The Scar (12 page)

What was the nature of this project that was hinted at in nods and cryptic remarks? The plan that underpinned all their efforts? That no one would talk openly about, but that many seemed to know a little of, and a few pretended by omission, or hint, to understand?

Something big and important lay behind Garwater’s industry, and Tanner Sack did not yet know what it was. He suspected that none of his fellows did, either, but still he felt excluded from some community: one based on lies, cant, and bullshit.

Stories occasionally reached him about the other
Terpsichoria
passengers or crew or prisoners.

Shekel had told him about Coldwine in the library. The man Johannes Tearfly he had seen himself, visiting the docks with a secretive group, all notepads and murmured discussion. A part of Tanner had thought tartly that it didn’t take long for ranks to reestablish themselves, that while he worked his arse off below, the gentleman watched and ticked his little charts and fumbled with his waistcoat.

Hedrigall, the impassive cactus-man who piloted the
Arrogance
, told Tanner about a man called Fench, also from the
Terpsichoria
, who was visiting the docks quite often (
Do you know him?
Hedrigall had asked, and Tanner had shaken his head: it was too dull to explain that he had known no one above the decks). Fench was a good man, Hedrigall said, whom you could talk to, who seemed already to know everyone on the ship, who spoke on knowledgeable terms about people like King Friedrich and the Brucolac.

There was a distracted air to Hedrigall when he talked about these things, which reminded Tanner of Tintinnabulum. Hedrigall was one of those who always seemed to know something about something that he would not discuss. It would have felt to Tanner a breach of their embryonic friendship to ask him outright.

Tanner took to walking the city at night.

He would wander, surrounded by the sounds of water and ships, the sea smell in him. Under the moon and her glowing daughters, diffused through faint cloud, Tanner walked steadily around the edge of the bay containing the now-silent
Sorghum
. He trod past a cray dwelling: a suspended, half-sunk clipper, its prow and bows jutting like an iceberg. He walked up the covered bridge to the rear of the enormous
Grand Easterly
, his head down as he passed the few other insomniacs and night workers.

By rope bridge to the starboard side of Garwater. An illuminated dirigible skidded slowly overhead, and a klaxon sounded nearby while a steamhammer pounded (
some late shift
), and the sound for a moment was so reminiscent of New Crobuzon that he felt a strong, nameless emotion.

Tanner lost himself in a maze of old ships and bricks.

In the water below he thought he saw fleeting and random patches of light: the anxiety of bioluminescent plankton. The city’s snarls seemed to be answered sometimes, miles away, by something big and very distant and alive.

He wound in the direction of Curhouse and Urchinspine Harbor. Below him was surf, to either side decaying brickwork damp with mildew and salt-stained. High walls and windows, many broken, and alleyways between main streets, winding between old bulkheads and cowls. Rubbish on deserted dhows. Balustrades and taffrails buffeted in the cold wind by the ragged remnants of posters; politics and entertainment advertised in garish colors rendered from squid and shellfish and stolen ink.

Cats padded past him.

The city shifted and corrected, and the tireless fleet of steamships beyond Armada’s bounds plowed on, chains outstretched, hauling their home.

Tanner stood in the quiet, looking up at old towers, the silhouettes of slates, chimneys, factory roofs, and trees. Across a little stretch of water, broken by a hamlet of houseboats, lights glimmered in the cabins of boats from shores about which Tanner Sack knew nothing. Others were watching the night.

(
—Have you fucked before? she said, and Shekel could not help but remember things he did not much want to. The Remade women in the dark stinking of
Terpsichoria
who took his fumbling prick inside them for more portions of bread. Those whom the sailors held down whether they would or not (all the men catcalled him to join them) and whom twice he had lain on (once only pretending to finish before slinking away discomforted by her shrieks and) once entering for true and spending inside her, tightly struggling and crying as she was. And before them girls in the back alleys of Smog Bend, and boys (like him) showing their privates, their transactions something between barter and sex and bullying and play. Shekel opened his mouth to answer and the truths struggled, and she saw and interrupted him (it was a mercy she did him) and said—No not for games or money and not when you took it or gave it by force but when you fucked one who wanted you and who you wanted like real people like equals. And of course when she said that of course the answer was no, and he gave it, grateful to her for making this his first time (an undeserved gift that he took humble and eager).

