Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  Each successive exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to each other. The moist valves below their chitin dripped with aphrodisiac. They swept through the banks of each other’s perfume.

  As the pheremonal duel continued, one febrile voice sounded more and more triumphant. One body swept higher and higher, its fellows dropping away. Its emanations stank the air of sex. There were last-gasp attacks, spurts of erotic challenge. But one by one, the other moths closed their female pudenda, accepting defeat and masculinity.

  The triumphant moth—the moth still scarred and dripping from its mêlée with the Weaver—soared. Its scent still stank of female juices, its fecundity was unquestioned. It had proved itself the most motherly.

  It had gained the right to bear the brood.

  The other three moths adored it. They became swains.

  The feel of the new matriarch’s flesh made them ecstatic. They looped and fell and returned, aroused and ardent.

  The mother-moth toyed with them, led them over the hot dark city. When their beseeching became as painful as its own lust, it hovered and presented itself, opened its segmented exoskeleton and curled its vagina towards them.

  It coupled with them, one by one, becoming briefly a dangerous plummeting double-bodied thing, flanked by eager partners waiting their turn. The three who had become male felt organic mechanisms pull and twist, their bellies opening and penises emerging for the first time. They fumbled with their arms and flesh-ropes and bone jags and their matriarch did the same, reaching behind it with a complex twist of limbs that grabbed and tugged and intertwined.

  Sudden slipping connections were made. Each pair consorted and copulated with a fervent need and pleasure.

  When the hours of rutting had passed, the four slake-moths drifted on open wings, utterly exhausted. They dripped.

  As the air cooled, their bed of thermals deflated slowly, and they began to beat their wings to stay aloft. One by one, the three fathers peeled away and down to the city below, to search for food to revive and sustain them, and to provide for their conjugal partner.

  It lolled in the sky a while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

  The slake-moth matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to prepare the nest.

  My talons flex, trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

  I walk bent double along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge, watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

  Looking over to the west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister of light on the city’s skin.

  I am changing. There is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt. Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

  I have trailed these humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what to say?

  I am not Respected Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage fighter is gone.

  I am not the tiring one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never was.

  I am none of those. I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

  I am afraid of the Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto, dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

  To ask the question is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.

  And if it were the desert, if it were a gateway to the deepest Cymek, to the dry forests and fertile swampland, to the repository of sand-hidden life and the great nomadic garuda library, if the Glasshouse were more than a shadow, if it were the desert it feigns to be, it would still not be my home.

  That place does not exist.

  I shall wander for a night and a day. I will retrace the steps that once I made, in the shade of the railways. I will stalk the city’s monstrous geography and find the streets that bore me here, the squat channels in the brick to which I owe my life and self.

  I will find the tramps who shared my food, if they are not dead from disease or stabbed for their piss-stained shoes. They became my tribe, atomized and ruined and broken, but still some kind of tribe. Their numb lack of interest in me—in anything—was refreshing after days of careful skulking and an hour or two of ostentatious wandering in my agonizing wooden prostheses. I owe them nothing, those tedious alcohol- and drug-fucked heads, but I will find them again for my own sake, not theirs.

  I feel as if I walk these streets for the last time.

  Am I to die?

  There are two possibilities.

  I will help Grimnebulin and we will defeat these moths, these horrific night-creatures, these soul-drinkers, and he will create of me a battery. He will reward me, he will charge me up like a phlogistic cell and I will fly. As I think it I am climbing. I reach higher and higher on these girder-steps, climbing the city like a ladder to gaze at its tawdry, teeming night. I feel the flabby stubs of my wing muscles try to flap with a pathetic rudimentary motion. I will not rise on tides of air pushed down by feathers, but I will flex my mind like a wing and soar on channels of power, transformative energy, thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres, that Grimnebulin calls crisis.

  I will be a marvel.

  Or I will fail and die. I will fall and be skewered on harsh metal, or my dreams will be sucked from my mind and fed to some hatchling devil.

  Will I feel it? Will I live on in the milk? Will I know that I am being drunk?

  The sun is creeping into view. I am tiring.

  I know that I should have stayed. If I am to be anything real, something more than the mute, imbecilic presence I have so far been, I should stay and intervene and plan and prepare and nod at their suggestions, supplement them with my own. I am, I was, a hunter. I can stalk the monsters, the horrendous beasts.

  But I could not. I tried to say my sorries, to let Grimnebulin—even Blueday—know that I am one with them, that I am part of the gang. The crew. The posse. The moth-hunters. But it rang hollow in my skull.

