Perdido Street Station (31 page)

With its priestesses
and its orgies and its cottage industries, its secret reliance on the
wider economy of New Crobuzon—the vastness of which was usually
depicted airily as a kind of adjunct to Kinken—Lin realized
that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined
sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic
brew. It was parasitic.

Lin realized, to her
revolted anger, that Kinken was more dishonest than Creekside. But
this realization brought with it no nostalgia for her miserable
childhood. She would not return to Creekside. And if, now, she was
turning her back on Kinken as once she had turned it on Insect
Aspect, there was nowhere to go but out.

So Lin taught herself
signing, and left.

**

Lin was never so
foolish as to think she could stop being defined by being khepri, as
far as the city was concerned. Nor did she want to. But for herself,
she stopped
trying
to be khepri, as she had once stopped
trying to be insect. That was why she was bewildered by her feelings
about Ma Francine. It was not only that Ma Francine was opposing to
Mr. Motley, Lin realized. There was something about a
khepri
doing that, effortlessly stealing territory from this vile man, that
stirred Lin.

Lin could not, even to
herself, pretend to understand. She would sit, for a long time, in
the shadow of banyans or oaks or pear trees, in the Kinken she had
despised for years, surrounded by sisters to whom she was an
outsider. She did not want to return to the "khepri way"
any more than to the Insect Aspect. She did not understand the
strength she drew from Kinken.

The construct that had
swept David’s and Lublamai’s floor for years seemed
finally to be giving up the ghost. It wheezed and spun as it
scrubbed. It became fixated with arbitrary patches of floor, polished
them as if they were jewels. Some mornings it took nearly an hour to
warm up. It was becoming caught in programme loops, causing it to
endlessly repeat tiny pieces of behaviour.

Isaac learnt to ignore
its repetitive, neurotic whines. He worked with both hands at once.
With his left, he scribbled down his notions in diagrammatic form.
With his right he fed equations into the innards of his little
calculating engine through its stiff keys, slotted punctured cards
into its programme slot, fumbling them in and out at speed. He solved
the same problems with different programmes, comparing answers,
typing out the sheets of numbers.

The innumerable books
on flight that had filled Isaac’s bookshelves had been
replaced, with Teafortwo’s help, by an equally large number of
tomes on unified field theory, and on the arcane sub-field of crisis
mathematics.

After only two weeks of
research, something extraordinary happened in Isaac’s mind. The
reconceptualization came to him so simply that he did not at first
realize the scale of his insight. It seemed a thoughtful moment like
many others, in the course of a whole internal scientific dialogue. A
sense of genius did not descend on Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in a
cold shock of brilliant light. Instead, as he gnawed the top of a
pencil one day, there was a moment of vaguely verbalized thought
along the lines of
or wait a minute maybe you could do it like
this...

It took an hour and a
half for Isaac to realize that what he had thought might be a useful
mental model was vastly more exciting. He set out in a systematic
attempt to prove himself wrong. He constructed scenario after
mathematical scenario with which he tried to rubbish his tentatively
scrawled sets of equations. His attempts at destruction failed. His
equations held firm.

It took Isaac two days
before he began to believe that he had solved a fundamental problem
of crisis theory. He enjoyed moments of euphoria, many more of
cautious nervousness. He pored over his textbooks at a crushingly
slow pace, searching to make sure he had not ignored some obvious
error, had not replicated some long-disproved theorem.

Still, his equations
held. In terror of hubris, Isaac sought any alternative than to
believe what was looking more and more like the truth: that he had
solved the problem of mathematic representation, quantification, of
crisis energy.

He knew that he should
immediately converse with colleagues, publish his findings as "work
in progress" in
The Review of Philosophical Physics and
Thaumaturgy,
or the
Unified Field.
But he was so
intimidated by what he had discovered that he avoided that route. He
wanted to be sure, he told himself. He had to take a few more days, a
few more weeks, maybe a month or two...then he would publish. He did
not tell Lublamai or David, or Lin, which was more extraordinary.
Isaac was a garrulous man, prone to spouting any old tosh,
scientific, social or obscene, which came to his mind. His
secretiveness was profoundly out of character. He knew himself well
enough to recognize this, and to realize what it meant: he was deeply
disturbed, and deeply, deeply excited by what he had found.

