China Mieville - The Scar

Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.

Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.

She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several ships. The room she was in was higher by far than any of the surrounding vessels, the side of the ship falling away below. At eye level she saw dirigibles and a mass of thin masts.

“This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know.”

Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.

Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him . I translated the book , she thought. I get special treatment .

The Lover closed the door behind him.

“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the Grand Easterly ’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.

“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?

“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but… ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.

“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.

“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.

“We took the Grand Easterly because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last… great age for Armada.”

There was silence for a long time.

“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.

When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.

He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.

There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.

She tried not to seem to try.

There was no one to meet her outside, of course, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the Grand Easterly to the lower ships beside it.

She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafes in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.

Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the surface of the sea.

Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.

They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.

After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.

It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.

Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.

She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.

Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.

The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the Grand Easterly . Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.

The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.

Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the Grand Easterly : from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.

Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great billows. The air sounded with them-a susurrus of paper sliding against paper-and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.

Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.

Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.