Perdido Street Station (3 page)

Lin had tried to
describe how she saw the city to Isaac.

I see clearly as
you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum
collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a
gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship...You must
process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts
itself, changes its story. For me each tiny part has integrity, each
fractionally different from the next, until all variation is
accounted for, incrementally, rationally.

Isaac had been
fascinated for a week and a half. He had, typically, taken pages of
notes and sought books on insectile vision, subjected Lin to tedious
experiments in depth-perception and distance-vision; and reading,
which impressed him most, knowing as he did that it did not come
naturally to her, that she had to concentrate like someone
half-blind.

His interest had
quickly waned. The human mind was incapable of processing what the
khepri saw.

All around Lin the
duckers and divers of Aspic filled the streets on their way to scrape
for money, stealing or begging or selling or sifting through the
piles of rubbish which punctuated the street. Children scampered by
carrying engine parts cobbled together into obscure shapes.
Occasionally gentlemen and ladies strode by with an air of
disapproval on their way Somewhere Else.

Lin’s clogs were
wet with organic muck from the street, rich pickings for the furtive
creatures peering from drains. The houses around her were flat-roofed
and looming, with plank walkways slung across gaps between houses.
Getaway routes, alternative passageways, the streets of the roofworld
above New Crobuzon.

Only a very few
children called names at her. This was a community used to xenians.
She could taste the cosmopolitan nature of this neighbourhood, the
minute secretions of a variety of races, only some of which she
recognized. There was the musk of more khepri, the dank odour of
vodyanoi, even, from somewhere, the delicious taste of cactacae.

Lin turned the corner
onto the cobbled road around Sobek Croix. Cabs waited all along the
iron fence. A massive variety. Two-wheelers, four-wheelers, pulled by
horses, by sneering ptera-birds, by steam-wheezing constructs on
caterpillar treads...here and there by Remade, miserable men and
women both cabdriver and cab.

Lin stood before the
ranks and waved her hand. Mercifully, the first driver in line geed
his ornery-looking bird forward at her signal.

"Where to?"
The man leaned down to read the careful instructions she scrawled on
her notepad. "Righto," he said, and jerked his head,
motioning her in.

The cab was an
open-fronted two-seater, giving Lin a view of her passage through the
south side of the city. The great flightless bird moved with a
bobbing, rolling run that translated smoothly through the wheels. She
sat back and read over her instructions to the driver.

Isaac would not
approve. At all.

Lin
did
need
colourberries, and she was going to Kinken for them. That was true.
And one of her friends, Cornfed Daihat,
was
having an
exhibition in Howl Barrow.

But she would not see
it.

She had already spoken
to Cornfed, asking him to vouch that she had been there, should Isaac
ask (she could not foresee that he would, but she might as well be
safe). Cornfed had been delighted, flicking his white hair out of his
face and flamboyantly begging eternal damnation for himself should he
breathe a word. He clearly thought she was two-timing Isaac, and
considered it a privilege to be part of this new twist to her already
scandalous sex life.

Lin could not make it
to his show. She had business elsewhere. The cab was progressing
towards the river. She swayed as the wooden wheels hit more
cobblestones. They had turned onto Shadrach Street. The market was to
their south now: they were above the point where the vegetables and
shellfish and overripe fruit petered out.

Swelling fatly above
the low houses before her was the Flyside militia tower. A vast,
filthy, pudgy pillar, squat and mean, somehow, for all its
thirty-five storeys. Thin windows like arrow-slits peppered its
sides, their dark glass matt, immune to reflection. The tower’s
concrete skin was mottled and flaking. Three miles to the north Lin
caught a glimpse of an even taller structure: the militia’s
hub, the Spike, that punctured the earth like a concrete thorn in the
heart of the city.

Lin craned her neck.
Oozing obscenely over the top of the Flyside tower was a
half-inflated dirigible. It flapped and lolled and swelled like a
dying fish. She could feel its engine humming, even through the
layers of air, as it strained to disappear into the gun-grey clouds.

There was another
murmur, a buzzing dissonant with the airship’s drone. Somewhere
nearby a support strut vibrated, and a militia-pod streaked
northwards towards the tower at breakneck speed.

It careered along way,
way above, suspended from the skyrail that stretched out on either
side of the tower, threaded through its summit like wire through some
colossal needle, disappearing to the north and the south. The pod
slammed to a sudden stop against the buffers. Figures emerged, but
the cab passed on before Lin could see any more.

For the second time
that day Lin luxuriated in the taste of cactus-people sap, as the
pterabird loped towards the Greenhouse in Riverskin. Shut out of that
monastic sanctuary (the twisting, intricate panes of its steep glass
dome looming to the east, in the heart of the quarter), despised by
their elders, small gangs of cactus youth leaned against shuttered
buildings and cheap posters. They played with knives. Their spines
were cropped in violent patterns, their spring-green skin savaged
with bizarre scarification.

They eyed the cab
without interest.

Shadrach Street dipped
suddenly. The cab was poised on a high point, where the streets
curved sharply down away from it. Lin and her driver had a clear view
of the grey, snow-specked jags of mountains rising splendidly to the
west of the city.

Before the cab trickled
the River Tar.

Faint cries and
industrial drones sounded from dark windows set into its brick banks,
some of them below the high-water mark. Prisons and torture-chambers
and workshops, and their bastard hybrids, the punishment factories,
where the condemned were Remade. Boats coughed and retched their way
along the black water.

The spires of Nabob
Bridge appeared. And beyond them, slate roofs hunching like shoulders
in the cold, rotten walls held at the point of collapse by buttresses
and organic cement, stinking a unique stink, was the shambles of
Kinken.