He watched her take off her blouse and his breath came very short at the sight of all that woman’s flesh and at the eagerness in her own eyes. He felt the radiant heat of her boiler (which she could never let die she told him, which ate and ate fuel incessantly, old and broken and unreasonably greedy) and saw the dark pewter of her harness where it met the pasty flesh of her upper thighs like a tide. His own clothes were off him in easy layers and he stood shivering and thin and scrawny, prick bobbing erect and adolescent, heart and passion filling him so that it was hard to swallow.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.

Heal me
, he thought, not understanding what he thought, hoping for a reconfiguration. There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

—My Remade girl, he said wondering, and she forgave him that, instantly, because she knew he would not think it again.

It was not easy, with the stubs of her legs pinioned in metal, in a tight
V
, parted only slightly, with only two inches of the inside of her thighs below her cunt in flesh. She could not open to him or lie back, and it was not easy.

But they persevered, and succeeded.)

Chapter Nine

Shekel came to Bellis and asked her to teach him to read.

He knew the shapes of the Ragamoll alphabet, he told her, and had a tentative sense of which sound each letter made, but they remained esoteric. He had never tried to link them and make them words.

Shekel seemed subdued, as if his thoughts were outside the corridors of the library boats. He was slower than usual to smile. He did not talk about Tanner Sack, or about Angevine, whose name had peppered his conversations recently. He wanted only to know if Bellis would help him read.

She spent more than two hours, after her shift, going through the alphabet with him. He knew the names of the letters, but his sense of them was abstract. Bellis had him write his name, and he did, scratchy and inexpert, pausing halfway into the second letter and skipping ahead to the fourth, then going back and filling in lost spaces.

He knew his written name, but only as strokes of a pen.

Bellis told him that the letters were instructions, orders, usually to make the sound that started their own name. She wrote her own first name, separating each letter from its neighbors by an inch or more. Then she had him obey the orders they gave him.

She waited while he faltered through the
buh
and
eh
and
luh luh ih suh
. Then she brought the letters closer together and had him obey them—still slowly—again. And once more.

Finally she closed the characters up into a word and told him to repeat his exercise quickly, to do what the letters told him (“Look at them, so close together”) in one quick run.

Buh eh luh luh ih suh
.

(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)

He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.

After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the
Corrosive Memory
. It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.

There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.

“Look,” Bellis said. “Can you see?” She indicated the brass label. “Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon.”

She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.

Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.

The second was for older children. It was a history of New Crobuzon. Bellis stopped short, seeing the etched pictures of the Ribs and the Spike and Perdido Street Station. She skim-read quickly, curling her face in amused contempt at the grotesquely misleading history. The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust and, most shamefully, the Pirate Wars all suggested, in childish and disingenuous language, that New Crobuzon was a stronghold of liberty that thrived despite almost insuperable and unfair odds.

Shekel was watching her, fascinated.

“Try this one,” she said, and held out to him
The Courageous Egg
. He took it reverentially. “It’s for young children,” she said. “Don’t get worried about the story; it’s much too silly for you. It means nothing. But I want to know if you can work out what’s happening, if you can understand what goes on, by working through the words like I showed you. Follow the letters’ orders, say the words. There are bound to be some in there that you can’t understand. When you come to them, write them down, and bring the list to me.”

Shekel looked up at her sharply. “Write them down?” he said.

She saw inside him. He still related to the words as if they were outside entities: subtle teases that he was finally beginning to understand, just a little. But he had not yet conceived of being able to encode them into his own secrets. He had not realized that by learning to read he had learned to write.

