Perdido Street Station (28 page)

"Of course I’ve
heard that!" said Isaac. "I never knew it was about someone
real...
"

"Well, you never
took Introductory Bio-Thaumaturgy, did you? As I remember, you did
about two terms of the Intermediate course, much later. You missed my
first lecture. That’s the story I use to entice our jaded young
knowledge-hunters onto the road of this noble science."
Vermishank spoke in a completely deadpan voice. Isaac felt his
distaste return with interest. "Calligine disappeared,"
Vermishank continued. "Went off flying south-west, towards the
Cacotopic Stain. Never seen again."

There was another long
silence.

"Uh...is that the
whole story?" said Isaac. "How did they get the wings on
him? Did he keep experimental notes? What was the Remaking like?"

"Oh, horribly
difficult, I’d imagine. Calligine probably got through a few
experimental subjects before getting his sums right..."
Vermishank grinned. "Probably called in a few favours with Mayor
Mantagony. I suspect a few felons sentenced to death had a few more
weeks of life than they’d expected. Not part of the process
that he advertised. But it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that
it’s going to take a few tries before you get it right. I mean,
you’ve got to connect up the mechanism to bones and muscles and
whatnot that haven’t a clue what they’re supposed to be
doing..."

"But what if the
muscles and bones
did
know what they were doing? What about if
a...a wyrman or something, had its wings cut off. Could they be
replaced?"

Vermishank gazed
passively at Isaac. His head and eyes did not move.

"Ha..." he
said faintly, eventually. "You’d have thought that was
easier, wouldn’t you? It is, in theory, but it’s even
harder in practice. I’ve done some of this with birds
and...well, with winged things. First off, Isaac, in theory it’s
perfectly possible. In theory, there is almost nothing which can’t
be done with Remaking. It’s all just a question of wiring
things up right, a bit of flesh-moulding. But flight’s horribly
hard because you’re dealing with all sorts of variables that
have to be exactly right. See, Isaac, you can Remake a dog, sew a leg
back on, or mould it on with a clayflesh hex, and the animal’ll
limp along happily. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll walk.
Can’t do that with wings. Wings have to be perfect or they
won’t do the trick. It’s
harder
to teach muscles
that think they know how to fly to do the same trick differently than
it is to teach muscles that haven’t any idea in the first
place. Your bird or what have you, its shoulders get all confused by
this wing which is just a tad the wrong shape, or the wrong size, or
based on different aerodynamics, and it ends up being totally
stymied,
even assuming
you’ve reconnected everything up
right.

"So the answer, I
suppose I’m saying, Isaac, is that yes it can be done. This
wyrman,
or whatever, can be Remade to fly again. But it isn’t
likely. It’s too damn hard. There’s no bio-thaumaturge,
no Remaker, who could promise a result. Either you’re going to
have to find Calligine, get him to do it," hissed Vermishank in
conclusion, "or I wouldn’t risk it."

Isaac finished
scribbling notes and flipped his notebook closed.

"Thanks,
Vermishank. I was sort of...hoping you’d say that. That’s
your professional opinion, eh? Well, I’ll just have to pursue
my
other
line of enquiry, of which you wouldn’t approve
at all..." His eyes bulged like a naughty boy’s.

Vermishank nodded very
slightly and a sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a
fungus.

"Ha," he said
faintly.

"Right, well,
thanks for your time...Appreciate it..." Isaac flustered as he
stood to go. "Sorry to be so fleeting..."

"Not at all. Any
other opinions needed?"

"Well..."
Isaac paused with his arm half into his jacket. "Well. Have you
heard of something called dreamshit?"

Vermishank raised an
eyebrow. He leaned back in his chair and chewed his thumb, looking at
Isaac with half-closed eyes.

"This is a
university, Isaac. Do you think a new and
exciting
illicit
substance would sweep the city and none of our students would be
tempted? Of course I’ve heard of it. We had our first expulsion
for selling the drug less than half a year ago. Very bright young
psychonomer, of predictably avant-garde theoretical persuasion.

"Isaac,
Isaac...for all your many, uh,
indiscretions
..." a little
simper pretended unconvincingly to rob the insult of its barb "—I
wouldn’t have had you down as a...a
drug
person."

"No, Vermishank,
nor am I. However, living and operating in the
quagmire of
corruption
that I’ve chosen, surrounded by
lowlifes,
and vile degenerates, I tend to be faced with things like drugs at
the various
sordid orgies
I attend." Isaac told himself
off for losing his patience at the same moment that he decided there
was nothing to be gained from further diplomacy. He spoke loudly and
sarcastically. He rather enjoyed his ire.

"So anyway,"
he continued, "one of my disgusting friends was using this
bizarre drug and I wanted to know more about it. Obviously shouldn’t
have asked someone so high-minded."

