Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  “Onions! Who’ll buy my fine onions?”

  “Whelks! Stick to whelks!”

  “Broth to warm yer!”

  Other goods and services were plainly available on every streetcorner.

  Whores congregated in wretched, raucous gangs. Filthy petticoats and tawdry flounces of stolen silk, faces smeared white and scarlet over bruises and broken veins. They laughed with mouths full of broken teeth and sniffed tiny stains of shazbah cut with soot and rat-poison. Some were children who played with little paper dolls and wooden quoits when no one watched them, pouted lasciviously and tongued the air whenever a man walked by.

  The Dog Fenn streetwalkers were the lowest of a despised breed. For decadent, inventive, obsessive, fetishized corruption and perversion of the flesh, the connoisseur looked elsewhere, in the red-light zone between The Crow and Spit Hearth. In Dog Fenn, the quickest, simplest, cheapest relief was available. The clients here were as poor and dirty and diseased as the tarts.

  At the entrances to clubs already ejecting comatose drunks, industrial Remade worked as bouncers. They teetered aggressively on hooves and treads and massive feet, flexing metal claws. Their faces were brutalized, defensive. Their eyes would lock at the taunts from a passer-by. They took gobs of spit in the face, unwilling to risk their jobs. Their fear was understandable: to Derkhan’s left a cavernous space opened in an arch below the railway. From the darkness came the reek of shit and oil, the mechanical clank and human groans of Remade dying in a starving, drunken, stinking huddle.

  A few ancient, tottering constructs staggered through the streets, clumsily ducking the rocks and mud thrown by ragged street-children. Graffiti covered every wall. Rude poems and obscene drawings jostled with slogans from Runagate Rampant and anxious prayers:

  Half-a-Prayer’s coming!

  Against the Lottery!

  Tar and Canker spread like legs / City wonders where her Lover went / Cos now she’s being Ravished blind / by the Prick that is the Government!

  The walls of churches were not spared. The Veruline monks stood in a nervous group and wiped at the scrawled pornography that had appeared on their chapel.

  There were xenians in the crowds. Some were being harassed, notably the few khepri. Others laughed and joked and swore with their neighbours. On one corner a cactus was arguing fiercely with a vodyanoi, and the mainly human crowd was catcalling equally for both sides.

  Children hissed and called for stivers from Derkhan as she walked past. She ignored them, did not pull her bag closer to herself and identify herself as a victim. She stomped aggressively into the heart of Dog Fenn.

  The walls around her suddenly sealed over her head as she passed under rickety bridges and ersatz rooms thrown up as if by aggregated filth. The air in their shadow dripped and creaked ominously. A whoop sounded from behind her, and Derkhan felt a rush of air on her neck as a wyrman dived aerobatically through the short tunnel and took off again into the sky, cackling madly. She stumbled as he passed and fell against a wall, adding her voice to the chorus of abuse that travelled in the wyrman’s wake.

  The architecture she passed seemed governed by rules quite distinct from those in the rest of the city. There was no functional sense here. Dog Fenn seemed born of struggles in which the inhabitants were unimportant. The nodes and cells of brick and wood and palsied concrete had gone rogue, spreading like malignant tumours.

  Derkhan turned into a mildewed brick cul-de-sac and looked around her. A Remade horse stood by the far end, its hind legs enormous piston-driven hammers. Behind it, a covered cart was backed nearly to the wall. Any one of the dead-eyed figures loitering around could be militia informers. It was a risk she would have to take.

  She walked around to the back of the cart. Six pigs had been loaded out of the cart into a makeshift pen open on the side nearest the wall. Two men were chasing the pigs comically around the little space. The pigs squealed and screeched like babies as they ran. The pen led onto a semicircular opening about four feet high set into the wall at ground level. Derkhan peered through this space into a foetid hole ten feet below, barely lit with gasjets that flickered unreliably. The burrow boomed and hissed and gleamed red in the gaslight. Figures came and went below her, bent double under dripping burdens like souls in some lurid hell.

  A doorless opening to her left led Derkhan down steep stairs towards the sunken slaughterhouse.

