WATCHING GOD
China Miéville
NAILED to the top of the tower over our town hall entrance is an iron sign that reads ‘Every man’s wish.’ Below it the high stone step looks down a long cut of rock over the edge of the cliff into the bay and the sea beyond it, and consequently at the ships when they come.
Our town hall has two floors and the tower extends to the height of a third; it is by some way our biggest and tallest building. Every three days in the main hall we hold the market where we exchange clothes we have made or into which we no longer fit, vegetables we have grown and animals we have caught, any small fish we might have netted and the shellfish we have prized off rocks in the rock pools at low tide. In its other rooms the hall is also our hospital and our library. It is our school and our gallery.
Though most of the frames on the walls of the gallery room contain images, a few have quotations within them—some attributed, some not. They are handwritten in fading ink, or typewritten with a blocky typeface that does not match that of any of the machines on the isthmus, or torn, it looks like, from books, with half-finished phrases at either end where the page continued. Many of the older books in the library room have torn pages within them of course, no matter how vigilant Howie the librarian is, but these have not been taken from any of them.
. . .
