Perdido Street Station (15 page)

She picked up the
cardboard box and carried it at arms’ length through the room.
At the far end one of her colleagues, a thin cactacae with his spines
carefully secured beneath thick white coveralls, had opened the large
bolted door for which she was heading. She showed him her security
clearance and he stood aside to let her precede him.

They walked carefully
down a corridor as white and sparse as the room from which they had
come, with a large iron grille at the far end. The cactus saw that
his colleague was carrying something gingerly in both hands, and he
reached past her and fed a programme card into an input slot in the
wall. The slatted gate slid open.

They entered a vast
dark chamber.

**

Its ceiling and its
walls were far enough away to be invisible. Weird wails and lowing
sounded distantly from all sides. As their eyes adjusted, cages
walled with dark wood or iron or reinforced glass loomed at them
irregularly in the enormous hall. Some were huge, the size of rooms:
others were no larger than a book. All were raised like cabinets in a
museum, with charts and books of information slotted before them.
White-clad scientists moved through the maze between the blocks of
glass like spirits in a ruin, taking notes, observing, pacifying and
tormenting the cages’ inhabitants.

Captive things sniffed
and grunted and sang and shifted unreally in their dim prisons.

The cactus walked
briskly off into the distance and disappeared. The woman carrying the
grubs made her way carefully through the room.

Things lunged at her as
she walked past and she shuddered with the glass. Something swirled
oleaginously through a huge vat of liquid mud: she saw toothy
tentacles slapping at her and scouring the tank. She was bathed in
hypnotic organic lights. She passed a small cage smothered in black
cloth, with warning signs plastered ostentatiously on all sides and
instructions on how to deal with the contents. Her colleagues drifted
up to her and away again with clipboards and children’s
coloured bricks and slabs of putrefying meat.

Ahead, temporary black
wooden walls twenty feet high had been thrown up, surrounding a
floor-space forty feet square. Even a corrugated iron ceiling had
been hammered over the top. At the padlocked entrance to the
room-within-a-room stood a white-suited guard, his head braced to
take the weight of a bizarre helmet. He carried a flintlock rifle and
a back-slung scimitar. At his feet were several more helmets like
his.

She nodded to the guard
and indicated her desire to enter. He looked at the identification
around her neck.

"You know what to
do, then?" he asked quietly.

She nodded and put the
box carefully on the floor for a moment, after testing that the
string was still tight. Then she picked up one of the helmets by the
guard’s feet and slipped the unwieldy thing over her head.

It was a cage of brass
pipes and screws that slotted around her skull, with one small mirror
suspended a foot and a half in front of each of her eyes. She
adjusted the chinstrap to keep the heavy contraption steady, then
turned her back on the guard and fiddled with the mirrors. She angled
them on their swivelling joints until she could see him clearly
directly behind her. She switched focus from eye to eye, testing the
visibility.

She nodded.

"All right, I’m
ready," she said, and picked up the box, untying it as she did
so. She stared intently into the mirrors while the guard unlocked the
door behind her. When he opened it he averted his eyes from the
interior.

The scientist used her
mirrors to walk backwards quickly into the dark room.

**

She was sweating as she
saw the door close in front of her face. She switched her attention
again to the mirrors, moved her head slowly from side to side to take
in what was behind her.

There was a huge cage
of thick black bars filling almost the whole space. From the dark
brown light of burning oil and candles she could make out the
desultory, dying vegetation and small trees that filled the cage. The
gently rotting growth and the darkness in the room were thick enough
that she could not see the far side of the room.

She scanned quickly in
the mirrors. Nothing was moving.

She backed quickly up
to the cage, to where a small tray slotted back and forth through the
bars. She reached behind her and tilted her head up such that the
mirrors angled down and she could see her hand groping. It was a
difficult, inelegant manoeuvre, but she managed to grip the handle
and tug the tray out towards her.

She heard a heavy
beating in the corner of the cage, like thick rugs being slammed
quickly together. Her breath came faster and she fumbled to pour the
grubs onto the tray. The four little undulating lozenges slipped in a
shower of paper debris onto the metal.

Immediately, something
changed in the quality of the air. The caterpillars could smell the
inhabitant of the cage, and they were crying out to it for succour.

The thing in the cage
was answering.

These cries were not
audible. They vibrated in wavelengths other than sonar. The scientist
felt the hair all over her body bristle as the ghosts of emotions
fleeted through her skull like half-heard rumours. Snippets of alien
joy and inhuman terror wafted in her nostrils and ears and behind her
eyes, synaesthetically.

With trembling fingers
she pushed the tray into the cage.

As she stepped away
from the bars, something stroked her leg with a lascivious flourish.
She gave a moaning grunt of fear and yanked her trouser out of reach,
clamped down on her terror, resisted the instinct to look behind her.

In her head-mounted
mirrors, she glimpsed dark brown limbs uncurling in the rough
undergrowth, the yellowing bone of teeth, black ocular pits. The
ferns and scrub rustled and the thing was gone.

The scientist knocked
brusquely on the door as she swallowed, holding her breath until it
was opened and she stumbled out nearly into the arms of the guard.
She snatched at the clasps under her head, pulling herself free of
the helmet. She stared intently away from the guard while she heard
him closing and locking the door.

"Is it done?"
she whispered eventually.

"Yes."

She turned back slowly.
She could not look up, but kept her eyes firmly on the floor,
checking that he told the truth by looking at the base of the door,
then slowly and with a rush of relief raising her line of sight to
eye-level.

She handed the helmet
back to the guard.

"Thanks," she
murmured.

"Was it all
right?" he asked.

"Never," she
snapped, and turned.

