Perdido Street Station (14 page)

Some did not return.

Most came back
scratching at burrs, stung and torn and angry, empty-handed. They
might as well have hunted ghosts.

Occasionally they
triumphed, and some frantic nightingale or Rudewood finch would be
smothered with rough cloth to a chorus of ludicrously overblown
cheers. Hornets buried their harpoons into their tormentors as they
were swept into jars and pots. If they were lucky, their captors
remembered to pierce airholes in the lids.

Many birds and more
insects died. Some survived, to be taken into the dark city just
beyond the trees.

In the city itself,
children scaled walls to pull eggs from nests in decaying gutters.
The caterpillars and maggots and cocoons they kept in matchboxes and
bartered for string or chocolate were suddenly worth money.

There were accidents. A
girl in pursuit of her neighbour’s racing pigeon fell from a
roof, breaking her skull. An old man scrabbling for grubs was stung
by bees until his heart stopped.

Rare birds and flying
creatures were stolen. Some escaped. New predators and prey briefly
joined the ecosystem in New Crobuzon’s skies.

Lemuel was good at his
job. Some would only have plumbed the depths: not he. He made sure
that Isaac’s desires were communicated uptown: Gidd, Canker
Wedge, Mafaton and Nigh Sump, Ludmead and The Crow.

Clerks and doctors,
lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of
leisure...even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually
indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry.

The main differences
between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants,
in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and
the capacity they had not to get caught.

From the parlours and
dining rooms there were cautious murmurings of interest.

**

In the heart of
Parliament a debate was taking place about levels of business
taxation. Mayor Rudgutter sat regally on his throne and nodded as his
deputy, Montjohn Rescue, bellowed the Fat Sun party’s line,
poking his finger aggressively across the enormous vaulted chamber.
Rescue paused periodically to rearrange the thick scarf he wore
around his neck, despite the warmth.

Councillors dozed
quietly in a haze of dust motes.

Elsewhere in the vast
building, through intricate corridors and passages that seemed
designed to confuse, suited secretaries and messengers brushed busily
past each other. Little tunnels and stairs of polished marble
bristled from main thoroughfares. Many were unlit and unfrequented.
An old man pulled a decrepit trolley along one such passage.

With the bustling noise
of Parliament’s main entrance hall receding behind him, he
dragged the trolley behind him up steep stairs. The corridor was
barely wider than his trolley: it was a long, uncomfortable few
minutes until he had reached the top. He stopped and wiped sweat from
his forehead and around his mouth, then resumed his trudging plod
along the ascending floor.

Ahead of him the air
lightened, as sunlight tried to finger its way around a corner. He
turned full into it, and his face was splashed with light and warmth.
It gushed in from a skylight and, beyond that, from the windows of
the doorless office at the corridor’s end.

"Morning, sir,"
croaked the old man as he reached the entrance.

"Good morning to
you," came the reply from the man behind the desk.

The office was small
and square, with narrow windows of smoked glass that looked out over
Griss Fell and the arches of the Sud Line railway. One wall was flush
with the looming dark bulk of Parliament’s main edifice. Set
into that wall was a small sliding door. A pile of crates teetered in
the corner.

The little room was one
of the chambers that jutted from the main building, high over the
surrounding city. The waters of the Gross Tar surged fifty feet
below.

The delivery man
unloaded his trolley of parcels and boxes in front of the pale
middle-aged gentleman sitting before him.

"Not too many
today, sir," he murmured, rubbing his moaning bones. He went
slowly back the way he came, his trolley jouncing lightly behind him.

The clerk sifted
through the bundles and rattled out brief notes on his typewriter. He
made entries in an enormous ledger labelled "acquisitions,"
skimming the pages between sections and recording the date before
each item. He opened up the packages and recorded the contents in a
typewritten day-list and in the big book.

Militia reports: 17.
Human knuckles: 3. Heliotypes (incriminating): 5.

