Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Isaac could not persuade Yagharek to stay in the warehouse. The garuda would not explain his objections. He simply slipped away into the evening, a wretched outcast for all his pride, to sleep in some ditch or chimney or ruin. He would not even accept food. Isaac stood at the door to the warehouse and watched him go. Yagharek’s dark blanket swung loosely from that wooden framework, those false wings.

Eventually, Isaac closed the door. He returned to his ledge and watched lights slide along the Canker. He rested his head on his fists and listened to the tick of his clock. The feral sounds of New Crobuzon at night inveigled their way through his walls. He heard the melancholy lowing of machines and ships and factories.

In the room below him, David and Lublamai’s construct seemed to cluck gently in time to the clock.

Isaac collected his drawings from the walls. Some that he thought were good he stuffed into an obese portfolio. Many he squinted at critically and threw away. He got onto his big belly and rooted under the bed, bringing out a dusty abacus and a slide-rule.

What I need, he thought, is to get to the university and liberate one of their difference engines. It would not be easy. The security for such items was neurotic. Isaac realized suddenly that he would have the chance to scope out the guard systems for himself: he was going to the university the next day, to talk to his much-loathed employer, Vermishank.

Not that Vermishank employed him much these days. It had been months since he had received a letter in that tight little hand telling him his services were required to research some abstruse and perhaps pointless bywater of theory. Isaac could never refuse these “requests.” To do so would have been to risk his access privileges to the university’s resources, and hence to a rich vein of equipment he plundered more or less at his leisure. Vermishank did not make any move to restrict Isaac’s privileges, despite their attenuating professional relationship, and despite probably noticing a correlation between disappearing resources and Isaac’s research schedule. Isaac did not know why. Probably to try to keep power over me, he thought.

It would be the first time in his life he had sought out Vermishank, he realized, but Isaac had to go and see him. Even though he felt committed to his new approach, his crisis theory, he could not entirely turn his back on more mundane technologies such as Remaking without asking one of the city’s foremost bio-thaumaturges’ opinions on Yagharek’s case. It would have been unprofessional.