Perdido Street Station (2 page)

He lay hugely in the
bed without opening his eyes. He heard Lin walk across the room and
felt the slight listing of the floorboards. The garret was filled
with pungent smoke. Isaac salivated.

Lin clapped twice. She
knew when Isaac woke. Probably because he closed his mouth, he
thought, and sniggered without opening his eyes.

"Still sleeping,
shush, poor little Isaac ever so tired," he whimpered, and
snuggled down like a child. Lin clapped again, once, derisory, and
walked away.

He groaned and rolled
over.

"Termagant!"
he moaned after her. "Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you
win, you, you...uh...virago, you spit-fire..." He rubbed his
head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at
him without turning around.

She stood with her back
to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot drops of oil leapt
from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of Isaac’s
belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair burst
from him abundantly.

Lin was hairless. Her
muscles were tight under her red skin, each distinct. She was like an
anatomical atlas. Isaac studied her in cheerful lust.

His arse itched. He
scratched under the blanket, rooting as shameless as a dog. Something
burst under his nail, and he withdrew his hand to examine it. A tiny
half-crushed grub waved helplessly on the end of his finger. It was a
refflick, a harmless little khepri parasite.
The thing must have
been rather bewildered by
my
juices,
Isaac thought, and
flicked his finger clean.

"Refflick, Lin,"
he said. "Bath time."

Lin stamped in
irritation.

New Crobuzon was a huge
plague pit, a morbific city. Parasites, infection and rumour were
uncontainable. A monthly chymical dip was a necessary prophylactic
for the khepri, if they wanted to avoid itches and sores.

Lin slid the contents
of the pan onto a plate and set it down, across from her own
breakfast. She sat and gestured for Isaac to join her. He rose from
the bed and stumbled across the room. He eased himself onto the small
chair, wary of splinters.

Isaac and Lin sat naked
on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was conscious of their
pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful,
strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in the light
from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked by
cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and
detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting
opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her
chitinous head in silhouette.

They ignored their food
and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him:
Good
morning, lover.
Then she began to eat, still looking at him.

It was when she ate
that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and
an affirmation. As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of
emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out,
guilty desire.

Light glinted in Lin’s
compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and
gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner
mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.

Isaac watched the huge
iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her
breakfast.

He watched her swallow,
saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued
smoothly into her human neck...not that she would have accepted that
description.
Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads
of shaved gibbons,
she had once told him.

He smiled and dangled
his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped
his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her
headlegs at him and signed,
My monster.

I am a pervert,
thought Isaac,
and so is she.

**

Breakfast conversation
was generally one-sided: Lin could sign with her hands while she ate,
but Isaac’s attempts to talk and eat simultaneously made for
incomprehensible noises and food debris on the table. Instead they
read; Lin an artists’ newsletter, Isaac whatever came to hand.
He reached out between mouthfuls and grabbed books and papers, and
found himself reading Lin’s shopping list. The item
a
handful of pork slices
was ringed and underneath her exquisite
calligraphy was a scrawled question in much cruder script:
Got
company??? Nice bit of pork goes down a treat!!!

Isaac waved the paper
at Lin. "What’s this filthy arse on about?" he
yelled, spraying food. His outrage was amused but genuine.

Lin read it and
shrugged.

Knows I don’t
eat meat. Knows I’ve got a guest for breakfast. Wordplay on
"pork."

"Yes, thanks,
lover, I got that bit. How does he know you’re a vegetarian? Do
you two often engage in this witty banter?"

Lin stared at him for a
moment without responding.

Knows because I
don’t buy meat.
She shook her head at the stupid question.
Don’t worry: only ever
banter
on paper. Doesn’t
know I’m bug.

Her deliberate use of
the slur annoyed Isaac.

"Dammit, I wasn’t
insinuating anything..." Lin’s hand waggled, the
equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Isaac howled in irritation. "Godshit,
Lin! Not everything I say is about fear of discovery!"

Isaac and Lin had been
lovers nearly two years. They had always tried not to think too hard
about the rules of their relationship, but the longer they were
together the more this strategy of avoidance became impossible.
Questions as yet unasked demanded attention. Innocent remarks and
askance looks from others, a moment of contact too long in public—a
note from a grocer—everything was a reminder that they were, in
some contexts, living a secret. Everything was made fraught.

They had never said,
We
are lovers,
so they had never had to say,
We will not disclose
our relationship to all, we will hide from some.
But it had been
clear for months and months that this was the case.

Lin had begun to hint,
with snide and acid remarks, that Isaac’s refusal to declare
himself her lover was at best cowardly, at worst bigoted. This
insensitivity annoyed him. He had, after all, made the nature of his
relationship clear with his close friends, as Lin had with hers. And
it was all far, far easier for her.

She was an artist. Her
circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians
and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They
delighted in the scandalous and the outre. In the tea-houses and bars
of Salacus Fields, Lin’s escapades—broadly hinted at,
never denied, never made explicit—would be the subject of
louche discussion and innuendo. Her love-life was an avant-garde
transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last
season, or ‘Snot Art! the year before that.

And yes, Isaac could
play that game. He was known in that world, from long before his days
with Lin. He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable
thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in
experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran
the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with
whomever and whatever he liked, surely!

That was his persona in
Salacus Fields, where his relationship with Lin was an open secret,
where he enjoyed being more or less open, where he would put his arm
around her in the bars and whisper to her as she sucked sugar-coffee
from a sponge. That was his story, and it was at least half true.

