China Mieville - The Scar

“Oh dear gods, dear Jabber…” she heard herself say. She met Silas’ troubled eyes. “Dear gods, what are we going to do ?”

Slow like some vast, bloated creature, Armada passed into warmer water.

The citizens and the yeomanry put aside their heavier clothes. The press-ganged from the Terpsichoria were disorientated. The idea that seasons could be escaped, could be outrun physically, was profoundly unsettling.

The seasons were only points of view-matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all across the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.

The birds of Armada’s microclimate increased in number. The small, inbred community of finches and sparrows and pigeons that clung to the city’s skyline wherever it moved were joined by transients: migrators that crossed the Swollen Ocean, following the year’s heat. A few were waylaid from their gigantic flocks by Armada, coming down to rest and drink, and staying.

They circled confused over the wheeled spires of Curhouse, where the Democratic Council met in session after emergency session, fiercely and ineffectually debating Armada’s direction. They agreed that the Lovers’ secret plans could not be good for the city, that they must do something, bickering miserably as their impotence became more and more clear.

Garwater had always been the most powerful riding, and now Garwater had the Sorghum , and the Democratic Council of Curhouse could do nothing at all.

(Nevertheless, Curhouse opened tentative communications with the Brucolac.)

The hardest thing for Tanner was not gill-breathing, not moving his arms and legs like a frog or vodyanoi, but staring into the face of the colossal gradient of dark water below him. Attempting to look it full-on and not be cowed.

When he had worn his diving suit, he had been an intruder. He had challenged the sea, and he had worn armor. Clinging to the rungs and the guy ropes, hanging on for life, he had known that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.

Now he swam free, descending toward darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light.

Each day he descended further.

He slipped below the level of Armada’s keels and rudders and descending pipeways. The long sentinels of weed that fringed them, that delimited the city’s lowest points, reached out for him, but he slipped past them like a thief. He stared at the deep.

Tanner passed through a rain of baitfish that nibbled at the city’s scraps, and then he was down in clear water, and there was nothing of Armada around him. He was below the city, all the way below it.

He hung still in the water. It was not difficult.

The pressure coddled him, tightly as if in swaddling.

The ships of Armada sprawled almost a mile across the sea, occluding his light. Above him, Bastard John fussed around below the docks like a hornet. In the twilight water around him Tanner saw a thick suspension of particles, life upon tiny life. And beyond the plankton and krill he faintly saw Armada’s seawyrms and its submersibles, a handful of dark shadows around the city’s base.

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.

I’m damn small , he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.

With Angevine he was shy and a little resentful, but he worked hard for Shekel’s sake.

She came to eat with them. Tanner tried to chat with her, but she was withdrawn and hard. For some time they sat and chewed their kelp bread without any sounds. After half an hour, Angevine motioned to Shekel, and he, well-practiced, stood behind her and scooped pieces of coke from the container behind her back into her boiler.

Angevine met Tanner’s gaze without embarrassment.

“Keeping your engines stoked?” he said eventually.

“They aren’t the most efficient,” she replied slowly (in Salt, spurning the Ragamoll that he had used, though it was her native tongue).

Tanner nodded. He remembered the old man in the hold of the Terpsichoria . It took a while for him to say more. Tanner was shy of this stern Remade woman.

“What model is your engine?” he said eventually, in Salt. She stared at him in consternation, and he realized with astonishment that she was ignorant of the mechanics of her own Remade body.

“It’s probably an old pre-exchange model,” he continued slowly. “With only one set of pistons and no recombination box. They were never any good.” He stopped there for a while. Go on , he thought. She might say yes, and the lad’d like it . “If you fancy, I could take a look. Worked with engines all my life. I could… I could even…” He hesitated at a verb that sounded somehow obscene, discussing a person. “I could even refit you.”

He wandered away from the table, ostensibly for more stew, to avoid listening to Shekel’s embarrassing monologue: gratitude to Tanner and cajoling of the unconvinced Angevine combined. Over the chorus of go on Ange best mate Tanner you’re my best mate , Tanner saw that Angevine was unsettled. She was not used to offers like this, unless they meant incurring debts.

It ain’t for you , Tanner thought fervently, wishing he could tell her. It’s for the boy.

He moved further away while she and Shekel whispered to each other. He turned his back on them politely, stripped to his longjohns, and slipped into a tin bath full of brine. It soothed him. He soaked with the same sense of luxury that he once would have had for a hot bath, and he hoped that Angevine would understand his motivations.

She was nobody’s fool. After a short time she said with dignity something like thanks then, Tanner, that might be good . She said yes, and Tanner found to his mild surprise that he was glad.

Shekel was still excited by the clamor of silent sounds reading had given him, but with familiarity came control. He no longer found himself stopping midway along a corridor and gasping as the word bulkhead or heads shouted itself to him from some ship’s sign.

For the first week or so, graffiti had been an intoxication. He had stood in front of walls and ships’ sides and let his eyes crawl across the morass of messages scratched or scrawled or painted on the city’s flanks. Such a diversity of styles: the same letters could be written tens of different ways but always say the same thing. Shekel never stopped enjoying that fact.

Most of what was written was rude or political or scatological. Dry Fall Fuck Off , he read. Names in scores. Somebody loves somebody, repeated again and again. Accusations, sexual and otherwise. Barsum or Peter or Oliver is a Cunt or a Whore or a Queer or whatever else it might be. The writing gave each declaration a different voice.

In the library, his ransacking of the shelves had become less furious, less drunken in its haste and exhilaration, but he still picked books out and laid them down in great numbers, and read them slowly and wrote down words he did not understand.