Perdido Street Station

Chapter Four

Lin, to her mortal horror, was running late.

It did not help that she was not an aficionado of Bonetown. The cross-bred architecture of that outlandish quarter confused her: a syncresis of industrialism and the gaudy domestic ostentation of the slightly rich, the peeling concrete of forgotten docklands and the stretched skins of shantytown tents. The different forms segued into each other seemingly at random in this low, flat zone, full of urban scrubland and wasteground where wild flowers and thick-stemmed plants pushed through plains of concrete and tar.

Lin had been given a street name, but the signs around her crumbled on their perches and drooped to point in impossible directions, or were obscured with rust, or contradicted each other. She concentrated to read them, looked instead at her scribbled map.

She could orient herself by the Ribs. She looked up and found them above her, shoving vastly into the sky. Only one side of the cage was visible, the bleached and blistered curves poised like a bone wave about to break over the buildings to the east. Lin made her way for them.

The streets opened out around her and she found herself before another abandoned-looking lot, but larger than the others by a huge factor. It did not look like a square but a massive unfinished hole in the city. The buildings at its edge did not show their faces but their backs and their sides, as if they had been promised neighbours with elegant façades that had never arrived. The streets of Bonetown edged nervously into the scrubland with exploratory little fringes of brick that petered quickly out.

The dirty grass was dotted here and there with makeshift stalls, foldaway tables put down at random places and spread with cheap cakes or old prints or the rubbish from someone’s attic. Street-jugglers chucked things around in lacklustre displays. There were a few half-hearted shoppers, and people of all races sitting on scattered boulders, reading, eating, scratching at the dry dirt, and contemplating the bones above them.

The Ribs rose from the earth at the edges of the empty ground.

Leviathan shards of yellowing ivory thicker than the oldest trees exploded out of the ground, bursting away from each other, sweeping up in a curved ascent until, more than a hundred feet above the earth, looming now over the roofs of the surrounding houses, they curled sharply back towards each other. They climbed as high again till their points nearly touched, vast crooked fingers, a god-sized ivory mantrap.

There had been plans to fill the square, to build offices and houses in the ancient chest cavity, but they had come to nothing.

Tools used on the site broke easily and went missing. Cement would not set. Something baleful in the half-exhumed bones kept the gravesite free of permanent disturbance.

Fifty feet below Lin’s feet, archaeologists had found vertebrae the size of houses; a backbone which had been quietly reburied after one too many accidents on-site. No limbs, no hips, no gargantuan skull had surfaced. No one could say what manner of creature had fallen here and died millennia ago. The grubby print-vendors who worked the Ribs specialized in various lurid depictions of Gigantes Crobuzon, four-footed or bipedal, humanoid, toothed, tusked, winged, pugnacious or pornographic.

Lin’s map directed her to a nameless alley on the south side of the Ribs. She wound her way to a quiet street where she found the black-painted buildings she had been told to seek, a row of dark, deserted houses, all but one with bricked-up doorways and windows sealed and painted with tar.

There were no passers-by in this street, no cabs, no traffic. Lin was quite alone.

Above the one remaining door in the row was chalked what looked like a gameboard, a square divided into nine smaller squares. There were no noughts or crosses, however, no other mark at all.

Lin hovered in the vicinity of the houses. She fidgeted with her skirt and blouse until, exasperated with herself, she walked up to the door and knocked quickly.

Bad enough that I’m late, she thought, without pissing him off even more.

She heard hinges and levers slide somewhere above her, and detected a tiny glint of reflected light over her head: some system of lenses and mirrors was being deployed so those within could judge whether those without were worthy of attention.

The door opened.

Standing before Lin was a vast Remade. Her face was still the same mournful, pretty human woman’s it had always been, with dark skin and long plaited hair, but it supplanted a seven-foot skeleton of black iron and pewter. She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. Her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving her what looked like ineluctable strength. Her right arm was levelled at Lin’s head, and from the centre of the brass hand extended a vicious harpoon.

Lin recoiled in astonished terror.

A large voice sounded from behind the sad-faced woman.

“Ms. Lin? The artist? You’re late. Mr. Motley is expecting you. Please follow me.”

The Remade stepped backwards, balancing on her central leg and swinging the others behind it, giving Lin room to step around her. The harpoon did not waver.

How far can you go? thought Lin to herself, and stepped into the dark.

At the far end of an entirely black corridor was a cactacae man. Lin could taste his sap in the air, but very faintly. He stood seven feet tall, thick-limbed and heavy. His head broke the curve of his shoulders like a crag, his silhouette uneven with nodules of hardy growth. His green skin was a mass of scars, three-inch spines and tiny red spring flowers.

He beckoned to her with gnarled fingertips.

