Perdido Street Station (13 page)

king garuda! lord of
the air!

Derkhan tugged at the
heavy curtain. She and Isaac exchanged glances, and entered.

**

"Ah! Visitors from
this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay
a while with a traveller from far, far away!"

The querulous voice
burst out of the shadows. Isaac squinted through the bars before
them. A dark, shambolic figure stood painfully and lurched out of the
darkness at the back of the tent.

"I am a chief of
my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard."

The voice was pained
and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the
alien sounds that burst from Yagharek’s throat. The speaker
stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to
bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and
died in an aghast whisper.

The figure before Isaac
and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy
off it like a pudgy schoolboy’s. Its skin was pale and
pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over
its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched
toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but
feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to
its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered
myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open
lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like
old pewter.

Behind the wretched
creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no
more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they
half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic
muck spilt from them as they shuddered.

The creature’s
beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips
forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly
made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the
nose and mouth, he realized.

"Let me tell you
of the times I have soared into the air with my prey..." began
the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to
cut it off.

"Please gods,
enough!" he shouted. "Spare us this...
embarrassment
..."

The false garuda
staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

There was silence for a
long time.

"What’s the
matter, guvnor?" whispered the thing behind bars eventually.
"What’d I do wrong?"

"I came here to
see a fucking garuda," rumbled Isaac. "What d’you
take me for? You’re Remade, mate...as any fool can see."

The big dead beak
clicked together as the man licked his lips. His eyes darted left and
right nervously.

"Jabber’s
sake, squire," he whispered pleadingly. "Don’t go
complaining. This is all I got. You’re obviously a gentleman of
education...I’m as close as most get to garuda...all they
want’s to hear a bit about hunting in the desert, see the
bird-man, and that way I earn."

"Godspit, Isaac,"
whispered Derkhan. "Go easy."

Isaac was crushingly
disappointed. He had been preparing a list of questions in his mind.
He knew exactly how he had wanted to investigate the wings, which
muscle-bone interaction currently intrigued him. He had been prepared
to pay a good rate for the research, had prepared to get Ged to come
down to ask questions about the Cymek Library. To be faced instead
with a scared, sickly human reading from a script that would have
disgraced the lowest playhouse depressed him.

His anger was tempered
with pity as he stared at the miserable figure before him. The man
behind the feathers nervously clutched and unclutched his left arm
with his right. He had to open that preposterous beak to breath.

" ‘Stail,"
Isaac swore softly.

Derkhan had walked up
to the bars.

"What did you do?"
she asked.

The man looked around
again before answering.

"Did thieving,"
he said quickly. "Got caught trying to get an old painting of a
garuda from some ancient cunt out in Chnum. Worth a fortune. Magister
said since I was so impressed with garuda I could—" his
breath caught for a moment "—I could be one."

Isaac could see how the
feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless
bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He
imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one. When the
Remade turned slightly to Derkhan, Isaac could see the ugly knot of
hardened flesh on his back where those wings, torn from some buzzard
or vulture, had been sealed together with the human muscles.

Nerve endings bonded
randomly and uselessly, and the wings moved only with the spasms of a
long drawn-out death. Isaac’s nose wrinkled at the stench. The
wings were rotting slowly on the Remade’s back.

"Does it hurt?"
Derkhan was asking.

"Not so very much
any more, miss," the Remade answered. "Anyway, I’m
lucky to have this." He indicated the tent and the bars. "Keeps
me eating. That’s why I’d be obliged more’n I can
say if you’d refrain from telling the boss that you clocked
me."

Did most who came
here really accept this disgusting charade?
wondered Isaac.
Were
people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this
could ever fly?

"We’ll say
nothing," said Derkhan. Isaac nodded curtly in agreement. He was
full of pity and anger and disgust. He wanted to leave.

Behind them, the
curtain swished and a group of young women entered, laughing and
whispering lewd jokes. The Remade looked over Derkhan’s
shoulder.

"Ah!" he said
loudly. "Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear
stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far,
far away!"

He moved away from
Derkhan and Isaac, gazing at them pleadingly as he did so. Delighted
screams and astonishment burst from the new spectators.

"Fly for us!"
yelled one.

"Alas," heard
Isaac and Derkhan as they left the tent, "the weather in your
city is too inclement for my kind. I have caught chill and
temporarily cannot fly. But tarry and I will tell you of the views
from the cloudless Cymek skies..."

The cloth closed behind
them. The speech was obscured.

Isaac watched as
Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

"What are you
going to turn in?" he asked.

" ‘Remade
Forced by Magister’s Torture into Living as Zoo Exhibit.’
I won’t say which one," she answered without looking up
from her writing. Isaac nodded.

"Come on," he
murmured. "I’ll get that candyfloss."

**

"I’m fucking
depressed now," said Isaac heavily. He bit at the sickly-sweet
bundle he carried. Wisps of sugar fibres stuck to his stubble.

"Yes, but are you
depressed because of what’d been done to that man, or because
you didn’t get to meet a garuda?" asked Derkhan.

