Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [45]
Eventually, it was done. He straightened up and squinted critically down at his handiwork. It looked like a 4.
That’s the hard bit, he thought.
He felt about him for some container, turned his pockets inside out, scratched his head and thought. His face lit, and he pulled out his glasses case. He opened it and filled it with shredded paper. Then, his face wrinkling with anxious disgust, he pulled the edge of his sleeve down over his hand and reached into the box. He felt the soft edges of one of the big caterpillars between his fingers. As gently and quickly as he could, he plucked it squirming from its fellows and dropped it into his glasses case. Quickly, he closed the case around the frantically twitching little creature and fastened it.
He buried his glasses case at the bottom of his briefcase, behind mint-sweets and papers and pens and notebooks.
The clerk retied the string on the box, then sat back quickly and waited. His heart was very loud, he realized. He was sweating a little. He breathed deeply and squeezed his eyes closed.
Relax, now, he thought soothingly to himself. That’s your bit of excitement over.
Two or three minutes passed, and no one came. The clerk was still alone. His bizarre embezzlement had gone unnoticed. He breathed easier.
Eventually he looked again at his forged invoice. It was, he realized, very good. He opened the ledger and entered, in the section marked R&D, the date and the information: 27th Chet, Anno Urbis 1779: From merchant ship X. SM caterpillars: 4.
The last number seemed to glare at him as if it was written in red.
He typed the same information onto his day-sheet before picking up the resealed box and carrying it over to the wall. He opened the sliding doors and leaned into the little metal threshold, pushed the box of grubs into the waiting cage. Gusts of stale, dry air billowed onto his face from the dark cavity between the hide and guts of Parliament.
The clerk pulled the cage shut and closed the door before it. He fumbled for his programme cards, eventually pulling the one marked R&D from the little pack with fingers that still trembled, just a little. He slotted it into the information engine.
There was a juddering hiss and a ratcheting sound as the instructions fed along pistons and hammers and flywheels and the cage was pulled vertiginously up, away from the clerk’s office, beyond Parliament’s foothills, into the craggy peaks.
The box of caterpillars swung as it was tugged through the darkness. Oblivious to their journey, the grubs circumscribed their little prison with peristaltic motion.
Quiet engines transferred the cage from hook to hook, changing its direction and dropping it onto rusted conveyor-belts, retrieving it in another part of Parliament’s bowels. The box spiralled invisibly around the building, rising gradually and inexorably towards the high-security East Wing, passing through mechanized veins to those organic turrets and protuberances.
Finally the wire cage dropped with a muted chime onto a bed of springs. The vibrations of the bell ebbed into the silence. After a minute the door to the shaft snapped open and the box of larvae was yanked brusquely into a harsh light.
There were no windows in the long white room, only incandescent gasjets. Every cranny of the room was visible in its sterility. No dust, no dirt invaded here. The cleanliness was hard and aggressive.
All around the perimeter of the room, white-coated figures were huddled in obscure tasks.
It was one of those bright, hidden figures who untied the box’s string and read the invoice. She gently opened the box and peered inside.
She picked up the cardboard box and carried it at arms’ length through the room. At the far end one of her colleagues, a thin