The winds rush up to me and hammer me with joy. The air is boisterous and alive.
I close my eyes.
I can imagine it with absolute exactitude. A flight. To kick out with the legs and feel my wings grab the air and throw it easily earthward, scooping great chunks away from me like paddles. The hard slog into a thermal where the feathers plump and prime, spread out, drifting, easing, gliding up around in a spiral over this enormity below me. It is another city from above. The hidden gardens become spectacles to delight me. The dark bricks are something to shake off like mud. Every building becomes an eyrie. The whole of the city can be treated with disrespect, landing and alighting on a whim, soiling the air in passing.
From the air, in flight, from above, the government and militia are pompous termites, the squalor a dulled patch passing quickly away, the degradations that take place in the shadow of the architecture are none of my concern.
I feel the wind force my fingers apart. I am buffeted invitingly. I feel the twitching as my ragged flanges of wingbone stretch.
I will not do this any more. I will not be this cripple, this earthbound bird, any longer.
This half-life ends now, with my hope.
I can so well picture a last flight, a swift, elegant curving sweep through the air that parts like a lost lover to welcome me.
Let the wind take me.
I lean forward on the wall, out over the tumbling city, into the air.
Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised.
And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them mercilessly the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.
And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.
A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.
A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.
I find that I am not surprised.
Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.
He invites me in. Into his city.
I step forward into what little light there is.
I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.
I know how I must look.
My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.
My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden. The fringes of feathers that segued into their scales are ripped clean. I walk gingerly, my groin as raw and newly plucked as my head.
I tried to break my beak, but I could not.
I stand before the building in my new flesh.
Half-a-Prayer pauses, but not for very long. With another languorous stroke, he repeats his invitation.
It is generous, but I must decline.
He offers me the half-world. He offers to share his bastard liminal life, his interstitial city. His obscure crusades and anarchic vengeance. His scorn for doors.
Escaped Remade, fReemade. Nothing. He does not fit in. He has wrested New Crobuzon into a new city, and he strives to save it from itself.
He sees another broken-down half-thing, another exhausted relic that he might convert to fight his unthinkable fight, another for whom existence in any world is impossible, a paradox, a bird that cannot fly. And he offers me a way out, into his uncommunity, his margin, his mongrel city. The violent and honourable place from where he rages.
He is generous, but I decline. That is not my city. Not my fight.
I must leave his half-breed world alone, his demimonde of weird resistance. I live in a simpler place.
He is mistaken.
I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor.
I have torn the misleading quills from my skin and made it smooth, and below that avian affectation, I am the same as my citizen fellows. I can live foresquare in one world.
I indicate him thanks and farewell and turn away, stepping off into the dim lamplight to the east, towards the university campus and Ludmead Station, through my world of bricks and mortar and tar, bazaars and markets, sulphur-lit streets. It is night and I must hurry to my bed, to find my bed, to find a bed in this my city where I can live my foresquare life.
I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.
Also by China Miéville
KING RAT
“AMBITIOUS, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN,
ENORMOUSLY IMAGINATIVE, ENGROSSING . . .
A complex fable that blends several genres—fantasy, horror, gothic, science fiction, and social protest with believable, interesting, and utterly weird, fantastic creature-characters . . . I could feel my imagination stretched and tweaked by the haunting narrative—redolent of dreams, nightmares, intuitive whisperings, visions, and tastes of the unconscious. . . . With its inventive plot, fascinating characters, evocative language, and underlying themes of coexistence among very different beings, economics and politics, crime and punishment, computer consciousness, science and art, Perdido Street Station is in the end both complex and satisfying. And China Miéville is an author to read both for fun and for quite serious amusement.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Revolutionary in the sheer bravura range of its invention . . . This is the point in the review where prefabricated accolades like ‘this novel heralds a promising new voice on the fantasy horizon’ are usually offered up. To hell with that. Miéville isn’t on the horizon, he’s roared to the center of the map, kicked ass, taken names, and jumped straight to the top of the heap.”
—The New York Review of Science Fiction
“With his new novel, the gargantuan, intricate, and thoroughly grounded Perdido Street Station, China Miéville moves effortlessly into the first division of those who use the tools and weapons of the fantastic to define and create the fiction of the coming century.”
—NEIL GAIMAN
“BRILLIANTLY ORIGINAL . . .
It’s been a long time since I’ve lost myself in a book as I did in Perdido Street Station. . . . High fantasy jammed up against gritty realism, a tender love story (albeit with an insect-woman) elbow-to-elbow at the bar with gothic horror, odd stews of medieval and modern technology, tremendous social scope and fascination with the individual; not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy, with fillips of horror, high adventure, intrigue. . . . [It] does not have something for everyone, it has lots for everyone. Reading it, I rediscovered my own fascination with stories.”
—Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Precise and rich prose . . . In the tradition of Wyndham, Lewis, Alasdair Gray, and Mervyn Peake, Miéville pulls off the most impressive act of narrative ‘subcreation’ in ages. . . . How ultimately true and pertinent to all that we hold dear are the people and issues and living conditions that we encounter in this skewed mirror.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Amazing . . . It is exhilar
ating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking. Its exuberant and unflagging inventiveness, as well as the strong narrative, keep up interest throughout. . . . An astonishing novel, guaranteed to . . . enthrall.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)
“It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling’s.”
—JOHN CLUTE
“[A] PHANTASMAGORIC MASTERPIECE . . .
THE BOOK LEFT ME BREATHLESS WITH ADMIRATION.”
—BRIAN STABLEFORD
“New Crobuzon combines equal parts Dickens and Kafka, Dick and Cronenberg to generate 700-odd pages of moving freak show, united into a single urban organism through the matter-of-fact deadpan of Miéville’s assured narration. Perdido Street Station combines audacious invention with surprising detail and grace, and gives a complex amalgam of grotesque and mundane without flinching or smirking.”
—City Paper (Philadelphia)
“[This] darkly imaginative and complex story whirls along to its final resolution with the reader’s own imagination locked in tow.”
—The Anniston Star
“An astonishing fantasy tale that is a must reading . . . Creative, satirical, and witty . . . Fans of epic fantasy will reread this classy tale many times over.”
—Booksnbytes.com
“AUDACIOUSLY IMAGINED . . .
AN IMPRESSIVE AND ULTIMATELY PLEASING EPIC.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wiggy, weird, and way cool . . . Perdido Street Station is set in a world that is a cross between Blade Runner and the London of Charles Dickens. And it’s populated with characters borrowed from mythologies from all over the world that are given China’s own unique twist. . . . Considering that Perdido Street Station is only his second book, he’s a writer to keep our eyes on.”
—WARREN JAMES
Hour 25
“The most exciting, enthralling novel I have read in a long time. It is about everything important—love, work, hope, worlds we knew were out there but needed a writer like Miéville to show them to us. His imagination is vast, his talent volcanic. Read this book. It just might be a masterpiece.”
—JONATHON CARROLL
“China Miéville’s cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination.”
—PETER F. HAMILTON
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2000 by China Miéville
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London, in 2000.
Perdido Street Station is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
e-ISBN 978-0-345-46452-1
v2.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part 2
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part 3
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part 4
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part 5
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part 6
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Part 7
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Part 8
Chapter 52
Other Books by China Miéville
Praise for Perdido Street Station
Copyright