Bellis found a pencil and a half-used piece of paper in her pocket and handed them to him.

“Just copy the words that you don’t understand, the letters in order exactly like they are in the book. Bring them to me,” she said.

He eyed her, and another of those beatific smiles shot across him.

“Tomorrow,” she went on, “I want you to come to me at five o’clock, and I’m going to ask you questions about the story in the book. I’m going to have you read pieces to me.” Shekel stared at her as he took the book, nodded briskly, as if they’d reached some business arrangement in Dog Fenn.

Shekel’s demeanor changed when they left the galleon. He held himself cocky again, and swaggered a little as he walked, and even began to talk to Bellis about his dockside gang. But he gripped
The Courageous Egg
tight. Bellis checked it out on her own ticket, an act of trust that she performed without thinking and that touched him deeply.

It was cold again that night, and Bellis sat close to her stove.

Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity. She performed them joylessly and as quickly as possible, then sat with Tearfly’s books and continued to work through them, making notes. At nine she stopped and brought out her letter.

She wrote.

Blueday 27th of Dust 1779 (although that means nothing here. Here it is 4th Sepredi of Hawkbill Quarto, 6/317),
Chromolith
Smokestack.

I will not stop looking for clues. At first, when I read Johannes’ books, I opened them at random and skimmed through at random, and pieced together what I could in snippets, waiting for inspiration. But I have realized that I will not make headway thus.

Johannes’ work, he has told me, is one of the driving forces behind this city. The nature of the scheme of which he is part, which he would not describe but which was important enough for Armada to risk an act of gross piracy against the greatest power in Bas-Lag, must be hidden somewhere in the pages of his books. It was, after all, one of those books that made him irresistible to the Lovers. But I cannot even work out which of his works is the “required reading” he described for this secret project.

So I am reading them carefully, taking each in turn; starting with the preface and working through to the index. Gleaning information. Trying to feel what designs might be in these works.

Of course, I am not a scientist. I have never read books like these before. A great deal of what is in them is opaque to me.

“The
acetabulum
is a depression on the outer side of the os innominatum just where the ilium and ischium fuse.”

I read such sentences like poesy: ilium, ischium, os innominatum, ecto-cuneiform and cnemial crest, platelets and thrombin, keloid, cicatrix.

The book that I like least so far is
Sardula Anatomy
. Johannes was gored once by a young sardula, and it must have been at the time that he researched this book. I can imagine the creature pacing back and forth in a cell, subjected to soporific vapors, and lashing out as it feels itself slipping away. And then dead, and transfered into a cold book that peels away Johannes’ passion along with the sardula’s skin. A drab list of bones and veins and sinews.

My favorite of the books comes as a surprise. It is neither
Theories of MegaFauna
nor
Transplane Life
, volumes as much philosophy as zoology, which I therefore expected to feel closer to than the others. I found their abstruse ponderings intriguing but vague.

No, the volume that I read most closely, that I felt I understood, that kept me quite entranced, was
Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools
.

Such an intricate concatenation of narratives. Chains of savagery and metamorphosis. I can see it all. Devil crabs and ragworms. The oyster drill gnawing a murderous peephole in its prey’s armor. The stretched-out slow-time ripping open of a scallop by a famished starfish. A beadlet anemone devouring a young goby with an implosive burst.

It is a vivid little seascape Johannes has conjured for me, of shell-dust and sea urchins and merciless tides.

But it tells me nothing about the city’s plans. Whatever Armada’s rulers have in mind, I will have to look deeper to find. I will keep reading these books. They are the only clues I have. And I will not thus seek to understand Armada so that I can learn to live happily in my rusting chimney. I will understand
where we are going
, and
why
, so that I might leave.

There was a sudden knocking on Bellis’ door. She looked up, alarmed. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

She stood slowly and descended the tight spiral staircase in the center of her circular room. Johannes was the only person in Armada who knew where she lived, and she had not spoken to him since their altercation in the restaurant.

