Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.

  The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.

  But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.

  Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.

  I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.

  When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.

  We have been freed.

  This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.

  We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.

  We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.

  But she does not.

  That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.

  But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.

  She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.

  She raises her hands and signs for him.

  He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.

  Derkhan’s eyes widen as she reads the words.

  Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.

  Morning . . . food . . . warming, he falters, insect . . . journey . . . happy.

  She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.

  He comforts her, holds the apple before her, helping her to bite, wiping her when she drips juice and residue across herself. Afraid, she signs, as Isaac hesitantly translates. Mind tiring spilling loose, art Motley! She shakes suddenly, peering around her in terror. Isaac shushes her, comforts her. Derkhan watches in misery. Alone, Lin signs desperately, and spews out a chymical message that is opaque to us all. Monster warm Remade . . . She looks around. Apple, she signs. Apple.

  Isaac lifts it to her mouth and lets her feed. She jigs like a toddler.

  When the evening comes and she falls asleep once more, quickly and deeply, Isaac and Derkhan confer, and Isaac begins to rage and shout, and to cry.

  She’ll recover, he shouts, as Lin shifts in her sleep, she’s half-dead with fucking tiredness, she’s had the shit beaten out of her, it’s no wonder, no wonder she’s confused . . .

  But she does not recover, as he knows she will not.

  We ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone, burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men.

  Lin wakes happy, talks animated gibberish with her hands, flails to stand and cannot, falls and weeps or laughs chymically, chatters with her mandibles, fouls herself like a baby.

  Lin toddles across our roof with her half-mind. Helpless. Ruined. A weird patchwork of childish laughter and adult dreams, her speech extraordinary and incomprehensible, complex and violent and infantile.

  Isaac is broken.

  We move roofs, made uneasy by noises from below. Lin has a tantrum on our journey, made mad by our inability to understand her bizarre stream of words. She drums her heels on the pavement, slaps Isaac with weak strokes. She signs vile insults, tries to kick us away.

  We control her, hold her tight, bundle her away.

  We move by night. We are fearful of the militia and of Motley’s men. We watch out for constructs which might report to the Council. We watch carefully for sudden movements and suspicious glances. We cannot trust our neighbours. We must live in a hinterland of half darkness, isolated and solipsistic. We steal what we need, or buy from tiny late-night grocers miles from where we are settled. Every askance look, every gaze, every shout, sudden flurry of hooves or boots, every bang or hiss of a construct’s pistons is a moment of fear.

  We are the most wanted in New Crobuzon. An honour, a dubious honour.

  Lin wants colourberries.

  Isaac interprets her motions thus. The faltering charade of chewing, the pulsing of her gland (an unsettling sexual sight).

  Derkhan agrees to go. She loves Lin, too.

  They spend hours on Derkhan’s disguise, with water and butter and soot, ragged clothes from all over, foodstuffs and the remnants of dyes. She emerges with sleek black hair that shines like coal-crystals and a puckered scar across her forehead. She holds herself hunched and scowls.

  When she leaves, Isaac and I spend the hours waiting fearfully. We are almost totally silent.

  Lin continues her idiot monologue, and Isaac tries to answer with his own hands, caressing her and signing slowly as if she were a child. But she is not: she is half an adult, and his manner enrages her. She tries to stalk away and falls, her limbs disobedient. She is terrified of her own body. Isaac helps her, sits her up and feeds her, massages her tense, bruised shoulders.

  Derkhan returns to our muttered relief with slabs of paste and a large handful of variegated berries. Their tones are lush and vivid.

  I thought the damn Council had us, she says. I thought some construct was after me. I had to wind through Kinken to get away.

  None of us know if she was really being tracked.

  Lin is excited. Her antennae and her headlegs quiver. She tries to chew a finger of the white paste, but she trembles and spills it and cannot control herself. Isaac is gentle with her. He pushes the paste slowly into her mouth, unobtrusive, as if she ate for herself.

  It takes some minutes for the headscarab to digest the paste and direct it towards the khepri’s gland. As we wait, Isaac shakes a few colourberries at Lin, waiting until her twitches decide him that she wants a particular bunch, which he feeds to her gently and carefully.

  We are silent. Lin swallows and chews carefully. We watch her.

  Minutes pass and then her gland distends. We rock forward, eager to see what she will make.

  She opens her gland-lips and pushes out a pellet of moist khepri-spit. She moves her arms in excitement as it oozes shapeless and sopping from her, dropping heavy to the floor like a white turd.

  A thin drool of coloured spittle from the berries streams out after it, spattering and staining the mess.

  Derkhan looks away. Isaac cries as I have never seen a human do.

