"Perdido Street Station" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)Part Two. Physiognomies of FlightChapter SixNew Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity. Aerostats oozed from cloud to cloud above it like slugs on cabbages. Militia-pods streaked through the heart of the city to its outlands, the cables that held them twanging and vibrating like guitar strings hundreds of feet in the air. Wyrmen clawed their way above the city leaving trails of defecation and profanity. Pigeons shared the air with jackdaws and hawks and sparrows and escaped parakeets. Flying ants and wasps, bees and bluebottles, butterflies and mosquitoes fought airborne war against a thousand predators, aspises and dheri that snapped at them on the wing. Golems thrown together by drunken students beat mindlessly through the sky on clumsy wings made of leather or paper or fruit-rind, falling apart as they flew. Even the trains that moved innumerable women and men and commodities around New Crobuzon’s great carcass fought to stay above the houses, as if they were afraid of the putrefaction of architecture. The city thrust upwards massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St. Jabber’s Mound like scree. The smoky black walls of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the sky. The building was knotted with obscure tubes and vast rivets. It throbbed with the ancient boilers deep within. Rooms used for uncertain purposes poked out of the main body of the colossal edifice with scant regard for buttresses or braces. Somewhere inside, in the Chamber, out of reach of the sky, Rudgutter and countless droning bores strutted. The Parliament was like a mountain poised on the verge of architectural avalanche. It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. The clouds swirled in the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station. An industrial castle, bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station was the militia’s Spike, that loomed over the other turrets, dwarfing them, tugged in seven directions by taut skyrails. But for all its height the Spike was only an annex of the enormous station. The architect had been incarcerated, quite mad, seven years after Perdido Street Station was completed. He was a heretic, it was said, intent on building his own god. Five enormous brick mouths gaped to swallow each of the city’s trainlines. The tracks unrolled on the arches like huge tongues. Shops and torture chambers and workshops and offices and empty spaces all stuffed the fat belly of the building, which seemed, from a certain angle, in a certain light, to be bracing itself, taking its weight on the Spike, preparing to leap into the enormous sky it so casually invaded. Isaac did not look with eyes clouded by romance. He saw flight wherever he looked in the city (his eyes were swollen: behind them buzzed a brain wired with new formulae and facts all furnished to slip gravity’s clutches), and he saw that it was not an escape to a better place. Flight was a secular, profane thing: simply a passage from one part of New Crobuzon to another. He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic. Isaac lay on his bed and gazed out of his window. He followed one flying speck after another with his eyes. Scattered around him on the bed, spilling onto the floor like a paper tide, were books and articles, typewritten notes and long sheaves of his excited scrawl. Classic monographs nestled under the musings of cranks. Biology and philosophy jostled for space on his desk. He had sniffed his way along a contorted bibliographical trail like a bloodhound. Some titles could not be ignored: Isaac scratched his nose and sipped the beer balancing on his chest through a straw. Only two days working on Yagharek’s commission, and the city was completely changed for him. He wondered if it would ever change back. He rolled onto his side, rummaged around underneath him to shift the papers that were making him uncomfortable. He tugged free a collection of obscure manuscripts and a sheaf of the heliotypes he had taken of Teafortwo. Isaac held those prints in front of him, examined the intricacies of the wyrmen musculature that he had made Teafortwo show off. Hope it’s not too long, Isaac thought. He had spent the day reading and taking notes, grunting politely when David or Lublamai yelled greetings or questions or offers of lunch up to him. He had munched some bread and cheese and peppers which Lublamai had dumped on his desk in front of him. He had gradually shed layers of clothing as the