China Mieville - The Scar

“He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”

“Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”

Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.

“I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of Grand Easterly took me in and gave me a job that pays money and told me they didn’t give a cup of piss that I was Remade. The Lovers gave me my life, Shekel, and a city and a home. I tell you that whatever they fucking want to do is alfuckingright by me. New Crobuzon can kiss my arse, lad. I’m an Armada man, a Garwater man. I’m learning my Salt. I’m loyal.”

Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.

He was very impressed.

It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the Terpsichoria who had been let out tried to live.

On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.

In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the Terpsichoria . Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.

And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.

Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment. As if he were a real waiter, she found herself thinking, in a real restaurant in a real city .

The Raddletongue was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.

There were strange shapes in the Raddletongue ’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.

The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.

Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.

She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.

They sat quietly for a while. Johannes seemed shy, and Bellis found herself resentful that it had been so long since she had heard from him, and suspecting that she was not being fair she retreated into silence.

Bellis saw with amazement that the red wine on the table was a vintage Galaggi, a House Predicus 1768. She looked up at Johannes with eyes wide. With her mouth set shut she looked disapproving.

“I thought we might celebrate,” he said. “I mean, at seeing each other again.”

The wine was excellent.

“Why’ve they just left me… us… to get on with it? Or to rot?” Bellis demanded. She picked at her concoction of fish and bitter ship-grown leaves. “I’d have thought… I’d have thought it illadvised to pluck a few hundred people from their lives, then let them loose in… this…”

“They’ve not done that,” Johannes said. “How many of the other Terpsichoria passengers have you seen? How many of the crew? Don’t you remember the interviews, the questions, when we first arrived? They were tests,” he said gently. “They were estimating who was safe, and who not. If they think you’re too troublesome, or too… tied to New Crobuzon…” His voice petered away.

“Then what?” demanded Bellis. “Like the captain…?”

“No no no,” said Johannes quickly. “I think that they… work on you. Try to persuade you. I mean, you know about press-ganging. There are plenty of sailors in the New Crobuzon navy who were doing nothing more nautical than carousing in a tavern the night they were ‘recruited.’ It doesn’t stop most of them working as sailors once they’re taken.”

“For a while,” said Bellis.

“Yes. I’m not saying it’s exactly the same. That’s the big difference: once you join Armada you don’t… leave.”

“I’ve been told that a thousand times,” Bellis said slowly. “But what about Armada’s fleet? What about the cray underneath? You think they can’t get away? Anyway, if that were true, if people never did have a chance to leave, no one but the city-born would be prepared to live here.”

“Obviously,” Johannes said. “The city’s freebooters are on sail for months, maybe years at a time till they make their way back to Armada. And they’ll dock at other ports during those journeys, and I’m sure some of their crew must have disappeared. There must be ex-Armadans scattered here and there.

“But the fact is, those crews are chosen: partly for their loyalty, and partly for the fact that if they do run, it won’t matter. They’re almost all city-born, for a start: it’s a rare press-ganged who’s given a letter of pass. The likes of you and me, we couldn’t hope to get on a vessel like that. Armada is where most of us press-ganged’ll see things out.

“But dammit, think who gets taken, Bellis. Some sailors, sure, some ‘rival’ pirates, a few merchants. But the ships the Armadans encounter-you think they all get taken? Most of the press-ganged vessels are… well, ships like the Terpsichoria . Slavers . Or colony ships full of transported Remade. Or jail ships. Or ships carrying prisoners of war.

“Most of the Remade on the Terpsichoria realized long ago that they’d never be going home. Twenty years, my eye-it’s a life sentence, and a death sentence, and they know it. And here they are now, with work and money and respect … Is it any wonder they accept it? As far as I know there are only seven Remade from the Terpsichoria being treated for rejection, and two of those already suffer dementia.”

And how the fuck , wondered Bellis, how in the name of Jabber do you know that?

“What about the likes of you and me?” Johannes continued. “All of us… we already knew we’d be away from home-away from New Crobuzon-for five years at the very, very least, and probably more. Look at the motley group we were. I’d say very few of the other passengers had unbreakable ties with the city. People arriving here are unsettled, sure; and surprised, confused, alarmed. But not destroyed. Isn’t it a ‘new life’ that they promise Nova Esperium colonists? Wasn’t that what most of us sought?”

Most, perhaps , thought Bellis. But not all. And if it’s satisfaction with this place they look for before they let us live free here, then gods know -I know-they can make mistakes of judgment.