China Mieville - The Scar

Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the Chromolith , onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.

Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.

Armadan citizens , she read, after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.

She scanned the page quickly, racing through the propagandist explanation, and her eyes moved slower over the key word, picked out in bold.

Avanc …

Bellis felt a thrill of confused emotion. I did this , she thought with weird pride. I set this in motion .

“It is choice work,” said Tintinnabulum thoughtfully.

He was hunkered down in front of Angevine, thrusting his face and hands into the engines in her metal underparts. She leaned her flesh body back, impassive and patient.

For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone-her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.

“What has happened to your engine, Angevine?” he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.

He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance-as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated design that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

“This man,” he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, “this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but… this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?” he asked her.

She could only respond vaguely to that.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum said.

Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada-the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.

That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?

His room was full of evidence. Books-the only ones that she knew of outside the library-etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc-he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.

Sometimes, when the eight were meeting, Angevine would put her ear flat against the wood and press hard, but she could only ever hear the occasional snatch of sound. Enough to learn tantalizing things.

The ship’s madman, Argentarius, whom no one ever saw, she would hear railing and screaming to them, telling them he was afraid. Some prey of theirs had done this to him long ago, Angevine came to understand. It had galvanized his comrades. They were stamping their authority on the deep sea, thumbing their noses at that terrible realm.

When she had heard them speak of hunting, it was the largest game that enthused them: the leviathan and lahamu, the cuttlegod.

Why not the avanc?

None of it was any surprise, really, Angevine thought.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum repeated.

“He is,” Angevine said. “He’s a good man. He’s grateful for being spared the colonies; he’s angry with New Crobuzon. He’s had himself Remade, the better to dive, the better to work in the docks-he’s a sea creature now. He’s loyal as any Garwater born, I’d say.”

Tintinnabulum raised himself and shut Angevine’s boiler. His mouth pursed thoughtfully. On his desk he found a long, handwritten list of names.

“What’s he called?” he said.

He nodded, leaned over, and carefully added Tanner Sack .

Rumor and word of mouth were even stronger forces in Armada than in New Crobuzon, but Armada was not without a more organized media than that. There were criers, most yelling the semiofficial line of one or other of the ridings. A few news sheets and periodicals were available, printed on dreadful-quality, ink-saturated sheets that were constantly recycled.

Most were irregular, available when writers and printers could be bothered or find the resources. Many were free; most were thin: one or two folded sheets crammed with print.

Armada’s halls were full of plays and music, coarse and very popular, so the publications were full of reviews. Some contained titillation and scandal mongering, but to Bellis they were depressingly parochial. Disputes about allocation of seized goods, or over which riding was responsible for which haul, were generally the most provocative and controversial topics they carried. And those were just the news sheets she could make sense of.

In the hybrid culture of Armada, as many different traditions of journal were represented as existed in the world of Bas-Lag, alongside unique forms born on the pirate city. More Often Than Not was a weekly that reported only on the city’s deaths, in verse. Juhangirr’s Concern , published in Thee-And-Thine riding, was wordless, telling what stories it considered important (according to criteria quite opaque to Bellis) in sequences of crude pictures.

Occasionally, Bellis would read The Flag or Council’s Call , both published out of Curhouse. The Flag was probably the best news-gathering organ in the city. Council’s Call was a political publication, carrying arguments between proponents of the various ridings’ governmental systems: Curhouse’s democracy, Jhour’s solar queendom, the “absolutist benevolence” of Garwater, the Brucolac’s protectorate, and so on.

Both the publications, for all their vaunted toleration of dissent, were more or less loyal to Curhouse’s Democratic Council. It was therefore no great surprise to Bellis, who had started to understand the tussles of Armadan politics, when The Flag and Council’s Call began to raise doubts about conjuring the avanc.

They were circumspect at first.