“He’s not my uncle; just Uncle. He’s the leader of the Lost Boys. Nobody knows his real name, or where he came from. I heard a story that he’d been a great man once, aboard Breidhavik or Arkangel or one of those cities, and he got thrown out for some reason, and that’s when he turned to thieving. He’s a genius. He invented the limpets and the crab-cams, and found us, and built the Burglarium to train us in.”
“Found you? Where?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Caul. “All over the place. On different cities. The limpets steal children to train up as Lost Boys, just like they steal everything else Uncle needs. I was so little when I was taken that I don’t remember anything before. None of us do.”
“But that’s horrible!”
“No it’s not!” Caul laughed. He always ended up laughing. It was funny and frustrating, trying to explain the life he had always taken for granted to an outsider. How could he make Tom see that being taken to the Burglarium had been an honour, and that he would much rather be a Lost Boy than a boring Dry? “You’ll understand when we get there,” he promised. And then (because it made him uneasy, the thought of going home to explain himself to Uncle) he would change the subject and ask, “What’s Freya really like?” or “Do you think it’s true that Pennyroyal doesn’t know the way to America?”
“He knows the way,” said Tom bleakly. “Anybody with half a brain can work out a route to America from the old charts. The trouble is, I think he lied about what’s at the end of it. I don’t think the green places exist, except in Professor Pennyroyal’s imagination.” He hung his head, wishing he had managed to warn Freya of his fears before the Lost Boys took him. By now Anchorage would be so far on its way that it wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back.
“You never know,” said Caul, reaching out to touch Tom’s arm and then snatching his hand away quickly, as if the touch of a Dry burned. “He turned out to be right about the parasites, sort of.”
There came a day (or maybe a night) when Tom was roused from his troubled dreams by Caul shouting, “Tom! We’re home!” He scrambled out of his nest of stolen textiles and hurried to look, but when he reached the control cabin he found that the Screw Worm was still deep under water. A repetitive, echoey ping came from one of the machines. Skewer, busy with his instruments, glanced up just long enough to say, “It’s Uncle’s beacon!”
There was a yawing, twisting sensation as the limpet adjusted its course. The darkness outside the windows was fading, turning to a twilight blue, and Tom realized that he was no longer beneath the ice-sheet but out in open sea, and that sunlight was dazzling through a choppy surface several hundred feet above his head. The bottoms of gigantic icebergs slid past, like upside-down mountains. Then in the dimness ahead other shapes began to form; weed-furred gantries and girders; the barnacle-encrusted blade of a gigantic propeller; a tilted, silted plane where rows of rusty blocks shoved up out of the mud and litter. Like an airship flying above a landscape of mesas and canyons the Screw Worm was cruising over the streets of an enormous sunken raft-city.
“Welcome to Grimsby,” said Skewer, steering towards the upper tier.
Tom had heard of Grimsby. Everybody had heard of Grimsby. Biggest and fiercest of the North Atlantic predator-rafts, it had been sunk by pack ice during the Iron Winter of ninety years ago. Awed, Tom gazed out through the limpet’s windows at the passing view; the swirls of fish glittering between the dead houses, the temples and great office buildings festooned with weed. And then, amid the greys and blues and blacks, something showed warm and golden. Gargle gave a cheer, and Skewer grinned, easing the Worm ’s steering-levers forward and lifting it up over the brink of the city’s topmost tier.
Tom gasped. Ahead, lights shone in the windows of the Town Hall, and people were moving about inside, making this drowned building look warm and homely, like a house well-lit on a winter night.
“What is it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, how — ?”
“It’s our home,” said Caul. He had been quiet until now, worrying about what sort of welcome awaited him, but he felt proud that Grimsby had impressed Tom, who had seen so many strange cities.
“Uncle built it!” said Gargle.
