Perdido Street Station (7 page)

"I am." He
held out his hand, spoke slowly. "What is your name?"

The garuda looked
imperiously at his hand, then shook it with a strangely fragile grip.

"Yagharek..."
There was a shrieking stress on the first syllable. The great
creature paused, and shifted uncomfortably, before continuing. It
repeated its name, but this time added an intricate suffix.

Isaac shook his head.

"Is that all your
name?"

"Name...and
title."

Isaac raised an
eyebrow.

"Am I, then, in
the presence of nobility?"

The garuda stared at
him blankly. Eventually it spoke slowly without breaking his gaze.

"I am Too Too
Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected."

Isaac blinked. He
rubbed his face.

"Um...right. You
have to forgive me, Yagharek, I’m not familiar
with...uh...garuda honorifics."

Yagharek shook his
great head slowly.

"You will
understand."

Isaac asked Yagharek to
come upstairs, which he did, slowly and carefully, leaving gouges in
the wooden stairs where he gripped with his great claws. But Isaac
could not persuade him to sit down, or to eat, or to drink.

The garuda stood by
Isaac’s desk, while his host sat and stared up at him.

"So," said
Isaac, "why are you here?"

Again, Yagharek
gathered himself for a moment before he spoke.

"I came to New
Crobuzon days ago. Because this is where the scientists are."

"Where are you
from?"

"Cymek."

Isaac whistled quietly.
He had been right. That was a huge journey. At least a thousand
miles, through that hard, burning land, through dry veldt, across
sea, swamp, steppe. Yagharek must have been driven by some strong,
strong passion.

"What do you know
about New Crobuzon’s scientists?" asked Isaac.

"We have read of
the university. Of the science and industry that moves and moves here
like nowhere else. Of Brock Marsh."

"But where do you
hear all this stuff?"

"From our
library."

Isaac was astonished.
He gaped, then recovered.

"Forgive me,"
he said. "I thought you were nomads."

"Yes. Our library
travels."

And Yagharek told
Isaac, to Isaac’s growing amazement, of the Cymek library. The
great librarian clan who strapped the thousands of volumes into their
trunks and carried them between them as they flew, following the food
and the water in the perpetual, punishing Cymek summer. The enormous
tent village that sprung up where they landed, and the garuda bands
that congregated on the vast, sprawling centre of learning whenever
it was in their reach.

The library was
hundreds of years old, with manuscripts in uncountable languages,
dead and alive: Ragamoll, of which the language of New Crobuzon was a
dialect; hotchi; Fellid vodyanoi and Southern vodyanoi; high khepri;
and a host of others. It even contained a codex, Yagharek claimed
with discernible pride, written in the secret dialect of the
handlingers.

Isaac said nothing. He
was ashamed at his ignorance. His view of the garuda was being torn
up. This was more than a dignified savage.
Time to get me down
my
library and learn about the garuda. Pig ignorant bastard,
he reproached himself.

"Our language has
no written form, but we learn to write and read in several others as
we grow," said Yagharek. "We trade for more books from
travellers and merchants, of whom many have passed through New
Crobuzon. Some are native to this city. It is a place we know well. I
have read the histories, the stories."

"Then you win,
mate, because I know shit about your place," said Isaac
despondently. There was a silence. Isaac looked back up at Yagharek.

"You still haven’t
told me why you’re here."

Yagharek turned away
and looked out of the window. Barges floated aimlessly below.

It was difficult to
discern emotion in Yagharek’s scraping voice, but Isaac thought
he could hear disgust.

"I have crawled
like vermin from hole to hole for a fortnight. I have sought journals
and gossip and information, and it led me to Brock Marsh. And in
Brock Marsh it led me to you. The question that led me has been: ‘Who
can change the powers of material?’ ‘Grimnebulin,
Grimnebulin,’ everyone says. ‘If you have gold,’
they say, ‘he is yours, or if you have no gold but you interest
him, or if you bore him but he pities you, or if a whim takes him.’
They say you are a man who knows the secrets of matter, Grimnebulin."

Yagharek looked
directly at him.

"I have some gold.
I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me."

"Tell me what you
need," said Isaac.

Yagharek looked away
from him again.

"Perhaps you have
flown in a balloon, Grimnebulin. Looked down at roofs, at the earth.
I grew up hunting from the skies. Garuda are a hunting people. We
take our bows and spears and long whips and we scour the air of
birds, the ground of prey. It is what makes us garuda. My feet are
not built to walk your floors, but to close around small bodies and
tear them apart. To grip dry trees and rock pillars between the earth
and the sun."

Yagharek spoke like a
poet. His speech was halting, but his language was that of the epics
and histories he had read, the curious stilted oration of someone who
has learnt a language from old books.

"Flight is not a
luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at
roofs that trap me. I want to look down at this city before I leave
it, Grimnebulin. I want to fly, not once, but whenever I will.

"I want you to
give me back flight."

Yagharek unclipped his
cloak and threw it away across the floor. He stared at Isaac with
shame and defiance. Isaac gasped.

Yagharek had no wings.

Strapped across his
back was an intricate frame of wooden struts and leather straps that
bobbed idiotically behind him as he turned. Two great carved planks
sprouted from a kind of leather jerkin below his shoulders, jutting
way above his head, where they hinged and dangled down to his knees.
They mimicked wing-bones. There was no skin or feathers or cloth or
leather stretched between them, they were no kind of gliding
apparatus. They were only a disguise, a trick, a prop on which to
drape Yagharek’s incongruous cloak, to make it seem as if he
had wings.

