The Scar - China Mieville [157]
“Thank you, Captain,” says Tanner, and shakes the cactus-man’s thorn-plucked hand.
Watching Tanner as he leaps from the guardrail, Captain Sengka leans forward, half smiling, oddly warm to the fierce little human who has visited him. He stays on deck for some time, watching the ripples that Tanner leaves behind. And when they have been assimilated by the waves, he looks up into the night, untroubled by the sounds of the she-anophelii who will do no more than circle him, sniffing eagerly, failing to smell blood.
He thinks about what he will say to his officers, the new orders he will give in the morning, when the Armadans are gone. He wonders wryly how they will react. They will be aghast. Intrigued.
Tanner Sack is swimming doggedly back to the split in the cliffs. He anticipates the terrifying climb up that staggered path, practicing the movement of kicking out from the rock should the mosquito-women come, hurtling back into the sea.
He is unhappy. It does not help to think that he had to do it.
He wishes suddenly that the sea would do what poets and painters promise of it: that it would wash everything away so that he could start again, that it would make everything new. The water sluices through him as if he were hollow, and he closes his eyes as he moves, and imagines it cleansing him from the inside.
Tanner’s fist is clenched around the ugly seal ring. He wishes his memories would wash out of him, but they are tenacious as his innards.
He stops suddenly in the middle of the sea, suspended fifty feet below the surface, hanging like a condemned man in the black water. This is my home, he tells himself, but takes no comfort from it. Tanner feels a rage in him, a rage that he controls, sadness as much as anger, and loneliness. He thinks of Shekel and Angevine (as he has done scores of times).
He reaches out deliberately and opens his hand, and the heavy Crobuzoner ring pitches instantly away.
It is so black, the sense of his own pale skin is more memory than sight. He can only imagine the ring falling from his palm. Plunging. Falling for a long time. Coming to rest at last in a snarl of rock or lost engine parts. Threading perhaps by chance onto some frond of weed, some finger of coral—a mindless, contingent affectation.
And then, and then. Ground down by the endless motion of the water. Not swallowed as he tries to imagine, not lost forever. Reconstituted. Until one day, years or centuries from now, it will resurface, thrown up by submarine upheavals. Diminished perhaps by the implacable currents. And even if the gnawing of brine has been absolute, if the ring is dissipated, its atoms will rise to the light and add to Machinery Beach.
The sea forgets nothing, forgives nothing, whatever we’re told, thinks Tanner.
He should swim on, and he will soon; he’ll return and clamber up dripping into the mosquito township. Tentacles flailing like fly whisks, he will scuttle back to the door where Bellis will admit him (he knows she’ll be waiting). And the job will be done and the city (the old city, his first city) safe, perhaps. But for now he can’t move.
Tanner is thinking of all the things he has still to see. All the things he has been told are out there in the water. The ghost ships, the melted ships, the basalt islands. The plains of ossified waves where the water is grey and solid, where the sea has died. Places where the water is boiling. The gessin homelands. Steam-storms. The Scar. He is thinking about the ring below him, hidden in the weeds.
It’s all still there, he thinks.
There is no redemption in the sea.
Interlude VI
Elsewhere
The whales are dead. Without these vast, stupid guides, the going is harder.
Brother, have we lost the trail?
There are many possibilities.
Once again they are just a cabal of dark bodies above the base of the sea. They slide through blood-warm water.
Around them, the salinae are anxious. Miles off, thousands of feet below the waves, something is shaking the crust of the world.
Can you taste it?
Amid the millions of mineral particles that