They were also taught to worship 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 crushing 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.

It had taken Lin until she was fifteen to challenge her broodma openly. She did so in terms that she now saw were naive and confused. Lin denounced her mother as a heretic, cursing her in the name of the mainstream pantheon. She fled the lunatic self-loathing of Insect Aspect worship, and the narrow streets of Creekside. She had run away to Kinken.

That was why, she reflected, for all her later disenchantment-her contempt, in fact, her hatred-there was a part of her that would always remember Kinken as a sanctuary. Now the smugness of the insular community nauseated her, but at the time of her escape she had been drunk on it. She had revelled in the arrogant denunciation of Creekside, had prayed to Awesome Broodma with a vehement delight. She had baptized herself with a khepri name and-which was vital in New Crobuzon-a human one. She had discovered that in Kinken, unlike Creekside, the hive and moiety system made for complex and useful nets of social connectivity. Her mother had never mentioned her birth or upbringing, so Lin had copied the allegiance of her first friend in Kinken, and told anyone who asked that she was Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety.

Her friend introduced her to pleasuresex, taught her to delight in the sensuous body below her neck. This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her. Until then she had been subjected only to headsex at her mother’s behest, sitting still and uncomfortable while a male scrabbled and coupled excitedly with her headscarab, in mercifully unsuccessful attempts at procreation.

With time, Lin’s hatred of her broodma slowly cooled, becoming first contempt, then pity. Her disgust at the squalor of Creekside was joined with some kind of understanding. Then, her five-year love-affair with Kinken drew to an end. It started when she stood in the Plaza of Statues, and realized that they were mawkish and badly executed, embodying a culture that was blind to itself. She began to see Kinken as implicated in the subjugation of Creekside and the never-mentioned Kinken poor, saw a “community” at best callous and uncaring, at worst deliberately keeping Creekside down to maintain its superiority.

With its priestesses and its orgies and its cottage industries, its secret reliance on the wider economy of New Crobuzon-the vastness of which was usually depicted airily as a kind of adjunct to Kinken-Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.

Lin realized, to her revolted anger, that Kinken was more dishonest than Creekside. But this realization brought with it no nostalgia for her miserable childhood. She would not return to Creekside. And if, now, she was turning her back on Kinken as once she had turned it on Insect Aspect, there was nowhere to go but out.

So Lin taught herself signing, and left.

Lin was never so foolish as to think she could stop being defined by being khepri, as far as the city was concerned. Nor did she want to. But for herself, she stopped trying to be khepri, as she had once stopped trying to be insect. That was why she was bewildered by her feelings about Ma Francine. It was not only that Ma Francine was opposing to Mr. Motley, Lin realized. There was something about a khepri doing that, effortlessly stealing territory from this vile man, that stirred Lin.

Lin could not, even to herself, pretend to understand. She would sit, for a long time, in the shadow of banyans or oaks or pear trees, in the Kinken she had despised for years, surrounded by sisters to whom she was an outsider. She did not want to return to the “khepri way” any more than to the Insect Aspect. She did not understand the strength she drew from Kinken.

Chapter Nineteen

The construct that had swept David’s and Lublamai’s floor for years seemed finally to be giving up the ghost. It wheezed and spun as it scrubbed. It became fixated with arbitrary patches of floor, polished them as if they were jewels. Some mornings it took nearly an hour to warm up. It was becoming caught in programme loops, causing it to endlessly repeat tiny pieces of behaviour.

Isaac learnt to ignore its repetitive, neurotic whines. He worked with both hands at once. With his left, he scribbled down his notions in diagrammatic form. With his right he fed equations into the innards of his little calculating engine through its stiff keys, slotted punctured cards into its programme slot, fumbling them in and out at speed. He solved the same problems with different programmes, comparing answers, typing out the sheets of numbers.

The innumerable books on flight that had filled Isaac’s bookshelves had been replaced, with Teafortwo’s help, by an equally large number of tomes on unified field theory, and on the arcane sub-field of crisis mathematics.

After only two weeks of research, something extraordinary happened in Isaac’s mind. The reconceptualization came to him so simply that he did not at first realize the scale of his insight. It seemed a thoughtful moment like many others, in the course of a whole internal scientific dialogue. A sense of genius did not descend on Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in a cold shock of brilliant light. Instead, as he gnawed the top of a pencil one day, there was a moment of vaguely verbalized thought along the lines of or wait a minute maybe you could do it like this…

It took an hour and a half for Isaac to realize that what he had thought might be a useful mental model was vastly more exciting. He set out in a systematic attempt to prove himself wrong. He constructed scenario after mathematical scenario with which he tried to rubbish his tentatively scrawled sets of equations. His attempts at destruction failed. His equations held firm.

It took Isaac two days before he began to believe that he had solved a fundamental problem of crisis theory. He enjoyed moments of euphoria, many more of cautious nervousness. He pored over his textbooks at a crushingly slow pace, searching to make sure he had not ignored some obvious error, had not replicated some long-disproved theorem.