Perdido Street Station (16 page)

It was only at the end
of hours of work, bloated and exhausted, her mouth foul with berry
acid and the musty chalk of the paste, that Lin could turn and see
her creation. That was the skill of the gland-artist, who had to work
blind.

The first of Mr.
Motley’s legs was coming along, she had decided, with some
pride.

The clouds just visible
through the skylight moiled vigorously, dissolving and recombining in
scraps and shards in new parts of the sky. The air in the attic was
very still, by comparison. Dust hung motionless. Mr. Motley stood
poised against the light.

He was good at staying
very still, as long as one of his mouths kept up a rambling
monologue. Today he had decided to talk to Lin about drugs.

"What
is
your poison, Lin? Shazbah? Tusk has no effect on khepri, does it, so
that’s out..." He ruminated. "I think artists have an
ambivalent relationship with drugs. I mean, the whole project’s
about unlocking the beast within, right? Or the angel. Whatever.
Opening doors one thought were jammed closed. Now, if you do that
with drugs, then doesn’t that make the
art
rather a
let-down? Art’s got to be about communication, hasn’t it?
So if you rely on drugs, which are, I do not care what any
proselytizing little ponce dropping a fizzbolt with chums at a
dancehall tells me, which are an intrinsically
individualized
experience, then you’ve opened the doors, but can you
communicate what you’ve found on the other side?

"Then on the other
hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the
mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with
others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it
were...but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is
peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do..."

Lin glanced up to see
which mouth he was speaking from. It was a large, feminine one near
his shoulder. She wondered why it was that his voice remained
unchanged. She wished she could reply, or that he would stop talking.
She found it hard to concentrate, but she thought she had already
extracted as good a compromise as she would get from him.

"Lots and lots of
money in drugs...of course you know that. D’you know what your
friend and agent Lucky Gazid is prepared to pay for his latest
illicit tipple? Honestly, it would astonish you. Ask him, do. The
market for these substances is extraordinary. There’s room for
a few purveyors to make quite tidy sums."

Lin felt that Mr.
Motley was laughing at her. Every conversation he had with her
wherein he disclosed some hidden details of New Crobulon’s
underworld lore, she was embroiled in something she was eager to
avoid.
I’m nothing but a visitor,
she wanted to sign
frantically.
Don’t give me a streetmap! The occasional shot
of shazbah to come up, maybe a jolt of quinner to come down, that’s
all I ask...Don’t know about the distribution and don’t
want to!

"Ma Francine has
something of a monopoly in Petty Coil. She’s spreading her
sales representatives further afield from Kinken. D’you know
her? One of your kind. Impressive businesswoman. She and I are going
to have to come to some arrangement. Otherwise it’s all going
to get messy." Several of Mr. Motley’s mouths smiled. "But
I’ll tell you something," he added softly. "I’m
taking a delivery very soon of something that should rather
dramatically change my distribution. I may have something of a
monopoly myself..."

I’m going to
find Isaac tonight,
decided Lin nervously.
I’m going to
take him out to supper, somewhere in Salacus Fields where I can touch
his toes with mine.

The annual Shintacost
Prize competition was coming up fast, at the end of Melluary, and she
would have to think of something to tell him as to why she was not
entering. She had never won—the judges, she thought haughtily,
did not understand gland-art—but she, along with all her artist
friends, had entered without fail for the last seven years. It had
become a ritual. They would have a grand supper on the day of the
announcement, and send someone to pick up an early copy of the
Salacus Gazetteer,
which sponsored the competition, to see who
had won. Then they would drunkenly denounce the organizers for
tasteless buffoons.

Isaac would be
surprised that she was not taking part. She had decided to hint at
some monumental work-in-progress, something to keep him from asking
questions for some time.

Of course,
she
reflected,
if his garuda thing’s still going on, he won’t
really notice if I enter or not.

