Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  It was only at the end of hours of work, bloated and exhausted, her mouth foul with berry acid and the musty chalk of the paste, that Lin could turn and see her creation. That was the skill of the gland-artist, who had to work blind.

  The first of Mr. Motley’s legs was coming along, she had decided, with some pride.

  The clouds just visible through the skylight moiled vigorously, dissolving and recombining in scraps and shards in new parts of the sky. The air in the attic was very still, by comparison. Dust hung motionless. Mr. Motley stood poised against the light.

  He was good at staying very still, as long as one of his mouths kept up a rambling monologue. Today he had decided to talk to Lin about drugs.

  “What is your poison, Lin? Shazbah? Tusk has no effect on khepri, does it, so that’s out . . .” He ruminated. “I think artists have an ambivalent relationship with drugs. I mean, the whole project’s about unlocking the beast within, right? Or the angel. Whatever. Opening doors one thought were jammed closed. Now, if you do that with drugs, then doesn’t that make the art rather a let-down? Art’s got to be about communication, hasn’t it? So if you rely on drugs, which are, I do not care what any proselytizing little ponce dropping a fizzbolt with chums at a dancehall tells me, which are an intrinsically individualized experience, then you’ve opened the doors, but can you communicate what you’ve found on the other side?

  “Then on the other hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it were . . . but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do . . .”

  Lin glanced up to see which mouth he was speaking from. It was a large, feminine one near his shoulder. She wondered why it was that his voice remained unchanged. She wished she could reply, or that he would stop talking. She found it hard to concentrate, but she thought she had already extracted as good a compromise as she would get from him.

  “Lots and lots of money in drugs . . . of course you know that. D’you know what your friend and agent Lucky Gazid is prepared to pay for his latest illicit tipple? Honestly, it would astonish you. Ask him, do. The market for these substances is extraordinary. There’s room for a few purveyors to make quite tidy sums.”

  Lin felt that Mr. Motley was laughing at her. Every conversation he had with her wherein he disclosed some hidden details of New Crobuzon’s underworld lore, she was embroiled in something she was eager to avoid. I’m nothing but a visitor, she wanted to sign frantically. Don’t give me a streetmap! The occasional shot of shazbah to come up, maybe a jolt of quinner to come down, that’s all I ask . . . Don’t know about the distribution and don’t want to!

  “Ma Francine has something of a monopoly in Petty Coil. She’s spreading her sales representatives further afield from Kinken. D’you know her? One of your kind. Impressive businesswoman. She and I are going to have to come to some arrangement. Otherwise it’s all going to get messy.” Several of Mr. Motley’s mouths smiled. “But I’ll tell you something,” he added softly. “I’m taking a delivery very soon of something that should rather dramatically change my distribution. I may have something of a monopoly myself . . .”

  I’m going to find Isaac tonight, decided Lin nervously. I’m going to take him out to supper, somewhere in Salacus Fields where I can touch his toes with mine.

  The annual Shintacost Prize competition was coming up fast, at the end of Melluary, and she would have to think of something to tell him as to why she was not entering. She had never won—the judges, she thought haughtily, did not understand gland-art—but she, along with all her artist friends, had entered without fail for the last seven years. It had become a ritual. They would have a grand supper on the day of the announcement, and send someone to pick up an early copy of the Salacus Gazetteer, which sponsored the competition, to see who had won. Then they would drunkenly denounce the organizers for tasteless buffoons.

  Isaac would be surprised that she was not taking part. She had decided to hint at some monumental work-in-progress, something to keep him from asking questions for some time.

  Of course, she reflected, if his garuda thing’s still going on, he won’t really notice if I enter or not.

  There was a sour note to her thoughts. She was not being fair, she realized. She was prone to the same kind of obsessing: she found it difficult, now, not to see the monstrous shape of Mr. Motley hovering at the corner of her vision at every hour. It was just bad timing that Isaac should be obsessed at the same time as her, she thought desultorily. This job was swallowing her up. She wanted to come home every night to freshly mixed fruit salad and theatre tickets and sex.

