Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblace to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by China Miéville

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Earlier versions of the stories within were originally published as follows: “The Rope is the World,” Icon Magazine (print and online), December 2009; “Covehithe,” The Guardian (online), April 2011; “Estate,” The White Review, issue 8, July 2013; “The 9th Technique,” self-published by the author in The Apology Chapbook in October 2013; “The Design,” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, issue 45, December 2013; “Säcken,” Subtropics, issue 17, Winter/Spring 2014; “The Condition of New Death,” “Syllabus,” “Rules,” and “A Second Slice Manifesto” as handouts by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, for their exhibition “New Death,” March 2014; “Four Final Orpheuses,” “Three Moments of an Explosion,” and “The Crawl” at chinamieville.net in April 2012, September 2012, and June 2014; “Polynia” on tor.co.uk, June 2014; and “The Buzzard’s Egg,” Granta, issue 131, April 2015.

  eISBN 978-1-101-88472-0

  www.delreybooks.com

  First Edition

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker

  “The horses dreamed on their feet and the wild animals, crouching to leap even in their sleep, seemed to be collecting gloom under their skins which would break out later.”

  —Ilse Aichinger, “The Bound Man”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  By China Miéville

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Three Moments of an Explosion

  Polynia

  The Condition of New Death

  The Dowager of Bees

  In the Slopes

  The Crawl

  Watching God

  The 9th Technique

  The Rope is the World

  The Buzzard’s Egg

  Säcken

  Syllabus

  Dreaded Outcome

  After the Festival

  The Dusty Hat

  Escapee

  The Bastard Prompt

  Rules

  Estate

  Keep

  A Second Slice Manifesto

  Covehithe

  The Junket

  Four Final Orpheuses

  The Rabbet

  Listen the Birds

  A Mount

  The Design

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THREE MOMENTS OF AN EXPLOSION

  1. The demolition is sponsored by a burger company. Everyone is used, now, to rotvertising, the spelling of brand names and the reproduction of hip product logos in the mottle and decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition—Apple paying for the breakdown of apples, the bitten-fruit sigil becoming visible on moldy cores. Explosion marketing is new. Stuff the right nanos into squibs and missiles so the blasts of war machines inscribe BAE and Raytheon’s names in fire on the sky above the cities those companies ignite. Today we’re talking about nothing so bleak. It’s an old warehouse, too unsafe to let stand. The usual crowd gathers at the prescribed distance. The mayor hands the plunger to the kid who, courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, will at least get to do this. She beams at the cameras and presses, and up goes the bang, and down slides the old ruin to the crowd’s cheer, and above them all the dust clouds billow out Your Way in soft scudding font.

  2. It’s a fuck of a fine art, getting that pill into you so the ridiculous tachyon-buggered MDMA kicks in at just the right instant and takes you out of time. This is extreme squatting. The boisterous, love-filled crew jog through their overlapping stillness together and hustle toward the building. Three make it inside before they slip back into chronology. Theirs are big doses and they have hours—subjectively speaking—to explore the innards of the collapsing edifice as it hangs, slumping, its floors now pitched and interrupted mid-eradication, its corridors clogged with the dust of the hesitating explosion. The three explorers have bought climbing gear, and they haul themselves up the new random slopes inside the soon-to-be-rubble, racing to outrace their own metabolisms, to reach the top floor of the shrugging building before they come down and back into time. They make it. Two of them even make it down and out again. They console themselves over the loss of their companion by insisting to each other that it was deliberate, her last stumble, that she had been slowing on purpose, so the ecstasy would come out through her pores, allowing the explosion to rise up like applause and swallow her. It would hardly be an unprecedented choice for urban melancholics such as these.

  3. You can’t say, you can’t tell yourself that it’s the intruder’s spirit doing any of this, that there’s a lesson here. It’s neither her nor any of the other people who’ve died in its rooms, in any of the one hundred and twenty-six years of the big hall’s existence. It’s not even the memories, wistful or otherwise, of the building. The city’s pretty used to those by now. The gusts, the thick and choking wafts that fill the streets of the estate that’s built in the space the warehouse once occupied, are the ghost of the explosion itself. It wants something. It’s sad—you can tell in its angles, its slow coiling and unfolding. A vicar is called: book, candle, bell. The explosion, at last, lies down. As if, though—the two drug enthusiasts who got in and out of its last moment insist—out of pity, rather than because it must.

  POLYNIA

  When cold masses first started to congeal above London, they did not show up on radar. By the time they started to, perhaps two hours later, hundreds of thousands of people were already out in the streets and gaping skyward. They shielded their eyes—it was cloudy but very bright. They looked up at glowing things the size of cathedrals, looming above the skyline.

  They’d started as wisps, anomalies noticed only by dedicated weather-watchers. Slowly they’d grown, started to glint in the early-winter afternoon. They solidified, their sides becoming more faceted, more opaquely white. They started to shed shadows.

