Perdido Street Station Part 8

"Maybe. Depends what else we see."

"What we'll see see," hissed Isaac furiously, dragging Derkhan with him as he caught sight of the next exhibit, "is pure human viciousness! I f.u.c.king despair, Derkhan!"

He had stopped a little way behind a group of dawdlers who were gazing at a child born without eyes, a fragile, bony human girl who cried out wordlessly and waved her head at the sound of the crowd. She sees with Inner Sight! She sees with Inner Sight! proclaimed the sign over her head. Some before the cage were cackling and yelling at her. proclaimed the sign over her head. Some before the cage were cackling and yelling at her.

"G.o.dspit, Derkhan . . ." Isaac shook his head. "Look at them tormenting that poor creature . . ."

As he spoke, a couple turned from the exhibited child with disgust in their faces. They turned as they left and spat behind them at the woman who had laughed the loudest.

"It turns turns, Isaac," said Derkhan quietly. "It turns quickly."

The tour guide strode the path between the rows of little tents, stopping here and there at choice horrors. The crowd was breaking apart. Little clots of people milled away under their own volition. At some tents they were stopped by attendants, who waited until a sufficient number had congregated before unveiling their hidden pieces. At others the punters walked right in, and shouts of delight and shock and disgust would emanate from within the grubby canvas.

Derkhan and Isaac wandered into a long enclosure. Above the entrance was a sign rendered in ostentatious calligraphy. A Panoply of Wonders! Do You Dare Enter the Museum of Hidden Things? A Panoply of Wonders! Do You Dare Enter the Museum of Hidden Things?

"Do we dare, Derkhan?" muttered Isaac as they pa.s.sed into the warm dusty darkness within.

The light ebbed slowly into their eyes from the corner of the makeshift room. The cotton chamber was full of cabinets in iron and gla.s.s, stretching out before them. Candles and gasjets burned in niches, filtered through lenses that concentrated them into dramatic spots, illuminating the bizarre displays. Punters meandered from one to another, murmuring, laughing nervously.

Isaac and Derkhan wandered slowly past jars of yellowing alcohol in which broken body parts floated. Two-headed foetuses and sections of a kraken's arm. A deep red shining jag that could have been a Weaver's claw, or could have been a burnished carving; eyes that spasmed and lived in jars of charged liquid; intricate, infinitesimal paintings on ladybirds' backs, visible only through magnifying lenses; a human skull scuttling in its cage on six insectile bra.s.s legs. A nest of rats with intertwined tails that took it in turns to scrawl obscenities on a little blackboard. A book made of pressed feathers. Druds' teeth and a narwhal's horn.

Derkhan scribbled notes. Isaac gazed avariciously about him at the charlatanism and cryptoscience.

They left the museum. To their right was Anglerina, Queen of the Deepest Sea; to their left Bas-Lag's Oldest Cactus-Man.

"I'm getting depressed," said Derkhan.

Isaac agreed.

"Let's find the Bird-Man Chief of the Wild Desert quickly, and f.u.c.k off. I'll buy you some candyfloss."

They wound through the ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small. Isaac suddenly pointed above them, at the sign that had come into view.

King Garuda! Lord of the Air!

Derkhan tugged at the heavy curtain. She and Isaac exchanged glances, and entered.

"Ah! Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!"

The querulous voice burst out of the shadows. Isaac squinted through the bars before them. A dark, shambolic figure stood painfully and lurched out of the darkness at the back of the tent.

"I am a chief of my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard."

The voice was pained and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the alien sounds that burst from Yagharek's throat. The speaker stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and died in an aghast whisper.

The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy off it like a pudgy schoolboy's. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac's eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.

Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt from them as they shuddered.

The creature's beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth, he realized.

"Let me tell you of the times I have soared into the air with my prey . . ." began the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to cut it off.

"Please G.o.ds, enough!" he shouted. "Spare us this . . . embarra.s.sment embarra.s.sment . . ." . . ."

The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

There was silence for a long time.

"What's the matter, guvnor?" whispered the thing behind bars eventually. "What'd I do wrong?"

