Isaac had steered Yagharek into a chair. He pulled up a stool and sat opposite him. The garuda was completely silent. He gazed at Isaac with powerful concentration, then at the diagrams he held. This was how he read, Isaac realized, with this intensity and focus. He was not like a patient waiting for a doctor to get to the point: he was taking in every single word.
“I should say that I’m not totally finished with this. There’s one person I know who’s adept at the sort of bio-thaumaturgy you’d need to have working wings grafted to you. So I’m going to go round and pick his brains about the chances of success.” Isaac grimaced and shook his head. “And let me tell you, Yag old son, that if you knew this geezer you’d know how damn noble that is. There’s no sacrifice I won’t make it for you…” He paused lengthily.
“So there’s the chance this chap could say ‘Yes, wings, no problem, bring him round and I’ll do it on Dustday afternoon.’ That is possible, but you employ me for my scientificnous, and I’m telling you that it’s my professional opinion that that won’t happen. I think we have to think laterally.
“My first forays down this route were to look at the various things that fly without wings. Now, I’ll spare you the details of my schemes. Most of the plans are…here, if you’re interested. A subcutaneous self-inflating mini-dirigible; a transplant of mutant wind-polyp glands; integrating you with a flying golem; even something as prosaic as teaching you basic physical thaumaturgy.” Isaac indicated the notes on each of these plans as he mentioned them. “All unworkable. Thaumaturgy’s unreliable and exhausting. Anyone can learn some basic hexes, given application, but constant countergeotropy on demand would take a damn sight more energy and skill than most people have got. Do you have powerful sortilege in the Cymek?”
Yagharek shook his head slowly. “Some whispers to call prey to our claws; some symbols and passes that encourage bones to knit and blood to clot: that is all.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. So best not to rely on that. And trust me when I tell you that my other…er…offbeat plans were unworkable.
“So I’ve been spending all my time working on stuff like this, and getting nowhere, and I realized that whenever I stop for a minute or two and just have a think, the same thing comes into my head. Watercraeft.”
Yagharek frowned, drawing his already heavy brows into an overhanging crag of almost geological aspect. He shook his head to show his confusion.
“Watercraeft,” Isaac repeated. “You know what that is?”
“I have read something of it…The skill of the vodyanoi…”
“Bang on, old son. You’ll see the dockers doing it sometimes, in Kelltree or Smog Bend. A whole gang of them can shape quite a bit of the river. They dig holes in the water down to where spilt cargoes lie on the bottom, so the cranes can hook them. Fucking amazing. In rural communities they use it to cut trenches of air through rivers, then drive fish into them. They just fly out of the flat side of the river and flop onto the ground. Brilliant.” Isaac pursed his lips in appreciation. “Anyway, these days it’s mostly just used to arse about, make little sculptures. They have little competitions and whatnot.
“The point is, Yag, that what you’ve got there is water behaving very much as it shouldn’t. Right? And that’s what you want. You want heavy stuff, this thing here, this body-” he poked Yagharek gently in the chest-“to fly. Are you with me? Let’s turn our minds to the ontological conundrum of persuading matter to break habits of aeons. We want to make elements misbehave. This isn’t a problem of advanced ornithology, it’s philosophy.
“ ‘Stail, Yag, this is stuff I’ve been working on for years! It’d almost turned into a kind of hobby. But then this morning I looked again at some notes I’d made early on in your case, and I linked it up with all my old ideas, and I saw that this was the way to go. And I’ve been wrestling with it all day.” Isaac shook a piece of paper at Yagharek, a piece of paper on which was a triangle containing a cross.
Isaac grabbed a pencil and wrote words at the three points of the triangle. He turned the diagram to face Yagharek. The top point was labelled Occult/thaumaturgical; the bottom left Material; the bottom right Social/sapiential.
“Righto, now, don’t get too bogged down with this diagram, Yag old son, it’s supposed to be an aid to thought, nothing more. What you’ve got here is a depiction of the three points within which all scholarship, all knowledge, is located.
“Down here, there’s material. That’s the actual physical stuff, atoms and the like. Everything from fundamental femtoscopic particles like elyctrons, up to big fuck-off volcanos. Rocks, elyctromagnetism, chymical reaction…All that sort of thing.
“Opposite, that’s social. Sentient creatures, of which there’s no shortage on Bas-Lag, can’t just be studied like stones. By reflecting on the world and on their own reflections, humans and garuda and cactacae and whatnot create a different order of organization, right? So it’s got to be studied in its own terms-but at the same time it’s also obviously linked to the physical stuff that makes everything up. That’s what this nice line is here, connecting the two.
“Up top is occult. Now we’re cooking. Occult: ‘hidden.’ Takes in the various forces and dynamics and the like that aren’t just to do with physical bits and bobs interacting, and aren’t just the thoughts of thinkers. Spirits, daemons, gods if you want to call them that, thaumaturgy…you get the idea. That’s up at that end. But it’s linked to the other two. First off, thaumaturgic techniques, invocation, shamanism and so on, they all affect-and are affected by-the social relations that surround them. And then the physical aspect: hexes and charms are mostly the manipulation of theoretical particles-the ‘enchanted particles’-called thaumaturgons. Now, some scientists-” he thumped his chest “-think they’re essentially the same sort of thing as protons and all the physical particles.
“This…” said Isaac slyly, his voice slowing right down, “is where stuff gets really interesting.
“If you think of any arena of study or knowledge, it lies somewhere in this triangle, but not squarely on one corner. Take sociology, or psychology, or xenthropology. Pretty simple, right? It’s down here, in the ‘Social’ corner? Well, yes and no. That’s definitely its closest node, but you can’t study societies without thinking about the questions of physical resources. Right? So straight away, the physical aspect is kicking in. So we have to move sociology along the bottom axis a little bit.” He slid his finger a fraction of an inch to the left. “But then, how can you understand, say, cactacae culture without understanding their solar-focus, or khepri culture without their deities, or vodyanoi culture without understanding shamanic channelling? You can’t” he concluded triumphantly. “So we have to shift things up towards the occult.” His finger moved a little, accordingly.
“So that’s roughly where sociology and psychology and the like are. Bottom right-hand corner, little bit up, little bit along.
“Physics? Biology? Should be right over by material sciences, yeah? Only, if you say that biology has an effect on society, the reverse is also true, so biology’s actually a tiny bit to the right of the ‘Material’ corner. And what about the flight of wind-polyps? The feeding of soul trees? That stuff’s occult, so we’ve moved it again, up this time. Physics includes the efficacy of certain substances in thaumaturgic hexes. You take my point? Even the most ‘pure’ subject’s actually somewhere between the three.
“Then there’s a whole bunch of subjects that define themselves by their mongrel nature. Socio-biology? Halfway along the bottom and a little bit up. Hypnotology? Halfway up the right flank. Social/psychological and occult, but with a bit of brain chymistry thrown in, so that’s over a bit…”