Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [41]
“Well, I suppose . . . probably because I didn’t meet a garuda . . . But,” he added defensively, “I wouldn’t be half so depressed if it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like that. It’s the . . . fucking indignity of it that really sticks in the craw . . .”
Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.
“We could look around, you know,” she said. “There’s bound to be a garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here.” She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could hardly even see the stars.
“Not now,” said Isaac. “I’m not in the mood. I’ve lost my momentum.” There was a long, companionable silence before he spoke again.
“Will you really write something about this place in Runagate Rampant?”
Derkhan shrugged, looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.
“It’s a difficult job, dealing with the Remade,” she said. “There’s so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to link up, so people don’t . . . judge them as monsters . . . it’s really hard. And it’s not like people don’t know they’ve got fucking horrendous lives, for the most part . . . it’s that there’s a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve it, even if they pity them, or think it’s Gods-given, or rubbish like that. Oh, Godspit,” she said suddenly, and shook her head.
“What?”
“I was in court the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a sordid, pathetic, miserable crime . . .” She winced in remembrance. “Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath monoliths killed her baby . . . smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows what . . . because it wouldn’t stop crying. She’s sitting there in court, her eyes are just . . . damn well empty . . . she can’t believe what’s happened, she keeps moaning her baby’s name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.
“Her baby’s arms are going to be grafted to her face. ‘So she doesn’t forget what she did,’ he says.” Derkhan’s voice curdled as she mimicked the Magister.
They walked in silence for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.
“I’m an art critic, Isaac,” Derkhan said eventually. “Remaking’s art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows . . . ! Not that they admit that’s what they’re for . . .
“Remaking’s creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR.” She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. “It’s the same thing, Isaac. Art’s something you choose to make . . . it’s a bringing together of . . . of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That’s why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.
“I don’t want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art.”
Isaac felt in his pocket for Runagate Rampant. It was dangerous even to hold a copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called “comprador scum”; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party; the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in a sandpit.
At the end of the path paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food, discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing