Perdido Street Station (26 page)

Gazid sauntered slowly
over towards the bed. He took a sweet wrapper from his pocket and
twisted it around one of his dreamshit doses, dropped it into his
pocket. An idiot grin grew and blossomed across his face as he stared
at the second lump.

"Should
know
what you’re prescribing, ‘Zaac," he whispered.
"That’s
ethical...
" He giggled with delight.

"What’s
that?" shouted Isaac. He began to wriggle his way out from under
the bed. "I’ve found it. I knew there was some money in
the pocket of one of these trousers..."

Lucky Gazid quickly
peeled off the top of the ham roll that lay half-eaten on the desk.
He slipped the dreamshit into a mustard-covered space under a lettuce
leaf. He replaced the top of the roll and stepped away from the desk.

Isaac stood and turned
to him, dusty and smiling. He clutched a fan of notes and some loose
change.

"That’s ten
guineas. ‘Stail, you bargain like a fucking pro..."

Gazid took the
proffered money and backed down the stairs quickly.

"Thanks then
‘Zaac," he said. "Appreciate it."

Isaac was somewhat
taken aback.

"Right then. I’ll
contact you if I need any more dreamshit, all right?"

"Yeah, you do
that, big brother..."

Gazid was all but
scurrying out of the warehouse, pulling the door behind him with a
cursory wave. Isaac heard a peal of absurd giggles from the
retreating form, a thin wittering cluck that tailed out in the
darkness.

Devil’s Tail!
he thought.
I fucking hate dealing with junkies. What a screwed-up
mess he is...
Isaac shook his head and wandered back to the
caterpillar’s cage.

**

The grub was already
starting on the second lump of sticky drug. Unpredictable little
waves of insect happiness spilt over into Isaac’s mind. The
sensation was unpleasant. Isaac backed away. As he watched, the grub
broke off eating and delicately cleaned itself of the sticky residue.
Then it resumed eating, soiling itself again, then preening again.

"Fastidious little
bugger, eh?" muttered Isaac. "Is that good, eh? You
enjoying that? Hmmm? Lovely."

Isaac wandered over to
his desk and picked up his own supper. He turned back to watch the
twisting little multicoloured form as he took a bite of his hardening
roll and sipped the chocolate.

"So what the fuck
are you going to turn into, then?" he muttered to his
experiment. Isaac ate the rest of his roll, grimacing at the slightly
stale bread and the musty salad. At least the chocolate was good.

He wiped his mouth and
returned to the caterpillar’s cage, steeling himself against
the peculiar little empathic waves. Isaac squatted down and watched
the starving creature gorge itself. It was difficult to be sure, but
Isaac thought the grub’s colours were brighter already.

"You’ll be a
good little sideline to keep me from getting obsessed with crisis
theory, eh? Won’t you, you little squirming bugger? Not in any
of the textbooks, are you? Shy? Is that it?"

A blast of twisted
psyche hit Isaac like a crossbow bolt. He staggered and fell over.

"Ow!" he
screeched, and writhed to get away from the cage. "I can’t
hack your empathic bleating, old son..." He picked himself up
and walked towards the bed, rubbing his head. Just as he reached it,
another spasm of alien emotions pulsed violently in his head. His
knees buckled and he fell by the bed, clawing at his temples.

"Oh
shit
!"
He was alarmed. "That’s too much, you’re getting way
too strong..."

Suddenly he could not
speak. He snapped totally still as a third intense attack flooded his
synapses. These were different, he realized, these were not the same
as the querulous little psychic wails from the weird grub ten feet
from him. His mouth was suddenly arid, and tasted of musty salad.
Mulch. Compost. Old fruitcake.

Lumpy mustard.

"Oh no..." he
muttered. His voice shook as realization gripped him. "Oh
no,
no, no,
oh Gazid, you fucking
prick,
you
shit,
I’ll
fucking
kill you
..."

He clutched the edge of
the bed with hands that trembled violently. He was sweating and his
skin looked like stone.

Get into bed,
he
thought desperately.
Get under the covers and ride it out,
thousands of people do this every day for
pleasure
for
Jabber’s sake...

Isaac’s hand
crawled like a drugged tarantula across the folds of the blanket. He
couldn’t work out the best way of getting under the covers,
because of the way they folded in on themselves and around the sheet:
both sets of cloth ripples were so similar that Isaac was suddenly
convinced that they were all part of the same big undulating cloth
unity and that to bisect it would be ghastly, so he rolled his bulk
on top of the covers and found himself swimming in the intricate
twisting folds of cotton and wool. He swam up and down, waving his
arms in an energetic, childish doggy paddle, hacking and spitting and
smacking his lips with a prodigious thirst.

