Perdido Street Station

Chapter Three

Opposite Isaac on the train sat a small child and her father, a shabby gent in a bowler hat and second-hand jacket. Isaac made a monster face at her whenever she caught his eye.

Her father was whispering to her, entertaining her with prestidigitation. He gave her a pebble to hold, then spat on it quickly. It became a frog. The girl squealed with delight at the slimy thing and glanced shyly up at Isaac. He opened his eyes and mouth wide, mumming astonishment as he left his seat. She was still watching him as he opened the door of the train and stepped out onto Sly Station. He made his way down and onto the streets, wound through the traffic for Brock Marsh.

There were few cabs or animals in the narrow twisting streets of the Scientific Quarter, the oldest part of the ancient city. There were pedestrians of all races, as well as bakeries and laundries and guildhalls, all the sundry services any community needed. There were pubs and shops and even a militia tower; a small, stubby one at the apex of Brock Marsh where the Canker and the Tar converged. The posters plastered on the crumbling walls advertised the same dancehalls, warned of the same coming doom, demanded allegiance to the same political parties as elsewhere in the city. But for all that apparent normality, there was a tension to the area, a fraught expectancy.

Badgers-familiars by tradition, believed to have a certain immunity to the more dangerous harmonics of hidden sciences-scampered past with lists in their teeth, their pear-shaped bodies disappearing into special flaps in shop doorways. Above the thick glass storefronts were attic rooms. Old warehouses on the waterfront had been converted. Forgotten cellars lurked in temples to minor deities. In these and all the other architectural crevices, the Brock Marsh dwellers pursued their trades: physicists; chimerists; biophilosophers and teratologists; chymists; necrochymists; mathematicians; karcists and metallurgists and vodyanoi shaman; and those, like Isaac, whose research did not fit neatly into any of the innumerable categories of theory.

Strange vapours wafted over the roofs. The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly, and the water steamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless chymicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments, from factories and laboratories and alchymists’ dens, mixed randomly into bastard elixirs. In Brock Marsh, the water had unpredictable qualities. Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.

Isaac turned down a quiet stretch of the river’s edge onto the decaying flagstones and tenacious weeds of Umber Promenade. Across the Canker, the Ribs jutted over the roofs of Bonetown like a clutch of vast tusks curling hundreds of feet into the air. The river sped up a little as it bore south. Half a mile away he could see Strack Island breaking its flow where it met the Tar and curled away grandly to the east. The ancient stones and towers of Parliament rose hugely from the very edges of Strack Island. There was no gradual incline or urban scrub before the blunt layers of obsidian shot out of the water like a frozen fountain.

The clouds were dissipating, leaving behind a washed-out sky. Isaac could see the red roof of his workshop rising above the surrounding houses; and before it, the weed-choked forecourt of his local, The Dying Child. The ancient tables in the outside yard were colourful with fungus. No one, in Isaac’s memory, had ever sat at one of them.

He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox’s muzzle that had been grafted to his face.

Isaac quietly greeted the old man by the door, Joshua, whose Remaking had been very small and very cruel. A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

Joshua nodded at Isaac and, with his fingers, carefully held his mouth closed over a straw, sucked greedily at his cider.

Isaac headed for the back of the room. The bar, in one corner, was very low, about three feet from the ground. Behind it, in a trough of dirty water, wallowed Silchristchek the landlord.

Sil lived and worked and slept in the tub, hauling himself from one end to the other with his huge, webbed hands and frog’s legs, his body wobbling like a bloated testicle, seemingly boneless. He was ancient and fat and grumpy, even for a vodyanoi. He was a bag of old blood with limbs, without a separate head, his big curmudgeonly face poking out from the fat at the front of his body.

Twice a month he scooped the water out from around him and had his regulars pour fresh buckets over him, farting and sighing with pleasure. The vodyanoi could spend at least a day in the dry without ill-effects, but Sil could not be bothered. He oozed surly indolence, and chose to do so in his filthy water. Isaac could not help feeling that Sil debased himself as a kind of aggressive show. He seemed to relish being more-disgusting-than-thou.

