Perdido Street Station (18 page)

Lin peered up at them.

David and Lublamai
started in confusion. They were embarrassed at Isaac’s sudden
cry of irritated welcome. They found something else to look at.

Isaac was scurrying
down the stairs.

"Lin," he
bellowed. "Good to see you." When he reached her he spoke
quietly.

"Sweetheart, what
are you doing here? I thought I was going to see you later in the
week."

As he spoke he saw her
antennae quivering miserably, tried to temper his nervous irritation.
It was clear that Lub and David understood what was going on—they’d
known him a long time: he did not doubt that his evasion and hints
about his love life had left them guessing reasonably close to the
truth. But this was not Salacus Fields. This was too close to home.
He might be seen.

But then, Lin was
clearly miserable.

Look,
she signed
rapidly,
want you to come home with me, don’t say no. Miss
you. Tired. Difficult job. Sorry for coming here. Needed to see you.

Isaac felt anger and
affection jostle.
This is a dangerous precedent,
he thought.
Fuck!

"Hang on," he
whispered. "Give me a minute."

He raced up the stairs.

"Lub, David, I’d
forgotten I’m supposed to be out with friends this evening, so
someone’s been sent to fetch me. I
promise
I’ll
muck out all my little charges tomorrow. On my honour. They’re
all fed, that’s taken care of..." He was looking around
him rapidly. He forced himself to meet their eyes.

"Right," said
David. "Have a nice evening."

Lublamai waved him
away.

"Right," said
Isaac heavily, looking around him. "If Yagharek comes
back...uh..." He realized he had nothing to say. He grabbed a
notebook from the desk and bounced downstairs without looking behind
him. Lublamai and David studiously did not watch him go.

He seemed to carry Lin
with him as if he was a gale, billowing her helplessly with him
through the door and into the darkening streets. It was only as they
left the warehouse, when he looked at her clearly, that he felt his
own irritation diminish to a low burn. He saw her in all her
exhausted dejection.

Isaac hesitated a
moment, then took her arm. He slipped his notebook into her bag,
which he snapped closed.

"Let’s have
us a night," he whispered.

She nodded and leaned
her headbody against him, briefly, held him tight.

They disengaged, then,
for fear of being watched. They walked to Sly Station together
slowly, at a lovers’ pace, a few careful feet apart.

If a murderer stalked
the mansions of Flag Hill or Canker Wedge, would the militia waste
any time or spare resources? Why, no! The hunt for Jack Half-a-Prayer
proves it! And yet, when the Eyespy Killer strikes in
Smog Bend,
nothing happens! Another eyeless victim was fished from the Tar last
week—bringing the number killed to five—and not a word
from the blue-clad bullies in the Spike. We say:
it’s one
law for the rich, another for the poor!

**

Around New Crobuzon the
posters are appearing demanding
your vote—
should you be
lucky enough to have one! Rudgutter’s Fat Sun huffs and puffs,
Finally We Can See spout weasel-words, the Diverse Tendency lies to
the oppressed xenians, and the human dust of the Three Quills spread
their poison. With this sorry crew as the "choice,"
Runagate Rampant
calls on all "winners" of the vote
to spoil their ballots! Build a party from below and denounce the
Suffrage Lottery as a cynical ploy. We say:
votes for all and vote
for change!

**

The vodyanoi stevedores
of Kelltree are discussing strike action after vicious attacks on
wages by the dock authorities. Disgracefully, the Guild of Human
Dockers has denounced their actions. We say:
towards an all-race
union against the bosses!

**

Derkhan looked up from
reading as a couple entered the carriage. Casually and
surreptitiously, she folded her copy of
Runagate Rampant
and
slipped it into her bag.

She sat at the very
front end of the train, facing backwards, so she could see the few
people in her carriage without appearing to spy on them. The two
young people who had just entered swayed as the train left Sedim
Junction and sat quickly. They were dressed simply but well, which
marked them out from the majority of those travelling to Dog Fenn.
Derkhan pegged them as Veruline missionaries, students from the
university up the road in Ludmead, descending piously and
sanctimoniously into the depths of Dog Fenn to improve the souls of
the poor. She sneered at them mentally as she took out a little
mirror.

