The Scar - China Mieville [109]
Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.
They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.
After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.
It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.
Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.
She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.
Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.
The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the Grand Easterly. Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.
The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.
Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the Grand Easterly: from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.
Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on
Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great
billows. The air sounded with them—a susurrus of paper sliding against paper—and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their
eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.
Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on
the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.
Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.
Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the Chromolith, onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.
Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.
Armadan citizens, she read, after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.
She scanned the page quickly, racing