  I will look and find myself, and then I will know if I can tell them that. And if not, what I can say instead.

  I will arm myself. I will bring weapons. I will find a knife, a whip like that I used to wield. Even if I find myself an outsider, I will not let them die unaided. I will sell our lives dear to the thirsting things.

  I hear sad music. There is a moment of uncanny quiet, when the trains and the barges pass away from me in my eyrie, and the grinding of their engines ebbs away and the dawn is momentarily uncovered.

  Someone at the river’s edge, in some garret, is playing the fiddle. It is a haunting strain, a tremulous dirge of semitones and counterpoints over a broken rhythm. These do not sound like local harmonies.

  I recognize the sound. I have heard it before. On the boat that
took me across the Meagre Sea, and before that in Shankell.

  There is no escaping my southern past, it seems.

  It is the dawn greeting of the fisherwomen of Perrick Nigh and the Mandrake Islands, way to the south. My unseen accompanist is welcoming the sun.

  The few New Crobuzon Perrickish live mostly in Echomire, yet here she is, three miles upstream as the river twists, waking the great Dayfisher with her exquisite playing.

  She plays to me for a few more moments, before the noise of the morning takes her sound away, and I am left clinging to the bridge, listening to the boom of klaxons and the whistle from the trains.

  That sound from far away continues, but I cannot hear it. The noises of New Crobuzon fill my ears. I will follow them, welcome them. I will let them surround me. I will dive into the hot, city life. Under arch and over stone, through the sparse bone forest of the Ribs, into the brick burrows of Badside and Dog Fenn, through the booming industry of Gross Coil. Like Lemuel sniffing for contacts I will retrace all the steps I have made. And here and there, I hope, among the spires and the crammed architecture, I will touch the immigrants, the refugees, the outsiders who remake New Crobuzon every day. This place with bastard culture. This mongrel city.

  I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain . . . A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home.

  All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping in through my skin.

  When I return to Griss Twist, my companions will be waiting, and we will liberate this hijacked city. Thanklessly and unseen.

  PART SIX

  The Glasshouse

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The streets of Riverskin inclined gently upwards towards the Glasshouse. The houses were old and tall, with rotting wooden frames and walls of damp plaster. Every rain saturated and blistered them, sent slates cascading from the steep roofs as rusted nails dissolved. Riverskin seemed to sweat, gently, in the slow heat.

  The southern half of Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of the city’s small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bekman Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.

  But northern Riverskin was very different. It was quieter, more sullen. It was the preserve of the cactacae.

  Large as the Glasshouse was, it could not possibly contain all the cactacae of the city, not even those who kept faith with tradition. At least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s cactus people lived outside its protective glass. They packed the Riverskin slums, and a few other quarters in places like Syriac and Abrogate Green. But Riverskin was the centre of their city, and there they mixed in equal numbers with human locals. They were the cactus underclass, who entered the Glasshouse to shop and worship, but were forced to live in the infidel city.

  Some rebelled. Angry cactacae youths vowed never to enter the Glasshouse which had betrayed them. They referred to it ironically by an older, obsolete name: the Nursery. They scarred themselves and fought in brutal, pointless and exciting gangfights. Sometimes they terrorized the neighbourhood, mugging and stealing from the humans and cactacae elders who shared their streets.

  Outside, in Riverskin, the cactus people were surly and quiet. They worked for their human or vodyanoi bosses without demur or enthusiasm. They did not communicate with their workmates of other races in anything more than curt grunts. Their behaviour inside the walls of the Glasshouse was never seen.

  The Glasshouse itself was a huge, flattened dome. On the ground, its diameter was more than a quarter of a mile. At its peak, it was eighty yards high. Its base was angled to sit tight on the listing streets of Riverskin.

  The framework was wrought in black iron, a great thick skeleton decorated with occasional curlicues and flourishes. It bulged out over the Riverskin houses, visible from a long way off on the top of its low hill. Emerging in two concentric circles from its skin were colossal girdered arms, nearly the size of the Ribs, suspending the dome and taking its weight on great cords of twisted metal.

  The further away it was seen from, the more impressive the Glasshouse appeared. From the wooded top of Flag Hill, looking down across two rivers, the railways, the skyrails and four miles of grotesque urban sprawl, the facets of the dome glinted with clean shards of light. From the surrounding streets, however, the multitude of cracks and dark spaces where glass had fallen in were visible. The dome had been repaired only once in its three centuries of existence.