“Mr. Motley can afford to be patient,” he said as he turned and climbed the stairs behind him, “but I’ve never known him relish waiting.” He looked back clumsily and raised an eyebrow at Lin pointedly.

Fuck off, lackey, she thought impatiently. Take me to the big man.

He stomped off on shapeless feet like small tree-stumps.

Behind her, Lin could hear the explosive bursts of steam and thumps as the Remade took the stairs. Lin followed the cactus through a twisting, windowless tunnel.

This place is huge, Lin thought, as they moved on and on. She realized that it must be the whole row of houses, dividing walls destroyed and rebuilt, custom-made, renovated into one vast convoluted space. They passed doors from which suddenly emerged an unnerving sound, like the muffled anguish of machines. Lin’s antennae bristled. As they left it behind, a volley of thuds sounded, like a score of crossbow bolts fired into soft wood.

Oh Broodma, thought Lin querulously. Gazid, what the fuck have I let you talk me into?

It was Lucky Gazid, the failed impresario, who had started the process leading Lin to this terrifying place.

He had run off a set of heliotypes of her most recent batch of work, hawked them around the city. It was a regular process, as he attempted to establish a reputation among the artists and patrons of New Crobuzon. Gazid was a pathetic figure forever reminding anyone who would listen of the one successful show he had arranged for a now-dead aether sculptress thirteen years previously. Lin and most of her friends viewed him with pity and contempt. Everyone she knew let him take his heliotypes and slipped him a few shekels or a noble, “an advance on his agent’s fee.” Then he would disappear for a few weeks, to emerge again with puke on his trousers and blood on his shoes, buzzing on some new drug, and the process would begin again.

Only not this time.

Gazid had found Lin a buyer.

When he had sidled up to her in The Clock and Cockerel she had protested. It was someone else’s turn, she had scribbled on her pad, she had “advanced” him a whole guinea only a week or so ago; but Gazid had interrupted her and insisted she retreat from the table with him. And as her friends, the artistic elite of Salacus Fields, laughed and cheered them on, Gazid had handed her a stiff white card stamped with a simple crest of a three-by-three chessboard. On it was a short printed note.

Ms. Lin, it said. My employer was most impressed with the examples of your work your agent showed him. He wonders whether you might be interested in meeting him to discuss a possible commission. We look forward to hearing from you. The signature was illegible.

Gazid was a wreck and an addict of most things going, who could not help going to any lengths to secure money for drugs; but this was not like any scam that Lin could imagine. There was no angle for him, unless there was indeed someone wealthy in New Crobuzon prepared to pay for her work, giving him a cut.

She had dragged him out of the bar, to catcalls and whoops and consternation, and had demanded to know what was going on. Gazid was circumspect at first, and seemed to rack his brains to think of what lies to spout. He realized quite quickly that he needed to tell her the truth.

“There’s a guy I buy some stuff from occasionally…” he started shiftily. “Anyway, I had the prints of your statues lying around…uh…on the shelf when he came round, and he loved them and wanted to take a couple away, and…uh…I said ‘yeah.’ And then a while later he told me that he showed them to the guy who supplies him with the stuff I sometimes buy, and that guy liked them, and took them away, and showed them to his boss, and then they got to the kind of top man, who’s huge into art-bought some of Alexandrine’s stuff last year-and he liked them and wants you to do a piece for him.”

Lin translated the evasive language.

Your drug dealer’s boss wants me to work for him??? she scrawled.

“Oh shit, Lin, it’s not like that…I mean, yeah, but…” Gazid paused. “Well, yeah,” he finished lamely. There was a pause. “Only…only…he wants to meet you. If you’re interested he has to actually meet you.”

Lin pondered.

It was certainly an exciting prospect. Judging by the card, this was not some minor hustler: this was a big player. Lin was not stupid. She knew that this would be dangerous. She was excited, she could not help it. It would be such an event in her art-life. She could drop hints about it. She could have a criminal patron. She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

And while she was deciding that she didn’t care, Gazid named the kinds of sums the mysterious buyer was quoting. Lin’s headlegs flexed in astonishment.

I have to talk to Alexandrine, she wrote, and went back inside.

Alex knew nothing. She milked the kudos of having sold canvases to a crime boss for what she could, but she had only ever met an at-best middle-ranking messenger, who had offered her enormous sums for two paintings that she had just finished. She had accepted, handed them over, and never heard anything again.

That was it. She had never even known the name of her buyer.

Lin decided that she could do better than that.

She had sent a message through Gazid, down the illicit conduit of communication that led fuck-knew-where, saying that yes, she was interested, and would be prepared to meet, but she really must have a name to write in her diary.

