Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  The cactacae did not lock their doors. It was easy enough to gain entrance to the house. Shadrach began to creep up the stairs.

  As Isaac followed him, he sniffed at the exotic, unfamiliar smell of cactacae sap and strange food. Pots of sandy soil were placed all around the entrance hall, sporting a variety of desert plants, mostly unhealthy and dwindling in the interior of the house.

  Shadrach turned and took in Isaac and Yagharek with a look. Very slowly, he put his finger to his lips. Then he continued to climb.

  As they approached the first floor, they heard a quiet argument in deep cactus voices. Yagharek translated what he understood in a tiny whisper, something about being afraid, an exhortation to trust the elders. The corridor was bare and unadorned. Shadrach paused and Isaac peered over his shoulder, saw that the door to the cactus-people’s room was wide open.

  Inside he saw a large room with a very high ceiling, wrought, he realized as he saw the fringe of planking that skirted the walls seven feet up, by tearing out the floor of the rooms above. A gaslight was turned on low. A little way from the door, Isaac saw several sleeping cactacae, standing with their legs locked, immobile and impressive. Two figures next to each other were still awake, leaning in slightly, whispering.

  Very slowly, Shadrach stalked like a predatory creature up the last of the stairs and past the door. He paused just before he reached it, and looked back and pointed at one of the monkey-constructs, then beside himself. He repeated the gesture. Isaac understood. He pulled himself close to the aural inputs of the construct and whispered instructions to it.

  It scampered up the stairs with a quiet clatter that made Isaac wince, but the cactacae did not notice it. The construct squatted quietly down beside Shadrach, blocked from sight inside the room by his dark-drenched form. Isaac sent another construct to follow it, then signalled Shadrach to move.

  At a slow, steady crawl, the big man crept in front of the doorway, shielding the constructs with his body. Their forms still caught the light, would glint as they passed the threshold. Shadrach moved without pause past the line of sight of the cactacae talking within, with the constructs creeping beside him hidden from the light, then on past the edge of the doorway into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

  And then it was Isaac’s turn.

  He indicated two more constructs hide behind his bulk, then began to crawl along the wooden floor. His belly hung down as he shuffled along with the constructs.

  It was a frightening feeling, to move out from behind the wall and emerge in full view of the cactacae couple talking quietly as they stood ready to sleep. Isaac was huddled against the banisters on the hallway, as far from the door as he could go, but there were still several intolerable seconds when he crept through the dim cone of light towards the safety of the dark corridor beyond.

  He had time to stare at the big cactus people standing in the hard dirt on the floor, whispering. Their eyes passed over him as he crept before their door, and he held his breath, but his thaumaturgic shadows augmented the darkness of the house, and he went unseen.

  Then Yagharek, his scrawny form doing its best to hide the last of the constructs, crept past the light.

  They regrouped before the next stairs.

  “This section is easier,” whispered Shadrach. “There’s no one on the floor above, it’s just the ceiling of this one. And then above that . . . that’s where our slake-moths hide.”

  Before they reached the fourth floor, Isaac tugged at Shadrach and pulled him to a stop. Watched by Shadrach and Yagharek, Isaac whispered again to one of the monkey-constructs. He held Shadrach still as the thing crept with mechanical stealth over the lip of the stairs, and disappeared into the dark room beyond.

  Isaac held his breath. After a minute, the construct emerged and waved its arm jerkily, indicated them to come up.

  They rose slowly into a long-deserted attic room. A window looked out onto the junction of the streets, a window without glass, whose dusty frame was scuffed with a variety of bizarre markings. It was through this little rectangle that light came in, a wan and changing exudation of the torches below.

  Yagharek pointed at the window slowly.

  “From there,” he said. “It came from there.”

  The floor was littered with ancient rubbish, and thick in dust. The walls were scratched with unsettling random designs.

  The room was traversed by a discomfiting river of air. It was a faint current, almost undetectable. In the motionless heat of the dome, it was unsettling and remarkable. Isaac looked around, trying to trace its source.

  He saw it. Even sweating in the night-heat, he shivered slightly.

  Directly opposite the window, the plaster of the wall lay in shredded layers across the floor. It had fallen from a hole, a hole that looked newly created, an irregular cavity in the bricks that raised to the height of Isaac’s thighs.

  It was a glaring, looming wound in the wall. The breeze connected it and the window, as if some unthinkable creature breathed out in the bowels of the house.

  “It’s in there,” said Shadrach. “That must be where they’re hiding. That must be the nest.”

  Inside the hole was a complex and broken tunnel, carved into the substance of the house. Isaac and Shadrach squinted into its darkness.

