Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  In 1985 McCulloch had seen them in the British Museum. That had nothing to do, he always insisted, with the choice he made later, to live in Elam.

  “We’re still using pretty much the same techniques as always,” Sophia said. Even guarded at his presence, McCulloch could see she was excited. “Sort of. But the prof—Well.”

  She unzipped the door to the larger tent, and McCulloch went in and blinked in the red brightness of the sun through the canvas. It smelled of sweat. In each of the four sides was a clear plastic window covered by curtains.

  Something shone and glinted on the canvas floor.

  McCulloch was looking at a half-man. A cast, like those he had seen many times, a person with his arms outstretched, his mouth open below the holes of his eyes. His body ended at his waist, abruptly, but that was not what made McCulloch gasp.

  The shape was not dirty pitted plaster. It was transparent as crystal or glass.

  The surface of the cast looked polished, but it was studded with pebbles. There were smears of dirt within its substance. Matter swept up and embedded, muck in suspension.

  McCulloch got to his knees. To look closer. Light refracted through the body.

  “We’re trying a new process,” Sophia said. “It’s a kind of resin instead of plaster. When we find a hole we pour in two chemicals and when they mix they react and get harder and harder. Then two, three days later, you’ve got this. Don’t touch it.”

  “Wasn’t going to,” McCulloch said.

  “Eventually you should be able to, that’s part of the point. It’s tougher than plaster, and it isn’t porous. But we’re still getting it right. Different mixes, different set times.”

  He wanted to run his hands over the shiny clear face. He wanted to put his eyes right up to the clear hole eyes and look through them.

  “We don’t know what happened to his legs,” Sophia said.

  The figure glowed. Perhaps he had died incomplete like this. Or perhaps long after he was gone, crumbling earth had filled the leg holes and eradicated half of him. Matter absenting him.

  “Hello.”

  McCulloch stood and turned at the new voice.

  There was a woman in tall and straight-backed silhouette in the tent entrance, brushing dust from her hands. Her hair was tied back but it escaped in wisps of black and gray. She stepped into the red light of the tent so McCulloch could see her face.

  Nicola Gilroy was a few years younger than he. She regarded him with sullen and mournful courtesy. Her eyebrows were raised, her head tilted back, emphasizing craggy features, a Roman nose. She was covered in dirt.

  “Prof,” said Sophia. “I hope it’s OK, I just—”

  “It’s fine.” She made an effort to smile. Her voice was thin enough to be a surprise. “I gather one has you to thank for the crisps.”

  “I’m McCulloch,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping. I’ve lived here donkey’s years and I didn’t know there was a dig.”

  “Yes, well. This is recent,” Gilroy said. “Trowels on the ground cross-referenced with satellite images.”

  “When’d you find it?” McCulloch said.

  “I didn’t. They brought me in. New methods for a new find.”

  McCulloch wanted to turn and stare at what she’d brought out of the earth.

  “Was this a temple or what?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “It’s beautiful. The statue.”

  “It isn’t quite a statue,” she said.

  “Fair play. You looking for something specific?” he said.

  Gilroy did not answer. As if he didn’t know.

  Cheevers met McCulloch at the cheaper of Elam’s two cinemas. The program had changed from the one advertised, and neither wanted to see the detective movie now showing. They went instead for tapas across the way.

  McCulloch told Cheevers what he had seen.

  “Did some googling,” he said. “Turns out she’s not the first to try resin. There’s a Lady of Oplontis in Pompeii. You can make out bones and whatnot in her, clumped at the bottom. But she’s like wax or dirty amber or something. This one was completely clear.”

  “So why’s Paddick still using plaster?” Cheevers said. “Assuming he is. Why’s anyone?”

  “He is. Everyone is. That’s what that kid Charlotte told me. Gilroy’s stuff’s experimental.” He rubbed thumb and forefinger together. “Plus plaster’s cheaper.”

