Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [12]
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 watercræft 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 watercræft. 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 watercræft, 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 the vodyanois’ application of an hydrocohesive/aquamorphic energy field of minor diachronic extension.
In other words, Benchamburg had no more idea