Perdido Street Station (97 page)

In the early afternoon,
when he had worked for an hour, an hour and a half, he heard
something clatter in the yard below. Half a minute later there were
footsteps on the stairs.

Isaac froze and waited
for them to stop, to disappear into one of the junkies’ rooms.
They did not. They moved with a deliberate tread up the final two
flights, making their careful way up the noisome steps and halting
outside his door.

Isaac was still. His
heart beat quickly in alarm. He looked around wildly for his gun.

There was a knock at
the door. Isaac said nothing.

After a moment, whoever
was outside knocked again: not hard, but rhythmically and
insistently, repeatedly. Isaac stalked closer, trying to be quiet. He
saw Lin twisting uncomfortably at the sound.

There was a voice
outside the door, a weird, harsh, familiar voice. It was all grating
treble, and Isaac could not understand it, but he reached out for the
door suddenly, unsettled and aggressive and ready for trouble.
Rudgutter would send a whole damn squadron,
he thought as his
hand closed on the handle,
it’s bound to be some junkie
begging.
And although he did not believe that, he was reassured
that it was not the militia, or Motley’s men.

He pulled the door
open.

Standing before him on
the unlit stairs, leaning slightly forward, sleek feathered head
mottled like dry leaves, beak curved and glinting like an exotic
weapon, was a garuda.

He saw instantly that
it was not Yagharek.

Its wings rose up and
swelled around it like a corona, vast and magnificent, feathered in
ochre and smooth red-stained brown.

Isaac had forgotten
what an uncrippled garuda looked like. He had forgotten the
extraordinary scale and grandeur of those wings.

**

He understood what was
happening almost immediately, in some inchoate and unstructured way.
A wordless intimation hit him.

Following it by a
fraction of a second came a massive gust of doubt and alarm and
curiosity and a slew of questions.

"Who the fuck are
you?" he breathed, and: "What are you fucking doing here?
How did you find me...What..." Half-answers came unbidden to
him. He stepped back from the threshold quickly, trying to banish
them.

"Grim...neb...lin..."
The garuda struggled with his name. It sounded as if he was a daemon
being invoked. Isaac jerked his arm quickly for the garuda to follow
him into the little room. He closed the door and pushed the chair
back up against it.

The garuda stalked into
the centre of the room, into a sunlit patch. Isaac watched it warily.
It wore a dusty loincloth and nothing more. Its skin was darker than
Yagharek’s, its feathered head more mottled. It moved with
incredible economy, tiny snapping movements and great stillness, its
head cocked to take in the room.

It stared at Lin for a
long time, until Isaac sighed and the garuda looked up at him.

"Who are you?"
Isaac said. "How did you fucking find me?"
What did he
do?
Isaac thought, but did not say.
Tell me.

They stood, slim,
tight-muscled garuda and fat, thickset human, at opposite ends of the
room. The garuda’s feathers were shiny with sun. Isaac stared
at them, suddenly tired. Some sense of inevitability, of finality,
had entered with the garuda. Isaac hated it for that.

"I am Kar’uchai,"
the garuda said. Its voice was harder even than Yagharek’s with
Cymek intonations. It was difficult to understand. "Kar’uchai
Sukhtu-h’k Vaijhin-khi-khi. Concrete Individual Kar’uchai
Very Very Respected." Isaac waited.

"How did you
find
me?"
he said eventually, bitterly. "I have...come a
long way, Grimneb...lin," Kar’uchai said. "I am
yahj’hur...
hunter. I have hunted for days. Here I hunt
with...gold and paper-money...My quarry leaves a trail of
rumour...and memory."

What did he do?

"I come from
Cymek. I have hunted...since Cymek."

"I can’t
believe you found us," said Isaac suddenly, nervously. He talked
quickly, hating the pervasive sense of ending and ignoring it
aggressively, blotting it. "If you did the damn militia can for
sure and if
they
can..." He strode quickly back and
forth. He knelt down by Lin, stroked her gently, drew breath to say
more.

"I am come for
justice," said Kar’uchai, and Isaac could not speak. He
felt suffocated.

"Shankell,"
said Kar’uchai. "Meagre Sea. Myrshock."
I’ve
heard about the journey,
thought Isaac in anger,
you don’t
have to tell me.
Kar’uchai continued. "I have...hunted
across a thousand miles. Seek justice."

Isaac spoke slowly, in
rage and sadness.

**

"Yagharek is my
friend," he said.

Kar’uchai
continued as if he had said nothing. "When we found that he was
gone, after...judgement...I was chosen to come..."

"What do you
want?" said Isaac. "What are you going to do to him? You
want to take him back with you? You want to...what, cut off...more of
him?"

"I have not come
for Yagharek," said Kar’uchai. "I have come for you."

Isaac stared in
miserable confusion.

"It is up to
you...to let justice be..."

Kar’uchai was
relentless. Isaac could say nothing.

