Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  If she entered and her broodma was there, she thought, they would both be angry, and miserable, and they would argue, pointlessly, as if the years had not gone by.

  If her sister was there and told her their broodma had died, and Lin had let her go without a word of anger or forgiveness, she would be alone. Her heart might burst.

  If there was no sign . . . if the floors crawled only with males, living like the vermin they were, no longer pampered princes without brains but bugs that stank and ate carrion, if her broodma and her sister had gone . . . then Lin would be standing pointlessly in a deserted house. Her homecoming would be ridiculous.

  An hour or more had passed, and Lin had turned her back on the putrefying building. With her headlegs waving and her head-scarab flexing in agitation, in confusion and loneliness, she made her way back to the station.

  She had grappled fiercely with her melancholy, stopping in The Crow and spending some of Motley’s enormous payments on books and rare foods. She had entered an exclusive women’s boutique, provoking the sharp tongue of the manageress until Lin had fanned her guineas and pointed imperiously at two dresses. She had taken her time in being measured, insisting each piece fit her as sensuously as it would the human women for whom its designer had intended it.

  She had bought both pieces, all without a word from the manageress, whose nose wrinkled as she took a khepri’s money.

  Lin had walked the streets of Salacus Fields wearing one of her purchases, an exquisite fitted piece in cloudy blue that darkened her russet skin. She could not tell if she felt worse or better than before.

  She wore the dress again the next morning as she crossed the city to find Isaac.

  That morning by Kelltree Docks, dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of cræfted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.

  They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feet across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercræft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.

  In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.

  As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. FAIR WAGES NOW! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.

  On either side of the gorge in the river, small boats rowed carefully to the edge of the water. The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.

  The channel had been dug a little to the south of Barley Bridge, at the very edge of the docklands. There were ships waiting to enter and ships waiting to leave. A mile or so downstream, in the insalubrious waters between Badside and Dog Fenn, merchant ships reined in their nervous seawyrms and let the boilers run low. In the other direction, by the jetties and landing bays, in Kelltree’s fat canals beside the drydocks, the captains of vessels from as far as Khadoh gazed impatiently at the vodyanoi pickets that thronged the banks and worried about getting home.

  By mid-morning the human wharfmen had arrived to get about the task of unloading and loading. They quickly discovered that their presence was more or less superfluous. Once the remaining work was done preparing those ships still at anchor in Kelltree itself—at most another two days’ work—they were stuck.

  The small group who had been in discussion with the striking vodyanoi had come prepared. At ten in the morning about twenty men suddenly streamed out of their yards, climbing the fences around the docks, and jogging to the waterfront by the vodyanoi pickets, who cheered them on with something like hysteria. The men pulled out their own signs: HUMAN AND VODYANOI AGAINST THE BOSSES!

  They joined in the noisy chanting.

  Over the next two hours, the mood hardened. A core of humans set up a counter-demonstration inside the dockland’s low walls. They screamed abuse at the vodyanoi, calling them frogs and toads. They jeered at the striking humans, denounced them as race-traitors. They warned that the vodyanoi would ruin the dock, making human wages plummet. One or two of them carried Three Quills literature.

  Between them and the equally strident human strikers was a great mass of confused, vacillating dockers. They wandered back and forth, swearing and baffled. They listened to the shouted arguments from both sides.

  The numbers began to grow.

  On either bank of the river, in Kelltree itself and on the south bank of Syriac Well, crowds were gathering to watch the confrontation. A few men and women ran among them, moving too fast to be identified, handing out leaflets with the Runagate Rampant banner at the top. They demanded in closely printed text that the human dockers join the vodyanoi, that it was the only way the demands would be won. The papers could be seen circulating among the human dockers, handed out by person or persons unseen.

  As the day wore on, and the air heated, more and more dockers began to drift over the wall to join the demonstration beside the vodyanoi. The counter-demonstration also grew, sometimes rapidly; but over the space of the hours, it was the strikers that increased most visibly.

  There was a tense uncertainty in the air. The crowd was becoming more vocal, yelling at both sides to do something. There was a rumour that the chairman of the dock authority was coming to speak, another that Rudgutter himself would put in an appearance.

  All the time, the vodyanoi in the canyon of air carved into the river busied themselves shoring up the shimmering waterwalls. Occasionally fish blundered through the flat edges and fell to the ground, flapping, or half-sunk rubbish eddied gently into the sudden chasm. The vodyanoi threw everything back. They worked in shifts, swimming up through the water to watercræft the upper reaches of the riverwalls. They shouted encouragement at the human strikers from the riverbed, among the ruined metal and thick sludge that was the Gross Tar’s floor.

  At half past three, with the sun blazing hot through ineffectual clouds, two airships were seen approaching the docks, from the north and the south.

  There was excitement among the crowds, and the word quickly spread through the assembled that the mayor was coming. Then a third and fourth airship were noticed, cruising ineluctably over the city towards Kelltree.

  The shadow of unease passed over the riverbanks.

  Some of the crowd dispersed quietly. The strikers redoubled their chants.

  By five to four, the airships hovered over the docks in an airborne X, a massive threatening mark of censure. A mile or so to the east, another solitary dirigible hung over Dog Fenn, on the other side of the river’s ponderous kink. The vodyanoi and the humans and the gathered crowds shaded their eyes with their hands and stared up at the impassive shapes, bullet-bodies like hunting squid.

  The airships began to sink earthwards. They approached at some speed, the details of their design and the sense of mass of their inflated bodies quite suddenly discernible.

