Isaac waved the paper at Lin. “What’s this filthy arse on about?” he yelled, spraying food. His outrage was amused but genuine.
Lin read it and shrugged.
Knows I don’t eat meat. Knows I’ve got a guest for breakfast. Wordplay on “pork.”
“Yes, thanks, lover, I got that bit. How does he know you’re a vegetarian? Do you two often engage in this witty banter?”
Lin stared at him for a moment without responding.
Knows because I don’t buy meat. She shook her head at the stupid question. Don’t worry: only ever banter on paper. Doesn’t know I’m bug.
Her deliberate use of the slur annoyed Isaac.
“Dammit, I wasn’t insinuating anything . . .” Lin’s hand waggled, the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Isaac howled in irritation. “Godshit, Lin! Not everything I say is about fear of discovery!”
Isaac and Lin had been lovers nearly two years. They had always tried not to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer they were together the more this strategy of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of contact too long in public—a note from a grocer—everything was a reminder that they were, in some contexts, living a secret. Everything was made fraught.
They had never said, We are lovers, so they had never had to say, We will not disclose our relationship to all, we will hide from some. But it had been clear for months and months that this was the case.
Lin had begun to hint, with snide and acid remarks, that Isaac’s refusal to declare himself her lover was at best cowardly, at worst bigoted. This insensitivity annoyed him. He had, after all, made the nature of his relationship clear with his close friends, as Lin had with hers. And it was all far, far easier for her.
She was an artist. Her circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They delighted in the scandalous and the outré. In the tea-houses and bars of Salacus Fields, Lin’s escapades—broadly hinted at, never denied, never made explicit—would be the subject of louche discussion and innuendo. Her love-life was an avant-garde transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last season, or ’Snot Art! the year before that.
And yes, Isaac could play that game. He was known in that world, from long before his days with Lin. He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!
That was his persona in Salacus Fields, where his relationship with Lin was an open secret, where he enjoyed being more or less open, where he would put his arm around her in the bars and whisper to her as she sucked sugar-coffee from a sponge. That was his story, and it was at least half true.
He had walked out of the university ten years ago. But only because he realized to his misery that he was a terrible teacher.
He had looked out at the quizzical faces, listened to the frantic scrawling of the panicking students, and realized that with a mind that ran and tripped and hurled itself down the corridors of theory in anarchic fashion, he could learn himself, in haphazard lurches, but he could not impart the understanding he so loved. He had hung his head in shame and fled.
In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac’s research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere. Isaac could be brilliant, but he was undisciplined. Vermishank had played him like a fish, making him beg for work as a freelance researcher on terrible pay, but with limited access to the university laboratories.
And it was this, his work, which kept Isaac circumspect about his lover.
These days, his relationship with the university was tenuous. Ten years of pilfering had equipped him with a fine laboratory of his own; his income was largely made up of dubious contracts with New Crobuzon’s less wholesome citizens, whose needs for sophisticated science constantly astounded him.
But Isaac’s research—unchanged in its aims over all those years—could not proceed in a vacuum. He had to publish. He had to debate. He had to argue, to attend conferences—as the rogue, the rebellious son. There were great advantages to renegacy.
But the academy did not just play at being old-fashioned. Xenian students had only been admitted as degree candidates in New Crobuzon for twenty years. To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as beyond the pale.
All of which Lin took badly.
You hide us so you can publish articles for people you despise, she had signed at him once after they had made love.
Isaac, in sour moments, wondered how she would react if the art-world threatened to ostracize her.
That morning the lovers managed to kill the nascent argument with jokes and apologies and compliments and lust. Isaac smiled at Lin as he struggled into his shirt, and her headlegs rippled sensuously.
“What are you up to today?” he asked.
Going to Kinken. Need some colourberries. Going to exhibition in Howl Barrow. Working tonight, she added mock-ominously.
“I suppose I won’t be seeing you for a while, then?” Isaac grinned. Lin shook her head. Isaac counted off days on his fingers. “Well . . . can we have dinner at The Clock and Cockerel on, uh . . . Shunday? Eight o’clock?”
Lin pondered. She held his hands while she thought.
Gorgeous, she signed coyly. She left it ambiguous as to whether she meant dinner or Isaac.
They piled the pots and plates into the bucket of cold water in the corner and left them. As Lin gathered her notes and sketches to go, Isaac tugged her gently onto him, on the bed. He kissed her warm red skin. She turned in his arms. She angled up on one elbow and, as he watched, the dark ruby of her carapace opened slowly while her headlegs splayed. The two halves of her headshell quivered slightly, held as wide as they would go. From beneath their shade she spread her beautiful, useless little beetle wings.
She pulled his hand towards them gently, invited him to stroke the fragile things, totally vulnerable, an expression of trust and love unparalleled for the khepri.
The air between them charged. Isaac’s cock stiffened.
He traced the branching veins in her gently vibrating wings with his fingers, watched the light that passed through them refract into mother-of-pearl shadows.
He rucked up her skirt with his other hand, slid his fingers up her thigh. Her legs opened around his hand and closed, trapped it. He whispered at her, filthy and loving invitations.
The sun shifted above them, sending shadows of the windowpane and clouds moving uneasily through the room. The lovers did not notice the day move.
CHAPTER TWO
It was 11 o’clock before they disentangled. Isaac glanced at his pocket-watch and stumbled around gathering his clothes, his mind wandering to his work. Lin spared them the awkward negotiations that would surround leaving the house together. She bent and caressed the back of Isaac’s neck with her antennae, raising goosebumps, and then she left while he still fumbled with his boots.
Her rooms were nine floors up. She descended the tower; past the unsafe eighth floor; the seventh with its birdlime carpet and soft jackdaw susurrus; the old lady who never emerged on the sixth; and on down past petty thieves and steel workers and errand-girls and knife-grinders.
The door was on the other side of the tower from Aspic Hole itself. Lin emerged into a quiet street, a mere passageway to and from
the stalls of the bazaar.
She walked away from the noisy arguments and the profiteering towards the gardens of Sobek Croix. Ranks of cabs were always waiting at their entrance. She knew that some of the drivers (usually the Remade) were liberal or desperate enough to take khepri custom.
As she passed through Aspic the blocks and houses grew less salubrious. The ground undulated and rose slowly to the southwest, where she was heading. The treetops of Sobek Croix rose like thick smoke above the slates of the dilapidated housing around her; beyond their leaves poked the stubby high-rise skyline of Ketch Heath.
Lin’s bulging mirrored eyes saw the city in a compound visual cacophony. A million tiny sections of the whole, each minuscule hexagon segment ablaze with sharp colour and even sharper lines, super-sensitive to differentials of light, weak on details unless she focused hard enough to hurt slightly. Within each segment, the dead scales of decaying walls were invisible to her, architecture reduced to elemental slabs of colour. But a precise story was told. Each visual fragment, each part, each shape, each shade of colour, differed from its surroundings in infinitesimal ways that told her about the state of the whole structure. And she could taste chymicals in the air, could tell how many of which race lived in which building: she could feel vibrations of air and sound with precision enough to converse in a crowded room or feel a train pass overhead.
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 pterabirds, 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 in
sectile 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.
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