzon cactacae ain’t like the Cymek variety, Yag,” said Isaac. “Or rather, they are, and maybe that’s the problem. You’ve dealt with ’em in Shankell, doubtless. You know what they’re like. Our cactus people here are a branch of those same desert cactacae who came north. I don’t know anything about the others, the mountain cactus, up in the steppes, east. But I do know the southern style, and their lifestyle never translated so well up here.” He paused and sighed and rubbed his head. He was exhausted and his head still ached. He had to concentrate, to think through the simmering memories of Lin just behind his eyes. He swallowed hard and continued.
“All that puffed-up hard-man stuff that rules the roost in Shankell starts looking a bit dubious up here. That’s why they built the Glasshouse, you ask my opinion. Have a nasty little bit of the Cymek in New Crobuzon. They got special dispensation in law when the Glasshouse was put up—gods only know what deals they had to cut to get that. Technically it’s an independent country. No entry for anyone without permission, including the militia. They’ve got their own laws in there, their own everything.
“Now, obviously, that’s a joke. You can bet your arse the Glasshouse wouldn’t mean shit without New Crobuzon. Masses of the cactacae troop out every day, go to work, surly buggers that they are, then take the shekels back to Riverskin. New Crobuzon owns the Glasshouse. And I don’t think for one minute the militia can’t go in any godsdamn time they choose. But Parliament and the city governors go through with this charade. You don’t just walk into the Glasshouse, Yag, and if you do get in . . . damned if I’d know what to ex
pect in there.
“I mean, you do hear rumours. Some people have been inside, of course. And there are stories of what the militia have seen through the dome from above in their airships. But most of us—me included—have no real idea what goes on in there, or how to get in.”
“But we could get in,” said Derkhan. “Maybe Pigeon’ll crawl back, sniffing for your gold. Eh? And if he does, I bet he could get us in. You can’t tell me there’s no crime in the Glasshouse. I just don’t believe it.” She looked fierce. Her eyes were glinting with purpose. “Council,” she said, and turned towards the naked man. “Do you have any . . . of you . . . in the Glasshouse?”
The avatar shook his head.
“The cactus people do not use many constructs. None of me have been inside. That is why I cannot be exact about where the slake-moths are. Except that they sleep within that dome.”
As the avatar spoke, Isaac was hit by a sudden revelation.
He was mulling over the problem, thinking for ways into the Glasshouse, when he realized with astonishment that he could simply walk away from this. Lemuel’s exasperated advice came back to him: leave it to the professionals.
He had waved the suggestion off in irritation, but now he realized that he could choose to do exactly that. There were a thousand ways to tip off the militia without delivering himself to them: the state made informing easy. He knew now where the slake-moths were: he could tell the government, with all its might, its hunters and scientists, its massive resources. He could let them know where the slake-moths nested, and he could run. And the militia could hunt them for him, and they could recapture the monstrous things. The moth which had hunted him was gone: he had no special reason to be afraid.
The possibility struck him hard.
But it was never, even for a fraction of a second, a temptation.
Isaac remembered Vermishank’s interrogation. The man had tried not to show his fear, but it had been obvious he had no faith at all in the militia’s ability to catch the slake-moths. And now, in the Construct Council, for the first time Isaac was faced with a power that had shown it could kill these unthinkable predators. A power that was not working with the state, but rather that offered its services to him and his companions—or that commandeered their services for itself.
Perdido Street Station Page 49