  Just before four o’clock, strange org
anic shapes floated up from behind the surrounding roofs, emerging from sliding doors at the top of the Kelltree and Syriac militia struts, smaller towers not connected to the skyrail network.

  The eddying, weightless objects bobbed gently in the breeze and began to drift almost aimlessly towards the wharfs. The sky was suddenly full of the things. They were big and soft-bodied, each a mass of twisted, bloated tissue coated with intricate flaps and curves of skin, craters and strange, dripping orifices. The central sac was about ten feet in diameter. Each of the creatures had a human rider, visible in a harness sutured to the corpulent body. Below each such body was a thicket of dangling tentacles, ribbons of blistered flesh that stretched the forty or so feet to the ground.

  The creatures’ pinky-purple flesh throbbed regularly like beating hearts.

  The extraordinary things bore down on the gathered crowd. There was a full ten seconds when those who saw them were too aghast to speak, or to believe what they saw. Then the shouts started: “Men-o’-war!”

  As the panic began, some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at once.

  Throughout the gathered crowd, in the anti-strike demonstration and even here and there among the striking dockworkers themselves, clumps of men—and some women—suddenly reached over their heads and in violent, quick motions tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible eye- or mouth-holes; dark crumpled blanks.

  From the underbelly of each of the airships—looming absurdly close now—spilt clutches of ropes that jounced and whiplashed as they fell. They fell through the yards and yards of air, their ends coiling slightly on the pavement. They contained the gathering, the pickets and demonstrations and surrounding crowds within four pillars of suspended rope, two on either side of the river. Dark figures slid expertly, at breakneck speed, the length of the cords. They came in a constant quick drip. They looked like glutinous clots dribbling down the entrails of the disembowelled airships.

  There were wails from the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The people fled in all directions, trampling the fallen, grabbing children and lovers and stumbling on cobbles and broken flagstones. They tried to disperse down the side streets that spread like a network of cracks out from the riverbanks. But they ran into the paths of the men-o’-war that bobbed sedately along the alleys’ routes.

  Uniformed militia were suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on monstrous bipedal shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as they felt their way with echoes.

  The air brimmed with sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs around corners into men-o’-war tentacles and shrieked as the nerve-agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.

  The man-o’-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures’ movements, coursing deceptively fast over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing their steeds’ venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd—the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky—reacted to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.

  The militia’s dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o’-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.

  Ranks of militia charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly mass were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o’-war stings. Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their filter-masks.

  A splinter group of officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into the vodyanoi’s watercræft ditch. The croaks and screeches of burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.

  Three militiamen knelt at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very fast, they sighted along the shafts into the miasma of grey smoke. An officer in the peculiar silver epaulettes of a captain-thaumaturge stood behind them, muttering quickly and inaudibly, his voice muffled. He touched each marksman’s temples, then jerked his hands away.

  Behind their masks, the men’s eyes watered and cleared, suddenly seeing registers of light and radiation that rendered the smoke virtually invisible.

  Each man knew the bodyshape and movement patterns of his target perfectly. The sharpshooters tracked quickly through the fog of gas and saw their targets conferring with wet rags clamped to their mouths and noses. There was a rapid crackle, three shots in a quick tempo.

  Two of the vodyanoi fell. The third looked round in panic, seeing nothing but the swirl of that vicious gas. He raced to the water walling him in, scooped a handful from it and began to croon to it, moving his hand in fast and esoteric passes. One of the riverside marksmen dropped his rifle quickly and picked up his second weapon. The target was a shaman, he realized, and if given time he might invoke an undine. That would make things vastly more complicated. The officer raised the gun to his shoulder, aimed and fired in one brisk movement. The hammer with its clamped shard of flint slid down the serrated edge of the pan cover and snapped, sparking, into the pan.

  The bullet burst through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths, and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the quag.

  The watercræft walls of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political papers and the bodies.

  As the militia put down the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airship as from its kin.

  The crowds in Dog Fenn were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

  The costermongers on Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by one the five airships sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

  They slipped below the silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned and fled.

  The militia troops stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into the swirling, bloody air. The
butchers and slaughterers turned dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they ran.

  The militia tore down the swinging, dripping carcasses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex’s bedroom might have been gauze.

  Once inside the troops moved to either side of the wardrobe, leaving one man to unstrap a huge sledgehammer from his back. He swung it at the old wood, dissolving the wardrobe in three huge strokes, uncovering a hole in the wall that emitted the chugging of a steam engine and fitful oil-lamp light.

  Two of the officers disappeared into the secret room. There was a muffled shout and the sound of repeated hammering thuds. Benjamin Flex came flying through the crumbling hole, his body twisting, beads of blood hitting his grimy walls in radial patterns. He hit the floor head first and shrieked, tried to scrabble away, swearing incoherently. Another officer reached down and lifted him by the shirt with steam-enhanced strength, shoving him against a wall.

  Ben gibbered and tried to spit, staring at the impassive blue-masked face, intricate smoked goggles and gasmask and spiked helmet like the face of some insectile dæmon.

  The voice that emerged from the hissing mouthparts was monotonous, but quite clear.

  “Benjamin Flex, please give your verbal or written assent to accompany myself and other officers of the New Crobuzon militia to a place of our choosing for the purposes of interview and intelligence gathering.” The militiaman slammed Ben against the wall, hard, eliciting an explosive burst of breath and an unintelligible bark. “Assent so noticed in presence of myself and two witnesses,” the officer responded. “Aye?”