Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [51]
The translucent colours spilt in uneven grots down the white that glinted like the inside of a shell. The slabs of tissue and muscle crawled over each other. The intricacies of the many-textured flesh were vivid. Mr. Motley nodded approvingly.
“You know,” he ventured quietly, “my sense of the grand moment makes me wish there was some way I could avoid seeing anything more of this until it’s finished. I think it is very fine so far, you know. Very fine. But it’s dangerous to offer praise too early. Can lead to complacency . . . or to the opposite. So please don’t be downhearted, Ms. Lin, if that is the last word I say, positive or negative, on the matter, until the very end. Are we agreed?”
Lin nodded. She was unable to take her eyes from what she had created, and she rubbed her hand very gently over the smooth surface of the drying khepri-spit. Her fingers explored the transition from fur to scales to skin below Mr. Motley’s knee. She looked down at the original. She looked up at his head. He returned her gaze with a pair of tiger’s eyes.
What . . . what were you? she signed at him.
He sighed.
“I wondered when you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you wouldn’t, but I knew it was unlikely. It makes me wonder if we understand each other at all,” he hissed, sounding suddenly vicious. Lin recoiled.
“It’s so . . . predictable. You’re still not looking the right way. At all. It’s a wonder you can create such art. You still see this—” he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a monkey’s paw “—as pathology. You’re still interested in what was and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence . . .” His voice rang around the rafters.
He calmed a little and lowered his many arms.
“This is totality.”
She nodded to show that she understood, too tired to be intimidated.
“Maybe I’m too hard on you,” Mr. Motley said reflectively. “I mean . . . this piece before us makes it clear that you have a sense of the ruptured moment, even if your question suggests the opposite . . . So maybe,” he continued slowly, “you yourself contain that moment. Part of you understands without recourse to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which renders an answer impossible.”
He looked at her triumphantly.
“You too are the bastard-zone, Ms. Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding and your ignorance blur.”
Fine, she signed as she gathered her things. Whatever. Sorry I asked.
“So was I, but not any more, I think,” he replied.
Lin folded her wooden case around her stained pallet, around the remaining colourberries (she needed more, she saw) and the blocks of paste. Mr. Motley continued with his philosophical ramblings, his ruminations on mongrel theory. Lin was not listening. She tuned her antennae away from him, felt the tiny ructions and rumblings of the house, the weight of the air on the window.
I want a sky above me, she thought, not this ancient dusty brace of beams, this tarred, brittle roof. I’m walking home. Slowly. Through Brock Marsh.
Her resolution increased as her thoughts progressed.
I’ll stop at the lab and nonchalantly ask Isaac to come with me, and I’ll steal him away for a night.
Mr. Motley continued sounding.
Shut up, shut up, you spoilt child, you damn megalomaniac with your crackpot theories, thought Lin.
When she turned to sign goodbye, it was with only the faintest semblance of politeness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A pigeon hung cruciform on an X of darkwood on Isaac’s desk. Its head bobbed frantically from side to side, but despite its terror, it could only emit a bathetic cooing.
Its wings were pinned with thin nails driven through the tight spaces between splayed feathers and bent hard down to pinion the wingtip. The pigeon’s legs were tied to the lower quarters of the little cross. The wood beneath it was spattered with the dirty white