Perdido Street Station (96 page)

I can see the sky.
There are slats of light between the rough boards that surround us. I
would like very much to be away from this now. I can imagine the
sensation of wind, the sudden heaviness of air below me. I would like
to look down on this building and this street. I wish that there was
nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could
ignore.

Lin signs.
Sticky fearful,
whispers Isaac snottily, watching her hands.
Piss and mother, food wings happy. Afraid. Afraid.

"We have to
leave."

Derkhan spoke quickly.
Isaac looked up at her dully. He was feeding Lin, who squirmed
uncomfortably, unsure of what she wanted to do. She signed at him,
her hands tracing words and then simply moving, tracing shapes that
had no meaning. He flicked fruit detritus from her shirt.

He nodded and looked
down. Derkhan continued as if he had disagreed with her, as if she
were convincing him.

"Every time we
move, we’re afraid." She spoke quickly. Her face was hard.
Terror, guilt, exhilaration and misery had scoured her. She was
exhausted. "Every time any kind of automaton goes past, we think
the Construct Council’s found us. Every man or woman or xenian
makes us freeze up. Is it the militia? Is it one of Motley’s
thugs?" She kneeled down. "I can’t live like this,
‘Zaac," she said. She looked down at Lin, smiled very
slowly and closed her eyes. "We’ll take her away,"
she whispered. "We can look after her. We’re finished
here. It can’t be long before one of them finds us. I’m
not waiting around for that."

Isaac nodded again.

"I..." He
thought carefully. He tried to organize his mind. "I’ve
got...a commitment," he said quietly.

He rubbed the flab
below his chin. It itched as his stubble re-grew, pushing through his
uneven skin. Wind blew through the windows. The house in Pincod was
tall and mouldering and full of junkies. Isaac and Derkhan and
Yagharek had claimed the top two floors. There was one window on each
side, overlooking the street and the wretched little yard. Weeds had
burst out through the stained concrete below like subcutaneous
growths.

Isaac and the others
barricaded the doors whenever they were in: slipped out carefully,
disguised, mostly at night. Sometimes they would venture out in the
daylight, as Yagharek had now. There was always some reason given,
some urgency that meant the vague trip could not wait. It was just
claustrophobia. They had freed the city: it was untenable that they
should not walk under the sun.

"I
know
about the commitment," Derkhan said. She looked over at the
loosely connected components of the crisis engine. Isaac had cleaned
them up the previous night, slotted them into place.

"Yagharek,"
he said. "I owe him. I promised."

Derkhan looked down and
swallowed, then turned her head to him again. She nodded.

"How long?"
she said. Isaac glanced up at her, broke her gaze and looked away. He
shrugged briefly.

"Some of the wires
are burnt out," he said vaguely, and shifted Lin into a more
comfortable position on his chest. "There was a shitload of
feedback, melted right through some of the circuits. Um...I’m
going to have to go out tonight and rummage around for a couple of
adapters...and a dynamo. I can fix the rest of it myself," he
said, "but I’ll have to get the tools. Trouble is, every
time we nick something we put ourselves even more at risk." He
shrugged slowly. There was nothing he could do. They had no money.
"Then I have to get a cell-battery or something. But the hardest
thing is going to be the maths. Fixing all this up is mostly
just...mechanics. But even if I can get the engines to work, getting
the sums right to...you know, formulating this in
equations...
that’s
damn hard. That’s what I got the Council to do last time."
He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

"I have to
formulate the commands," he said quietly.
"Fly.
That’s what I’ve got to tell it. Put Yag in the sky and
he’s in crisis, he’s about to fall. Tap that and channel
it, keep him in the air, keep him flying, keep him in crisis, so tap
the energy and so on. It’s a perfect loop," he said. "I
think it’ll work. It’s just the
maths..."

"How long?"
Derkhan repeated quietly. Isaac frowned.

"A week...or two,
maybe," he admitted. "Maybe more."

Derkhan shook her head.
She said nothing.

"I
owe
him,
Dee!" Isaac said, his voice tense. "I’ve promised him
this for ages, and he..."

