Perdido Street Station (42 page)

The sun had moved and
heated the air and clouds, and still Lin had stood, some little way
from her old home. It was unchanged. From within, from cracks in the
walls and door, she could hear the skittering, the organic pistoning
of little male khepri legs.

No one had emerged.

Passers-by had ejected
chymical disgust at her, for coming back to crow, for spying on some
unsuspecting household, but she had ignored them all.

If she entered and her
broodma was there, she thought, they would both be angry, and
miserable, and they would argue, pointlessly, as if the years had not
gone by.

If her sister was there
and told her their broodma had died, and Lin had let her go without a
word of anger or forgiveness, she would be alone. Her heart might
burst.

If there was no
sign...if the floors crawled only with males, living like the vermin
they were, no longer pampered princes without brains but bugs that
stank and ate carrion, if her broodma and her sister had gone...then
Lin would be standing pointlessly in a deserted house. Her homecoming
would be ridiculous.

An hour or more had
passed, and Lin had turned her back on the putrefying building. With
her headlegs waving and her head-scarab flexing in agitation, in
confusion and loneliness, she made her way back to the station.

She had grappled
fiercely with her melancholy, stopping in The Crow and spending some
of Motley’s enormous payments on books and rare foods. She had
entered an exclusive women’s boutique, provoking the sharp
tongue of the manageress until Lin had fanned her guineas and pointed
imperiously at two dresses. She had taken her time in being measured,
insisting each piece fit her as sensuously as it would the human
women for whom its designer had intended it.

She had bought both
pieces, all without a word from the manageress, whose nose wrinkled
as she took a khepri’s money.

Lin had walked the
streets of Salacus Fields wearing one of her purchases, an exquisite
fitted piece in cloudy blue that darkened her russet skin. She could
not tell if she felt worse or better than before.

She wore the dress
again the next morning as she crossed the city to find Isaac.

**

That morning by
Kelltree Docks, dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The
vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and
clearing away great weights of craefted water. As the sun rose
hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great
handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.

They had whooped and
cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from
the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more
feet across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater,
stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow
trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along
the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench,
forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat
bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at
one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped.
Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows,
and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous
froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the
looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified
errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing
the watercraeft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.

In the centre of the
trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or
crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then
returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These
were the elected leaders of the strike committee.

As the sun rose, the
vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled
banners. fair wages now! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.

On either side of the
gorge in the river, small boats rowed carefully to the edge of the
water: The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged
the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in
exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.

The channel had been
dug a little to the south of Barley Bridge, at the very edge of the
docklands. There were ships waiting to enter and ships waiting to
leave. A mile or so downstream, in the insalubrious waters between
Badside and Dog Fenn, merchant ships reined in their nervous seawyrms
and let the boilers run low. In the other direction, by the jetties
and landing bays, in Kelltree’s fat canals beside the drydocks,
the captains of vessels from as far as Khadoh gazed impatiently at
the vodyanoi pickets that thronged the banks and worried about
getting home.

By mid-morning the
human wharfmen had arrived to get about the task of unloading and
loading. They quickly discovered that their presence was more or less
superfluous. Once the remaining work was done preparing those ships
still at anchor in Kelltree itself—at most another two days’
work—they were stuck.

The small group who had
been in discussion with the striking vodyanoi had come prepared. At
ten in the morning about twenty men suddenly streamed out of their
yards, climbing the fences around the docks, and jogging to the
waterfront by the vodyanoi pickets, who cheered them on with
something like hysteria. The men pulled out their own signs: human
and vodyanoi against the bosses!

They joined in the
noisy chanting.

Over the next two
hours, the mood hardened. A core of humans set up a
counter-demonstration inside the dockland’s low walls. They
screamed abuse at the vodyanoi, calling them frogs and toads. They
jeered at the striking humans, denounced them as race-traitors. They
warned that the vodyanoi would ruin the dock, making human wages
plummet. One or two of them carried Three Quills literature.

Between them and the
equally strident human strikers was a great mass of confused,
vacillating dockers. They wandered back and forth, swearing and
baffled. They listened to the shouted arguments from both sides.

The numbers began to
grow.

On either bank of the
river, in Kelltree itself and on the south bank of Syriac Well,
crowds were gathering to watch the confrontation. A few men and women
ran among them, moving too fast to be identified, handing out
leaflets with the
Runagate Rampant
banner at the top. They
demanded in closely printed text that the human dockers join the
vodyanoi, that it was the only way the demands would be won. The
papers could be seen circulating among the human dockers, handed out
by person or persons unseen.

