The Scar - China Mieville [63]
He was just sad that it had come so fast.
Tanner could see the masts of Grand Easterly dominating the skyline to star’d. Aerostats sailed like submersibles through the city’s rigging. He descended to Winterstraw Market and made his way over its little vessels accosted by vendors and jostled by early shoppers.
The water was very close to him here, just below his feet. It slopped all around him in the grooves between the boats that made up the bazaar, awash with rubbish. The smell and sound of it were strong.
He closed his eyes momentarily and imagined himself hovering in the cool saltwater. Descending, feeling the pressure increase as the sea cosseted him. His tentacles grasping at passing fish. Making sense of the mysteries of the city’s underside: the obscure dark shapes in the distance, the gardens of pulp and rockweed and algae.
Tanner felt his resolve waxing, and he walked more quickly.
In The Clockhouse Spur riding he almost became lost in the unfamiliar environs. He referred carefully to his hand-scrawled map. Tanner made his way along winding walkways stretched out over low boats, and across ornately reconfigured caravels, to the Duneroller, a fat old gunship. An unstable-looking tower tottered at the ship’s rear, tethered by guy ropes to the rigging.
This was a quiet quarter. Even the water coursing between these boats seemed subdued. This was a neighborhood of back-alley thaumaturges and apothecaries, the scientists of Booktown.
In the office at the top of the tower, Tanner looked out from the imperfectly cut window. He could see across the restless shipscape to the horizon that pitched gently, swung up and down in the window frame as the Duneroller listed with the sea.
There was no word in Salt for Remaking. Serious augmentation or change was not common. Major work—to ameliorate the effects of the New Crobuzon punishment factories or, rarely, for some more proactive purpose—relied on a handful of practitioners. Self-taught biothaumaturges, specialist doctors, and chirurgeons and—rumor held—a few exiles from New Crobuzon whose expertise had been gleaned years before in the punitive service of the state.
For these serious changes, the word was taken from the Ragamoll. It was that Ragamoll word that filled Tanner’s mouth.
He brought his eyes back to the man behind the desk, patiently waiting.
“I need you to help me,” Tanner said, faltering. “I want to be Remade.”
Tanner had thought about it for a long time.
His coming to terms with the sea felt like a long, drawn-out birth. Every day he spent more time below, and the water felt better against him. His new limbs had adapted completely, were as strong and almost as prehensile as his arms and hands.
He had seen with envy how Bastard John the dolphin policed his watch, passing through the brine with unique motion (as he swept in to punish some slacking worker with a brutal butting); and had watched as cray from their half-sunk ships (suspended at the point of being lost, pickled in time) or the unclear menfish from Bask riding launched themselves into the water, uncontained by harnessing or chains.
When he left the sea, Tanner felt his tentacles hang heavy and uncomfortable. But when he was below, in his harness, his leather and brass, he felt tethered and constrained. He wanted to swim free, across and up into the light and even, yes, even down, into the cold and silent darkness.
There was only one thing he could do. He had considered asking the docks to subsidize him, as they surely would, gaining an infinitely more efficient worker to do their bidding. But as the days went on and his resolution grew, he had dispensed with that plan, and had begun to hoard his eyes and flags.
That morning, with Shekel away and the clear sky blowing salt air into him, he realized, suddenly, that this was truly and completely what he wanted to do. And with a great happiness he understood that it was not because he was ashamed that he would not ask for