Perdido Street Station (71 page)

I am not the tiring
one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not
the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city
introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never
was.

I am none of those.
I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

**

I am afraid of the
Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the
Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto,
dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to
replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

To ask the question
is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It
is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.

And if it
were
the desert, if it were a gateway to the deepest Cymek, to the dry
forests and fertile swampland, to the repository of sand-hidden life
and the great nomadic garuda library, if the Glasshouse were more
than a shadow, if it were the desert it feigns to be, it would still
not be my home.

That place does not
exist.

**

I shall wander for a
night and a day. I will retrace the steps that once I made, in the
shade of the railways. I will stalk the city’s monstrous
geography and find the streets that bore me here, the squat channels
in the brick to which I owe my life and self.

I will find the
tramps who shared my food, if they are not dead from disease or
stabbed for their piss-stained shoes. They became my tribe, atomized
and ruined and broken, but still some kind of tribe. Their numb lack
of interest in me—in anything—was refreshing after days
of careful skulking and an hour or two of ostentatious wandering in
my agonizing wooden prostheses. I owe them nothing, those tedious
alcohol- and drug-fucked heads, but I will find them again for my own
sake, not theirs.

I feel as if I walk
these streets for the last time.

Am I to die?

There are two
possibilities.

I will help
Grimnebulin and we will defeat these moths, these horrific
night-creatures, these soul-drinkers, and he will create of me a
battery. He will reward me; he will charge me up like a phlogistic
cell and I will fly. As I think it I am climbing. I reach higher and
higher on these girder-steps, climbing the city like a ladder to gaze
at its tawdry, teeming night. I feel the flabby stubs of my wing
muscles try to flap with a pathetic rudimentary motion. I will not
rise on tides of air pushed down by feathers, but I will flex my mind
like a wing and soar on channels of power, transformative energy,
thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres, that
Grimnebulin calls crisis.

I will be a marvel.

Or I will fail and
die. I will fall and be skewered on harsh metal, or my dreams will be
sucked from my mind and fed to some hatchling devil.

Will I feel it? Will
I live on in the milk? Will I know that I am being drunk?

**

The sun is creeping
into view. I am tiring.

I know that I should
have stayed. If I am to be anything real, something more than the
mute, imbecilic presence I have so far been, I should stay and
intervene and plan and prepare and nod at their suggestions,
supplement them with my own. I am, I was, a hunter. I can stalk the
monsters, the horrendous beasts.

But I could not. I
tried to say my sorries, to let Grimnebulin—even Blueday—know
that I am one with them, that I am part of the gang. The crew. The
posse. The moth-hunters. But it rang hollow in my skull.

I will look and find
myself, and then I will know if I can tell them that. And if not,
what I can say instead.

I will arm myself. I
will bring weapons. I will find a knife, a whip like that I used to
wield. Even if I find myself an outsider, I will not let them die
unaided. I will sell our lives dear to the thirsting things.

**

I hear sad music.
There is a moment of uncanny quiet, when the trains and the barges
pass away from me in my eyrie, and the grinding of their engines ebbs
away and the dawn is momentarily uncovered.

Someone at the
river’s edge, in some garret, is playing the fiddle. It is a
haunting strain, a tremulous dirge of semitones and counterpoints
over a broken rhythm. These do not sound like local harmonies.

I recognize the
sound. I have heard it before. On the boat that took me across the
Meagre Sea, and before that in Shankell.

There is no escaping
my southern past, it seems.

It is the dawn
greeting of the fisherwomen of Perrick Nigh and the Mandrake Islands,
way to the south. My unseen accompanist is welcoming the sun.

The few New Crobuzon
Perrickish live mostly in Echomire, yet here she is, three miles
upstream as the river twists, waking the great Day fisher with her
exquisite playing.

She plays to me for
a few more moments, before the noise of the morning takes her sound
away, and I am left clinging to the bridge, listening to the boom of
klaxons and the whistle from the trains.

That sound from far
away continues, but I cannot hear it. The noises of New Crobuzon fill
my ears. I will follow them, welcome them. I will let them surround
me. I will dive into the hot, city life. Under arch and over stone,
through the sparse bone forest of the Ribs, into the brick burrows of
Badside and Dog Fenn, through the booming industry of Gross Coil.
Like Lemuel sniffing for contacts I will retrace all the steps I have
made. And here and there, I hope, among the spires and the crammed
architecture, I will touch the immigrants, the refugees, the
outsiders who remake New Crobuzon every day. This place with bastard
culture. This mongrel city.

I will hear the
sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet
stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan
or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea
printer-captain...A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home.

All around me will
be New Crobuzon, seeping in through my skin.

**

When I return to
Griss Twist, my companions will be waiting, and we will liberate this
hijacked city. Thanklessly and unseen.

The streets of
Riverskin inclined gently upwards towards the Glasshouse. The houses
were old and tall, with rotting wooden frames and walls of damp
plaster. Every rain saturated and blistered them, sent slates
cascading from the steep roofs as rusted nails dissolved. Riverskin
seemed to sweat, gently, in the slow heat.

The southern half of
Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It
was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a
mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of
vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a
little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside
of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of
the city’s small number of more exotic races. There was a shop
run by a hotchi family in Bek-man Avenue, their spines carefully
filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a
homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and
staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.

But northern Riverskin
was very different. It was quieter, more sullen. It was the preserve
of the cactacae.