Bellis padded slowly toward the door, waited, and the sharp rapping came again. Was he here to apologize? To rage at her again? Did she even want to see him, to reopen the door to that friendship?

She was still angry with him, she realized, and still somewhat ashamed.

There was a third bout of knocking, and Bellis stepped forward, her face set, ready to hear him out and see him off. When she pulled open the door she stopped short, her mouth hanging with astonishment, her curt admonition whispered away from her with her breath.

Standing on her threshold, huddled against the cold and looking up at her warily, was Silas Fennec.

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the wine Fennec had brought.

“You’ve done well, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, looking appreciatively around the battered metal cylinder that was her room. “A lot of us newcomers are in much less attractive places.” She raised one eyebrow at him, but he nodded again. “I promise you it’s true. Have you not seen?”

Of course she had not.

“Where are you living?” she asked.

“Near Thee-And-Thine riding,” he said, “in the base of a clipper. No windows.” He shrugged. “Are these yours?” He pointed to the books on her bed.

“No,” she said, and tidied them quickly away. “They only let me keep my notebook. Even books I’d damn well
written
, they took away.”

“Same for me,” he said. “All I’ve got left is my journal. It’s the log of years of traveling. I’d have been heartbroken to lose it.” He smiled.

“What do they have you doing?” Bellis asked, and Fennec shrugged again.

“I managed to avoid all that,” he said. “I’m doing what I want to do. You work in the library, don’t you?”

“How?” she said sharply. “How did you keep them off your back? How do you manage to live?”

He watched her for a while without answering.

“I got three or four offers—like you, I imagine. I told the first that I’d accepted the second, the second that I’d said yes to the third, and so on. They don’t care. As for how I live, well . . . It’s easier than you think to make yourself indispensable, Miss Coldwine. Providing services, offering whatever it is people will pay for. Information mostly . . .” His voice petered out.

Bellis was bewildered by his candor, suggesting conspiracies and underworlds around her.

“You know . . .” he said suddenly, “I’m grateful to you, Miss Coldwine. Sincerely grateful.”

Bellis waited.

“You were there in Salkrikaltor City, Miss Coldwine. You saw the conversation between the late Captain Myzovic and myself. You must have wondered what exactly was on that letter that had the captain so unhappy, that turned you back, but you remained quiet. I’m sure you realized that things could have become . . . very hard for me when we were hijacked by Armada, but you said nothing. And I’m grateful.

“You did say nothing?” he added with an anxiety he could not quite hide. “As I say, I’m very grateful.”

“When we last spoke, on the
Terpsichoria
,” Bellis said, “you told me it was vital you get back to New Crobuzon immediately. Well, what now?”

He shook his head uncomfortably.

“Hyperbole and . . . and bullshit,” he said. He glanced up, but she showed no disapproval of his language. “I get into habits of exaggeration.” He waved his hand to dispel the issue. There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So you can express yourself in Salt?” Bellis asked. “For this work you do, presumably you have to, Mr. Fennec.”

“I have had many years to perfect Salt,” he said in the language, swift and expert, with an unfeigned smile, and continued in Ragamoll. “And . . . Well, I’m not going by that name here. If you’d indulge me, I’m known here as Simon Fench.”

“So where did you learn Salt, Mr. Fench?” she said. “You mentioned your travels . . .”

“Dammit.” He looked amused and embarrassed. “You make the name sound like a hex. You can call me what you like, Miss Coldwine, in these rooms, but outside, I beg your indulgence. Rin Lor. I learnt Salt in Rin Lor, and the outer edge of the Pirate Islands.”

“What were you doing there?”

“The same thing,” he said, “that I do everywhere. I buy and I sell. I trade.”

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” he said after they had drunk some more and Bellis had fussed with the stove. “I’ve been a trader since before I was twenty. I’m a New Crobuzon man, don’t get me wrong. Born and brought up in the shadow of the Ribs. But I doubt I’ve spent five hundred days in that city in the last twenty years.”