Perdido Street Station Read Online Free PDF Page B

The construct they shared was rolling across
the floor, loudly and inefficiently sweeping up dust. They keep
the useless thing out of sentimentality, thought Isaac.
    Isaac’s workshop,
his kitchen and his bed, were on the huge walkway that jutted out
from the walls halfway up the old factory. It was about twenty feet
wide, circumnavigating the hall, with a ramshackle wooden railing
miraculously still holding from when Lublamai had first hammered it
in.
    The door slammed
heavily shut behind Isaac, and the long mirror that hung beside it
shuddered. I can’t believe that thing doesn’t break, thought Isaac. We must move it. As always, the thought was
gone as soon as it had come.
    As Isaac took the
stairs three at a time, David saw how he held his hands and laughed.
    "More of
Silchristchek’s high art, Isaac?" he yelled.
    Isaac grinned back.
    "Never let it be
said I don’t collect the best!"
    Isaac, who had found
the warehouse all those years ago, had had first pick of the working
space, and it showed. His bed and stove and chamberpot were in one
corner of the raised platform, and at the other end of the same side
were the bulky protuberances of his lab. Glass and clay containers
full of weird compounds and dangerous chymicals filled the shelves.
Heliotypes of Isaac with his friends in various poses around the city
and in Rudewood dotted the walls. The warehouse backed onto the Umber
Promenade: his windows looked out over the Canker and the Bonetown
shore, gave him a splendid view of the Ribs and the Kelltree train.
    Isaac ran past those
huge arched windows to an esoteric machine of burnished brass. It was
a dense knot of pipes and lenses, with dials and gauges shoved
roughly wherever they would fit.
    Ostentatiously stamped
on every component of the whole was a sign:
    property of nc
university physics dept. do not remove.
    Isaac checked and was
relieved to see that the little boiler at the machine’s heart
had not gone out. He shoved in a handful of coal and bolted the
boiler closed. He placed Sil’s little statue on a viewing
platform under a glass bell, and heaved at some bellows just beneath
it, siphoning out the air and replacing it with gas from a slender
leather tube.
    He relaxed. The
integrity of the vodyanoi waterpiece would hold a little longer, now.
Outside vodyanoi hands, untouched, such works would last perhaps an
hour before slowly collapsing back into their elemental form.
Interfered with, they dissolved much more quickly: in a noble gas
more slowly. He had perhaps two hours to investigate.
    Isaac had become
interested in vodyanoi watercraeft in a roundabout way, as a result
of his research in unified energy theory. He had wondered whether
what allowed vodyanoi to mould water was a force related to the
binding force that he sought, that held matter together in certain
circumstances, dispersed it violently in others. What had happened
was a common pattern of Isaac’s research: a byway of his work
had taken on a momentum of its own, and had become a deep, almost
certainly short-lived, obsession.
    Isaac bent some
lens-tubes into position and lit a gasjet to illuminate the
waterpiece. Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding
watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream
science was bunk, how much "analysis" was just,
description—often bad description—hiding behind
obfuscatory rubbish. His favourite example of the genre came from
Benchamburg’s Hydrophysiconometricia, a hugely respected
textbook. He had howled when he read it, copied it out carefully and
pinned it to his wall.
    The vodyanoi, by means of what is called their watercraeft, are able to manipulate the plasticity and sustain the surface tension
of water such that a quantity will hold any shape the manipulator
might give it for a short time. This is achieved by thevodyanois’
application of an hydrocohesive/aquamorphic energy field of minor
diachronic