Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [49]
She used the opalescent nacre of the khepri-spit to good effect. At certain places, though, the hues of Mr. Motley’s bizarre flesh were too spectacular, too arresting, not to be represented. Lin would glance down and grab a handful of the colourberries arrayed on her pallet before her. She would take them in subtle combinations and quickly eat them, a careful cocktail of redberries and cyanberries, say, yellowberries and purpleberries and blackberries.
The vivid juice would be spat through her headguts, down peculiar intestinal byways and into an adjunct of her main thoracic sac, and within four or five minutes she could push the mixed colour into the diluted khepri-spit. She would smear the liquid froth into careful position, slopping astonishing tones in suggestive patches and scabs, where it coagulated quickly into shape.
It was only at the end of hours of work, bloated and exhausted, her mouth foul with berry acid and the musty chalk of the paste, that Lin could turn and see her creation. That was the skill of the gland-artist, who had to work blind.
The first of Mr. Motley’s legs was coming along, she had decided, with some pride.
The clouds just visible through the skylight moiled vigorously, dissolving and recombining in scraps and shards in new parts of the sky. The air in the attic was very still, by comparison. Dust hung motionless. Mr. Motley stood poised against the light.
He was good at staying very still, as long as one of his mouths kept up a rambling monologue. Today he had decided to talk to Lin about drugs.
“What is your poison, Lin? Shazbah? Tusk has no effect on khepri, does it, so that’s out . . .” He ruminated. “I think artists have an ambivalent relationship with drugs. I mean, the whole project’s about unlocking the beast within, right? Or the angel. Whatever. Opening doors one thought were jammed closed. Now, if you do that with drugs, then doesn’t that make the art rather a let-down? Art’s got to be about communication, hasn’t it? So if you rely on drugs, which are, I do not care what any proselytizing little ponce dropping a fizzbolt with chums at a dancehall tells me, which are an intrinsically individualized experience, then you’ve opened the doors, but can you communicate what you’ve found on the other side?
“Then on the other hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it were . . . but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do . . .”
Lin glanced up to see which mouth he was speaking from. It was a large, feminine one near his shoulder. She wondered why it was that his voice remained unchanged. She wished she could reply, or that he would stop talking. She found it hard to concentrate, but she thought she had already extracted as good a compromise as she would get from him.
“Lots and lots of money in drugs . . . of course you know that. D’you know what your friend and agent Lucky Gazid is prepared to pay for his latest illicit tipple? Honestly, it would astonish you. Ask him, do. The market for these substances is extraordinary. There’s room for a few purveyors to make quite tidy sums.”
Lin felt that Mr. Motley was laughing at her. Every conversation he had with her wherein he disclosed some hidden details of New Crobuzon’s underworld lore, she was embroiled in something she was eager to avoid. I’m nothing but a visitor, she wanted to sign frantically. Don’t give me a streetmap! The occasional shot of shazbah to come up, maybe a jolt of quinner to come down, that’s all I ask . . . Don’t know about the distribution and don’t want to!
“Ma Francine has something of a monopoly in Petty Coil. She’s spreading her sales representatives further afield