Glancing up again to
ensure she was not observed, Derkhan looked critically at her face.
She adjusted her white wig minutely, and pressed at her rubber scar
to make sure it was solid. She was dressed carefully. Dirty and torn
clothes, no hint of money to attract unwanted attention in the Fenn,
but not so fouled as to attract the opprobrious wrath of travellers
in The Crow, where she had started her journey.

Her notebook was on her
lap. She was taking some time during her journey to make preparatory
notes on the Shintacost Prize. The first round was taking place
sometime at the end of the month, and she had in mind a piece for the
Beacon
about what did and did not get through the early
stages. She intended to make it funny, but with a serious point about
the politics of the judging panel.

She stared at her
lacklustre beginning and sighed.
Now,
she decided,
is not
the time.

Derkhan stared out of
the window to her left, across the city. On this branch of the Dexter
Line, between Ludmead and the industrial zone of New Crobuzon’s
south-east, the trains passed at about the midpoint of the city’s
tussle with the sky. The mass of roofs was pierced by militia towers
in Brock Marsh and Strack Island, and far away in Flyside and Sheck.
Sud Line trains passed south beyond the Gross Tar.

The bleached Ribs came
and went beside the tracks, towering over the carriage. Smoke and
grime built up in the air until the train seemed to ride on a smog
tide. The sounds of industry increased. The train flew through
clutches of vast, sparse chimneys like blasted trees as the train
passed through Sunter. Echomire was a savage industrial zone a little
way to the east.
Somewhere below and a little to the south,
realized Derkhan,
a vodyanoi picket is probably massing. Good
luck, brothers.

Gravity pulled her to
the west as the train turned. It broke off from the Kelltree Line and
veered away to the east, gearing up to leap the river.

The masts of tall ships
in Kelltree swung into view as the train turned. They teetered and
swayed gently in the water. Derkhan glimpsed the furled sails, the
massive paddles and yawning smokestacks, the excited, tightly reined
seawyrms of trading ships from Myrshock and Shankell and Gnurr Kett.
The water boiled with submersibles carved from great nautili shells.
Derkhan turned her head to stare as the train arced.

She could see the Gross
Tar over the roofs to the south, wide and relentless and bristling
with vessels. Antique ordinances stopped the large ships, the foreign
ships, half a mile downriver of the confluence of Canker and Tar.
They collected beyond Strack Island, in the docklands. For a mile and
a half or more, the north bank of the Gross Tar thronged with cranes
loading and unloading constantly, bobbing like massive feeding birds.
Swarms of barges and tugs took the transferred cargos upriver to Smog
Bend and Gross Coil and the mean slum-industries of Creekside; they
hauled crates along New Crobuzon’s canals, linking minor
franchises and failing workshops, finding their way through the maze
like laboratory rats.

The clay of Kelltree
and Echomire was gouged by fat square docks and reservoirs, huge
culs-de-sac of water that jutted into the city, linked by deep
channels to the river, thronging with ships.

There had once been an
attempt to replicate the Kelltree docks in Badside. Derkhan had seen
what remained. Three massive stinking troughs of malarial slime,
their surfaces broken with half-sunk wrecks and twisted girders.

The rattle and boom of
the tracks beneath the iron wheels changed suddenly as the steaming
engine hauled its charges onto the great girders of Barley Bridge. It
veered a little from side to side, slowing on the unkempt tracks as
it rose as if with distaste over Dog Fenn.

A few grey blocks rose
from the streets like weeds in a cesspool, their concrete seeping and
rotten. Many were unfinished, with splayed iron supports fanning out
from the ghosts of roofs, rusting, bleeding with the rain and the
damp, staining the skin of the buildings. Wyrmen swirled like carrion
crows over these monoliths, squatting on the upper floors and fouling
their neighbours’ roofs with dung. The outlines of Dog Fenn’s
slum landscape bloated and burst and changed every time Derkhan saw
them. Tunnels were dug into the undercity that stretched in a network
of ruins and sewers and catacombs below New Crobuzon. Ladders left
against a wall one day were hammered into place the next, reinforced
after that, and within a week had become the stairwells to a new
storey, thrown precariously between two drooping roofs. Wherever she
looked, Derkhan could see people lying or running or fighting on the
roofscape.

