The Scar - China Mieville [65]
“I have here . . .” Tintinnabulum held out a sheet of paper. “I have here a list of authors whose books we’re most interested in tracing. These are writers of great use to us in our work. We’re requesting your help. We have some works by some of these writers, and we’re eager to find whatever else we can. Others are said to have written specific volumes for which we’re searching. About others we know only rumors. You’ll find three of them have works in the catalog—those books we already know about, but we’re interested in any others.
“It might be that one or other of these names surfaces in the next batch of books that arrives. Or it may be that the library has stocked their work for centuries, and they’re lost on the shelves. We’ve searched the relevant sections carefully—biology, philosophy, thaumaturgy, oceanology—and have found nothing. But we could have made mistakes. We would like you to keep a watch for us, on every new book you take in, on forgotten ones you find behind shelves, any time you catalog unlisted volumes. Two of these, those that aren’t from New Crobuzon, are old.”
Bellis took the list and looked at it, expecting it to be very long. But, typed very neatly, in the dead center of the sheet, there were only four names. None of them meant anything to her.
“Those are the core of our list,” Tintinnabulum said. “There are others—there’s a much longer version that will be posted at the desks—but those four are the ones we’d ask you to commit to memory, to search for . . . assiduously.”
Marcus Halprin. That was a New Crobuzon name. Angevine was motioning at Shekel surreptitiously as she and Tintinnabulum moved slowly toward the door.
Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer (transliteration), Bellis read, and beside it the original: a set of cursive pictograms she recognized as the lunar calligraphy of Khadoh.
Beneath that was the third name, A. M. Fetchpaw—New Crobuzon again.
“Halprin and Fetchpaw are relatively recent writers,” said Tintinnabulum from the doorway. “The other two are older, we think—probably a century or so. We’ll leave you to your work, Miss Coldwine. If you should find anything that we want, anything by any of these writers not listed in the catalogs, please come to my vessel. It’s by the for’ard tip of Garwater, the Castor. I can assure you that anyone able to help us will be rewarded.”
What do you know about me? thought Bellis anxiously as the door closed.
She sighed and looked at the paper again. Shekel looked over her shoulder and began, hesitantly, to say the names on the paper out loud.
Krüach Aum, Bellis read finally, ignoring Shekel’s slow progress through the syllables. How exotic, she thought sardonically, looking at the script, an archaic variant of Ragamoll. Johannes mentioned you. That’s a Kettai name.
Halprin and Fetchpaw each had books listed in the catalogs. Fetchpaw’s were volumes one and two of Against Benchamburg: A Radical Theory of Water. Halprin’s were Maritime Ecologies and The Biophysics of Brine.
Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer had a large number of works listed, Khadohi books apparently averaging little more than forty pages each. Bellis was familiar enough with the moon-writing alphabet to make out how the titles sounded, but she had no idea what they meant.
Of Krüach Aum there was nothing.
Bellis watched Shekel teaching himself to read, rifling through the sheets on which he had written difficult words, scribbling additions to them as he said their sounds, copying words from the papers around him, from files, from the list of names that Tintinnabulum had left her. It was as if the boy had once known how to read, and was now remembering.
At five o’clock he sat with her and went through The Courageous Egg. Shekel answered her questions about the egg’s adventures with a care that skirted the comic. She pronounced the words he did not know, syllable by slow syllable, guiding him through the confusions of silent or irregular letters. He told her he already had another book ready for her, that he had read in the library itself