**

Over the river, in the
Old City, the streets were narrower and darker. The pterabird paced
uneasily past buildings slick with the hardened gel of the
home-beetle. Khepri climbed from windows and doors of the refashioned
houses. They were the majority here, this was their place. The
streets were full of their women’s bodies, their insectile
heads. They congregated in cavernous doorways, eating fruit.

Even the cabdriver
could taste their conversations: the air was acrid with chymical
communication.

An organic thing split
and burst under the wheels.
A male, probably,
thought Lin with
a shudder, imagining one of the countless mindless scuttlers that
swarmed from holes and cracks all around Kinken.
Good riddance.

The shying pterabird
balked at passing under a low arch of brick that dripped stalactites
of beetle mucus. Lin tapped the driver as he wrestled with the reins.
She scrawled quickly and held up her pad.

Bird not too happy.
Wait here, I’ll be back five minutes.

He nodded gratefully
and extended a hand to help her down.

Lin left him trying to
calm the irritable mount. She turned a corner into Kinken’s
central square. The pale exudations that drooled from rooftops left
street-signs visible at the edges of the square, but the name they
declared—Aldelion Place—was not one that any of Kinken’s
inhabitants would use. Even the few humans and other non-khepri who
lived there used the newer khepri name, translating it from the hiss
and chlorine burp of the original tongue: the Plaza of Statues.

It was large and open,
ringed by ramshackle buildings hundreds of years old. The tumbledown
architecture contrasted violently with the great grey mass of another
militia tower looming to the north. Roofs sloped incredibly steep and
low. Windows were dirty and streaked with obscure patterns. She could
feel the faint therapeutic humming of nurse-khepri in their
surgeries. Sweet smoke wafted over the crowd: khepri, mostly, but
here and there other races, investigating the statues. They filled
the square: fifteen-foot figures of animals and plants and monstrous
creatures, some real and some that had never lived, fashioned in
brightly coloured khepri-spit.

They represented hours
and hours of communal labour. Groups of khepri women had stood for
days, back-to-back, chewing paste and colourberries, metabolizing it,
opening the gland at the hindpart of their beetle-heads and pushing
out thick (and misnamed) khepri-spit, that hardened in the air in an
hour to a smooth, brittle, pearly brilliance.

To Lin the statues
represented dedication and community, and bankrupt imaginations
falling back on cod-heroic grandiosity. This was why she lived and
ate and spat her art alone.

Lin walked past the
fruit and vegetable shops, the handwritten signs promising home-grubs
for hire in large uneven capitals, the art-exchange centres with all
the accoutrements for the khepri gland artist.

Other khepri glanced at
Lin. Her skirt was long and bright in the fashion of Salacus Fields:
human fashion, not the traditional ballooning pantaloons of these
ghetto-dwellers. Lin was marked. She was an outsider. Had left her
sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety.

Damn right I have,
thought Lin, defiantly swishing her long green skirt.

The spittle-store owner
knew her, and they politely, perfunctorily, brushed antennae.

Lin looked up at the
shelves. The inside of the store was coated in home-grub cement,
rippling across walls and blunting corners with more care than was
traditional. The spittle goods perched on shelves that jutted like
bones from the organic sludge were illuminated by gaslight. The
window was artistically smeared with juice from various
colourberries, and the day was kept out.

Lin spoke, clicking and
waving her headlegs, secreting tiny mists of scent. She communicated
her desire for scarletberries, cyanberries, blackberries, opalberries
and purpleberries. She included a spray of admiration for the high
quality of the storekeeper’s goods.

Lin took her wares and
left quickly.

The atmosphere of pious
community in Kinken nauseated her.

The cabdriver was
waiting, and she leapt up behind him, pointed north-east, bade him
take them away.

Redwing Hive,
Catskull Moiety,
she thought giddily.
You sanctimonious
bitches, I remember it all! On and on about community and the great
khepri hive while the "sisters" over in Creekside scrabble
about for potatoes. You have nothing, surrounded by people that mock
you as bugs, buy your art cheap and sell you food dear, but because
there are others with even less you style yourselves the protectors
of the khepri way. I’m out. I dress how I like. My art is mine.

She breathed easier
when the streets around her were clean of beetle cement, and the only
khepri in the crowds were, like her, outcasts.

She sent the cab under
the brick arches of Spit Bazaar Station, just as a train roared
overhead like a great petulant steam-powered child. It set off
towards the heart of the Old Town. Superstitiously, Lin directed the
cab up towards Barguest Bridge. It was not the nearest place to cross
the Canker, the Tar’s sister; but that would be in Brock Marsh,
the triangular slice of the Old City wedged between the two rivers as
they met and became Gross Tar, and where Isaac, like many others, had
his laboratory.

There was no chance at
all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where
the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy.
But so that she need not even think of it for a moment, she sent the
cab to Gidd Station, where the Dexter Line stretched out to the east
on raised tracks that stretched higher and higher above the city as
they moved further from the centre.

Follow the trains!
she wrote, and the cabdriver did, through the wide streets of West
Gidd, over the ancient and grand Barguest Bridge, across the Canker;
the cleaner, colder river that flowed down from the Bezhek Peaks. She
stopped him and paid, with a generous tip, wanting to walk the last
mile herself, not wanting to be traceable.

She hurried to make her
appointment in the shadow of the Ribs, the Bonetown Claws, in the
Thieves’ Quarter. Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very
full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched
erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like
dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train,
heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New
Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the
city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from
the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met,
converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and
scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that
yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart, Perdido Street
Station.

Opposite Isaac on the
train sat a small child and her father, a shabby gent in a bowler hat
and second-hand jacket. Isaac made a monster face at her whenever she
caught his eye.