Perdido Street Station (8 page)

"I do not know
where I will be, Grimnebulin. I shun this city. It hunts me. I must
keep moving."

Isaac shrugged
helplessly. Yagharek stood to leave. "You understand what I
want, Grimnebulin? I do not want to have to take a potion. I do not
want to have to wear a harness. I do not want to climb into a
contraption. I do not want one glorious journey into the clouds, and
an earthbound eternity. I want you to let me leap from the earth as
easily as you walk from room to room. Can you do that, Grimnebulin?"

"I don’t
know." Isaac spoke slowly. "But I think so. I’m your
best bet, I reckon. I’m not a chymist, or a biologist, or a
thaumaturge...I’m a dilettante, Yagharek, a dabbler. I think of
myself..." Isaac paused and laughed briefly. He spoke with heavy
gusto. "I think of myself as the main station for all the
schools of thought. Like Perdido Street Station. You know it?"
Yagharek nodded. "Unavoidable, ain’t it? Fucking massive
great thing." Isaac patted his belly, maintaining the analogy.
"All the trainlines meet there—Sud Line, Dexter, Verso,
Head and Sink Lines; everything has to pass through it. That’s
like me. That’s my job. That’s the kind of scientist I
am. I’m being frank with you. Thing is, you see, I think that’s
what you need."

Yagharek nodded. His
predatory face was so sharp, so hard. Emotion was invisible. His
words had to be decoded. It was not his face, nor his eyes, nor his
bearing (once again proud and imperious), nor his voice that let
Isaac see his despair. It was his words.

"Be a dilettante,
a sciolist, a swindler...So long as you return me to the sky,
Grimnebulin."

Yagharek stooped and
picked up his ugly wooden disguise. He strapped it to himself without
obvious shame, despite the indignity of the act. Isaac watched as
Yagharek draped the huge cloak over himself and stepped quietly down
the stairs.

Isaac leant
thoughtfully on the railing and looked down into the dusty space.
Yagharek paced past the immobile construct, past haphazard piles of
papers and chairs and blackboards. The light beams that had burst
through walls pierced by age were gone. The sun was low, now, behind
the buildings across from Isaac’s warehouse, blocked by massed
ranks of bricks, sliding sideways across the ancient city, lighting
the hidden sides of the Dancing Shoe Mountains, Spine Peak and the
crags of Penitent’s Pass, throwing the jagged skyline of the
earth into silhouettes that loomed up miles to the west of New
Crobuzon.

When Yagharek opened
the door, it was onto a street in shadow.

**

Isaac worked into the
night.

As soon as Yagharek
left Isaac opened his window and dangled a large red piece of cord
from nails in the brick. He moved his heavy calculation engine from
the centre of its desk to the floor beside it. Sheafs of programme
cards spilt from its storage shelf to the floor. Isaac swore. He
patted them together and replaced them. Then he carried his
typewriter to his desk and began to make a list. Occasionally he
would leap upright and pace over to his makeshift bookshelves, or
rummage through a pile of books on the floor, till he found the
volume he was looking for. He would take it to the desk and flick
through from the back, searching for the bibliography.

He laboriously copied
details, stabbing with two fingers at the typewriter keys.

As he wrote, the
parameters of his plan began to expand. He sought more and more
books, his eyes widening as he realized the potentiality of this
research.

Eventually he stopped
and sat back in his chair, pondering. He grabbed some loose paper and
scrawled diagrams on it: mental maps, plans of how to proceed.

Again and again he
returned to the same model. A triangle, with a cross firmly planted
in the middle. He could not stop himself grinning.

"I like it..."
he murmured.

There was a knock at
the window. He rose and paced over to it.

A small scarlet idiot
face grinned at Isaac from outside. Two stubby horns jutted from its
prominent chin, ridges and knobs of bone unconvincingly imitated a
hairline. Watery eyes gazed above an ugly, cheerful grin.

