Perdido Street Station (48 page)

Some of the men kept
their heads high, pugnaciously. Most walked as David did, carefully
alone.

The sky was warm and
dirty. The stars shimmered unclearly. In the air above the roofscape,
there was a whispering and then a rush of wind as a pod passed by. It
was a municipal irony that above the very centre of the fleshpits
stretched a militia skyrail. On rare occasions the militia would raid
the corrupt, sumptuous houses of the red-light zone. But for the most
part, as long as payments were made and violence did not spill out of
the rooms in which it had been paid for, the militia kept out.

The wafts of night air
brought with them something unsettling, some brimming sense of
unease. Something more profound than any usual anxiety.

In some of the houses,
large windows were illuminated through soft, diffusing muslin. Women
in shifts and tight nightgowns rubbed themselves lasciviously, or
looked up at the passers-by through coy lashes. Here were also the
xenian brothels, where drunken youths cheered each other on to rites
of passage, fucking khepri or vodyanoi women or other more exotic
breeds. Seeing these establishments, David thought of Isaac. He tried
not to.

David did not stop. He
did not take in the women around him. He plunged deeper.

He turned a corner into
a row of lower, meaner houses. In the windows here were unsubtle
hints as to the nature of the wares within. Whips. Cuffs. A girl of
seven or eight in a baby’s crib, squalling and snotty.

David tracked on and
on. The crowds thinned further, although David was never alone. The
night air teemed with faint noises. Rooms full of conversation.
Music, played well. Laughter. Cries of pain and the barks or howls of
animals.

There was a tumbledown
cul-de-sac near the heart of the sector, a little still place in the
maze. David turned onto its cobbles with a faint shudder. There were
men at the doors of these establishments. They stood, heavy and surly
in cheap suits, vetting the miserable men that came to them.

David shuffled up to
one of the doors. The massive bouncer stopped him, one hand impassive
on his chest.

"Mrs. Tollmeck
sent me," muttered David. The man let him pass.

Inside, the lampshades
were thick and dirty brown. The hall seemed glutinous with
shit-coloured light. Behind a desk sat a severe, middle-aged woman in
a drab floral dress that matched the lampshades. She looked up at
David through half-moon spectacles.

"Are you new to
our establishment?" she asked. "Have you an appointment?"

"I’m due in
room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel," said
David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly
and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.

"I see. Well,
you’re..." she glanced at the wall-clock. "You’re
ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way?
Sally’s waiting for you." She looked up at him
and—horrendously, monstrously—gave him a complicitous
little wink and smirk. David felt sick.

He turned from her
quickly and headed up the stairs.

His heart was going
very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the
top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end
of the walkway was room seventeen.

David began to walk
towards it.

He hated this floor. He
hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that
emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through
the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by
convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.

The door to room
seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house
rule.

David walked slowly
along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was
closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar,
muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing,
hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself
gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the
nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than
fifteen. She crouched on all fours...her arms and legs were hairy and
pawed...dog’s legs.

His eyes lingered on
her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to
the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed
quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed
out her arse and pudenda.

David’s mouth
hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.

This was where he
shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.

The city crawled with
Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy
available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving.
But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the
most sophisticated manner.

Most Remade tarts had
been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little
more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their
prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the
specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade
specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade
into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There
were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt
to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers.
There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other
Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories
according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams.
It was a profitable sideline run by the biothaumaturges of the state.

Time was stretched out
and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every
door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance
inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.

It was like a nightmare
garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of
torture.

David paced past naked
bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike
torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at
him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical
slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her
splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive
phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.

There was a thump
inside David’s head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.

Room seventeen was
before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the
Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and
bone and sex.

He knocked on the door.
After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the
door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that
shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was
closed.

**

A suited man sat
waiting on a dirty bed, smoothing down his tie. Another man, who had
opened and closed the door, stood behind David with folded arms.
David glanced at him briefly and turned all his attention to the
seated man.

The man indicated a
chair at the foot of the bed, bade David pull it up in front of him.

David sat.

"Hello ‘Sally,’
" he said quietly.

"Serachin,"
said the man. He was thin and middle-aged. His eyes were calculating
and intelligent. He looked wildly out of place in this crumbling
room, this vile house, and yet his face was quite composed. He had
waited as patient and comfortable among the Remade whores as he would
in the corridors of Parliament.

"You asked to see
me," said the man. "It’s been quite a time since
we’ve heard from you. We had designated you a sleeper."