  Instead, he scribbled avidly in his workshop, and she came home to an empty bed in Aspic Hole, night after night. They met once or twice a week, for a hurried supper and a deep, unromantic sleep.

  Lin looked up and saw that the shadows had moved some way since she had come into the attic. Her mind felt foggy. Her delicate forelegs cleaned her mouth and eyes and antennae in quick passes. She chewed what she had decided would be the day’s last clutch of colourberries. The tartness of the blueberries was tempered by the sweet pinkberries. She was mixing carefully, adding an unripe pearlberry or a nearly fermenting yellowberry. She knew exactly the taste she was striving for: the sickly, cloying bitterness of a colour like vivid, greying salmon, the colour of Mr. Motley’s calf muscle.

  She swallowed and squeezed juice through her headgullet. It squirted eventually onto the shimmering sides of the drying khepri-spit. It was a little too liquid: it spattered and dribbled as it emerged. Lin worked with it, rendering the muscle tone in abstract streaks and drips, a spur-of-the-moment rescue.

  When the spit was dry she disengaged. She felt a sticky seal of mucus stretch and snap as she pulled her head away from the half-finished leg. She leaned to one side and tensed, pushing the remaining paste through her gland. The ribbed underbelly of her headbody squeezed itself out of its distended shape, into more usual dimensions. A fat white glop of khepri-spit dropped from her head and curled on the floor. Lin stretched her gland-tip forwards and cleaned it with her rear legs, then carefully closed the little protective case below her wingtips.

  She stood and stretched. Mr. Motley’s amiable, cold, dangerous little pronouncements broke off sharply. He had not realized she was finished.

  “So soon, Ms. Lin?” he cried with theatrical disappointment.

  Losing my edge if not careful, she signed slowly. Takes a lot out of you. Got to stop.

  “Of course,” said Mr. Motley. “And how is the meisterwork?”

  They turned together.

  Lin was pleased to see that her impromptu recovery from the watery colourberry juice had created a vivid, suggestive effect. It was not entirely naturalistic, but none of her work was: instead, Mr. Motley’s muscle seemed to have been thrown violently onto the bones of his leg. An analogy perhaps close to the truth.

  The translucent colours spilt in uneven grots down the white that glinted like the inside of a shell. The slabs of tissue and muscle crawled over each other. The intricacies of the many-textured flesh were vivid. Mr. Motley nodded approvingly.

  “You know,” he ventured quietly, “my sense of the grand moment makes me wish there was some way I could avoid seeing anything more of this until it’s finished. I think it is very fine so far, you know. Very fine. But it’s dangerous to offer praise too early. Can lead to complacency . . . or to the opposite. So please don’t be downhearted, Ms. Lin, if that is the last word I say, positive or negative, on the matter, until the very end. Are we agreed?”

  Lin nodded. She was unable to take her eyes from what she had created, and she rubbed her hand very gently over the smooth surface of the drying khepri-spit. Her fingers explored the transition from fur to scales to skin below Mr. Motley’s knee. She looked down at the original. She looked up at his head. He returned her gaze with a pair of ti
ger’s eyes.

  What . . . what were you? she signed at him.

  He sighed.

  “I wondered when you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you wouldn’t, but I knew it was unlikely. It makes me wonder if we understand each other at all,” he hissed, sounding suddenly vicious. Lin recoiled.

  “It’s so . . . predictable. You’re still not looking the right way. At all. It’s a wonder you can create such art. You still see this—” he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a monkey’s paw “—as pathology. You’re still interested in what was and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence . . .” His voice rang around the rafters.

  He calmed a little and lowered his many arms.

  “This is totality.”

  She nodded to show that she understood, too tired to be intimidated.

  “Maybe I’m too hard on you,” Mr. Motley said reflectively. “I mean . . . this piece before us makes it clear that you have a sense of the ruptured moment, even if your question suggests the opposite . . . So maybe,” he continued slowly, “you yourself contain that moment. Part of you understands without recourse to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which renders an answer impossible.”

