Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [84]
New Crobuzon appeared here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps between streets that were traversed in seconds.
There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard.
The sea of dreams in which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.
Less of a sea, he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of a consommé. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally. If I throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out, he thought.
The memories and dreams came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.
He rolled in a surf of sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming out their guilty, illicit desires.
Isaac spiralled in a little whirlpool of anxiety dreams. A human girl about to enter her exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi watercræfter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable to recall a single line of his speech.
My mind’s a cauldron, Isaac thought, and all these dreams are bubbling over.
The slop of ideas came quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker, trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.
It was no use. The dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized that his dream was true.
All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own.
There was a frantic chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.
Abruptly, all the dreams stopped.
Isaac opened his eyes too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.
The dreams had stopped. Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.
“By . . . Jabber’s . . . arse . . .” he whispered. The effort made his head ache.
This was absurd. He had no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything, his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was . . . he struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock . . . it was half past seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way onto the bed.
He propped himself on his elbows and examined himself. His dark skin was slick and grey. His mouth reeked. Isaac realized that he must have lain almost motionless for the whole night: the covers were a little rucked, that was all.
The terrified birdsong that had woken him started again. Isaac shook his head in irritation and looked for its