Perdido Street Station (67 page)

He stumbled forward
onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by
the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric
hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood
from his face.

It took a moment for
him to make sense of the scene before him.

Derkhan and Yagharek
were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had
thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held
themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any
direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.

In front of Isaac were
several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him
when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous
shattered thing.

Towering over the
Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous
chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river,
over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the
centre of the space.

Directly below it,
burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an
enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the
smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering
mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the
heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.

The mound of dense
rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the
shattered slats of the crate.

Below it, twisting and
scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered
exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath
the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.

**

"Isaac, did you
see
it?" hissed Derkhan.

He shook his head, his
eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.

"What happened?"
he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.

"You were under
nearly a minute," Derkhan said urgently. "It got you...I
was screaming at you, but you were gone...and then...and then the
constructs stepped forward." She looked, wondering. "They
were walking towards it, and it could sense them...and it seemed
confused and...and
flustered.
It moved back a little and
stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at
the constructs as well as you, but they
kept coming."

Derkhan stumbled
forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of
her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide
circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly
and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it
fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its
wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.

Derkhan sank to the
floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently
shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped
slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.

"It couldn’t
get them! They kept coming and it was...it was backing away...It kept
its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was
fearful...confused. And while it was moving back,
the crane was
moving.
It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was
rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was
waiting...and the crate came down on it."

She turned and looked
at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground.
The slake-moth keened piteously.

Behind her, the
Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish
floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked
out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too
weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid
it.

"It cannot sense
my mind. I am invisible to it," the man said. "And when it
hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche
remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned
with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and
relentless slide...and that is all.

"
I do not
dream,
der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has
calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no
hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my
processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind,
with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

"There is nothing
in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it."
The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. "I can
kill it."

Derkhan stared at
Isaac.

"A thinking
machine..." she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.

"Why did you
subject me to that?" he said shakily, seeing the blood which
still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.

"It was my
calculation," he said simply. "I computed it as most likely
to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying
one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening."

Isaac shook his head in
exhausted disgust.

"See..." he
spat. "That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic...No
allowances for variables like headaches..."

"Isaac," said
Derkhan fervently. "We’ve got them! We can use the Council
as...as troops. We can take the moths out!"

Yagharek had come to
stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the
peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking
hard.

"Damn," he
said very slowly. "Minds without dreams."

"The others will
not be so easy," said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the
Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those
enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of
light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted
through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.

"There are two,"
said the avatar. "They have been brought here by the dying call
of this their sibling."

"Fuck it!"
shouted Isaac in alarm. "What shall we do?"

"They will not
come," replied the man. "They are quicker and stronger,
less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is
not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the
physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them.
They will not come."

Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan
and Yagharek relaxed.

They looked at each
other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in
its death-agony. It was ignored.

"What," said
Derkhan, "are we going to do?"

**

After some minutes, the
flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny
desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the
pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.

Even exhausted and
bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed
by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying
moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical
features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the
avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s
head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the
inside of the slake-moth mind.

The thing kept a
tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it
expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There
was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that
dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic
ganglions flexed in death.

There was a sublime
stillness in the dump.

With a companionable
motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They
began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke,
with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.

"We can’t do
anything until we know where the damn things are," said Isaac.
"Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait,
hoping the bastard creatures come for
us
out of the millions
of souls in the city."

Derkhan and Yagharek
nodded in agreement.

"I know where they
are," said the avatar.

The others stared at
him in astonishment.

"I know where they
hide," he said. "I know where they nest."

"How?"
hissed Isaac.
"Where?"
He grasped the avatar’s
arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was
leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the
horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull
just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with
bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate
fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where
his brain had been torn.

The avatar’s skin
was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.

Those eyes, with their
unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish,
regarded him.

"All of me have
tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have
found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the
evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I
steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do
not correspond to any city-race.

