Perdido Street Station Page 5

  Lin hesitated, but her fear drove her on. She wanted to keep this man happy, and if that meant talking about her work, then that was what she would do.

  I work alone, she signed, which is part of my . . . rebellion. I left Creekside and then Kinken, left my moiety and my hive. People were miserable, so communal art got stupidly heroic. Like Plaza of Statues. I wanted to spit out something . . . nasty. Tried to make some of the grand figures we all made together a little less perfect . . . Pissed off my sisters. So turned to my own work. Nasty work. Creekside nasty.

  “That is exactly as I had expected. It is even—forgive me—somewhat hackneyed. However, that doesn’t detract from the power of the work itself. Khepri spit is a wonderful substance. Its lustre is quite unique, and its strength and lightness make it convenient, which I know is not the sort of word one is supposed to think of in connection with art, but I am pragmatic. Anyhow, to have such a lovely substance used for the drab wish-fulfilment of depressed khepri is a terrible waste. I was so very relieved to see someone using the substance for interesting, unsettling ends. The angularity you achieve is extraordinary, by the way.”

  Thank you. I have powerful gland technique. Lin was enjoying the licence to boast. Originally I was a member of the Outnow school which forbids working on a piece after spat out. Gives you excellent control. Even though I have . . . reneged. I now go back while the spit is soft, work it more. More freedom, can do overhangs and the like.

  “Do you use a great deal of colour variation?” Lin nodded. “I saw only the sepia of the heliotypes. That is good to know. That is technique and aesthetics. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on themes, Ms. Lin.”

  Lin was taken aback. Suddenly she could not think what her themes were.

  “Let me put you in an easier position. I’d like to tell you what themes I am interested in. And then we can see if you’d be right for the commission I have in mind.”

  The voice waited until Lin nodded assent.

  “Please tilt your head up, Ms. Lin.” Startled, she did so. The motion made her nervous, exposing as it did the soft underbelly of her beetle head, inviting harm. She held her head still as eyes behind the mirror-fish watched her.

  “You have the same cords in your neck as a human woman. You share the hollow at the base of your throat beloved by poets. Your skin is a shade of red that would mark you out as unusual, that’s true, but it could still pass as human. I follow that beautiful human neck up—I have no doubt you won’t accept the description ‘human,’ but indulge me a minute—and then there is . . . there is a moment . . . there is a thin zone where that soft human skin merges with the pale segmented cream underneath your head.”

  For the first time since Lin had entered the room, the speaker seemed to be searching for words.

  “Have you ever created a statue of a cactus?” Lin shook her head. “Nonetheless you have seen them up close? My associate who led you here, for example. Did you happen to notice his feet, or his fingers, or his neck? There is a moment when the skin, the skin of the sentient creature, becomes mindless plant. Cut the fat round base of a cactus’s foot, he can’t feel a thing. Poke him in the thigh where he’s a bit softer, he’ll squeal. But there in that zone . . . it’s an altogether different thing . . . the nerves are intertwining, learning to be succulent plant, and pain is distant, blunt, diffuse, worrying rather than agonizing.

  “You can think of others. The torso of the Cray or the Inchmen, the sudden transition of a Remade limb, many other races and species in this city, and countless more in the world, who live with a mongrel physiognomy. You will perhaps say that you do not recognize any transition, that the khepri are complete and whole in themselves, that to see ‘human’ features is anthropocentric of me. But leaving aside the irony of that accusation—an irony you can’t yet appreciate—you would surely recognize the transition in other races from your own. And perhaps in the human.

  “And what of the city itself? Perched where two rivers strive to become the sea, where mountains become a plateau, where the clumps of trees coagulate to the south and—quantity becomes quality—are suddenly a forest. New Crobuzon’s architecture moves from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren . . . You take my point. I won’t go on.

  “This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone.

  “Could this theme interest you, d’you think? And if the answer is yes . . . then I am going to ask you to work for me. Before you answer, please understand what this will mean.

  “I will ask you to work from life, to produce a model—life-size, I fancy—of me.

  “Very few people see my face, Ms. Lin. A man in my position has to be careful. I’m sure you can understand. If you take this commission I will make you rich, but I will also own a part of your mind. The part that pertains to me. That is mine. I do not give you permission to share it with any. If you do, you will suffer greatly before you die.

  “So . . .” Something creaked. Lin realized that he had sat back in his chair. “So, Ms. Lin. Are you interested in the hybrid zone? Are you interested in this job?”

  I cannot . . . cannot turn this down, thought Lin helplessly. I cannot. For money, for art . . . Gods help me. I cannot turn this down. Oh . . . please, please let me not regret this.

  She paused, and signed her acceptance of his terms.

