Perdido Street Station (20 page)

"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..."

She grinned at him and,
sighing, rubbed her face and eyes.

"Oooh, Mr. B,"
she squeaked absurdly. "You’re the best I ever had!"

"More like it..."
he muttered, and winked.

They unlocked the door
and stepped out into the corridor. Their preparations had been
unnecessary. They were alone.

Far below, the sound of
meat-grinders could be heard.

When Lin woke with
Isaac’s head next to hers, she stared at it for a long time.
She let her antennae flutter in the wind from his breath. It had, she
thought, been much too long since she had enjoyed the sight of him
like this.

She rolled slightly to
her side and stroked him. He muttered and his mouth set. His lips
pursed and popped open as he breathed. She ran her hands over his
bulk.

She was pleased with
herself, pleased and proud at what she had effected last night. She
had been miserable and lonely, and she had taken a risk, angering
Isaac by coming unbidden to his side of town. But she had managed to
make the evening work.

Lin had not intended to
play on Isaac’s sympathy, but his anger had turned so quickly
to concern at her demeanour. She had realized with a vague
satisfaction that she was visibly exhausted and low, that she did not
have to convince him of her need for mollycoddling. He was even
recognizing emotions in the movement of her headbody.

There was one positive
side to Isaac’s attempts not to be seen as her lover. When they
walked the streets together, without touching, at a gentle pace, it
mimicked the shyness of young humans courting.

There was no equivalent
for khepri. Headsex for procreation was an unpleasant chore carried
out for demographic duty. Male khepris were mindless scarabs like the
females’ headbodies, and to feel them crawling and mounting and
rutting one’s head was something Lin was glad not to have
experienced for years. Sex for fun, between females, was a
boisterous, communal business, but rather ritualized. The signs of
flirtation, rejection and acceptance between individuals or groups
were as formal as dances. There was nothing of the tongue-tied
nervous eroticism of young humans.

Lin had steeped herself
enough in human culture to recognize the tradition that Isaac was
pulled back to when they walked together through the city. She had
been enthusiastic about sex with her own kind before her illicit
cross-affair, and intellectually she scorned the wasteful, pointless
stammered conversations she heard from humans in snatches around New
Crobuzon. But to her surprise, she felt that same coy and uncertain
companionship from Isaac sometimes—and she rather liked it.

It had grown the
previous night, as they walked cool streets towards the station, and
rode across the top of the city towards Aspic Hole. One of the best
effects, of course, was to make the sexual release, when it was
finally possible, all the more charged.

Isaac had grabbed her
as the door closed, and she had squeezed him back, wrapping her arms
around him. Lust came quickly. She had held him back, opened her
carapace and made him stroke her wings, which he did, with trembling
fingers. She made him wait while she enjoyed his devotion, before
pulling him to her bed. She rolled with him, till he lay on his back.
She threw off her clothes and tugged his from him. She mounted him
and he stroked her hard headbody, ran his hands down her body, over
her breasts, clutching at her hips as they moved.

Afterwards he made her
supper. They ate and talked. Lin told him nothing of Mr. Motley. She
was uneasy when he asked her why she was so melancholy that night.
She began to tell him a half-truth about a vast, difficult sculpture
that she could show no one, that meant she would not compete in the
Shintacost Prize, that was draining her away to nothing, in a space
in the city she had found and could not tell him.

He was attentive.
Perhaps it was studied. He knew Lin was sometimes offended by his
absent-mindedness when he was on a project. He begged to know where
she was working.

Of course, she would
not tell him.

They went to bed wiping
away crumbs and seeds. Isaac clutched her in his sleep.

When she woke, Lin
spent long slow minutes enjoying Isaac’s presence, before
rising and frying bread for his breakfast. When he rose to the smell,
he kissed her neck and headbelly playfully. She stroked his cheeks
with her headlegs.

Do you have to work
this morning?
she signed at him from across the table, while her
mandibles chewed grapefruit.

Isaac peered up from
his bread a little uneasily.

"Uh...yeah. I
really do, sweety." He munched at her.

What?

"Well...I’ve
got all this stuff at home, all these birds and whatnot, but it’s
a bit ridiculous. See, I’ve studied pigeons, robins, merlins,
Jabber knows what else, but I’ve not yet seen a fucking
garuda
up close. So I’m going to go hunting. I’ve put it off,
but I think the time’s come. I’m going to Spatters."
Isaac grimaced and let that sink in. He took another big bite. When
he had swallowed, he looked at her from under his brows. "I
don’t suppose...D’you want to come?"

Isaac,
she
signed immediately,
don’t say that if you don’t mean
it because I
do
want to come and I’ll say yes if you’re
not careful. Even to Spatters.

"Look...I
really...I
do
mean it. I’m serious. If you’re not
working on your magnum opus this morning, come and knock about."
The conviction in his voice strengthened as he spoke. "Come on,
you can be my mobile lab assistant. No, I know what you can do: you
can be my heliotypist for the day. Bring your camera. You need a
break."

Isaac was getting
bolder. He and Lin left the house together, without him displaying
any signs of unease. They wandered a little way north-west along
Shadrach Street, towards the Salacus Fields Station, but Isaac became
impatient and hailed a cab on the way. The hirsute driver raised his
eyebrows at Lin, but he kept any objections quiet. He inclined his
head while he murmured to his horse, indicating Isaac and Lin inside.

"Where to, guv?"
he asked.