The New Crobuzon underworld digested her message, and made her wait a week, and then spat back an answer in the shape of another printed note, pushed under her door while she slept, giving her an address in Bonetown, a date, and a one-word name: Motley.

A frenetic snapping and clatter sifted into the corridor. Lin’s cactacae escort pushed open one dark door among the many, and stood aside.

Lin’s eyes adjusted to the light. She was looking into a typing pool. It was a large room with a high ceiling, painted black like everything in this troglodytic place, well-lit with gaslamps, and filled with perhaps forty desks; on each was a bulky typewriter, at each a secretary copying from reams of notes by their sides. Mostly human and mostly women, Lin also caught smell and sight of men and cactacae, even a pair of khepri, and a vodyanoi working at a typewriter with keys adapted for her huge hands.

Around the room Remade were stationed, mostly human, again, but of other races too, rare as xenian Remade were. Some were organically Remade, with claws and antlers and slabs of grafted muscle, but most were mech, and the heat from their boilers made the room close.

At the end of the room was a closed office.

“Ms. Lin, finally,” boomed a speaking-trumpet above its door as soon as she entered. None of the secretaries looked up. “Please make your way across the room to my office.”

Lin picked her way between the desks. She looked closely at what was being typed, hard though it was, and harder in the odd light of the black-walled room. The secretaries all typed expertly, reading the scribbled notes and transferring them without looking at their keyboards or their work.

Further to our conversation of the thirteenth of this month, read one, please consider your franchise operation under our jurisdiction, terms to be arranged. Lin moved on.

You die tomorrow, you fuck, you wormshit. You’re going to envy the Remade, you cowardly cunt, you’re going to scream till your mouth bleeds, said the next.

Oh…thought Lin. Oh…help.

The door to the office opened.

“Come in, Ms. Lin, come in!” The voice boomed from the trumpet.

Lin did not hesitate. She entered.

Filing cabinets and bookshelves filled most of the small room. There was a small, traditional oil painting of Iron Bay on one wall. Behind a large darkwood desk was a folding screen illustrated with silhouettes of fish, a large version of the screens behind which artists’ models changed. In the centre of the screen, one fish was rendered in mirrored glass, giving Lin a view of herself. Lin hovered uncertainly in front of the screen.

“Sit, sit,” said a quiet voice from behind it. Lin pulled up the chair in front of the desk.

“I can see you, Ms. Lin. The mirrored carp is a window on my side. I think it’s polite to let people know that.”

The speaker seemed to expect a response, so Lin nodded.

“You’re late, you know, Ms. Lin.”

Devil’s Tail! Of all the appointments to be late to! Lin thought frantically. She began to scribble an apology on her pad when the voice interrupted her.

“I can sign, Ms. Lin.”

Lin put down her pad and apologized profusely with her hands.

“Don’t worry,” said her host disingenuously. “It happens. The Bonetown is unforgiving to visitors. Next time you’ll know to leave earlier, won’t you?”

Lin agreed that she would, that that was exactly what she would know to do.

“I like your work a great deal, Ms. Lin. I have all the heliotypes that made their way from Lucky Gazid. He is a sad, pathetic, broken cretin, that man-addiction is very sad in most of its forms-but he does, strangely enough, have something of a nose for art. That woman Alexandrine Nevgets was one of his, wasn’t she? Pedestrian, unlike your own work, but pleasant. I’m always prepared to indulge Lucky Gazid. It will be a shame when he dies. It’ll doubtless be a sordid affair, some dirty stubby knife gutting him slowly for the sake of small change; or a venereal disease involving vile emissions and sweat caught from an underage whore; or perhaps his bones will be broken for snitching-the militia, after all, do pay well, and junkies can’t be choosers when it comes to income.”

The voice that floated over the screen was melodious, and what the speaker said scanned hypnotically: he spoke everything into a poem. His sentences lilted on gently. His words were brutal. Lin was very afraid. She could not think of anything to say. Her hands were still.

“So having decided that I like your art I want to talk to you to discover whether you would be right for a commission. Your work is unusual for a khepri. Would you agree?”

Yes.

“Talk to me about your statues, Ms. Lin, and don’t worry, were you about to, that you might sound precious. I have no prejudices against taking art seriously, and don’t forget that I started this conversation. The key words to bear in mind when thinking how to answer my question are ‘themes,’ ‘technique’ and ‘aesthetics.’ ”

Lin hesitated, but her fear drove her on. She wanted to keep this man happy, and if that meant talking about her work, then that was what she would do.

I work alone, she signed, which is part of my…rebellion. I left Creekside and then Kinken, left my moiety and my hive. People were miserable, so communal art got stupidly heroic. Like Plaza of Statues. I wanted to spit out something…nasty. Tried to make some of the grand figures we all made together a little less perfect…Pissed off my sisters. So turned to my own work. Nasty work. Creekside nasty.