  “Oh, I am so glad,” he breathed. Lin’s heart raced. “I really am glad. Well . . .”

  There was a shuffling sound behind the screen. Lin sat very still. Her antennae moved tremulously.

  “The blinds are down in the office, aren’t they?” said Mr. Motley. “Because I think you should see what you will be working with. Your mind is mine, Lin. You work for me now.”

  Mr. Motley stood and pushed the screen to the floor.

  Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

  Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded.

  Lin backed away, stumbling, feeling her terrified way away from his slow advance. Her chitinous headbody was twitching neurotically. She shook.

  Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

  “So,” he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. “Which do you think is my best side?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Isaac waited, facing his guest. The garuda stood silent. Isaac could see it was concentrating. It was preparing to speak.

  The garuda’s voice, when it came, was harsh and monotone.

  “You are the scientist. You are…Grimnebulin.”

  It had difficulty with his name. Like a parrot trained to speak, the shaping of consonants and vowels came from within the throat, without the aid of versatile lips. Isaac had only ever conversed with two garuda in his life. One was a traveller who had long-practised the formation of human sounds; the other was a student, one of the tiny garuda community born and raised in New Crobuzon, which grew up shouting the city slang. Neither had sounded human, but neither had sounded half so animal as this great birdman struggling with an alien tongue. It took Isaac a moment to understand what had been said.

  “I am.” He held out his hand, spoke slowly. “What is your name?”

  The garuda looked
imperiously at his hand, then shook it with a strangely fragile grip.

  “Yagharek…” There was a shrieking stress on the first syllable. The great creature paused, and shifted uncomfortably, before continuing. It repeated its name, but this time added an intricate suffix.

  Isaac shook his head.

  “Is that all your name?”

  “Name…and title.”

  Isaac raised an eyebrow.

  “Am I, then, in the presence of nobility?”

  The garuda stared at him blankly. Eventually it spoke slowly without breaking his gaze.

  “I am Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected.”

  Isaac blinked. He rubbed his face.

  “Um…right. You have to forgive me, Yagharek, I’m not familiar with…uh…garuda honorifics.”

  Yagharek shook his great head slowly.

  “You will understand.”

  Isaac asked Yagharek to come upstairs, which he did, slowly and carefully, leaving gouges in the wooden stairs where he gripped with his great claws. But Isaac could not persuade him to sit down, or to eat, or to drink.

  The garuda stood by Isaac’s desk, while his host sat and stared up at him.

  “So,” said Isaac, “why are you here?”

  Again, Yagharek gathered himself for a moment before he spoke.

  “I came to New Crobuzon days ago. Because this is where the scientists are.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Cymek.”

  Isaac whistled quietly. He had been right. That was a huge journey. At least a thousand miles, through that hard, burning land, through dry veldt, across sea, swamp, steppe. Yagharek must have been driven by some strong, strong passion.

  “What do you know about New Crobuzon’s scientists?” asked Isaac.

  “We have read of the university. Of the science and industry that moves and moves here like nowhere else. Of Brock Marsh.”

  “But where do you hear all this stuff?”

  “From our library.”

  Isaac was astonished. He gaped, then recovered.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I thought you were nomads.”

  “Yes. Our library travels.”

  And Yagharek told Isaac, to Isaac’s growing amazement, of the Cymek library. The great librarian clan who strapped the thousands of volumes into their trunks and carried them between them as they flew, following the food and the water in the perpetual, punishing Cymek summer. The enormous tent village that sprung up where they landed, and the garuda bands that congregated on the vast, sprawling centre of learning whenever it was in their reach.

  The library was hundreds of years old, with manuscripts in uncountable languages, dead and alive: Ragamoll, of which the language of New Crobuzon was a dialect; hotchi; Fellid vodyanoi and Southern vodyanoi; high khepri; and a host of others. It even contained a codex, Yagharek claimed with discernible pride, written in the secret dialect of the handlingers.

  Isaac said nothing. He was ashamed at his ignorance. His view of the garuda was being torn up. This was more than a dignified savage. Time to get me down my library and learn about the garuda. Pig ignorant bastard, he reproached himself.

  “Our language has no written form, but we learn to write and read in several others as we grow,” said Yagharek. “We trade for more books from travellers and merchants, of whom many have passed through New Crobuzon. Some are native to this city. It is a place we know well. I have read the histories, the stories.”

  “Then you win, mate, because I know shit about your place,” said Isaac despondently. There was a silence. Isaac looked back up at Yagharek.

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  Yagharek turned away and looked out of the window. Barges floated aimlessly below.

  It was difficult to discern emotion in Yagharek’s scraping voice, but Isaac thought he could hear disgust.

