Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [50]
I’m going to find Isaac tonight, decided Lin nervously. I’m going to take him out to supper, somewhere in Salacus Fields where I can touch his toes with mine.
The annual Shintacost Prize competition was coming up fast, at the end of Melluary, and she would have to think of something to tell him as to why she was not entering. She had never won—the judges, she thought haughtily, did not understand gland-art—but she, along with all her artist friends, had entered without fail for the last seven years. It had become a ritual. They would have a grand supper on the day of the announcement, and send someone to pick up an early copy of the Salacus Gazetteer, which sponsored the competition, to see who had won. Then they would drunkenly denounce the organizers for tasteless buffoons.
Isaac would be surprised that she was not taking part. She had decided to hint at some monumental work-in-progress, something to keep him from asking questions for some time.
Of course, she reflected, if his garuda thing’s still going on, he won’t really notice if I enter or not.
There was a sour note to her thoughts. She was not being fair, she realized. She was prone to the same kind of obsessing: she found it difficult, now, not to see the monstrous shape of Mr. Motley hovering at the corner of her vision at every hour. It was just bad timing that Isaac should be obsessed at the same time as her, she thought desultorily. This job was swallowing her up. She wanted to come home every night to freshly mixed fruit salad and theatre tickets and sex.
Instead, he scribbled avidly in his workshop, and she came home to an empty bed in Aspic Hole, night after night. They met once or twice a week, for a hurried supper and a deep, unromantic sleep.
Lin looked up and saw that the shadows had moved some way since she had come into the attic. Her mind felt foggy. Her delicate forelegs cleaned her mouth and eyes and antennae in quick passes. She chewed what she had decided would be the day’s last clutch of colourberries. The tartness of the blueberries was tempered by the sweet pinkberries. She was mixing carefully, adding an unripe pearlberry or a nearly fermenting yellowberry. She knew exactly the taste she was striving for: the sickly, cloying bitterness of a colour like vivid, greying salmon, the colour of Mr. Motley’s calf muscle.
She swallowed and squeezed juice through her headgullet. It squirted eventually onto the shimmering sides of the drying khepri-spit. It was a little too liquid: it spattered and dribbled as it emerged. Lin worked with it, rendering the muscle tone in abstract streaks and drips, a spur-of-the-moment rescue.
When the spit was dry she disengaged. She felt a sticky seal of mucus stretch and snap as she pulled her head away from the half-finished leg. She leaned to one side and tensed, pushing the remaining paste through her gland. The ribbed underbelly of her headbody squeezed itself out of its distended shape, into more usual dimensions. A fat white glop of khepri-spit dropped from her head and curled on the floor. Lin stretched her gland-tip forwards and cleaned it with her rear legs, then carefully closed the little protective case below her wingtips.
She stood and stretched. Mr. Motley’s amiable, cold, dangerous little pronouncements broke off sharply. He had not realized she was finished.
“So soon, Ms. Lin?” he cried with theatrical disappointment.
Losing my edge if not careful, she signed slowly. Takes a lot out of you. Got to stop.
“Of course,” said Mr. Motley. “And how is the meisterwork?”
They turned together.
Lin was pleased to see that her impromptu recovery from the watery colourberry juice had created a vivid,