Perdido Street Station (22 page)

Lin stood five feet
tall. She could see no further than the first circle of garuda who
surrounded her and Isaac at arms’ length, but she could see
more and more dropping from the sky; she had the sense of the numbers
building up around her. Isaac patted her shoulder absently.

A few shapes still
swept and hunted and played in the air around them. When the garuda
had stopped landing on the roof, Isaac broke the silence.

"Righto," he
yelled. "Thanks very much for inviting us up here. I want to
make a proposition to you."

"To who?"
came a voice from the crowd.

"Well, to all of
you," he replied. "See, I’m doing some work
on...well,
on flight.
And you are the only creatures in New
Crobuzon who can fly
and
have brains in your bonces. Wyrmen
aren’t renowned for their conversational skills," he said
jovially. There was no reaction to his joke. He cleared his throat
and continued.

"So,
anyway...uh...I’m wondering whether any of you would be willing
to come and do a couple of days’ work with me, show me some
flight, let me take a few prints of your wings..." He took hold
of Lin’s hand that contained the camera and waved it around.
"Obviously I’ll pay for your time...I’d really
appreciate some help..."

"What you doing?"
The voice came from one of the garuda in the front row. The others
looked to him when he spoke.
This,
thought Lin,
is the boss
man.

Isaac looked at him
carefully.

"What am I doing?
You mean..."

"I mean what for
d’you need pics? What you up to?"

"It’s...uh...research
into the nature of flight. See, I’m a scientist and..."

"Horsecrap. How we
know you don’t kill us?"

Isaac started in
surprise. The congregated garuda nodded and cawed in agreement.

"Why by
damn
would I want to kill you...?"

"Just fuck off,
mister. No one here wants to help you."

There were a few
mutterings of unease. It was clear that a few of the assembled might,
in fact, have been prepared to take part. But none of them challenged
the speaker, a tall garuda with a long scar linking his nipples.

Lin watched as Isaac
opened his mouth slowly. He was trying to turn the situation round.
She saw his hand go to his pocket and come away again. If he flashed
money on the spot, he could seem like a spiv or a wide-boy.

"Listen..."
he said hesitantly. "I really didn’t realize there’d
be a problem with this..."

"No, well, see,
that may or may not be true, mister. Might be you’re militia."
Isaac snorted derisorily, but the big garuda continued in his
sneering tone. "Might be that the murder squads’ve found a
way to get to us bird-boys. ‘Just come along to do research...’
Well, none of us is interested, ta."

"You know,"
said Isaac, "I understand that you’re concerned at my
motives. I mean, you don’t know me from Jabber and..."

"Ain’t none
of us going with you, mister. Simple."

"Look. I can pay
well. I’m prepared to pay a shekel a day for anyone prepared to
come to my lab."

The big garuda stepped
forward and prodded Isaac aggressively in the chest.

"Want us to come
to your
lab
to cut us open, see what makes us tick?" The
other garuda stepped back as he circled Lin and Isaac. "You and
your bugger friend want to cut me into pieces?"

Isaac was expostulating
and trying to deny the charge. He turned slightly away and looked
over at the surrounding crowd.

"So am I to
understand that this
gent
speaks for all of you, or would
someone here like to earn a shekel a day?"

There were a few
mutterings. Garuda looked shiftily and uneasily at each other. The
big garuda facing Isaac threw up his hands and shook them as he
spoke. He was incensed.

"I speak for
all
!"
He turned and stared slowly at his kin. "Any
dissenters
?"

There was a pause, and
a young male stepped forward slightly.

"Charlie..."
He spoke directly to the self-appointed leader. "Shekel’s
a lot of moolah...what say a bunch of us go down, make sure there’s
no monkey-business, keep it sweet..."

The garuda called
Charlie strode over as the other male was speaking and punched him
hard in the face.

There was a communal
shriek from the congregation. With a tumult of wings and feathers,
great numbers of the garuda burst up and out from the roof like an
explosion. Some circled briefly and returned to watch warily, but
many others disappeared into the upper floors of other blocks, or off
into the cloudless sky.