There was a sour note
to her thoughts. She was not being fair, she realized. She was prone
to the same kind of obsessing: she found it difficult, now, not to
see the monstrous shape of Mr. Motley hovering at the corner of her
vision at every hour. It was just bad timing that Isaac should be
obsessed at the same time as her, she thought desultorily. This job
was swallowing her up. She wanted to come home every night to freshly
mixed fruit salad and theatre tickets and sex.

Instead, he scribbled
avidly in his workshop, and she came home to an empty bed in Aspic
Hole, night after night. They met once or twice a week, for a hurried
supper and a deep, unromantic sleep.

Lin looked up and saw
that the shadows had moved some way since she had come into the
attic. Her mind felt foggy. Her delicate forelegs cleaned her mouth
and eyes and antennae in quick passes. She chewed what she had
decided would be the day’s last clutch of colourberries. The
tartness of the blueberries was tempered by the sweet pinkberries.
She was mixing carefully, adding an unripe pearlberry or a nearly
fermenting yellowberry. She knew exactly the taste she was striving
for: the sickly, cloying bitterness of a colour like vivid, greying
salmon, the colour of Mr. Motley’s calf muscle.

She swallowed and
squeezed juice through her headgullet. It squirted eventually onto
the shimmering sides of the drying khepri-spit. It was a little too
liquid: it spattered and dribbled as it emerged. Lin worked with it,
rendering the muscle tone in abstract streaks and drips, a
spur-of-the-moment rescue.

When the spit was dry
she disengaged. She felt a sticky seal of mucus stretch and snap as
she pulled her head away from the half-finished leg. She leaned to
one side and tensed, pushing the remaining paste through her gland.
The ribbed underbelly of her headbody squeezed itself out of its
distended shape, into more usual dimensions. A fat white glop of
khepri-spit dropped from her head and curled on the floor. Lin
stretched her gland-tip forwards and cleaned it with her rear legs,
then carefully closed the little protective case below her wingtips.

She stood and
stretched. Mr. Motley’s amiable, cold, dangerous little
pronouncements broke off sharply. He had not realized she was
finished.

"So soon, Ms.
Lin?" he cried with theatrical disappointment.

Losing my edge if
not careful,
she signed slowly.
Takes a lot out of you. Got to
stop.

"Of course,"
said Mr. Motley. "And how is the meisterwork?"

They turned together.

Lin was pleased to see
that her impromptu recovery from the watery colourberry juice had
created a vivid, suggestive effect. It was not entirely naturalistic,
but none of her work was: instead, Mr. Motley’s muscle seemed
to have been thrown violently onto the bones of his leg. An analogy
perhaps close to the truth.

The translucent colours
spilt in uneven grots down the white that glinted like the inside of
a shell. The slabs of tissue and muscle crawled over each other. The
intricacies of the many-textured flesh were vivid. Mr. Motley nodded
approvingly.

"You know,"
he ventured quietly, "my sense of the grand moment makes me wish
there was some way I could avoid seeing anything more of this until
it’s finished. I think it is very fine so far, you know.
Very
fine. But it’s dangerous to offer praise too early. Can lead to
complacency...or to the opposite. So please don’t be
downhearted, Ms. Lin, if that is the last word I say, positive or
negative, on the matter, until the very end. Are we agreed?"

Lin nodded. She was
unable to take her eyes from what she had created, and she rubbed her
hand very gently over the smooth surface of the drying khepri-spit.
Her fingers explored the transition from fur to scales to skin below
Mr. Motley’s knee. She looked down at the original. She looked
up at his head. He returned her gaze with a pair of tiger’s
eyes.

What...what were
you?
she signed at him. He sighed.

"I wondered when
you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you wouldn’t, but I
knew it was unlikely.
It makes me wonder if we understand each
other at all,"
he hissed, sounding suddenly vicious. Lin
recoiled.

"It’s
so...predictable. You’re still not looking the right way. At
all. It’s a wonder you can create such art. You still see
this
—" he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with
a monkey’s paw "—as pathology. You’re still
interested in what
was
and how it went
wrong. This is not
error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence
..."
His voice rang around the rafters.

