Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.

  This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said . . .

  But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’ uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

  This is all arse-side up, he thought.

  If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?

  He remembered Yagharek scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

  He remembered Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing Lin.

  But when he thought of Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but think of that as rape. And he thought of Lin, and everything that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke with anger.

  He tried to extricate himself.

  He tried to think himself away from the whole thing. He told himself desperately that to refuse his services would not imply judgement, that it would not mean he pretended knowledge of the facts, that it would simply be a way of saying, “This is beyond me, this is not my business.” But he could not convince himself.

  He slumped and breathed a miserable moan of exhaustion. If he turned from Yagharek, he realized, no matter what he said, Isaac would feel himself to have judged, and to have found Yagharek wanting. And Isaac realized that he could not in conscience imply that, when he did not know the case.

  But on the heels of that thought came another; a flipside, a counterpoint.

  If withholding help implied negative judgement he could not make, thought Isaac, then helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions were acceptable.

  And that, thought Isaac in cold distaste and fury, he would not do.

  He folded his notes slowly, his half-finished equations, his scribbled formulae, and began to pack them away.

  When Derkhan returned, the sun was low and the sky was blemished with blood-coloured clouds. She tapped the door in the quick rhythm they had agreed, bundling past Isaac when he opened it.

  “It’s an amazing day,” she said with sadness. “I’ve been sniffing quietly all over the place, getting a few leads, a few ideas . . .” She turned to face him and was instantly quiet.

  His dark, scarred face bore an extraordinary expression. Some complex composite of hope and excitement and terrible misery. He seemed to brim with energy. He shifted as if he crawled with ants. He wore his long beggar’s cloak. A sack sat beside the door, bulging with heavy, bulky contents. The crisis engine was gone, she realized, disassembled and hidden away in the sack.

  Without the spread-out mess of metal and wire, the room seemed utterly bare.

  With a little gasp, Derkhan saw that Isaac had wrapped up Lin in a foul, tattered blanket. Lin clutched at it fitfully and nervously, signing nonsense up at him. She saw Derkhan and jerked happily.

  “Let’s go,” said Isaac in a hollow voice that strained with tension.

  “What are you talking about?” said Derkhan angrily. “What are you talking about? Where’s Yagharek? What’s come over you?”

  “Dee, please . . .” whispered Isaac. He took her hands. She reeled at his imploring fervour. “Yag’s still not come back. I’m leaving this for him,” he said, and plucked a letter from his pocket. He tossed it nervously into the centre of the floor. Derkhan began to speak again and Isaac cut her off, shaking his head violently.

  “I’m not . . . I can’t . . . I don’t work for Yag no more, Dee . . . I’m terminating our contract . . . I’ll explain everything, I promise, but let’s go. You’re right, we’ve stayed much too long.” He flicked his hand at the window, where the evening sounded boisterous and easygoing. “The fucking government are after us, and the biggest damn gangster on the continent . . . And the . . . the Construct Council . . .” He shook her gently.

  “Let’s go. The . . . the three of us. Let’s get out and away.”

  “What happened, Isaac?” she demanded. She shook him back. “Tell me now.”

  He looked away quickly, and back at her.

  “I had a visitor . . .” She gasped and her eyes widened, but he shook his head slowly. “Dee . . . a visitor from the fucking Cymek.” He held her eyes and swallowed. “I know what Yagharek did, Dee.” He was quiet as her face rearranged itself into a cold calm. “I know what he got . . . punished for.

  “There’s nothing holding us here, Dee. I’ll tell you everything—everything, I swear—but there’s nothing holding us here. I’ll tell you while we . . . while we go.”

  For days he had been in an awful lassitude, distracted by crisis maths and utterly, exhaustingly despondent about Lin. Quite suddenly, the urgency of their situation had come home to him. He realized their danger. He understood how patient Derkhan had been, and he understood that they must leave.

  “Godsdamnit,” she said quietly. “I know it’s only a few months, but he . . . he’s your friend. Isn’t he? We can’t just . . . can we just leave him . . . ?” She looked at him and her face creased. “Is it . . . what is it? Is it so terrible? Is it bad enough that it . . . that it cancels everything else out? Is it so terrible?” Isaac closed his eyes.

  “No . . . yes. It’s not that simple. I’ll explain when we go.

  “I’m not going to help him. That’s the bottom line. I can’t, I fucking can’t, Dee, I fucking can’t. And I can’t see him, I don’t want to see him. So there’s nothing here, so we can go.

  “We really must go.”

  Derkhan argued, but briefly and without conviction. She was gathering her tiny bag of clothes, her little notebook, even while she said she was not sure. She was caught up in Isaac’s wake.

  She scrawled a tiny addendum to the back of Isaac’s note, without opening it. Good luck, she scribbled. We will meet again. Sorry to disappear so suddenly. You know how to get out of the city. You know what to do. She paused for quite a long time, unsure of how to say goodbye, and then wrote Derkhan. She replaced the letter.