  “Terra incognita,” Cheevers said. “Although, the terra’s always cognita enough, I suppose. What isn’t is the lost body. The perdidi corpus? It’s the hole that’s unknown. Cavus incognita?”

  McCulloch snorted.

  For the first few years of his island life he had not known Cheevers. Given Elam’s size, and that Cheevers was hardly unobtrusive, this later came to seem surprising to him. Their association began when McCulloch tried to buy property, a small lockup in the town’s outskirts, and discovered that local laws meant he might have to disclose his criminal record.

  His crimes had been those of a rough London youth, not shocking, though they had not been trivial. There was a possibility that his application might be declined. This was what troubled him, more than shame. He did not believe he wanted secrets for their own sakes, but he did not want to lose the opaque past he’d granted himself.

  He’d found Cheevers in the phone book. McCulloch never cared what loopholes Cheevers had maneuvered, but he had been able to buy his property in the end. Even now, only those to whom he’d chosen to disclose it knew his record.

  Two weeks after the conclusion of their business, he’d met Cheevers again by chance, in a bar. McCulloch bought him a drink and told Cheevers that his non-judgmental, cheerful glee in the information he’d disclosed had initially horrified and now interested him.

  “This isle is full of secrets as well as noises,” Cheevers said. McCulloch responded with, “Sweet airs.” It was obvious that Cheevers didn’t expect him to get the reference, that he’d made it only for his own pleasure, but he was delighted when McCulloch surprised him.

  What they later came to agree was that the isle was full of noisy secrets. They bantered and played at gossip. A complicated game.

  There was no one to whom McCulloch was closer, he supposed, but he didn’t inform Cheevers, for example, when he was engaged in one of his infrequent and brief sexual relationships. The men barely discussed their own lives.

  McCulloch wasn’t invited to the funeral of Cheevers’s wife, and he was neither surprised nor offended.

  They were eating dessert when the film ended. McCulloch looked up to see Sophia and Will come out of the cinema with Charlotte and two young men he did not recognize. He waved them over.

  “My friend Cheevers,” he introduced them. “Best lawyer on the island.”

  “A low bar,” said Cheevers. “Bar. Boom-boom. How was the film?” He leaned too close and Charlotte shifted away.

  “Rubbish,” said Will.

  “We suspected it,” Cheevers said. “Hence our repast. Get drunk with us.” He poured bad wine.

  “We’re going to go dancing,” Sophia said. She looked at McCulloch. “We’re going to ChatUp.”

  “You lot allowed to fraternize?” McCulloch said.

  “Oh, don’t you start,” said a young man. “We’re doing charity, letting Soph and Will hang out with us.”

  “We’re cutting-edge, mate,” Will said. “You stick to your stone-age ways.”

  “Seriously, though, isn’t she a bit of a nightmare?” Charlotte said.

  “No,” Sophia said. “She’s ace. It’s just there’s only three of us so it’s a ton of work. She’s sure there’s more stuff down there.”

  “She’s been wrong before.”

  “Not that it’s even her dig,” someone said.

  “Don’t you start,” said Sophia.

  “What’s with her and Paddick?” McCulloch said. The students looked at each other.

  “Why are you so interested?” Will said quietly.

>   “He just doesn’t like her,” said Sophia. “She barely knows he exists.”

  “This sounds like the first act of a terrific romantic comedy,” said Cheevers. “ ‘Dig In.’ Or ‘Collaborators.’ Bit melancholy, that, perhaps.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to be snogging in Act Three,” Charlotte said. “Paddick reckons Gilroy’s going nowhere. Not just because he’s not a fan of the magic goo. The whole project. He said she’s even more of a flake in private.”

  “They worked together back in the day?” someone said. Another bottle of red wine arrived.

  “Yeah, that’s how he knows.”

  “Everyone worked with everyone once,” Will said. “And they all compete too.”

  “And she wins,” said Charlotte. “Sharp elbows.”

  “Come on, hardly, look how many of you there are.”

  “Yeah, but she got his spot.”