Behind her, she thought
she heard a massive fluttering through the wooden walls.

She walked briskly back
through the chamber of strange animals, realizing halfway through
that she still clutched the now-empty box in which the grubs had
come. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

She pulled the
telescoping gate closed behind her on the massive chamber full of
shadowy, violent shapes. She returned the length of the scrubbed
white corridor and at last back into the Research & Development
antechamber, through the first heavy door.

She pushed it closed
and bolted it, before turning happily to join her white-suited
fellows staring into femtoscopes or reading treatises or conferring
quietly by the doors that led to other specialist departments. Each
had a legend stencilled on it in red and black.

As Dr. Magesta Barbile
walked back to her bench to make her report, she glanced briefly over
her shoulder at the warnings printed on the door she had taken.

Biohazard. Danger.
Extreme Caution Required.

"Are you a dabbler
in drugs, Ms. Lin?"

Lin had told Mr. Motley
many times that it was difficult for her to speak when she was
working. He had affably informed her that he got bored when he was
sitting for her, or for any portraits. She didn’t have to
answer him, he had said. If anything he said really interested her,
she could save it up for afterwards and discuss it with him at the
end of the session. She really mustn’t mind him, he had said.
He couldn’t possibly stay still for two, three, four hours at a
time and say nothing. It would drive him mad. So she listened to what
he said and tried to remember one or two remarks to bring up later.
She was still very careful to keep him happy with her.

"You should give
them a try. I’m sure you have, actually. Artist like you.
Plumbing the depths of the psyche. Such-like." She heard a smile
in his voice.

Lin had persuaded Mr.
Motley to let her work in the attic of his Bonetown base. It was the
only place with natural light in the whole building, she had
discovered. It was not only painters or heliotypists who needed
light: the textures and tactility of surfaces that she evoked so
assiduously in her gland-art was invisible by candlelight, and
exaggerated in gasjets. So she had wrangled with him nervously until
he had accepted her expertise. From then on, she was greeted at the
door by the cactus valet and led to the top floor, where a wooden
ladder dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

She came and went into
the attic alone. Whenever Lin arrived she would find Mr. Motley
waiting. He would stand in the enormous space a few feet from where
she pulled herself into his view.

The triangular cavity
seemed to stretch at least a third the length of the terrace, a study
in perspective, with the chaotic agglutination of flesh that was Mr.
Motley poised at its centre.

There were no
furnishings. There was one door leading to some little corridor
outside, but she never saw it open. The attic air was dry. Lin trod
over loose boards, risking splinters with every step. But the dirt on
the large dormer windows seemed translucent, admitting light and
diffusing it. Lin would gently sign for Mr. Motley to position
himself below the wash of sun, or cloudlight. Then she would pace
around him, reorienting herself, before continuing with her
sculpture.

Once she had asked him
where he would put a life-size representation of himself.

"It’s
nothing for you to worry about," he had answered with a gentle
smile.

**

She stood before him
and watched the lukewarm grey light pick out his features. Every
session before she started she would spend some minutes making
herself familiar with him again.

The first couple of
times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight,
that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized
when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She
wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children’s
tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to
freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything,
starting each day from the beginning all over again.

But it was not long
before she learnt to impose order on his chaos. It felt absurdly
prosaic to
count
the razor-sharp shards of chitin that jutted
from a scrap of pachyderm skin, just to make sure she had not missed
one in her sculpture. It felt almost vulgar, as if his anarchic form
should defy accounting. And yet, as soon as she looked at him with
such an eye, the work of sculpture took shape.

Lin would stand and
stare at him, switching focus rapidly from visual cell to cell, her
concentration fleeting across her eyes, gauging the aggregate that
was Mr. Motley through the minutely changing parts. She carried dense
white sticks of the organic paste she would metabolize to make her
art. She had already eaten several before arriving, and as she took
the visual measure of him, she would chew rapidly on another,
stolidly ignoring the dull, unpleasant taste, and rapidly passing it
through her headbody to the sac inside the hindpart of her
headthorax. Her headbelly would swell visibly as she stored up her
mulch.

She would turn and pick
up the beginnings of the work, the three-toed reptile claw that was
one of Mr. Motley’s feet, and she would tie it into place on a
low bracket. Then she would turn back and kneel, facing her subject,
opening the little chitin case protecting her gland and fastening the
nether lips at the rear of her head-body with a gentle
slup
onto the edge of the sculpture behind her.

First, Lin would gently
spit a little of the enzyme that broke down the integrity of the
already hardened khepri-spit, returning the edge of her
work-in-progress to a thick sticky mucus. Then she would focus hard
on the section of the leg she was working on, taking in what she
could see and remembering the features out of her sight, the
exoskeletal jags, the muscular cavities; she would begin gently to
squeeze the thick paste from her gland, her sphincter-lips dilating
and contracting and extending, rolling and smoothing the sludge into
shape.

She used the opalescent
nacre of the khepri-spit to good effect. At certain places, though,
the hues of Mr. Motley’s bizarre flesh were too spectacular,
too arresting, not to be represented. Lin would glance down and grab
a handful of the colourberries arrayed on her pallet before her. She
would take them in subtle combinations and quickly eat them, a
careful cocktail of redberries and cyanberries, say, yellowberries
and purpleberries and blackberries.

The vivid juice would
be spat through her headguts, down peculiar intestinal byways and
into an adjunct of her main thoracic sac, and within four or five
minutes she could push the mixed colour into the diluted khepri-spit.
She would smear the liquid froth into careful position, slopping
astonishing tones in suggestive patches and scabs, where it
coagulated quickly into shape.