  He looked at her triumphantly.

  “You too are the bastard-zone, Ms. Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding and your ignorance blur.”

  Fine, she signed as she gathered her things. Whatever. Sorry I asked.

  “So was I, but not any more, I think,” he replied.

  Lin folded her wooden case around her stained pallet, around the remaining colourberries (she needed more, she saw) and the blocks of paste. Mr. Motley continued with his philosophical ramblings, his ruminations on mongrel theory. Lin was not listening. She tuned her antennae away from him, felt the tiny ructions and rumblings of the house, the weight of the air on the window.

  I want a sky above me, she thought, not this ancient dusty brace of beams, this tarred, brittle roof. I’m walking home. Slowly. Through Brock Marsh.

  Her resolution increased as her thoughts progressed.

  I’ll stop at the lab and nonchalantly ask Isaac to come with me, and I’ll steal him away for a night.

  Mr. Motley continued sounding.

  Shut up, shut up, you spoilt child, you damn megalomaniac with your crackpot theories, thought Lin.

  When she turned to sign goodbye, it was with only the faintest semblance of politeness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A pigeon hung cruciform on an X of darkwood on Isaac’s desk. Its head bobbed frantically from side to side, but despite its terror, it could only emit a bathetic cooing.

  Its wings were pinned with thin nails driven through the tight spaces between splayed feathers and bent hard down to pinion the wingtip. The pigeon’s legs were tied to the lower quarters of the little cross. The wood beneath it was spattered with the dirty white and grey of birdshit. It spasmed and tried to shake its wings, but it was held.

  Isaac loomed over it brandishing a magnifying glass and a long pen.

  “Stop fucking about, you vermin,” he muttered, and prodded the bird’s shoulder with the tip of the pen. He gazed through his lens at the infinitesimal shudders that passed through the tiny bones and muscles. He scribbled without looking at the paper beneath him.

  “Oy!”

  Isaac looked round at Lublamai’s irritated call, and left his desk. He paced to the balcony’s edge and peered over.

  “What?”

  Lublamai and David were standing shoulder to shoulder on the ground floor, their arms folded. They looked like a small chorus line about to burst into song. Their faces were furrowed. There was silence for some seconds.

  “Look,” began Lublamai, his voice suddenly placatory, “Isaac . . . We’ve always agreed that this is a place we can all do the research we want to do, no questions asked, back each other up, that sort of thing . . . right?”

  Isaac sighed and rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  “For Jabber’s sake, boys, let’s not play old soldiers,” he said with a groan. “You don’t have to tell me we’ve been through thick and thin, or what have you, I know you’re arsed off, and I don’t blame you . . .”

  “It smells, Isaac,” said David bluntly. “And we’re treated to the dawn chorus every minute of the day.”

  As Lublamai spoke, the old construct wheeled its way uncertainly behind him. It stopped and its head rotated, its lenses taking in the two poised men. It hesitated a moment, then folded its stubby metal arms in clumsy imitation of their poses.

  Isaac gesticulated at it.

  “Look, look, that stupid thing’s losing it! It’s got a virus! You’d better have it trashed or it’ll self-organize; you’ll be having existential arguments with your mechanical skivvy before the year’s out!”

  “Isaac, don’t change the fucking subject,” said David irritably, glancing round and shoving the construct, which fell over. “We all have a bit of leeway when it comes to inconveniences, but this is pushing it.”

  “All right!” Isaac threw up his hands. He looked slowly around. “I suppose I sort of underestimated Lemuel’s abilities to get things done,” he said ruefully.