As the day wore on, and
the air heated, more and more dockers began to drift over the wall to
join the demonstration beside the vodyanoi. The counter-demonstration
also grew, sometimes rapidly; but over the space of the hours, it was
the strikers that increased most visibly.

There was a tense
uncertainty in the air. The crowd was becoming more vocal, yelling at
both sides to do something. There was a rumour that the chairman of
the dock authority was coming to speak, another that Rudgutter
himself would put in an appearance.

All the time, the
vodyanoi in the canyon of air carved into the river busied themselves
shoring up the shimmering waterwalls. Occasionally fish blundered
through the flat edges and fell to the ground, flapping, or half-sunk
rubbish eddied gently into the sudden chasm. The vodyanoi threw
everything back. They worked in shifts, swimming up through the water
to watercraeft the upper reaches of the riverwalls. They shouted
encouragement at the human strikers from the riverbed, among the
ruined metal and thick sludge that was the Gross Tar’s floor.

At half past three,
with the sun blazing hot through ineffectual clouds, two airships
were seen approaching the docks, from the north and the south.

There was excitement
among the crowds, and the word quickly spread through the assembled
that the mayor was coming. Then a third and fourth airship were
noticed, cruising ineluctably over the city towards Kelltree.

The shadow of unease
passed over the riverbanks.

Some of the crowd
dispersed quietly. The strikers redoubled their chants.

By five to four, the
airships hovered over the docks in an airborne X, a massive
threatening mark of censure. A mile or so to the east, another
solitary dirigible hung over Dog Fenn, on the other side of the
river’s ponderous kink. The vodyanoi and the humans and the
gathered crowds shaded their eyes with their hands and stared up at
the impassive shapes, bullet-bodies like hunting squid.

The airships began to
sink earthwards. They approached at some speed, the details of their
design and the sense of mass of their inflated bodies quite suddenly
discernible.

Just before four
o’clock, strange organic shapes floated up from behind the
surrounding roofs, emerging from sliding doors at the top of the
Kelltree and Syriac militia struts, smaller towers not connected to
the skyrail network.

The eddying, weightless
objects bobbed gently in the breeze and began to drift almost
aimlessly towards the wharfs. The sky was suddenly full of the
things. They were big and soft-bodied, each a mass of twisted,
bloated tissue coated with intricate flaps and curves of skin,
craters and strange, dripping orifices. The central sac was about ten
feet in diameter. Each of the creatures had a human rider, visible in
a harness sutured to the corpulent body. Below each such body was a
thicket of dangling tentacles, ribbons of blistered flesh that
stretched the forty or so feet to the ground.

The creatures’
pinky-purple flesh throbbed regularly like beating hearts.

The extraordinary
things bore down on the gathered crowd. There was a full ten seconds
when those who saw them were too aghast to speak, or to believe what
they saw. Then the shouts started: "Men-o’-war!"

**

As the panic began,
some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at
once.

Throughout the gathered
crowd, in the anti-strike demonstration and even here and there among
the striking dockworkers themselves, clumps of men—and some
women—suddenly reached over their heads and in violent, quick
motions tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible
eye- or mouth-holes; dark crumpled blanks.

From the underbelly of
each of the airships—looming absurdly close now—spilt
clutches of ropes that jounced and whip-lashed as they fell. They
fell through the yards and yards of air, their ends coiling slightly
on the pavement. They contained the gathering, the pickets and
demonstrations and surrounding crowds within four pillars of
suspended rope, two on either side of the river. Dark figures slid
expertly, at breakneck speed, the length of the cords. They came in a
constant quick drip. They looked like glutinous clots dribbling down
the entrails of the disembowelled airships.

There were wails from
the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The
people fled in all directions, trampling the fallen, grabbing
children and lovers and stumbling on cobbles and broken flagstones.
They tried to disperse down the side streets that spread like a
network of cracks out from the river-banks. But they ran into the
paths of the men-o’-war that bobbed sedately along the alleys’
routes.

Uniformed militia were
suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were
shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on monstrous bipedal
shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as
they felt their way with echoes.

The air brimmed with
sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs
around corners into men-o’-war tentacles and shrieked as the
nerve-agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their
clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of
juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.

The man-o’-war
pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that
controlled the creatures’ movements, coursing deceptively fast
over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing
their steeds’ venomous appendages into the channels between
architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed
and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the
crowd—the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky—reacted
to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.

The militia’s
dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o’-war hide.
The tendrils could not penetrate them.

Ranks of militia
charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and
vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the
disorderly mass were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung
spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o’-war stings.
Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry
demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their
knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the
gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their
fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia
moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their
filter-masks.

A splinter group of
officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on
the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into
the vodyanoi’s watercraeft ditch. The croaks and screeches of
burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained
walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled
themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.