The Scar - China Mieville [270]
“They came to you . . . we came to you and asked you to turn back. Said we were happy with how things had been. That we didn’t need this, that too much had gone wrong already, and that we were fearful there was worse to come. Some of us had been having terrible dreams. The city was . . . so tense. Like a cat, fur all sparking and jagged.
“We asked you to turn us back. Before it was too late. We were afraid.
“I don’t know how you did it, but you kept . . . for just enough time, you kept us . . . I’ll not say happy; I’ll not say willing. You kept us obedient; and we waited, and let you take us further in, fearful as we were.”
“If it had been another week, I don’t think we would have put up with any more. I think we would have turned back, and then you all wouldn’t have died.
“But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was too late.
“At six in the morning, on the ninth Playdi of Flesh, from the cabin of the Arrogance I saw something, forty miles ahead, at the edge of the horizon. A disturbance in the air, very faint, very frightening. And there was something else.
“The horizon was too close.
“An hour, five miles later, I knew we were definitely approaching something. And the horizon was still too close, and getting closer.
“I sent messages down below. And I could see them all preparing. I could look down and see the mass of ships all pushed together—all colors, all different shapes. I could see the crews setting up the cranes on the city’s edge, and firing up engines and gods knew what else. Getting ready with all the sciences they’d been preparing. Little aerostats belting from one end of the city to another. Way below me.
“I was watching where the sea and sky met. I didn’t believe it for the longest time; I kept thinking I must have it wrong and that any moment I’d see it right, make sense of it, but I didn’t. And finally I couldn’t deny what I saw.
“The horizon was only twenty miles away. I could see it clear, jagging across the face of the sea. The Scar.
“It was like seeing a god.
“You’d told us almost nothing, when you described it.
“It was a big wound in reality, broken open by the Ghosthead, you told us, thick with seams of what might be, all the possible ways. A big wound in reality, you said, and I thought you were speaking . . . like poetry.
“When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.
“That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.
“We were only a few miles away.
“It was a crevice in the sea.
“It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but cracked, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.
“The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then . . .
“Empty air.
“A precipice.
“And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.
“In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar.”
“I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?”
Of course the Lovers did not