  Outside our foul shanty the city squats fatly in its freedom, brazen again and fearless. It ignores us. It is an ingrate. The days are cooler this week, a brief ebbing of the relentless summer. Gusts blow in from the coast, from the Gross Tar estuary and Iron Bay. Clutches of ships arrive every day. They queue in the river to the east, waiting to load and unload. Merchant ships from Kohnid and Tesh; explorers from the Firewater Straits; floating factories from Myrshock; privateers from Figh Vadiso, respectable and law-abiding so far from the open sea. Clouds scurry like bees before the sun. The city is raucous. It has forgotten. It has some vague notion that once its sleep was troubled: nothing more.

  I can see the sky. There are slats of light between the rough boards that surround us. I would like very much to be away from this now. I can imagine the sensation of wind, the sudden heaviness of air below me. I would like to look down on this buildi
ng and this street. I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.

  Lin signs. Sticky fearful, whispers Isaac snottily, watching her hands. Piss and mother, food wings happy. Afraid. Afraid.

  PART EIGHT

  Judgement

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “We have to leave.”

  Derkhan spoke quickly. Isaac looked up at her dully. He was feeding Lin, who squirmed uncomfortably, unsure of what she wanted to do. She signed at him, her hands tracing words and then simply moving, tracing shapes that had no meaning. He flicked fruit detritus from her shirt.

  He nodded and looked down. Derkhan continued as if he had disagreed with her, as if she were convincing him.

  “Every time we move, we’re afraid.” She spoke quickly. Her face was hard. Terror, guilt, exhilaration and misery had scoured her. She was exhausted. “Every time any kind of automaton goes past, we think the Construct Council’s found us. Every man or woman or xenian makes us freeze up. Is it the militia? Is it one of Motley’s thugs?” She kneeled down. “I can’t live like this, ’Zaac,” she said. She looked down at Lin, smiled very slowly and closed her eyes. “We’ll take her away,” she whispered. “We can look after her. We’re finished here. It can’t be long before one of them finds us. I’m not waiting around for that.”

  Isaac nodded again.

  “I . . .” He thought carefully. He tried to organize his mind. “I’ve got . . . a commitment,” he said quietly.

  He rubbed the flab below his chin. It itched as his stubble regrew, pushing through his uneven skin. Wind blew through the windows. The house in Pincod was tall and mouldering and full of junkies. Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek had claimed the top two floors. There was one window on each side, overlooking the street and the wretched little yard. Weeds had burst out through the stained concrete below like subcutaneous growths.

  Isaac and the others barricaded the doors whenever they were in: slipped out carefully, disguised, mostly at night. Sometimes they would venture out in the daylight, as Yagharek had now. There was always some reason given, some urgency that meant the vague trip could not wait. It was just claustrophobia. They had freed the city: it was untenable that they should not walk under the sun.

  “I know about the commitment,” Derkhan said. She looked over at the loosely connected components of the crisis engine. Isaac had cleaned them up the previous night, slotted them into place.

  “Yagharek,” he said. “I owe him. I promised.”

  Derkhan looked down and swallowed, then turned her head to him again. She nodded.

  “How long?” she said. Isaac glanced up at her, broke her gaze and looked away. He shrugged briefly.

  “Some of the wires are burnt out,” he said vaguely, and shifted Lin into a more comfortable position on his chest. “There was a shitload of feedback, melted right through some of the circuits. Um . . . I’m going to have to go out tonight and rummage around for a couple of adapters . . . and a dynamo. I can fix the rest of it myself,” he said, “but I’ll have to get the tools. Trouble is, every time we nick something we put ourselves even more at risk.” He shrugged slowly. There was nothing he could do. They had no money. “Then I have to get a cell-battery or something. But the hardest thing is going to be the maths. Fixing all this up is mostly just . . . mechanics. But even if I can get the engines to work, getting the sums right to . . . you know, formulating this in equations . . . that’s damn hard. That’s what I got the Council to do last time.” He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

  “I have to formulate the commands,” he said quietly. “Fly. That’s what I’ve got to tell it. Put Yag in the sky and he’s in crisis, he’s about to fall. Tap that and channel it, keep him in the air, keep him flying, keep him in crisis, so tap the energy and so on. It’s a perfect loop,” he said. “I think it’ll work. It’s just the maths . . .”

  “How long?” Derkhan repeated quietly. Isaac frowned.

  “A week . . . or two, maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe more.”

  Derkhan shook her head. She said nothing.

  “I owe him, Dee!” Isaac said, his voice tense. “I’ve promised him this for ages, and he . . .”

  He got the slake-moth off Lin, he had been about to say, but something in him had preempted him, asked if that was such a good thing after all, and appalled, Isaac faltered into silence.

  It’s the most powerful science for hundreds of years, he thought in a sudden rage, and I can’t come out of hiding. I have to . . . to spirit it away.