  “I have crawled like vermin from hole to hole for a fortnight. I have sought journals and gossip and information, and it led me to Brock Marsh. And in Brock Marsh it led me to you. The question that led me has been: ‘Who can change the powers of material?’ ‘Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin,’ everyone says. ‘If you have gold,’ they say, ‘he is yours, or if you have no gold but you interest him, or if you bore him but he pities you, or if a whim takes him.’ They say you are a man who knows the secrets of matter, Grimnebulin.”

  Yagharek looked directly at him.

  “I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me.”

  “Tell me what you need,” said Isaac.

  Yagharek looked away from him again.

  “Perhaps you have flown in a balloon, Grimnebulin. Looked down at roofs, at the earth. I grew up hunting from the skies. Garuda are a hunting people. We take our bows and spears and long whips and we scour the air of birds, the ground of prey. It is what makes us garuda. My feet are not built to walk your floors, but to close around small bodies and tear them apart. To grip dry trees and rock pillars between the earth and the sun.”

  Yagharek spoke like a poet. His speech was halting, but his language was that of the epics and histories he had read, the curious stilted oration of someone who has learnt a language from old books.

  “Flight is not a luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at roofs that trap me. I want to look down at this city before I leave it, Grimnebulin. I want to fly, not once, but whenever I will.

  “I want you to give me back flight.”

  Yagharek unclipped his cloak and threw it away across the floor. He stared at Isaac with shame and defiance. Isaac gasped.

  Yagharek had no wings.

  Strapped across his back was an intricate frame of wooden struts and leather straps that bobbed idiotically behind him as he turned. Two great carved planks sprouted from a kind of leather jerkin below his shoulders, jutting way above his head, where they hinged and dangled down to his knees. They mimicked wingbones. There was no skin or feathers or cloth or leather stretched between them, they were no kind of gliding apparatus. They were only a disguise, a trick, a prop on which to drape Yagharek’s incongruous cloak, to make it seem as if he had wings.

  Isaac reached out for them. Yagharek stiffened, then steeled himself and let Isaac touch them.

  Isaac shook his head in astonishment. He caught a glimpse of ragged scar tissue on Yagharek’s back, until the garuda turned abruptly to face him.

  “Why?” breathed Isaac.

  Yagharek’s face creased slowly as he screwed up his eyes. A thin, utterly human moan started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird of prey’s melancholy war-cry, loud and monotonous and miserable and lonely. Isaac gazed on in alarm as the cry became a barely comprehensible shout.

  “Because this is my shame!” screamed Yagharek. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke quietly again.

  “This is my shame.”

  He unclipped the uncomfortable-looking bulk of wood from behind him, and it fell with a flat clatter to the floor.

  He was nude to the waist. His body was thin and fine and tight, with a healthy emaciation. Without the looming bulk of his fake wings behind him, he looked small and vulnerable.

  He turned slowly, and Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought into view.

  Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long, and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough, curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been sawed from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long, drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.

  Thinly hidden knobs of bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.

  “Who did this?” breathed Isaac. The stories were r
ight, he thought. The Cymek is a savage, savage land.

  There was a long silence before Yagharek responded.

  “I…I did this.”

  At first Isaac thought he had misunderstood.

  “What do you mean? How the fuck could you…?”

  “I brought this onto me.” Yagharek was shouting. “This is justice. It is I who did this.”

  “This is a fucking punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could…what did you do?”

  “Do you judge garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of the Remade…”

  “Don’t try to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no stomach for the law in this city…I’m just trying to understand what happened to you…”

  Yagharek sighed, with a shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet and pained, a duty that he resented.

  “I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There…was a madness…I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act…” His words broke down into avian moans.

  “What did you do?” Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity.

  “This language cannot express my crime. In my tongue…” Yagharek stopped for a moment. “I will try to translate. In my tongue they said…they were right…I was guilty of choice-theft…choice-theft in the second degree…with utter disrespect.”

  Yagharek was gazing back at the window. He held his head high, but he would not meet Isaac’s eyes.

  “That is why they deemed me Too Too Abstract. That is why I am not worthy of respect. That is who I am now. I am no longer Concrete Individual and Respected Yagharek. He is gone. I told you my name, and my name-title. I am Too Too Abstract Yagharek Not To Be Respected. That is who I will always be, and I will be true enough to tell you.”

  Isaac shook his head as Yagharek sat slowly on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He cut a forlorn figure. Isaac stared at him for a long time before speaking.

  “I have to tell you…” said Isaac. “I don’t really…uh…Plenty of my clients are…not entirely on the right side of the law, shall we say? Now, I’m not going to pretend that I even slightly understand what you did, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not my business. Like you said, there’s no words for your crime in this city: I don’t think I could ever understand what it was you’d done wrong.” Isaac spoke slowly and seriously, but his mind was already racing away. He began to speak with more animation.