Perdido Street Station (9 page)

We have watched
mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and
whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in the faecal
mud.

I have sat with the
wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things.

**

My scars and
bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of
wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise
myself before arrogant spirits.

Sometimes I make my
way to the warehouse where Grimnebulin reads and writes and scrawls,
and I climb silently to the roof, and I lie with my back to the
slate. The thought of all that energy of his mind channelled towards
flight, my flight, my deliverance, lessens the itching in my ruined
back. The wind tugs me harder when I am here: it feels betrayed. It
knows that if I am made whole it will lose its night-time companion
in the brick mire and midden of New Crobuzon. So it chastises me when
I lie there, suddenly threatening to pull me from my perch into the
wide stinking river, clutching my feathers, fat petulant air warning
me not to leave it; but I grip the roof with my claws and let the
healing vibrations pass up from Grimnebulin’s mind through the
crumbling slate into my poor flesh.

I sleep in old
arches under the thundering railtracks.

I eat whatever
organic thing I find that will not kill me.

I hide like a
parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and
rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with
age.

Sometimes I clamber
to the top of the huge, huge towers that teeter like porcupine spines
from the city’s hide. Up in the thinner air, the winds lose the
melancholy curiosity they have at street level. They abandon their
second-floor petulance. Stirred by towers that poke above the host of
city light—intense white carbide lamps, smoke-burnished red of
lit grease, tallow twinkling, frenetic sputtering gas flare, all
anarchic guards against the dark—the winds rejoice and play.

I can dig my claws
into the rim of a building’s crown and spread my arms and feel
the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and
remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.

New Crobuzon was a city
unconvinced by gravity.

Aerostats oozed from
cloud to cloud above it like slugs on cabbages. Militia-pods streaked
through the heart of the city to its outlands, the cables that held
them twanging and vibrating like guitar strings hundreds of feet in
the air. Wyrmen clawed their way above the city leaving trails of
defecation and profanity. Pigeons shared the air with jackdaws and
hawks and sparrows and escaped parakeets. Flying ants and wasps, bees
and bluebottles, butterflies and mosquitoes fought airborne war
against a thousand predators, aspises and dheri that snapped at them
on the wing. Golems thrown together by drunken students beat
mindlessly through the sky on clumsy wings made of leather or paper
or fruit-rind, falling apart as they flew. Even the trains that moved
innumerable women and men and commodities around New Crobuzon’s
great carcass fought to stay above the houses, as if they were afraid
of the putrefaction of architecture.

The city thrust upwards
massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the
west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty
storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat
fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically
above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar
that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and
barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses
spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St.
Jabber’s Mound like scree.

The smoky black walls
of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or
a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the
sky. The building was knotted with obscure tubes and vast rivets. It
throbbed with the ancient boilers deep within. Rooms used for
uncertain purposes poked out of the main body of the colossal edifice
with scant regard for buttresses or braces. Somewhere inside, in the
Chamber, out of reach of the sky, Rudgutter and countless droning
bores strutted. The Parliament was like a mountain poised on the
verge of architectural avalanche.

It was not a purer
realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the
membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous
smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking
haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low
chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes
of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt
to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped
New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The clouds swirled in
the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New
Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling
hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous
mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone
known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years
of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station.

An industrial castle,
bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station
was the militia’s Spike, that loomed over the other turrets,
dwarfing them, tugged in seven directions by taut skyrails. But for
all its height the Spike was only an annex of the enormous station.

The architect had been
incarcerated, quite mad, seven years after Perdido Street Station was
completed. He was a heretic, it was said, intent on building his own
god.

Five enormous brick
mouths gaped to swallow each of the city’s trainlines. The
tracks unrolled on the arches like huge tongues. Shops and torture
chambers and workshops and offices and empty spaces all stuffed the
fat belly of the building, which seemed, from a certain angle, in a
certain light, to be bracing itself, taking its weight on the Spike,
preparing to leap into the enormous sky it so casually invaded.

Isaac did not look with
eyes clouded by romance. He saw flight wherever he looked in the city
(his eyes were swollen: behind them buzzed a brain wired with new
formulae and facts all furnished to slip gravity’s clutches),
and he saw that it was not an escape to a better place. Flight was a
secular, profane thing: simply a passage from one part of New
Crobuzon to another.

He was cheered by this.
He was a scientist, not a mystic.

Isaac lay on his bed
and gazed out of his window. He followed one flying speck after
another with his eyes. Scattered around him on the bed, spilling onto
the floor like a paper tide, were books and articles, typewritten
notes and long sheaves of his excited scrawl. Classic monographs
nestled under the musings of cranks. Biology and philosophy jostled
for space on his desk.

He had sniffed his way
along a contorted bibliographical trail like a bloodhound. Some
titles could not be ignored:
On Gravity
or
The Theory Of
Flight
. Some were more tangential, like
The Aerodynamics Of
The Swarm
. And some were simply whims that his more respectable
colleagues would surely frown at. He had yet, for example, to browse
the pages of
The Dweomers That Live Above The Clouds And What They
Can Tell Us
.

Isaac scratched his
nose and sipped the beer balancing on his chest through a straw.

Only two days working
on Yagharek’s commission, and the city was completely changed
for him. He wondered if it would ever change back.