"I came here to see a f.u.c.king garuda," rumbled Isaac. "What d'you take me for? You're Remade, mate . . . as any fool can see."

The big dead beak clicked together as the man licked his lips. His eyes darted left and right nervously.

"Jabber's sake, squire," he whispered pleadingly. "Don't go complaining. This is all I got. You're obviously a gentleman of education . . . I'm as close as most get to garuda . . . all they want's to hear a bit about hunting in the desert, see the bird-man, and that way I earn."

"G.o.dspit, Isaac," whispered Derkhan. "Go easy."

Isaac was crushingly disappointed. He had been preparing a list of questions in his mind. He knew exactly how he had wanted to investigate the wings, which muscle-bone interaction currently intrigued him. He had been prepared to pay a good rate for the research, had prepared to get Ged to come down to ask questions about the Cymek Library. To be faced instead with a scared, sickly human reading from a script that would have disgraced the lowest playhouse depressed him.

His anger was tempered with pity as he stared at the miserable figure before him. The man behind the feathers nervously clutched and unclutched his left arm with his right. He had to open that preposterous beak to breath.

" 'Stail," Isaac swore softly.

Derkhan had walked up to the bars.

"What did you do?" she asked.

The man looked around again before answering.

"Did thieving," he said quickly. "Got caught trying to get an old painting of a garuda from some ancient c.u.n.t out in Chnum. Worth a fortune. Magister said since I was so impressed with garuda I could-" his breath caught for a moment "-I could be one."

Isaac could see how the feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one. When the Remade turned slightly to Derkhan, Isaac could see the ugly knot of hardened flesh on his back where those wings, torn from some buzzard or vulture, had been sealed together with the human muscles.

Nerve endings bonded randomly and uselessly, and the wings moved only with the spasms of a long drawn-out death. Isaac's nose wrinkled at the stench. The wings were rotting slowly on the Remade's back.

"Does it hurt?" Derkhan was asking.

"Not so very much any more, miss," the Remade answered. "Anyway, I'm lucky to have this." He indicated the tent and the bars. "Keeps me eating. That's why I'd be obliged more'n I can say if you'd refrain from telling the boss that you clocked me."

Did most who came here really accept this disgusting charade? wondered Isaac. wondered Isaac. Were people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this could ever fly? Were people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this could ever fly?

"We'll say nothing," said Derkhan. Isaac nodded curtly in agreement. He was full of pity and anger and disgust. He wanted to leave.

Behind them, the curtain swished and a group of young women entered, laughing and whispering lewd jokes. The Remade looked over Derkhan's shoulder.

"Ah!" he said loudly. "Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!"

He moved away from Derkhan and Isaac, gazing at them pleadingly as he did so. Delighted screams and astonishment burst from the new spectators.

"Fly for us!" yelled one.

"Alas," heard Isaac and Derkhan as they left the tent, "the weather in your city is too inclement for my kind. I have caught chill and temporarily cannot fly. But tarry and I will tell you of the views from the cloudless Cymek skies . . ."

The cloth closed behind them. The speech was obscured.

Isaac watched as Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

"What are you going to turn in?" he asked.

" 'Remade Forced by Magister's Torture into Living as Zoo Exhibit.' I won't say which one," she answered without looking up from her writing. Isaac nodded.

"Come on," he murmured. "I'll get that candyfloss."

"I'm f.u.c.king depressed now," said Isaac heavily. He bit at the sickly-sweet bundle he carried. Wisps of sugar fibres stuck to his stubble.

"Yes, but are you depressed because of what'd been done to that man, or because you didn't get to meet a garuda?" asked Derkhan.

They had left the freakshow. They munched earnestly as they walked past the garish body of the fair. Isaac pondered. He was a little taken aback.

"Well, I suppose . . . probably because I didn't meet a garuda . . . But," he added defensively, "I wouldn't be half so depressed if it'd just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like that. It's the . . . f.u.c.king indignity indignity of it that really sticks in the craw . . ." of it that really sticks in the craw . . ."

Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.

"We could look around, you know," she said. "There's bound to be a garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here." She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could hardly even see the stars.

