The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

by China Miéville

Sometimes it is not prey but predators that rise from the twilight zone.

Off the ship, out into Armada, into her new city. A flotilla of dwellings. A city built on old boat bones.

(Someone had told him about “a scary lofty lady in black with blue lips” working in the library, he explained to her. He grinned when he said that, and she had looked away to avoid smiling back.)

“There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading,

once you join Armada you don’t … leave.”

“Tell me, Johannes, that is somewhat remarkable, isn’t it? That out of an entire ocean—an entire fucking ocean—that out of that whole empty sea they should pluck the one ship that was carrying their intellectual hero …”

“I’ve no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! ‘The Floating Pirate City’! I don’t want it! I don’t want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking its victims dry. This isn’t a city, Johannes; it’s a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it. “I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It’s dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous—particularly for me, particularly now—but it’s my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history … New Crobuzon,” she said slowly, “is the greatest city in Bas-Lag.” And coming from her, from someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon’s brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian.

“It’s people like me who bring back the maps and the information. We can offer insights like no one else. We can trade them with the government—that’s my commission. There’s no such thing as exploration or science—there’s only trade.

I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them.

As she sat back in her chair, her half-drunk tea beside her on the uneven floor, she felt a sudden gush of tiredness, so that all of a sudden she could barely speak. She saw the first sickly light of dawn and knew it was too late to go to bed. Fennec watched her. He saw her slump with exhaustion. He was more awake than she. He made himself another cup of tea as she let fits of dozing lap at her like little waves. She flirted with dreams.

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

“He would have sought help from outsiders,” she hesitantly made out, “but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women.” Bellis looked up. Jabber knows, she thought, what I’ve got my hands on.

I don’t want to wonder what I’m going to do anymore, she thought. I want to just do something.

“The Scar does not exist,” he said. There was silence. “The Scar does not exist,” he repeated, “and if by some chance the astrolonomers are wrong, and it does, then we’ll not find it. And if by some fucking miracle we do find it, then you know—you, Uther, of all people know—that it’ll mean our deaths.”

“Listening to Fennec, hearing him talk, trying to stay silent, trying to implicate you, admitting the truth … He’s saying different things with every minute. But the truth is obvious: you were stupid,” Doul said without emotion. “You believed him. Thought you were … what? What did he tell you again? Saving your city. You weren’t out to destroy us; you were trying to save your homeland so that one day you could return to it, still whole and saved. You weren’t trying to destroy us; you were just stupid.” Bellis’ face was set. She was burning. Doul watched her. “You were caught up in it, weren’t you?” he said. “In the idea of … connecting with your home. The fact of doing something. That was enough, wasn’t it? You … saving your city.” Doul spoke in a soft monotone, and Bellis looked down at her hands. “I bet,” he continued, “that if you ever did think about what you’d been told … I bet you felt uneasy.” He said it almost kindly. The maggot of doubt was alive again, grubbing through Bellis’ head.

“It’s a letter,” she said. “To whom?” said Doul. He did not lean over and peer at the paper. Instead he caught her eyes. She sighed and leafed through the many pages of the letter, finding its beginning and holding it up to him so that he could read the first word. Dear, the letter said, and then there was a blank. A word-hole. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not to no one,” she said. “That would be sad, pathetic, to write a letter to no one. And it’s not a letter to someone dead, or anything so … sad. It’s the opposite of all that, the opposite. It’s not closed down like that: it opens up; it’s a door; it could be to anyone.”

Since when did intent determine judgment? Whatever you thought, or convinced yourself you thought you were doing, you’re responsible for unleashing a war that killed thousands of my people.”

temperate fronts so still that the weather seemed to be waiting for something—and

Bellis felt something that at first she did not recognize. Not depression or misery or cynicism, but despair. The feeling of all plans, all options, dying.

You win, she thought, and let go of hope. I’ll be here till I die. I’ll grow old here, a crabby old lady imprisoned on a boat, and I’ll scratch the scars on my back (dear gods they will be wicked) and mutter and complain. Or perhaps I’ll die with the rest of you, and with you my rulers, in some stupid, terrible accident of the Hidden Ocean. Either way, I’m yours, if I like it or not. You’ve won. You are taking me with you. You are taking me to the Scar.

Bellis tried to rethink her, to be clear, to give credit or blame where it was due and think about the woman piloting that lost vessel toward the edge of the world according to no one’s plans or desires but her own.

In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away. I can’t say good-bye.

I carry my memories of Armada on my back. I took the dressings off some weeks ago, and with angled mirrors I have seen what Garwater has written on me. It is a breathtakingly ugly message, in a brutal script. Contours ridge my back, lines stretched horizontal across it, roughly parallel, where the whip landed. They seem to emerge from one side of my back, break my skin, and descend on the other. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me. I look at them with wonder. It is as if they are nothing to do with me. Armada is sewn fast onto my back, and I know that I will carry it with me everywhere.

There is no redemption in the sea.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,” all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

And though sadness and the guilt are stitched indelibly to me with my scars, two things are clear. The first is that everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. And I feel, for all that has happened, as if it is now, only now in these days, that my journey is beginning. I feel as if this—even all this—has been a prologue. The other is that all my anxiety to send this letter off, to get it to someone—to you—to cut a little mark upon New Crobuzon, all that neurotic eagerness has blown away. The desperation I had, in Tarmuth, in Salkrikaltor, to post this, to decide at the last minute who you were and send it, so that I might be noted, all that frantic fear is gone. It has become nothing. It is not necessary anymore. I am coming home. I will amass much more to tell you on the return journey, which will be long, but will end. I do not need this letter delivered. Whoever I decide you are, dear friend, I will give it to you myself. I will deliver it by hand.