The Scar - China Mieville [245]
She set her mouth and waited. He studied her calmly and did not speak for several seconds.
“You’re worried for your friend,” he said. “The Grand Easterly is out of bounds during this emergency, but if you’d like, you can wait there for him to return.”
He took her to a small room at the rear of the Grand Easterly, whose porthole looked out over the Hoddling, which was suspending the submersible. Doul left her without a word, closing the door behind him. But he had taken her to a room more comfortable and better furnished than her own quarters and, five minutes after she arrived, one of the Garwater stewards brought her tea, unbidden.
Bellis sipped it as she watched the water. She was bewildered and untrusting. She did not understand why Doul was indulging her.
At first it was merely warm in the tiny spherical cabin of the Ctenophore, with three breathing bodies pushed together. They crushed each other uncomfortably, negotiating around each other’s arms and legs to peer through the little portholes.
The light fell away with astonishing speed, and Johannes checked this waning visibility with nervous fascination. They descended by one of the great chains that tethered the avanc, slipping past one massive link after another, psoriatic with shellfish and generations of weed. Placid fish with eyes like cows’ investigated their light, peering in at the intruders on their way down, spiraling the tubes that fed them air, shying away from the bubbles their vessel exhaled.
As the light in the sea declined, the chain became baleful. Its black shafts plumbed almost vertically, plaiting one into the other in patterns that seemed suddenly obscure and sinister, the links suggestive as hieroglyphs.
At the edge of absolute darkness, the sea seemed absolutely still, uncut by the Hidden Ocean’s predatory currents. The crew did not speak. The cabin was now quite black. There were chymical lights and lanterns aboard, but they could not risk exhausting them during their descent—it was at the bottom that they must be able to see. So they sat, pressed together, in the most profound darkness any of them had ever experienced.
There was only the wheeze of breath and a faint percussion as they moved their cramped limbs and knocked them against metal or each other. The whisper of pumped air. The engine was not running—gravity took the vessel down.
Johannes listened to his own breath, and that of those around him, and realized that they were unconsciously synchronizing. Which meant that after every exhalation there was a pause, a moment when he could pretend for a fraction of a second that he was alone.
They were far beyond the sun’s reach now. They warmed the sea. Heat leached through from the boilers into the cabin, through the vessel’s metal skin into water that ate it hungrily.
Time could not survive this unbroken dark heat and monotonous susurrus of air and creaking leather and shifting skin. It was broken and bled. Its moments did not segue into each other, but were stillborn. I am out of time, Johannes thought.
For a shocking instant he felt claustrophobia like bile, but he held himself still and closed his eyes (uncomforted by the darkness he found there, no more or less profound than that he had shut out), swallowed, and defeated it. Stretching out his hand, Johannes found the glass of the porthole, and was shocked by its cold, condensation-wet surface—the water outside was like ice.
After uncountable minutes, the darkness outside was momentarily broken, and the crew gasped as time returned to them like an elyctric shock. Some living lamp was passing them by, some tentacular thing that inverted its body with a peristaltic wave, enveloping itself in its luminescent innards and shooting away, its austere glimmer snuffed out.
Chion ignited the lamp at the bathyscaphos’s front. It stuttered on, its phosphorous glow casting a cone of light. They could see its edges as clearly