Perdido Street Station Part 19

I did not approach them.

Behind me where the river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade, breaking it off in the flesh of some rus.h.i.+ng, sucking predator that loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the muck. I do not know if it died.

Before the wetland and the river were days of drying gra.s.s and foothills, that I was warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I saw none.

There were villages that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on their behalf to their harvest G.o.ds. There were villages that kept me out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the gra.s.s with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

I slept alone, hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept, leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

Those sprawling downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

I walked with temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me.

I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pa.s.s my body on to a newborn, and rest.

I had been a harder creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left Myrshock, where my s.h.i.+p had landed, without spending even one night there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I felt oppressed.

I hurried through the city seeking nothing but supplies and a.s.surance that I was right to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept my gold, only my weapon.

I was eager to leave the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish, oily paddles.h.i.+p crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

And before the waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town. Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more than I lost, rampaging like a fighting c.o.c.kerel at night and h.o.a.rding pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly, even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought pa.s.sage on a merchant s.h.i.+p.

I set out across the continent to become whole.

The desert came with me.

PART THREE.

Metamorphoses

CHAPTER E EIGHTEEN.

The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They murmured to each other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way. They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

"b.l.o.o.d.y useless b.l.o.o.d.y thing," they muttered in disgust. Half-hearted attempts were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by G.o.ds or nature or chance.

In the Canker Wedge zoo, animals s.h.i.+fted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of l.u.s.tful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable behaviour.

Now, as light stayed longer every day, the bears and hyaenas and bony hippos, the lonely alopex and the apes, lay still-tensely, it seemed-for hours, watching the pa.s.sers-by from their scrubbed-brick cells and their muddy trenches. They were waiting. For the southern rains that would never reach New Crobuzon, but were encoded in their bones, perhaps. And when the rains had not come, they might settle down and wait for the dry season that, similarly, did not afflict their new home. It must be a strange, anxious existence, the keepers mused over the roars of tired, disoriented beasts.

The nights had lost nearly two hours since winter, but they seemed to have squeezed even more essence into the shorter time. They seemed particularly intense, as more and more illicit activity strove to fit the hours from sundown to dawn. Every night the enormous old warehouse half a mile south of the zoo attracted streams of men and women. The occasional leonine roar might breach the thumping and the constant blare of the crotchety, wakeful city entering the old building, sounding above the throng. It would be ignored.

The bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign still read the length of the building: Cadnebar's Soaps and Tallow Cadnebar's Soaps and Tallow. Cadnebar's had gone bust in the slump of '57. The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken and sold as sc.r.a.p. After two or three years of quiet mouldering, Cadnebar's had been reborn as the glad' circus.

Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the seasons' changes did not bring an onslaught of superst.i.tious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its Parliament was not like Maru'ahm's, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.

And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport.

Except, of course, at Cadnebar's.

Illegal it might have been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment. Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians, industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of course, that doubled as c.o.c.kfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another, with glad'-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar's was legendary.

Every night, the evening's entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena's hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impa.s.sive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and b.l.o.o.d.y and played for laughs by the professionals.

The sport at Cadnebar's was driven by fas.h.i.+on. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with ma.s.sive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard G.o.ds, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar's Wax Cadnebar's Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant Runagate Rampant.

The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.

In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of ma.s.sive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with doc.u.ments which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

Lin and Isaac s.n.a.t.c.hed furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the s.h.i.+ntacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual b.i.t.c.hery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms.

Lin had stroked his arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was tentatively very proud. She had found a s.p.a.ce that she could not and did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece that he mustn't ask her about. It was not as if she had disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with a little less vigour than she had two months ago.

She teased Isaac about his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of dreams.h.i.+t, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug. Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Isaac's part, the creature sounded extraordinary.

Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed grat.i.tude in his lurching changes of subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks.

Lin wanted to displace Isaac's concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

Every day that she saw Mr. Motley, he pulled her-unwilling as she was-into his city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped hints of gangland ma.s.sacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for. But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her. It must be deliberate.

The statue grew thighs and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng piece, as befitted its subject.

Despite her attempts to insulate her mind, Mr. Motley's blithe chat crept in, past her defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she would find herself idly wondering who was was more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer's End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import. more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer's End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import.