  The spring warmth was magnified here as if by infernal energy. Derkhan sweated and picked her way through swinging carcasses and slicks of congealing blood. At the back of the room a raised belt dragged heavy meathooks along the ceiling in a remorseless circuit, disappearing into the darker bowels of the charnel-house.

  Even the glints of light from knives seemed filtered through ruddy gloom. Derkhan held a posset to her nose and mouth and tried not to gag at the rancid, heavy stench of blood and warm meat.

  At the far end of the room, she saw three men congregated below the open arc she had seen from the street. In this dark and stinking place, the Dog Fenn light and air that spilt through from above was like bleach.

  At some unspoken signal, the three slaughtermen stood back. The pig-men in the alley above had got hold of one of the animals, and in the midst of a rising wave of curses and grunts and terrified sounds, they hurled her enormous weight through the opening. The pig screamed as she pitched into the darkness. She was rigid with terror as she hurtled towards the waiting knives.

  There was a sick-making crack and snap as the sow’s stiff little legs shattered on flagstones slimy with blood and shit. She collapsed on legs bleeding from bone-shards, thrashing and screeching, unable to run or fight. The three men moved forward with practised precision. One leaned on the pig’s rump in case she jackknifed, another pulled back her head by those lolling ears. The third man split the skin of her throat with his knife.

  Her cries ebbed quickly with the gouts and wash of blood. The men hauled her huge, twitching body onto a waiting table by which a rusted saw leaned. One man saw Derkhan. He nudged another.

  “Ay ay, Ben, you dark horse, you rogue! It’s your fancy tart!” he shouted good-naturedly, loud enough for Derkhan to hear. The man he spoke to turned and waved at her.

  “Five minutes,” he yelled. She nodded. Her posset was clamped to her mouth as she swallowed back bile and spew.

  Again and again the massive, terrified pigs dropped from the alley in a flailing organic mess, legs folded in unnatural angles against their guts, again and again they were cut open and bled dry on ancient wooden stands. Tongues and flaps of ragged skin dangled, dripping. The channels cut in the abattoir floor burst their banks as a swamp of dirty blood lapped against buckets of giblets and bleached, boiled cows’ heads.

  Eventually, the last pig had fallen. The exhausted men swayed where they stood. They were awash with gore, and steaming. There was a brief conference and raucous laughter, and the one called Ben turned away from his fellows and approached Derkhan. Behind him, the two remaining men split the first carcass and swept innards into a huge trough.

  “Dee,” said Flex quietly, “I’ll not kiss you hello.” He gestured briefly at his saturated clothes, his bloody face.

  “I’m obliged,” she replied. “Can we get out of here?”

  They ducked under the jerkily progressing meathooks and picked their way towards the dark exit. They took stairs up towards ground level. The light became less livid as the blue-grey tint of the sky filtered through dirty skylights in the narrow corridor’s ceiling, a long way above.

  Benjamin and Derkhan turned into a windowless room filled with a tub, a pump and several buckets. Some tough robes hung behind the door. Derkhan watched quietly as he stripped off his fouled clothes and threw them in a pail with water and powdered soap. He scratched himself and stretched luxuriously, then pumped water vigorously into the tub. His naked body was streaked with oily blood as if he was newborn. He shook some of the soap under the sputtering pump, swirled the cold water to make suds.

  “Your mat
es are very understanding about you just up and taking a fuck-break, aren’t they?” said Derkhan mildly. “What have you told them? Did I steal your heart, you mine, or are we in a purely business arrangement?”

  Benjamin sniggered. He spoke with a strong Dog Fenn accent, in distinction to Derkhan’s uptown tones.

  “Well, I’ve been working an extra shift, ain’t I? I’m already working over my time. I told them you’d be along. Far as they’re concerned you’re just a tart who’s taken to me, and I to you. That wig, afore I forget, is a marvel.” He grinned lopsidedly. “Suits you, Dee. You look a smasher.”

  He stood in the tub, slowly lowered himself into it, goosebumps peppering him. He left a thick scum of blood on the surface of the water. Gore and grime lifted slowly from his skin and billowed lazily towards the surface. He closed his eyes a minute.

  “I won’t be long, Dee, I promise,” he whispered.

  “Take your time,” she replied.

