Perdido Street Station (53 page)

Isaac paused. There
was, he realized, something almost urgent about Vermishank’s
manner. He seemed anxious to leave nothing out. It must have been
Lemuel’s unwavering pistol.

"I’ve...
seen
one of these things feeding...
" said Isaac. "I saw
it...eat someone’s brain."

"Hah."
Vermishank shook his head appreciatively. "Astonishing. You are
lucky to be here. You did
not
see it eat anyone’s brain.
Slake-moths don’t live entirely in our plane.
Their...ah...
nutritional needs
are met by substances that we
cannot measure. Don’t you
see,
Isaac?" Vermishank
gazed at him intently, like a teacher trying to encourage the right
answer from a petulant pupil. The urgency flashed again in his eyes.
"I know biology’s not your
strong point,
but it’s
such an...
elegant
mechanism, I thought you might see it. They
draw the dreams out with their wings, flood the mind, break the dykes
that hold back hidden thoughts, guilty thoughts, anxieties, delights,
dreams...
" He stopped. Sat back. Composed himself.

"And then,"
he continued, "when the mind is nice and juicy...they
suck it
dry.
The subconscious is their nectar, Isaac, don’t you
see? That is why they only feed on the sentient. No cats or dogs for
them. They drink the peculiar brew that results from self-reflexive
thought, when the instincts and needs and desires and intuitions are
folded in on themselves and we reflect on our thoughts and then
reflect on the reflection, endlessly..." Vermishank’s
voice was hushed. "Our thoughts ferment like the purest liquor.
That is what the slake-moths drink, Isaac. Not the meat-calories
slopping about in the brainpan, but the fine wine of sapience and
sentience itself, the subconscious.

"
Dreams."

**

The room was silent.
The idea was stunning. Everyone seemed to reel at the notion.
Vermishank seemed almost to be revelling in the effect his
revelations were having.

Everyone started at a
clanging sound. It was just the construct, busy vacuuming the rubbish
beside David’s desk. It had tried to empty the bin into its
receptacle, had slightly missed and spilled the contents. It was busy
trying to clear up the pieces of crumpled paper that surrounded it.

"And...Dammit, of
course!" Isaac breathed. "That’s what the nightmares
are! They...it’s like fertilizer! Like, I don’t know,
rabbit-shit, that feeds the plants that feed the rabbits...It’s
a little chain, a little ecosystem..."

"Hah. Quite,"
said Vermishank. "You are thinking at last. You can’t see
slake-moth faeces, or smell it, but you can sense it. In your dreams.
It feeds them, makes them boil. And then the slake-moth feeds
on
them. A perfect loop."

"How do you know
all this, you swine?" breathed Derkhan. ‘How long have you
been working on these monsters?"

"Slake-moths are
very rare. And a state secret. That is why we were so excited about
our little clutch of the things. We had one old, dying specimen, then
received four new grubs. Isaac had one, of course. The original, that
had fed our little caterpillars, died. We were debating whether to
open the cocoon of another during its change, killing it but gleaning
invaluable
knowledge of its metamorphic state, but before we
had decided, regrettably," he sighed, "we had to sell all
four. They were an excessive risk. The word came that our research
was taking too long, that our failure to control the specimens was
making the...ah...
paymasters
nervous. Funding was withdrawn,
and our department had to pay its debts quickly, given the failure of
our project."

"Which was what?"
hissed Isaac. "Weapons? Torture?"

"Oh, really,
Isaac," said Vermishank calmly. "Look at you, stiff with
moral outrage. If you hadn’t
stolen
one of them in the
first place, it would never have escaped, and it would never have
freed its fellows—which is what must have happened, you
realize—and think how many innocent people would have lived."

Isaac stared at him
aghast.

"
Fuck you!"
he screamed. He rose and would have leapt at Vermishank had Lemuel
not spoken.

"Isaac," he
said curtly, and Isaac saw that Lemuel’s gun was trained on
him. "Vermishank is being very co-operative and there’s
more we need to know.
Right?"

Isaac stared at him,
nodded and sat.