The Screw Worm slid into the water-filled lower storey of the town hall, then wound its way along tubular tunnels where it had to keep waiting for automatic doors to open ahead of it and close behind. This system of water-doors and airlocks served to keep the rest of the building dry, but Tom did not understand that, and it came as a surprise and a huge relief when the limpet broke the surface and came to rest in a pool beneath a high, domed roof.
The noise of the engines ceased, but from outside came clangs and thuds as docking-arms engaged, hoisting the Screw Worm clear of the water. A hatch in the cabin roof sprang open with a sigh. Caul fetched a ladder and hooked it to the opening. “You go first,” he told Tom, and Tom climbed out on to the limpet’s broad back and stood there breathing cold, ammonia-smelling air and looking around.
The limpet had surfaced through a circular hole in the floor of a huge, echoing room which might once have been Grimsby’s main council-chamber (on the ceiling the spirit of Municipal Darwinism — a rather beefy young woman with wings — pointed the city fathers towards a prosperous future). Dozens of similar entrances dotted the broad floor, each overhung by a complicated docking-crane. From several of them hung limpets, and Tom was startled to see how ramshackle the vessels looked; as if cobbled together from bits of anything that came to hand. Some were obviously undergoing repairs, but the people who had been working on them (all young men or boys, few much older than Caul or Skewer) had left their posts and were converging on the Screw Worm. They were all staring at Tom.
Tom stared back, feeling glad of Caul, who had climbed up to stand beside him. Even on the roughest of the cities the Jenny Haniver had visited he had seldom seen a bunch as hostile-looking as this. Lads his own age, wiry, hard-looking young men, little boys smaller than Gargle, all glared at him with something that was half hate, half fear. They were shaggy-headed, and the few who were old enough to shave hadn’t bothered. Their clothes were a mismatched assortment of too big and too small: bits of uniforms, ladies’ shawls and bonnets, diving suits and aviators’ helmets, tea-cosies and colanders pressed into service as hats. They looked as if they’d been showered with debris by an exploding jumble sale.
A crackle came from overhead, then a high warbling shriek of feedback. All faces turned upwards. Fluted speakers bolted to the docking cranes belched static, and a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Bring the Dry to my quarters, my boys,” it said. “I will speak with him right away.”
24
Grimsby was not quite what Tom would have expected of a master-criminal’s underwater lair. It was too chilly, and smelled too much of mould and boiled cabbage. The reclaimed building which had looked so magical from outside was poky and cluttered, packed like a junk shop with the spoils from years of burglary. Swags of stolen tapestry decked the corridors, the rich designs embroidered over with new patterns of mildew. On shelves, in cubbyholes, half-glimpsed through the open doors of the rooms and workshops that he passed, Tom saw heaps of clothes; mouldering moraines of books and documents, ornaments and jewellery, weapons and tools; snooty- looking mannequins from high-class shops; goggle-screens and fly-wheels; batteries and bulbs; big, greasy machine-parts torn from the bellies of towns.
And everywhere there were the crab-cameras. The ceilings crawled with the little machines; dark corners glittered with their stilting legs. With no need to hide, they crouched on stacks of crockery or crept down the fronts of bookcases, scuttled over the wall-hangings and swung from the heavy, dangerous-looking electrical cables which festooned the walls. Their cyclops eyes glinted and whirred, tracking Tom as Caul and Skewer led him up the long flights of stairs towards Uncle’s quarters. To live in Grimsby was to live forever in the gaze of Uncle.
And Uncle was expecting them, of course. He stood up from his chair as they entered his chamber, coming to meet them through the light of a thousand surveillance-screens. He was a little man; both short and thin, pallid from living so long out of the sun’s sight. Half-moon spectacles perched on his narrow nose. He wore fingerless mittens, a five-cornered hat, a braided tunic that might have belonged once to a general or an elevator attendant, a silk dressing gown whose hem drew patterns on the dusty floor, nankeen trousers and bunny-slippers. Strands of sparse white hair trailed over his shoulders. Books which his boys had snatched for him at random from the shelves