"There are complex
patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and
applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining
potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is
impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is
seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.

"The moths are
living in the Glasshouse, above the cactus people, in Riverskin."

**

"
Damn,"
hissed Isaac, after a silence. "Are they animals? Or are they
cunning?
It’s inspired, whichever. Best damn place I can
think of."

"Why?" said
Yagharek unexpectedly.

Isaac and Derkhan
looked at him.

"New Crobuzon
cactacae ain’t like the Cymek variety, Yag," said Isaac.
"Or rather, they
are,
and maybe that’s the problem.
You’ve dealt with ‘em in Shankell, doubtless. You know
what they’re like. Our cactus people here are a branch of those
same desert cactacae who came north. I don’t know anything
about the others, the mountain cactus, up in the steppes, east. But I
do know the southern style, and their lifestyle never translated so
well up here." He paused and sighed and rubbed his head. He was
exhausted and his head still ached. He had to concentrate, to think
through the simmering memories of Lin just behind his eyes. He
swallowed hard and continued.

"All that
puffed-up hard-man stuff that rules the roost in Shankell starts
looking a bit dubious up here. That’s why they built the
Glasshouse, you ask my opinion. Have a nasty little bit of the Cymek
in New Crobuzon. They got special dispensation in law when the
Glasshouse was put up—gods only know what deals they had to cut
to get that. Technically it’s an independent country. No entry
for anyone without permission, including the militia. They’ve
got their own laws in there, their own everything.

"Now, obviously,
that’s a joke. You can bet your arse the Glasshouse wouldn’t
mean shit without New Crobuzon. Masses of the cactacae troop out
every day, go to work, surly buggers that they are, then take the
shekels back to Riverskin. New Crobuzon
owns
the Glasshouse.
And I don’t think for one minute the militia can’t go in
any godsdamn time they choose.
But
Parliament and the city
governors go through with this charade. You don’t just walk
into the Glasshouse, Yag, and if you do get in...damned if I’d
know what to expect in there.

"I mean, you do
hear rumours. Some people have been inside, of course. And there are
stories of what the militia have seen through the dome from above in
their airships. But most of us—me included—have no real
idea what goes on in there, or how to get in."

"But we
could
get in," said Derkhan. "Maybe Pigeon’ll crawl back,
sniffing for your gold. Eh? And if he does, I bet he could get us in.
You can’t tell me there’s no crime in the Glasshouse. I
just don’t believe it." She looked fierce. Her eyes were
glinting with purpose. "Council," she said, and turned
towards the naked man. "Do you have any...of you...in the
Glasshouse?"

The avatar shook his
head.

"The cactus people
do not use many constructs. None of me have been inside. That is why
I cannot be exact about where the slake-moths are. Except that they
sleep within that dome."

**

As the avatar spoke,
Isaac was hit by a sudden revelation.

He was mulling over the
problem, thinking for ways into the Glasshouse, when he realized with
astonishment that he could simply walk away from this. Lemuel’s
exasperated advice came back to him:
leave it to the
professionals.

He had waved the
suggestion off in irritation, but now he realized that he could
choose to do exactly that. There were a thousand ways to tip off the
militia without delivering himself to them: the state made informing
easy. He knew now where the slake-moths were: he could tell the
government, with all its might, its hunters and scientists, its
massive resources. He could let them know where the slake-moths
nested, and he could run. And the militia could hunt them for him,
and they could recapture the monstrous things. The moth which had
hunted him was gone: he had no special reason to be afraid.

The possibility struck
him hard.

But it was never, even
for a fraction of a second, a temptation.

Isaac remembered
Vermishank’s interrogation. The man had tried not to show his
fear, but it had been obvious he had no faith at all in the militia’s
ability to catch the slake-moths. And now, in the Construct Council,
for the first time Isaac was faced with a power that had shown it
could kill these unthinkable predators. A power that was not working
with the state, but rather that offered its services to
him
and his companions—or that commandeered their services for
itself.