“That is exactly as I had expected. It is even-forgive me-somewhat hackneyed. However, that doesn’t detract from the power of the work itself. Khepri spit is a wonderful substance. Its lustre is quite unique, and its strength and lightness make it convenient, which I know is not the sort of word one is supposed to think of in connection with art, but I am pragmatic. Anyhow, to have such a lovely substance used for the drab wish-fulfilment of depressed khepri is a terrible waste. I was so very relieved to see someone using the substance for interesting, unsettling ends. The angularity you achieve is extraordinary, by the way.”

Thank you. I have powerful gland technique. Lin was enjoying the licence to boast. Originally I was a member of the Outnow school which forbids working on a piece after spat out. Gives you excellent control. Even though I have…reneged. I now go hack while the spit is soft, work it more. More freedom, can do overhangs and the like.

“Do you use a great deal of colour variation?” Lin nodded. “I saw only the sepia of the heliotypes. That is good to know. That is technique and aesthetics. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on themes, Ms. Lin.”

Lin was taken aback. Suddenly she could not think what her themes were.

“Let me put you in an easier position. I’d like to tell you what themes I am interested in. And then we can see if you’d be right for the commission I have in mind.”

The voice waited until Lin nodded ascent.

“Please tilt your head up, Ms. Lin.” Startled, she did so. The motion made her nervous, exposing as it did the soft underbelly of her beetle head, inviting harm. She held her head still as eyes behind the mirror-fish watched her.

“You have the same cords in your neck as a human woman. You share the hollow at the base of your throat beloved by poets. Your skin is a shade of red that would mark you out as unusual, that’s true, but it could still pass as human. I follow that beautiful human neck up-I have no doubt you won’t accept the description ‘human,’ but indulge me a minute-and then there is…there is a moment…there is a thin zone where that soft human skin merges with the pale segmented cream underneath your head.”

For the first time since Lin had entered the room, the speaker seemed to be searching for words.

“Have you ever created a statue of a cactus?” Lin shook her head. “Nonetheless you have seen them up close? My associate who led you here, for example. Did you happen to notice his feet, or his fingers, or his neck? There is a moment when the skin, the skin of the sentient creature, becomes mindless plant. Cut the fat round base of a cactus’s foot, he can’t feel a thing. Poke him in the thigh where he’s a bit softer, he’ll squeal. But there in that zone…it’s an altogether different thing…the nerves are intertwining, learning to be succulent plant, and pain is distant, blunt, diffuse, worrying rather than agonizing.

“You can think of others. The torso of the Cray or the Inchmen, the sudden transition of a Remade limb, many other races and species in this city, and countless more in the world, who live with a mongrel physiognomy. You will perhaps say that you do not recognize any transition, that the khepri are complete and whole in themselves, that to see ‘human’ features is anthropocentric of me. But leaving aside the irony of that accusation-an irony you can’t yet appreciate-you would surely recognize the transition in other races from your own. And perhaps in the human.

“And what of the city itself? Perched where two rivers strive to become the sea, where mountains become a plateau, where the clumps of trees coagulate to the south and-quantity becomes quality-are suddenly a forest. New Crobuzon’s architecture moves from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren…You take my point. I won’t go on.

“This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone.

“Could this theme interest you, d’you think? And if the answer is yes…then I am going to ask you to work for me. Before you answer, please understand what this will mean.

“I will ask you to work from life, to produce a model-life-size, I fancy-of me.

“Very few people see my face, Ms. Lin. A man in my position has to be careful. I’m sure you can understand. If you take this commission I will make you rich, but I will also own a part of your mind. The part that pertains to me. That is mine. I do not give you permission to share it with any. If you do, you will suffer greatly before you die.

“So…” Something creaked. Lin realized that he had sat back in his chair. “So, Ms. Lin. Are you interested in the hybrid zone? Are you interested in this job?”

I cannot…cannot turn this down, thought Lin helplessly. I cannot. For money, for art…Gods help me. I cannot turn this down. Oh…please, please let me not regret this.

She paused, and signed her acceptance of his terms.

“Oh, I am so glad,” he breathed. Lin’s heart raced. “I really am glad. Well…”

There was a shuffling sound behind the screen. Lin sat very still. Her antennae moved tremulously.

“The blinds are down in the office, aren’t they?” said Mr. Motley. “Because I think you should see what you will be working with. Your mind is mine, Lin. You work for me now.”

Mr. Motley stood and pushed the screen to the floor.

Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded.

Lin backed away, stumbling, feeling her terrified way away from his slow advance. Her chitinous headbody was twitching neurotically. She shook.

Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

“So,” he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. “Which do you think is my best side?”