Perdido Street Station (30 page)

Lin was not made
welcome. Sheck bordered Kinken, separated only by a couple of
insignificant parks. The khepri were a constant reminder to Sheck
that it did not have far to fall. Khepri filled Sheck’s streets
during the day, making their way to The Crow to shop or take the
train from Perdido Street Station. At night, though, it was a brave
khepri who would walk streets made dangerous by pugnacious Three
Quillers out to "keep their city clean." Lin made sure she
was through this zone by sundown. Because just beyond was Kinken,
where she was safe.

Safe, but not happy.

Lin walked Kinken’s
streets with a kind of nauseated excitement. For many years, her
journeys to the area had been brief excursions to pick up
colourberries and paste, perhaps the occasional khepri delicacy. Now
her visits were jars to memories she had thought banished.

Houses oozed the white
mucus of home-grubs. Some were completely coated in the thick stuff:
it spread across roofs, linking different buildings into a lumpy,
congealed totality. Lin could see in through windows and doors. The
walls and floors that had been provided by human architects had been
broken away in places, and the massive home-grubs allowed to burrow
their blind way through the shell, oozing their phlegm-cement from
their abdomens, their stubby little legs skittering as they ate their
way through the ruined interiors of the buildings.

Occasionally Lin would
see a live specimen taken from the farms by the river, going about
its refitting of a building into the intricate twisting organic
passageways preferred by most khepri tenants. The big, stupid
beetles, larger than rhinos, responded to the tweaks and tugs of
their keepers, blundering this way and that through the houses,
recasting rooms in a quick-drying coating that softened edges and
connected chambers, buildings and streets with what looked from the
inside like giant worm-tracks.

Sometimes Lin would sit
in one of Kinken’s tiny parks. She would be still among the
slowly blossoming trees and watch her kind, all around her. She would
stare high above the park, at the backs and sides of tall buildings.
One time, she saw a young human girl lean out from a window high
above, that was stuck almost at random at the top of a stained
concrete wall at the back of the building. Lin saw the girl watching
her khepri neighbours placidly, as her family’s washing
fluttered and snapped in the brisk wind from a pole jutting beside
her.
A strange way of growing up,
thought Lin, imagining the
child surrounded by silent, insect-headed creatures, as strange as if
Lin had been brought up among vodyanoi but that thought led her
uncomfortably in the direction of her own childhood.

Of course, her journey
to these despised streets was a walk back through the city of her
memory. She knew that. She was steeling herself to think back.

Kinken had been Lin’s
first refuge. In this strange time of isolation, when she cheered the
efforts of khepri crime-queens and walked as an outcast in all the
quadrants of the city—except, perhaps, Salacus Fields, where
outcasts ruled—she realized that her feelings for Kinken were
more ambivalent than she had so far allowed.

There had been khepri
in New Crobuzon for nearly seven hundred years, since the
Fervent
Mantis
crossed the Swollen Ocean and reached Bered Kai Nev, the
eastern continent, the khepri home. A few merchants and travellers
had returned on a one-way mission of edification. For centuries, the
stock of this tiny group sustained itself in the city, became
natives. There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no
ghettos. There were not enough khepri. Not until the Tragic Crossing.

It was a hundred years
since the first refugee ships had crawled, barely afloat, into Iron
Bay. Their enormous clockwork motors were rusted and broken, their
sails ragged. They were charnel ships, packed with Bered Kai Nev
khepri who were only just alive. Contagion was so merciless that
ancient taboos against water-burial had been overthrown. So there
were few corpses on board, but there were thousands of dying. The
ships were like crowded antechambers to morgues.

The nature of the
tragedy was a mystery to the New Crobuzon authorities, who had no
consuls and little contact with any of the countries of Bered Kai
Nev. The refugees would not speak of it, or if they did they were
elliptical, or if they were graphic and explicit the language barrier
blocked understanding. All that the humans knew was that something
terrible had happened to the khepri of the eastern continent, some
horrendous vortex that had sucked up millions, leaving only a tiny
handful able to flee. The khepri had christened this nebulous
apocalypse the Ravening.

There were twenty-five
years between the arrival of the first ships and the last. Some slow,
motorless vessels were said to be crewed entirely by khepri born at
sea, all the original refugees having died during the interminable
crossing. Their daughters did not know what it was they fled, only
that their dying broodmas had all bade them go
west,
and never
to turn the wheel. Stories of the khepri Mercy Ships—named for
what they begged—reached New Crobuzon from other countries on
the eastern coast of the Rohagi continent, from Gnurr Kett and the
Jheshull Islands, from as far south as the Shards. The khepri
diaspora had been chaotic and diverse and panicked.

In some lands the
refugees were butchered in terrible pogroms. In others, like New
Crobuzon, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official
violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and
criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too
gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by
bigots and thugs.

Lin had not grown up in
Kinken. She was born in the younger, poorer khepri ghetto of
Creekside, a grubby stain in the northwest of the city. It was nearly
impossible to understand the true history of Kinken and Creekside,
because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had
undertaken. The trauma of the Ravening was such that the first
generation of refugees had deliberately forgotten ten thousand years
of khepri history, announcing their arrival at New Crobuzon to be the
beginning of a new cycle of years, the City Cycle. When the next
generation had demanded their story from their broodmas, many had
refused and many could not remember. Khepri history was obscured by
the massive shadow of genocide.

So it was hard for Lin
to penetrate the secrets of those first twenty years of the City
Cycle. Kinken and Creekside were presented as fait accompli to her,
and to her broodma, and the generation before that, and the
generation before that.

