Perdido Street Station (17 page)

"All right!"
Isaac threw up his hands. He looked slowly around. "I suppose I
sort of underestimated Lemuel’s abilities to get things done,"
he said ruefully.

Circumscribing the
entire warehouse, the whole length of the raised platform was crammed
with cages filled with flapping, crying, crawling things. The
warehouse was loud with the sounds of displaced air, the sudden
shifts and fluttering of beating wings, the spatter of droppings, and
loudest of all, the constant screech of captive birds. Pigeons and
sparrows and starlings registered their distress with their coos and
calls: feeble on their own, but a sharp, grating chorus en masse.
Parrots and canaries punctuated the avian wittering with squawked
exclamation marks that made Isaac wince. Geese and chickens and ducks
added a rustic air to the cacophony. Hard-faced aspises flung
themselves through the air the short distance of their cages, their
little lizard bodies banging against the chickenwire fronts. They
licked their wounds with their tiny lions’ faces and roared
like aggressive mice. Huge glass tanks of flies and bees and wasps,
mayflies and butterflies and flying beetles sounded a vivid
aggressive drone. Bats hung upside down and regarded Isaac with
fervent little eyes. Dragonfly-snakes rustled their long elegant
wings and hissed loudly.

The floors of the cages
had not been cleaned and the acrid smell of birdshit was very strong.
Sincerity, Isaac saw, was wobbling up and down the room shaking her
striped head. David saw where Isaac was looking.

"Yeah," he
shouted. "See? The stink’s making her miserable."

"Fellows,"
said Isaac, "I appreciate your forbearance, I really do. It’s
give and take, isn’t it? Lub, remember when you were doing
those experiments in sonar and you had that chap in banging that huge
drum for two days?"

"Isaac, it’s
already been nearly a week! How long’s it going to be? What’s
the schedule? At the very least clean their mess up!"

Isaac looked down at
the irate faces below him. They were very pissed off, he realized. He
thought quickly for a compromise.

"Fine, look,"
he eventually said, "I’ll clean them out tonight—I
promise. And I’ll work flat fucking out...I know! I’ll
work hard on the
loud
ones first. I’ll try and get rid
of them within...two weeks?" he finished lamely. David and
Lublamai expostulated, but he interrupted their jeers and catcalls.
"I’ll pay a little extra rent for the next month! How’s
that?"

The rude noises died
down instantly. The two men stared at him calculatedly. They were
scientific comrades, the Brock Marsh bad boys, friends; but their
existence was precarious, and there was limited room for
sentimentality where money was concerned. Knowing that, Isaac tried
to forestall any temptation they might have to seek alternative
space. He, after all, couldn’t afford the rent here alone.

"What are we
talking?" asked David.

Isaac pondered.

"Two extra
guineas?"

David and Lublamai
looked at each other. It was generous.

"And," said
Isaac casually, "while we’re on the subject, I’d
appreciate a hand. I don’t know how to manage some of
these...uh...scientific subjects. Didn’t you do some
ornithological theory once, David?"

"No," said
David tartly. "I was an assistant to someone who did. I was
bored shitless. And stop being so transparent, ‘Zaac. I’m
not going to resent your pestilential pets any less if you
involve
me in your projects
..." He laughed with a trace of genuine
humour. "Have you been taking Introductory Empathic Theory, or
something?"

But despite his scorn,
David was ascending the stairs, with Lublamai behind him.

He paused at the top
and took in all the jabbering captives.

"Devil’s
Tail, Isaac!" he whispered, grinning. "How much has this
lot set you back?"

"Haven’t
entirely settled with Lemuel yet," said Isaac dryly. "But
my new boss should see me all right."

Lublamai had joined
David on the top step. He gesticulated at a collection of variegated
cages in the far corner of the walkway.

"What’s over
there?"

"That’s
where I keep the exotica," said Isaac. "Aspises,
lasifly..."

"You’ve got
a lasifly?" exclaimed Lublamai. Isaac nodded and grinned.

"Don’t have
the heart to do any experiments with the beautiful thing," he
said.

"Can I see it?"

" ‘Course,
Lub. It’s over there behind the cage with the batkin in it."