  They were not raucous but the wine made them louder and they attracted attention. The phone of one of Paddick’s students sounded and he stood and took the call, a few steps away. McCulloch glanced up: it was expensive to get coverage on the island.

  There was a strong moon. Insects bothered the restaurant’s colored lights. The dead volcano sat sulking, hunch-shouldered.

  “I only saw the one thing,” McCulloch said. “Looked good to me.”

  “Yeah but,” Charlotte said. “Just because her stuff’s going to get turned into more postcards …”

  “Oh, come on,” Sophia said. “You know it’s not just about making it pretty. You can’t see through plaster. We’re supposed to be looking for things.”

  “For what?”

  The boy came back. He rapped on the table so everyone looked at him. His eyes were very wide.

  “We have to go,” he said. His voice was strained.

  “What is it?” said Charlotte. Then: “Oh my God.”

  “They found one.”

  “Oh my God.”

  The students put their hands to their mouths.

  “No!” Sophia said. “Congratulations!”

  “We have to go,” the young man said. He blinked at Cheevers and slapped his pocket. “Can we … ?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Cheevers. “May we ask what’s been found?”

  But all of Paddick’s group were already shouting, “Thank you!” and running into the dark street.

  “Are they alright to drive, do you think?” Cheevers said.

  “Prof’s going to hear,” Sophia said to Will. “She probably already has. Shit.” She looked excited and angry.

  “We better go too,” Will said.

  “I’m glad I’m a bit pissed, to be honest,” Sophia said. “Thanks for the booze. Come on boy: let’s go face it.”

  Cheevers and McCulloch sat alone and in silence.

  “Well now,” Cheevers said eventually. “I doubt there’s much question as to what was just unearthed.”

  “That’s a big deal,” said McCulloch. “Been a fair old while.” He pursed his lips. “Be nice to see. Take tomorrow morning off? Be at mine at six?”

  “Six? Leave it out. Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Don’t you want to see? How long’s it been? They’re going to be up all night dealing with it. Perfect: they’ll be in no state to turn us away.”

  Free Bay was a tiny working harbor. Yards out from the field where Paddick’s team worked, little boats coughed soot. People had heard rumors: when McCulloch and Cheevers arrived at the dig the next morning there was already a small group of townspeople by the site.

  This dig’s security comprised a much larger operation of freelancers and island police than Gilroy’s. They were not trying to get rid of the crowds, just to keep them behind temporary barriers.

  “Stay back, ladies and gents,” one officer called.

  “You’re loving this, aren’t you, Bob?” someone shouted. There was laughter, including from the policeman. He flicked his cap and came to speak to Cheevers.

  McCulloch looked down a slope of crabgrass to where the archaeologists milled around a makeshift screen in the pit. He saw Charlotte and raised his hand and she waved back. He could see she was exhausted.

  “Look.” Cheevers pointed. Will and Sophia stood on the side of the hole, near Paddick’s team. “Apparently Gilroy was here last night. Academic courtesy. Paddick showing her what they’d found.”

  “Bet he enjoyed that,” said McCulloch.

  The students began to fold back the screens. The crowd pushed forward to see. McCulloch stood on tiptoe.

  Within the wider pit was a deep hole where muck and dirt had been carefully dug out from around a plaster figure. With the tenderness of parents, the archaeologists looped slings around it to haul it from the ground.

  The thing rose wobbling into view.

  It was perfect. Unbroken. Splayed in a pose familiar to McCulloch, from images, from the island museum. A typical death shape.

  Seeing such things in glass cases, reading the captions that described them, McCulloch had been awed enough. Now he saw one delivered. He had to hold his breath.

  Its wings were coiled. Its heavy head lolled. The scoops of its great eyes were intricately molded. There was the spiraling body, like something winkled from a shell; there its many limbs, outfolded. Its little hand-things looked as if they were beseeching.

  The archaeologists laid a blanket on the plaster echo of the epochs-dead thing, as if to warm it. They carried it away.

  It was almost two decades since the first such shape had been raised and dusted clean.