Lin found herself thinking more and more of Ma Francine. Mr. Motley discussed her in carefree tones, but she came up again and again in his monologues, and Lin realized that he was a little concerned.

To her surprise, Lin began to root for Ma Francine.

She was not sure how it started. The first she was aware of it was when Mr. Motley had been talking with mock humour about a disastrous attack on two couriers the previous night, during which a huge quant.i.ty of some undisclosed substance, some raw material for the manufacture of something, had been s.n.a.t.c.hed by khepri raiders from Ma Francine's gang. Lin had realized that she was thinking a little mental cheer. She was astonished, her glandwork stopping for a moment as she thought through her own feelings.

She wanted Ma Francine to win.

There was no logic to it. As soon as she applied any rigorous thought to the situation she had no opinion at all. Intellectually speaking, the triumph of one drug-dealer and hoodlum over another was of no interest to her. But emotionally, she was beginning to see the unseen Ma Francine as her champion. She found herself booing silently when she heard Mr. Motley's slyly smug a.s.surance that he had a plan that would radically alter the shape of the marketplace.

What's this? she thought wryly. she thought wryly. After all these years, the stirrings of khepri consciousness? After all these years, the stirrings of khepri consciousness?

She mocked herself, but there was some truth in the ironic thought. Maybe it would be the same for anyone who was opposing Motley, Maybe it would be the same for anyone who was opposing Motley, she thought. Lin was so fearful of reflecting on her relations.h.i.+p with Mr. Motley, so nervous of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long time to realize that she hated him. she thought. Lin was so fearful of reflecting on her relations.h.i.+p with Mr. Motley, so nervous of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long time to realize that she hated him. My enemy's enemy . . . My enemy's enemy . . . she thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But-and maybe this was at the heart of her feelings-Francine was not she thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But-and maybe this was at the heart of her feelings-Francine was not good good khepri. khepri.

These thoughts p.r.i.c.ked at Lin, discomforted her. For the first time in many years, they made her think of her relations.h.i.+p with the khepri community in other than a straightforward, righteous, confrontational way. And that made her think of her childhood.

After each day with Mr. Motley ended, Lin took to visiting Kinken. She would leave him and catch a cab from the edge of the Ribs. Across Danechi's or Barguest Bridge, past the restaurants and offices and houses of Spit Hearth.

Sometimes she would stop at Spit Bazaar and take her time wandering through its subdued lights. She felt the linen dresses and coats hanging from the stalls, ignoring the pa.s.sers-by staring rudely, wondering at the khepri shopping for human clothes. Lin would meander through the bazaar until she came to Sheck, dense and chaotic with intricate streets and sprawling brick apartment buildings.

This was not a slum. The buildings of Sheck were solid enough, and most kept the rain out. Compared to the mutant sprawl of Dog Fenn, the rotting brick mulch of Badside and Chimer's End, the desperate shacks of Spatters, Sheck was a desirable place. A little crowded, of course, and not without drunkenness and poverty and thievery. But all things considered, there were many worse places to live. This was where the shopkeepers lived, the lower managers and better-paid factory workers that every day crowded Echomire and Kelltree docks, Gross Coil and Didacai Village, known universally as Smog Bend.

Lin was not made welcome. Sheck bordered Kinken, separated only by a couple of insignificant parks. The khepri were a constant reminder to Sheck that it did not have far to fall. Khepri filled Sheck's streets during the day, making their way to The Crow to shop or take the train from Perdido Street Station. At night, though, it was a brave khepri who would walk streets made dangerous by pugnacious Three Quillers out to "keep their city clean." Lin made sure she was through this zone by sundown. Because just beyond was Kinken, where she was safe.

Safe, but not happy.

Lin walked Kinken's streets with a kind of nauseated excitement. For many years, her journeys to the area had been brief excursions to pick up colourberries and paste, perhaps the occasional khepri delicacy. Now her visits were jars to memories she had thought banished.

Houses oozed the white mucus of home-grubs. Some were completely coated in the thick stuff: it spread across roofs, linking different buildings into a lumpy, congealed totality. Lin could see in through windows and doors. The walls and floors that had been provided by human architects had been broken away in places, and the ma.s.sive home-grubs allowed to burrow their blind way through the sh.e.l.l, oozing their phlegm-cement from their abdomens, their stubby little legs skittering as they ate their way through the ruined interiors of the buildings.

