Perdido Street Station (70 page)

He tweaked the copper,
hardened it.

Tansell removed his
hands and looked up at Isaac. The helmet on his head was unwieldy,
and its provenance from a colander was still absurdly obvious, but it
was perfect for their needs. It had taken him a little more than
fifteen minutes to fashion.

"I’m going
to put a couple of holes in, thread a piece of leather through for a
chinstrap, just in case," he muttered.

Isaac nodded,
impressed.

"That’s
perfect. We need...uh...seven of those, one of them for a garuda.
That’s a
rounder
head, remember. I’m going to
leave you to it for a minute." He looked over at Derkhan and
Lemuel. "I think I’d better liaise with the Council,"
he said.

He turned and traced
his way through the dump labyrinth.

**

"Good evening, der
Grimnebulin," said the avatar, in the heart of the rubbish.
Isaac nodded a greeting to it, and to the enormous skeleton shape of
the Council itself, which waited beyond. "You did not come
alone." His voice was emotionless as ever.

"Please don’t
start," said Isaac. "We are
not
going to get into
this on our own. We are one fat scientist, a crook and a journalist.
We need some fucking professional back-up. These are people who kill
exotic animals for a damn
living,
and they have not the
slightest damn interest in telling anyone about you. All they know is
that some fucking constructs are going to be there with us. Even if
they could work out who or what you were, they’ve probably
broken at least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s laws by now, so
they ain’t about to damn well go running to Rudgutter."
There was silence. "Just damn well
compute it,
if you
want. You are in no risk at all from the three reprobates busy making
helmets."

Isaac imagined that he
felt a trembling under his feet, as the information raced through the
Council’s innards. After a long pause, the avatar and the
Council nodded warily. Isaac did not relax.

"I’ve come
for those of yourself you can risk for tomorrow’s business,"
he said. The Council nodded again.

"Very well,"
said the Construct Council slowly with the dead man’s tongue.
"First, as we discussed, I will take the part of caretaker. Have
you the crisis engine?"

Something hard moved
across Isaac’s face. It went quickly.

"Right here,"
he said, and put one of his bags down in front of the avatar. The
naked man opened it and bent down to peer inside at the tubes and
glass within, giving Isaac a sudden, vile view into the scabbing
hollow of his skull. He picked it up and walked over to the Council
with it, depositing it before the enormous figure’s crotch.

"So," said
Isaac. "You hang on to that, just in case they find our shack.
Good idea. I’ll be back for it in the morning." He
glowered. "Which of you are coming with us? We need some power
behind us."

"I cannot risk
discovery, Grimnebulin," the avatar said. "If I were to
come in my hidden selves, those construct bodies that work by day in
grand houses and building sites and bank vaults, biding their time
and accumulating knowledge, and they were to come back battered and
broken, or not come back at all, I would leave myself open to the
inquiry of the city. And I am not ready for that. Not yet."
Isaac nodded slowly. "Accordingly, I will be coming with you in
those shapes that I can afford to lose. That will arouse confusion
and bewilderment, but not suspicion of the truth."

Behind Isaac, the
rubbish began to skitter and fall away. He turned.

From the reams of
discarded objects, particular aggregations of trash were separating
themselves. Like the Construct Council itself, they were clotted
together from the materia of the dump.

The constructs mimicked
the form and size of chimpanzees. They clattered and clanged as they
moved, with a weird and unsettling sound. Each was unique. Their
heads were kettles and lampshades, their hands were vicious-looking
claws ripped from scientific instruments and scaffolding joints. They
were armoured in great scabs of metal plating torn, roughly welded
and riveted to their bodies, which scampered across the wasteland in
an unsettling half-simian motion. They were created with an
extraordinary sense of found aesthetics.

If they lay still, they
would be invisible: nothing but a random accretion of old metal.

Isaac gazed at the
chimp-things, swinging and jumping, dripping water and oil, ticking
with clockwork.

"I have downloaded
into each of their analytical engines," said the avatar, "as
much memory and capacity as they will hold. These of me can obey you,
and understand the urgency of doing so. I have given them viral
intelligence. They have been programmed with the data to recognize
the slake-moths, and to attack them. Each is built with acid or
phlogistic agent within its midriff." Isaac nodded, wondering at
the casual ease with which the Council created these murderous
machines. "You have worked out the best plan?"

"Well..."
said Isaac. "We’re going to prepare tonight. Work out some
kind of...uh...gear up, you know, plan with our...additional staff.
Then tomorrow at sixish we’ll meet Yag here, assuming the
stupid bastard hasn’t got himself killed. And then we’re
going to get into the Riverskin ghetto, using Lemuel’s
expertise.

"Then we go
moth-hunting." Isaac’s voice was hard and staccato. He
spat out what he needed to say quickly. "The thing is we’ve
got to separate them. We can take one, I think. Otherwise, if there
are two or more, then one will always be in front of us, able to
flash the wings. So we’re going to scope the place out, see if
we can work out where they are. It’s hard to say without seeing
it. We’ll take the amplifier and channeller you used on me, as
well. It might help us get one interested, get it sniffing. Push a
little peak through the background mental noise, or something. Can
you attach other helmets to the one engine? D’you
have
any extras?" The avatar nodded. "You’d better give
them to me, and show me the different functions. I’ll get
Tansell to adjust them, add some mirrors.