Large as the Glasshouse
was, it could not possibly contain all the cactacae of the city, not
even those who kept faith with tradition. At least two-thirds of New
Crobuzon’s cactus people lived outside its protective glass.
They packed the Riverskin slums, and a few other quarters in places
like Syriac and Abrogate Green. But Riverskin was the centre of their
city, and there they mixed in equal numbers with human locals. They
were the cactus underclass, who entered the Glasshouse to shop and
worship, but were forced to live in the infidel city.

Some rebelled. Angry
cactacae youths vowed never to enter the Glasshouse which had
betrayed them. They referred to it ironically by an older, obsolete
name: the Nursery. They scarred themselves and fought in brutal,
pointless and exciting gangfights. Sometimes they terrorized the
neighbourhood, mugging and stealing from the humans and cactacae
elders who shared their streets.

Outside, in Riverskin,
the cactus people were surly and quiet. They worked for their human
or vodyanoi bosses without demur or enthusiasm. They did not
communicate with their workmates of other races in anything more than
curt grunts. Their behaviour inside the walls of the Glasshouse was
never seen.

**

The Glasshouse itself
was a huge, flattened dome. On the ground, its diameter was more than
a quarter of a mile. At its peak, it was eighty yards high. Its base
was angled to sit tight on the listing streets of Riverskin.

The framework was
wrought in black iron, a great thick skeleton decorated with
occasional curlicues and flourishes. It bulged out over the Riverskin
houses, visible from a long way off on the top of its low hill.
Emerging in two concentric circles from its skin were colossal
girdered arms, nearly the size of the Ribs, suspending the dome and
taking its weight on great cords of twisted metal.

The further away it was
seen from, the more impressive the Glasshouse appeared. From the
wooded top of Flag Hill, looking down across two rivers, the
railways, the skyrails and four miles of grotesque urban sprawl, the
facets of the dome glinted with clean shards of light. From the
surrounding streets, however, the multitude of cracks and dark spaces
where glass had fallen in were visible. The dome had been repaired
only once in its three centuries of existence.

From the base of the
dome the age of the structure showed. It was decrepit. Paint curled
in great tongues away from the metal-work, and rust had eaten it like
worms. For the first fifteen or so feet above the ground, the
panes—each nearly seven feet square at the bottom, descending
in width like pieces of pie as they approached the vertex—were
filled with the same crumbling, painted iron. Above that, the glass
was dirty and impure, tinted green and blue and beige in chance
patchwork. It was reinforced, and was supposed to be able to support
the weight of at least two decent-sized cactacae. Even so, several
panes were broken and empty of glass, and many more were laced with a
filigree of cracks.

The dome had been built
without much concern for the surrounding houses. The pattern of
streets that surrounded it continued until they reached its solid
metal base. Those two or three or four houses that had been in the
way of the dome’s edges had been crushed, and then the rows
continued beneath the glass canopy, at a variety of random angles.

The cactacae had simply
enclosed an existing clutch of New Crobuzon streets.

Over the decades, the
architecture within the dome had been altered to adapt the once-human
houses to cactacae tenants, tearing down some structures and
replacing them with strange new edifices. But the broad layout and
much of the structure was said to remain, exactly as it was before
the dome existed.

There was one entrance
to the dome, at the southern tip of its base in Yashur Plaza. At the
opposite end of its circumference was its exit on Bytrash Street, a
steep road that looked down onto the river. Cactus law stated that
entrance to and exit from the Glasshouse was only by these portals
respectively. This was unlucky for the cactacae who lived just
outside in sight of one or other of the portals. Getting in, for
example, might take two minutes, but returning home from the exit
would involve a long, tangled walk home.

Each morning at five
the gateways were thrown open, onto the short enclosed passage
beyond, and each evening at midnight they were closed. They were
guarded by a small unit of armoured guards, hefting huge war-cleavers
and the powerful cactacae rivebow.

Like their dumb, rooted
cousins, the cactacae had thick, fibrous vegetable skin. It was taut
and punctured easily, but it healed fast, in ugly, thick scars—most
cactacae were covered in harmless ganglions of scab tissue. It took a
lot of thrusts or a lucky shot into the organs to have any real
damaging effect. Bullets or arrows or quarrels were usually
ineffective against cactacae. Which was why the cactus soldiers
carried rivebows.

The designers of the
first rivebow had been human. The weapons had been used during the
ghastly premiership of Mayor Collodd—they had been carried by
the human guards of the mayor’s cactus farm. But after the
reforming Sapience Bill dissolved the farm and granted cactacae
something approaching citizenship, the pragmatic cactus elders had
realized this would be an invaluable weapon to keep their own people
in line. Since then, the bow had been improved many times, this time
by cactacae engineers.

The rivebow was an
enormous crossbow, too large and heavy for a human effectively to
operate. It fired not bolts, but chakris; flat metal disks with
serrated or razored edges, or metal stars with curved arms. A toothed
hole in the chakri’s centre slotted neatly onto a little bud of
metal that emerged from the rivebow shaft. When the trigger was
pulled, the wire in the shaft snapped violently to, pulling the metal
bud at massive speed, intricate gears grinding together to send it
spinning at an enormous rate. At the end of the enclosed channel the
whirling bolt slipped sharply down and out from the chakri’s
hole, and the chakri was discharged as fast as a slingshot stone,
spinning like the blade of a circular saw.