The Scar - China Mieville [0]
MIÉVILLE
THE
SCAR
BALLANTINE BOOKS
NEW YORK
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Interlude I
Interlude II
Part 2
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Interlude III
Part 3
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Interlude IV
Part 4
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Interlude V
Interlude VI
Part 5
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Interlude VII
Interlude VIII
Part 6
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Interlude IX
Part 7
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Coda
About the Author
Other Books by China Miéville
Praise for The Scar
Copyright
To Claudia, my mother
Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact.
—Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight
Acknowledgments
With deep love and thanks to Emma Bircham, again and always.
Huge gratitude to all at Macmillan and Del Rey, especially my editors, Peter Lavery and Chris Schluep. And as ever, more thanks than I can say to Mic Cheetham.
I’m indebted to everyone who read drafts and gave me advice: my mother, Claudia Lightfoot; my sister, Jemima Miéville; Max Schaefer; Farah Mendelsohn; Mark Bould; Oliver Cheetham; Andrew Butler; Mary Sandys; Nicholas Blake; Deanna Hoak; Jonathan Strahan; Colleen Lindsay; Kathleen O’Shea; and Simon Kavanagh. This would be a much poorer book without them.
A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.
At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land, and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.
The sea throngs.
There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them. Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock shelves and dropping into a zone below light.
There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.
There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes, leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.
In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.
The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice caverns and graveyards. The water is