Look at you, you
cretin,
spat one section of his mind in contempt.
How
dignified is this?

But he paid no
attention. He was content to swim gently in place on the bed, panting
like a dying animal, tensing his neck experimentally and prodding his
eyes.

He felt a build-up of
pressure in the back of his mind. He watched a big door, a big cellar
door, set into the wall of the most ignored corner of his cerebellum.
The door was rattling. Something was trying to get out.

Quick,
thought
Isaac.
Bolt it...

But he could feel the
increasing power of whatever was fighting to escape. The door was a
boil, bursting with pus, ready to rupture, a hugely muscled
blank-faced dog, straining ominously and silently against chains, the
sea pounding relentlessly against a crumbling harbour wall.

Something in Isaac’s
mind burst open.

sun pouring in like
a waterfall and I rejoice in it as blooms burst from my shoulders and
my head and chlorophyll rushes invigoratingly through my skin and I
raise great spined arms

don’t touch me
like that I’m not ready you pig

Look at those
steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work
so!

is this

I am proud to be
able to tell you that your father has consented to our match

is this a

and here I swim
under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat
like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my
webbed feet push towards

is this a dream?

light skin food air
metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes
bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods
chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow
darkness

Is this a dream?

**

But Isaac knew this was
not a dream.

A magic lantern was
flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images.
This was no zoetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual
anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied
moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every
fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would
eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical
language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her
and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to
some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent
inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the
mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling
orgiastically and he...

"Oh Jabber..."
He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional
onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast,
they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more
moments of life were occurring at once.

The light was bright,
when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and
invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous,
symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical
pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be,
grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin.
Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had
not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds.
He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were
memories. These were dreams.

Isaac was spattered by
a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no
one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly
into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness.
Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that
flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled
logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he
could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams
and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.

His body was nothing
but a boneless sac of mental effluent. Somewhere way away, he heard
it moan and rock on the bed with a liquid gurgling.

Isaac reeled. Somewhere
in the flickering onslaught of emotion and bathos he discerned a
thin, constant stream of disgust and fear that he recognized as his
own. He struggled towards it through the sludge of imagined and
replayed dramas of consciousness. He touched the tentative dribble of
nausea that was indisputably what
he
was feeling
at that
moment,
held fast, centred himself in it...Isaac clung to it with
radical fervour.

He held to his core,
buffeted by the dreams around him. Isaac flew over a spiky town, a
six-year-old girl laughing delightedly in a language he had never
heard but momentarily understood as his own; he bucked with inexpert
excitement as he dreamed the sex dream of a pubescent boy; he swam
through estuaries and visited strange grottoes and fought ritualistic
battles. He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming
cactacae mind. Houses morphed around him with the dreamlogic that
seemed to be shared by all the sentient races of Bas-Lag.

New Crobuzon appeared
here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined
geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps
between streets that were traversed in seconds.

There were other cities
and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless
dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references:
oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real
as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen
or heard.

The sea of dreams in
which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.

Less of a sea,
he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of
a consomme. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and
giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in
a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally.
I’ll
throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out,
he thought.

The memories and dreams
came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in
the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas
inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging
of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and
head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.

He rolled in a surf of
sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the
rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil
across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming
out their guilty, illicit desires.

Isaac spiralled in a
little whirlpool of anxiety dreams. A human girl about to enter her
exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi
watercraefter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back
from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable
to recall a single line of his speech.

My mind’s a
cauldron,
Isaac thought,
and all these dreams are bubbling
over.

The slop of ideas came
quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto
the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it
quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker,
trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.

It was no use. The
dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He
dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized
that his dream was true.

All he could do was
try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the
dreams was his own.

**

There was a frantic
chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a
skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew
in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.

Abruptly, all the
dreams stopped.

Isaac opened his eyes
too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with
the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his
head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.

The dreams had stopped.
Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.

"By...Jabber’s...
arse...
"
he whispered. The effort made his head ache.

This was absurd. He had
no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything,
his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of
having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the
dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was...he
struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock...it was half past
seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way
onto the bed.