Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [54]
“Absolutely. So anyway, short of going to Spatters, at the moment I can’t work with actual garuda, so I’m looking at the various flight mechanisms you . . . uh . . . see around you. Amazing variation, actually.”
Isaac sheafed through piles of notes, holding up diagrams of finches’ and bluebottles’ wings. He untied the dead pigeon and delicately traced the movement of its wings through a rolling arc. He pointed wordlessly at the wall around his desk. It was covered with carefully rendered diagrams of wings. Close-up sections of the rotating joint at the shoulder, pared-down representations of forces, beautifully shaded studies of feather patterns. Here too were heliotypes of dirigibles, with arrows and question marks scrawled on them in dark ink. There were suggestive sketches of the mindless men-o’-war, and hugely enlarged pictures of wasps’ wings. Each was carefully labelled. David moved his eyes slowly over the hours and hours of work, the comparative studies of the engines of flight.
“I don’t think my client’s too fussy about what his wings—or whatever—look like, as long as he can get airbound as and when.” David and Lublamai knew about Yagharek. Isaac had asked them for secrecy. He trusted them. He had told them in case Yagharek visited when they were in the warehouse, although so far the garuda had managed to avoid them on his fleeting visits.
“Have you thought about just, y’know, sticking some wings back on?” said David. “Remaking him?”
“Well, absolutely, that’s my main line of enquiry, but there’re two problems. One is what wings? I’ll have to build them. Second is, do you know any Remakers prepared to do that on the quiet? The best bio-thaumaturge I know is the despised Vermishank. I’ll go to him if I fucking have to, but I’ll be sorely desperate before I do that . . . So at the moment I’m doing preliminary stuff, trying to work out the size and shape and power-source of something that would hold him up at all. If I go that way, eventually.”
“What else have you got in mind? Physico-thaumaturgy?”
“Well, you know, UFT, my old favourite . . .” Isaac grinned and shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have a feeling his back’s too messed up for easy Remaking, even if I could get the wings sorted out. I’m wondering about combining two different energy fields . . . Shit, David, I don’t know. I’ve got the beginnings of an idea . . .” He pointed vaguely at a roughly labelled drawing of a triangle.
“Isaac?” Lublamai’s yell sailed over the relentless squawks and screeches. Isaac and David looked over at him. He had wandered on past the lasifly and the pair of gild-parakeets. He was pointing at a smaller set of boxes and cases and vats. “What’s all this?”
“Oh, that’s my nursery,” shouted Isaac with a grin. He strode towards Lublamai, pulling David with him. “I thought it might be interesting to see how you progress from something that can’t fly to something that can, so I managed to get hold of a bunch of neonates and unborns and baby things.”
He stopped by the collection. Lublamai was peering into a small hutch at a clutch of vivid cobalt eggs.
“Don’t know what they are,” said Isaac. “Hope it’s something pretty.”
The hutch was on the top of a pile of similar open-fronted boxes, in each of which a clumsy little hand-made nest contained between one and four eggs. Some were astonishing colours, some a drab beige. A little pipe coiled away behind the hutches and disappeared over the railings into the boiler below. Isaac nudged it with his foot.
“I think they prefer it warm . . .” he muttered. “Don’t really know . . .”
Lublamai was bending down to peer into a glass-fronted tank.
“Wow . . .” he breathed. “I feel like I’m ten again! Trade you these for six marbles.”
The tank’s floor writhed with little green caterpillars. They munched voraciously and systematically on the leaves stuffed rudely around them. The stems were crawling with little bodies.
“Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Any day now they should go into their cocoons, and then I think I’m going to ruthlessly cut them open at various stages to see