Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [147]
Now Derkhan was crying, a little. She nodded.
“I’ll chase it, Ben. Promise.”
Ben nodded. There was a moment of silence.
“Dee . . .” said Ben eventually. “I . . . I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do with that communico-wossname that would . . . I don’t suppose . . . you can’t kill me, can you?”
Derkhan let out a gasp of shock and grief.
She looked around desperately and shook her head.
“No, Ben. I could only do that by killing the communicatrix . . .”
Ben nodded sadly.
“I really don’t know as I’m going to be able to . . . hold back from letting some stuff slip . . . Jabber knows I’ll try, Dee . . . but they’re experts, you know? And I . . . well . . . might as well get it all over with, know what I mean?”
Derkhan was holding her eyes closed. She wept for Ben, and with him.
“Oh gods, Ben, I’m so sorry . . .”
He was suddenly, ostentatiously brave. Stiff-jawed. Pugnacious. “I’ll do me best. Just you make damn sure you chase Barbile, all right?”
She nodded.
“And . . . thanks,” he said with a wry smile. “And . . . goodbye.”
He bit his lip, looked down, then up again and kissed her on the cheek for a long time. Derkhan held him close with her left arm.
And then Benjamin Flex broke away and stepped back, and with some mental reflex invisible to the distraught Derkhan, he told Umma Balsum that it was time for them to disengage.
The communicatrix rippled again, quivered and staggered, and with an almost palpable gust of relief her body collapsed back into its own shape.
The battery continued winding the little handle until Umma Balsum righted herself and walked closer, laid a peremptory hand on it. She stopped the watch on the table, and said: “That’s it, dear.”
Derkhan stretched out and laid her head on the table. She wept in silence. Across the city, Benjamin Flex was doing the same.
Both of them alone.
It was only two or three minutes before Derkhan sniffed sharply and sat up. Umma Balsum was sitting in her chair, calculating sums on a scrap of paper with great efficiency.
She glanced over at the sound of Derkhan’s brisk attempts to reassert control over herself.
“Feeling better, deario?” she asked breezily. “I’ve worked out your charge.”
There was a moment when Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did, Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal and torture and misery.
There was a certain obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be a special death.
“Look.” Umma Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. “Two marks plus five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re looking at one noble nine and two.”
Derkhan gave her two nobles and left.
She walked quickly, without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh. She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed were more than shifty-looking