"Well..."
said David uneasily. "Not much to report. Till now." The
man nodded judiciously and waited.

David licked his lips.
He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.

"The rate is still
the same, you know," the man said. "A little more, even."

"No, gods, I..."
David stuttered. "I’m just...You know...Out of practice."
The man nodded again.

Very
out of
practice,
thought David helplessly.
Been six years since the
last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of
it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money...

The very first time,
fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent
himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl.
The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they
would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the
university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.

He had informed.
Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for
a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.

David breathed in
deeply and began.

**

"Something big’s
going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the
disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I
know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I
thought it’d all be...containable...but Devil’s Tail! It
just gets bigger and bigger and...and I think we need help."
(Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust
at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly,
kept talking.) "It’s all down to Isaac."

"Dan der
Grimnebulin?" said the man. "Who you share your workspace
with? The renegade theorist. The guerrilla scientist with a talent
for self-importance. What’s he been up to?" The man smiled
coldly.

"Right, listen. He
got commissioned by...well, he got commissioned to look into flight,
and he got hold of shitloads of flying things to do research on.
Birds, insects, aspises, fucking everything. And one of the things he
gets is this big caterpillar. Damn thing looks like it’s going
to die for the longest time, then ‘Zaac must’ve worked
out how to keep the thing alive, because suddenly it starts growing.
Huge.
Fucking...this big." He held out his hands in a
reasonable estimate of the grub’s size. The man opposite him
was looking intently at him, face set, hands clenched.

"Then it pupates,
right, and we were all sort of curious about what’d come out.
So we get home one day and Lublamai—the other guy in the
building, you know—Lublamai’s lying there, drooling.
Whatever the fucking thing was that hatched out, it fucking
ate
his mind...
and...and it got away and the damn thing’s
loose.

The man jerked his head
in a decisive nod, quite different from his earlier casual
invitations to information. "So you thought you’d better
keep us informed."

"Shit, no! I
didn’t think...even then I thought we could deal with it. I
mean Jabber, I was pissed off with Isaac, I was completely at a loss,
but I thought maybe we could find some way of tracking the damn thing
down, fixing Lub...Well, first off there starts being more and more
of these things, these stories about people’s...minds
going...But the main thing was that we tracked down who got these
things to ‘Zaac. It’s some fucking clerk nicking them
from R&D in the sodding
Parliament.
And I’m thinking
‘Fuck, I don’t want to muck about with the
government.’
"
The man on the bed nodded at David’s judgement. "So
then I’m thinking we’re way,
way
out of our
depth..."

David paused. The man
on the bed opened his mouth and David cut him off.

"No, listen! It
doesn’t stop there! ‘Cause I heard about the riot down in
Kelltree, and I know you’ve banged up the editor of
Runagate
Rampant,
right?" The man waited, flicked imaginary lint from
his jacket in an automatic motion. The fact had not been advertised,
but the ruined abattoir left no doubt that some pit of sedition had
been raided in Dog Fenn, and rumours abounded. "So one of
Isaac’s friends is a writer on the damn thing, and she’s
contacted the editor—I don’t know how, some fucking
thaumaturgy—and he’s told her two things. One is that the
inquisitors...your lot...think he knows something he
doesn’t,
and the other is that they’re asking him about some story in
Double-R
and the contact for the story, who presumably
does
know whatever they think he does, is called Barbile. So get this!
That’s who our clerk nicked the monster caterpillar from!"

David paused at this,
waited for it to impact on the man, then continued.

"So it’s all
connecting and I
do
not know what’s going on. And I
don’t want to. I can just see that we’re...treading on
your toes. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I can’t see it
myself...I don’t mind chasing monsters but I am
not
getting on the wrong side of the fucking militia, and the secret
police, and the government and everything. You have to clear this
shit up."

The man on the bed
clasped his hands. David remembered something else.

"Damn, yeah,
listen! I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work out what’s
going on, and...well, I don’t know if this is right, but is it
something to do with crisis energy?"

The man shook his head
very slowly, his face guarded, not comprehending. "Go on,"
he said.

"Well, at one
point during the run-up to all this, Isaac lets slip...sort of
hints...that he’s built a...a
working crisis engine...
d’you
know what that means?"

The man’s face
was set hard and his eyes were very wide.

"I am a liaison
for those who report from Brock Marsh," he hissed. "I know
what it
would
mean...it cannot...is it...Wait a minute, that
would make
no sense
...is it...is it true?" For the first
time, the man seemed truly rattled.