  Almost immediately after that first, archaeologists had uncovered three more, and the curlicues on the temples of the volcano’s lower slopes ceased to be decorative filigrees and were suddenly recognizable as images of these other locals. The peculiar dimensions of ruined doorways in the old town made new sense. The mosaics were no longer depictions of mythic visitations: they were simple realism.

  All the island waters were sounded and explored. No one found vessels. Where the things came from, and how, no one could know. It was only ever on the island that evidence—conclusive evidence—of such coexistence had ever been found.

  The creatures lay with the humans, dead islanders alongside them. They’d worked with them. Worshipped with them, the scientists said, looking anew at the shards of illustration still visible, the extraterrestrial and the human at prayer together, coronaed, altar-top boxes glowing.

  Another cavity. You never knew what, if anything, any such would surrender. The fourth swallowed a lot of gesso. They left it to dry a long time.

  They’d peeled the ground slowly away from the definitive image of the Collaborator Culture. One of the creatures, hunkered against the volcano’s murderous flow, the winglike limbs with which it could not have flown but which everyone called wings, curled protectively around two human youths, one girl one boy.

  They clung to it. They died together.

  In Gilroy’s resin, the light would have gone back and forward through the millennia-dead alien’s shape in the most complicated ways. McCulloch could have rubbed his hand on its face and felt it smooth under his fingers.

  Paddick was laughing by a cement mixer full of sloshing plaster, staring at his find with joy.

  “This is quite the coup for him,” Cheevers said. “What everyone wants but few are granted. He’s been doing recon all over the place, applying for digs hither and yon.”

  “Bet I know where else,” McCulloch said.

  “Some chap in the ministry likes the cut of Gilroy’s gib, I gather, hence bumping her up the queue. But look at Paddick. Revenge is a dish best served in plaster. Something particularly choice for him about finding it using the old untrendy techniques, wouldn’t you say? And not in Banto, but in this most untrendy old place.”

  “Gilroy must be spitting.”

  “Those who saw her visit report she was a model of professionalism. Congratulated the team. Asked to be shown over the whole site. Examined the specimen with appropriate f
ascination. And with grace.”

  Cheevers was engaged in what he called “a dull swine of a case.” McCulloch did not see him for several days.

  McCulloch was a man who thought himself content in his own company. He was always startled on the rare occasions he realized that he was lonely. This time, he did not have it in him to pursue conversation or sex.

  There was a small cave system halfway up the cold volcano. He had visited it when he came to the island, and once since, years ago. A path had been cut within, with a rope to hold on to. A sign by the entrance explained what rocks and types of formations were within, what species of bats. McCulloch realized he wanted to go back into the mountain. But he didn’t do it. He did not trust that it was not some lugubrious performance for himself, some nostalgia for his first days here, or for a childhood trip to Chislehurst Caves in London. He would not risk it.

  A few visitors came into the shop. He hoped one would engage him in conversation. None did, but after a few days someone phoned him.

  “Can you come?” A young man’s agitated voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “I got your number from the book. Can you come?”

  “Will?” McCulloch remembered decrepit call boxes outside the Banto petrol station. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the dig. You have to bring someone. Paddick’s here. Him and Gilroy are going to kill each other.”

  “What? Call the police.”

  “I can’t, they’ll take her away, and—Do you know any cops? Can you send them? But talk to them first, you have to tell them, they can’t take her, not now—”

  The call ended. McCulloch swore.

  McCulloch parked skew-whiff across the Banto path and shivered as he emerged into a cold, very bright day.

  Paddick was by the dig site, one of his colleagues restraining him. He was screaming at Gilroy. She stood in unlikely smart clothes, her fists clenched. The terrified security guard stood between them.

  Sophie and Will watched. She had been crying, it looked as if with rage.

  Will ran to McCulloch. He hesitated as a thickset policeman hauled out of McCulloch’s car and straightened his cap.

  “Hensher’s alright,” McCulloch said quietly. “I’ve had a word. What the hell’s going on?”