  Social media went mad with theories. The things were dismissed as mirages, hoaxes, advertising gimmicks for a TV show. They were heralded as angels, abominated as an alien attack or a new superweapon.

  The first appeared over City Hall. This was plausibly a strategic target, which increased the sense of panic, though Parliament was only a few miles away and would have seemed a more obvious choice. Others quickly thickened into visibility over Lewisham and Elephant and Castle and up my way.

  Some stayed still. Others began to drift slowly, seemingly randomly, according to their own currents, not the winds.

  All but military flights over the city were banned. The army and specialist police units came onto the streets. Jets went low overhead, and bristling helicopters rose suspiciously and seemed to sniff at the sides and undersides of the eddying things.

  I was about eleven—this was almost fifteen years ago. There was me, Robbie, Sal—she was big for her age and bossed the rest of us around a bit—and Ian, a nervous kid to whom I wasn’t nice.

  We were under Mass 2, as it was later dubbed. It rocked sedately from side to side over the skies of Neasden as I and my friends ran in urgent delight around the gawping north Londoners. We ran to keep up with it, following it toward Harlesden. It seemed to be the most excitable of the visitations, heading east and south
like an unstable ship.

  From every one of the masses sank microclimates. We were all wearing our thickest clothes in the air that poured off them. It was like a bitterly cold wind flowing straight down, gusting with wispy snow.

  It was all frenetic, it’s hard to say just what happened when. I remember running really fast past the clock on Station Road, where it meets Wendover Road and Avenue Road, barreling by a woman in a black jilbaab and knocking her shopping over so she shouted at me furiously and I yelled something like “Shut up you old cow!” to make my friends laugh even though I knew I was in the wrong. It seems strange to me now that I remember that, that I took a moment to answer her, that she was so angry with me, that she even noticed me, in the shadow of what was overhead.

  “Look at that thing, man!” Robbie said. Army vehicles went past the Portuguese cafés and the Islamic bookshop.

  We ran full pelt all the way to the West London Crematorium. As if they’d have let a gang of raucous kids like us in to the grounds, normally, but they didn’t care: everyone was pushing through the gates because the mass was right overhead. It rose above the gardens of remembrance. There must have been funerals going on that day, with hundreds of strangers in the garden, and that thing above.

  People were trawling for information, watching the news on their phones, but by the time the government scientists announced the results of their tests (whatever they were and however they’d taken them) their conclusions were obvious to everyone. We all knew that what hung above London were icebergs.

  Military pilots made heroic maneuvers through the cold vortexes around the masses. Their undersides and flanks were frost- and snow-furred ice. On top, invisible from London until we saw the footage from the planes, jutting toward the lowest cloud, they were almost snowless. They were like white glass, hills and hillocks of blocky facets.

  The city heat met their cold. On day two a frozen stalactite like a giant icicle broke off Mass 4 and plummeted to the ground, destroying a car in Dagenham and starting a whole new panic. I texted with my crew. We agreed to meet right below Mass 2 again. It was as if we were goading it. We were eleven and death couldn’t touch us.

  The berg had stopped above the common of Wormwood Scrubs. A line of police officers surrounded the grass. “You ain’t coming in,” an officer said to us. The dirty parkland stretched behind him, overlooking London. Above it was the ice. We shivered in its shadow. I could hear the screams of London’s feral parakeets freaking out in the trees.

  We were debating how to slip past the cops but before an hour passed they took some instruction over their radios and did not so much usher us in as simply give up being guards. Mass 2 was on the move again. We went whooping after it.

  After the fall of that first pillar people got nervous. There were instructions to stay indoors, as though it would be better to be crushed by a ruined house than by the ice itself. In fact the bergs were very solid. In the first week of their existence, only three slabs of any size came down, causing damage but no fatalities.

  They weren’t the only chunks to break off: they were the only ones to fall.

  I was at Brent Cross Shopping Center with my mum and dad and my sister the first time I saw one of the icebergs break. It was a few days after their appearance and we were shopping for a football kit I needed. We were in the car-park and I was looking at Mass 4, I think it was, hovering miles away above Ealing. My dad told me to hurry up, and as he turned we heard a cracking. A chunk of ice the size of a building broke off the northern edge of the berg.

  I gasped and my dad let out a horrified noise as the block toppled sideways, spinning—and then stopped. It didn’t fall—it drifted away horizontally. It bobbed, spinning, leaving a little wake of suspended ice. We looked at each other.

  The breakaway drifted back, and coagulated again with the main mass, a day and a half later.

  It was two days post-manifestation that the first official government survey team made icefall. Scientists, professional explorers, a few international observers, an escort of Royal Marine commandos. In the press release, they all wore cutting-edge arctic gear and determined expressions.

  They went for Mass 3. It had a horizontal plateau breaking up the slopes of its topside, onto which a helicopter could lower them. By now, all the icebergs had been given their own names, usually based on their silhouettes. The London Evening Standard declared this the “ascent of the Saucepan.” They live-streamed the delivery online, soldiers in thermal clothes lowered on swaying cables onto the pristine blowing surface of the ice, to make base camp almost a mile over Battersea.

