Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [21]
“Me too,” said Zanna.
“’Course you do,” said Jones gently. The sadness and homesickness that filled the two girls was sudden, but it didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. It had been there many hours, underneath everything, and now that things were calmer, with the beautiful view below them, it sort of ambushed them.
“My mum must have the police and everything,” Deeba said.
“Actually, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said Jones.
“What do you mean?” said Zanna.
“Difficult to explain. The Propheseers’ll tell you.” The girls shook their heads in exasperation. “Just…I wouldn’t worry yet.”
Deeba and Zanna were quiet. Sensing their mood, Curdle snuffled up to Deeba’s foot. She picked up the little carton and, ignoring its sour smell, stroked it.
“Yet?” Zanna said. Conductor Jones looked evasive, and started muttering something about air currents and tacking and the directions. “You said,” Zanna insisted, “don’t worry yet?”
“Well,” he said grudgingly. “Londoners can get out of the habit of thinking about some things. Things that come here. But I wouldn’t worry yet.”
13
Encounters on a Bus
Obaday and Skool could tell Zanna was upset. Obaday offered to read to her from his jacket. “Although,” he added doubtfully, eyeing his lapels, “I confess this story isn’t quite the alpine romance I was expecting…” When she declined his offer, he opened his bag and handed Zanna and Deeba what looked like two tiles and cement. They stared at them dubiously, but they were both starving, and the strange sandwiches had a surprising—and surprisingly enticing—aroma.
They bit experimentally. The tiles tasted like crusty bread—the cement like cream cheese.
Below them was the Smeath, the great river of UnLondon, drawing an amazingly straight line across the abcity. A few spirals, curlicues, and straight lines—tributaries and canals—poked off from it in various directions, into the streets. Bridges crossed it, some familiar in shape, some not, some static, some moving.
“Look at that!” Deeba cried out. Far off, there was a bridge like two huge crocodile heads, snout-to-snout.
Deeba started humming a tune, and Zanna snorted with laughter and joined in: it was the theme song to the program EastEnders, which started with an aerial shot of the Thames.
“Dum dum dum dum dum, deee dum,” they sang, looking down at the water. The passengers looked at them as if they were mad.
A few birds and intelligent-seeming clouds examined the bus curiously. “Here comes a highfish,” said Jones, and the girls jerked back in horror at the approaching jackknifing body, its ferocious teeth and unmistakable shark fin. It glided with a faint burring sound. Where its ocean cousins’ side fins were, it grew dragonfly wings.
Jones leaned out and banged the side of the bus. “Get out of it, you dustbin!” he shouted, and the big fish darted off in alarm.
“What is that?” said Zanna. They were approaching a truly enormous wheel. Its base dipped into the river, and its highest point arced hundreds of meters up, almost to the bus.
“The UnLondon-I,” Jones said. “It’s what gave them the idea for that big wheel in London. I saw some photos. Ideas seep both ways, you know. Like clothes—Londoners copy so many UnLondon fashions, and for some reason they always seem to make them uniforms. And the I? Well, if an abnaut didn’t actually come here and see it, then some dream of it floated from here into their heads. But what’s the point making it a damn fool thing for spinning people round and round? The UnLondon-I has a purpose.”
He pointed. What had looked at first like compartments were scoops, pushed around by the river. The UnLondon-I was a waterwheel.
“The dynamos attached to that keep a lot of things going,” Jones said. Above the wheel was the ring of sunshine. The two circles echoed each other.
“Some people say,” Jones said, “that the bit missing from the middle of the UnSun was what became the sun of London. That what lights your days got plucked out of what lights ours.”
Zanna held out her thumb. The hole in the UnSun’s center was about the same size as the