Isaac thought back on
the process of discovery, of formulation. He realized that his
advances, his incredible leaps of theory in the last month, which
eclipsed his previous five years’ work, were all in response to
immediate, practical concerns. He had reached an impasse in his
studies of crisis theory until Yagharek had commissioned him. Isaac
did not know why it was so, but he realized that it was with
applications in mind that his most abstract theories were advancing.
Accordingly, he decided not to immerse himself totally in abstruse
theory. He would continue to focus on the problem of Yagharek’s
flight.

He would not let
himself think about the ramifications of his research, not at this
stage. Everything he uncovered, every advance, every idea he had, he
would quietly plough back into his applied studies. He tried to see
everything as a means to get Yagharek back in the air. It was
difficult—perverse, even—constantly trying to contain and
circumscribe his work. He saw the situation as one of working behind
his own back, or more exactly, as trying to do research out of the
corner of his eye. Yet, incredible as it seemed, with the discipline
that was forced on him, Isaac progressed theoretically at a rate he
could never have dreamed of six months before.

It was an
extraordinary, circuitous route to scientific revolution, he thought
sometimes, chiding himself quickly for his direct gaze at the theory.
Get back to work,
he would tell himself sternly.
There’s
a garuda to get airborne.
But he could not stop his heart from
thumping with excitement, the occasional almost hysterical grin from
racing across his face. Some days he sought Lin out and, if she was
not working at her secret piece in her secret location, he would try
to seduce her in her flat with a tender, excited fervour that
delighted her, for all that she was obviously tired. At other times
he spent days in only his own company, immersing himself in science.

Isaac applied his
extraordinary insights and began tentatively to design a machine to
solve Yagharek’s problem. The same drawing began to appear more
and more in his work. At first it was a doodle, a few loosely
connecting lines covered in arrows and question marks. Within days it
was appearing more solid. Its lines were drawn in ruled ink. Its
curves were measured and careful. It was on its way to becoming a
blueprint.

Yagharek sometimes came
back to Isaac’s laboratory, always when the two of them were
alone. Isaac would hear the door creak open at night, turn to see the
impassive, dignified garuda still steeped in visible misery.

Isaac found that trying
to explain his work to Yagharek helped him. Not the big theoretical
stuff, of course, but the applied science which furthered the
half-hidden theory. Isaac spent days with a thousand ideas and
potential projects swilling violently in his head, and to pare that
down, to explain in non-technical language the various techniques he
thought might enable him to tap crisis energy forced him to evaluate
his trajectories, discard some, focus on others.

He began to rely on
Yagharek’s interest. If too many days passed without the garuda
appearing, Isaac became distracted. He spent those hours watching the
enormous caterpillar.

The creature had gorged
itself on dreamshit for nearly a fortnight, growing and growing. When
it had reached three feet in length, Isaac had nervously stopped
feeding it. Its cage was getting much too small. That would have to
be the full extent of its size. It had spent the next day or two
wandering around hopefully in its little space, waving its nose in
the air. Since then it seemed to have resigned itself to the fact
that it would get no more food. Its original desperate hunger had
subsided.

It was not moving very
much, just shifting around now and then, undulating once or twice the
width of the cage, stretching as if yawning. For the most part it
just sat and pulsed slightly in and out, with breath or heartbeat or
what, Isaac did not know. It looked healthy enough. It looked as if
it was waiting.