  From the base of the dome the age of the structure showed. It was decrepit. Paint curled in great tongues away from the metalwork, and rust had eaten it like worms. For the first fifteen or so feet above the ground, the panes—each nearly seven feet square at the bottom, descending in width like pieces of pie as they approached the vertex—were filled with the same crumbling, painted iron. Above that, the glass was dirty and impure, tinted green and blue and beige in chance patchwork. It was reinforced, and was supposed to be able to support the weight of at least two decent-sized cactacae. Even so, several panes were broken and empty of glass, and many more were laced with a filigree of cracks.

  The dome had been built without much concern for the surrounding houses. The pattern of streets that surrounded it continued until they reached its solid metal base. Those two or three or four houses that had been in the way of the dome’s edges had been crushed, and then the rows continued beneath the glass canopy, at a variety of random angles.

  The cactacae had simply enclosed an existing clutch of New Crobuzon streets.

  Over the decades, the architecture within the dome had been altered to adapt the once-human houses to cactacae tenants, tearing down some structures and replacing them with strange new edifices. But the broad layout and much of the structure was said to remain, exactly as it was before the dome existed.

  There was one entrance to the dome, at the southern tip of its base in Yashur Plaza. At the opposite end of its circumference was its exit on Bytrash Street, a steep road that looked down onto the river. Cactus law stated that entrance to and exit from the Glasshouse was only by these portals respectively. This was unlucky for the cactacae who lived just outside in sight of one or other of the portals. Getting in, for example, might take two minutes, but returning home from the exit would involve a long, tangled walk home.

  Each morning at five the gateways were thrown open, onto the short enclosed passage beyond, and each evening at midnight they were closed. They were guarded by a small unit of armoured guards, hefting huge war-cleavers and the powerful cactacae rivebow.

  Like their dumb, rooted cousins, the cactacae had thick, fibrous vegetable skin. It was taut and punctured easily, but it healed fast, in ugly, thick scars—most cactacae were covered in harmless ganglions of scab tissue. It took a lot of thrusts or a lucky shot into the organs to have any real damaging effect. Bullets or arrows or quarrels were usually ineffective against cactacae. Which was why the cactus soldiers carried rivebows.

  The designers of the first rivebow had been human. The weapons had been used during the ghastly premiership of Mayor Collodd—they had been carried by the human guards of the mayor’s cactus farm. But after the reforming Sapience Bill dissolved the farm and granted cactacae something approaching citizenship, the pragmatic cactus elders had realized this would be an invaluable weapon to keep their own people in line. Since then, the bow had been improved many times, this time by cactacae engineers.

  The r
ivebow was an enormous crossbow, too large and heavy for a human effectively to operate. It fired not bolts, but chakris; flat metal disks with serrated or razored edges, or metal stars with curved arms. A toothed hole in the chakri’s centre slotted neatly onto a little bud of metal that emerged from the rivebow shaft. When the trigger was pulled, the wire in the shaft snapped violently to, pulling the metal bud at massive speed, intricate gears grinding together to send it spinning at an enormous rate. At the end of the enclosed channel the whirling bolt slipped sharply down and out from the chakri’s hole, and the chakri was discharged as fast as a slingshot stone, spinning like the blade of a circular saw.

  Aerial friction dissipated its momentum quickly: it did not have nearly the range of a longbow or a flintlock. But it could sever a cactus limb or head—or a human one—at nearly one hundred feet, and slice savagely some way beyond that.

  The cactacae guards glowered, and swung their rivebows with surly arrogance.

  The late rays of the day blazed out from above the far-off peaks. The west-facing aspects of the Glasshouse dome glowed like rubies.

  Straddling a corroded ladder that swept up to the peak of the dome, a silhouetted human figure grasped and clung to the metal. The man crept gradually up the rungs, rising up the curved firmament of the dome like the moon.

  The walkway was one of three that extended at regular intervals from the very top of the dome’s arch, designed originally for the repair crews that had never appeared. The curve of the dome seemed to break the surface of the earth like the tip of a bent back, implying a vast body below ground. The figure was riding a gargantuan whaleback. He was buoyed up by the light that the dome trapped, that played on the underside of the glass and made the whole great edifice shine. He kept low, moving very slowly to avoid being seen. He had chosen the ladder on the Glasshouse’s north-western side, so as to avoid the trains on the Salacus Fields branch of the Sud Line. The tracks passed close by the glass on the opposite side of the dome, and any observant passengers would see the man crawling up the curved surface.