"Why
are you
being so helpful, Vermishank?" asked Lemuel, returning his gaze
to the older man.

Vermishank shrugged.

"I do not relish
the idea of pain," he said with a little simper. "In
addition to which, although you will not like this...it will do you
no good. You cannot catch them. You cannot evade the militia. Why
would I hold back?" He gave a smug, loathsome grin.

And yet his eyes were
nervous, his upper lip sweating. There was a forlorn note buried deep
in his throat.

Godspit!
thought
Isaac with a sudden shock of realization. He sat up and stared at
Vermishank.
That is
not
all! He...he’s telling us
because he’s afraid! He doesn’t think the government can
catch them...and he’s afraid. He wants us to succeed!

Isaac wanted to taunt
Vermishank with this, to wave the knowledge of his weakness at him,
to punish him for all his crimes...but he would not risk it. If Isaac
were to antagonize him too flagrantly, to confront him with an
understanding of his fear that Isaac doubted Vermishank himself
possessed, then the vile man might withdraw all his help out of
spite.

If he needed to think
he was crowing to beg for help, then Isaac would let him.

**

"What is
dreamshit?" said Isaac.

"Dreamshit?"
Vermishank smiled, and Isaac remembered the last time he had asked
Vermishank that question and the man had affected disgust, had
refused to sully his mouth with the foul word.

It came easy to him
now.

"Hah. Dreamshit is
baby food. It is what the moths feed their young. They exude it all
the time, but in great quantities when they are parenting. They are
not like other moths: they’re very caring. They nurture their
eggs assiduously, by all accounts, and
suckle
the newborn
caterpillars. Only in their adolescence, when they pupate, can they
feed themselves."

Derkhan interjected.

"Are you saying
that dreamshit is slake-moth
milk?"

"Exactly. The
caterpillars cannot yet digest purely psychic food. It must be
imbibed in quasi-physical form. The liquid the moths exude is
thick
with distilled dreams."

"And that’s
why some fucking
druglord
bought them? Who was it?"
Derkhan’s mouth curled.

"I have no idea. I
merely suggested the deal. Which of the bidders was successful is
irrelevant to me. One has to husband the moths carefully, stud them
regularly, milk them. Like cows. They can be manipulated—by
someone who knows what they’re doing—fooled into exuding
milk without having born grubs. And the milk has to be processed, of
course. No human, or any other sentient race, could drink it neat. It
would instantly explode their mind. The inelegantly named dreamshit
has been rendered and...ah...
cut
with various
substances...Which incidentally, Isaac, means that the caterpillar
you raised—that I presume you fed on dreamshit—must have
grown into a less than healthy moth. It is as if you fed a human baby
milk laced with large quantities of sawdust and pondwater."

"How do you know
all this?" hissed Derkhan.

Vermishank looked at
her blankly.

"How do you know
how many mirrors it takes to make you safe, how do you know they turn
the minds they...they eat into that...milk...?
How many people
have you fed to them?"

Vermishank pursed his
lips, a little perturbed.

"I am a
scientist," he said. "I use the means at my disposal. On
occasion, criminals are sentenced to death. The
manner
of
their death is not specified..."

"You
swine...
"
she hissed viciously. "What about all the people the dealers
take to feed them, to make the drug...?" she continued, but
Isaac cut her off.

"Vermishank,"
he said softly, and stared at the other man. "How do we get
their minds back? The ones who’ve been taken."

"Back?"
Vermishank seemed genuinely baffled. "Ah..." He shook his
head and furrowed his eyes. "You cannot."

"Don’t
lie
to me..." screamed Isaac, thinking of Lublamai.

"
They have been
drunk,"
hissed Vermishank, and brought silence quickly to
the room. He waited.

"They have been
drunk"
he said again. "Their thoughts have been
taken, their dreams—their conscious and subconscious—have
been burnt up in the moths’ stomachs, have trickled out again
to feed the grubs. Have you taken dreamshit, Isaac? Any of you?"
No one, least of all Isaac, would answer him. "If you have,
you
have dreamed them, the victims, the prey. You have had their
metabolized minds slip into your stomach and you have
dreamed
them.
There is nothing left to save. There
is
nothing to
get back."