Isaac opened the window
onto the rapidly dwindling light. There was an argument between
klaxons as industrial boats fought to crawl past each other in the
waters of the Canker. The creature perched on Isaac’s
window-ledge hopped up into the open window-frame, grasping the edges
with gnarled hands.

"Wotcher,
captain!" it gabbled. Its accent was thick and bizarre. "Saw
the red wossname, scarf thing...Says to meself, ‘Time for da
bossman!’ " It winked and barked stupid laughter. "Wossyer
pleasure, captain? Atcher service."

"Evening,
Teafortwo. You got my message." The creature flapped its red
batwings.

Teafortwo was a wyrman.
Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a
human dwarf’s below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen
ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet,
those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows’
legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on
their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over
the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by.

The wyrmen were more
intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They
thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and
mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding
from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks
they could just about read. Teafortwo’s sister, Isaac knew, was
called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies.

The wyrmen lived in
hundreds and thousands of nooks, in attics and annexes and behind
hoardings. Most picked a living from the margins of the city. The
huge dumps and rubbish-heaps at the outskirts of Stoneshell and
Abrogate Green, the wastescape by the river in Griss Twist, all
swarmed with wyrmen, squabbling and laughing, drinking from stagnant
canals, fucking in the sky and on the earth. Some, like Teafortwo,
supplemented this with informal employment. When scarfs flapped on
roofs, or chalk marks defaced walls near attic windows, the odds were
that someone was calling some wyrman or other for a task.

Isaac foraged in his
pocket and held up a shekel. "Fancy earning this, Teafortwo?"

"Betcha, captain!"
shouted Teafortwo. "Look out below!" he added and shat
loudly. The stool spattered on the street. Teafortwo guffawed.

Isaac handed him the
list he had made, rolled into a scroll. "Take that to the
university library. You know it? Over the river? Good. It’s
open late, you should catch ‘em open. Give that to the
librarian. I’ve signed it, so they shouldn’t give you any
trouble. They’ll load you up with some books. Think you can
bring them back to me? They’ll be pretty heavy."

"No problem,
captain!" Teafortwo swelled his chest like a bantam. "Big
strong lad!"

"Fine. Manage it
in one go and I’ll slip you a bit more moolah." Teafortwo
clutched the list and turned to go with some rude childish yell, when
Isaac grabbed the edge of his wing. The wyrman turned, surprised.
"Problem, boss?"

"No, no..."
Isaac was staring at the base of his wing, thoughtfully. He gently
opened and closed Teafortwo’s massive wing with his hands.
Under that vivid red skin, horny and pockmarked and stiff like
leather, Isaac could feel the specialized muscles of flight winding
through the flesh to the wings. They moved with a magnificent
economy. He bent the wing through a full circle, feeling the muscles
tug it into a paddling, scooping motion that would shovel air out and
under the wyrman. Teafortwo giggled.

"Captain tickle
me! Saucy devil!" he screamed.

Isaac reached for some
paper, having to stop himself from dragging Teafortwo with him. He
was visualizing the wyrman wing represented mathematically, as simple
component planes.

"Teafortwo...tell
you what. When you get back, I’ll toss you another shekel if I
can take a few heliotypes of you and do a couple of experiments. Only
half an hour or so. What do you say?"

"Lovely-jubbly,
captain!"

Teafortwo hopped onto
the window-sill and lurched out into the gloaming. Isaac squinted,
studying the rolling motion of the wings, watching those strong
muscles unique to the airborne send eighty or more pounds of twisted
flesh and bone powering through the sky.

When Teafortwo had
disappeared from sight, Isaac sat and made another list, by hand this
time, scribbling at speed.

Research,
he
wrote at the top of the page. Then below it:
physics; gravity;
forces/planes/vectors;
unified field
.
And a little
below that, he wrote:
Flight i) natural ii) thaumaturgical iii)
chymico-physical iv) combined v) other.

Finally, underlined and
in capitals, he wrote PHYSIOGNOMIES OF FLIGHT.

