Perdido Street Station (27 page)

He propped himself on
his elbows and examined himself. His dark skin was slick and grey.
His mouth reeked. Isaac realized that he must have lain almost
motionless for the whole night: the covers were a little rucked, that
was all.

The terrified birdsong
that had woken him started again. Isaac shook his head in irritation
and looked for its source. A tiny bird circled desperately in the air
around the inside of the warehouse. Isaac realized that it was one of
the previous evening’s reluctant escapees, a wren, obviously
afraid of something. As Isaac looked around to see what had the bird
so nervous, the lithe reptilian body of an aspis flew like a crossbow
bolt from one corner of the eaves to the other. It plucked the little
bird from the air as it passed. The wren’s calls were cut short
abruptly.

Isaac stumbled
inexpertly out of bed and circled confusedly. "Notes," he
told himself. "Make notes."

He snatched paper and
pen from his desk and began to scribble down his recollections of the
dreamshit.

"What the fuck
was
that?" he whispered out loud as he wrote. "Some cove’s
doing a damn good job of reproducing the biochymistry of dreams, or
tapping it at source..." He rubbed his head again. "Lord,
what sort of thing is it that
eats
this..." Isaac stood
briefly and glanced at his captive caterpillar.

He was quite still. His
mouth gaped idiotically, then worked up and down and finally shaped
words.

"Oh. My. Good.
Arse."

He stumbled slowly,
nervously across the room, seeming to hang back, chary of seeing what
he was seeing. He approached the cage.

Inside, a colossal mass
of beautifully coloured grub-flesh wriggled unhappily. Isaac stood
uneasily over the enormous thing. He could feel the odd little
vibrations of alien unhappiness in the aether around him.

The caterpillar had at
least tripled in size overnight. It was a foot long, and
correspondingly fat. The faded magnificence of its coloured patches
had returned to their initial, burnished brilliance. With interest.
The sticky-looking hairs on its tail-end were wicked-looking
bristles. It had no more than six inches of space around it on all
sides. It nudged weakly against the sides of the hutch. "What
happened to you?" hissed Isaac.

He recoiled and gazed
at the thing, which waved its head in the air blindly. He thought
quickly, pictured the number of dreamshit lozenges he had given the
grub to eat. He looked around and saw the envelope containing all the
remains where he had left it, untouched. The thing hadn’t got
out and gorged itself. There was no way, Isaac realized, that the
little pellets of drug he had left in that hutch contained anything
like the number of calories that the caterpillar had used on growth
over the night. Even if it had just piled on weight ounce for ounce
with what it had eaten, it would not have represented an increase in
this league.

"Whatever energy
you’re getting out of your supper," he whispered, "it’s
not physical. What in Jabber’s name
are
you?"

He had to get the thing
out of the cage. It looked so miserable, flailing pointlessly in that
little space. Isaac hung back, slightly afraid and a little disgusted
at the idea of touching the extraordinary thing. Eventually he picked
up the box, staggering under the massively increased weight, and held
it just above the ground in a much larger cage left over from his
experiments, a chicken-wire-fronted mini-aviary five feet high that
had contained a small family of canaries. He opened the front of the
hutch and tipped the fat grub into the sawdust, then quickly closed
and latched the front grille.

He stood back to gaze
at his rehoused captive.

It looked directly at
him, now, and he felt its childish pleas for breakfast.

"Oh steady
on,
"
he said, "
I
haven’t even eaten yet."

He backed uneasily
away, then turned and made for his parlour.

Over his breakfast of
fruit and iced buns, Isaac realized that the effects of the dreamshit
were wearing off very quickly.
It might be the worst hangover in
the world,
he thought wryly,
but it’s gone within the
hour. No wonder the punters come back.

From across the room,
the foot-long caterpillar scrabbled around the floor of its new cage.
It nosed miserably around the dirt, then reared up again and waved
its head in the direction of the packet of dreamshit.

Isaac slapped his hand
over his face.

