The Scar (64 page)
Authors: China Mieville
Why would I risk that? Why in the world would I relinquish what understandings I have?
Tanner Sack came to my rooms. Angevine waited for him below on the
Chromolith
’s deck. Her treads could not take my stairs.
I am sure that they are a comfort to each other. But what I heard between them was uncertain and careful, and I think they will move apart. Sharing loss, I suspect, will not be enough.
Tanner brought me a heliotype he had found: of Shekel, holding two books, grinning outside the library. Tanner has decided that everything to do with Shekel and books is mine. I am embarrassed. I don’t know how to tell him to stop.
After he left, I looked at the sepia scrap he had left me. It was not a good print. Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory.
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.
So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.
Carrying it on my back, I will take Armada home with me.
Home.
The second time Doul found me at his door, he must have seen something in my face. He nodded once and then spoke.
He said: “Enough is enough. We will take you back.”
Back again.
I was stunned. I bowed my head, nodded, and thanked him.
He gave me that. And not for any residue of what he once pretended was between us.
He is rewarding me. He is paying me.
For the jobs I have done. Since he has used me.
Doul passed messages to Fennec through me, for Fennec to give the city. But Fennec did the wrong thing, and the Lovers outmaneuvered us all by telling the truth. So Doul found other uses for me.
And now he will take me home. Not for warmth or out of justice. He is offering me a wage.
I will accept.
He is not stupid. He knows that nothing I could do in New Crobuzon could undermine or threaten Armada in any way. I would not be listened to if I tried to tell Parliament, and why would I do that, renegade that I am?
Eventually there will be a ship charged to rob the Basilisk Channel. And I will be on it. I will be taken on some tiny boat, perhaps, dropped in that ugly port Qé Banssa that I saw from the
Terpsichoria
’s deck. And I will wait there until a New Crobuzon ship appears, heading home for Iron Bay and the Gross Tar, and the city.
Uther Doul will not deny me that. It costs him nothing.
It is many months since we left Iron Bay. By the time we are dragged back again, it will be much more than a year. I will take another name.
The
Terpsichoria
is lost. There is no reason for the city to chase Bellis Coldwine anymore. And even if some interfering swine back in New Crobuzon were to remember, were to recognize me and pass information on to some uniformed bastard, I have had enough of running. And I cannot find it in me to believe they will. That part of my life is over. This is a new time.
After all that has happened—after all my frantic, fruitless efforts to escape—I find that quite unwittingly I have done what was necessary for me to go home, carrying the memories of Armada stitched to my flesh.
I am surprised to find myself writing this letter to you again. Once I told Uther Doul the truth about it, I felt that it was closed to me.
Hearing myself admit it, I felt like a lonely child. Was there anything more pathetic than these scraps of paper that I was so eager to post, not even having decided yet to whom they would go?
I put them away, then.
But this is a new chapter. The city is going back in time, readying itself to start again with its simple piracy in the rich shores near my home. Everything has changed, and I find myself trembling, excited, biding my time, eager to finish this letter.
It does not embarrass me. I am opened up by it.
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.
I have not been the best friend to you, and I need you to forgive me that. I think back to my friends in New Crobuzon, and I wonder which of them you are to be.
And if I want this letter to be a remembrance, to be something with which to say
good-bye
instead of
hello again
, then you will be Carrianne. You are my dear friend, if that is so, and the fact that I did not know you when I started to write you this letter means nothing. This is a Possible Letter, after all.
Whoever you are, I have not been the best friend to you, and I am sorry.
Now we approach the fleet that is ranged just beyond the waters of the Hidden Ocean, like a phalanx of anxious guards, and I write this letter to you, to tell you everything that has happened to me. And as I tell you, I come to understand that I have been manipulated, used at every step of the way, that even when I was not a translator, I passed on others’ messages. I find myself detached from such knowledge.
It is not that I do not care. Not that I am not angry at being used, or, gods and Jabber help me, for the awful, brute times I was used to bring about.
But even when I spoke for others (wittingly or not), I was doing things for myself. I have been present throughout all this, my own fact. And besides, as I sit here, ten thousand miles from New Crobuzon, on the other side of foreign seas, I know that we are heading slowly home. 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.
About the Author
China Miéville was born in London in 1972. When he was eighteen, he lived and taught English in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. Miéville has a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge and a master’s with distinction from the London School of Economics. His first novel,
King Rat,
was nominated for both an International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award.
Perdido Street Station
won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He lives in England.
By China Miéville
Perdido Street Station
The Scar
More praise for
Perdido Street Station
,
winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel
“What is most memorable about
Perdido Street Station
is not the diversity of its imaginings but the manner in which it presents them, its sophisticated writing and adept characterization. . . . Unlike much science fiction,
Perdido Street Station
is infused with a sense of compassion and humility.”
—The Seattle Times
“Exhilarating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking. Its exuberant and unflagging inventiveness, as well as the strong narrative, keep up interest throughout.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“When a fantasy writer combines an intriguing new world with vibrant writing, a high-energy plot and a coherent philosophical compass, the results can be sheer delight.
Perdido Street Station
. . . is exactly that sort of fantasy . . . [It] grabbed my imagination and . . . never loosened its grip.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A haunting, disturbing, and welcome addition to the ‘steampunk’ genre, where Victorian technology meets science fiction. . . . Miéville renders this dark fantasy with imagination and innovation.”
—Kansas City Star
“Flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
“An action-packed thriller with high literary production values. A sprawling, vastly ambitious, exquisitely executed science fiction fantasy with the best possible ending: You want more, more, more.”
—Salon.com
“[A] PHANTASMAGORIC MASTERPIECE . . .
The book left me breathless with admiration.”
—Brian Stableford
“The most exciting, enthralling novel I have read in a long time. It is about everything important—love, work, hope, worlds we knew were out there but needed a writer like Miéville to show them to us. His imagination is vast, his talent volcanic. Read this book. It just might be a masterpiece.”
—
Jonathon Carroll
“An astonishing fantasy tale that is must reading . . . An action-packed, exciting plot. Fans of epic fantasy will reread this classy tale many times over the years to come.”
—
Allscifi.com
“This writer knows what he’s about, [and] does it well. . . . His darkly imaginative and complex story whirls along to its final resolution with the reader’s own imagination locked in tow.”
—The Anniston Star
“Highly recommended . . . A powerful tale about the power of love and the will to survive in a dystopian universe that combines Victorian elements with a fantasy version of cyberpunk. Miéville’s visceral prose evokes an immediacy that commands attention and demands a wide readership.”
—Library Journal
“Powerful . . . Mesmerizingly complex . . . A work of relentless inventiveness . . . A world suffused with both wonder and terror, where hitherto unimagined creatures inspire at once fascination and revulsion, excitement and fear.”
—January Magazine
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by China Miéville
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002091868
Manufactured in the United States of America
eISBN: 978-0-345-45489-8
v3.0