She stood wearily as
the smell of the Fenn seeped into the slowing carriage.

**

As usual, there was no
one to take her ticket at the station exit. Had it not been for the
profound consequences of discovery, however small the possibility,
Derkhan would never have bothered buying one. She flung it down on
the counter and descended.

The doors of Dog Fenn
Station were always open. They had rusted into position, and ivy had
anchored them against the walls. Derkhan stepped out into the squalls
and stench of Silverback Street. Barrows were thrown against walls
slick with fungus and rotting paste. All manner of wares—some
of surprisingly high quality—were available here. Derkhan
turned and walked deeper into the slum. She was surrounded with a
constant hubbub of shouts, advertising that sounded more like riotous
assembly. For the most part, it was food that was announced.

"Onions! Who’ll
buy my fine onions?"

"Whelks! Stick to
whelks!"

"Broth to warm
yer!"

Other goods and
services were plainly available on every streetcorner.

Whores congregated in
wretched, raucous gangs. Filthy petticoats and tawdry flounces of
stolen silk, faces smeared white and scarlet over bruises and broken
veins. They laughed with mouths full of broken teeth and sniffed tiny
stains of shazbah cut with soot and rat-poison. Some were children
who played with little paper dolls and wooden quoits when no one
watched them, pouted lasciviously and tongued the air whenever a man
walked by.

The Dog Fenn
streetwalkers were the lowest of a despised breed. For decadent,
inventive, obsessive, fetishized corruption and perversion of the
flesh, the connoisseur looked elsewhere, in the red-light zone
between The Crow and Spit Hearth. In Dog Fenn, the quickest,
simplest, cheapest relief was available. The clients here were as
poor and dirty and diseased as the tarts.

At the entrances to
clubs already ejecting comatose drunks, industrial Remade worked as
bouncers. They teetered aggressively on hooves and treads and massive
feet, flexing metal claws. Their faces were brutalized, defensive.
Their eyes would lock at the taunts from a passer-by. They took gobs
of spit in the face, unwilling to risk their jobs. Their fear was
understandable: to Derkhan’s left a cavernous space opened in
an arch below the railway. From the darkness came the reek of shit
and oil, the mechanical clank and human groans of Remade dying in a
starving, drunken, stinking huddle.

A few ancient,
tottering constructs staggered through the streets, clumsily ducking
the rocks and mud thrown by ragged street-children. Graffiti covered
every wall. Rude poems and obscene drawings jostled with slogans from
Runagate Rampant
and anxious prayers:

Half-a-Prayer’s
coming!

Against the Lottery!

Tar and Canker
spread like legs | City wonders where her Lover went | Cos now she’s
being Ravished blind | lay the Prick that is the Government!

The walls of churches
were not spared. The Veruline monks stood in a nervous group and
wiped at the scrawled pornography that had appeared on their chapel.

There were xenians in
the crowds. Some were being harassed, notably the few khepri. Others
laughed and joked and swore with their neighbours. On one corner a
cactus was arguing fiercely with a vodyanoi, and the mainly human
crowd was catcalling equally for both sides.

Children hissed and
called for stivers from Derkhan as she walked past. She ignored them,
did not pull her bag closer to herself and identify herself as a
victim. She stomped aggressively into the heart of Dog Fenn.

The walls around her
suddenly sealed over her head as she passed under rickety bridges and
ersatz rooms thrown up as if by aggregated filth. The air in their
shadow dripped and creaked ominously. A whoop sounded from behind
her, and Derkhan felt a rush of air on her neck as a wyrman dived
acrobatically through the short tunnel and took off again into the
sky, cackling madly. She stumbled as he passed and fell against a
wall, adding her voice to the chorus of abuse that travelled in the
wyrman’s wake.

The architecture she
passed seemed governed by rules quite distinct from those in the rest
of the city. There was no functional sense here. Dog Fenn seemed born
of struggles in which the inhabitants were unimportant. The nodes and
cells of brick and wood and palsied concrete had gone rogue,
spreading like malignant tumours.