What did he do?

"I heard your name
first in Myrshock," said Kar’uchai. "It was on a
list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again
until...all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you...were
linked. People whispered...of your researches. Flying monsters and
thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought.
What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice,
Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you...not to do that.

"It was finished.
He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think...we
did not know that he might...find a way...that justice could be
retracted.

"I am here to ask
you not to help him fly."

"Yagharek is my
friend," said Isaac steadily. "He came to me and employed
me. He was generous. When things...went wrong...got complicated and
dangerous...well, he was brave and he helped me—us. He’s
been part of...of something extraordinary. And I owe him...a life."
He glanced at Lin and then away again. "I owe him...for the
times...He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he
stayed and without him...I don’t think I could have come
through."

Isaac spoke quietly.
His words were sincere and affecting.

What did he do?

"What did he do?"
said Isaac, defeated.

**

"He is guilty,"
said Kar’uchai quietly, "of choice-theft in the second
degree, with utter disrespect."

"What does that
mean?"
shouted Isaac. "What did he
do?
What’s
fucking choice-theft anyway? This means
nothing to
me."

"It is the only
crime we
have,
Grimneb’lin," replied Kar’uchai
in a harsh monotone. "To take the choice of another...to forget
their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a
node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take
the choice of another being. What is community but a means to...for
all we individuals to have...our
choices."

Kar’uchai
shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. "Your city
institutions...Talking and talking of individuals...but crushing them
in layers and hierarchies...until their choices might be between
three kinds of squalor.

"We have far less,
in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst.
But we have all
the choices that we can.
Except when someone forgets themselves,
forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an
individual
alone...
And steals food, and takes the choice of
others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others
to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the
choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

"A child who
steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night...they take
away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit
of respect.

"Other thefts,
though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.

"To kill...not in
war or defence, but to...
murder
...is to have such disrespect,
such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether
to live or die that moment...but
every other choice for all of
time
that might be made. Choices beget choices...if they had been
allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish
in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or
cook stew...and all those choices are taken from them in that one
theft.

"That is
choice-theft in the
highest
degree. But all choice-thefts
steal from the future as well as the present.

"Yagharek’s
was a heinous...a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree."

"What did he do?"
shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous
twitching.

Kar’uchai spoke
dispassionately.

"You would call it
rape."

**

Oh, I would call it
rape, would I?
thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the
torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.

I would call it
rape.

Isaac could not but
imagine. Immediately.

The act itself, of
course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind
(did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and
fight back?).
What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the
vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly,
Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.

The choice not to have
sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And
then...what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The
choice not to have a child?

The choice to look at
Yagharek with respect?

Isaac’s mouth
worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.

"It was my choice
he stole."

It took a few seconds,
a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai
meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time
the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as
bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he
did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to
express.

He murmured some
appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.

"I thought you
were...the garuda magister...or the militia, or something," he
said.

"We have none,"
she replied.

"Yag...a fucking
rapist"
he hissed, and she clucked.

"He stole choice,"
she said flatly.

"He
raped
you," he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.

"He stole my
choice," she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac
realized: she was correcting him. "You cannot translate into
your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin," she said. She seemed
annoyed.

Isaac tried to speak,
shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime
committed, behind his eyes.

"You cannot
translate,
Grimneb’lin," Kar’uchai repeated.
"Stop. I can see...all the texts of your city’s laws and
morals that I have read...in you." Her tone sounded monotonous
to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was
opaque.

"I was not
violated
or
ravaged,
Grimneb’lin. I am not
abused
or
defiled
...or
ravished
or
spoiled.
You would
call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He
stole
my choice,
and that is why he was...judged. It was severe...the
last sanction but one...There are many choice-thefts less heinous
than his, and only a few more so...And there are others that are
judged equal...many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s.
Some, you would not deem crimes at all.

"The actions vary:
the
crime
...is the theft of
choice.
Your magisters and
laws...that sexualize and sacralize...for whom individuals are
defined abstract...their matrix-nature ignored...where context is a
distraction...cannot grasp that.

"Do not look at me
with eyes reserved for victims...And when Yagharek returns...I ask
you to observe our justice—Yagharek’s justice—not
to impute your own.

"He stole choice,
in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is
the end."

Is it?
thought
Isaac.
Is that enough? Is that the end?

Kar’uchai watched
him struggle.

Lin called to Isaac,
clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to
her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she
said made sense, as if they were conversing.

She was calmed, and she
hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her
unbroken compound eye.

"Will you observe
our judgement?" said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at
her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.

Kar’uchai was
silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her
question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but
confusion.

"I don’t
know," he said. "Please..."

He turned back to Lin,
who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.

After minutes of
silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his
name.

He started as if he had
forgotten she was there.

"I will leave. I
ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our
judgement be." She moved the chair from the door and stalked
out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.