Perdido Street Station (98 page)

And Isaac sat and
stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace—marbled now with
stress-fractures and lines of cruelty—thinking about Yagharek.

Do not translate,
Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?

He thought of
Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was
pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife?
A weapon? A fucking
whip?

Fuck them,
he
would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts.
I
don’t owe their laws respect...
Free the prisoners. That was
what
Runagate Rampant always
said.

But the Cymek garuda
did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no
magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no
quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians.
Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.

Or so he had been told.
So he remembered.
The band voted,
Kar’uchai had said.

Was that true? Did that
change things?

In New Crobuzon
punishment was
for
someone. Some interest was served. Was that
different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?

Was a garuda rapist
worse than a human one?

Who am I to judge?
Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked
up his calculations, ready to continue, but then,
Who am I to
judge?
he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken
from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.

He kept glancing at
Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of
them was as savage a stain as they had been.

They had mottled her in
suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.

Lin shifted and woke
and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at
the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of
Kar’uchai.

This is all wrong,
he thought.
That’s just exactly what she told you not to do.
This isn’t about rape, she said...

But it was too hard.
Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of
Kar’uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

**

This is all
arse-side up,
he thought.

If he took Kar’uchai
at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide
whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all,
he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it
was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew:
his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave
his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the
doubt?

He remembered Yagharek
scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

He remembered
Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing
Lin.

But when he thought of
Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but
think of that as
rape.
And he thought of Lin, and everything
that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke
with anger.

He tried to extricate
himself.

He tried to think
himself away from the whole thing. He told himself desperately that
to refuse his services would
not
imply judgement, that it
would
not
mean he pretended knowledge of the facts, that it
would simply be a way of saying, "This is beyond me, this is not
my business." But he could not convince himself.

He slumped and breathed
a miserable moan of exhaustion. If he turned from Yagharek, he
realized, no matter what he said, Isaac would feel himself to have
judged, and to have found Yagharek wanting. And Isaac realized that
he could not in conscience imply that, when he did not know the case.

But on the heels of
that thought came another; a flipside, a counterpoint.

If withholding help
implied negative judgement he could not make, thought Isaac, then
helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions
were
acceptable.

And that, thought Isaac
in cold distaste and fury, he
would not do.

**

He folded his notes
slowly, his half-finished equations, his scribbled formulae, and
began to pack them away.

**

When Derkhan returned,
the sun was low and the sky was blemished with blood-coloured clouds.
She tapped the door in the quick rhythm they had agreed, bundling
past Isaac when he opened it.

"It’s an
amazing day," she said with sadness. "I’ve been
sniffing quietly all over the place, getting a few leads, a few
ideas..." She turned to face him and was instantly quiet.

His dark, scarred face
bore an extraordinary expression. Some complex composite of hope and
excitement and terrible misery. He seemed to brim with energy. He
shifted as if he crawled with ants. He wore his long beggar’s
cloak. A sack sat beside the door, bulging with heavy, bulky
contents. The crisis engine was gone, she realized, disassembled and
hidden away in the sack.

Without the spread-out
mess of metal and wire, the room seemed utterly bare.

With a little gasp,
Derkhan saw that Isaac had wrapped up Lin in a foul, tattered
blanket. Lin clutched at it fitfully and nervously, signing nonsense
up at him. She saw Derkhan and jerked happily.

"Let’s go,"
said Isaac in a hollow voice that strained with tension.

"What are you
talking about?" said Derkhan angrily. "What are you
talking
about? Where’s Yagharek? What’s come over you?"

"Dee,
please...
"
whispered Isaac. He took her hands. She reeled at his imploring
fervour. "Yag’s still not come back. I’m leaving
this for him," he said, and plucked a letter from his pocket. He
tossed it nervously into the centre of the floor. Derkhan began to
speak again and Isaac cut her off, shaking his head violently.

"I’m not...I
can’t...I don’t work for Yag no more, Dee...I’m
terminating our contract...
I’ll explain
everything,
I promise, but let’s
go.
You’re right, we’ve
stayed much too long." He flicked his hand at the window, where
the evening sounded boisterous and easygoing. "The fucking
government
are after us, and the biggest damn gangster on the
continent...And the...the Construct Council..." He shook her
gently.

"Let’s
go.
The...the three of us. Let’s get out and away."

"What
happened,
Isaac?" she demanded. She shook him back.

"Tell me now."

He looked away quickly,
and back at her.

"I had a
visitor..." She gasped and her eyes widened, but he shook his
head slowly. "Dee...a visitor from the fucking
Cymek."
He held her eyes and swallowed. "I know what Yagharek did, Dee."
He was quiet as her face rearranged itself into a cold calm. "I
know what he got...punished for.

"There’s
nothing holding us here, Dee. I’ll tell you
everything—
everything,
I swear—but there’s
nothing holding us here. I’ll tell you while we...while we go."

For days he had been in
an awful lassitude, distracted by crisis maths and utterly,
exhaustingly despondent about Lin. Quite suddenly, the urgency of
their situation had come home to him. He realized their danger. He
understood how patient Derkhan had been, and he understood that they
must leave.