"Not now," said Isaac. "I'm not in the mood. I've lost my momentum." There was a long, companionable silence before he spoke again.

"Will you really write something about this place in Runagate Rampant Runagate Rampant?"

Derkhan shrugged, looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.

"It's a difficult job, dealing with the Remade," she said. "There's so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to link up, so people don't . . . judge them as monsters . . . it's really hard. And it's not like people don't know they've got f.u.c.king horrendous lives, for the most part . . . it's that there's a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve it, even if they pity them, or think it's G.o.ds-given, or rubbish like that. Oh, G.o.dspit," she said suddenly, and shook her head.

"What?"

"I was in court the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a sordid, pathetic, miserable crime . . ." She winced in remembrance. "Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath monoliths killed her baby . . . smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows what . . . because it wouldn't stop crying. She's sitting there in court, her eyes are just . . . d.a.m.n well empty empty . . . she can't believe what's happened, she keeps moaning her baby's name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember. . . . she can't believe what's happened, she keeps moaning her baby's name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.

"Her baby's arms are going to be grafted to her face. 'So she doesn't forget what she did,' he says." Derkhan's voice curdled as she mimicked the Magister.

They walked in silence for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.

"I'm an art critic, Isaac," Derkhan said eventually. "Remaking's art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I've seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron sh.e.l.ls they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I've seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows . . . ! Not that they admit that's what they're for . . .

"Remaking's creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR RR." She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. "It's the same thing same thing, Isaac. Art's something you choose to make . . . it's a bringing together of . . . of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That's why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.

"I don't want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art."

Isaac felt in his pocket for Runagate Rampant Runagate Rampant. It was dangerous even to hold a copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called "comprador sc.u.m"; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party; the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in a sandpit.

At the end of the path paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food, discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing her. As they neared her she stood straighter and waved at them. She sauntered in their direction.

Isaac saw that she had a toffee-apple gripped in her mandibles. Her inner jaw chewed with gusto.

How was it, treasure? she signed. she signed.

"An unmitigated arsing disaster," Isaac huffed miserably. "I'll tell you all about it."

He even risked grasping her hand briefly as they turned their backs on the fair.

The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, gla.s.s, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky.

CHAPTER N NINE.

Across the city, through the shady alleys of Echomire and the hovels of Badside, in the lattice of dust-clogged ca.n.a.ls, in Smog Bend and the faded estates of Barrackham, in towers in Tar Wedge and the hostile concrete forest of Dog Fenn, came the whispered word. Someone's paying for winged things.

Like a G.o.d, Lemuel breathed life into the message and made it fly. Small-time hoods heard it from drug dealers; costermongers told it to decayed gentlemen; doctors with dubious records got it from part-time bouncers.

Isaac's request swept through the slums and rookeries. It travelled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps.

Where putrefying houses loomed over courtyards, wooden walkways seemed to self-generate, linking them together, connecting them to the streets and mews where exhausted beasts of burden hauled third-rate goods up and down. Bridges jutted like splinted limbs across cess-trenches. Isaac's message was couriered across the chaotic skyline in the paths of the feral cats.

Little expeditions of urban adventurers took the Sink Line train south to Fell Stop and ventured into Rudewood. They walked the deserted train tracks as long as they could, stepping from slat to wooden slat, pa.s.sing the empty, nameless station in the outlands of the forest. The platforms had surrendered to green life. The tracks were thick with dandelions and foxgloves and wild roses that had shoved pugnacious through the railway gravel and, here and there, bent the tracks. Darkwood and banyan and evergreen crept up on the nervous invaders until they were surrounded, enclosed in a lush trap.

They went with sacks and catapults and big nets. They hauled their clumsy urban carca.s.ses through the tangled roots and thick tree-shadows, yelling and tripping and breaking branches. They tried to pinpoint the birdsong that disoriented them, sounding on every side. They made faltering, useless a.n.a.logies between the city and this alien realm: "If you can find your way through Dog Fenn," one might say fatuously and wrongly, "you can find your way anywhere." They would spin, look for and fail to find the militia tower of Vaudois Hill, out of sight behind the trees.

Some did not return.