The Scar - China Mieville [101]
Until they had a plan.
It was so loose, so nebulous, it was hard to admit that it was all
they had.
They sat back in silent unease. Bellis heard the recurring muttering of the waves, watched the smoke from her cigarillo unravel in front of the window, obscuring the night sky. The conjuncture disgusted her suddenly: it seemed to have trapped her. Her life was reduced to a succession of nights and smoking and scratching for ideas. But now something had changed.
It might be the last night that she needed to do this.
“I hate this,” said Silas eventually. “I fucking hate it, that I
can’t . . . But can you do it? There’s a lot falling on you.”
“I have to,” she replied. “You don’t know High Kettai. Is there any other way you could convince them to take you?”
Silas grit his teeth and shook his head.
“But what about you?” he said. “Your friend Johannes knows you’re not exactly a model Armadan citizen, doesn’t he?”
“I can convince him,” Bellis said. “There aren’t going to be too many Kettai readers in Armada. But you’re right; he’s the only real barrier.” She was silent for some time, eventually continuing thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’s mentioned me to them. If he’d wanted to make life hard, if he suspected me of being . . . dangerous, I’d know it by now. I think he has a sense of . . . of honor, or something, that stops him talking about me.”
That’s not what it is, she thought even as she spoke. You know why he hasn’t reported you for dissidence.
Like it or not, however you left it, whatever you think of him, he counts you a friend.
“When they read this,” said Silas, “and they realize that Krüach Aum’s not from Kohnid, and that he may still be alive, they’ll probably fall over themselves to find him. But . . . what if they don’t?
“We have to get them to that island, Bellis. If we can’t do that, we have nothing. It’s no small thing we want them to do. You know where we’re trying to head them. You know what’s there. You can leave me to do the rest—I can put together what we need. I have the seal, so I can get the messages written. I can do all that. But dammit, that’s all I can do.” He was bitter. “And if we can’t get them to the fucking island, we have nothing at all.”
He picked up Krüach Aum’s book and turned the pages slowly. When he reached the data appendix, he held it up to Bellis.
“You’ve translated this, haven’t you?” he said.
“What I can.”
“They’re not expecting ever to see this book, but they think they can maybe raise the avanc anyway. If we give them this—“ He waggled it, and the pages flapped like wings. “—maybe it’s all they’ll need. Maybe they’ll just look through these pages, and do whatever decoding they have to do to make sense of it, using you, using all the other translators and scientists in the Lyceum and in the Grand Easterly . . . Maybe everything they’d need to raise the avanc is right here. We might just be handing them the last piece they need.”
He was right. If Aum’s claims were true, all the data he had used, all the information, all the configurations were there in those pages.
“But without this book,” Silas continued, “we have nothing. Nothing to sell you to them, nothing to entice them to the island. They’ll just head off as they were planning, and work on whatever they’ve got, and maybe raise the avanc anyway. If they had nothing, they’d make do. But if we give them a part of what they want, they’ll have to have it all. We have to turn this from a gift . . . into bait.”
And after a moment, Bellis understood. She pursed her lips and nodded quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Give it to me.”
She leafed through to the data appendix and paused, wondering how to start.
Eventually she shrugged and simply tore out a clutch of pages.
After that initial, oddly euphoric moment, she was more careful.