The Scar - China Mieville [144]
She focused on voices as if they were music: the measured sonority of Tintinnabulum, the staccato excitement of Faber, the seesawing oboe tones of the bio-philosopher whose name Bellis could never remember.
Aum was tireless. Bellis felt faintly dismayed by exhaustion when she sat with Tanner Sack and the other engineers in the afternoon, but Aum continued without apparent difficulty, shifting his attention from the conceptual problems and philosophy of the avancs to practical issues of bait, and control, and capture of something the size of an island. And when the failing light and general fatigue forced the day’s work to end, it was never Aum who suggested it.
Bellis could not fail to realize that research problems were being overcome, one by one. It had not taken long for Aum to rewrite his data appendix, and then for the Armadans to point out errors and miscalculations, holes in his research. The excitement of the scientists was palpable; they were almost drunk on it. It was a problem—a project—of unthinkable scale, and yet one by one, the problems, the objections and obstacles, were being overcome.
They were teetering on the edge of something extraordinary. The fact of its possibility was utterly giddying.
Bellis did not fraternize with the Armadans, but she could not spend her days without speaking to them. “There you go. Get that down you,” one might say, handing her a bowl of dull stew, and to refuse a word of thanks would have been a quite unnecessary violence.
Occasionally in the evenings—amid the Armadans’ dice and singsongs, which entranced the sough-voiced anophelii—she found herself on the edge of conversations.
The only one she knew by name was Tanner Sack. The fact that she had traveled above him on the Terpsichoria, free while he had been incarcerated, had poisoned any chance of trust between them, she supposed, though she had the sense that he was an open man. He was one of those who would make a little attempt to include her when he spoke. Bellis now came closer than she had ever been to Armadan society. She was allowed to listen to stories.
Most were about secrets. She heard about the chains that dangled below Armada: ancient, hidden for tens of decades; years’ worth of work, and many ships’ worth of metal. “Long before the Lovers made up their minds what to do with them,” the teller of one story said, “this was tried before.”
Uther Doul was prey to the storytellers, too.
“He comes from the land of the dead,” someone said once, conspiratorially. “Old Doul was born more’n three thousand years ago. It was him started the Contumancy. He was born a slave in the Ghosthead Empire, and he stole that sword, Mightblade, and fought free, and destroyed the empire. He died. But a warrior like him, greatest fighter there’s ever been, he’s the only man was able to fight his way out of the shadeworld, back to the living.”
Those listening made good-humored, derisory noises. They did not believe it, of course, but then they did not know what to believe about Uther Doul.
Doul himself spent his days quietly. The main person whose company he sought, the only one who came anything close to a friend, seemed to be Hedrigall. The cactus aeronaut and the human warrior often talked quietly at the edge of the room. They muttered in quick undertones, as if they were ashamed of friendship.
There was only one other person with whom Uther Doul was prepared to spend time, and to whom he talked, and that was Bellis.
It had not taken her long to realize that the apparently chance meetings, the brief pleasantries, were not coincidental. In an elliptical and tentative way, he was trying to make friends with her.
Bellis could not make sense of him, and she did not try to second-guess him. She trusted herself to cope. Though a sense of danger always remained, part of her enjoyed the encounters—the formal air, the slightest sense of flirtation. It was hardly coquetry. She did not compromise her dignity with simpering suggestiveness. But she was drawn to him,