  Over the next five days we all followed the team’s terse dispatches, their tweets and photographs, footage from their cameras, as Mass 3 itself described a wobbling circuit above the city. People leaned shivering out of their offices to look as it overflew. “The Saucepan” was escorted by military helicopters. If you were at a high point in the city looking out at the icebergs, you could see Mass 3 was surrounded with the specks of aircraft.

  We read the reports of the team struggling up sides of ice, stared at the images they beamed down. Of course we were all caught up in the drama, and no one would deny how brave they were. Now, though, a few years on, so it’s not like pissing in church any more to pass comment, it’s fair to say that those dispatches were mostly the sort of thing you’d expect from any arctic adventure. Freezing winds, terrible ice, so on.

  I suppose I’m saying that Mass 3, like all of them, is exactly what it looks like: an iceberg. No more, no less. Cold, austere, barren. Awesome, of course, because since when were icebergs not? But, and bear with me with this, except for the fact that it’s levitating above London, it seems no more nor less awesome than its cousins in the sea.

  There were, though, two exceptional images from that expedition. The first is the iconic shot of the team crossing an ice bridge between two forbidding white crags, with the slates and aerials of Wandsworth far below. The second is the selfie of Dr. Joanna Lund, taken close to the iceberg’s summit.

  Dr. Lund looks unhappily at the camera. She’s slight, with squinting eyes circled in dark, her hat pulled down hard over her ears. Behind her is the pinnacle. You can just see the rest of the team at its base, looking up at the white blocks. There’s the usual hard beauty of such landscapes. The city is not visible. The ice could be any ice. But there’s a flat quality to the light and something in Lund’s expression that makes the picture profoundly unsettling.

  In the debriefing after the team’s extraction, the government was keen to stress that they had, of course, considered the possibility that the icebergs might collide. If that was true, any protocols they had in place utterly failed.

  On the morning of 17 June, the very day that last photo of Lund was released—while, we were told, the team were attempting an ascent of that troublesome ice—Mass 6, nicknamed Big Bear, began rolling with unusual speed across the skies, north away from Croydon.

  At first this caused no particular alarm. But as the hours passed and Mass 6 accelerated, and as Mass 3’s own sedate trajectory altered, it became obvious that the two were on a collision course.

  The helmetcam of Lund captures the catastrophe. The crew are bracing behind frozen slabs. Swinging into view below them with the yawing of Mass 3 are the tower blocks of Peckham. And looming abruptly out of the south comes a cliff of ice. Mass 6 moves fast.

  Everyone in London heard the impact.

  Considering the scale of the things, it wasn’t much more than a glancing blow. The two ground together horribly, breaking off great chunks that spun into the sky. Mass 6 lurched to the east. Mass 3 pitched.

  Lund staggered as her nook tilted. Her brace held, the steel cord did not snap, but the ice in which it was tethered crumbled. In seconds she slid down angles it had taken her hours to ascend. We saw the footage from her point of view. She careered down a chasm that now sloped hard and became a funnel.

  I watched the file many times, though my parents told me not to. I’d slow it down
, feeling sick and adrenalized as Lund descended. She’d been issued no parachute. I’d loop back to the start again and again, every time the ice released her into the air.

  Mercifully, the camera gave out before she hit the ground.

  We played games of London Iceberg. Robbie’s great-aunt was in sheltered housing up toward Wembley, and we’d meet him there because at the back of the complex was a slope of rubbishy grass down toward the railway lines, that we could access by climbing a low fence near a neighboring garden.

  Robbie’s great-aunt would give us biscuits and ask us what we were all up to. Her house was untidy and full of papers and books. She was small and smiley and, I now think, shrewd and amused by us, though her attention always seemed elsewhere, as if she was listening for something. Robbie was kind to her. It was strange to see him so gentle, Robbie with his boxer’s face and megaphone voice. He’d been in a body cast as a small child, and had been making up for it since. He called his great-aunt Nantie and we never knew her real name.

  “Those things,” she said once, interrupting our awkward chat while we sat politely in her living room, standing up suddenly apropos of nothing and opening her front door so we could see that one of the bergs was indeed approaching. When she sat back down she said, “Life in a polynia, eh?” She smiled, watching our reaction to the word.

  “That’s a lake with ice all round it,” Ian said. I blinked at him, angry that he knew that. He wouldn’t look at me. Nantie laughed.

  I looked it up myself when I got home. He was right. I scrolled through images of ice-holes and belugas.

  We’d do our best to talk politely with Nantie as long as we could. When we ran out of anything to say we would go outside and wait until Robbie could get away too and then we would all run, slip through the barrier and slide down a scree of trash to a wire fence, only a few feet above the train lines themselves.

  Sal was usually the first down. She would wait for us by the wire, finger-snarling her long hair into knots, and whistling impatiently through her teeth.