But now there was something plaintive in him. His rediscovered eagerness to be her friend was a little pathetic. And though Bellis spent what time she could with Carrianne, whose irreverence and affection were genuine pleasures, and though Carrianne did not much like Johannes, there were times when Bellis let him stay a while. She felt pity for him.
With the avanc caught, trapped, and tethered, and with Tintinnabulum’s crew gone, Johannes’ job was done. Now, after all Johannes’ work, Krüach Aum was working with the Lovers’ thaumaturges and Uther Doul, ushered into the new inner circle to discover the secrets of possibility mining. Johannes had realized, Bellis supposed, that there were very many years ahead of him as a captive in the city.
Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.
Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.
He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.
Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.
Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.
The Arrogance had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the Grand Easterly, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the Arrogance’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.
“What did he see coming?” they muttered. “Hedrigall, what did he see coming?”
The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.
Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.
They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.
Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish—there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean—eating them or being eaten.
Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.
Further and further into that sea.
There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.
In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.
Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here. From one set of ruined nights to another, she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.
During some of those dark times, Bellis walked to the Grand Easterly to watch the city’s journey through mysterious, faintly moving seas. She would stare out at the remorseless miles of water until, cowed by the scale of it, she fled into the corridors of the great ship, moved by a compulsion she did not understand.
She would wind through its warren of empty passages, into the forgotten zone of the steamer, to the little cubbyhole that Doul had shown her. And there she would perch, uncomfortable and disturbed, eavesdropping on the fucking and the bedroom talk of the Lovers.
It was a habit that revolted her, but she could not shake off the sly sense of power it gave her. My little rebellion, my little escape—someone’s listening, and you don’t know, she would think, and hear the Lovers mutter wetly to each other and grapple with an abandon that still appalled her.
They never gave her any revelations. They never spoke of anything important. They only rolled and lay together, and murmured their fetishistic connection. The Lover sounded more and more febrile with every night, her voice growing harder, and the Lover debased himself to her, eager to dissolve into her.
I do not want to be here, Bellis thought, fervently and repeatedly. She spoke it aloud, finally, to Carrianne one night, knowing that her friend would not agree.
“I do not want to be here.” Bellis swilled the wine in her glass. “Now there’s nightmares, and what comes next are fugues. I’ve seen it before. And we can’t be heading anywhere that’s any good—and what can happen then? Either we die . . . or the Lovers get control of the most . . . terrible, terrible power. Would you really trust them, Carrianne?” she demanded drunkenly. “That cut-up fuck and his psychopath woman? You’d trust them with power like that? I do not want to be here.”
“I know, Bellis,” Carrianne said, searching for words. “But I want to see what’s out there. I think this is something amazing, you understand? Whether or not the Lovers get hold of . . . whatever’s there. And no, I don’t really trust them. I’m Dry Fall, remember? But I’ll tell you what . . . Since Hedrigall did a runner, I think there’s a lot of people who are starting to agree with you.”
And Bellis nodded in sudden surprise, and raised her glass in a toast. Carrianne responded sardonically.
She’s right, thought Bellis suddenly. Godsdammit, she’s fucking right. Something’s changing.
The avanc began to slow.
Perhaps ten days after Armada entered the Hidden Ocean, people began to notice.
At first it was Bastard John, the menfish and the cray, Tanner Sack and the other few upsiders who still swam. It was growing easier for them to keep up with the city. At the end of a few hours’ immersion, skittering below the city’s barnacle-scaled underside, their muscles burned less than they would have expected. They were not traveling so far, so fast.
It was not long before the air-breathing citizens noticed. Without land, in cryptic seas, it was not so easy to chart the distances the city was traveling. But there were methods.
Something was happening to the mile-long creature hidden in the deep. Something had changed. The avanc was slowing down.
At first it was hoped that it was a temporary change, that the avanc’s pace would increase again. But the days went on, and still the beast slowed.
With delight and triumph, Johannes found himself suddenly back in favor. His old team was reassembled by the Lovers, to make sense o
f what was happening.
Bellis was surprised to discover that he still talked to her and Carrianne about his work, now that he had been brought back into the inner circle.
“There can’t be anyone in the city who hasn’t noticed,” he told them one night, exhausted and mystified. “The Lovers are waiting for us to solve it.” He shook his head. “Even Aum can’t fathom it. The rockmilk engine’s still controlling it; the avanc’s still traveling . . . It’s just slowing.”
“Something in the Hidden Ocean?” suggested Bellis.
Johannes bit his lip. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “What in Bas-Lag can fuck with an avanc?”
“It must be sickening,” said Carrianne, and Johannes nodded.
“I think it must be,” he agreed slowly. “Krüach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it.”
The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.
All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.
Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.
A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.
A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.
The city’s speed was still decreasing.
(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary—a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)
It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.
At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water—sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.
The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.
It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.
The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.
Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.
A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.
“Jabber preserve us!” gasped Bellis. Above her head Armada’s carrion birds wheeled, coiling excitedly like some living cloud toward the rank stuff, then arcing suddenly away as they grew close, as if its degree of corruption defied even them.
The city reached the outer edges of the reeking substance. There were great swathes of it ahead, a bobbing purulent mass.