day grew warmer and the little boilers on all the equipment heated the air. Shirts and kerchiefs littered the floor by his desk. Isaac was waiting for delivery of supplies. He had realized early in his reading that for the purposes of this commission there was a massive hole in his scientific knowledge. Of all the arcana, biology was his weakest. He was quite at home reading about levitation and countergeotropic thaumaturgy and his beloved unified field theory, but the prints of Teafortwo had made him realize how little he understood the biomechanics of simple flight. The flippant idea had suddenly taken a more serious shape. He had sat and pondered for a while at his desk, before taking off into the darkness of Brock Marsh. The most notorious pub between the Tar and the Canker lurked in the shadow of a huge Palgolak church. It was a few dank streets back from Danechi’s Bridge, which joined Brock Marsh to Bonetown. Most of the denizens of Brock Marsh, of course, were bakers or street-sweepers or prostitutes, or any of a host of other professions unlikely ever to cast a hex or look into a test-tube in their lives. Similarly, the inhabitants of Bonetown were, for the most part, no more interested in grossly or systematically flouting the law than most of New Crobuzon. Nevertheless, Brock Marsh would always be the Science Quarter: Bonetown the Thieves’ District. And there where those two influences met-esoteric, furtive, romanticized and sometimes dangerous-was The Moon’s Daughters. With a sign depicting the two small satellites that orbited the moon as pretty, rather tawdry-looking young women, and a façade painted in deep scarlet, The Moon’s Daughters was shabby but attractive. Inside, its clientele consisted of the more adventurous of the city’s bohemians: artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia informants jostling under the eyes of the pub’s proprietor, Red Kate. Kate’s nickname was a reference to her ginger hair, and, Isaac had always thought, a damning indictment of the creative bankruptcy of her patrons. She was physically powerful, with a sharp eye for who to bribe and who to ban, who to punch and who to ply with free beer. For these reasons (as well, Isaac suspected, as a small proficiency with a couple of subtle thaumaturgical glamours), The Moon’s Daughters negotiated a successful, precarious trail evading any of the competing protection rackets in the area. The militia raided Kate’s establishment only rarely and perfunctorily. Her beer was good. She did not ask what was being discussed in huddles and knots at corner tables. That night, Kate had greeted Isaac with a brief wave, which he had returned. He had gazed around the smoky room, but the person he had been seeking was absent. He had made his way to the bar. “Kate,” he shouted over the din. “No sign of Lemuel?” She shook her head and handed him, unbidden, a Kingpin ale. He paid and turned to face the room. He was rather thrown. The Moon’s Daughters was Lemuel Pigeon’s office, as near as dammit. He could usually be relied on to be here every night, wheeling, dealing, taking a cut. Isaac guessed he was out on some dubious job or other. He paced through the tables aimlessly, looking for someone he knew. Over in the corner, grinning beatifically at someone, wearing the yellow robes of his order, was Gedrecsechet, the librarian of the Palgolak church. Isaac brightened and headed towards him. He was amused to see that the forearms of the scowling youth arguing with Ged were tattooed with the interlocking wheels that proclaimed her a Godmech Cog, doubtless attempting to convert the ungodly. As Isaac drew closer the argument became audible. “…if you approach the world and God with one iota of the Ged grinned at the spotty girl and opened his mouth to reply. Isaac interrupted. “Pardon me, Ged, for butting in. Just wanted to say to you, young Flywheel, whatever you call yourself…” The Cog tried to protest, but Isaac cut her off. “No, shut up. I’ll say this very clearly… Ged was giggling. His opponent was swallowing, trying to maintain her anger, but she was intimidated by Isaac’s bulk and cheerful pugnacity. She gathered herself to go with a semblance of dignity. As she stood, she opened her mouth with some parting shot she had clearly been preparing. Isaac pre-empted her. “Speak and I’ll break your teeth,” he advised amiably. The Cog closed her mouth and stalked off. When she was gone from view both Isaac and Ged burst into laughter. “Why do you put up with them, Ged?” howled Isaac. Ged, crouched like a frog before the low table, rocked back and forth on his legs and arms, his big tongue flapping in and out of his huge loose mouth. “I just feel Ged was generally held to be the most anomolously good-humoured vodyanoi anyone had ever met. He had absolutely none of the glowering snappiness typical of that cantankerous race. “Anyway,” he continued, calming down a little, “I don’t mind the Cogs nearly as much as some. They don’t have half the rigour they think they do, of course, but at least they’re taking things seriously. And at least they’re not…I don’t know…Compline or Codling Brood, or something.” Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once. His congregation were human and vodyanoi in roughly equal proportions. He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information. Isaac worshipped no gods. He did not believe in the omniscience or omnipotence claimed for a few, or even the existence of many. Certainly there were creatures and essences that inhabited different aspects of existence, and certainly some of them were powerful, in human terms. But worshipping them seemed to him rather a craven activity. Even he, though, had a soft spot for Palgolak. He rather hoped the fat bastard Palgolak’s library was at least the equal to that of the New Crobuzon University. It did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or the night, and there were very, very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter into their library. Which was what Ged was gently complaining about. The New Crobuzon Palgolak Library had the best collection of religious manuscripts known in the world of Bas-Lag, and it attracted pilgrims from a huge variety of religious traditions and factions. They thronged the northern ends of Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth, all the worshipping races of the world, in robes and masks, sporting whips, leashes, magnifying glasses, the whole gamut of religious paraphernalia. Some of the pilgrims were less than pleasant. The viciously anti-xenian Codling Brood, for example, was growing in the city, and Ged saw it as his unfortunate sacred duty to assist these racists who spat and called him “toad” and “riverpig” in between tracing passages from their texts. Compared to them, the egalitarian Godmech Cogs were a harmless sect, even if their belief in the mechanicity of One True God was aggressively asserted. Isaac and Ged had had many long arguments over the years, mostly theological, but also over literature and art and politics. Isaac respected the friendly vodyanoi. He knew him to be fervent in his religious duty of reading and, accordingly, hugely knowledgeable about any subject Isaac could think of. He was always at first a little circumspect with “Ged,” Isaac asked. “What can you tell me about the garuda?” Ged shrugged, and he grinned with pleasure at imparting what he knew. “Not very much. Bird-people. Live in the Cymek, and the north of Shotek, and the west of Mordiga, reputedly. Maybe also on some of the other continents. Hollow bones.” Ged’s eyes were fixed, focused on the remembered pages of whatever xenthropological work he was quoting. “Cymek garuda are egalitarian… Isaac nodded. Ged’s eyes glazed with an almost obscene look of hunger. “Godspit, I’d love to get to that. It’ll never happen.” He looked glum. “Desert’s not really vodyanoi territory. Bit dry…” “Well, seeing as you know so arsing little about them, I might as well just stop talking to you,” said Isaac. To Isaac’s astonishment, Ged’s face fell. “Joke, Ged! Irony! Sarcasm! You know fucking Ged stared at him. His huge eyes narrowed. “What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian…well…Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the “How do you steal someone’s choice?” “No idea. I suppose if you nick someone’s spear, they don’t have the choice of using it…What about if you lie about where some tasty lichen is, so you deprive others of the choice of going for it…?” “Maybe some choice-thefts are analogies of stuff we’d consider crimes and some have absolutely no equivalent,” said Isaac. “I’d imagine so.” “What’s an abstract individual and a concrete individual?” Ged was gazing at Isaac in wonder. “My good arse, Isaac…you’ve made friends with some garuda, haven’t you?” Isaac raised one eyebrow, and nodded quickly. “Damn!” Ged shouted. People at the surrounding tables turned to him with brief surprise. “And a Cymek garuda…! Isaac, you “I don’t know, Ged. He’s a bit…taciturn…” “Oh please oh “All right, all right, I’ll “Oh, this is “So an abstract individual is a garuda who