  She wrapped her scarf about her, let her new black hair slide like oil over her shoulders. It rubbed against the scab left by her ruined ear. She looked out of the window, to where the sky grew thick with evening, then turned and put her arm gently around Lin, helped her walk in her erratic fashion.

  Slowly, the three of them descended.

  “There’s a bunch of guys over in Smog Bend,” Derkhan said. “Bargemen. They can take us south without any questions.”

  “Fuck, no!” hissed Isaac. He looked up from below his hood with wide eyes.

  They stood at the end of the street, where the cart had acted as goal for the children hours before. The warm evening air was full of smells. There were loud disagreements and hysterical laughter from a parallel avenue. Grocers and housewives and steelwrights and minor criminals chatted on corners. The lights were emerging with the sputter of a hundred different fuels and currents. Flames in various colours sprang up behind frosted glass.

  “Fuck no,” Isaac said again. “Not inland . . . Let’s go out . . . Let’s go to Kelltree. Let’s go to the docks.”

  So they walked together slowly south and west. They skirted between Saltbur and Mog Hill, shuffling through the busy streets, an unlikely trio. A tall and bulky beggar with a hidden face, a striking crow-haired woman and a hooded cripple walking in unsteady spasming gait, half-supported and half-pulled by her companions.

  Every steaming construct that walked past made them duck their heads uncomfortably away. Isaac and Derkhan kept their eyes down, talking quickly under their bre
ath. They glanced up nervously as they passed below skyrails, as if the militia streaking above them could sniff them out from all that way above. They avoided catching the eyes of the men and women who lounged aggressively on street corners.

  They felt as if they held their breath. An agonizing journey. They were tremulous with adrenalin.

  They looked around them as they walked, taking in everything they could as if their eyes were cameras. Isaac snatched glimpses of opera posters curling ragged off walls, twists of barbed wire and concrete embedded with broken glass, the arches of the Kelltree rail-link that branched from the Dexter Line, hovering over Sunter and Bonetown.

  He looked up at the Ribs that loomed colossal to his right, and he tried to remember their angles, exactly.

  With every step they pulled themselves free of the city. They could feel its gravity receding. They felt light-headed. As if they might cry.

  Unseen, just below the clouds, a shadow drifted lazily after them. It turned and spiralled as their course became clear. It swept giddily in a moment of lonely aerobatics. As Isaac and Lin and Derkhan continued, the figure broke off its circles and shot away at speed through the sky, heading out of the city.

  Stars appeared and Isaac began to whisper goodbye to The Clock and Cockerel, to Aspic Bazaar and Ketch Heath and his friends.

  It stayed warm as they made their way south, shadowing the trains, into a wide-open landscape of industrial estates. Weeds escaped from lots and encroached onto the pavement, tripping the pedestrians that still filled the night-city, making them swear. Isaac and Derkhan guided Lin carefully through the outskirts of Echomire and Kelltree, bearing south, the trains beside them, heading for the river.

  The Gross Tar, shimmering prettily under the neon and the gaslight, its pollution obscured by reflections: and the docks full of tall ships with heavy furled sails and steamboats leaking iridescently into the water, merchant vessels drawn by bored seawyrms chewing on vast bridles, unsteady factory-freighters that bristled with cranes and steamhammers; ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a journey.

  In the Cymek, we call the moon’s little satellites the mosquitoes. Here in New Crobuzon they call them her daughters.

  The room is full of light from the moon and her daughters, and empty of all else.

  I have stood here for a long time, Isaac’s letter in my hand.

  In a moment, I will read it again.

  I heard the emptiness of the decaying house from the stairs. The echoes receded for too long. I knew before I touched the door that the attic was deserted.

  I was away for hours, seeking some spurious, faltering freedom in the city.

  I wandered into the pretty gardens of Sobek Croix, through fussing clouds of insects and past the sculpted lakes of overfed fowl. I found the ruins of the monastery, the little shell displayed proudly at the park’s heart. Where romantic vandals carve their lovers’ names onto the ancient stone. The little keep was deserted a thousand years before New Crobuzon’s foundations were laid. The god to which it was consecrated died.

  Some people come at night to honour the dead god’s ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology.

  I visited Howl Barrow today. I saw Lichford. I stood before a grey wall in Barrackham, the crumbling skin of a dead factory, and read all the graffiti.

  I was foolish. I took risks. Did not remain carefully hidden.

  I felt almost drunk with that little snatch of freedom, eager for more.

  So I returned at last through the night, to that hollow and forsaken attic, to Isaac’s brutal betrayal.

  What breach of faith, what cruelty.

  I open it once more (ignoring Derkhan’s pathetic little words, like some dusting of sugar on poison). The extraordinary tension in the words seems to make them crawl. I can see Isaac striving for so many things as he writes. Bluff no-nonsense. Anger, stern disapproval. True misery. Objectivism. And some weird comradeship, some shame-faced apology.

  . . . had a visitor today . . . I read, and . . . under the circumstances . . .

  Under the circumstances. Under the circumstances I will flee you. I will turn and judge you. I will leave you with your shame, I will know you from the inside and I will pass on and I will not help you.

