China Mieville - The Scar

Cats padded past him.

The city shifted and corrected, and the tireless fleet of steamships beyond Armada’s bounds plowed on, chains outstretched, hauling their home.

Tanner stood in the quiet, looking up at old towers, the silhouettes of slates, chimneys, factory roofs, and trees. Across a little stretch of water, broken by a hamlet of houseboats, lights glimmered in the cabins of boats from shores about which Tanner Sack knew nothing. Others were watching the night.

( -Have you fucked before? she said, and Shekel could not help but remember things he did not much want to. The Remade women in the dark stinking of Terpsichoria who took his fumbling prick inside them for more portions of bread. Those whom the sailors held down whether they would or not (all the men catcalled him to join them) and whom twice he had lain on (once only pretending to finish before slinking away discomforted by her shrieks and) once entering for true and spending inside her, tightly struggling and crying as she was. And before them girls in the back alleys of Smog Bend, and boys (like him) showing their privates, their transactions something between barter and sex and bullying and play. Shekel opened his mouth to answer and the truths struggled, and she saw and interrupted him (it was a mercy she did him) and said-No not for games or money and not when you took it or gave it by force but when you fucked one who wanted you and who you wanted like real people like equals. And of course when she said that of course the answer was no, and he gave it, grateful to her for making this his first time (an undeserved gift that he took humble and eager).

He watched her take off her blouse and his breath came very short at the sight of all that woman’s flesh and at the eagerness in her own eyes. He felt the radiant heat of her boiler (which she could never let die she told him, which ate and ate fuel incessantly, old and broken and unreasonably greedy) and saw the dark pewter of her harness where it met the pasty flesh of her upper thighs like a tide. His own clothes were off him in easy layers and he stood shivering and thin and scrawny, prick bobbing erect and adolescent, heart and passion filling him so that it was hard to swallow.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.

Heal me , he thought, not understanding what he thought, hoping for a reconfiguration. There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

– My Remade girl, he said wondering, and she forgave him that, instantly, because she knew he would not think it again.

It was not easy, with the stubs of her legs pinioned in metal, in a tight V , parted only slightly, with only two inches of the inside of her thighs below her cunt in flesh. She could not open to him or lie back, and it was not easy.

But they persevered, and succeeded.)

Shekel came to Bellis and asked her to teach him to read.

He knew the shapes of the Ragamoll alphabet, he told her, and had a tentative sense of which sound each letter made, but they remained esoteric. He had never tried to link them and make them words.

Shekel seemed subdued, as if his thoughts were outside the corridors of the library boats. He was slower than usual to smile. He did not talk about Tanner Sack, or about Angevine, whose name had peppered his conversations recently. He wanted only to know if Bellis would help him read.

She spent more than two hours, after her shift, going through the alphabet with him. He knew the names of the letters, but his sense of them was abstract. Bellis had him write his name, and he did, scratchy and inexpert, pausing halfway into the second letter and skipping ahead to the fourth, then going back and filling in lost spaces.

He knew his written name, but only as strokes of a pen.

Bellis told him that the letters were instructions, orders, usually to make the sound that started their own name. She wrote her own first name, separating each letter from its neighbors by an inch or more. Then she had him obey the orders they gave him.

She waited while he faltered through the buh and eh and luh luh ih suh . Then she brought the letters closer together and had him obey them-still slowly-again. And once more.

Finally she closed the characters up into a word and told him to repeat his exercise quickly, to do what the letters told him (“Look at them, so close together”) in one quick run.

Buh eh luh luh ih suh .

(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)

He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.

After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the Corrosive Memory . It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.

There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.

“Look,” Bellis said. “Can you see?” She indicated the brass label. “Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon.”

She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.

Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.

The second was for older children. It was a history of New Crobuzon. Bellis stopped short, seeing the etched pictures of the Ribs and the Spike and Perdido Street Station. She skim-read quickly, curling her face in amused contempt at the grotesquely misleading history. The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust and, most shamefully, the Pirate Wars all suggested, in childish and disingenuous language, that New Crobuzon was a stronghold of liberty that thrived despite almost insuperable and unfair odds.

Shekel was watching her, fascinated.

“Try this one,” she said, and held out to him The Courageous Egg . He took it reverentially. “It’s for young children,” she said. “Don’t get worried about the story; it’s much too silly for you. It means nothing. But I want to know if you can work out what’s happening, if you can understand what goes on, by working through the words like I showed you. Follow the letters’ orders, say the words. There are bound to be some in there that you can’t understand. When you come to them, write them down, and bring the list to me.”

Shekel looked up at her sharply. “Write them down?” he said.