The Scar - China Mieville [244]
Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick.
A few miles clear of the repulsive pus-flats, the avanc came to a stop.
Desperately, signals from the rockmilk engine were increased, sent down repeatedly, but there was no response. The avanc was absolutely still.
It hovered, static, unable or unwilling to move, miles down.
And when everything that the avanc’s protectors and doctors knew how to do had been done, and nothing had happened; when all the different wavelengths had been tried to entice the great creature back into motion, and it had not responded; there was only one option left. The city could not be allowed to molder motionless.
The avanc was sick, and none of the scholars knew why. They would have to examine it, from close quarters.
Garwater’s bathyscaphos swung like an unwieldy pendulum from a crane on the Hoddling, a factory ship at the Grand Easterly’s bow. The submersible was a stubby sphere, broken by pipes and rivets, random extrusions in reinforced iron. Its engine bulged at its rear like a bustle. Handspan-thick glass fronted its four portholes and chymical lamp.
Engineers and work crews were hurriedly checking and refitting the deep-water vessel.
The crew of the bathyscaphos Ctenophore were preparing on the Hoddling’s deck, pulling on overalls and checking the books and treatises they had with them. A scabmettler pilot, Chion, her face puckered by the remnants of ritual cuts; Krüach Aum (and Bellis, watching, shook her head to see him, her erstwhile pupil, his tight sphincter-mouth dilating with agitation); and at the front, looking excited, proud, and terrified in equal parts, Johannes Tearfly.
He had no choice but to go—he more than anyone but Krüach Aum understood the avanc, and it was imperative that the creature be tended as expertly as possible. Bellis knew that Johannes would have gone even without the Lovers’ coercion.
“We’re going down,” he had explained to Bellis earlier, staring at her with the same expression he wore now, while he kitted up on the Hoddling’s deck. “We’re going to take a look. We have to cure it.” And if he looked aghast, he looked no less excited.
As a scientist, he was fascinated. She saw fear in him, but no foreboding. Bellis remembered him describing the scar he carried, where he was once gored by a sardula. He could be utterly craven, but his cowardice was only social. She had never seen him flinch from the dangers his research entailed. He did not balk now at this appalling commission.
“Well,” Bellis had said, carefully. “I’ll see you in a few hours, I suppose.” And Johannes was so excited that her measured voice, the careful neutrality of her tone, which undermined the meaning of her words and stressed the danger he was in, passed him by. He nodded naÏvely and gripped her shoulder, an awkward gesture, then left.
The preparation took a long time. There was not much of a crowd around the city’s aft edge to watch them and see them off. The strained air of the city kept people away—it was not that they did not care, but they felt without energy, as if they were sucked dry.
Johannes glanced up toward the few onlookers and waved. Then he climbed into the cabin of the Ctenophore.
Bellis watched the hatch being screwed down tight on the cramped vessel. She watched the bathyscaphos being tugged up above the water, lurching sickeningly, and she remembered that same motion from when she had been lowered into Salkrikaltor City. A huge wheel on the Hoddling, reeling out reinforced rubberized cable, began to revolve as the deepwater submersible descended.
It touched the waters of the Hidden Ocean with a muted splash and sank below without pause. It would take at least three hours for