"Spatters,
please." Isaac spoke rather grandly, as if making up in his tone
of voice for his destination.

The driver turned to
him incredulously. "You’ve got to be joking, squire. I
ain’t going into Spatters. I’ll take you as far as
Vaudois Hill, but that’s your lot. Ain’t worth my while.
Down Spatters way, they’ll have the wheels off me cab while I’m
still driving."

"Fine, fine,"
said Isaac irritably. "Just get us as close as you
dare
."

As the rickety hansom
cab rolled across the cobbles through Salacus Fields, Lin caught
Isaac’s attention.

Is it really
dangerous?
she signed nervously.

Isaac glanced round,
then answered her with signs himself. He was much slower and less
fluent than her, but using signing he could be ruder to the
cabdriver.

Well...just fuck
poor. They’ll nick whatever’s going, but not especially
violent. Arsehole here’s just cowardly. Reads too many...
Isaac
faltered and screwed up his face with concentration.

"Don’t know
the sign," he murmured.
"Sensational.
Reads too many
sensational papers." He sat back and looked out of the window at
the skyline of Howl Barrow that wobbled unsteadily to his left.

Lin had never been to
Spatters. She knew it only by its notoriety. Forty years previously,
the Sink Line had been extended southwest of Lichford, past Vaudois
Hill and into the spur of Rudewood that abutted the southern reaches
of the city. The planners and money-men had built the tall shells of
residential blocks: not the monoliths of nearby Ketch Heath, but
impressive nonetheless. They had opened the railway station, Fell
Stop, and had started building another in Rudewood itself, before
anything more than a narrow strip around the railway had been
cleared. There had been plans for another station beyond that, and
the tracks had extended into the forest accordingly. There had even
been tentative, absurdly hubristic schemes to extend the rails
hundreds of miles south or west, to link New Crobuzon to Myrshock or
Cobsea.

Then the money had run
out. There had been some financial crisis, some speculative bubble
had burst, some trade network had collapsed under the weight of
competition and a plethora of too-cheap products no one could buy,
and the project had been killed in its infancy. The trains had still
visited Fell Stop, pointlessly waiting a few minutes before returning
to the city. Rudewood quickly reclaimed the land south of the empty
architecture, assimilating the nameless empty station and the rusting
tracks. For a couple of years, the trains at Fell Stop waited empty
and silent. And then, a few passengers had started appearing.

The empty integuments
of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and
the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough. The
word spread that this was a ghost sector, beyond Parliament’s
ken, where taxes and laws were as rare as sewage systems. Rough
frameworks of stolen wood filled the empty floors. In the outlines of
stillborn streets shacks of concrete and corrugated iron blistered
overnight. Inhabitation spread like mould. There were no gaslamps to
take the edge off the night, no doctors, no jobs, yet within ten
years the area was dense with ersatz housing. It had acquired a name,
Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines:
the whole stinking shantytown seemed to have dribbled like shit from
the sky.

The suburb was beyond
the reach of New Crobuzon’s municipality. There was an
unreliable alternative infrastructure: a self-appointed network of
postal workers, sanitary engineers, even a kind of law. But these
systems were inefficient and partial at best. For the most part,
neither the militia nor anyone else went in to Spatters. The only
visitors from outside were the regular trains appearing at the
incongruously well-maintained Fell Stop Station, and the gangs of
masked gunmen who appeared sometimes at night to terrorize and
murder. The Spatters street-children were particularly vulnerable to
the ferocious barbarism of the murder-squads.

The slum-dwellers of
Dog Fenn and even Badside considered Spatters beneath their dignity.
It was simply not part of the city, nothing but a strange little town
that had grafted itself onto New Crobuzon without a by-your-leave.
There was no money to entice industry, legal or illicit. The crimes
in Spatters were nothing but small-scale acts of desperation and
survival.

There was something
else about Spatters, something that brought Isaac to visit its
unwelcoming alleys. For the past thirty years, it had been New
Crobuzon’s garuda ghetto.

Lin watched the huge
towerblocks of Ketch Heath. She could see tiny figures riding the
updrafts that they created, swirling above them. Wyrmen, and maybe a
couple of garuda. The cab was passing under the skyrail that dipped
gracefully out of the militia tower that loomed near to the blocks.

The cab pulled to.

"All right, guv,
this is where I stop," said the driver.

Isaac and Lin
disembarked. On one side of the cab was a row of neat white houses.
Each was fronted with a small garden, most of which were assiduously
maintained. The street was lined with shaggy banyan trees. Opposite
the houses, on the other side of the cab, was a long thin park, a
strip of greenery three hundred or so yards wide that sloped steeply
down and away from the street. This thin slip of grass acted as a
no-man’s-land between the polite houses of Vaudois Hill
inhabited by clerks and doctors and lawyers, and the crumbling chaos
beyond the trees, at the bottom of the hill: Spatters.

"It’s no
fucking wonder Spatters isn’t the most popular place, is it?"
breathed Isaac. "Look, it’s ruined the view for all these
nice people up here..." He gave an evil grin.

In the distance, Lin
could see that the edge of the hill was split with the Sink Line. The
trains passed through a chasm cut into the parkland of the hill’s
western flank. The red brick of Fell Stop Station loomed out over the
quagmire of Spatters. In this corner of the city, the tracks were
only fractionally above the level of the houses, but it did not take
much architectural grandeur for the station to tower over the
surrounding makeshift dwellings. Of all Spatters’ buildings,
only the refitted towerblock shells were taller.