"Oh, Hell’s
Donkeys," he said. Vague emotions of unease and experimental
curiosity combined in his mind. It was a childish excitement, like
that of boys and girls who burnt insects with magnified sun. He stood
and reached into the envelope with a big wooden spoon. He carried the
congealed lump over to the caterpillar, which almost danced with
excitement as it saw, or smelt, or somehow sensed, the dreamshit
approaching. Isaac opened a little feeding hatch at the back of the
crate and tipped the doses of drug in. Immediately the caterpillar
raised its head and slammed it down on the lumpy mess. Its mouth was
large enough now that its workings could easily be seen. It slid open
and gnawed voraciously at the powerful narcotic.

"That," said
Isaac, "is as big a cage as you’re going to get, so ease
up on the growing, right?" He backed away to his clothes,
without taking his eyes from the feeding creature.

Isaac picked up and
sniffed the various clothes strewn around the room. He put on a shirt
and trousers with no smell and a minimum of stains.

Better sort out a
"things to do" list,
he thought grimly.
Top of which
is "Beat Lucky Gazid to death."
He stomped to his desk.
The triangular Unified Field Theory diagram he had drawn for Yagharek
was at the top of the papers that covered it. Isaac pursed his lips
and stared at it. He picked it up and looked thoughtfully over to
where the caterpillar gnawed happily. There was something else he
should do that morning.

There’s no
point putting it off,
he thought reluctantly.
Maybe I can
clear the decks for Yag and learn a little about my friend
here...maybe.
Isaac sighed heavily and rolled up his sleeves,
then sat down at a mirror for a rare and perfunctory preen. He poked
inexpertly at his hair, found another, cleaner shirt into which he
changed, oozing resentment.

He scribbled a note for
David and Lublamai, checked that his giant caterpillar was secure and
unlikely to escape. Then he descended the stairs and, pinning his
message to the door, walked out into a day full of sharp clear blades
of light.

Isaac sighed and set
off to find an early cab to take him to the university and the best
biologist, natural philosopher and bio-thaumaturge he knew: the
odious Montague Vermishank.

Isaac entered New
Crobuzon University with a mixture of nostalgia and discomfort. The
university buildings were little changed since his time as a teacher.
The various faculties and departments dotted Ludmead with a grandiose
architecture that overshadowed the rest of the area.

The quad before the
enormous and ancient Science Faculty building was covered with trees
shedding their blossom. Isaac walked footpaths worn by generations of
students through a blizzard of garish pink petals. He strode busily
up the scrubbed steps and pushed open the great doors.

Isaac was brandishing
faculty identification that had expired seven years previously, but
he need not have bothered. The porter behind the desk was Sedge, an
old, entirely witless man, whose tenure at the faculty long predated
Isaac’s own, and looked set to continue for ever. He greeted
Isaac as he always did, on these irregular visits, with an incoherent
mutter of recognition. Isaac shook his hand and enquired after his
family. Isaac had reason to be grateful to Sedge, before whose milky
eyes he had liberated numerous expensive pieces of laboratory
equipment.

Isaac strode up the
steps past groups of students, smoking, arguing, writing.
Overwhelmingly male and human, there were, nonetheless, the
occasional defensive tight-knit group of young xenians or women or
both. Some students conducted theoretical debates at ostentatious
volume. Others made occasional marginal notes in their textbooks and
sucked at rolled cigarillos of pungent tobacco. Isaac passed a group
squatting at the end of a corridor, practising what they had just
learned, laughing delightedly as the tiny homunculus they had made
from ground liver stumbled four steps before collapsing in a pile of
twitching mulch.

The number of students
around him decreased as he continued up stairs and along corridors.
To his irritation and disgust, Isaac found that his heart was
speeding up as he approached his erstwhile boss.

He walked the plush
darkwood panelling of the Science Faculty’s administration
wing, and approached the office at the far end, on the door of which
was written in gold leaf:
Director. Montague Vermishank.

Isaac paused outside
and fiddled nervously. He was emotionally confused, striving to
maintain a decade’s anger and dislike along with a
conciliatory, non-confrontational tone. He breathed deeply once, then
turned and knocked briskly, opened the door and walked in.

"What do you
think..." shouted the man behind the desk, before stopping
abruptly when he recognized Isaac. "Ah," he said, after a
long silence. "Of course. Isaac. Do sit down."

Isaac sat.