  His head slid below the bubbles, leaving thin fronds of hair to coil on the surface and be sucked slowly under. He held his breath a moment, then began to scrub his submerged body vigorously, coming up and sucking air, then ducking below again.

  Derkhan filled a bucket with water and stood behind the bath. As he broke the surface she poured it slowly over his head, rinsing him free of bloody soap stains.

  “Oooh, lovely,” he muttered. “More, I beg you.”

  She obliged him.

  Eventually he stepped out of the bath, which looked like the site of violent murder. He tipped the slimy residue into a sluice hammered into the floor. They heard it slosh through the walls.

  Benjamin stepped into a rough robe. He wagged his head at Derkhan.

  “Shall we get down to business, love?” He winked at her.

  “Just tell me what services you require, squire,” she replied.

  They left the room. At the end of the passage, picked out in the wash from the skylight, was the little room where Benjamin slept. He closed and locked the door behind them. The room was like a well, far taller than it was wide. Another grubby window was set into the square ceiling space. Derkhan and Benjamin stepped over the flimsy mattress to the ramshackle old wardrobe at its foot, a relic with a decaying grandeur at odds with the slum setting.

  Benjamin reached inside and swept a few greasy shirts out of the way. He reached into the fingerholds drilled strategically in the wardrobe’s wooden back, and with a little grunt, lifted it away. He turned it gently sideways and laid it on the cabinet’s floor.

  Derkhan looked into the small brick doorway Benjamin had uncovered while he reached onto a little shelf in the wardrobe and took down a matchbox and a candle. He lit the candle in a burst of sulphur, shielding it from the cool air that wafted from the hidden room. With Derkhan behind him, he stepped through the wardrobe and lit up the office of Runagate Rampant.

  Derkhan and Benjamin lit the gaslamps. The room was large, dwarfing the adjoining bedroom. The air inside was heavy and sluggish. There was no natural light. High above, the frame of a skylight was visible, but the glass was painted over in black.

  Around the room were dotted tumbledown chairs and a couple of desks, all covered in paper and scissors and typewriters. On one chair sat an inactive construct, its eyes dim. One of its legs was crushed and ruined, bleeding copper wire and splinters of glass. The wall was papered with posters. Stacks of mouldering Runagate Rampants lined the room. Against one damp wall was the unwieldy-looking press, a huge iron thing coated in grease and ink.

  Benjamin sat at the largest desk and tugged a chair over next to him. He lit a long, drooping cigarillo. It smoked profusely. Derkhan joined him. She jerked her thumb at the construct.

  “How’s that old thing?” she asked.

  “Too bloody noisy to use during the day. I have to wait till the others have gone, but then the press is hardly silent itself, so that makes no difference. And it ain’t half a relief not to have to spin that damn wheel over and over and over all fucking night, once a fortnight. I just chuck a bit of coal in his innards, point him at it, and have a snooze.”

  “How’s the new issue?”

  Benjamin nodded slowly and pointed at a bound pile beside his chair.

  “Not too bad. Going to print off a few more. We’re running a little thing about your Remade in the freakshow.”

  Derkhan waved her hand.

  “It’s not a big story.”

  “No, but it’s . . . y’know . . . toothy . . . We’re leading on the election. ‘Fuck the Lottery,’ in slightly less strident terms.” He grinned. “I know it’s pretty much the same as last issue, but that’s the time of year.”

  “You weren’t a lucky winner in the lotto this year, were you?” asked Derkhan. “Your number come up?”

  “Nah. Only once in me life, years ago. Ran out to the ballot clasping me prize voucher proudly and voted Finally We Can See. Youthful enthusiasm.” Ben sniggered. “You don’t qualify automatically, do you?”

  “Devil’s Tail, Benjamin, I don’t have that kind of money! I’d give a damn sight more to RR if I did. No, and I didn’t win this year, either.”

  Benjamin split the string on the pile of papers. He shoved a handful at Derkhan. She picked up the top copy and glanced at the front. Each copy was a single large sheet of paper folded in half and half again. The font on the front page was about the same size as that used in the Beacon or the Quarrel or any other of New Crobuzon’s legal press. However, inside the folds of Runagate Rampant stories and slogans and exhortations jostled with each other in a thicket of tiny print. It was ugly but efficient.

