Perdido Street Station (77 page)

In the absolute dark,
it was easy to sense the slightest glimmer. Isaac knew that he was
crawling towards a source of light when he looked up and saw the grey
outline of the tunnel ahead. Something pressed Isaac’s chest.
He started massively, then recognized the pewter fingers and dark
bulk of a construct. Isaac hissed to Shadrach to stop.

The construct
gesticulated to Isaac with exaggerated jerky gestures. It pointed
forward, towards its two fellows that hovered at the edge of the
visible shaft, where the tunnel turned a sharp corner
upwards.

Isaac indicated that
Shadrach should wait. Then he crept forward at an almost motionless
pace. Glacial dread was beginning to creep through his system, from
the stomach out. He breathed deep and slow. He shifted his feet
slowly, inching along, until he felt his skin prickle as it emerged
into a shaft of faint light.

The tunnel ended in a
wall of brick five feet high, on three sides of him. A wall rose
behind him, above the tunnel mouth. Isaac looked up and saw a ceiling
way above him. A pestilential stench began to dribble into the hole.
Isaac screwed up his face.

He was crouching in a
hole, by the wall, embedded in the cement floor of a room. He could
see nothing of the chamber above and beyond him. But he could hear
faint sounds. A slight rustle, like wind against discarded paper. The
softest sound of liquid adhesion, like fingers sticky with glue
meeting and parting.

Isaac swallowed three
times and whispered to himself, gearing himself up to bravery,
forcing himself on. He turned his back on the bricks before him, on
the room beyond them. He saw Shadrach watching him on all fours, his
face set. Isaac looked intently into his mirrors. He tugged briefly
at the pipe attached to the top of his helmet, that twisted its way
backwards into the tunnel and disappeared below Shadrach’s body
into the depths, diverting his telltale thoughts.

Then Isaac began to
stand, very slowly. He stared with violent fervour into the mirrors,
as if trying to prove himself to some testing god—
See! I’m
not looking behind me, you damn well see if I do!
The top of
Isaac’s head breached the lip of the hole, and more light fell
across him. The foul smell grew stronger still.

His terror was very
strong. His sweat was no longer warm.

Isaac tilted his head
and stood a little taller, until he saw the room itself in the sepia
light that fought its way through one filthy, tiny window.

It was a long, thin
room. Eight or so feet wide, and about twenty feet long. Dusty and
long-deserted, with no visible entrance or exit, no hatches or doors.

Isaac did not breathe.
At the furthest end of the room, sitting and seeming to stare
directly at him, the lattice of its complex killing arms and limbs
moving in baffling antiphase, its wings half-open in languorous
threat, was a slake-moth.

**

It took a moment for
Isaac to realize that he had not moaned. It took another few seconds
of staring into the vile thing’s twitching antennaed sockets to
realize that it had not sensed him. The moth shifted and turned a
little, moving until it was three-quarters on to him.

Absolutely silently,
Isaac exhaled. He twitched his head fractionally, to see the rest of
the room.

When he saw its
contents, he had to fight all over again not to make a sound.

Lying at irregular
intervals the whole length of the floor, the room was littered with
the dead.

That, Isaac realized,
was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put
his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing
cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood
bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and
beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated
vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

Some, he saw with
misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay
discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit
their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until
they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had
lived at the end.

They could not be in
paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not
roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk
and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become
fuel for a slake-moth flight.

Isaac saw that in one
of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus
elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders.
The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the
mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

Then the slake-moth
moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It
shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across
the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a
great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac
squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he
recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of
dreamshit.

His eyes widened.

The slake-moth measured
the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat
globule of slake-moth milk.
That’s got to be worth fucking
thousands...
Isaac thought.
No, cut it to make it palatable,
there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder
everyone’s trying to get these damn things back...

Then, as Isaac watched,
a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic
syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards
from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was
nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack
with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball
of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the
centre of the sticky mass.

Under the armour that
had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible, from
where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the
slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the
length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

Isaac knew what he was
seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings
reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

The slake-moth was
laying its eggs.

**

Isaac slipped back
below the surface of the wall. He was hyperventilating. Urgently, he
beckoned Shadrach.

"One of the
godsdamned things is
right there
and it’s laying its
eggs
so we have to damn well take it right now..." he
hissed. Shadrach smacked his hand over Isaac’s mouth. He held
Isaac’s eyes until the older man had calmed a little. Shadrach
turned his back as Isaac had done, then stood slowly and gazed for
himself onto the grisly scene. Isaac sat with his back to the bricks,
waiting.

Shadrach dropped down
again to Isaac’s level. His face was set.

"Hmmm," he
murmured. "I see. Right. Did you say the moth-thing can’t
sense constructs?" Isaac nodded.

"As far as we
know," he said.

"Right then.
You’ve done a damn fine job programming these constructs. And
they’re an extraordinary design. Do you really mean it, that
they’ll know when to attack, if we give them instructions? They
can understand variables that complicated?"

Isaac nodded again.

"Then we have a
plan," said Shadrach. "Listen to me."

Slowly, trembling
almost uncontrollably, the memory of Barbile’s quasi-death
vivid in him, Isaac climbed out of the hole.

He kept his eyes
rigidly on the mirrors before him. He was dimly aware of the
discoloured wall behind them. The vile shape of the slake-moth shook
in the mirrors as his head moved.

