Perdido Street Station (4 page)

Her father was
whispering to her, entertaining her with prestidigitation. He gave
her a pebble to hold, then spat on it quickly. It became a frog. The
girl squealed with delight at the slimy thing and glanced shyly up at
Isaac. He opened his eyes and mouth wide, mumming astonishment as he
left his seat. She was still watching him as he opened the door of
the train and stepped out onto Sly Station. He made his way down and
onto the streets, wound through the traffic for Brock Marsh.

There were few cabs or
animals in the narrow twisting streets of the Scientific Quarter, the
oldest part of the ancient city. There were pedestrians of all races,
as well as bakeries and laundries and guildhalls, all the sundry
services any community needed. There were pubs and shops and even a
militia tower; a small, stubby one at the apex of Brock Marsh where
the Canker and the Tar converged. The posters plastered on the
crumbling walls advertised the same dancehalls, warned of the same
coming doom, demanded allegiance to the same political parties as
elsewhere in the city. But for all that apparent normality, there was
a tension to the area, a fraught expectancy.

Badgers—familiars
by tradition, believed to have a certain immunity to the more
dangerous harmonics of hidden sciences—scampered past with
lists in their teeth, their pear-shaped bodies disappearing into
special flaps in shop doorways. Above the thick glass storefronts
were attic rooms. Old warehouses on the waterfront had been
converted. Forgotten cellars lurked in temples to minor deities. In
these and all the other architectural crevices, the Brock Marsh
dwellers pursued their trades: physicists; chimerists;
biophilosophers and teratologists; chymists; necrochymists;
mathematicians; karcists and metallurgists and vodyanoi shaman; and
those, like Isaac, whose research did not fit neatly into any of the
innumerable categories of theory.

Strange vapours wafted
over the roofs. The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly,
and the water steamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless
chymicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments,
from factories and laboratories and alchymists’ dens, mixed
randomly into bastard elixirs. In Brock Marsh, the water had
unpredictable qualities. Young mudlarks searching the river quag for
scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and
start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or
fade slowly to translucency and disappear.

Isaac turned down a
quiet stretch of the river’s edge onto the decaying flagstones
and tenacious weeds of Umber Promenade. Across the Canker, the Ribs
jutted over the roofs of Bonetown like a clutch of vast tusks curling
hundreds of feet into the air. The river sped up a little as it bore
south. Half a mile away he could see Strack Island breaking its flow
where it met the Tar and curled away grandly to the east. The ancient
stones and towers of Parliament rose hugely from the very edges of
Strack Island. There was no gradual incline or urban scrub before the
blunt layers of obsidian shot out of the water like a frozen
fountain.

The clouds were
dissipating, leaving behind a washed-out sky. Isaac could see the red
roof of his workshop rising above the surrounding houses; and before
it, the weed-choked forecourt of his local, The Dying Child. The
ancient tables in the outside yard were colourful with fungus. No
one, in Isaac’s memory, had ever sat at one of them.

He entered. Light
seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled
windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned
except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated
drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were
junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned
no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table
twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or
very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam
and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped
quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox’s muzzle that had
been grafted to his face.

Isaac quietly greeted
the old man by the door, Joshua, whose Remaking had been very small
and very cruel. A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against
his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he
had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of
flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose,
Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him
tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a
flaccid wound.

Joshua nodded at Isaac
and, with his fingers, carefully held his mouth closed over a straw,
sucked greedily at his cider.

Isaac headed for the
back of the room. The bar, in one corner, was very low, about three
feet from the ground. Behind it, in a trough of dirty water, wallowed
Silchristchek the landlord.

Sil lived and worked
and slept in the tub, hauling himself from one end to the other with
his huge, webbed hands and frog’s legs, his body wobbling like
a bloated testicle, seemingly boneless. He was ancient and fat and
grumpy, even for a vodyanoi. He was a bag of old blood with limbs,
without a separate head, his big curmudgeonly face poking out from
the fat at the front of his body.

Twice a month he
scooped the water out from around him and had his regulars pour fresh
buckets over him, farting and sighing with pleasure. The vodyanoi
could spend at least a day in the dry without ill-effects, but Sil
could not be bothered. He oozed surly indolence, and chose to do so
in his filthy water. Isaac could not help feeling that Sil debased
himself as a kind of aggressive show. He seemed to relish being
more-disgusting-than-thou.

In the early days,
Isaac had drunk here out of a youthful delight in plumbing the depths
of squalor. Mature now, he frequented more salubrious inns for
pleasure, returning to Sil’s hovel only because it was so close
to his work, and, increasingly, unexpectedly, for research purposes.
Sil had taken to providing him with experimental samples he needed.

Stinking piss-coloured
water slopped over the edges of the tub as Sil wriggled his way
towards Isaac.

"What you having,
‘Zaac?" he barked.

"Kingpin."

Isaac flipped a deuce
into Sil’s hand. Sil brought down a bottle from one of the
shelves behind him. Isaac sipped the cheap beer and slid onto a
stool, grimacing as he sat in some dubious liquid.

Sil sat back in his
tub. Without looking at Isaac, he began a monosyllabic, idiot
conversation about the weather, about the beer. He went through the
motions. Isaac said just enough to keep the discourse alive.

On the counter were
several crude figures, rendered in water that seeped into the grain
of the old wood before his eyes. Two were rapidly dissolving, losing
their integrity and becoming puddles as Isaac watched. Sil idly
scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water
responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the
dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the
figure’s face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of
small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac.