  He stroked Lin’s carapace and she began to sign to him, mentioning fish and cold and sugar.

  “I know, ’Zaac,” said Derkhan without anger. “I know. He’s . . . he deserves it. But we can’t wait that long. We have to go.”

  I’ll do what I can, promised Isaac, I have to help him, I’ll be quick.

  Derkhan accepted it. She had no choice. She would not leave him, or Lin. She did not blame him. She wanted him to honour his agreement, to give Yagharek what he wanted.

  The stink and sadness of the damp little room overwhelmed her. She muttered something about scouting out the river and she left. Isaac smiled without warmth at her half-hearted excuse.

  “Be careful,” he said unnecessarily as she left.

  He lay cuddling Lin with his back to the foetid wall.

  After a while he felt Lin relax into sleep. He slipped out from behind her and walked over to the window, looked out over the bustle below.

  Isaac did not know the name of the street. It was wide, lined with young trees all pliant and hopeful. At the far end, a cart had been parked sideways, deliberately creating a cul-de-sac. A man and a vodyanoi were arguing ferociously beside it, while the two cowed donkeys drawing it hung their heads, trying not to be noticed. A group of children materialized in front of the motionless wheels, kicking a ball of tied rags. They scampered, their clothes flapping like flightless wings.

  An argument broke out, four little boys prodding one of the two vodyanoi children in the group. The fat little vodyanoi backed away on all fours, crying. One of the boys threw a stone. The argument was forgotten quickly. The vodyanoi sulked a brief moment, then hopped back into the game, stealing the ball.

  Further along the road, a few doors down from Isaac’s building, a young woman was chalking some symbol onto the wall. It was an unfamiliar, angular device, some witch’s talisman. Two old men sat together on a stoop, tossing dice and laughing uproariously at the results. The buildings were bird-limed and grotty, the tarred pavement punctuated with water-filled potholes. Rooks and pigeons threaded through smoke from thousands of chimneys.

  Cuttings from conversations reached Isaac’s ears.

  “. . . so he says a stiver for that? . . .”

  “. . . damaged the engine, but then he was always a cunt . . .”

  “. . . don’t say nothing about it . . .”

  “. . . it’s on Dockday next, and she copped a total crystal . . .”

  “. . . savage, absofuckinglutely savage . . .”

  “. . . remembrance? For who?”

  For Andrej, thought Isaac suddenly, without warning or reason. He listened again.

  There was much more. There were languages he did not speak. He recognized Perrickish and Fellid, the intricate cadences of Low Cymek. And others.

  He did not want to leave.

  Isaac sighed and turned back into the room. Lin squirmed on the floor in sleep.

  He looked at her, saw her breasts pushing at her torn shirt. Her skirt rode up her thighs. He looked away.

  Since recovering Lin, twice he had woken with the warmth and pressure of her against him, his prick erect and eager. He had rubbed his hand over the swell of her hips and down into her parted legs. Sleep had rolled off him like fog as his arousal grew and he had opened his eyes to see her, moving her beneath him as she woke, forgetting that Derkhan and Yagharek were sleeping nearby. He had breathed at her and spoken lovingly and explicitly of what he wanted
to do, and then he had jerked backwards in horror as she began to sign babble at him and he remembered what had happened to her.

  She had rubbed against him and stopped, rubbed him again (like some capricious dog, he had thought, appalled), her erratic arousal and confusion absolutely clear. Some lustful part of him had wanted to continue, but the weight of sorrow had shrivelled his penis almost instantly.

  Lin had seemed disappointed and hurt, then she hugged him, happily and suddenly. Then she curled up in despair. Isaac had tasted her emissions in the air around them. He had known she was crying herself to sleep.

  Isaac glanced out at the day again. He thought of Rudgutter and his cronies; of the macabre Mr. Motley; he imagined the cold analysis of the Construct Council, cheated of the engine it coveted. He imagined the rages, the arguments, the orders given and received that week that cursed him.

  Isaac walked over to the crisis engine, took brief stock of it. He sat down, folded paper in his lap, and began to write calculations.

  He was not worried that the Construct Council might mimic his engine itself. It could not design one. It could not calculate its parameters. The blueprint had come to him in an intuitive leap so natural that he had not recognized it for hours. The Construct Council could not be inspired. Isaac’s fundamental model, the conceptual basis of the engine, he had never even had to write down. His notes would be quite opaque to any reader.

  Isaac positioned himself so that he worked in a shaft of sunlight.

  The grey dirigibles patrolled the air, as they did every day. They seemed uneasy.

  It was a perfect day. The wind from the sea seemed constantly to renew the sky.

  Yagharek and Derkhan, in separate quarters of the city, enjoyed their furtive times in the sun, and tried not to court danger. They walked away from arguments and stuck to the crowded streets.