China Mieville - The Scar

Tanner Sack was breathing water.

He woke later, too vague to understand what had happened, but infected by the chirurgeon’s enthusiasm. His throat hurt terribly, so he slept again.

That was by far the hardest thing done.

The chirurgeon peeled back Tanner’s eyelids and bound to him clear nictitating membranes taken and modified from a caiman bred in one of the city’s farms. He injected Tanner with particulate life-forms that thrived in him harmlessly and interacted with his body, making his sweat a touch more oleaginous, to warm him and slide him through water. He grafted in a little ridge of muscle at the base of Tanner’s nostrils, and little nubs of cartilage, so that he could flex them closed.

Finally, the chirurgeon performed by far the easiest, if the most visible, alteration. Between Tanner’s fingers and his thumb, he stretched a membrane, a web of rubbery skin that he pinched into position, tethering it in Tanner’s epidermis. He removed Tanner’s toes and replaced them with the fingers from a cadaver, sewing and sealing them onto Tanner’s foot until he looked simian; then he changed the resemblance from ape to frog as he stretched more webbing between those once-more living digits.

He bathed Tanner, washed him in seawater. Kept him clean and cool, and watched his tentacles writhe in his sleep.

And on the fourth day Tanner woke, properly and completely. Untied, free to move, his mind empty of chymicals.

He sat up, slowly.

His body hurt; it raged in fact. It assaulted him in waves that beat with his heart. His neck, his feet, his eyes, dammit. He saw his new toes and looked away for a moment, a memory of the old horror of the punishment factory come back for a second, till he battened it down and looked again ( More pus , he thought, with a shade of humor).

He clenched his new hands. He blinked slowly and saw something translucent slip across his vision before his eyelid came down. He breathed deep into water-bruised lungs and coughed, and it hurt, as the chirurgeon had warned it would.

Tanner, despite the pain and the weakness and the hunger and nervousness, began to smile.

The chirurgeon came in as Tanner grinned and grinned, and grunted to himself, and rubbed himself gently.

“Mr. Sack,” he said, and Tanner turned to him and held out his shaking arms as if to grab him, trying to shake his hand. Tanner’s tentacles flexed as well, trying to reach out in echo through the too-thin air. The chirurgeon smiled.

“Congratulations, Mr. Sack,” he said. “The procedures were successful. You are now amphibian.”

And at that-they couldn’t help themselves and didn’t try-both he and Tanner Sack laughed uproariously, even though it hurt Tanner’s chest, and even though the chirurgeon wasn’t certain what was funny.

When he got home, after hauling himself gingerly through the valleys of Booktown and Garwater, he found Shekel waiting in rooms that had never been so clean.

“Ah now, lad,” he said, shy of him. “That’s great what you’ve done, ain’t it?”

Shekel tried to grab him in welcome, but Tanner was too sore and held him back good-naturedly. They talked quietly into the evening. Tanner asked carefully after Angevine. Shekel told Tanner that his reading was improving, and that nothing much had happened, but that it was warmer now, could Tanner feel it?

He could. They crawled south at an almost geologically slow pace, but the tugs and steamers had been dragging them continuously for two weeks now. They were perhaps five hundred miles south of where they had been-they had traveled so far, with a motion so slow it was unnoticed-and the winter was waning as they approached the band of temperate sea and air.

Tanner showed Shekel the additions, the changes to his body, and Shekel winced at their oddness and inflammations, but was fascinated. Tanner told him all the things the chirurgeon had explained.

“You’ll be tender, Mr. Sack,” he had said. “And even when you’re well, I want to warn you: some of the cuts I’ve made, some of the wounds, they may heal hard. They might scar. In that case, I want you not to be downhearted or disappointed. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

“A fortnight, lad,” Tanner said, “before I’m back at work, he reckons. If I practice and all.”

But Tanner had an advantage the doctor had not considered: he had never learned to swim. He did not have to adjust a flailing, inefficient, slapping paddle into the sinuous motion of a sea dweller.

He sat by the dockside while his workmates greeted him. They were surprised, solicitous, and friendly. Bastard John the dolphin broke surface nearby, glaring at Tanner with his liquid, piggy eyes and emitting what were doubtless insults in his imbecilic cetacean chittering. But Tanner was not cowed that morning. He received his colleagues like a king, thanking them for their concern.

At the border of Garwater and Jhour ridings, there was a space in the fabric of the city, between vessels: a patch of sea that might have housed a modest ship formed a swimming area. Only a very few of the Armadan pirates could swim, and in such temperatures, few would try. There were only a handful of humans swimming in that patch of open sea, brave or masochistic.

Under the water, slowly, nervous of his new buoyancy and freedom, over hours that day and the next and next, Tanner spread his arms and hands, opening out the webs of skin and capturing the water, pushing himself forward in inexpert bursts. He kicked out in something like a breaststroke, those still-sore toes flexing, painful and powerful. The little presences he could not see or feel beneath his skin pulsed infinitesimal glands and lubricated his sweat.

He opened his eyes and learned to close only his inner eyelids-an extraordinary sensation. He learned to see in the water, unconstrained by any unwieldy helmet, any iron and brass and glass. Not peering through a porthole, but looking out freely, peripheral vision and all.

Slowest and most frightening of all, alone-who could possibly teach him?-Tanner learned to breathe.

The first inrush of water into his mouth closed his windpipe reflexively, and his tongue clamped back and his throat tightened and blocked the route to his stomach, and the seawater scored its way through his tender new pathways, opening him up. He tasted salt so totally it became quickly insensible. He felt rills of water pass through him, through his neck, his gills, and Godspit and shit and all he thought, because he felt no need to breathe.

He had filled his lungs before descending, out of habit, but aerated he was too buoyant. Slowly, in a kind of luxuriant panic, he exhaled through his nose and let his air disappear above him.

And felt nothing. No dizziness or pain or fear. Oxygen still reached his blood, and his heart kept pumping.

Above him, the pasty little bodies of his fellow citizens floundered across the surface of the water, tethered to the air they breathed. Tanner spun beneath them, clumsy still but learning, corkscrewing, looking above and below-up into the light and bodies and the massive sprawling interlocking shape of the city, down into the boundless blue dark.

Silas and Bellis spent two nights together.

During the days, Bellis shelved, helped Shekel to read and told him about Croom Park, sometimes ate with Carrianne. Then she returned to Silas. They talked some, but he left her quite ignorant of how he passed his hours. She had a sense that he was full of secret ideas. They fucked several times.

After the second night, Silas disappeared. Bellis was glad. She had been neglecting Johannes’ books, and she now returned to their unfamiliar science.