Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [310]
The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.
The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.
But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.
Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.
I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.
When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.
We have been freed.
This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.
We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.
We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.
But she does not.
That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.
But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.
She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.
She raises her hands and signs for him.
He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.
Derkhan’s eyes widen as she reads the words.
Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.
Morning . . . food . . . warming, he falters, insect . . . journey . . . happy.
She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.
He comforts her, holds the apple before her, helping her to bite, wiping her when she drips juice and residue across herself. Afraid, she signs, as Isaac hesitantly translates. Mind tiring spilling loose, art Motley! She shakes suddenly, peering around her in terror. Isaac shushes her, comforts her. Derkhan watches in misery. Alone, Lin signs desperately, and spews out a chymical message that is opaque to us all. Monster warm Remade . . . She looks around. Apple, she signs. Apple.
Isaac lifts it to her mouth and lets her feed. She jigs like a toddler.
When the evening comes and she falls asleep once more, quickly and deeply, Isaac and Derkhan confer, and Isaac begins to rage and shout, and to cry.
She’ll recover, he shouts, as Lin shifts in her sleep, she’s half-dead with fucking tiredness, she’s had the shit beaten out of her, it’s no wonder, no wonder she’s confused . . .
But she does not recover, as he knows she will not.
We ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone, burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men.
Lin wakes happy, talks animated gibberish with her hands, flails to stand and cannot, falls and weeps or laughs chymically, chatters with her mandibles, fouls herself like a baby.
Lin toddles across our roof with her half-mind. Helpless. Ruined. A weird patchwork of childish laughter and adult dreams, her speech extraordinary and incomprehensible, complex and violent and infantile.
Isaac is broken.
We move roofs, made uneasy by noises from below. Lin has a tantrum on our journey, made mad by our inability to understand