Yagharek nodded. His predatory face was so sharp, so hard. Emotion was invisible. His words had to be decoded. It was not his face, nor his eyes, nor his bearing (once again proud and imperious), nor his voice that let Isaac see his despair. It was his words.
“Be a dilettante, a sciolist, a swindler…So long as you return me to the sky, Grimnebulin.”
Yagharek stooped and picked up his ugly wooden disguise. He strapped it to himself without obvious shame, despite the indignity of the act. Isaac watched as Yagharek draped the huge cloak over himself and stepped quietly down the stairs.
Isaac leant thoughtfully on the railing and looked down into the dusty space. Yagharek paced past the immobile construct, past haphazard piles of papers and chairs and blackboards. The light beams that had burst through walls pierced by age were gone. The sun was low, now, behind the buildings across from Isaac’s warehouse, blocked by massed ranks of bricks, sliding sideways across the ancient city, lighting the hidden sides of the Dancing Shoe Mountains, Spine Peak and the crags of Penitent’s Pass, throwing the jagged skyline of the earth into silhouettes that loomed up miles to the west of New Crobuzon.
When Yagharek opened the door, it was onto a street in shadow.
Isaac worked into the night.
As soon as Yagharek left Isaac opened his window and dangled a large red piece of cord from nails in the brick. He moved his heavy calculation engine from the centre of its desk to the floor beside it. Sheafs of programme cards spilt from its storage shelf to the floor. Isaac swore. He patted them together and replaced them. Then he carried his typewriter to his desk and began to make a list. Occasionally he would leap upright and pace over to his makeshift bookshelves, or rummage through a pile of books on the floor, till he found the volume he was looking for. He would take it to the desk and flick through from the back, searching for the bibliography.
He laboriously copied details, stabbing with two fingers at the typewriter keys.
As he wrote, the parameters of his plan began to expand. He sought more and more books, his eyes widening as he realized the potentiality of this research.
Eventually he stopped and sat back in his chair, pondering. He grabbed some loose paper and scrawled diagrams on it: mental maps, plans of how to proceed.
Again and again he returned to the same model. A triangle, with a cross firmly planted in the middle. He could not stop himself grinning.
“I like it…” he murmured.
There was a knock at the window. He rose and paced over to it.
A small scarlet idiot face grinned at Isaac from outside. Two stubby horns jutted from its prominent chin, ridges and knobs of bone unconvincingly imitated a hairline. Watery eyes gazed above an ugly, cheerful grin.
Isaac opened the window onto the rapidly dwindling light. There was an argument between klaxons as industrial boats fought to crawl past each other in the waters of the Canker. The creature perched on Isaac’s window-ledge hopped up into the open window-frame, grasping the edges with gnarled hands.
“Wotcher, captain!” it gabbled. Its accent was thick and bizarre. “Saw the red wossname, scarf thing…Says to meself, ‘Time for da bossman!’ ” It winked and barked stupid laughter. “Wossyer pleasure, captain? Atcher service.”
“Evening, Teafortwo. You got my message.” The creature flapped its red batwings.
Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf’s below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows’ legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by.
The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo’s sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies.
The wyrmen lived in hundreds and thousands of nooks, in attics and annexes and behind hoardings. Most picked a living from the margins of the city. The huge dumps and rubbish-heaps at the outskirts of Stoneshell and Abrogate Green, the wastescape by the river in Griss Twist, all swarmed with wyrmen, squabbling and laughing, drinking from stagnant canals, fucking in the sky and on the earth. Some, like Teafortwo, supplemented this with informal employment. When scarfs flapped on roofs, or chalk marks defaced walls near attic windows, the odds were that someone was calling some wyrman or other for a task.
Isaac foraged in his pocket and held up a shekel. “Fancy earning this, Teafortwo?”
“Betcha, captain!” shouted Teafortwo. “Look out below!” he added and shat loudly. The stool spattered on the street. Teafortwo guffawed.
Isaac handed him the list he had made, rolled into a scroll. “Take that to the university library. You know it? Over the river? Good. It’s open late, you should catch ‘em open. Give that to the librarian. I’ve signed it, so they shouldn’t give you any trouble. They’ll load you up with some books. Think you can bring them back to me? They’ll be pretty heavy.”
“No problem, captain!” Teafortwo swelled his chest like a bantam. “Big strong lad!”
“Fine. Manage it in one go and I’ll slip you a bit more moolah.” Teafortwo clutched the list and turned to go with some rude childish yell, when Isaac grabbed the edge of his wing. The wyrman turned, surprised. “Problem, boss?”
“No, no…” Isaac was staring at the base of his wing, thoughtfully. He gently opened and closed Teafortwo’s massive wing with his hands. Under that vivid red skin, horny and pockmarked and stiff like leather, Isaac could feel the specialized muscles of flight winding through the flesh to the wings. They moved with a magnificent economy. He bent the wing through a full circle, feeling the muscles tug it into a paddling, scooping motion that would shovel air out and under the wyrman. Teafortwo giggled.
“Captain tickle me! Saucy devil!” he screamed.
Isaac reached for some paper, having to stop himself from dragging Teafortwo with him. He was visualizing the wyrman wing represented mathematically, as simple component planes.
“Teafortwo…tell you what. When you get back, I’ll toss you another shekel if I can take a few heliotypes of you and do a couple of experiments. Only half an hour or so. What do you say?”
“Lovely-jubbly, captain!”
Teafortwo hopped onto the window-sill and lurched out into the gloaming. Isaac squinted, studying the rolling motion of the wings, watching those strong muscles unique to the airborne send eighty or more pounds of twisted flesh and bone powering through the sky.
When Teafortwo had disappeared from sight, Isaac sat and made another list, by hand this time, scribbling at speed.
Research, he wrote at the top of the page. Then below it: physics; gravity; forces/planes/vectors; unified field. And a little below that, he wrote: Flight i) natural ii) thaumaturgical iii) chymico-physical iv) combined v) other.
Finally, underlined and in capitals, he wrote PHYSIOGNOMIES OF FLIGHT.
He sat back, not relaxed but poised to leap. He was humming abstractedly. He was desperately excited.
He fumbled for one of the books he had fished from under his bed, an enormous old volume. He let it topple flat onto the desk, relishing the heavy sound. The cover was embossed in unrealistic fake gold.