He got the slake-moth
off Lin, he had been about to say, but something in him had preempted
him, asked if that was such a good thing after all, and appalled,
Isaac faltered into silence.

It’s the most
powerful science for hundreds of years,
he thought in a sudden
rage,
and I can’t come out of hiding. I have to...to spirit
it away.

He stroked Lin’s
carapace and she began to sign to him, mentioning fish and cold and
sugar.

"I know, ‘Zaac,"
said Derkhan without anger. "I know. He’s...he deserves
it. But we can’t wait that long. We have to go."

**

I’ll do what I
can, promised Isaac, I have to help him, I’ll be quick.

Derkhan accepted it.
She had no choice. She would not leave him, or Lin. She did not blame
him. She wanted him to honour his agreement, to give Yagharek what he
wanted.

The stink and sadness
of the damp little room overwhelmed her. She muttered something about
scouting out the river and she left. Isaac smiled without warmth at
her half-hearted excuse.

"Be careful,"
he said unnecessarily as she left.

He lay cuddling Lin
with his back to the foetid wall.

After a while he felt
Lin relax into sleep. He slipped out from behind her and walked over
to the window, looked out over the bustle below.

Isaac did not know the
name of the street. It was wide, lined with young trees all pliant
and hopeful. At the far end, a cart had been parked sideways,
deliberately creating a cul-de-sac. A man and a vodyanoi were arguing
ferociously beside it, while the two cowed donkeys drawing it hung
their heads, trying not to be noticed. A group of children
materialized in front of the motionless wheels, kicking a ball of
tied rags. They scampered, their clothes flapping like flightless
wings.

An argument broke out,
four little boys prodding one of the two vodyanoi children in the
group. The fat little vodyanoi backed away on all fours, crying. One
of the boys threw a stone. The argument was forgotten quickly. The
vodyanoi sulked a brief moment, then hopped back into the game,
stealing the ball.

Further along the road,
a few doors down from Isaac’s building, a young woman was
chalking some symbol onto the wall. It was an unfamiliar, angular
device, some witch’s talisman. Two old men sat together on a
stoop, tossing dice and laughing uproariously at the results. The
buildings were bird-limed and grotty, the tarred pavement punctuated
with water-filled potholes. Rooks and pigeons threaded through smoke
from thousands of chimneys.

Cuttings from
conversations reached Isaac’s ears.

"...so he says
a
stiver for that?...
"

"...damaged the
engine, but then he was always a cunt..."

"...don’t
say nothing about it..."

"...it’s on
Dockday next, and she copped a total crystal..."

"...savage,
absofuckinglutely savage..."

"...remembrance?
For who?"

For Andrej,
thought Isaac suddenly, without warning or reason. He listened again.

There was much more.
There were languages he did not speak. He recognized Perrickish and
Fellid, the intricate cadences of Low Cymek. And others.

He did not want to
leave.

Isaac sighed and turned
back into the room. Lin squirmed on the floor in sleep.

He looked at her, saw
her breasts pushing at her torn shirt. Her skirt rode up her thighs.
He looked away.

Since recovering Lin,
twice he had woken with the warmth and pressure of her against him,
his prick erect and eager. He had rubbed his hand over the swell of
her hips and down into her parted legs. Sleep had rolled off him like
fog as his arousal grew and he had opened his eyes to see her, moving
her beneath him as she woke, forgetting that Derkhan and Yagharek
were sleeping nearby. He had breathed at her and spoken lovingly and
explicitly of what he wanted to do, and then he had jerked backwards
in horror as she began to sign babble at him and he remembered what
had happened to her.

She had rubbed against
him and stopped, rubbed him again
(like some capricious dog,
he had thought, appalled), her erratic arousal and confusion
absolutely clear. Some lustful part of him had wanted to continue,
but the weight of sorrow had shrivelled his penis almost instantly.

Lin had seemed
disappointed and hurt, then she hugged him, happily and suddenly.
Then she curled up in despair. Isaac had tasted her emissions in the
air around them. He had known she was crying herself to sleep.