**

Isaac felt absolute
despair.

Take his body too,
he thought,
Jabber, don’t be cruel, don’t leave me
with that fucking shell that I can’t let die, that means
nothing...

"How do we kill
the slake-moths?" he hissed.

Vermishank smiled, very
slowly.

"You cannot,"
he said.

"Don’t
bullshit me," hissed Isaac. "Everything that lives can
die..."

"You misunderstand
me. As an
abstract proposition
of course they can die. And
therefore, theoretically, they can be killed. But
you will not be
able to kill them.
They live in several planes, as I’ve
said, and bullets, fire, and so forth injure only in one. You would
have to hit them in many dimensions at once, or do the most
extraordinary amount of damage in this one, and they will
not give
you the chance...
Do you understand?"

"So let’s
think
laterally..."
said Isaac. He batted his temples
hard with the heels of his hands. "What about a biological
control? Predators..."

"They have none.
They are at the top of their food chain. We’re fairly sure that
there are animals, in their native land, that are capable of killing
them, but there are none within several thousand miles of here. And
anyway, if we’re right, to unleash them would be to usher doom
more
quickly
onto New Crobuzon."

"Dear Jabber,"
breathed Isaac. "Without predators or competitors, with a
massive
supply of food, fresh and constantly
replenished...There’ll be no
stopping them."

"And that,"
whispered Vermishank hesitantly, "is before we’ve even
considered what’ll happen if they...They are still young, you
understand. They are not fully mature. But soon, when the nights
become hot...We have to consider what might happen when they
breed...
"

**

The room seemed to go
still and cold. Again Vermishank tried to control his face, but
again, Isaac saw the raw fear inside him. Vermishank was terrified.
He knew what was at stake.

A little way away, the
construct was rotating, hissing and clattering. It seemed to be
leaking dust and dirt, and moving in random directions trailing a
stiff litter-spike behind it.
Broken again,
thought Isaac, and
turned his attention back on Vermishank.

"When will they
breed?" he hissed.

Vermishank licked the
sweat from his upper lip.

"They are
hermaphrodites, I am told. We’ve never observed them mating or
seen them lay eggs. We only know what we’ve been told. They
come into heat in the back half of the summer. One designated
egg-layer. Around about Sinn, Octuary. Usually. Usually, that is."

"Come on! There
must be something we can do!" shouted Isaac. "Don’t
tell me Rudgutter’s got nothing in mind..."

"I’m not
privy to that. I mean, of course I know they’ve plans. Why,
yes. But what they are I simply can’t say. I have..."
Vermishank hesitated.

"What?"
yelled Isaac.

"I have heard that
they approached daemons." No one said a word. Vermishank
swallowed and continued. "And were refused help. Even at the
highest bribery."

"Why?" hissed
Derkhan.

"Because the
daemons were afraid." Vermishank licked his lips. The fear that
he was trying to keep hidden became visible again. "Do you
understand that? They were
afraid.
Because for all their power
and their presence...they think as we do. They are sentient, sapient.
And as far as the slake-moths are concerned...they are therefore
prey."

Everyone in the room
was still. The pistol sagged in Lemuel’s hand, but Vermishank
made no attempt to run, lost as he was in his own miserable reverie.

"What are we going
to do?" said Isaac. His voice was not quite steady.

The grating sound of
the construct grew stronger. The thing spun for a moment on its
central wheel. Its cleaning arms were extended and clattered against
the ground in staccato motion. Derkhan, then Isaac and David and the
others looked up at it.

"I can’t
think
with that fucking thing in the room!" yelled Isaac,
enraged. He strode over, ready to take out his impotence and his fear
on the construct. As he approached it, it spun to face him with its
glass iris and its two main arms extended suddenly, an errant piece
of paper on the end of one. The construct looked disorientingly like
a person with outstretched arms. Isaac blinked and continued towards
it.