He sat back, not
relaxed but poised to leap. He was humming abstractedly. He was
desperately excited.

He fumbled for one of
the books he had fished from under his bed, an enormous old volume.
He let it topple flat onto the desk, relishing the heavy sound. The
cover was embossed in unrealistic fake gold.

A Bestiary Of The
Potentially Wise: The Sentient Races Of Bas-Lag.

Isaac stroked the cover
of Shacrestialchit’s classic, translated from the Lubbock
vodyanoi and updated a hundred years ago by Benkerby Carnadine, human
merchant, traveller and scholar of New Crobuzon. Constantly reprinted
and imitated, but still unsurpassed. Isaac put his finger on the G of
the thumb-index and flipped the pages, until he found the exquisite
watercolour sketch of the Cymek bird-people that introduced the essay
on the garuda.

As the light ebbed from
the room he turned on the gaslamp that sat on his desk. Out in the
cool air, away to the east, Teafortwo beat his wings heavily and
grasped the sack of books that dangled below him. He could see the
bright glimmer of Isaac’s gasjet, and just beyond it, outside
the window, the sputtering ivory of the streetlamp. A constant stream
of night-insects spiralled it like elyctrons, finding their
occasional way through a crack in the glass and immolating themselves
in its light with a little combustive burst. Their carbonized remains
dusted the bottom of the glass.

The lamp was a beacon,
a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way
over the river and out of the predatory night.

**

In this city, those
who look like me are not like me. I made the mistake once (tired and
afraid and desperate for help) of doubting that.

Looking for a place
to hide, looking for food and warmth at night and respite from the
stares that greet me whenever I set foot on the streets. I saw a
young fledgling, running easily along the narrow passageway between
drab houses. My heart nearly burst. I cried out to him, this boy of
my own kind, in the desert tongue...and he gazed back at me and
spread his wings and opened his beak and broke into some cacophonous
laughter.

He swore at me in a
bestial croaking. His larynx fought to shape human sounds. I cried
out to him but he would not understand. He yelled something behind
him and a group of human street-children congregated from holes in
the city, like spirits spiteful to the living. He gesticulated at me,
that bright-eyed chick, and he screamed curses too fast for me to
understand. And these, his comrades, these dirty-faced roughnecks,
these dangerous brutalized amoral little creatures with pinched faces
and ragged trousers, spattered with snot and rheum and urban dirt,
girls in stained shifts and boys with jackets too big, grabbed
cobblestones from the earth and pelted me where I lay in the darkness
of a decaying threshold.

And the little boy
whom I will not call garuda, who was nothing but human with freakish
wings and feathers, my little lost non-brother threw the stones with
his comrades and laughed and broke windows behind my head and called
me names.

I realized then as
the stones splintered my pillow of old paint that I was alone.

**

And so, and so, I
know that I must live without respite from this isolation. That I
will not speak to any other creature in my own tongue.

I have taken to
foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes
introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came
by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert
is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My existence grows
nocturnal. My beliefs change.

I emerge into
streets that wind like dark rivers through cavernous brick rockfaces.
The moon and her little shining daughters glimmer wanly. Cold winds
ooze like molasses down from the foothills and the mountains and clog
the night-city with drifting rubbish. I share the streets with
aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with
motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.

I remember the
desert winds: the Khamsin that scourges the land like smokeless fire;
the Fohm that bursts from hot mountainsides as if in ambush; the sly
Simoom that inveigles its way through leather sandscreens and library
doors.

The winds of this
city are a more melancholy breed. They explore like lost souls,
looking in at dusty gaslit windows. We are brethren, the city-winds
and I. We wander together.

We have found
sleeping beggars that clutch each other and congeal for warmth like
lower creatures, forced back down evolutionary strata by their
poverty.

We have seen the
city’s night-porters fish the dead from the rivers. Dark-suited
militia tugging with hooks and poles at bloated bodies with eyes
ripped from their heads, the blood set and gelatinous in their
sockets.