The Scar - China Mieville [124]
Elsewhere
On keep on.
The water is like sweat and our whales do not like it.
Nonetheless.
South.
The trail is clear.
Into temperate and then into warm seas.
The submarine rockscape was dramatic here, jags and clefts in the world’s crust. Atolls and reefs rose from the deep water in a melee of vivid colors. The water was fertilized by rotting palm leaves and lotuses and the corpses of unique creatures: amphibious things that swam in mud, and fish that breathed air, and aquatic bats.
On every island there were scores of ecological niches, and for each unique opportunity there was a beast. Sometimes there were two or more, fighting for ascendancy.
The hunters made their way into shallows, into salt lagoons and caves, and ate what they found there.
The whales moaned and mewled and begged to return to the cold waters, and their masters ignored them or punished them, and told them again what it was they were looking for.
The hunters remarked upon the water temperature, and the new quality of light, and the crystalline colors of the fish that surrounded them, but they did not complain. It would have been unthinkable for them to care, with their quarry still loose.
South, they commanded, and even when their whales began to die, one by one, their colossal bodies falling prey to alien warmwater viruses and collapsing, their skins peeling off grey and rotten, their bodies bloating with gas and bobbing stinking and pustulant to the surface to be torn to pieces by carrion birds till their bones and the remnants of their flesh slid down into darkening water, their masters did not hesitate.
South, they said, and followed the trail into tropical seas.
Part Four
Blood
Chapter Twenty-one
Shunday 29th Lunuary 1780—or the Eighth Bookdi of
Hawkbill Quarto 6/317, as you please. On the Trident.
Another addition to this letter. It has been some time since I have written. I would apologize if it made any sense. I feel as if I should, somehow—absurdly. As if you read while I write, and fret during the delays. Of course, when you finally get this letter, a day’s silence or a week’s or a year’s will be the same—a line left clear, a row of stars. My months will be collapsed. But I am confused by time.
I am digressing—making little sense. Forgive me.
I am excited, and somewhat afraid.
I sit on the privvy and write this. I am beside a window, and the morning sun is streaming in on me. I am thousands of feet above the sea.
It was awesome at first; I will admit that. It was desperately beautiful. After a time, the monotony of wrinkled water and sky and occasional cloud is numbing.
The sea here is quite empty. I must be able to see sixty, seventy, ninety miles to the horizon, and there is not a sail, not a skiff or fishing boat. The water color shifts between green, blue, and grey according to I don’t know what beneath the surface.
Our motion through the air is almost undetectable. We can feel the vibrations, of course, from the steam engines aft, the big propellers, but there is no sense of acceleration, of passage or
direction.
This Trident is an astonishing vessel. Garwater is pouring effort and money into this journey. That is clear.
It must have been a sight, when the Trident lifted off from the deck of the Grand Easterly. It had spent long enough jutting over the ocean, lifted on a framework to keep it clear of the deck’s little capstans and bulkheads. I don’t doubt that there were bets taken on whether we would smash into the sea or into the fabric of the city.
But we lifted clear. It was late afternoon, and there was a darkness at the edge of the sky. I can imagine the Trident hanging there like gods know what, as big as most of the ships of the city, new and scrubbed clean.
We have brought with us the most bizarre thing. Hanging between our engines is a pen full of sheep and pigs.
The animals have food and water for our two-day journey. They must be able to see the gulf of air through the slats in their floor. I thought they might panic, but they can only stare down at the clouds below their