The Scar - China Mieville [286]
Uther Doul will not deny me that. It costs him nothing.
It is many months since we left Iron Bay. By the time we are dragged back again, it will be much more than a year. I will take another name.
The Terpsichoria is lost. There is no reason for the city to chase Bellis Coldwine anymore. And even if some interfering swine back in New Crobuzon were to remember, were to recognize me and pass information on to some uniformed bastard, I have had enough of running. And I cannot find it in me to believe they will. That part of my life is over. This is a new time.
After all that has happened—after all my frantic, fruitless efforts to escape—I find that quite unwittingly I have done what was necessary for me to go home, carrying the memories of Armada stitched to my flesh.
I am surprised to find myself writing this letter to you again. Once I told Uther Doul the truth about it, I felt that it was closed to me.
Hearing myself admit it, I felt like a lonely child. Was there anything more pathetic than these scraps of paper that I was so eager to post, not even having decided yet to whom they would go?
I put them away, then.
But this is a new chapter. The city is going back in time, readying itself to start again with its simple piracy in the rich shores near my home. Everything has changed, and I find myself trembling, excited, biding my time, eager to finish this letter.
It does not embarrass me. I am opened up by it.
This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,” all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.
I have not been the best friend to you, and I need you to forgive me that. I think back to my friends in New Crobuzon, and I wonder which of them you are to be.
And if I want this letter to be a remembrance, to be something with which to say good-bye instead of hello again, then you will be Carrianne. You are my dear friend, if that is so, and the fact that I did not know you when I started to write you this letter means nothing. This is a Possible Letter, after all.
Whoever you are, I have not been the best friend to you, and I am sorry.
Now we approach the fleet that is ranged just beyond the waters of the Hidden Ocean, like a phalanx of anxious guards, and I write this letter to you, to tell you everything that has happened to me. And as I tell you, I come to understand that I have been manipulated, used at every step of the way, that even when I was not a translator, I passed on others’ messages. I find myself detached from such knowledge.
It is not that I do not care. Not that I am not angry at being used, or, gods and Jabber help me, for the awful, brute times I was used to bring about.
But even when I spoke for others (wittingly or not), I was doing things for myself. I have been present throughout all this, my own fact. And besides, as I sit here, ten thousand miles from New Crobuzon, on the other side of foreign seas, I know that we are heading slowly home. And though sadness and the guilt are stitched indelibly to me with my scars, two things are clear.
The first is that everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. And I feel, for all that has happened, as if it is now, only now in these days, that my journey is beginning. I feel as if this—even all this—has been a prologue.
The other is that all my anxiety to send this letter off, to get it to someone—to you—to cut a little mark upon New Crobuzon, all that neurotic eagerness has blown away. The desperation I had, in Tarmuth, in Salkrikaltor, to post this, to decide at the last minute who you were and send it, so that I might be noted, all that frantic fear is gone.
It has become nothing. It is not necessary anymore.
I am coming home. I will amass much more to tell you on the return journey, which will be long, but will end. I do not need this letter delivered.