In the early days, Isaac had drunk here out of a youthful delight in plumbing the depths of squalor. Mature now, he frequented more salubrious inns for pleasure, returning to Sil’s hovel only because it was so close to his work, and, increasingly, unexpectedly, for research purposes. Sil had taken to providing him with experimental samples he needed.

Stinking piss-coloured water slopped over the edges of the tub as Sil wriggled his way towards Isaac.

“What you having, ‘Zaac?” he barked.

“Kingpin.”

Isaac flipped a deuce into Sil’s hand. Sil brought down a bottle from one of the shelves behind him. Isaac sipped the cheap beer and slid onto a stool, grimacing as he sat in some dubious liquid.

Sil sat back in his tub. Without looking at Isaac, he began a monosyllabic, idiot conversation about the weather, about the beer. He went through the motions. Isaac said just enough to keep the discourse alive.

On the counter were several crude figures, rendered in water that seeped into the grain of the old wood before his eyes. Two were rapidly dissolving, losing their integrity and becoming puddles as Isaac watched. Sil idly scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the figure’s face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac.

“That what you’re after?” he asked.

Isaac swallowed the rest of his beer.

“Cheers, Sil. Appreciate it.”

Very carefully, he blew on the little figure until it fell backwards into his cupped hands. It splashed a little, but he could feel its surface tension hold. Sil watched with a cynical smile as Isaac scurried to get the figurine out of the pub and to his laboratory.

Outside the wind had picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and backed into the building. Isaac’s laboratory had been a factory and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its corners.

From the two corners of the floor came yelled greetings. David Serachin and Lublamai Dadscatt-rogue-scientists like Isaac, with whom he shared the rent and the space. David and Lublamai used the ground floor, each filling a corner with their tools, separated by forty feet of empty wooden boards. A refitted waterpump jutted from the floor between their ends of the room. The construct they shared was rolling across the floor, loudly and inefficiently sweeping up dust. They keep the useless thing out of sentimentality, thought Isaac.

Isaac’s workshop, his kitchen and his bed, were on the huge walkway that jutted out from the walls halfway up the old factory. It was about twenty feet wide, circumnavigating the hall, with a ramshackle wooden railing miraculously still holding from when Lublamai had first hammered it in.

The door slammed heavily shut behind Isaac, and the long mirror that hung beside it shuddered. I can’t believe that thing doesn’t break, thought Isaac. We must move it. As always, the thought was gone as soon as it had come.

As Isaac took the stairs three at a time, David saw how he held his hands and laughed.

“More of Silchristchek’s high art, Isaac?” he yelled.

Isaac grinned back.

“Never let it be said I don’t collect the best!”

Isaac, who had found the warehouse all those years ago, had had first pick of the working space, and it showed. His bed and stove and chamberpot were in one corner of the raised platform, and at the other end of the same side were the bulky protuberances of his lab. Glass and clay containers full of weird compounds and dangerous chymicals filled the shelves. Heliotypes of Isaac with his friends in various poses around the city and in Rudewood dotted the walls. The warehouse backed onto the Umber Promenade: his windows looked out over the Canker and the Bonetown shore, gave him a splendid view of the Ribs and the Kelltree train.

Isaac ran past those huge arched windows to an esoteric machine of burnished brass. It was a dense knot of pipes and lenses, with dials and gauges shoved roughly wherever they would fit.

Ostentatiously stamped on every component of the whole was a sign:

property of nc university physics dept. do not remove.

Isaac checked and was relieved to see that the little boiler at the machine’s heart had not gone out. He shoved in a handful of coal and bolted the boiler closed. He placed Sil’s little statue on a viewing platform under a glass bell, and heaved at some bellows just beneath it, siphoning out the air and replacing it with gas from a slender leather tube.

He relaxed. The integrity of the vodyanoi waterpiece would hold a little longer, now. Outside vodyanoi hands, untouched, such works would last perhaps an hour before slowly collapsing back into their elemental form. Interfered with, they dissolved much more quickly: in a noble gas more slowly. He had perhaps two hours to investigate.

Isaac had become interested in vodyanoi watercraeft in a roundabout way, as a result of his research in unified energy theory. He had wondered whether what allowed vodyanoi to mould water was a force related to the binding force that he sought, that held matter together in certain circumstances, dispersed it violently in others. What had happened was a common pattern of Isaac’s research: a byway of his work had taken on a momentum of its own, and had become a deep, almost certainly short-lived, obsession.

