The Scar - China Mieville [132]
Scabmettler guards in their bloodclot armor kept watch with cactacae as the passengers descended. Bellis touched land, crouching beside the rope ladder, and ran her fingers through the sand. Her breathing was quick and very loud in her head.
At first she was conscious of nothing but the novelty of being on ground that did not sway. She remembered her land-legs delightedly, only realizing at that moment that she had forgotten them. Then she became aware of her surroundings again, and felt the beach beneath her closely, and for the first time registered its strangeness.
She remembered the naÏve woodcuts in Aum’s book. The stylized monochrome of the man in profile on the beach, broken mechanisms around him.
Machinery Beach, she thought, and looked out across the dirty-red sand and scree.
Some way off were the shapes she had taken to be boulders— huge things the size of rooms, breaking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.
There were smaller rocks, too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate, and complete pieces; gauges and glasswork and compact steam-power engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts, and screws.
Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of
thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline—painted with rust.
The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.
When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here? thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe. What disaster, what violence? She imagined the seafloor around the bay—a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.
She picked up another handful of machine-sand, let it dissipate. She could smell the metal.
This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant, she realized. This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets moldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade—two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand-piece puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have?
She stumbled away from the rope ladder, listening to the crunch of ancient engines underfoot.
As the last of the passengers descended, the guards kept careful watch on the horizon, muttering. A little way from Bellis, the pen of livestock had been winched to the ground. It stank like a farmyard, and its inhabitants sounded noisily and stupidly into the
still air.
“Close together and listen to me,” said the Lover harshly, and she was surrounded. The engineers and scientists had been scattering, dumbly running their fingers through the metal shale. A few, like Tanner Sack, had gone to the sea. (He had submerged briefly, with a sigh of pleasure.) For a moment, there was no sound except little breakers foaming on the rust shore.
“Now listen, if you want to live,” the Lover went on. People shifted, uneasy. “It’s a mile or two to the village, up those rocks overlooking this place.” They gazed up at them; the hillside looked empty. “Keep