Sometimes, as he had
dropped the gobs of dreamshit into the caterpillar’s eager
mandibles, Isaac had found himself reflecting on his own experience
with the drug with a faint, querulous longing. This was not the
delusion of nostalgia. Isaac vividly remembered the sense of being
awash in filth; of being sullied at the most profound level; the
nauseating, disorientating sickness; the panicked confusion of losing
himself in a welter of emotion, and losing the confusion, and
mistaking it for another mind’s invading fears...And yet,
despite the vehemence of those recollections, he found himself eyeing
his caterpillar’s breakfasts with a speculative air—perhaps
even a hungry one.

Isaac was very
disturbed by these feelings. He had always been unashamedly cowardly
when it came to drugs. As a student, there had been plenty of loose,
smelly fogweed cigarillos, of course, and the inane giggles that went
with that. But Isaac had never had the stomach for anything stronger.
These inchoate rumblings of a new appetite did nothing to allay his
fears. He did not know how addictive dreamshit was, if at all, but he
sternly refused to give in to those faint stirrings of curiosity.

The dreamshit was for
his caterpillar, and for it alone.

Isaac channelled his
curiosity from sensual into intellectual currents. He knew only two
chymists personally, both unutterable prudes with whom he would no
more raise the question of illegal drugs than he would dance naked
down the middle of Tervisadd Way. Instead, he raised the subject of
dreamshit in the louche taverns of Salacus Fields. Several of his
acquaintances turned out to have sampled the drug, and a few were
regular users.

Dreamshit did not seem
to differ in effect between the races. No one knew where the drug
came from, but all who admitted to taking it sang paeans of praise to
its extraordinary effects. The only thing they all agreed on was that
dreamshit was expensive, and getting more so. Not that this put them
off their habits. The artists in particular spoke in quasi-mystical
terms of communing with other minds. Isaac scoffed at this, claiming
(without acknowledging his own limited experience) that the drug was
no more than a powerful oneirogen, that stimulated the dream-centres
of the brain as very-tea stimulated the visual and olfactory
cortexes.

He did not believe it
himself. He was not surprised at the vehement opposition to his
theory.

"I don’t
know how, ‘Zaac," Thighs Growing had hissed at him
reverentially, "but it lets you
share dreams...
" At
this, the other users crammed into a little booth in The Clock and
Cockerel had nodded in time, comically. Isaac affected a sceptical
face, to maintain his role of killjoy. Actually, of course, he
agreed. He intended to find out more about the extraordinary
substance—Lemuel Pigeon would be the person to ask, or Lucky
Gazid, if he ever reappeared—but the pace of his work in crisis
theory overtook him. His attitude to the dreamshit he had shoved into
the grub’s cage remained one of curiosity, nervousness and
ignorance.

Isaac was staring
uneasily at the vast creature one warm day in late Melluary. It was,
he decided, more than prodigious. It was more than a very big
caterpillar. It was definitely a monster. He resented it for being so
damn interesting. Otherwise he could have just forgotten about it.

The door below him was
pushed open, and Yagharek appeared in the shafts of early sun. It was
rare, very rare for the garuda to come before nightfall. Isaac
started and leapt to his feet, beckoning his client up the stairs.

"Yag, old son!
Long time no see! I was drifting. I need you to tether me. Get on up
here."

Yagharek mounted the
stairs wordlessly.

"How do you know
when Lub and David are going to be out, eh?" asked Isaac. "You
keep watch, or something creepy, right? Damn, Yag, you’ve got
to stop skulking around like a fucking mugger."

"I would talk to
you, Grimnebulin." Yagharek’s voice was oddly tentative.

"Fire away, old
son." Isaac sat and watched him. He knew by now that Yagharek
would not sit.

Yagharek took off his
cloak and wing-frame and turned to Isaac with folded arms. Isaac
understood this to be as close as Yagharek would ever get to
expressing trust, standing with his deformity in full view, making no
effort to cover himself. Isaac supposed he should feel flattered.

Yagharek was eyeing him
sideways.

"There are people
in the night-city where I live, Grimnebulin, from many kinds of
lives. It is not all flotsam that hide themselves."

"I never presumed
it was..." Isaac began, but Yagharek twitched his head
impatiently, and Isaac was silent.