Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [311]
We control her, hold her tight, bundle her away.
We move by night. We are fearful of the militia and of Motley’s men. We watch out for constructs which might report to the Council. We watch carefully for sudden movements and suspicious glances. We cannot trust our neighbours. We must live in a hinterland of half darkness, isolated and solipsistic. We steal what we need, or buy from tiny late-night grocers miles from where we are settled. Every askance look, every gaze, every shout, sudden flurry of hooves or boots, every bang or hiss of a construct’s pistons is a moment of fear.
We are the most wanted in New Crobuzon. An honour, a dubious honour.
Lin wants colourberries.
Isaac interprets her motions thus. The faltering charade of chewing, the pulsing of her gland (an unsettling sexual sight).
Derkhan agrees to go. She loves Lin, too.
They spend hours on Derkhan’s disguise, with water and butter and soot, ragged clothes from all over, foodstuffs and the remnants of dyes. She emerges with sleek black hair that shines like coal-crystals and a puckered scar across her forehead. She holds herself hunched and scowls.
When she leaves, Isaac and I spend the hours waiting fearfully. We are almost totally silent.
Lin continues her idiot monologue, and Isaac tries to answer with his own hands, caressing her and signing slowly as if she were a child. But she is not: she is half an adult, and his manner enrages her. She tries to stalk away and falls, her limbs disobedient. She is terrified of her own body. Isaac helps her, sits her up and feeds her, massages her tense, bruised shoulders.
Derkhan returns to our muttered relief with slabs of paste and a large handful of variegated berries. Their tones are lush and vivid.
I thought the damn Council had us, she says. I thought some construct was after me. I had to wind through Kinken to get away.
None of us know if she was really being tracked.
Lin is excited. Her antennae and her headlegs quiver. She tries to chew a finger of the white paste, but she trembles and spills it and cannot control herself. Isaac is gentle with her. He pushes the paste slowly into her mouth, unobtrusive, as if she ate for herself.
It takes some minutes for the headscarab to digest the paste and direct it towards the khepri’s gland. As we wait, Isaac shakes a few colourberries at Lin, waiting until her twitches decide him that she wants a particular bunch, which he feeds to her gently and carefully.
We are silent. Lin swallows and chews carefully. We watch her.
Minutes pass and then her gland distends. We rock forward, eager to see what she will make.
She opens her gland-lips and pushes out a pellet of moist khepri-spit. She moves her arms in excitement as it oozes shapeless and sopping from her, dropping heavy to the floor like a white turd.
A thin drool of coloured spittle from the berries streams out after it, spattering and staining the mess.
Derkhan looks away. Isaac cries as I have never seen a human do.
Outside our foul shanty the city squats fatly in its freedom, brazen again and fearless. It ignores us. It is an ingrate. The days are cooler this week, a brief ebbing of the relentless summer. Gusts blow in from the coast, from the Gross Tar estuary and Iron Bay. Clutches of ships arrive every day. They queue in the river to the east, waiting to load and unload. Merchant ships from Kohnid and Tesh; explorers from the Firewater Straits; floating factories from Myrshock; privateers from Figh Vadiso, respectable and law-abiding so far from the open sea. Clouds scurry like bees before the sun. The city is raucous. It has forgotten. It has some vague notion that once its sleep was troubled: nothing more.
I can see the sky. There are slats of light between the rough boards that surround us. I would like very much to be away from this now. I can imagine the sensation of wind, the sudden heaviness of air below me. I would like to look down on this