Vermishank was
chuckling soundlessly. He laughed without opening his mouth. His face
remained set in a sour smirk. He kept his eyes on Isaac. The only
sign that he was laughing was the little shucking motion of his
shoulders and his slight rocking back and forth.

"Ha," he said
eventually. "Touchy-touchy, Isaac." He shook his head.
Isaac patted his pockets and fastened his jacket, ostentatiously
getting ready to go, refusing to feel silly. He turned his back and
walked to the door, debating the merits of a parting shot.

Vermishank spoke while
he considered.

"Dreamsh...Ah,
that substance
is not really my area, Isaac. Pharmacology and
whatnot something of a biological backwater. I’m sure one of
your old colleagues might be able to tell you more. Good luck."

Isaac had decided
against saying anything. He did, however, wave behind him in a
pusillanimous motion that he could convince himself was contemptuous,
but could just about pass for gratitude and farewell.
You arsing
coward,
he scolded himself. But there was no getting away from
it, Vermishank was a useful repository of knowledge. Isaac knew it
would take a lot for him to be really, unrepentantly rude to his
former boss. That was just too much expertise to close the door on.

So Isaac forgave
himself his half-hearted retaliation and grinned, instead, at his own
floundering reaction to the awful man. At least he had learnt what he
had come there to learn. Remaking was not an option for Yagharek.
Isaac was pleased, and he was honest enough to recognize the
ignobility of the reasons. His own research had been reinvigorated by
the problem of flight, and if the prosaic flesh-sculpting of applied
bio-thaumaturgy had won out over crisis theory, his research would
have stalled. He did not want to lose his new momentum.

Yag old son,
he
reflected,
it’s just as I thought. I’m your best shot,
and you’re mine.

**

Before the city
there were canals that wound between rock formations like silicate
tusks, and patches of corn in the thin soil. And before the scrub
there were days of glowering stone. Gnarled granite tumours that had
sat heavy in the belly of the land since its birth, their thin
earth-flesh stripped from them by air and water in a mere ten
thousand years. They were ugly and terrifying as innards always are,
those rock promontories, those crags.

I walked the path of
the river. It was nameless between the hard ridged hills: in days it
would become the Tar. I could see the freezing heights of real
mountains miles to the west, colossi of rock and snow that reared as
imperiously over the local jags of scree and lichen as those lower
peaks reared over me.

Sometimes I thought
the rocks shaped like looming figures, with claws and fangs and heads
like clubs or hands. Petrified giants; unmoving stone gods; mistakes
of the eye or the wind’s chance sculptures.

I was seen. Goats
and sheep poured scorn on my stumbling. Screaming birds of prey
shouted their contempt. Sometimes I passed shepherds who stared at
me, suspicious and rude.

There were darker
shapes at night. There were colder watchers under the water.

The rock teeth broke
earth so slowly and slyly that I was walking that gouged valley for
hours before I knew it. Before that were days and days of grass and
scrub.

The earth was easier
on my feet, and the massive sky easier on my eye. But I would not be
fooled. I would not be seduced. It was not the desert sky. It was a
pretender, a surrogate, that tried to lull me. Drying vegetation
stroked me with every wash of wind, lusher by far than my home. In
the distance was the forest that I knew extended north to the edge of
New Crobuzon, east to the sea. In secret places among its thick trees
jutted vast, obscure, forgotten machines, pistons and gears, iron
trunks among the wood, rust their bark.

I did not approach
them.

Behind me where the
river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that
promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the
raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed
me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing
cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade,
breaking it off in the flesh of some rushing, sucking predator that
loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It
reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the
muck. I do not know if it died.

Before the wetland
and the river were days of drying grass and foothills, that I was
warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I
saw none.

There were villages
that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on
their behalf to their harvest gods. There were villages that kept me
out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the grass
with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered
cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

I slept alone,
hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when
I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept,
leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

Those sprawling
downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

I walked with
temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick
my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in
my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers
that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if
seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the
trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

I walked, a desert
creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

One day I realized
that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again.
My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I
had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted,
somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid
way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated.
The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become
someone new, without the desire that defined me.

I saw in that spring
damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for
fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn,
and rest.

**

I had been a harder
creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left
Myrshock, where my ship had landed, without spending even one night
there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I
felt oppressed.

I hurried through
the city seeking nothing but supplies and assurance that I was right
to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping
back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one
who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let
me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept
my gold, only my weapon.

I was eager to leave
the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish,
oily paddleship crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed
below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were
sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined
deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those
stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls
and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in
my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

And before the
waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still
wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town.
Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The
Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and
the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more
than I lost, rampaging like a fighting cockerel at night and hoarding
pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who
wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly,
even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in
with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold
and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought
passage on a merchant ship.