Isaac bent some lens-tubes into position and lit a gasjet to illuminate the waterpiece. Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much “analysis” was just, description-often bad description-hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish. His favourite example of the genre came from Benchamburg’s Hydrophysiconometricia, a hugely respected textbook. He had howled when he read it, copied it out carefully and pinned it to his wall.

The vodyanoi, by means of what is called their watercraeft, are able to manipulate the plasticity and sustain the surface tension of water such that a quantity will hold any shape the manipulator might give it for a short time. This is achieved by thevodyanois’ application of an hydrocohesive/aquamorphic energy field of minor diachronic extension.

In other words, Benchamburg had no more idea how the vodyanoi shaped water than did Isaac, or a street urchin, or old Silchristchek himself.

Isaac pulled a set of levers, shifting a series of glass slides and sending different coloured lights through the statuette, which he could already see beginning to sag at the edges. Peering through a high-magnification eyepiece, he could see tiny animalculae squirm mindlessly. Internally the water’s structure changed not at all: it merely wanted to occupy a different space from its usual.

He collected it as it seeped through a crack in the stand. He would examine it later, though he knew from past experience he would find nothing of any interest in it.

Isaac scribbled notes on a pad beside him. He subjected the waterpiece to various experiments as the minutes went by, piercing it with a syringe and sucking some of its substance away, taking heliotypic prints of it from various angles, blowing tiny air-bubbles into it, which rose and burst out of its top. Eventually he boiled it and let it dissipate in steam.

At one point Sincerity, David’s badger, ambled up the stairs and sniffed at his dangling fingers. He stroked her absently and when she licked his hand, he yelled to David that she was hungry. He was surprised by the silence. David and Lublamai had left, presumably for a late lunch: several hours had passed since he had arrived.

He stretched and paced over to his pantry, throwing Sincerity a twist of dried meat, which she began to gnaw happily. Isaac was growing conscious of the world again, hearing boats through the walls behind him.

The door swung open and shut again below.

He trotted to the top of the stairs, expecting to see his colleagues returning.

Instead, a stranger stood in the centre of the great empty space. Air currents adjusted to his presence, investigated him like tentacles, sending a whirligig of dust spinning around him. Spots of light littered the floor from open windows and broken bricks, but none fell directly on him. The wooden walkway creaked as Isaac rocked, very slightly. The figure below jerked its head back and threw off a hood, hands clasped to its chest, very still, staring up.

Isaac gazed in astonishment.

It was a garuda.

He nearly stumbled down the stairs, fumbling with the rail, loath to take his eyes off the extraordinary visitor waiting for him. He touched earth.

The garuda stared down at him. Isaac’s fascination defeated his manners, and he stared frankly back.

The great creature stood more than six feet tall, on cruel clawed feet that poked out from under a dirty cloak. The ragged cloth dangled down almost to the ground, draped loosely over every inch of flesh, obscuring the details of physiognomy and musculature, all but the garuda’s head. And that great inscrutable bird face gazed down at Isaac with what looked like imperiosity. Its sharply curved beak was something between a kestrel’s and an owl’s. Sleek feathers faded subtly from ochre to dun to dappled brown. Deep black eyes stared at his own, the iris only a fine mottling at the very edge of the dark. Those eyes were set in orbits which gave the garuda face a permanent sneer, a proud furrow.

And looming over the garuda’s head, covered in the rough sackcloth it clasped about itself, projected the unmistakable shapes of its huge furled wings, promontories of feather and skin and bone that extended two feet or more from its shoulders and curved elegantly towards each other. Isaac had never seen a garuda spread its wings at close quarters, but he had read descriptions of the dust-cloud they could raise, and the vast shadows they threw across the garuda’s prey below.

What are you doing here, so far from home? thought Isaac with wonder. Look at the colour of you: you’re from the desert! You must have come miles and miles and miles, from the Cymek. What the spit are you doing here, you impressive fucker?

He almost shook his head with awe at the great predator before he cleared his throat and spoke.

“Can I help you?”