Charlie stood over his
stunned victim, who had fallen to one knee.

"Who’s the
big man?" shouted Charlie in a strident bird-call. "Who’s
the big man?"

Lin tugged at Isaac’s
shirt, began to pull him towards the stairwell door. Isaac resisted
half-heartedly. He was visibly appalled at the turn his request had
taken, but he was also fascinated to see the confrontation. She
dragged him slowly away from the scene.

The fallen garuda
looked up at Charlie.

"You the big man,"
he muttered.

"
I’m
the big man. I’m the big man ‘cause I take care of you,
right? I make sure you’re all right, don’t I? Don’t
I? And what’d I always tell you? Steer clear of groundcrawlers!
And steer clearest of the anthros. They’re the worst, they’ll
tear you up, take your wings away, kill you dead!
Don’t
trust any of ‘em! And
that includes fatboy with the fat
wallet over there." For the first time in his tirade he looked
up at Isaac and Lin. "You!" he shouted, and pointed at
Isaac. "Fuck off out of it ‘fore I show you exactly what
it’s like to fly...straight fucking down!"

Lin saw Isaac open his
mouth, attempt one last conciliatory explanation. She stamped in
irritation and pulled him hard through the door.

**

Learn to read a
damned situation, Isaac. Time to go,
Lin signed furiously as they
descended.

"All right Lin,
Jabber’s arse, I get the idea!" He was angry, stamping his
great bulk down the stairs without any complaints this time. He was
energized by his blistering irritation and bewilderment.

"I just don’t
see," he continued, "why they were so
fucking
antagonistic
..."

Lin turned to him in
exasperation. She made him stop, would not let him pass.

Because they’re
xenian and poor and scared, you cretin,
she signed slowly.
Big
fat bastard waving money comes to
Spatters,
for Jabber’s
sake, not much of a haven but all they’ve got, and starts
trying to get them to leave it for reasons he won’t explain.
Seems to me that Charlie’s bang-on right. Place like this needs
someone to look after its own. If I was garuda, I’d listen to
him, I tell you.

Isaac was calming down,
even looking a little shamed.

"Fair enough, Lin.
I take your point. I should’ve scouted it out first, gone
through someone who knows the area or whatever..."

Yes, and you’ve
blown that now. You can’t, it’s too late...

"Yes, quite,
thanks ever so for pointing that out..." He scowled. "Godspit
fuck damn! I ballsed it up, didn’t I?"

Lin said nothing.

They did not speak much
as they returned through Spatters. They were watched from
bottle-glass windows and open doors as they came back the way they’d
come.

As they retraced their
paths over the foul pit of nightsoil and rot, Lin glanced back at the
tumbledown towers. She saw the flat roof where they had stood.

Isaac and she were
being followed by a small swirling mass of garuda youth, sullenly
trailing them in the sky. Isaac turned and his face lightened
briefly, but the garuda did not come close enough to talk. They
gesticulated rudely from on high.

Lin and Isaac walked
back up Vaudois Hill towards the city.

"Lin," Isaac
said after minutes of silence. His voice was melancholy. "Back
there you said if you’d been garuda you’d have listened
to him, right? Well, you’re not garuda, but you
are
khepri...When you were ready to leave Kinken, there must’ve
been plenty of people telling you to stick to your own, that humans
couldn’t be trusted, and whatnot...And the thing is, Lin, you
didn’t
listen to them, did you?"

Lin thought quietly for
a long time, but she did not answer.

"Come on old
thing, old plum, old bugger. Eat something, for Jabber’s
sake..."

The caterpillar lay
listlessly on its side. Its flaccid skin rippled occasionally, and it
waved its head, looking for food. Isaac clucked over it, murmured at
it, prodded it with a stick. It wiggled uncomfortably, then subsided.

Isaac straightened up
and tossed the little stick to one side.

"I despair of you,
then," he announced to the air. "You can’t say I
haven’t tried."

He walked away from the
little box with its mouldering piles of foodstuffs.

