The Scar - China Mieville [141]
There was no systematicity or coherence to the island’s library. Most of the works available were the most abstract theory. The authorities in Kohnid and Dreer Samher kept from their subjects any works they deemed dangerous. There was almost nothing that related the anophelii to the world outside. To find those, the anophelii had to search the ruins of their ancestors’ habitations on the other side of the island.
And sometimes they found fables, like the story of the man who raised the avanc.
Stories were self-generating. Little references in abstruse philosophical texts, footnotes, vague folk memories. The mosquito-
people had their own etiolated legends.
Bellis did not see a raging curiosity about the world as she had expected. The anophelii seemed intrigued only by the most abstract of questions. But there appeared a glimmer of a more fierce, more earthed interest from Krüach Aum himself.
There are currents in the water, he wrote, that we can measure, that cannot be born in our seas.
Aum had started at the highest conceptual level and had proved to himself the reality of the avanc. The Armadan scientists sat spellbound as Bellis falteringly translated his story. From three or four scrawled equations to a page of logical propositions, mining what works of biology, oceanology, dimensional philosophy he could find. A hypothesis. Testing his results, checking the details of the story of the first summoning.
The scientists gasped and nodded excitedly at the equations and notations she copied into Salt.
And after eating, Bellis gathered her strength again and sat with the engineers.
Tanner Sack was one of the first to speak. “What manner of beast is it?” he said. “What’ll we need to bind it?”
Many of the engineers were press-ganged, and several were Remade. She was surrounded by criminals, Bellis realized, most from New Crobuzon. They spoke Salt with Dog Fenn and Badside accents, peppered with slum slang she had not heard for months, which made her blink with surprise. Their expertise was as arcane to her as the scientists’. They asked about the strength of steel and iron and various alloys, and the honeycomb structure of the chains below New Crobuzon, and the power of the avanc. Soon matters turned to steam engines and gas turbines, and rockmilk, and the gearwork of a harness, and bits and bridles the size of ships.
She knew it would be to her advantage to make sense of it all, but it was beyond her and she stopped trying.
That night, as one of the men was taken to his room, a she-anophelii came close to him, screaming gibberish, her hands extended, and a cactus guard shot her dead with his rivebow.
Bellis heard the thwacking report and watched through the window slits. The he-anophelii crooned with their sphincter mouths, and knelt beside her body, and felt her. Her mouth hung open, and her proboscis lolled like a massive stiff tongue. She had fed recently. Her still-plump body was cut almost in half by the rivebow’s massive, spinning chakri, and enormous gouts of blood were soaking into the earth and pooling in dusty slicks.
The males shook their heads. A he-anophelius beside her plucked at Bellis’ arms and wrote something on her pad.
Not necessary. She did not want to feed.
And then he explained to her, and Bellis’ head swam with the monstrousness of it.
Bellis was hungry to be alone. She had spent every minute of the day with others, and it exhausted her. So when the day’s tasks had ended, and the scientists were talking together, trying to agree on a direction for the next day’s research, she slipped briefly into the smaller side room, thinking it empty. It was not.
She made an apologetic noise and turned away, but Uther Doul spoke quickly.
“Please don’t leave,” he said.
She turned back, grasping the bag she carried, painfully