forgot, for some time, that he or she is part of a larger unit, and owes respect to all the other There was a long pause. “Are you any wiser, Isaac?” asked Ged gently, and broke off into giggles. Isaac wasn’t sure if he was or not. “So look, Ged, if I said to you ‘second-degree choice-theft with disrespect,’ would you know what a garuda had done?” “No…” Ged looked thoughtful. “No, I wouldn’t. Sounds bad…I think there are some books in the library that might explain, though…” At that moment, Lemuel Pigeon strode into Isaac’s view. “Ged, look,” Isaac interrupted hurriedly. “Beg pardon and all that, I really have to have a word with Lemuel. Can I talk to you later?” Ged grinned without rancour and waved Isaac away. “Lemuel…a word in your ear. Could be profitable.” “Isaac! Always a pleasure to deal with a man of science. How’s the life of the mind?” Lemuel leant back in his chair. He was dressed foppishly. His jacket was burgundy, his waistcoat yellow. He wore a small top hat. A mass of yellow curls burst out from under it in a ponytail they clearly resented. “The life of the mind, Lemuel, has reached something of an impasse. And that, my friend, is where “ “Yes, Lemuel,” said Isaac portentously. “You too can forward the cause of science.” Isaac enjoyed bantering with Lemuel, although the younger man made him a little uneasy. Lemuel was a chancer, a snitch, a fence…the quintessential go-between. He had carved a profitable little niche for himself out of being a most efficient middle-man. Packages, information, offers, messages, refugees, goods: anything that two people wanted to exchange without actually meeting, Lemuel would courier. He was invaluable to those like Isaac who wanted to dredge the New Crobuzon underworld without getting their feet wet or their hands dirty. Similarly, the denizens of that other city could use Lemuel to reach into the realm of the more-or-less legal without beaching, flopping helplessly at the militia’s door. Not that all of Lemuel’s work involved both worlds: some was entirely legal or entirely illegal. It was just that crossing the border was his speciality. Lemuel’s existence was precarious. He was unscrupulous and brutal-vicious when necessary. If the going ever got dangerous, he would leave anyone with him in a trail of his dust. Everyone knew that. Lemuel never hid it. There was a certain honesty about him. He never pretended that you could trust him. “Lemuel, you young science fiend, you…” Isaac said. “I’m conducting a little research. Now, I need to get hold of some specimens. I’m talking anything that flies. And that is where you come in. See, a man in my position can’t be trogging around New Crobuzon looking for fucking “Put an ad in the newspapers, Isaac old chum. Why’re you talking to me?” “Because I’m talking “Isaac old son…I begin to understand you.” “Of course you do, Lemuel. You’re a businessman. I’m looking for “Rare,” said Lemuel, looking intently at his pint. “Very rare,” agreed Isaac. “Which is why serious amounts of dosh would change hands for a good specimen. You get the idea, Lemuel? I want birds, insects, bats…also eggs, also cocoons, also grubs, anything which is going to turn “Who would, Isaac?” agreed Lemuel. Isaac stuffed a five-guinea note into Lemuel’s top pocket. The two men raised their glasses and drank together. That had been yesterday evening. Isaac sat back and imagined his request worming its way through New Crobuzon’s criminal alleys. Isaac had used Lemuel’s services before, when he had needed a rare or forbidden compound, or a manuscript of which there were only a few copies in New Crobuzon, or information on the synthesis of illegal substances. It appealed to Isaac’s sense of humour to think of the hardest elements of the city’s underworld earnestly scrabbling for birds and butterflies in between their gangfights and drugs deals. It was Shunday the next day, Isaac realized. It had been several days since he had seen Lin. She didn’t even Lublamai and David had gone, Isaac realized. He was alone. He undulated like a walrus, scattering papers and prints all over the boards. He turned his gasjet off and peered up out of the dark warehouse. Through his dirty window he could see the great cold circle of the moon and the slow pirouettes of her two daughters, satellites of ancient, barren rock glowing like fat fireflies as they spun around their mother. Isaac fell asleep watching the convoluted lunar clockwork. He basked in the moonlight and dreamt of Lin: a fraught, sexual, loving dream. |
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