Occasionally Lin would see a live specimen taken from the farms by the river, going about its refitting of a building into the intricate twisting organic pa.s.sageways preferred by most khepri tenants. The big, stupid beetles, larger than rhinos, responded to the tweaks and tugs of their keepers, blundering this way and that through the houses, recasting rooms in a quick-drying coating that softened edges and connected chambers, buildings and streets with what looked from the inside like giant worm-tracks.

Sometimes Lin would sit in one of Kinken's tiny parks. She would be still among the slowly blossoming trees and watch her kind, all around her. She would stare high above the park, at the backs and sides of tall buildings. One time, she saw a young human girl lean out from a window high above, that was stuck almost at random at the top of a stained concrete wall at the back of the building. Lin saw the girl watching her khepri neighbours placidly, as her family's was.h.i.+ng fluttered and snapped in the brisk wind from a pole jutting beside her. A strange way of growing up, A strange way of growing up, thought Lin, imagining the child surrounded by silent, insect-headed creatures, as strange as if Lin had been brought up among vodyanoi . . . but that thought led her uncomfortably in the direction of her own childhood. thought Lin, imagining the child surrounded by silent, insect-headed creatures, as strange as if Lin had been brought up among vodyanoi . . . but that thought led her uncomfortably in the direction of her own childhood.

Of course, her journey to these despised streets was a walk back through the city of her memory. She knew that. She was steeling herself to think back.

Kinken had been Lin's first refuge. In this strange time of isolation, when she cheered the efforts of khepri crime-queens and walked as an outcast in all the quadrants of the city-except, perhaps, Salacus Fields, where outcasts ruled-she realized that her feelings for Kinken were more ambivalent than she had so far allowed.

There had been khepri in New Crobuzon for nearly seven hundred years, since the Fervent Mantis Fervent Mantis crossed the Swollen Ocean and reached Bered Kai Nev, the eastern continent, the khepri home. A few merchants and travellers had returned on a one-way mission of edification. For centuries, the stock of this tiny group sustained itself in the city, became natives. There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no ghettos. There were not enough khepri. Not until the Tragic Crossing. crossed the Swollen Ocean and reached Bered Kai Nev, the eastern continent, the khepri home. A few merchants and travellers had returned on a one-way mission of edification. For centuries, the stock of this tiny group sustained itself in the city, became natives. There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no ghettos. There were not enough khepri. Not until the Tragic Crossing.

It was a hundred years since the first refugee s.h.i.+ps had crawled, barely afloat, into Iron Bay. Their enormous clockwork motors were rusted and broken, their sails ragged. They were charnel s.h.i.+ps, packed with Bered Kai Nev khepri who were only just alive. Contagion was so merciless that ancient taboos against waterburial had been overthrown. So there were few corpses on board, but there were thousands of dying. The s.h.i.+ps were like crowded antechambers to morgues.

The nature of the tragedy was a mystery to the New Crobuzon authorities, who had no consuls and little contact with any of the countries of Bered Kai Nev. The refugees would not speak of it, or if they did they were elliptical, or if they were graphic and explicit the language barrier blocked understanding. All that the humans knew was that something terrible had happened to the khepri of the eastern continent, some horrendous vortex that had sucked up millions, leaving only a tiny handful able to flee. The khepri had christened this nebulous apocalypse the Ravening.

There were twenty-five years between the arrival of the first s.h.i.+ps and the last. Some slow, motorless vessels were said to be crewed entirely by khepri born at sea, all the original refugees having died during the interminable crossing. Their daughters did not know what it was they fled, only that their dying broodmas had all bade them go west west, and never to turn the wheel. Stories of the khepri Mercy s.h.i.+ps-named for what they begged-reached New Crobuzon from other countries on the eastern coast of the Rohagi continent, from Gnurr Kett and the Jheshull Islands, from as far south as the Shards. The khepri diaspora had been chaotic and diverse and panicked.

In some lands the refugees were butchered in terrible pogroms. In others, like New Crobuzon, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by bigots and thugs.

