China Mieville - Railsea

Well here I am, Sham thought languidly. Amid the salvage .

The market was in an arcade. Above, levels of busy walkways reachable by spiral stairs. Around Sham, stall after stall of startling found detritus. Absolutely ringing with the noise of attempted sales, arguments, singing, the declaration of wares. A little band accompanying all the business with guitar & oboe, a woman overseeing strange sounds emerging from what looked like a bone box.

People smart & scruffy, businesswomen & -men, tough-dressed mercenaries & buyable thugs. Trainsfolk. Bookish types. Dignitaries & explorers in the sumptuous or strange or barbarian clothes of their homelands. & everywhere salvors.

I know, I know , Sham thought in answer to the correctives & the warnings levelled by Troose & Voam. I know they’re showoffs. Still though!

The salvors yelled at each other in slang. Slid layered visors into use & out of it again, pressed studs & extrusions on their protective overalls, their leather butchers’-style aprons & many-pocketed trousers. They prodded & finger-tinkered with odd boxes, with bits & pieces of salvage that threw colours & images into the air, that sung & dimmed local lights & made dogs lie down.

His curiosity overcame Sham’s awe. “What’s that?” He pointed at a rust-deformed wedge of iron. The salesman looked wryly at him.

“A wrench,” the man said.

“& that?” Some rot-mottled square in various colours, stamped on by tiny statues.

“A children’s game. So scholars say. Or a divination kit.”

“That?” A filigreed arachnid nub of what looked like glass, leg-things drumming in complicated articulation.

“No one knows.” The man handed Sham a bit of wood. “Hit it.”

“Eh?”

“Give it a whack.” The man grinned. Sham walloped the salvage. It did not break as it looked like it should. Instead the stick itself coiled in on itself like an injured tentacle. Sham held it up. It was a tight spiral, now, though it still felt hard in his hand.

“That’s offterran, duh,” the man said. “That’s alt-salvage, that curlbug. From one of the celestial stopoffs.”

“How much are they?” Sham said. The man looked at him gently & said a price that made Sham clamp his mouth shut & turn away. Then he turned back.

“Oh, can I ask you …” He glanced around to make sure Naphi wasn’t in sight or earshot. “Do you know some, some kids? A family? They have an arch, that looks like made of some old salvage.”

The man stared at him. “What are you after, boy?” he said at last. “No. I don’t. I have no idea who they might be & I suggest that you don’t either.” He ignored Sham’s consternation & started up again with his barking, singsonging announcements that he was selling tools & curlbugs & fine cheap salvage.

Sham tried a woman haggling with an ill-tempered buyer over antique ordinator circuitry; to a pair of men who specialised in offterran alt-salvage, their cubbyhole full of thoroughly discomfiting nuggets of strangeness; to a purveyor not of salvage but of equipment for its extraction: lodestones, gauges, telegoggles, shovels, corkscrew drillboots, air pumps & masks for total earth-submersion. A group of young men & women about his age watched Sham. They snickered & whispered to each other, picked their fingernails with foolish little knives. They dispersed as a sharp-faced ferronaval officer glared at them, gathered again when he passed on.

A table of dolls. Old dolls, salvaged dolls. No matter how cleaned they had been, the dust in which they had lain for so many lifetimes had permanently coloured them: whatever tone their skin had been supposed to be, it looked ensepiaed, as if seen through dirty glass. Mostly they were shaped like people, mostly like women or girls, though of deeply questionable physical proportions, with thickety knotted & scrambled hair where it remained at all. A few were grotesques, monsters. Many were limbless. They needed the ministrations of a dollmaker.

Everywhere Sham went the responses to his question, his description of the arch & the two children, were either sincere-seeming ignorance, or guarded recognition followed by lies &/or suggestions that he leave it alone. Mostly it was the salvors who displayed the former, the local merchants the latter.

What did he know of this family? Older sister, younger brother. Messy house. With vigorous & far-travelling parents. Who, the bones said, had died.

Which thoughts, inevitably, took Sham to thinking of his own family. He did not often ruminate on his mother & father, lost by him to heartbreak & accident. It was not that he did not care: certainly he cared. It was not that he did not suspect their not-there-ness was important. He was not stupid. It was, rather, all but unremembering their ministrations, cared for as he had been throughout his life by Troose & Voam—who were his parents, really, no two ways about it. The care Sham felt for his mum & dad was care for lost strangers, dwelling on whom might feel disloyal to those who had raised him.

But he was abruptly aware that he seemed to share with these two children in the image the fact that he was, technically, to be exact about it, an orphan. Well there was a word to sit in the throat. So. Were this girl & this boy also doctors’ assistants, dissatisfied, salvage-pining, missing something? Sham doubted it.

There were clocks all over the hall in a thousand designs. Some were modern, others obviously salvage, proudly rejigged to work again, extruding little birds at set moments. Some were blue-screened, glowing with digits. All showed Sham how fast time was going.

“How did you become a salvor?” The tough-looking woman to whom Sham spoke looked up in surprise. She was sipping tarry coffee, had been exchanging dig-anecdotes with colleagues. She laughed at Sham, not unkindly. She flipped a coin at a baker at her stall & indicated that Sham should take a pastry.

“Dig,” she said. “Find a piece. Take it to a salvage train. Dig more. Find another piece. Don’t be a …” She looked him up & down. “A dogsbody? A cabin boy? A steward? A trainee moler?”

“Doctor’s assistant,” he said.

“Ah. Well yes, that, too. Don’t be that.”

“I found a bat,” Sham said through a mouthful of his sticky bread present. “I suppose that ain’t salvage, though. It’s my mate.”

He was still watched, he realised, by the little gang. & they, he saw, were watched by another young man, a wiry & quick-moving lad Sham wondered if he’d seen before.

The salvor rummaged below her table. “I need more Smearing Widgets,” she said.

“Thank you very much for the cake,” Sham said. The woman was splendid-looking. He blinked & tried to concentrate. “I don’t suppose—have you ever seen two children? They live near a …”

“An arch,” she said. Sham blinked. “A salvage arch. I heard someone was looking for them.”

“What?” said Sham. “Since I came in you heard that?”

“Word travels. Who are you, lad?” She tilted her head. “What do I know about you? Nothing yet. You know I’m not from here. But these salvage-surrounded siblings, they ring a bell.”

“You must come here all the time,” Sham said. “Maybe you heard of them once.”

“Of course. This is Manihiki. It sticks in the mind, that sort of architectural detail you describe, don’t it? I was here, it would be a couple of journeys ago, which would be a few months, I suppose? Selling direct. Anyway.” She nodded slowly at the memory. “There were two here like the ones you’re describing. Young! Young young, but calm as you like.” She raised an eyebrow. “Prodding, picking, asking questions. & they knew their salvage.”

“You think it was the ones I’m looking for?”