"That what you’re
after?" he asked.

Isaac swallowed the
rest of his beer.

"Cheers, Sil.
Appreciate it."

Very carefully, he blew
on the little figure until it fell backwards into his cupped hands.
It splashed a little, but he could feel its surface tension hold. Sil
watched with a cynical smile as Isaac scurried to get the figurine
out of the pub and to his laboratory.

Outside the wind had
picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up
the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and
his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and
backed into the building. Isaac’s laboratory had been a factory
and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the
little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its
corners.

From the two corners of
the floor came yelled greetings. David Serachin and Lublamai
Dadscatt—rogue-scientists like Isaac, with whom he shared the
rent and the space. David and Lublamai used the ground floor, each
filling a corner with their tools, separated by forty feet of empty
wooden boards. A refitted waterpump jutted from the floor between
their ends of the room. The construct they shared was rolling across
the floor, loudly and inefficiently sweeping up dust.
They keep
the useless thing out of sentimentality,
thought Isaac.

Isaac’s workshop,
his kitchen and his bed, were on the huge walkway that jutted out
from the walls halfway up the old factory. It was about twenty feet
wide, circumnavigating the hall, with a ramshackle wooden railing
miraculously still holding from when Lublamai had first hammered it
in.

The door slammed
heavily shut behind Isaac, and the long mirror that hung beside it
shuddered.
I can’t believe that thing doesn’t break,
thought Isaac.
We must move it.
As always, the thought was
gone as soon as it had come.

As Isaac took the
stairs three at a time, David saw how he held his hands and laughed.

"More of
Silchristchek’s high art, Isaac?" he yelled.

Isaac grinned back.

"Never let it be
said I don’t collect the best!"

Isaac, who had found
the warehouse all those years ago, had had first pick of the working
space, and it showed. His bed and stove and chamberpot were in one
corner of the raised platform, and at the other end of the same side
were the bulky protuberances of his lab. Glass and clay containers
full of weird compounds and dangerous chymicals filled the shelves.
Heliotypes of Isaac with his friends in various poses around the city
and in Rudewood dotted the walls. The warehouse backed onto the Umber
Promenade: his windows looked out over the Canker and the Bonetown
shore, gave him a splendid view of the Ribs and the Kelltree train.

Isaac ran past those
huge arched windows to an esoteric machine of burnished brass. It was
a dense knot of pipes and lenses, with dials and gauges shoved
roughly wherever they would fit.

Ostentatiously stamped
on every component of the whole was a sign:

property of nc
university physics dept. do not remove.

Isaac checked and was
relieved to see that the little boiler at the machine’s heart
had not gone out. He shoved in a handful of coal and bolted the
boiler closed. He placed Sil’s little statue on a viewing
platform under a glass bell, and heaved at some bellows just beneath
it, siphoning out the air and replacing it with gas from a slender
leather tube.

He relaxed. The
integrity of the vodyanoi waterpiece would hold a little longer, now.
Outside vodyanoi hands, untouched, such works would last perhaps an
hour before slowly collapsing back into their elemental form.
Interfered with, they dissolved much more quickly: in a noble gas
more slowly. He had perhaps two hours to investigate.

Isaac had become
interested in vodyanoi watercraeft in a roundabout way, as a result
of his research in unified energy theory. He had wondered whether
what allowed vodyanoi to mould water was a force related to the
binding force that he sought, that held matter together in certain
circumstances, dispersed it violently in others. What had happened
was a common pattern of Isaac’s research: a byway of his work
had taken on a momentum of its own, and had become a deep, almost
certainly short-lived, obsession.

Isaac bent some
lens-tubes into position and lit a gasjet to illuminate the
waterpiece. Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding
watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream
science was bunk, how much "analysis" was just,
description—often bad description—hiding behind
obfuscatory rubbish. His favourite example of the genre came from
Benchamburg’s
Hydrophysiconometricia,
a hugely respected
textbook. He had howled when he read it, copied it out carefully and
pinned it to his wall.

The vodyanoi, by means of what is called their
watercraeft,
are able to manipulate the plasticity and sustain the surface tension
of water such that a quantity will hold any shape the manipulator
might give it for a short time. This is achieved by thevodyanois’
application of an
hydrocohesive/aquamorphic energy field of minor
diachronic extension.

In other words,
Benchamburg had no more idea how the vodyanoi shaped water than did
Isaac, or a street urchin, or old Silchristchek himself.

Isaac pulled a set of
levers, shifting a series of glass slides and sending different
coloured lights through the statuette, which he could already see
beginning to sag at the edges. Peering through a high-magnification
eyepiece, he could see tiny animalculae squirm mindlessly. Internally
the water’s structure changed not at all: it merely wanted to
occupy a different space from its usual.

He collected it as it
seeped through a crack in the stand. He would examine it later,
though he knew from past experience he would find nothing of any
interest in it.

Isaac scribbled notes
on a pad beside him. He subjected the waterpiece to various
experiments as the minutes went by, piercing it with a syringe and
sucking some of its substance away, taking heliotypic prints of it
from various angles, blowing tiny air-bubbles into it, which rose and
burst out of its top. Eventually he boiled it and let it dissipate in
steam.

At one point Sincerity,
David’s badger, ambled up the stairs and sniffed at his
dangling fingers. He stroked her absently and when she licked his
hand, he yelled to David that she was hungry. He was surprised by the
silence. David and Lublamai had left, presumably for a late lunch:
several hours had passed since he had arrived.