They had left the
freakshow. They munched earnestly as they walked past the garish body
of the fair. Isaac pondered. He was a little taken aback.

"Well, I
suppose...probably because I didn’t meet a garuda...But,"
he added defensively, "I wouldn’t be half so depressed if
it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like
that. It’s the...fucking
indignity
of it that really
sticks in the craw..."

Derkhan nodded
thoughtfully.

"We could look
around, you know," she said. "There’s bound to be a
garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here."
She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could
hardly even see the stars.

"Not now,"
said Isaac. "I’m not in the mood. I’ve lost my
momentum." There was a long, companionable silence before he
spoke again.

"Will you really
write something about this place in
Runagate Rampanfi"

Derkhan shrugged,
looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.

"It’s a
difficult job, dealing with the Remade," she said. "There’s
so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to
link up, so people don’t...judge them as monsters...it’s
really hard. And it’s not like people don’t know they’ve
got fucking horrendous lives, for the most part...it’s that
there’s a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve
it, even if they pity them, or think it’s Gods-given, or
rubbish like that. Oh, Godspit," she said suddenly, and shook
her head.

"What?"

"I was in court
the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a
sordid, pathetic, miserable crime..." She winced in remembrance.
"Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath
monoliths killed her baby...smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows
what...because it wouldn’t stop crying. She’s sitting
there in court, her eyes are just...damn well
empty...
she
can’t believe what’s happened, she keeps moaning her
baby’s name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course,
ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.

"Her baby’s
arms are going to be grafted to her face. ‘So she doesn’t
forget what she did,’ he says." Derkhan’s voice
curdled as she mimicked the Magister.

They walked in silence
for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.

"I’m an art
critic, Isaac," Derkhan said eventually. "Remaking’s
art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen
Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they
retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big
squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud,
plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the
ones made for the gladiatorial shows...! Not that they admit that’s
what they’re for...

"Remaking’s
creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone
rancid.
I remember you
once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing
for
RR
? She turned to look at him as they paced through the
fair. "It’s the
same thing,
Isaac. Art’s
something you choose to make...it’s a bringing together of...of
everything around you into something that makes you more human, more
khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that
survives. That’s why the same people who despise the Remade are
in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.

"I don’t
want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art."

Isaac felt in his
pocket for
Runagate Rampant.
It was dangerous even to hold a
copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at
Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling
over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and
Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called "comprador
scum"; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party;
the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in
a sandpit.

At the end of the path
paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food,
discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the
entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing
her. As they neared her she stood straighter and waved at them. She
sauntered in their direction.

Isaac saw that she had
a toffee-apple gripped in her mandibles. Her inner jaw chewed with
gusto.

How was it,
treasure?
she signed.

"An unmitigated
arsing disaster," Isaac huffed miserably. "I’ll tell
you all about it."

He even risked grasping
her hand briefly as they turned their backs on the fair.

The three small figures
disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight
was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the
enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued
to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky.

Across the city,
through the shady alleys of Echomire and the hovels of Badside, in
the lattice of dust-clogged canals, in Smog Bend and the faded
estates of Barrackham, in towers in Tar Wedge and the hostile
concrete forest of Dog Fenn, came the whispered word.
Someone’s
paying for winged things.

Like a god, Lemuel
breathed life into the message and made it fly. Small-time hoods
heard it from drug dealers; costermongers told it to decayed
gentlemen; doctors with dubious records got it from part-time
bouncers.

Isaac’s request
swept through the slums and rookeries. It travelled the alternative
architecture thrown up in the human sumps.

Where putrefying houses
loomed over courtyards, wooden walkways seemed to self-generate,
linking them together, connecting them to the streets and mews where
exhausted beasts of burden hauled third-rate goods up and down.
Bridges jutted like splinted limbs across cess-trenches. Isaac’s
message was couriered across the chaotic skyline in the paths of the
feral cats.

Little expeditions of
urban adventurers took the Sink Line train south to Fell Stop and
ventured into Rudewood. They walked the deserted train tracks as long
as they could, stepping from slat to wooden slat, passing the empty,
nameless station in the outlands of the forest. The platforms had
surrendered to green life. The tracks were thick with dandelions and
foxgloves and wild roses that had shoved pugnacious through the
railway gravel and, here and there, bent the tracks. Darkwood and
banyan and evergreen crept up on the nervous invaders until they were
surrounded, enclosed in a lush trap.

They went with sacks
and catapults and big nets. They hauled their clumsy urban carcasses
through the tangled roots and thick tree-shadows, yelling and
tripping and breaking branches. They tried to pinpoint the birdsong
that disoriented them, sounding on every side. They made faltering,
useless analogies between the city and this alien realm: "If you
can find your way through Dog Fenn," one might say fatuously and
wrongly, "you can find your way anywhere." They would spin,
look for and fail to find the militia tower of Vaudois Hill, out of
sight behind the trees.