The Scar - China Mieville [104]
“I have to be honest,” she said carefully. “I would not have believed that I’d say or think this, but . . . but I understand.” She looked at him levelly. “To tell the truth, it’s part of what mellowed me about this place. When I first found out what was happening, what the plan was with the avanc, I was so overwhelmed that it just frightened me.” She shook her head and groped for words. “But that changed. It’s the most . . . It’s the most extraordinary project, Johannes. And I realized that I want it to succeed.”
Bellis was aware that she was doing this well.
“I care, Johannes. I never thought I’d give a stiver for anything that happened in this place, but the scale of this plan, the hubris . . . And the thought that I might help . . .” Johannes watched her with cautious pleasure. “Because of how I found out the truth. That’s why I asked you to come here, Johannes. I have something for you.”
She reached into her bag and handed him the book.
Poor Johannes was suffering so many shocks tonight, Bellis thought vaguely, wave after wave of them: the shock of her contacting him, of seeing her, of her apparent change of mind about the city, of the fact that she knew about the avanc, and now this.
She was silent through his breathless incredulity and gasps and choked joy.
Finally he looked up at her.
“Where did you get this?” He could hardly speak.
She told him about Shekel and his fervor for the children’s section. She reached out gently to the book in his hands and turned the pages back.
“Look at the illustrations,” she said. “You can see how it got misshelved. I doubt there’s many people aboard who can read High Kettai. It was this that got under my skin. This.” She stopped at the picture of the massive eye under the boat. Even now as she dissembled, even having seen the simple picture scores of times, still she felt a little rill of astonishment as she looked at it.
“It wasn’t just the pictures that told me what was going on, Johannes.” From her bag she pulled a mass of paper, covered with her tight handwriting. “I do read High Kettai, Johannes,” she said. “I wrote a damn book about it.” And again, something about that fact sat ill inside her. She ignored it and waved the manuscript at him.
“I’ve translated Aum.”
And here was yet another shock for Johannes, who reacted with the same noises and fervor as before.
That’s the last one, Bellis thought, calculating. She watched him dancing with delight on the empty deck. That’s the end of them. When he had finished his stupid little jig, she began to steer him in the direction of the city, toward the pubs. Let’s sit and ponder this, she thought coolly. Let’s get drunk together, eh? Look at you, so overjoyed that I’m back on your side. So thrilled to have your friend back. Let’s work out what’s to be done, you and me.
Let’s help you come up with my plan.
Chapter Seventeen
In these warm waters, the night-lights and the sound of the waves against the city’s flanks were softer, as if the sea was aerated and the light diffuse: brine and illumination became less starkly elemental. Armada nestled in the long, balmy darkness of what was now, unquestionably, a summer.
At night, in pub gardens that abutted Armada’s parklands, its plots, its meadowland left fallow on forecastles and main decks, cicadas sang over the wave noise and the puttering tug motors. Bees and hornets and flies had appeared. They clustered at Bellis’ windows, butting themselves to death.
Armadans were not people of the cold, or of the heat, or of New Crobuzon’s temperate climate. Elsewhere Bellis might apply climatic stereotypes (the stolid cold-dweller, the emotive southerner), but in Armada she could not. On that nomadic city, such factors were irregular, they defied generalization. All that could be said was that for that summer, at that conjuncture of date and place, the city softened.
The streets were full for longer, and the patchwork phonemes of Salt conversations were everywhere. It was looking to be a loud season.
In a hall in the Castor, Tintinnabulum’s ship, a meeting was taking place.