He rolled onto his
side, rummaged around underneath him to shift the papers that were
making him uncomfortable. He tugged free a collection of obscure
manuscripts and a sheaf of the heliotypes he had taken of Teafortwo.
Isaac held those prints in front of him, examined the intricacies of
the wyrmen musculature that he had made Teafortwo show off.

Hope it’s not too
long, Isaac thought.

He had spent the day
reading and taking notes, grunting politely when David or Lublamai
yelled greetings or questions or offers of lunch up to him. He had
munched some bread and cheese and peppers which Lublamai had dumped
on his desk in front of him. He had gradually shed layers of clothing
as the day grew warmer and the little boilers on all the equipment
heated the air. Shirts and kerchiefs littered the floor by his desk.

Isaac was waiting for
delivery of supplies. He had realized early in his reading that for
the purposes of this commission there was a massive hole in his
scientific knowledge. Of all the arcana, biology was his weakest. He
was quite at home reading about levitation and countergeotropic
thaumaturgy and his beloved unified field theory, but the prints of
Teafortwo had made him realize how little he understood the
biomechanics of simple flight.

What I need’s
some dead wyrmen
...no,
some live one to do experiments
on...Isaac had thought idly, staring at the heliotypes the previous
night.
No...a dead one to dissect
and
a live one to watch
flying...

The flippant idea had
suddenly taken a more serious shape. He had sat and pondered for a
while at his desk, before taking off into the darkness of Brock
Marsh.

**

The most notorious pub
between the Tar and the Canker lurked in the shadow of a huge
Palgolak church. It was a few dank streets back from Danechi’s
Bridge, which joined Brock Marsh to Bonetown.

Most of the denizens of
Brock Marsh, of course, were bakers or street-sweepers or
prostitutes, or any of a host of other professions unlikely ever to
cast a hex or look into a test-tube in their lives. Similarly, the
inhabitants of Bonetown were, for the most part, no more interested
in grossly or systematically flouting the law than most of New
Crobuzon. Nevertheless, Brock Marsh would always be the Science
Quarter: Bonetown the Thieves’ District. And there where those
two influences met—esoteric, furtive, romanticized and
sometimes dangerous—was The Moon’s Daughters.

With a sign depicting
the two small satellites that orbited the moon as pretty, rather
tawdry-looking young women, and a façade painted in deep
scarlet, The Moon’s Daughters was shabby but attractive.
Inside, its clientele consisted of the more adventurous of the city’s
bohemians: artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia
informants jostling under the eyes of the pub’s proprietor, Red
Kate.

Kate’s nickname
was a reference to her ginger hair, and, Isaac had always thought, a
damning indictment of the creative bankruptcy of her patrons. She was
physically powerful, with a sharp eye for who to bribe and who to
ban, who to punch and who to ply with free beer. For these reasons
(as well, Isaac suspected, as a small proficiency with a couple of
subtle thaumaturgical glamours), The Moon’s Daughters
negotiated a successful, precarious trail evading any of the
competing protection rackets in the area. The militia raided Kate’s
establishment only rarely and perfunctorily. Her beer was good. She
did not ask what was being discussed in huddles and knots at corner
tables.

That night, Kate had
greeted Isaac with a brief wave, which he had returned. He had gazed
around the smoky room, but the person he had been seeking was absent.
He had made his way to the bar.

"Kate," he
shouted over the din. "No sign of Lemuel?"

She shook her head and
handed him, unbidden, a Kingpin ale. He paid and turned to face the
room.

He was rather thrown.
The Moon’s Daughters was Lemuel Pigeon’s office, as near
as dammit. He could usually be relied on to be here every night,
wheeling, dealing, taking a cut. Isaac guessed he was out on some
dubious job or other. He paced through the tables aimlessly, looking
for someone he knew.

Over in the corner,
grinning beatifically at someone, wearing the yellow robes of his
order, was Gedrecsechet, the librarian of the Palgolak church. Isaac
brightened and headed towards him.

He was amused to see
that the forearms of the scowling youth arguing with Ged were
tattooed with the interlocking wheels that proclaimed her a Godmech
Cog, doubtless attempting to convert the ungodly. As Isaac drew
closer the argument became audible.

"...if you
approach the world and God with one iota of the
rigour
and the
analysis
you claim, you’d see that your pointless
sentientomorphism would simply be untenable!"

Ged grinned at the
spotty girl and opened his mouth to reply. Isaac interrupted.

"Pardon me, Ged,
for butting in. Just wanted to say to you, young Flywheel, whatever
you call yourself..."

The Cog tried to
protest, but Isaac cut her off.

"No, shut up. I’ll
say this very clearly...
piss off.
And take your rigour with
you. I want to talk to Ged."

Ged was giggling. His
opponent was swallowing, trying to maintain her anger, but she was
intimidated by Isaac’s bulk and cheerful pugnacity. She
gathered herself to go with a semblance of dignity.

As she stood, she
opened her mouth with some parting shot she had clearly been
preparing. Isaac pre-empted her.

"Speak and I’ll
break your teeth," he advised amiably.

The Cog closed her
mouth and stalked off.

When she was gone from
view both Isaac and Ged burst into laughter.

"Why do you put up
with them, Ged?" howled Isaac.

Ged, crouched like a
frog before the low table, rocked back and forth on his legs and
arms, his big tongue flapping in and out of his huge loose mouth.