As Isaac emerged, the
slake-moth stopped moving suddenly. Isaac stiffened. It turned its
head upwards and flickered its enormous tongue through the air. The
vestigial antennae in its ocular sockets waved uneasily from side to
side. Isaac moved again, creeping towards the wall.

The slake-moth moved
its head uneasily. There was obviously some leakage, Isaac thought,
from the edge of his helmet, some trickles of thought that wafted
tantalizingly through the aether. But nothing clear enough for the
slake-moth to find him.

When Isaac had made his
way to the wall, Shadrach followed him up and into the room. Again,
his presence discomfited the slake-moth a little, but nothing more
than that.

After Shadrach, three
monkey-constructs pulled themselves into view, leaving one to guard
the tunnel. They began to walk slowly towards the slake-moth. It
turned towards them, seemed to watch them without eyes.

"I think it can
sense their physical shape and their movement, and ours as well,"
whispered Isaac. "But without any mental trail, it doesn’t
see any...either of us as sapient life. We’re just moving
physical stuff, like trees in the wind."

The slake-moth was
turning to face the oncoming constructs. They separated and began to
approach the moth from different directions. They did not move fast,
and the slake-moth did not seem concerned. But it was a little wary.

"Now,"
whispered Shadrach. He and Isaac reached out and began slowly to haul
in the metal piping that extended from the top of their helmets.

As the open ends of the
pipes drew closer, the slake-moth grew agitated. It skittered back
and forth, returning to protect its eggs, then stalking forward a few
feet, its teeth chattering in a terrible rictus.

Isaac and Shadrach
looked at each other and counted silently together.

On three, they pulled
the ends of their pipes out into the open room. In a single movement,
as swiftly as they could, they whipped the metal around and sent the
open ends into the corner, fifteen feet from them.

The slake-moth went
berserk. It hissed and screeched in a loathsome register. It hunched
up its body, increasing its size, and a host of exoskeletal jags
flicked out of hollows in its flesh in organic threat.

Isaac and Shadrach
stared into their mirrors, awed by its monstrous majesty. It had
spread its wings and turned to face the corner where the pipe ends
coiled. Its wing-patterns pulsed with misdirected, hypnotic energy.

Isaac was frozen. The
slake-moth’s wings eddied with uncanny patterns. It stalked
towards the pipe-ends in a low, predatory crouch, now on four legs,
now six, now two.

Quickly, Shadrach
pulled Isaac towards the dreamshit ball.

They walked forward,
passing the incensed, hungry slake-moth, almost close enough to
touch. They saw it approaching in their mirrors, a massive looming
animal weapon. As they passed it, both men turned smoothly on their
heels, walking backwards towards the dreamshit at one moment, then
forwards the next. That way, they kept the slake-moth behind them,
visible in the mirrors.

The moth walked
straight past the constructs, knocking one aside without even
noticing, as a serrated spine swung sideways in quivering, ravenous
rage.

Isaac and Shadrach
walked carefully, checking in their mirrors that the ends of their
mental exhaust-pipes remained where they had been thrown, acting as
slake-moth bait. Two of the monkey-constructs followed the slake-moth
at a small distance, the third approaching the eggs.

"Quickly,"
hissed Shadrach, and pushed Isaac to the floor. Isaac fumbled with
the knife at his belt, wasting seconds with the clip. Then he had it
out. He hesitated a moment, and then pushed it smoothly into the big,
sticky mass.

**

Shadrach watched
intently in his mirrors. The slake-moth, shadowed by the hovering
constructs, pounced absurdly on the snaking ends of the pipes.

As Isaac drew his knife
down the surface of the egg-case, the moth flailed with fingers and
tongue to find the enemy whose mind remained tauntingly conscious.

Isaac wound the ends of
his shirt around his hands and began to tug at the split he had made
in the mass of dreamshit. With a big effort, he pulled the yielding
ball apart.

"Quickly,"
said Shadrach again.

The dreamshit—raw,
uncut, distilled and pure—seeped through the cloth around
Isaac’s hands and made his fingers tingle. He gave one last
tug. The centre of the dreamshit ball was laid open, and there in the
centre was a little clutch of eggs.

Each was translucent
and oval, smaller than a hen’s. Through its semi-liquid skin,
Isaac could see some faint, coiling shape. He looked up and beckoned
the monkey-construct that stood nearby.

At the far end of the
room, the slake-moth had picked up one of the metal tubes, putting
its face in the flow of emotion from its open end. It shook it in
confusion. It opened its mouth and unrolled its obscene, intrusive
tongue. It licked the end of the pipe once, then plunged its tongue
into it, eagerly seeking the source of this tempting flow.

"Now!" said
Shadrach. The slake-moth’s hands moved along the coiled metal,
seeking purchase. Shadrach’s face went suddenly white. He
spread his legs and braced himself. "Now, dammit, do it now!"
he shouted. Isaac looked up in alarm.

Shadrach was staring
intently into his mirrors. With his left hand, he was aiming behind
him, pointing his thaumaturgic pistol at the slake-moth.

Time slowed down as
Isaac looked into his own mirrors and saw the dull metal pipe in the
hands of the moth. He saw Shadrach’s hand, steady as the dead,
clutching his flintlock, pointing it behind his own back. He saw the
monkey-constructs waiting for their order to attack.

He looked down again at
the vile clutch of eggs, seeping and glutinous below him.