Scholars from Rockvane watched Tharp conjurors; Cabigo emissaries swept their robes out of Manihiki puddles; hunters in Pittman overalls swapped maps & banter with updivers from Colony Cocos. The quaysides were haunts of pickers of pockets, players of rigged games, shake-lurks, fake survivors of fake train wrecks, asking for alms. Sham had no money to protect.
History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered. This building was grandly new, with steel in its plaster. This next was older by hundreds of years, & shabby. A mongrel place. Animal-tugged landcars, rickshaws, combustion engines growled past street furniture in endlessly different styles, houses made from what looked nothing like building materials. As if they’d been used as part of a bet.
Manihiki naval officers lounged in uniform, half on duty, half on display, half flirting with passersby. Yes, the maths was correct: such swagger could only be made up of three halves. They might bellow an instruction to a passing kid, or intervene in some minor altercation with tough, sanctioned panache. Imagine them at rail, Sham thought. A ferronaval train grinding down on pirates, guns going, rescue missions & defence-for-hire.
Off went Daybe into the low sky, investigating eaves, carvings, the gargoyles cobbled, Sham realised, out of salvage. “Careful,” he called to the bat. Maybe there were arm-sized flying scorpions above Manihiki. He’d no clue.
He followed the captain, squeezing through the throng. By shops, stalls & hawkers selling bottles & magnets. Flowers & cameras. Illustrations of beasts & angels punishing the hubristic, sneaking out at night & fixing rails, of swirling-winged birds from beyond the world.
Into a region of bookshops, with, Sham realised, a broad view of what made a book a book. Dark rooms full of paper & leather, disks for ordinators & spools of film. Captain Naphi was greeted with courteous recognition. At more than one stand, she said her name & the seller would check a ledger or pull up a file on a glowing screen.
“The Unknown,” they would murmur. “Is that correct? General theories. Also Floating Signifiers, Asymptotic Telos, Evasive Purpose. Loss. That’s what we have you for.” They cross-referenced her on-record tags with texts newly acquired. “Sulayman’s
As if she heard that thought the captain muttered, “Come now, Soorap, eyes up. Your suggestion brought us to Manihiki. Well done. Would you waste these sights?”
She considered the merits of various offerings. Those texts she bought she passed wordlessly to Sham. His bag grew heavy.
At an enormous, shabby & tumbledown warehouse, from within which came raucous bickering, Daybe investigated roofs. Naphi watched it go. “Tell me again,” she said, “the places your friend thought the tracker might be found.”
“Scabbling Street,” Sham said. “The market. She said that’s where the best salvage is.”
She pointed at a sign on the wall. Scabbling Street Market. Sham gaped. Naphi knew, no question, what sort of artefacts it was he hankered to see. After schlepping through all the bookshops, was this a reward for telling her about the tech?
“So,” Naphi said. She indicated, with a sudden lovely sweep of her hands, that he should enter before her. “I am going salvage shopping.”
TWENTY-NINE
YOU HAVE THE BOOKS?” THE CAPTAIN SAID. “YOUR JOB is to get them back to the train. I won’t need you, Soorap, for a while.”
“I’ve to go back?”
“Indeed. I want my books by nightfall.”
“By …?” That was hours away. He had hours. She was giving him hours! Hours to find his way through the streets of Manihiki. Through this market. Naphi was holding out a note. Money, too? “Lunch. Consider it from your share.” He stammered a thanks, but Naphi was gone.
The market was in an arcade. Above, levels of busy walkways reachable by spiral stairs. Around Sham, stall after stall of startling found detritus. Absolutely ringing with the noise of attempted sales, arguments, singing, the declaration of wares. A little band accompanying all the business with guitar & oboe, a woman overseeing strange sounds emerging from what looked like a bone box.
People smart & scruffy, businesswomen & -men, tough-dressed mercenaries & buyable thugs. Trainsfolk. Bookish types. Dignitaries & explorers in the sumptuous or strange or barbarian clothes of their homelands. & everywhere salvors.
The salvors yelled at each other in slang. Slid layered visors into use & out of it again, pressed studs & extrusions on their protective overalls, their leather butchers’-style aprons & many-pocketed trousers. They prodded & finger-tinkered with odd boxes, with bits & pieces of salvage that threw colours & images into the air, that sung & dimmed local lights & made dogs lie down.
His curiosity overcame Sham’s awe. “What’s that?” He pointed at a rust-deformed wedge of iron. The salesman looked wryly at him.
“A wrench,” the man said.
“& that?” Some rot-mottled square in various colours, stamped on by tiny statues.
“A children’s game. So scholars say. Or a divination kit.”
“That?” A filigreed arachnid nub of what looked like glass, leg-things drumming in complicated articulation.
“No one knows.” The man handed Sham a bit of wood. “Hit it.”
“Eh?”
“Give it a whack.” The man grinned. Sham walloped the salvage. It did not break as it looked like it should. Instead the stick itself coiled in on itself like an injured tentacle. Sham held it up. It was a tight spiral, now, though it still felt hard in his hand.
“That’s offterran, duh,” the man said. “That’s alt-salvage, that curlbug. From one of the celestial stopoffs.”
“How much are they?” Sham said. The man looked at him gently & said a price that made Sham clamp his mouth shut & turn away. Then he turned back.
“Oh, can I ask you …” He glanced around to make sure Naphi wasn’t in sight or earshot. “Do you know some, some kids? A family? They have an arch, that looks like made of some old salvage.”
The man stared at him. “What are you after, boy?” he said at last. “No. I don’t. I have no idea who they might be & I suggest that you don’t either.” He ignored Sham’s consternation & started up again with his barking, singsonging announcements that he was selling tools & curlbugs & fine cheap salvage.
Sham tried a woman haggling with an ill-tempered buyer over antique ordinator circuitry; to a pair of men who specialised in offterran alt-salvage, their cubbyhole full of thoroughly discomfiting nuggets of strangeness; to a purveyor not of salvage but of equipment for its extraction: lodestones, gauges, telegoggles, shovels, corkscrew drillboots, air pumps & masks for total earth-submersion. A group of young men & women about his age watched Sham. They snickered & whispered to each other, picked their fingernails with foolish little knives. They dispersed as a sharp-faced ferronaval officer glared at them, gathered again when he passed on.
A table of dolls. Old dolls, salvaged dolls. No matter how cleaned they had been, the dust in which they had lain for so many lifetimes had permanently coloured them: whatever tone their skin had been supposed to be, it
