Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [35]
It was an advertisement for a fair currently in Sobek Croix. The back was crisp with dry glue: Isaac had torn it from a wall.
Mr. Bombadrezil’s unique and wonderful fair, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate. The Palace of Love; The Hall of Terrors; The Vortex; and many other attractions for reasonable prices. Also come to see the extraordinary freakshow, the Circus of Weird. Monsters and marvels from every corner of Bas-Lag! Seers from the Fractured Land; a genuine Weaver’s claw; the living skull; the lascivious snake-woman; Ursus Rex, the man-king of the Bears; dwarf cactus-people of tiny sizes; a garuda, bird-man chief of the wild desert; the stone men of Bezhek; caged dæmons; dancing fish; treasures stolen from the Gengris; and innumerable other prodigies and wonders. Some attractions not suitable for the easily shocked or those of a nervous disposition. Entrance 5 stivers. Sobek Croix gardens, 14th Chet to 14th Melluary, 6 to 11 o’clock every night.
“See that?” Isaac barked, and stabbed the poster with his thumb. “They’ve got a garuda! I’ve been sending requests all over the city for dubious bits and bobs, probably going to end up with loads of horrible disease-riddled jackdaws, and there’s a fucking garuda on the doorstep!”
Are you going to go down? signed Lin.
“Damn right!” snorted Isaac. “Straight after this! I thought we could all go. The others,” he said, his voice dropping, “don’t have to know what it is I’m doing there. I mean, a fair’s always fun anyway. Right?”
Derkhan grinned and nodded.
“So are you going to spirit the garuda away, or what?” she whispered.
“Well, presumably I could arrange to take heliotypes of it, or even ask it to come for a couple of days to the lab . . . I don’t know. We’ll organize something! What do you say? Fancy a fair?”
Lin picked a cherry tomato from Isaac’s garnish and wiped it carefully clean of chicken stock. She gripped it in her mandibles and began to chew.
Could be fun, she signed. Your treat?
“Absolutely my treat!” boomed Isaac, and gazed at her. He stared at her very close for a minute. He glanced round to make sure that no one was watching, and then, clumsily, he signed in front of her.
Missed you.
Derkhan looked away for a moment, tactfully.
Lin broke off the moment, to make sure that she did it before Isaac. She clapped loudly, until everyone at the table was staring at her. She began to sign, indicating Derkhan to translate.
“Uh . . . Isaac is keen to prove that the talk of scientists being all work and no play is false. Intellectuals as well as dissolute aesthetes like us know how to have a good time, and thus he offers us this . . .” Lin waved the sheet, and threw it into the centre of the table where it was visible to all. “Rides, spectacles, marvels and coconut shies, all for a mere five stivers, which Isaac has kindly offered to underwrite . . .”
“Not for everyone, you sow!” Isaac roared in mock-outrage, but he was drowned out by the drunken roar of gratitude.
“. . . offered to underwrite,” continued Derkhan doggedly. “Accordingly, I move that we drink up and eat up and hightail to Sobek Croix.”
There was loud, chaotic agreement. Those who had finished their food and drink gathered their bags. Others tucked with renewed gusto into their oysters or salad or fried plantain. Trying to organize a group of any size to do anything in synchronicity was an epic struggle, Lin reflected wryly. It would be some time before they set off.
Isaac and Derkhan were hissing to each other across the table in front of her. Her antennae twitched. She could pick up some of their murmurs. Isaac excitedly talking politics. He channelled his diffuse, undirected, pointed social discontent into his discussions with Derkhan. He was posing, she thought with amused pique, out of his depth, trying to impress the laconic journalist.
She could see Isaac pass a coin carefully across the table, and receive a plain envelope in return. Undoubtedly the latest issue of Runagate