Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [9]
Damn right I have, thought Lin, defiantly swishing her long green skirt.
The spittle-store owner knew her, and they politely, perfunctorily, brushed antennae.
Lin looked up at the shelves. The inside of the store was coated in home-grub cement, rippling across walls and blunting corners with more care than was traditional. The spittle goods perched on shelves that jutted like bones from the organic sludge were illuminated by gaslight. The window was artistically smeared with juice from various colourberries, and the day was kept out.
Lin spoke, clicking and waving her headlegs, secreting tiny mists of scent. She communicated her desire for scarletberries, cyanberries, blackberries, opalberries and purpleberries. She included a spray of admiration for the high quality of the storekeeper’s goods.
Lin took her wares and left quickly.
The atmosphere of pious community in Kinken nauseated her.
The cabdriver was waiting, and she leapt up behind him, pointed north-east, bade him take them away.
Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety, she thought giddily. You sanctimonious bitches, I remember it all! On and on about community and the great khepri hive while the “sisters” over in Creekside scrabble about for potatoes. You have nothing, surrounded by people that mock you as bugs, buy your art cheap and sell you food dear, but because there are others with even less you style yourselves the protectors of the khepri way. I’m out. I dress how I like. My art is mine.
She breathed easier when the streets around her were clean of beetle cement, and the only khepri in the crowds were, like her, outcasts.
She sent the cab under the brick arches of Spit Bazaar Station, just as a train roared overhead like a great petulant steam-powered child. It set off towards the heart of the Old Town. Superstitiously, Lin directed the cab up towards Barguest Bridge. It was not the nearest place to cross the Canker, the Tar’s sister; but that would be in Brock Marsh, the triangular slice of the Old City wedged between the two rivers as they met and became Gross Tar, and where Isaac, like many others, had his laboratory.
There was no chance at all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy. But so that she need not even think of it for a moment, she sent the cab to Gidd Station, where the Dexter Line stretched out to the east on raised tracks that stretched higher and higher above the city as they moved further from the centre.
Follow the trains! she wrote, and the cabdriver did, through the wide streets of West Gidd, over the ancient and grand Barguest Bridge, across the Canker; the cleaner, colder river that flowed down from the Bezhek Peaks. She stopped him and paid, with a generous tip, wanting to walk the last mile herself, not wanting to be traceable.
She hurried to make her appointment in the shadow of the Ribs, the Bonetown Claws, in the Thieves’ Quarter. Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station.
CHAPTER THREE
Opposite Isaac on the train sat a small child and her father, a shabby gent in a bowler hat and second-hand jacket. Isaac made a monster face at her whenever she caught his eye.
Her father was whispering to her, entertaining her with prestidigitation. He gave her a pebble to hold, then spat on it quickly. It became a frog.