  Derkhan pulled out three shekels and pushed them across to Benjamin. He took them with a murmur of thanks and put them in a tin at the front of his desk.

  “When are the others coming?” asked Derkhan.

  “I’m meeting a couple in the pub in an hour or so, then the rest this evening and tomorrow.” In the oscillating, violent, disingenuous and repressive political atmosphere of New Crobuzon, it was a necessary defence that except in a few cases, the writers for Runagate Rampant did not meet. That way the chance of infiltration by the militia was minimized. Benjamin was the editor, the only person on the constantly shifting staff whom everyone knew, and who knew everyone.

  Derkhan noticed a pile of roughly printed sheets on the floor by her seat. Runagate Rampant’s fellow seditionist papers. Halfway between comrades and rivals.

  “Anything good?” she asked, and indicated the stack. Benjamin shrugged.

  “The Shout’s rubbish this week. Decent lead in Forge about Rudgutter’s dealings with the shipping companies. I’ll get someone to chase it, actually. Apart from that it’s slim pickings.”

  “What do you want me to get onto?”

  “Well . . .” Benjamin flicked through papers, consulted his notes. “If you can just keep your ear to the ground about the dock strike . . . Canvass opinion, try and get a few positive responses, a few quotes, you know. And how about five hundred words on the history of the Suffrage Lottery?”

  Derkhan nodded.

  “What else’ve we got coming up?” she asked.

  Benjamin pursed his lips.

  “There’s some rumour about Rudgutter having some illness, dubious cures: that’s something I’d like to chase, but you can tell it’s been filtered by Jabber knows how many mouths. Still, keep an ear open. There’s something else as well . . . very tentative at this stage, but interesting. I’m talking to someone who claims they’re talking to someone who wants to blow the whistle on links between Parliament and mob crime.”

  Derkhan nodded slowly and appreciatively.

  “Sounds very tasty. What are we talking? Drugs? Prostitutes?”

  “Shit, sure as eggs Rudgutter’s got fingers in every fucking pie you can think of. They all have. Churn out the commodity, grab the profit, get the militia to tidy up your customers afterwards, get a new crop of Remade or slave-miners for the Arrowhead pits, keep the jails full . . . nice as you like. I don’t kn
ow what this grass has in mind particularly, and they’re fucking nervous, apparently, ready to do a bunk. But you know me, Dee. Softly softly.” He winked at her. “I won’t let this one get away.”

  “Keep me posted, won’t you?” Derkhan said. Benjamin nodded.

  Derkhan bundled her collection of papers into a bag, hiding them under assorted detritus. She stood.

  “Right. I have my orders. That three shekels, by the way, includes fourteen copies of Double-R sold.”

  “Good stuff,” said Benjamin, and found a particular notebook among the many on his desk to record the fact. He stood and gestured Derkhan through the doorway and the wardrobe. She waited in his tiny bedroom as he shut off the lights in the press.

  “Is Grimwhatsisname still buying?” he asked through the hole. “That scientist geezer?”

  “Yes. He’s quite good.”

  “I heard a funny rumour about him the other day,” said Benjamin, emerging through the wardrobe, wiping his oily hands on a rag. “Is he the same one who’s after birds?”

  “Oh, yes, he’s doing some experiment or other. You been listening to criminals, Benjamin?” Derkhan grinned. “He’s collecting wings. I think he makes it a point of principle never to buy things officially when he can go through illicit channels.”

  Benjamin shook his head appreciatively.

  “Well, the cove’s good at it. He knows how to get word out.”

  As he spoke, he was leaning into the wardrobe and tugging the wooden rear back into position. He fastened it and turned to Derkhan.

  “Righto,” he said. “We’d best get into character.”

  Derkhan nodded curtly, and ruffled her white wig somewhat. She undid her intricate shoelaces. Benjamin untucked his shirt. He held his breath and swung his arms from side to side, until he went deep red. He exhaled in a sudden burst, and breathed hard. He squinted at Derkhan.

  “Come on,” he said imploringly. “Cut me some slack. What of me reputation? You could at least look tired . . .”