He checked for which
department each collection of items was bound, and he separated them
into piles. When one pile had grown big enough, he put it in a crate
and carried it over to the door in the wall. It was a
four-by-four-foot square, which hissed with a rush of siphoned air
and opened at the behest of some hidden piston when he tugged a
lever. At its side was a little slot for a programme card.

Beyond it a wire cage
dangled beneath Parliament’s obsidian skin, with one open side
flush with the doorway. It was suspended above and on either side by
chains that swung gently, rattled and disappeared into an eddying
darkness that loomed off without remission in all directions that the
clerk could see. The clerk lugged the crate up into the passageway
and slid it along into the cage, which pitched a little under the
weight.

He released a hatch
which closed sharply, enclosing the crate and its contents with woven
wire on all sides. Then he closed the sliding door, reached into his
pocket and pulled out the thick programme cards he carried, each
clearly marked:
Militia; Intelligence; Exchequer,
and so on.
He slid the relevant card into the slot beside the door.

There would be a whirr.
Tiny, sensitive pistons reacted to the pressure. Powered by steam
driven up from the vast basement boilers, gentle little cogs rotated
the length of the card. Where their spring-loaded teeth found
sections cut from the thick board, they slotted neatly inside for a
moment, and a minuscule switch was thrown further along the
mechanism. When the wheels had completed their brief passage, the
combination of on-off switches translated into binary instructions
that raced in flows of steam and current along tubes and cables to
hidden analytical engines.

The cage jerked free of
its moorings and began a swift, swinging passage beneath the skin of
Parliament. It would travel the hidden tunnels up or down or sideways
or diagonally, changing direction, transferring jerkily to new
chains, for five seconds, thirty seconds, two minutes or more, until
it arrived, slamming into a bell to announce itself. Another sliding
door opened before it, and the crate was pulled out into its
destination. Far away, a new cage swung into place outside the
clerk’s room.

The Acquisitions clerk
worked quickly. He had logged and sent on almost all the assorted
oddities before him within fifteen minutes. That was when he saw one
of the few remaining parcels shaking oddly. He stopped scribbling and
prodded it.

The stamps that adorned
it declared it newly arrived from some merchant ship, the name
obscured. Neatly printed across the front of the package was its
destination:
Dr. M. Barbile, Research and Development.
The
clerk heard a scraping. He hesitated a moment, then gingerly untied
the string that bound it and peered inside.

Inside, in a nest of
paper shavings that they nudged fitfully, were a mass of fat grubs
bigger than his thumb.

The clerk recoiled and
his eyes widened behind his glasses. The grubs were astonishingly
coloured, beautiful dark reds and greens with the iridescence of
peacock feathers. They floundered and wriggled to keep themselves on
their stubby, sticky legs. Thick antennae poked from their heads,
above a tiny mouthpiece. The hind part of their body was covered in
multicoloured hairs that bristled and seemed coated in thin glue.

The fat little
creatures undulated blindly.

The clerk saw, too
late, a tattered invoice attached to the back of the box,
half-destroyed in transit. Any invoiced package he was supposed to
record as whatever was listed, and send on without opening.

Shit,
he thought
nervously. He unfolded the torn halves of the invoice. It was still
quite legible.

SM caterpillars x 5.
That was all.

The clerk sat back and
pondered for a moment, watching the hairy little creatures crawl over
each other and the paper they sat in.

Caterpillars?
he
thought, and grinned fleetingly, anxiously. He kept glancing at the
corridor before him.

Rare
caterpillars...Some foreign breed,
he thought.

He remembered the
whispers in the pub, the winks and nods. He’d heard a chap at
his local offering money for such creatures...The rarer the better,
he’d said...

The clerk’s face
wrinkled suddenly in avarice and fear. His hand hovered over the box,
darting back and forth inconclusively. He got up and stalked over to
his room’s entrance. He listened. There was no sound from the
burnished corridor.