As Lublamai trooped
over between the tightly packed cases, David looked briskly about
him.

"So where’s
your ornithological problem, then?" he asked and rubbed his
hands.

"On the desk."
Isaac indicated the miserable, trussed pigeon. "How do I make
that thing stop wriggling. I wanted it to at first, to see the
musculature, but now I want to move the wings myself."

David stared levelly at
him as if at a halfwit.

"Kill it."

Isaac shrugged hugely.

"I tried. It
wouldn’t die."

"Oh for
fuck’s
sake..." David laughed exasperatedly, and strode over to the
desk. He wrung the pigeon’s neck.

Isaac winced
ostentatiously and held up his massive hands.

"They’re
just not subtle enough for that sort of work. My hands are too
clumsy, my sensibilities too damned delicate," he declared
airily.

"Right,"
agreed David sceptically. "What are you working on?"

Isaac was instantly
enthusiastic.

"Well..." He
strode over to the desk. "I’ve had fuck-all luck with the
garuda in the city. I heard rumours about a couple living in St.
Jabber’s Mound and Syriac, and I sent word that I was willing
to pay good moolah for a couple of hours’ time and some
heliotypes. I’ve had absolutely nil response. I’ve
whacked a couple of posters up in the university as well, asking for
any garuda student ready and willing to drop by here, but my
sources
tell me there’s been no intake this year."

" ‘Garuda
aren’t...
adept
at abstract thought.’ " David
imitated the sneering tone of the speaker from the sinister Three
Quills party, which had held a disastrous rally in Brock Marsh the
previous year. Isaac and David and Derkhan had gone along to disrupt
proceedings, hurling abuse and rotten oranges at the man on stage to
the delight of the xenian demonstration outside. Isaac barked in
recollection.

"Absolutely. So
anyway, short of going to Spatters, at the moment I can’t work
with actual garuda, so I’m looking at the various flight
mechanisms you...uh...see around you. Amazing variation, actually."

Isaac sheafed through
piles of notes, holding up diagrams of finches’ and
bluebottles’ wings. He untied the dead pigeon and delicately
traced the movement of its wings through a rolling arc. He pointed
wordlessly at the wall around his desk. It was covered with carefully
rendered diagrams of wings. Close-up sections of the rotating joint
at the shoulder, pared-down representations of forces, beautifully
shaded studies of feather patterns. Here too were heliotypes of
dirigibles, with arrows and question marks scrawled on them in dark
ink. There were suggestive sketches of the mindless men-o’-war,
and hugely enlarged pictures of wasps’ wings. Each was
carefully labelled. David moved his eyes slowly over the hours and
hours of work, the comparative studies of the engines of flight.

"I don’t
think my client’s too fussy about what his wings—or
whatever—look like, as long as he can get airbound as and
when." David and Lublamai knew about Yagharek. Isaac had asked
them for secrecy. He trusted them. He had told them in case Yagharek
visited when they were in the warehouse, although so far the garuda
had managed to avoid them on his fleeting visits.

"Have you thought
about just, y’know, sticking some wings back on?" said
David. "Remaking him?"

"Well, absolutely,
that’s my main line of enquiry, but there’re two
problems. One is what wings? I’ll have to build them. Second
is, do
you
know any Remakers prepared to do that on the quiet?
The best bio-thaumaturge I know is the despised Vermishank. I’ll
go to him if I fucking
have
to, but I’ll be sorely
desperate before I do that...So at the moment I’m doing
preliminary stuff, trying to work out the size and shape and
power-source of something that would hold him up at all. If I go that
way, eventually."

"What else have
you got in mind? Physico-thaumaturgy?"

"Well, you know,
UFT, my old favourite..." Isaac grinned and shrugged
self-deprecatingly. "I have a feeling his back’s too
messed up for easy Remaking, even if I could get the wings sorted
out. I’m wondering about combining two different energy
fields...Shit, David, I don’t know. I’ve got the
beginnings of an idea..." He pointed vaguely at a roughly
labelled drawing of a triangle.

"Isaac?"
Lublamai’s yell sailed over the relentless squawks and
screeches. Isaac and David looked over at him. He had wandered on
past the lasifly and the pair of gild-parakeets. He was pointing at a
smaller set of boxes and cases and vats. "What’s all
this?"