  “It doesn’t look wide enough for one of those bastards,” said Isaac. “I don’t think they work quite according to . . . uh . . . regular space.”

  The tunnel was four feet or so wide, rough-hewn and deep. Its interior was quickly invisible. Isaac kneeled before it and sniffed deeply of the darkness. He looked up at Yagharek.

  “You have to stay here,” he said. Before the garuda could protest, Isaac pointed to his head. “Me and Shad here, we’ve got the helmets that the Council gave us. And with this—” he patted his bag “—we might be able to get close to whatever, if anything, is in there.” He reached in and brought out a dynamo. It was the same engine the Council had used to amplify Isaac’s mindwaves, attracting his erstwhile pet. He also brought out a large tangle of metal-sheathed piping, coiled around his hand.

  Shadrach kneeled next to him and lowered his head. Isaac slotted an end of piping into place on the helmet’s outlet, and twisted the bolts that held it.

  “According to the Council, channellers use a setup like this for some technique called . . . displacement-ontolography,” mused Isaac. “Don’t ask me. Point is, these exhaust pipes will flush out our . . . uh . . . psychic effluvia . . . and discharge it out here.” He glanced up at Yagharek. “No mindprint. No taste, no trail.” He spun the last bolt firmly and rapped Shadrach’s helmet gently. He lowered his own head and Shadrach began to repeat the operation. “See, if there is a moth down there, Yag, and you go anywhere near it, it’ll taste you. But it shouldn’t taste us. That’s the theory.”

  When Shadrach was done, Isaac stood and threw the ends of the piping to Yagharek.

  “Each of those is about . . . twenty-five, thirty feet. Hang on to it till it’s taut, then let us go on with it trailing behind. All right?” Yagharek nodded. His stood stiff, angry at being left, but understanding without question that there was no choice.

  Isaac took two coiling wires and attached them first to the motor he held, then slotted the other end of each into a valve on his and Shadrach’s helmets.

  “There’s a little antacidic chymical battery in there,” he said, waving the engine. “It works in conjunction with a metaclockwork design pinched from the khepri. Are we ready?” Quickly, Shadrach checked his gun, touched each of his other weapons in turn, then nodded. Isaac felt for his flintlock and the unfamiliar knife at his belt. “All right then.”

  He snapped the little lever on the dynamo. A little humming hiss emerged from the engine. Yagharek held the outlets dubiously, peered into them. He felt some vague sensation, some weird little wash, trembling through him from the rims of the pipes. A little tremble passed through him from the hands up, a tiny tremor of fear that was not his own.

  Isaac
pointed at three of the monkey-constructs.

  “Go in,” he said. “Four feet ahead of us. Move slowly. Halt for danger. You—” he pointed at another “—go behind us. One stay with Yag.”

  Slowly, one by one, the constructs trooped into the darkness.

  Isaac briefly laid a hand on Yagharek’s shoulder.

  “Back soon, old son,” he said quietly. “Watch out for us.”

  He turned away and kneeled, preceded Shadrach into the shaft of shattered brick, crouching and working his way into the stygian hole.

  The tunnel was part of a subversive topography.

  It crept at bizarre angles between the walls of the terrace, tight and close, sending the sound of his breath and the clanking of the monkeys’ bouncing into Isaac’s ears. His hands and knees ached from the crushing pressure of the sharp stone-shards under him. Isaac estimated that they were moving back through the terraced houses. They were shuffling downwards, and Isaac remembered how the curve of the dome had decapitated the houses at a lower and lower point as they approached the glass. The closer the houses were to the edge of the dome, he realized, the lower they would be, the more filled with old wreckage.

  They were shuffling their way along the little stub of the street, towards the glass dome, down through deserted floors in an interstitial burrow. Isaac shivered for a moment in the dark. He was sweating from heat and from fear. He was terribly frightened. He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble.

  After a short time of crawling Isaac felt a moment’s drag on him, then a release. He had reached the full extent of his piping, and Yagharek had let it go to drag behind him.

  Isaac did not speak. He could hear Shadrach behind him, breathing deeply and grunting. The two men could not move more than five feet apart, because the wires connected their helmets to a single motor.

  Isaac threw up his face and swung it around him, desperately searching for light.

  The monkey-constructs swung their way up. Every few moments, one would momentarily turn on the lights in its eyes, and for a minuscule fraction of a second, Isaac would see a stark crawlway of littered brick and the metal gleam of the constructs’ bodies. Then the lights would go out. Isaac would try to negotiate by the ghost image that slowly ebbed from his eyes.