The clerk returned to
his desk, calculating risk and benefit frantically. He looked closely
at the invoice. It was stamped with an illegible crest, but the
actual information was handwritten. He fumbled in his desk drawer
without giving himself time to think, his eyes darting constantly
back to the deserted passage outside his doorway, and brought out a
paper-knife and a quill. He scratched with the sharp knife at the
straight line on the top and the end of the curl on the bottom of the
5 on the invoice, gently, gently, shaving them away. He blew away
paper- and ink-dust, smoothed the roughened paper carefully with the
feathered end of his quill. Then he turned it around and dipped the
fine point in his inkwell. Meticulously, he straightened the curling
base of the digit, converting it into crossing lines.

Eventually, it was
done. He straightened up and squinted critically down at his
handiwork. It looked like a 4.

That’s the
hard bit,
he thought.

He felt about him for
some container, turned his pockets inside out, scratched his head and
thought. His face lit, and he pulled out his glasses case. He opened
it and filled it with shredded paper. Then, his face wrinkling with
anxious disgust, he pulled the edge of his sleeve down over his hand
and reached into the box. He felt the soft edges of one of the big
caterpillars between his fingers. As gently and quickly as he could,
he plucked it squirming from its fellows and dropped it into his
glasses case. Quickly, he closed the case around the frantically
twitching little creature and fastened it.

He buried his glasses
case at the bottom of his briefcase, behind mint-sweets and papers
and pens and notebooks.

The clerk retied the
string on the box, then sat back quickly and waited. His heart was
very loud, he realized. He was sweating a little. He breathed deeply
and squeezed his eyes closed.

Relax, now,
he
thought soothingly to himself.
That’s your bit of excitement
over.

Two or three minutes
passed, and no one came. The clerk was still alone. His bizarre
embezzlement had gone unnoticed. He breathed easier.

Eventually he looked
again at his forged invoice. It was, he realized, very good. He
opened the ledger and entered, in the section marked
R&D,
the date and the information:
27th Chet, Anno Urbis 1779: From
merchant ship X. SM caterpillars: 4.

The last number seemed
to glare at him as if it was written in red.

He typed the same
information onto his day-sheet before picking up the resealed box and
carrying it over to the wall. He opened the sliding doors and leaned
into the little metal threshold, pushed the box of grubs into the
waiting cage. Gusts of stale, dry air billowed onto his face from the
dark cavity between the hide and guts of Parliament.

The clerk pulled the
cage shut and closed the door before it. He fumbled for his programme
cards, eventually pulling the one marked
R&D
from the
little pack with fingers that still trembled, just a little. He
slotted it into the information engine.

There was a juddering
hiss and a ratcheting sound as the instructions fed along pistons and
hammers and flywheels and the cage was pulled vertiginously up, away
from the clerk’s office, beyond Parliament’s foothills,
into the craggy peaks.

The box of caterpillars
swung as it was tugged through the darkness. Oblivious to their
journey, the grubs circumscribed their little prison with peristaltic
motion.

Quiet engines
transferred the cage from hook to hook, changing its direction and
dropping it onto rusted conveyor-belts, retrieving it in another part
of Parliament’s bowels. The box spiralled invisibly around the
building, rising gradually and inexorably towards the high-security
East Wing, passing through mechanized veins to those organic turrets
and protuberances.

Finally the wire cage
dropped with a muted chime onto a bed of springs. The vibrations of
the bell ebbed into the silence. After a minute the door to the shaft
snapped open and the box of larvae was yanked brusquely into a harsh
light.

There were no windows
in the long white room, only incandescent gasjets. Every cranny of
the room was visible in its sterility. No dust, no dirt invaded here.
The cleanliness was hard and aggressive.

All around the
perimeter of the room, white-coated figures were huddled in obscure
tasks.

It was one of those
bright, hidden figures who untied the box’s string and read the
invoice. She gently opened the box and peered inside.