He had walked out of
the university ten years ago. But only because he realized to his
misery that he was a terrible teacher.

He had looked out at
the quizzical faces, listened to the frantic scrawling of the
panicking students, and realized that with a mind that ran and
tripped and hurled itself down the corridors of theory in anarchic
fashion, he could learn himself, in haphazard lurches, but he could
not impart the understanding he so loved. He had hung his head in
shame and fled.

In another twist to the
myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank,
was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who
had nixed Isaac’s research less because it was unorthodox than
because it was going nowhere. Isaac could be brilliant, but he was
undisciplined. Vermishank had played him like a fish, making him beg
for work as a freelance-researcher on terrible pay, but with limited
access to the university laboratories.

And it was this, his
work, which kept Isaac circumspect about his lover.

These days, his
relationship with the university was tenuous. Ten years of pilfering
had equipped him with a fine laboratory of his own; his income was
largely made up of dubious contracts with New Crobuzon’s less
wholesome citizens, whose needs for sophisticated science constantly
astounded him.

But Isaac’s
research—unchanged in its aims over all those years—could
not proceed in a vacuum. He had to publish. He had to debate. He had
to argue, to attend conferences—as the rogue, the rebellious
son. There were great advantages to renegacy.

But the academy did not
just play at being old-fashioned. Xenian students had only been
admitted as degree candidates in New Crobuzon for twenty years. To
cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather
than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was
not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the
conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What
scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went
through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as
beyond the pale.

All of which Lin took
badly.

You hide us so you
can publish articles for people you despise,
she had signed at
him once after they had made love.

Isaac, in sour moments,
wondered how she would react if the art-world threatened to ostracize
her.

**

That morning the lovers
managed to kill the nascent argument with jokes and apologies and
compliments and lust. Isaac smiled at Lin as he struggled into his
shirt, and her headlegs rippled sensuously.

"What are you up
to today?" he asked.

Going to Kinken.
Need some colourberries. Going to exhibition in Howl Barrow. Working
tonight,
she added mock-ominously.

"I suppose I won’t
be seeing you for a while, then?" Isaac grinned. Lin shook her
head. Isaac counted off days on his fingers. "Well...can we have
dinner at The Clock and Cockerel on, uh...Shunday? Eight o’clock?"

Lin pondered. She held
his hands while she thought.

Gorgeous,
she
signed coyly. She left it ambiguous as to whether she meant dinner or
Isaac.

They piled the pots and
plates into the bucket of cold water in the corner and left them. As
Lin gathered her notes and sketches to go, Isaac tugged her gently
onto him, on the bed. He kissed her warm red skin. She turned in his
arms. She angled up on one elbow and, as he watched, the dark ruby of
her carapace opened slowly while her headlegs splayed. The two halves
of her headshell quivered slightly, held as wide as they would go.
From beneath their shade she spread her beautiful, useless little
beetle wings.

She pulled his hand
towards them gently, invited him to stroke the fragile things,
totally vulnerable, an expression of trust and love unparalleled for
the khepri.

The air between them
charged. Isaac’s cock stiffened.

He traced the branching
veins in her gently vibrating wings with his fingers, watched the
light that passed through them refract into mother-of-pearl shadows.

He rucked up her skirt
with his other hand, slid his fingers up her thigh. Her legs opened
around his hand and closed, trapped it. He whispered at her, filthy
and loving invitations.

The sun shifted above
them, sending shadows of the window-pane and clouds moving uneasily
through the room. The lovers did not notice the day move.

It was 11 o’clock
before they disentangled. Isaac glanced at his pocket-watch and
stumbled around gathering his clothes, his mind wandering to his
work. Lin spared them the awkward negotiations that would surround
leaving the house together. She bent and caressed the back of Isaac’s
neck with her antennae, raising goose-bumps, and then she left while
he still fumbled with his boots.

Her rooms were nine
floors up. She descended the tower; past the unsafe eighth floor; the
seventh with its birdlime carpet and soft jackdaw susurrus; the old
lady who never emerged on the sixth; and on down past petty thieves
and steel workers and errand-girls and knife-grinders.

The door was on the
other side of the tower from Aspic Hole itself. Lin emerged into a
quiet street, a mere passageway to and from the stalls of the bazaar.

She walked away from
the noisy arguments and the profiteering towards the gardens of Sobek
Croix. Ranks of cabs were always waiting at their entrance. She knew
that some of the drivers (usually the Remade) were liberal or
desperate enough to take khepri custom.

As she passed through
Aspic the blocks and houses grew less salubrious. The ground
undulated and rose slowly to the southwest, where she was heading.
The treetops of Sobek Croix rose like thick smoke above the slates of
the dilapidated housing around her; beyond their leaves poked the
stubby high-rise skyline of Ketch Heath.

Lin’s bulging
mirrored eyes saw the city in a compound visual cacophony. A million
tiny sections of the whole, each minuscule hexagon segment ablaze
with sharp colour and even sharper lines, super-sensitive to
differentials of light, weak on details unless she focused hard
enough to hurt slightly. Within each segment, the dead scales of
decaying walls were invisible to her, architecture reduced to
elemental slabs of colour. But a precise story was told. Each visual
fragment, each part, each shape, each shade of colour, differed from
its surroundings in infinitesimal ways that told her about the state
of the whole structure. And she could taste chymicals in the air,
could tell how many of which race lived in which building: she could
feel vibrations of air and sound with precision enough to converse in
a crowded room or feel a train pass overhead.