Most of those who had gathered to watch had run back to their houses to burn incense. Bellis and Carrianne remained, watching Johannes and his colleagues at the edge of the park. With perfume-soaked rags around their faces, Garwater’s investigators leaned over the rail, trolling a bucket on a rope into the substance. They hauled it up and began to examine it.
Then recoiled from it, violently.
When Johannes saw Bellis and Carrianne, he ran over to them and tore off his mask. He was white and trembling, his skin reflective with sweat.
“It’s pus,” he said, and pointed to the sea with an unsteady finger. “It’s a slick of pus.”
Chapter Forty-three
The avanc is sick.
Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine’s command, it slows and slows. It is—what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel or show its pain, the avanc’s lesions are not healing. They are shedding their dead matter in suppurating clots that eddy free and drift up like oil, expanding as the crushing pressure lessens, enveloping and suffocating fish and weed, until what breaks the waves with a mucal slurp is a noisome coagulate of infection and smothered sea-life.
Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick.
A few miles clear of the repulsive pus-flats, the avanc came to a stop.
Desperately, signals from the rockmilk engine were increased, sent down repeatedly, but there was no response. The avanc was absolutely still.
It hovered, static, unable or unwilling to move, miles down.
And when everything that the avanc’s protectors and doctors knew how to do had been done, and nothing had happened; when all the different wavelengths had been tried to entice the great creature back into motion, and it had not responded; there was only one option left. The city could not be allowed to molder motionless.
The avanc was sick, and none of the scholars knew why. They would have to examine it, from close quarters.
Garwater’s bathyscaphos swung like an unwieldy pendulum from a crane on the Hoddling, a factory ship at the Grand Easterly’s bow. The submersible was a stubby sphere, broken by pipes and rivets, random extrusions in reinforced iron. Its engine bulged at its rear like a bustle. Handspan-thick glass fronted its four portholes and chymical lamp.
Engineers and work crews were hurriedly checking and refitting the deep-water vessel.
The crew of the bathyscaphos Ctenophore were preparing on the Hoddling’s deck, pulling on overalls and checking the books and treatises they had with them. A scabmettler pilot, Chion, her face puckered by the remnants of ritual cuts; Krüach Aum (and Bellis, watching, shook her head to see him, her erstwhile pupil, his tight sphincter-mouth dilating with agitation); and at the front, looking excited, proud, and terrified in equal parts, Johannes Tearfly.
He had no choice but to go—he more than anyone but Krüach Aum understood the avanc, and it was imperative that the creature be tended as expertly as possible. Bellis knew that Johannes would have gone even without the Lovers’ coercion.
“We’re going down,” he had explained to Bellis earlier, staring at her with the same expression he wore now, while he kitted up on the Hoddling’s deck. “We’re going to take a look. We have to cure it.” And if he looked aghast, he looked no less excited.
As a scientist, he was fascinated. She saw fear in him, but no foreboding. Bellis remembered him describing the scar he carried, where he was once gored by a sardula. He could be utterly craven, but his cowardice was only social. She had never seen him flinch from the dangers his research entailed. He did not balk now at this appalling commission.
“Well,” Bellis had said, carefully. “I’ll see you in a few hours, I suppose.” And Johannes was so excited that her measured voice, the careful neutrality of her tone, which undermined the meaning of her words and stressed the danger he was in, passed him by. He nodded naÏvely and gripped her shoulder, an awkward gesture, then left.
The preparation took a long time. There was not much of a crowd around the city’s aft edge to watch them and see them off. The str
ained air of the city kept people away—it was not that they did not care, but they felt without energy, as if they were sucked dry.
Johannes glanced up toward the few onlookers and waved. Then he climbed into the cabin of the Ctenophore.
Bellis watched the hatch being screwed down tight on the cramped vessel. She watched the bathyscaphos being tugged up above the water, lurching sickeningly, and she remembered that same motion from when she had been lowered into Salkrikaltor City. A huge wheel on the Hoddling, reeling out reinforced rubberized cable, began to revolve as the deepwater submersible descended.
It touched the waters of the Hidden Ocean with a muted splash and sank below without pause. It would take at least three hours for the bathyscaphos to reach the avanc. Bellis watched the ripples from the disappearing submersible till she felt someone behind her and turned to face Uther Doul.
She set her mouth and waited. He studied her calmly and did not speak for several seconds.
“You’re worried for your friend,” he said. “The Grand Easterly is out of bounds during this emergency, but if you’d like, you can wait there for him to return.”
He took her to a small room at the rear of the Grand Easterly, whose porthole looked out over the Hoddling, which was suspending the submersible. Doul left her without a word, closing the door behind him. But he had taken her to a room more comfortable and better furnished than her own quarters and, five minutes after she arrived, one of the Garwater stewards brought her tea, unbidden.
Bellis sipped it as she watched the water. She was bewildered and untrusting. She did not understand why Doul was indulging her.
At first it was merely warm in the tiny spherical cabin of the Ctenophore, with three breathing bodies pushed together. They crushed each other uncomfortably, negotiating around each other’s arms and legs to peer through the little portholes.