China Mieville - The Scar

There were hand-drawn maps of The Gengris, covered in arrows and annotations, and other maps of the surrounding water of the Cold Claw Sea, the topography of submerged hills and valleys and grindylow fortresses picked out in different colors for different rocks, granite and quartz and limestone, carefully corrected over several pages. There were suggestive sketches of machinery, of defensive engines.

Silas leaned over her as she read, pointing out features.

“That’s a gorge just south of the city,” he said, “that leads right up to the rocks separating off the sea. That tower there”-some irregular smudge-“was the skin library, and those were the salp vats.”

Beyond those pages were scrawled diagrams of gashes and tunnels and clawed machines, and mechanisms like locks and sluices.

“What are these?” she said, and Silas glanced over, and laughed when he saw what she was looking at.

“Oh, the embryos of big ideas-that sort of thing,” he said, and smiled at her.

They sat with their backs to an overgrown stump, or perhaps the earth-smothered anatomy of a binnacle. Bellis put Silas’ book away. Still not quite at ease, she leaned in and kissed him.

He responded gently, and an aggression came to her, and she pushed herself into him more firmly. She drew away for a moment, her face set, and looked at him staring back at her with pleasure and uncertainty. She tried to parse him, to understand the grammar of his actions and reactions, and she could not.

But frustrated as she was by that, she felt intimately how his antagonisms mirrored hers. His despite and hers-at Armada, at this absurd existence-had become conjoined. And it was an extraordinary relief and release to share even something as cold as that.

She held his face and kissed him hard. He responded eagerly. When his arm came slowly around her waist, and his fingers crooked and combed her hair, she broke from him and took hold of his hand. She pulled him after her, back through the winding ways of the park, portward, to her home.

In Bellis’ room, Silas watched silently as she undressed.

She draped her skirt, shirt, jacket, and bloomers over the back of her chair and stood stripped bare in the fading light of her window, letting down her scraped-up hair. Silas stirred. His clothes were scattered like seed. He smiled at her again, and she sighed and smiled too, finally, deprecatingly, for what seemed the first time in months. With that smile came an unexpected little stab of shyness, and with the smile it quickly left again.

They were not children; they were not new to this. They did not fumble or panic. She walked to him and straddled him with practiced grace and desire. And when she did, pushing against his cock, when he wrestled his hands out from where she had pinioned them, he knew how to move her.

Passionate; loveless but not joyless; expert; eager. It made her smile again, and gasp and come in a great gout of relief and pleasure. When she lay back in the narrow bed, having taught him how she liked to fuck and learned his own predilections, she glanced up at him (his eyes closed, sweating). She checked herself and verified that she was still lonely, still as numb to this place as ever. She would have been astounded to find it any other way.

But still, but still. Even so. She smiled again. She felt better.

For three days, Tanner lay in the surgery, strapped to the wooden table, feeling the tower and the ship move slowly and slightly beneath him.

Three days. He moved only inches at a time, wriggling against the restraints, shifting slightly to the left or right.

Most of the time he swam in glutinous aether dreams.

The chirurgeon was kindly, and kept him drugged as much as was possible without damaging him, so Tanner meandered in and out of twilight consciousness. He muttered to himself, and to the chirurgeon, who fed him and wiped him like a baby. He would sit with Tanner in his spare minutes or hours, and talk to him, pretending that his absurd and frightening responses made sense. Tanner spat out words or was silent, or wept and giggled: drugged; feverish; sluggish; cold; soundly sleeping.

Tanner had blanched when the chirurgeon had told him how it would have to be. To be shackled again, to be strapped down while his body was rebuilt. The narcotic- and agony-raddled memories of the punishment factory had assaulted him.

But the chirurgeon had gently explained that some of the procedures were fundamental; some would involve the reconfiguration of his insides from the tiniest building blocks up. He could not move while the atoms and particles of his blood and lungs and brain found their ways along new pathways and met in alternative combinations. He must be still and patient.

Tanner acquiesced, as he had known he would.

On the first day, as Tanner lay deep in chymical and thaumaturgic sleep, the chirurgeon opened him.

He scored deep gashes in the sides of Tanner’s neck, then lifted off the skin and outer tissue, gently wiping away the blood that coursed from the raw flesh. With the exposed flaps oozing, the chirurgeon turned his attention to Tanner’s mouth. He reached inside with a kind of iron chisel and slid it into the pulp of the throat, twisting as he pushed, carving tunnels in the flesh.

Constantly vigilant that Tanner was not choking on the blood that ran into his mouth and throat, the chirurgeon created new passageways in his body. Runnels linked the back of Tanner’s mouth to the openings in his neck. Where the new orifices opened behind and below his teeth, the chirurgeon ringed them with muscle, pushing it into place with a clayflesh hex, stimulating it with little crackles of elyctricity.

He stoked the fire that drove his bulky analytical engine, and fed it program cards, gathering data. Finally, he wheeled into place alongside the gurney a tank containing a sedated cod, and linked the motionless fish to Tanner’s body by a cryptic and unwieldy construction of valves, gutta-percha tubes, and wires.

Homeomorphic chymicals sluiced dilute in brine across the cod’s gills, and then through the ragged wounds that would be Tanner’s. Wires linked the two of them. The chirurgeon muttered hexes as he operated the juddering apparatus-he was rusty with bio-thaumaturgy, but methodical and careful-and kneaded Tanner’s bleeding neck. Water began to drool through the holes and over the opened-up skin.

For most of the night, the scene was replayed, the surgery swaying gently with the water below. The chirurgeon slept a little, periodically checking Tanner’s progress, and that of the slowly dying cod suspended in a matrix of thaumaturgic strands that dragged out its demise. He applied pressure when it was needed, changed the settings of finely calibrated gauges, added chymicals to the sluicing water.

In those hours, Tanner dreamed of choking (while he opened and closed his eyes, unknowing).

When the sun came up, the chirurgeon uncoupled Tanner and the fish from his machinery (the cod dying instantly, its body shrunken and wrinkled). He closed up the flaps of skin in Tanner’s neck, slimy with gelatinous gore. He smoothed them down, his fingers tingling with puissance as the gashes sealed.

Without Tanner waking-still drugged as he was, there was no danger of that-the chirurgeon placed a mask over Tanner’s mouth, sealed his nose with his fingers, and began to pump brine gently into him. For several seconds there was no reaction. Then Tanner coughed and gagged violently, spattering water. The chirurgeon stood poised, ready to release Tanner’s nose.

And then Tanner calmed. All without waking, his epiglottis flexed and his windpipe constricted, keeping the saltwater from entering his lungs. The chirurgeon smiled as water began to seep from Tanner’s new gills.

It came sluggishly at first, bringing with it blood and dirt and scab matter. And then the water ran clean and the gills began to flex, regulating it, and it pulsed across the floor in measured draughts.