Creekside had no Plaza
of Statues. It had been a tumbledown slum for humans a hundred years
ago, a rookery of found architecture, and the khepri home-grubs had
done little more than encase the ruined houses with cement,
petrifying them forever on the point of collapse. The denizens of
Creekside were not artists or fruitbar owners, moiety chiefs or hive
elders or shopkeepers. They were disreputable and hungry. They worked
in the factories and in the sewers, sold themselves to whomever would
buy. Their sisters in Kinken despised them.

In Creekside’s
decrepit streets, strange and dangerous ideas blossomed. Small groups
of radicals met in hidden halls. Messianic cults promised deliverance
to the chosen.

Many of the original
refugees had turned their backs on the gods of Bered Kai Nev, angry
that they had not protected their disciples from the Ravening. But
subsequent generations, not knowing the nature of the tragedy,
offered their worship again. Over a hundred years, pantheon temples
had been consecrated in old workshops and deserted dancehalls. But
many Creeksiders, in their confusion and hunger, turned to dissident
gods.

All the usual temples
could be found in Creekside’s confines. Awesome Broodma was
worshipped, and the Artspitter. Kindly Nurse presided over the shabby
hospital, and the Tough Sisters defended the faithful. But in rude
shacks that mouldered by the industrial canals, and in front rooms
blocked by dark windows, prayers were raised to stranger gods.
Priestesses dedicated themselves to the service of the Elyctric Devil
or the Air Harvester. Furtive groups clambered to their roofs and
sang hymns to the Wingsister, praying for flight. And some lonely,
desperate souls—like Lin’s broodma—pledged their
fealty to Insect Aspect.

**

Properly transliterated
from Khepri into the New Crobuzon script, the chymico-audio-visual
composite of description, devotion and awe that was the name of the
god was rendered Insect/Aspect/ (male)/(singleminded). But the few
humans that knew of him called him Insect Aspect, and that was how
Lin had signed him to Isaac when she told him the story of her
upbringing.

Since the age of six,
when she had torn the chrysalis from what had been her baby headlarva
and was suddenly a headscarab, when she had burst into consciousness
with language and thought, her mother had taught her that she was
fallen. The gloomy doctrine of Insect Aspect was that khepri women
were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had
consigned her daughters to lives encumbered with ridiculous, slow,
floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless
byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile
purity of God and male.

Lin’s broodma
(who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her
broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the
all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and
satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in
a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for
being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were
taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their
self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies.

They were also taught
to worship and serve their mindless brothers.

Thinking back now to
that time, Lin no longer shuddered with revulsion. Sitting in those
secluded Kinken parks, Lin carefully watched her past unfold in her
mind, little by little, in a gradual act of reminiscence that took
courage to pursue. She remembered how she had slowly come to realize
that her life was not usual. On her rare shopping expeditions she
would see with horror the casual contempt with which her khepri
sisters treated male khepri, kicking and crushing the mindless
two-foot insects. She remembered her tentative conversations with the
other children, who taught her how her neighbours lived; her fear of
using the language she knew instinctively, the language she carried
in her blood, but that her broodma had taught her to loathe.

Lin remembered coming
home to a house that swarmed with male khepri, that stank of rotting
vegetables and fruit, littered as it was with organic rubbish for
males to gorge on. She remembered being commanded to wash her
innumerable brothers’ glistening carapaces, to pile up their
dung before the household altar, to let them scuttle over her and
explore her body as their dumb curiosity directed them. She
remembered the night-time discussions with her broodsister, carried
out in the tiny chymical wafts and gently rattling hisses that were
khepri-whispers. As a result of these theological debates, her
broodsister had turned the other way from her, had burrowed so deeply
into her Insect Aspect faith that she outshone their mother in
zealotry.

It had taken Lin until
she was fifteen to challenge her broodma openly. She did so in terms
that she now saw were naive and confused. Lin denounced her mother as
a heretic, cursing her in the name of the mainstream pantheon. She
fled the lunatic self-loathing of Insect Aspect worship, and the
narrow streets of Creekside. She had run away to Kinken.

That was why, she
reflected, for all her later disenchantment—her contempt, in
fact, her hatred—there was a part of her that would always
remember Kinken as a sanctuary. Now the smugness of the insular
community nauseated her, but at the time of her escape she had been
drunk on it. She had revelled in the arrogant denunciation of
Creekside, had prayed to Awesome Broodma with a vehement delight. She
had baptized herself with a khepri name and—which was vital in
New Crobuzon—a human one. She had discovered that in Kinken,
unlike Creekside, the hive and moiety system made for complex and
useful nets of social connectivity. Her mother had never mentioned
her birth or upbringing, so Lin had copied the allegiance of her
first friend in Kinken, and told anyone who asked that she was
Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety.

Her friend introduced
her to pleasuresex, taught her to delight in the sensuous body below
her neck. This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary
transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to
engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their
sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally
liberated her. Until then she had been subjected only to headsex at
her mother’s behest, sitting still and uncomfortable while a
male scrabbled and coupled excitedly with her headscarab, in
mercifully unsuccessful attempts at procreation.

With time, Lin’s
hatred of her broodma slowly cooled, becoming first contempt, then
pity. Her disgust at the squalor of Creekside was joined with some
kind of understanding. Then, her five-year love-affair with Kinken
drew to an end. It started when she stood in the Plaza of Statues,
and realized that they were mawkish and badly executed, embodying a
culture that was blind to itself. She began to see Kinken as
implicated in the subjugation of Creekside and the never-mentioned
Kinken poor, saw a "community" at best callous and
uncaring, at worst deliberately keeping Creekside down to maintain
its superiority.