  In the absolute dark, it was easy to sense the slightest glimmer. Isaac knew that he was crawling towards a source of light when he looked up and saw the grey outline of the tunnel ahead. Something pressed Isaac’s chest. He started massively, then recognized the pewter fingers and dark bulk of a construct. Isaac hissed to Shadrach to stop.

  The construct gesticulated to Isaac with exaggerated jerky gestures. It pointed forward, towards its two fellows that hovered at the edge of the visible shaft, where the tunnel turned a sharp corner upwards.

  Isaac indicated that Shadrach should wait. Then he crept forward at an almost motionless pace. Glacial dread was beginning to creep through his system, from the stomach out. He breathed deep and slow. He shifted his feet slowly, inching along, until he felt his skin prickle as it emerged into a shaft of faint light.

  The tunnel ended in a wall of brick five feet high, on three sides of him. A wall rose behind him, above the tunnel mouth. Isaac looked up and saw a ceiling way above him. A pestilential stench began to dribble into the hole. Isaac screwed up his face.

  He was crouching in a hole, by the wall, embedded in the cement floor of a room. He could see nothing of the chamber above and beyond him. But he could hear faint sounds. A slight rustle, like wind against discarded paper. The softest sound of liquid adhesion, like fingers sticky with glue meeting and parting.

  Isaac swallowed three times and whispered to himself, gearing himself up to bravery, forcing himself on. He turned his back on the bricks before him, on the room beyond them. He saw Shadrach watching him on all fours, his face set. Isaac looked intently into his mirrors. He tugged briefly at the pipe attached to the top of his helmet, that twisted its way backwards into the tunnel and disappeared below Shadrach’s body into the depths, diverting his telltale thoughts.

  Then Isaac began to stand, very slowly. He stared with violent fervour into the mirrors, as if trying to prove himself to some testing god—See! I’m not looking behind me, you damn well see if I do! The top of Isaac’s head breached the lip of the hole, and more light fell across him. The foul smell grew stronger still.

  His terror was very strong. His sweat was no longer warm.

  Isaac tilted his head and stood a little taller, until he saw the room itself in the sepia light that fought its way through one filthy, tiny window.

  It was a long, thin room. Eight or so feet wide, and about twenty feet long. Dusty and long-deserted, with no visible entrance or exit, no hatches or doors.

  Isaac did not breathe. At the furthest end of the room, sitting and seeming to stare directly at him, the lattice of its complex killing arms and limbs moving in baffling antiphase, its wings half-open in languorous threat, was a slake-moth.

  It took a moment for Isaac to realize that he had not moaned. It took another few seconds of staring into the vile thing’s twitching antennaed sockets to realize that it had not sensed him. The moth shifted and turned a little, moving until it was three-quarters on to him.

  Absolutely silently, Isaac exhaled. He twitched his head fractionally, to see the rest of the room.

  When he saw its contents, he had to fight all over again not to make a sound.

  Lying at irregular intervals the whole length of the floor, the room was littered with the dead.

  That, Isaac realized, was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

  Some, he saw with misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had lived at the end.

  They could not be in paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become fuel for a slake-moth flight.

  Isaac saw that in one of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders. The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

  Then the slake-moth moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of dreamshit.

  His eyes widened.

  The slake-moth measured the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat globule of slake-moth milk. That’s got to be worth fucking thousands . . . Isaac thought. No, cut it to make it palatable, there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder everyone’s trying to get these damn things back . . .

  Then, as Isaac watched, a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the centre of the sticky mass.

  Under the armour that had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible
, from where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

  Isaac knew what he was seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

  The slake-moth was laying its eggs.

  Isaac slipped back below the surface of the wall. He was hyperventilating. Urgently, he beckoned Shadrach.

  “One of the godsdamned things is right there and it’s laying its eggs so we have to damn well take it right now . . .” he hissed. Shadrach smacked his hand over Isaac’s mouth. He held Isaac’s eyes until the older man had calmed a little. Shadrach turned his back as Isaac had done, then stood slowly and gazed for himself onto the grisly scene. Isaac sat with his back to the bricks, waiting.

  Shadrach dropped down again to Isaac’s level. His face was set.

  “Hmmm,” he murmured. “I see. Right. Did you say the moth-thing can’t sense constructs?” Isaac nodded.

  “As far as we know,” he said.

  “Right then. You’ve done a damn fine job programming these constructs. And they’re an extraordinary design. Do you really mean it, that they’ll know when to attack, if we give them instructions? They can understand variables that complicated?”

  Isaac nodded again.

  “Then we have a plan,” said Shadrach. “Listen to me.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Slowly, trembling almost uncontrollably, the memory of Barbile’s quasi-death vivid in him, Isaac climbed out of the hole.