Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [28]
He had sniffed his way along a contorted bibliographical trail like a bloodhound. Some titles could not be ignored: On Gravity or The Theory Of Flight. Some were more tangential, like The Aerodynamics Of The Swarm. And some were simply whims that his more respectable colleagues would surely frown at. He had yet, for example, to browse the pages of The Dweomers That Live Above The Clouds And What They Can Tell Us.
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.
What I need’s some dead wyrmen . . . no, some live one to do experiments on . . . Isaac had thought idly, staring at the heliotypes the previous night. No . . . a dead one to dissect and a live one to watch flying . . .
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