The Scar - China Mieville [192]
The Lovers, the anophelius Aum, Uther Doul, and a cabal of others retreated into the Grand Easterly to work on their new secret project. The wider circle of scientists was cut loose, to wander disconsolate and aggrieved.
Bellis’ job was over. During the working hours, for want of other friends, she began tentatively to speak again with Johannes. He too was cast-off, like her. The avanc was caught—his role was over.
Johannes was still wary of her. They would wander the swaying streets of Armada, stopping at pavement cafés and little gardens, while pirate children played around them. They both still received stipends and could live easily from day to day, but their hours were endless and purposeless now. There was nothing ahead of them except other days, and Johannes was angry. He felt deserted.
For the first time Bellis could remember, he began to mention New Crobuzon regularly.
“What month is it at home?” he asked.
“Swiven,” Bellis replied, chastising herself silently for not appearing to have to work it out.
“Winter’s over,” he said, “back there. Back in New Crobuzon.” He nodded toward the west. “Spring now,” he said quietly.
Spring. And here am I, thought Bellis, who had winter stolen from me. She remembered the river journey to Iron Bay.
“Do you suppose they know by now that we never arrived?” he said quietly.
“Nova Esperium must do,” said Bellis. “Or at least they assume we’re very severely delayed. Then they’ll wait for the next New Crobuzon boat, probably in another six months’ time, to send them word. So they won’t know for sure back home for a long time.”
They sat and drank their thin city-grown coffee.
“I wonder what’s been happening there,” Johannes said eventually.
They did not say much to each other, but the air was pregnant with their quiet.
Things are speeding up, Bellis said to herself, not quite understanding her own thought. She did not think of New Crobuzon as Johannes seemed to: when she imagined it, it was preserved as if in glass, quite unmoving. She did not think of it now. Perhaps she was afraid to.
She was nearly alone in knowing what might have happened, what wars might be being fought on the banks of the Tar and the Canker. It was bewildering to think that if the city was saved it was down to her. Or that it might not, in fact, have been saved.
The uncertainty, she thought, the silence, the potentiality of what might have happened, what might be happening . . . it should crush me. But it did not. Instead, Bellis felt as if she were waiting.
She spent that evening with Uther Doul.
They would drink together perhaps one night in three. Or they might walk through the city, directionless, or they might return to his room, or sometimes to hers.
He never touched her. Bellis was exhausted by his reticence. He would spend minutes without speaking, only to embark on some mythic-sounding story or other in response to some vague statement or question. His wonderful voice would subdue her then, and she would forget her frustration until his story ended.
Uther Doul clearly drew something from his time with her, but still she could not be sure what. She was not intimidated by him anymore, even carrying her secrets. For all his deadly skills, his brilliance in branches of obscure theology and science, she thought she saw in him someone more lost and confused than she, someone removed from all societies, uncertain of norms and interaction, retreated behind cold control. It made her feel safe in his presence.
She was drawn to him, powerfully. She wanted him: his power and his grim self-control, his beautiful voice. His cool intelligence, the obvious fact that he liked her. The sense that she would be more in control than he, should anything happen between them, and not just because she was older. She would not coquette, but she engineered enough of a dynamic that he must know.
But he never touched her. Bellis was unsettled by that.
It made little sense. His behavior clearly spelled out battened-down, incompetent desire, but there was something else as well. His manner