Lin had not grown up in Kinken. She was born in the younger, poorer khepri ghetto of Creekside, a grubby stain in the northwest of the city. It was nearly impossible to understand the true history of Kinken and Creekside, because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had undertaken. The trauma of the Ravening was such that the first generation of refugees had deliberately forgotten ten thousand years of khepri history, announcing their arrival at New Crobuzon to be the beginning of a new cycle of years, the City Cycle. When the next generation had demanded their story from their broodmas, many had refused and many could not remember. Khepri history was obscured by the ma.s.sive shadow of genocide.

So it was hard for Lin to penetrate the secrets of those first twenty years of the City Cycle. Kinken and Creekside were presented as fait accompli to her, and to her broodma, and the generation before that, and the generation before that.

Creekside had no Plaza of Statues. It had been a tumbledown slum for humans a hundred years ago, a rookery of found architecture, and the khepri home-grubs had done little more than encase the ruined houses with cement, petrifying them forever on the point of collapse. The denizens of Creekside were not artists or fruitbar owners, moiety chiefs or hive elders or shopkeepers. They were disreputable and hungry. They worked in the factories and in the sewers, sold themselves to whomever would buy. Their sisters in Kinken despised them.

In Creekside's decrepit streets, strange and dangerous ideas blossomed. Small groups of radicals met in hidden halls. Messianic cults promised deliverance to the chosen.

Many of the original refugees had turned their backs on the G.o.ds of Bered Kai Nev, angry that they had not protected their disciples from the Ravening. But subsequent generations, not knowing the nature of the tragedy, offered their wors.h.i.+p again. Over a hundred years, pantheon temples had been consecrated in old workshops and deserted dancehalls. But many Creeksiders, in their confusion and hunger, turned to dissident G.o.ds.

All the usual temples could be found in Creekside's confines. Awesome Broodma was wors.h.i.+pped, and the Artspitter. Kindly Nurse presided over the shabby hospital, and the Tough Sisters defended the faithful. But in rude shacks that mouldered by the industrial ca.n.a.ls, and in front rooms blocked by dark windows, prayers were raised to stranger G.o.ds. Priestesses dedicated themselves to the service of the Elyctric Devil or the Air Harvester. Furtive groups clambered to their roofs and sang hymns to the Wingsister, praying for flight. And some lonely, desperate souls-like Lin's broodma-pledged their fealty to Insect Aspect.

Properly transliterated from Khepri into the New Crobuzon script, the chymico-audio-visual composite of description, devotion and awe that was the name of the G.o.d was rendered Insect/Aspect/(male)/(singleminded). But the few humans that knew of him called him Insect Aspect, and that was how Lin had signed him to Isaac when she told him the story of her upbringing.

Since the age of six, when she had torn the chrysalis from what had been her baby headlarva and was suddenly a headscarab, when she had burst into consciousness with language and thought, her mother had taught her that she was fallen. The gloomy doctrine of Insect Aspect was that khepri women were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had consigned her daughters to lives enc.u.mbered with ridiculous, slow, floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile purity of G.o.d and male.

Lin's broodma (who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were taught to wors.h.i.+p Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies.

They were also taught to wors.h.i.+p and serve their mindless brothers.

Thinking back now to that time, Lin no longer shuddered with revulsion. Sitting in those secluded Kinken parks, Lin carefully watched her past unfold in her mind, little by little, in a gradual act of reminiscence that took courage to pursue. She remembered how she had slowly come to realize that her life was not usual. On her rare shopping expeditions she would see with horror the casual contempt with which her khepri sisters treated male khepri, kicking and crus.h.i.+ng the mindless two-foot insects. She remembered her tentative conversations with the other children, who taught her how her neighbours lived; her fear of using the language she knew instinctively, the language she carried in her blood, but that her broodma had taught her to loathe.

Lin remembered coming home to a house that swarmed with male khepri, that stank of rotting vegetables and fruit, littered as it was with organic rubbish for males to gorge on. She remembered being commanded to wash her innumerable brothers' glistening carapaces, to pile up their dung before the household altar, to let them scuttle over her and explore her body as their dumb curiosity directed them. She remembered the night-time discussions with her broodsister, carried out in the tiny chymical wafts and gently rattling hisses that were khepri-whispers. As a result of these theological debates, her broodsister had turned the other way from her, had burrowed so deeply into her Insect Aspect faith that she outshone their mother in zealotry.