Montague Vermishank was
eating his lunch. His pale face and shoulders leaned sharply over his
enormous desk. Behind him was a small window. It looked out, Isaac
knew, over the wide avenues and large houses of Mafaton and Chnum,
but a grubby curtain was pulled across it and the light was stifled.

Vermishank was not fat,
but he was coated from his jowls down in a slight excess layer, a
swaddling of dead flesh like a corpse’s. He wore a suit too
small for him, and his necrotic white skin oozed from his sleeves.
His thin hair was brushed and styled with a neurotic fervour.
Vermishank was drinking lumpy cream soup. He dipped doughy bread into
it regularly and sucked at the resulting mess, chewing but not biting
off, gnawing and worrying at the saliva-fouled bread that dripped wan
yellow onto his desk. His colourless eyes took Isaac in.

Isaac stared uneasily
and was thankful for his tight bulk and his skin the colour of
smouldering wood.

"Was going to
shout at you for failing to knock or make an appointment, but then I
saw it was you. Of course. Normal rules do not apply. How are you,
Isaac? Are you after money? Need some research work?" asked
Vermishank in his phlegmy whisper.

"No, no, nothing
like that. I’m not bad, actually, Vermishank," said Isaac
with strained bonhomie. "How’s all your work?"

"Oh, good, good.
Doing a paper on bio-ignition. I’ve isolated the pyrotic flange
in a fire-bes." There was a long silence. "Very exciting,"
whispered Vermishank.

"Sounds it, sounds
it," enthused Isaac. They stared at each other. Isaac could not
think of any more small talk. He loathed and respected Vermishank. It
was an unsettling combination.

"So,
uh...anyway..." said Isaac. "I’m here, to be frank,
to ask your help."

"Oh ho."

"Yeah...See, I’m
working on something that’s a bit off my track...I’m more
of a theoretician than a practical researcher, you know..."

"Yes..."
Vermishank’s voice dripped an indiscriminate irony.

You ratfuck,
thought Isaac.
I gave you that for free...

"Right," he
said slowly. "Well, this is...I mean this
could
be,
though I doubt it...a problem of bio-thaumaturgy. I wanted to ask
your professional opinion."

"Ah ha."

"Yes. What I
wanted to know was...can someone be Remade to fly?"

"Ooh."
Vermishank leaned back and dabbed soup from around his mouth with
bread. Briefly, he wore a moustache of crumbs. He clasped his hands
in front of him and waggled his fat fingers. "Fly, eh?"

Vermishank’s
voice picked up an air of excitement previously lacking in his cold
tones. He may have wanted to sting Isaac with his heavy contempt, but
he could not help being enthused by problems of science.

"Yeah. I mean, has
that been done?" said Isaac.

"Yes...It has been
done..." Vermishank nodded slowly without taking his eyes from
Isaac, who sat up in his chair and snatched a notebook from his
pocket.

"Oh,
has
it?" said Isaac.

Vermishank’s eyes
lost focus as he thought harder.

"Yes...Why, Isaac?
Has someone come to you and asked to fly?"

"I really
can’t...uh, divulge..."

"Of course you
can’t, Isaac. Of
course
you can’t. Because you are
a professional. And I respect you for that." Vermishank smiled
idly at his guest.

"So...what were
the details?" ventured Isaac. He set his teeth before he spoke,
to control his shaking indignation.
Fuck you, you patronizing
game-playing pig,
he thought furiously.

"Oh ho...Well..."
Isaac twisted with impatience as Vermishank raised his head
ponderously to remember. "There was a bio-philosopher, years
ago, at the end of the last century. Calligine, name of. Had himself
Remade." Vermishank smiled fondly and cruelly and shook his
head. "Mad thing, really, but it did seem to work. Huge
mechanical wings that unfolded like fans. He wrote a pamphlet about
it." Vermishank strained his head over his lardy shoulder,
glanced vaguely at the shelves of volumes that covered his walls. He
waved with a limp hand that could have signalled anything at all
about the whereabouts of Calligine’s pamphlet. "Don’t
you know the rest? Not heard the song?" Isaac narrowed his eyes
quizzically. Appallingly, Vermishank sang a few bars in a reedy
tenor. "
So Cally flew high | On um-ber-ella wings | Headed
into the sky | Waved his love bye-bye | Went West with a sigh |
Disappeared in the land of the Horrible Things..."