He calmed a little and
lowered his many arms.

"This is
totality."

She nodded to show that
she understood, too tired to be intimidated.

"Maybe I’m
too hard on you," Mr. Motley said reflectively. "I
mean...this piece before us makes it clear that you
have
a
sense of the ruptured moment, even if your question suggests the
opposite...So maybe," he continued slowly, "you yourself
contain
that moment. Part of you understands without recourse
to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which
renders an answer impossible."

He looked at her
triumphantly.

"You too are the
bastard-zone, Ms. Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding
and your ignorance blur."

Fine,
she signed
as she gathered her things.
Whatever. Sorry I asked.

"So was I, but not
any more, I think," he replied.

Lin folded her wooden
case around her stained pallet, around the remaining colourberries
(she needed more, she saw) and the blocks of paste. Mr. Motley
continued with his philosophical ramblings, his ruminations on
mongrel theory. Lin was not listening. She tuned her antennae away
from him, felt the tiny ructions and rumblings of the house, the
weight of the air on the window.

I want a sky above
me,
she thought,
not this ancient dusty brace of beams, this
tarred, brittle roof. I’m walking home. Slowly. Through Brock
Marsh.

Her resolution
increased as her thoughts progressed.

I’ll stop at
the lab and nonchalantly ask Isaac to come with me, and I’ll
steal him away for a night.

Mr. Motley continued
sounding.

Shut up, shut up,
you spoilt child, you damn megalomaniac with your crackpot theories,
thought Lin.

When she turned to sign
goodbye,
it was with only the faintest semblance of
politeness.

A pigeon hung cruciform
on an X of darkwood on Isaac’s desk. Its head bobbed
frantically from side to side, but despite its terror, it could only
emit a bathetic cooing.

Its wings were pinned
with thin nails driven through the tight spaces between splayed
feathers and bent hard down to pinion the wingtip. The pigeon’s
legs were tied to the lower quarters of the little cross. The wood
beneath it was spattered with the dirty white and grey of birdshit.
It spasmed and tried to shake its wings, but it was held.

Isaac loomed over it
brandishing a magnifying glass and a long pen.

"Stop fucking
about, you vermin," he muttered, and prodded the bird’s
shoulder with the tip of the pen. He gazed through his lens at the
infinitesimal shudders that passed through the tiny bones and
muscles. He scribbled without looking at the paper beneath him.

"Oy!"

Isaac looked round at
Lublamai’s irritated call, and left his desk. He paced to the
balcony’s edge and peered over.

"What?"

Lublamai and David were
standing shoulder to shoulder on the ground floor, their arms folded.
They looked like a small chorus line about to burst into song. Their
faces were furrowed. There was silence for some seconds.

"Look," began
Lublamai, his voice suddenly placatory, "Isaac...We’ve
always agreed that this is a place we can all do the research we want
to do, no questions asked, back each other up, that sort of
thing...right?"

Isaac sighed and rubbed
his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

"For Jabber’s
sake, boys, let’s not play old soldiers," he said with a
groan. "You don’t have to tell me we’ve been through
thick and thin, or what have you, I know you’re arsed off, and
I don’t blame you..."

"It smells,
Isaac," said David bluntly. "And we’re treated to the
dawn chorus every minute of the day."

As Lublamai spoke, the
old construct wheeled its way uncertainly behind him. It stopped and
its head rotated, its lenses taking in the two poised men. It
hesitated a moment, then folded its stubby metal arms in clumsy
imitation of their poses. Isaac gesticulated at it.

"Look, look, that
stupid thing’s losing it! It’s got a virus! You’d
better have it trashed or it’ll self-organize; you’ll be
having existential arguments with your mechanical skivvy before the
year’s out!"

"Isaac, don’t
change the fucking subject," said David irritably, glancing
round and shoving the construct, which fell over. "We all have a
bit of leeway when it comes to inconveniences, but this is pushing
it."