Isaac glanced out at
the day again. He thought of Rudgutter and his cronies; of the
macabre Mr. Motley; he imagined the cold analysis of the Construct
Council, cheated of the engine it coveted. He imagined the rages, the
arguments, the orders given and received that week that cursed him.

Isaac walked over to
the crisis engine, took brief stock of it. He sat down, folded paper
in his lap, and began to write calculations.

He was not worried that
the Construct Council might mimic his engine itself. It could not
design one. It could not calculate its parameters. The blueprint had
come to him in an intuitive leap so natural that he had not
recognized it for hours. The Construct Council could not be inspired.
Isaac’s fundamental model, the conceptual basis of the engine,
he had never even had to write down. His notes would be quite opaque
to any reader.

Isaac positioned
himself so that he worked in a shaft of sunlight.

**

The grey dirigibles
patrolled the air, as they did every day. They seemed uneasy.

It was a perfect day.
The wind from the sea seemed constantly to renew the sky.

Yagharek and Derkhan,
in separate quarters of the city, enjoyed their furtive times in the
sun, and tried not to court danger. They walked away from arguments
and stuck to the crowded streets.

The sky was riotous
with birds and wyrmen. They flocked to buttresses and minarets,
crowding the gently sloped roofs of militia towers and struts,
coating them in white shit. They stormed in shifting spirals around
the Ketch Heath towers and the skeletal edifices in Spatters.

They scudded over The
Crow, wove intricately through the complex pattern of air that rose
above Perdido Street Station. Rowdy jackdaws squabbled over the
layers of clay. They flitted over the lower hulks of slate and tar at
the station’s shabby rear, descending towards a peculiar
plateau of concrete above a little brow of windowed roofs. Their
droppings fouled its recently scrubbed surface, little pellets of
white splattering against the dark stains where some noxious fluid
had spilled copiously.

The Spike and the
Parliament building swarmed with little avian bodies.

The Ribs bleached and
split, their flaws worsening slowly in the sun. Birds alit briefly on
the enormous shafts of bone, launching themselves free again quickly,
seeking refuge elsewhere in Bonetown, skimming over the roof of a
smoke-damaged black terrace, in the heart of which Mr. Motley ranted
against the incomplete sculpture which mocked him with unending
spite.

Gulls and gannets
followed rubbish barges and fishing boats up along the Gross Tar and
the Tar, swooping down to snatch organic morsels from the detritus.
They wheeled away to other pickings, to the offal-piles in Badside,
the fish market in Pelorus Fields. They landed briefly on the split,
algaed cable that crawled out of the river by Spit Hearth. They
explored the rubbish heaps in Stoneshell, and picked at half-dead
prey crawling through the Griss Twist wasteland. The ground purred
beneath them, as hidden cables hummed inches below the ragged
topsoil.

A larger body than the
birds rose up from the slums of St. Jabber’s Mound and soared
into the air. It sailed at a massive height over the western city.
The streets below became a mottled stain of khaki and grey like some
exotic mould. It passed easily above the aerostats in the gusting
breeze, warmed by the noon sun. It maintained a steady pace
eastwards, crossing the city’s nucleus where the five rail
lines burst out like petals.

In the air over Sheck,
gangs of wyrmen looped the loop in vulgar aerobatics. The drifting
figure passed over them serene and unnoticed.

It moved slowly, with
langorous strokes that suggested it could increase its speed tenfold
suddenly and with ease. It crossed the Canker and began a long
descent, passing in and out of the air over the Dexter Line trains,
riding their hot exhaust briefly, then gliding earthwards with unseen
majesty, descending towards the canopy of roofs, weaving easily
through the maze of the thermals gusting up from massive smokestacks
and little hovels’ flues.

It banked towards the
huge gas cylinders in Echomire, spiralled back easily, slipped under
a layer of disturbed air and flew steeply down towards Mog Station,
passing under the skyrails too fast to be seen, disappearing into the
Pincod roofscape.

**

Isaac was not lost in
his numbers.

He looked up every few
minutes at Lin, who slept and moved her arms and wriggled like a
helpless grub. His eyes looked as if they had never been lit up.