"Oh, that’s
my nursery," shouted Isaac with a grin. He strode towards
Lublamai, pulling David with him. "I thought it might be
interesting to see how you progress from something that can’t
fly to something that can, so I managed to get hold of a bunch of
neonates and unborns and baby things."

He stopped by the
collection. Lublamai was peering into a small hutch at a clutch of
vivid cobalt eggs.

"Don’t know
what they are," said Isaac. "Hope it’s something
pretty."

The hutch was on the
top of a pile of similar open-fronted boxes, in each of which a
clumsy little hand-made nest contained between one and four eggs.
Some were astonishing colours, some a drab beige. A little pipe
coiled away behind the hutches and disappeared over the railings into
the boiler below. Isaac nudged it with his foot.

"I think they
prefer it warm..." he muttered. "Don’t really
know..."

Lublamai was bending
down to peer into a glass-fronted tank.

"Wow..." he
breathed. "I feel like I’m ten again! Trade you these for
six marbles."

The tank’s floor
writhed with little green caterpillars. They munched voraciously and
systematically on the leaves stuffed rudely around them. The stems
were crawling with little bodies.

"Yeah, that’s
quite interesting. Any day now they should go into their cocoons, and
then I think I’m going to ruthlessly cut them open at various
stages to see how they transmogrify themselves."

"Life as a lab
assistant is cruel, isn’t it?" murmured Lublamai into the
tank. "What other disgusting grubs do you have?"

"Bunch of maggots.
Easy to feed. That’s probably the smell that’s got
Sincerity upset." Isaac laughed. "Some other grubs that
promise to turn into butterflies and moths, horribly aggressive
water-things that
I am told
turn into damask-flies and what
have you..." Isaac pointed at a tank full of dirty water, behind
the others.

"And," he
said, swaggering over to a little mesh cage some feet away,
"something
rather
special..." He jabbed his thumb at
the container.

David and Lublamai
crowded round. They gazed with open mouths.

"Oh, now that is
splendid
..." whispered David, after a while.

"What
is
it?" hissed Lublamai.

Isaac peered over their
heads at his star caterpillar.

"Frankly, my
friends, I have not an arsing clue. All I know is that it’s
huge, pretty, and not very happy."

The grub waved its
thick head blindly. It shifted its massive body sluggishly around the
wire prison. It was at least four inches long and one inch thick,
with bright colours slapped randomly around its chubby cylindrical
body. Spiky hairs sprouted from its rump. It shared its cage with
browning lettuce leaves, little snips of meat, slices of fruit, paper
strips.

"See," said
Isaac, "I’ve tried to feed the thing everything. I’ve
put in as many herbs and plants as exist, and it doesn’t want
any of them. So I tried it on fish and fruit and cake, bread, meat,
paper, glue, cotton, silk...it just roots aimlessly around being
hungry, staring at me accusingly."

Isaac leaned in,
planting his face between David’s and Lublamai’s.

"It obviously
wants to eat," he said. "Its colour’s fading, which
is worrying, both aesthetically and physiologically...I’m at a
loss. I think the beautiful thing’s going to sit there and die
on me." Isaac sniffed matter-of-factly.

"Where did you get
it from?" asked David.

"Oh, you know how
this stuff works," said Isaac. "I got it from a cove who
got it from a man who got it from a woman who got it...and so on.
I’ve no idea where it came from."

"You’re not
going to cut this open, are you?"

" ‘Stail,
no. If it lives to build a cocoon, which I’m afraid I doubt,
I’ll be very interested to see what comes out. I might even
donate it to the Science Museum. You know me. Public-spirited...So
anyway, this thing’s not really much use to me for research.
Can’t even make it eat, let alone metamorphose, let alone
fly.
So everything else you see around you—" he spread his arms
wide, wriggled his wrists to take in the room "—is grist
to my counter-gravitational mill. But this little geezer—"
he pointed at the listless caterpillar "—this is social
work." He grinned widely.

**

There was a creaking
from below. The door was being pushed open. All three men lurched
dangerously over the side of the walkway and peered down, expecting
to see Yagharek the garuda, with his false wings under his cloak.