  . . . not going to ask you “how could you?” I read and I feel weak suddenly, truly weak, not as if I will faint or vomit but as if I will die.

  It makes me cry out.

  It makes me scream. I cannot stop this noise, I do not want to, I shriek and shriek and as my voice grows, memories of war-cries come to me, memories of my band racing in to hunt or fight, memories of funereal ululation and exorcism wails but this is none of these, this is my pain, unstructured, uncultured, unregulated and illicit and my own, my agony, my loneliness, my misery, my guilt.

  She told me no, that Sazhin had asked for her that summer; that as it was his gathering-year she had said yes; that she wanted to pair exclusively as a present to him.

  She told me I was unfair, that I should leave her immediately, respect her, show respect and leave her be.

  It was an ugly, vicious coupling. I was only a little stronger than her. It took a long time to subdue her. She clawed and bit me every moment, battered me viciously. I was unrelenting.

  I grew infuriated. Lustful and jealous. I beat her and entered her when she lay stunned.

  Her anger was extraordinary and awesome. It woke me to what I had done.

  Shame has draped me since that day. Remorse came only a little later. They gather about me as if to replace my wings.

  The band’s vote was unanimous. I did not contest the facts (it entered my mind to do so for the briefest moment and a wave of self-loathing made me retch).

  There could be no question about judgement.

  I knew it was the correct decision. I could even show a little dignity, a tiny shred, as I walked between the elected finishers of the law. I was slow, shuffling with the enormous weight of ballast attached to me, to stop me fleeing and flying, but I walked on without pause or question.

  It was only at the last that I faltered, when I saw the stakes that would tether me to the baked earth.

  They had to drag me the last twenty feet, into the dried-up bed of the Ghost River. I twisted and fought at every step. I begged for mercy I did not deserve. We were half a mile from our encampment and I am sure that my band heard every scream.

  I was stretched out cruciform, my belly in the dust and the sun driving upon me. I tugged at my bonds until my hands and feet were absolutely numb.

  Five on each side, holding my wings. Holding my great wings tight as I thrashed and sought to beat them hard and viciously against my captors’ skulls. I looked up and saw the sawman, my cousin, red-feathered San’jhuarr.

  Dust and sand and heat and the coursing wind in the channel. I remember them.

  I remember the touch of the metal. The extraordinary sense of intrusion, the horrific in-out-in-out motion of the serrated blade. It fouled with my flesh many times, had to be withdrawn and wiped clean. I remember the breathtaking inrush of hot air on tissue laid bare, on nerves torn from their roots. The slow, slow, merciless cracking of bone. I remember the vomit that quenched my screams, briefly, before my mouth cleared and I drew breath and screamed again. Blood in frightening quantities. The sudden, giddying weightlessness as one wing was lifted away and the stubs of bone trembled shatteringly back into my flesh and ragged fringes of meat slithered from my wound and the agonizing pressure of clean cloth and unguents on my lacerations and the slow stalk of San’jhuarr around my head and the knowledge, the unbearable knowledge that it was all about to happen again.

  I never questioned that I deserved the judgement. Even when I fled to find flight again. I was doubly ashamed. Crippled and shorn of respect for my choice-theft; I would add to that the shame of overturning a just punishment.

  I could not live. I could not be earthbound. I was dead.

  I put Isaac’s letter in my ragged clothes without reading his merciless, miserable
farewell. I cannot say for sure that I despise him. I cannot say for sure I would do other than he has done.

  I step out and down.

  Some streets away in Saltbur, a fifteen-storey towerblock rises over the eastern city. The front door will not lock. It is easy to clamber over the gate that supposedly blocks access to the flat roof. I have climbed that edifice before.

  It is a short walk. I feel as if I am sleeping. The citizens stare at me as I step past them. I am not wearing my hood. I cannot see that it matters.

  No one stops me as I climb the huge building. On two levels, doors open very slightly as I walk past on the treacherous stairwell, and I am stared at by eyes too hidden in darkness for me to see. But I am not challenged, and within minutes I am on the roof.

  One hundred and fifty feet or more. There are plenty of taller structures in New Crobuzon. But this is high enough that the block rears out of the streets and stone and brick like something enormous emerging from water.

  I stalk past the rubble and the signs of bonfires, the detritus of intruders and squatters. I am alone in the skyline tonight.

  The brick wall that contains the roofspace is five feet high. I lean on it and look out, to all sides.

  I know what it is I see.

  I can place myself exactly.

  That is a glimpse of the Glasshouse dome, a smudge of dirty light between two gas towers. The clenching Ribs are only a mile away, dwarfing the railways and the stubby houses. Dark clutches of trees pepper the city. The lights, the lights of all the different colours, all around me.

  I vault easily onto the wall, and stand.

  I am on top of New Crobuzon now.

  It is such an enormous thing. Such a great wallow. There is everything within it, spread out under my feet.

  I can see the rivers. The Canker is about six minutes’ flying time away. I stretch out my arms.