**

"Godsdamnit,"
she said quietly. "I know it’s only a few months, but
he...he’s your friend. Isn’t he? We can’t
just...can we just leave him...?" She looked at him and her face
creased. "Is it...what is it? Is it so terrible? Is it bad
enough that it...that it cancels everything else out? Is it so
terrible?" Isaac closed his eyes.

"No...yes. It’s
not that simple. I’ll explain when we go.

"
I’m not
going to help him.
That’s the bottom line. I can’t, I
fucking can’t, Dee, I fucking
can’t.
And I can’t
see him, I don’t want to see him. So there’s
nothing
here, so we can go.

"We really must
go."

**

Derkhan argued, but
briefly and without conviction. She was gathering her tiny bag of
clothes, her little notebook, even while she said she was not sure.
She was caught up in Isaac’s wake.

She scrawled a tiny
addendum to the back of Isaac’s note, without opening it.
Good
luck,
she scribbled.
We will meet again. Sorry to disappear so
suddenly. You know how to get out of the city. You know what to do.
She paused for quite a long time, unsure of how to say goodbye, and
then wrote
Derkhan.
She replaced the letter.

She wrapped her scarf
about her, let her new black hair slide like oil over her shoulders.
It rubbed against the scab left by her ruined ear. She looked out of
the window, to where the sky grew thick with evening, then turned and
put her arm gently around Lin, helped her walk in her erratic
fashion. Slowly, the three of them descended.

**

"There’s a
bunch of guys over in Smog Bend," Derkhan said. "Bargemen.
They can take us south without any questions."

"Fuck, no!"
hissed Isaac. He looked up from below his hood with wide eyes.

They stood at the end
of the street, where the cart had acted as goal for the children
hours before. The warm evening air was full of smells. There were
loud disagreements and hysterical laughter from a parallel avenue.
Grocers and housewives and steelwrights and minor criminals chatted
on corners. The lights were emerging with the sputter of a hundred
different fuels and currents. Flames in various colours sprang up
behind frosted glass.

"Fuck no,"
Isaac said again. "Not
inland...
Let’s go
out...
Let’s go to Kelltree. Let’s go to the
docks."

So they walked together
slowly south and west. They skirted between Saltbur and Mog Hill,
shuffling through the busy streets, an unlikely trio. A tall and
bulky beggar with a hidden face, a striking crow-haired woman and a
hooded cripple walking in unsteady spasming gait, half-supported and
half-pulled by her companions.

Every steaming
construct that walked past made them duck their heads uncomfortably
away. Isaac and Derkhan kept their eyes down, talking quickly under
their breath. They glanced up nervously as they passed below
skyrails, as if the militia streaking above them could sniff them out
from all that way above. They avoided catching the eyes of the men
and women who lounged aggressively on street corners.

They felt as if they
held their breath. An agonizing journey. They were tremulous with
adrenalin.

They looked around them
as they walked, taking in everything they could as if their eyes were
cameras. Isaac snatched glimpses of opera posters curling ragged off
walls, twists of barbed wire and concrete embedded with broken glass,
the arches of the Kelltree rail-link that branched from the Dexter
Line, hovering over Sunter and Bonetown.

He looked up at the
Ribs that loomed colossal to his right, and he tried to remember
their angles, exactly.

With every step they
pulled themselves free of the city. They could feel its gravity
receding. They felt light-headed. As if they might cry.

Unseen, just below the
clouds, a shadow drifted lazily after them. It turned and spiralled
as their course became clear. It swept giddily in a moment of lonely
aerobatics. As Isaac and Lin and Derkhan continued, the figure broke
off its circles and shot away at speed through the sky, heading out
of the city.

**

Stars appeared and
Isaac began to whisper goodbye to The Clock and Cockerel, to Aspic
Bazaar and Ketch Heath and his friends.

It stayed warm as they
made their way south, shadowing the trains, into a wide-open
landscape of industrial estates. Weeds escaped from lots and
encroached onto the pavement, tripping the pedestrians that still
filled the night-city, making them swear. Isaac and Derkhan guided
Lin carefully through the outskirts of Echomire and Kelltree, bearing
south, the trains beside them, heading for the river.

The Gross Tar,
shimmering prettily under the neon and the gaslight, its pollution
obscured by reflections: and the docks full of tall ships with heavy
furled sails and steamboats leaking iridescently into the water,
merchant vessels drawn by bored seawyrms chewing on vast bridles,
unsteady factory-freighters that bristled with cranes and
steamhammers; ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a
journey.

**

In the Cymek, we
call the moon’s little satellites the mosquitoes. Here in New
Crobuzon they call them her daughters.

The room is full of
light from the moon and her daughters, and empty of all else.

I have stood here
for a long time, Isaacs letter in my hand.

In a moment, I will
read it again.

**

I heard the
emptiness of the decaying house from the stairs. The echoes receded
for too long. I knew before I touched the door that the attic was
deserted.

I was away for
hours, seeking some spurious, faltering freedom in the city.

I wandered into the
pretty gardens of Sobek Croix, through fussing clouds of insects and
past the sculpted lakes of overfed fowl. I found the ruins of the
monastery, the little shell displayed proudly at the park’s
heart. Where romantic vandals carve their lovers’ names onto
the ancient stone. The little keep was deserted a thousand years
before New Crobuzon’s foundations were laid. The god to which
it was consecrated died.

Some people come at
night to honour the dead god’s ghost. What tenuous, desperate
theology.