China Miéville - The Scar

CHINA
MIVILLE

THE
SCAR

BALLANTINE BOOKS
NEW YORK

Table of Contents

More praise for Perdido Street Station,
winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel

What is most memorable about Perdido Street Station is not the diversity of its imaginings but the manner in which it presents them, its sophisticated writing and adept characterization.... Unlike much science fiction, Perdido Street Station is infused with a sense of compassion and humility.

The Seattle Times

Exhilarating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking. Its exuberant and unflagging inventiveness, as well as the strong narrative, keep up interest throughout.

Times Literary Supplement

When a fantasy writer combines an intriguing new world with vibrant writing, a high-energy plot and a coherent philosophical compass, the results can be sheer delight. Perdido Street Station... is exactly that sort of fantasy... [It] grabbed my imagination and... never loosened its grip.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

A haunting, disturbing, and welcome addition to the steampunk genre, where Victorian technology meets science fiction.... Miville renders this dark fantasy with imagination and innovation.

Kansas City Star

Flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

An action-packed thriller with high literary production values. A sprawling, vastly ambitious, exquisitely executed science fiction fantasy with the best possible ending: You want more, more, more.

Salon.com

[A] PHANTASMAGORIC MASTERPIECE...
The book left me breathless with admiration.
Brian Stableford

The most exciting, enthralling novel I have read in a long time. It is about everything importantlove, work, hope, worlds we knew were out there but needed a writer like Miville to show them to us. His imagination is vast, his talent volcanic. Read this book. It just might be a masterpiece.

Jonathon Carroll

An astonishing fantasy tale that is must reading... An action-packed, exciting plot. Fans of epic fantasy will reread this classy tale many times over the years to come.

Allscifi.com

This writer knows what hes about, [and] does it well.... His darkly imaginative and complex story whirls along to its final resolution with the readers own imagination locked in tow.

The Anniston Star

Highly recommended... A powerful tale about the power of love and the will to survive in a dystopian universe that combines Victorian elements with a fantasy version of cyberpunk. Mivilles visceral prose evokes an immediacy that commands attention and demands a wide readership.

Library Journal

Powerful... Mesmerizingly complex... A work of relentless inventiveness... A world suffused with both wonder and terror, where hitherto unimagined creatures inspire at once fascination and revulsion, excitement and fear.

January Magazine

Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact.

Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight

To Claudia, my mother

A Del Rey Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright 2002 by China Miville

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreydigital.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002091868

Manufactured in the United States of America

eISBN: 978-0-345-45489-8

v3.0

Coda

Tanner Sack

Its been bloody mad here. Youd never believe what Ive been doing.

We aint heading for the Scar no more. Were heading back for waters way back the way we came. Were going back to how things were.

Strange. I put it like that, but I never knew this place when it wasnt hankering for the Hidden Ocean. Neither did you. Everything that happened, it was all geared up to getting us out there. Ive never lived here when it was just a pirate port.

Neither have you.

Ive been spending time with your Angevine. Ill be lying if I tell you were best friends. Were a bit shy, you might say. But we see each other, and talk about you, mostly.

We were lied to, and we had enough, and they were risking our necks, dammit, so we made them turn back.

It doesnt go away, that youre gone.

I dont live here anymore. I live nowhere. This place killed you.

I dont know what it was, the things in that water. I know that what we fought in the water that night was no vampir. No one talks about them. No one knows what they were. Only that they helped to try to turn us.

Bastard John saw them. I see it in his little piggy eyes. But he says nothing.

It was me who turned the city. Those things, the things that took you, the vampir man who fought beside them, they failed.

I did the job for them. Turned us round.

I dont know if thats funny. I only know I dont want to live here anymore, and I cant go.

Im a sea-thing now. Its a bad joke. We both know what real sea-things are, how they move, how fast. Not like me, heavy clumsily stolen fins flapping, slimy sweating, Remade.

And Im scared, now. I put myself in the sea I sweat. Now every little blenny looks like one of the things that took you.

But I cant live in the air now. I aint got that option no more.

Whatll I do? I cant go back to New Crobuzon, and if I could Id rot, without brine.

Ill make myself swim. Itll get easier again. Ill get it done.

They cant hold me. I can leave. Maybe well go near some coast one day, and there Ill slip away. There Ill go and live alone in the shallows so I can see rock under me, where trees and scree meet in the water. I can live there alone. Ive had enough of it, I tell you.

I aint got nothing. Ive got nothing.

In time, in time they tell me, Ill not feel so bad. I dont want time to heal me. Theres a reason Im like this.

I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I wont smooth you away.

I cant say good-bye.

Dustday 2nd Tathis, 1780. Armada.

The avanc is slowing again, one final time.

It is still wounded from the grindylows abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.

Its heart, I think, is winding down.

We all know that the avanc is dying.

Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.