  Circumscribing the entire warehouse, the whole length of the raised platform was crammed with cages filled with flapping, crying, crawling things. The warehouse was loud with the sounds of displaced air, the sudden shifts and fluttering of beating wings, the spatter of droppings, and loudest of all, the constant screech of captive birds. Pigeons and sparrows and starlings registered their distress with their coos and calls: feeble on their own, but a sharp, grating chorus en masse. Parrots and canaries punctuated the avian wittering with squawked exclamation marks that made Isaac wince. Geese and chickens and ducks added a rustic air to the cacophony. Hard-faced aspises flung themselves through the air the short distance of their cages, their little lizard bodies banging against the chickenwire fronts. They licked their wounds with their tiny lions’ faces and roared like aggressive mice. Huge glass tanks of flies and bees and wasps, mayflies and butterflies and flying beetles sounded a vivid aggressive drone. Bats hung upside down and regarded Isaac with fervent little eyes. Dragonfly-snakes rustled their long elegant wings and hissed loudly.

  The floors of the cages had not been cleaned and the acrid smell of birdshit was very strong. Sincerity, Isaac saw, was wobbling up and down the room shaking her striped head. David saw where Isaac was looking.

  “Yeah,” he shouted. “See? The stink’s making her miserable.”

  “Fellows,” said Isaac, “I appreciate your forbearance, I really do. It’s give and take, isn’t it? Lub, remember when you were doing those experiments in sonar and you had that chap in banging that huge drum for two days?”

  “Isaac, it’s already been nearly a week! How long’s it going to be? What’s the schedule? At the very least clean their mess up!”

  Isaac looked down at the irate faces below him. They were very pissed off, he realized. He thought quickly for a compromise.

  “Fine, look,” he eventually said, “I’ll clean them out tonight—I promise. And I’ll work flat fucking out . . . I know! I’ll work hard on the loud ones first. I’ll try and get rid of them within . . . two weeks?” he finished lamely. David and Lublamai expostulated, but he interrupted their jeers and catcalls. “I’ll pay a little extra rent for the next month! How’s that?”

  The rude noises died down instantly. The two men stared at him calculatedly. They were scientific comrades, the Brock Marsh bad boys, friends; but their existence was precarious, and there was limited room for sentimentality where money was concerned. Knowing that, Isaac tried to forestall any temptation they might have to seek alternative space. He, after all, couldn’t afford the rent here alone.

  “What are we talking?” asked David.

  Isaac pondered.

  “Two extra guineas?”

  David and Lublamai looked at each other.
It was generous.

  “And,” said Isaac casually, “while we’re on the subject, I’d appreciate a hand. I don’t know how to manage some of these . . . uh . . . scientific subjects. Didn’t you do some ornithological theory once, David?”

  “No,” said David tartly. “I was an assistant to someone who did. I was bored shitless. And stop being so transparent, ’Zaac. I’m not going to resent your pestilential pets any less if you involve me in your projects . . .” He laughed with a trace of genuine humour. “Have you been taking Introductory Empathic Theory, or something?”

  But despite his scorn, David was ascending the stairs, with Lublamai behind him.

  He paused at the top and took in all the jabbering captives.

  “Devil’s Tail, Isaac!” he whispered, grinning. “How much has this lot set you back?”

  “Haven’t entirely settled with Lemuel yet,” said Isaac dryly. “But my new boss should see me all right.”

  Lublamai had joined David on the top step. He gesticulated at a collection of variegated cages in the far corner of the walkway.

  “What’s over there?”

  “That’s where I keep the exotica,” said Isaac. “Aspises, lasifly . . .”

  “You’ve got a lasifly?” exclaimed Lublamai. Isaac nodded and grinned.

  “Don’t have the heart to do any experiments with the beautiful thing,” he said.

  “Can I see it?”

  “ ’Course, Lub. It’s over there behind the cage with the batkin in it.”

  As Lublamai trooped over between the tightly packed cases, David looked briskly about him.

  “So where’s your ornithological problem, then?” he asked and rubbed his hands.

  “On the desk.” Isaac indicated the miserable, trussed pigeon. “How do I make that thing stop wriggling. I wanted it to at first, to see the musculature, but now I want to move the wings myself.”

  David stared levelly at him as if at a halfwit.