"Thing is,"
said Isaac thoughtfully, "it can’t just be the
strength
of the signal that attracts them, or it would only ever be the seers
and communicatrixes and so on that got taken. I think they like
particular
flavours.
That’s why the runt came for me.
Not because there was a big waving trail above the city, any old
trail, but because it recognized and wanted that
particular
mind. And...well, now, maybe the others are going to recognize it as
well. Maybe I was wrong that only the one would ever recognize my
mind. They must’ve sniffed it last night." He looked at
the avatar thoughtfully. "They’re going to remember it as
the trail their brother or sister was after when it got killed. I
don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing..."

"Der Grimnebulin,"
said the dead man after a moment, "you must bring at least one
of my little selves back with you. They must download what they have
seen into me, the Council. I can learn so much of the Glasshouse from
this. It can only help us. Whatever happens, one must get free."

There were several
moments of silence. The Council waited. Isaac thought for something
to say, and then could not. He looked up into the avatar’s
eyes.

"I’ll be
back tomorrow. Have your monkey-selves ready then. And then I
will...I
will
...see you again," he said.

**

The city basked in
extraordinary night-heat. The summer reached a critical moment. In
the striae of dirty air above the city’s core, the slake-moths
danced.

They flitted giddily
over the minarets and crags of Perdido Street Station. They twitched
their wings infinitesimally, edging expertly up the thermals. Skeins
of inconstant emotion spun out from their cavorting.

With silent pleadings
and caresses they courted each other. Wounds, already half healed,
were now forgotten, in trembling, febrile excitement.

The summer here, in
this once verdant plain on the edge of the Gentleman’s Sea,
came a month and a half earlier than for the slake-moths’
siblings across the water. The temperature had slowly spiralled,
reaching twenty-year highs.

Thermotaxic reactions
were triggered in the slake-moths’ loins. Hormones swam in
their ichor tides. Unique configurations of flesh and chymicals
spurred their ovaries and gonads into untimely productivity. They
became suddenly fertile, and aggressively aroused.

Aspises and bats and
birds fled the air in terror, pungent as it was with psychotic
desires.

The slake-moths flirted
with ghastly and lascivious aerial ballet. They touched tentacles and
limbs, unfolded new parts they had never seen before. The three less
damaged moths tugged their sibling, the victim of the Weaver, on
wafts of smoke and air. Gradually, the most wounded moth stopped
licking its multitude of wounds with its trembling tongue, and began
to touch its fellows. Their erotic charge was utterly infectious.

The polymorphous
four-way wooing became fraught and competitive. Stroking, touching,
arousing. Each moth in turn spiralled moonward, drunk on lust. It
would split the seal on a gland hidden under its tail and exude a
cloud of empathic musk.

Its fellows lapped at
the psychoscent, sported like porpoises in clouds of carnality. They
rolled and played then swept up and sprayed the sky themselves. For
now, their sperm ducts were still. The little metadroplets were rich
with the slake-moths’ erogenous, ovigenic juices. They bickered
lecherously to be female.

Each successive
exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths
bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to
each other. The moist valves below their chitin dripped with
aphrodisiac. They swept through the banks of each other’s
perfume.

As the pheremonal duel
continued, one febrile voice sounded more and more triumphant. One
body swept higher and higher, its fellows dropping away. Its
emanations stank the air of sex. There were last-gasp attacks, spurts
of erotic challenge. But one by one, the other moths closed their
female pudenda, accepting defeat and masculinity.

The triumphant moth—the
moth still scarred and dripping from its melee with the
Weaver—soared. Its scent still stank of female juices, its
fecundity was unquestioned. It had proved itself the most motherly.

It had gained the right
to bear the brood.

The other three moths
adored it. They became swains.

The feel of the new
matriarch’s flesh made them ecstatic. They looped and fell and
returned, aroused and ardent.

The mother-moth toyed
with them, led them over the hot dark city. When their beseeching
became as painful as its own lust, it hovered and presented itself,
opened its segmented exoskeleton and curled its vagina towards them.

It coupled with them,
one by one, becoming briefly a dangerous plummeting double-bodied
thing, flanked by eager partners waiting their turn. The three who
had become male felt organic mechanisms pull and twist, their bellies
opening and penises emerging for the first time. They fumbled with
their arms and flesh-ropes and bone jags and their matriarch did the
same, reaching behind it with a complex twist of limbs that grabbed
and tugged and intertwined.

Sudden slipping
connections were made. Each pair consorted and copulated with a
fervent need and pleasure.

**

When the hours of
rutting had passed, the four slake-moths drifted on open wings,
utterly exhausted. They dripped.

As the air cooled,
their bed of thermals deflated slowly, and they began to beat their
wings to stay aloft. One by one, the three fathers peeled away and
down to the city below, to search for food to revive and sustain
them, and to provide for their conjugal partner.

It lolled in the sky a
while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae
twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It
was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath
its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

The slake-moth
matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to
prepare the nest.

**

My talons flex,
trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile
bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

I walk bent double
along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate
warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge,
watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead
of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in
rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

Looking over to the
west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to
the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister
of light on the city’s skin.

I am changing. There
is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is
that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it
was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt.
Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

I have trailed these
humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without
opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what
to say?

I am not Respected
Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not
the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man
and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts
and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage
fighter is gone.