Isaac reached out for
them. Yagharek stiffened, then steeled himself and let Isaac touch
them.

Isaac shook his head in
astonishment. He caught a glimpse of ragged scar tissue on Yagharek’s
back, until the garuda turned abruptly to face him.

"Why?"
breathed Isaac.

Yagharek’s face
creased slowly as he screwed up his eyes. A thin, utterly human moan
started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird of
prey’s melancholy war-cry, loud and monotonous and miserable
and lonely. Isaac gazed on in alarm as the cry became a barely
comprehensible shout.

"Because this is
my
shame!"
screamed Yagharek. He was silent for a moment,
then he spoke quietly again.

"This is my
shame."

He unclipped the
uncomfortable-looking bulk of wood from behind him, and it fell with
a flat clatter to the floor.

He was nude to the
waist. His body was thin and fine and tight, with a healthy
emaciation. Without the looming bulk of his fake wings behind him, he
looked small and vulnerable.

He turned slowly, and
Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought
into view.

Two long trenches of
flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with
tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like
small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of
ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long,
and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face
wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough,
curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been
sawed
from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long,
drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.

Thinly hidden knobs of
bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.

"Who did this?"
breathed Isaac.
The stories were right,
he thought.
The
Cymek is a savage, savage land.

There was a long
silence before Yagharek responded.

"I...I did this."

At first Isaac thought
he had misunderstood.

"What do you mean?
How the fuck could you...?"

"I brought this
onto me." Yagharek was shouting. "This is justice. It is I
who did this."

"This is a fucking
punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could...what did you do?"

"Do you judge
garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of
the Remade..."

"Don’t try
to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no
stomach for the law in this city...I’m just trying to
understand what happened to you..."

Yagharek sighed, with a
shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet
and pained, a duty that he resented.

"I was too
abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There...was a madness...I was
mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act..." His words
broke down into avian moans.

"What did you do?"
Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity.

"This language
cannot express my crime. In my tongue..." Yagharek stopped for a
moment. "I will try to translate. In my tongue they said...they
were right...I was guilty of choice-theft...choice-theft in the
second degree...with utter disrespect."

Yagharek was gazing
back at the window. He held his head high, but he would not meet
Isaac’s eyes.

"That is why they
deemed me Too Too Abstract. That is why I am not worthy of respect.
That is who I am now. I am no longer Concrete Individual and
Respected Yagharek. He is gone. I told you my name, and my
name-title. I am Too Too Abstract Yagharek Not To Be Respected. That
is who I will always be, and I will be true enough to tell you."

Isaac shook his head as
Yagharek sat slowly on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He cut a
forlorn figure. Isaac stared at him for a long time before speaking.

"I have to tell
you..." said Isaac. "I don’t really...uh...Plenty of
my clients are...not entirely on the right side of the law, shall we
say? Now, I’m not going to pretend that I even slightly
understand what you did, but as far as I’m concerned it’s
not my business. Like you said, there’s no words for your crime
in this city: I don’t think I could ever understand what it was
you’d done wrong." Isaac spoke slowly and seriously, but
his mind was already racing away. He began to speak with more
animation.

"And your
problem...is interesting." Representations of forces and lines
of power, of femtomorphic resonances and energy fields were beginning
to leap into his consciousness. "It’s easy enough to get
you
into
the air. Balloons, force manipulation and whatnot.
Even easy to get you up there more than once. But to get you up there
whenever you want it,
under your
own steam...
which is
what you’re after, yes?" Yagharek nodded. Isaac stroked
his chin.

"Godspit...!
Yes...now that is a much more...interesting conundrum."

Isaac was beginning to
retreat into his computations. One prosaic part of his mind recalled
that he had no appointments for some time, and that meant he could
immerse himself in research for a little while. Another pragmatic
level did its job, evaluating the importance and urgency of his
outstanding work. A couple of piss-easy analyses of compounds that he
could put off more or less indefinitely; a half-promise to synthesize
an elixir or two—easy to get out of...apart from that, it was
only his own research into vodyanoi watercraeft. Which he could put
to one side.

No, no, no!
he
contradicted himself suddenly.
Don’t have to put watercraeft
aside...I can integrate it! It’s all about elements arsing
about, misbehaving...liquid that stands free, heavy matter that
invades the air...there’s got to be something there...some
common denominator...

With an effort he
brought himself back to his laboratory, realized that Yagharek was
staring at him impassively.

"I’m
interested in your problem," he said simply. Immediately
Yagharek reached into a pouch. He held out a huge handful of twisted,
dirty gold nuggets. Isaac opened his eyes wide.

"Well...uh, thank
you. I’ll certainly accept some expenses, hourly rates, etc..."
Yagharek handed Isaac the pouch.

Isaac managed not to
whistle as he weighed it in his hand. He peered into it. Layer on
heavy layer of sifting gold. It was undignified, but Isaac felt
almost spellbound. This represented more money than he had ever seen
in one place, enough to cover a lot of research costs and still live
well for months.

Yagharek was no
businessman, that was certain. He could have offered a third, a
quarter of this and still had almost anyone in Brock Marsh panting.
He should have kept most of it back, dangled it if interest waned.

Maybe he
has
kept most of it back,
thought Isaac, and his eyes widened even
further.

"How do I reach
you?" said Isaac, still gazing at his gold. "Where are you
living?"

Yagharek shook his head
and was silent. "Well, I have to be able to reach you..."

"I will come to
you," said the garuda. "Every day, every two days, every
week...I will make sure you do not forget my case."

"No danger of
that, I assure you. Are you really saying I can’t get messages
to you?"