Cages were still piled
high on the warehouse’s raised walkway; the discordant symphony
of squawks and hisses and avian screams still sounded; but the store
of creatures was much depleted. Many of the pens and hutches lay open
and empty. Less than half of the original store remained.

Isaac had lost some of
his experimental subjects to disease; some to fights, both in- and
inter-species; and some to his own research. A few stiff little
bodies were nailed in various poses to boards around the walkway. A
vast number of illustrations were plastered to his walls. His initial
sketches of wings and flight had multiplied by a massive factor.

Isaac leaned against
his desk. He ran his fingers over the diagrams that littered its
surface. At the top was a scribbled triangle containing a cross. He
closed his eyes against the continuing cacophony.

"Oh
shut up,
all of you," he yelled, but the animal chorus went on as before.
Isaac held his head in his hands, his frown growing more and more
piercing.

He was still stinging
from his disastrous journey to Spatters the day before. He could not
help running over the events again and again in his mind, thinking
about what he could and should have done differently. He had been
arrogant and stupid, wading in like an intrepid adventurer, flailing
his money as if it were a thaumaturgic weapon. Lin was right. It was
no wonder he had managed to alienate probably the city’s entire
garuda population. He had approached them as a gang of rogues to be
wowed and bought off. He had treated them like cronies of Lemuel
Pigeon. They were not. They were a poor, scared community scrabbling
for survival and maybe a scrap of pride in a hostile city. They
watched their neighbours picked off by vigilantes as if for sport.
They inhabited an alternative economy of hunting and barter, foraging
in Rudewood and petty pilfering.

Their politics were
brutal, but totally understandable.

And now he had blown it
with the city’s garuda. Isaac looked up at all the pictures and
heliotypes and diagrams he had made.
Just like yesterday,
he
thought.
The direct approach isn’t working. I was on the
right track at the very start. It’s not about aerodynamics,
that’s not how to proceed...
The squalls of his captives
intruded on his thoughts.

"Right!" he
shouted suddenly. He stood up straight, and glared at the trapped
animals, as if daring them to continue with their noise. Which, of
course, they did.

"Right!" he
shouted again, and strode over to the first cage. The brace of doves
inside puffed and billowed explosively from one side to the other as
he tugged them over to a large window. He left the box facing the
glass and fetched another, within which a vivid dragonfly-snake
undulated like a sidewinder. He placed that one on top of the first.
He grabbed a gauze cage of mosquitoes, and another of bees, and
dragged them over too. Isaac woke cantankerous bats and aspises
basking in the sun, pulled them over to the window overlooking the
Canker.

He cleared all his
remaining menagerie over to that pile. The animals looked out at the
Ribs, which curved cruelly over the eastern city. Isaac piled all the
boxes containing living things into a pyramid in front of the glass.
It looked like a sacrificial pyre.

Eventually the job was
done. Predators and prey fluttered and screeched next to each other,
separated only by wood or thin bars.

Isaac reached awkwardly
into the thin space in front of the cages and swung the great window
open. It hinged horizontally, opening at the top of its five-foot
height. As it opened onto the warm air, a great rush of city sounds
washed in with the evening heat.

"Now," yelled
Isaac, beginning to enjoy himself. "I wash my hands of you!"

He looked around and
strode back to the desk for a moment, returning with a long cane he
had used many years before to point at blackboards. He poked it at
the cages, knocking hooks out of eyes, fumbling till he undid
latches, ripping holes in wire as thin as silk.

The fronts to the
little prisons began to fall away. Isaac speeded up, opening all the
doors, using his fingers where the cane was not delicate enough.

At first, the creatures
within were bewildered. For many, it was weeks since they had flown.
They had eaten badly. They were bored and frightened. They did not
understand the sudden vista of freedom, the twilight, the smell of
the air before them. But after those long moments, the first of the
captives bolted for freedom.

It was an owl.

It hurled itself
through the open window and sailed off towards the east, where the
sky was darkest, out towards the wooded lands by Iron Bay. It glided
between the Ribs on wings that hardly moved.