Un Lun Dun

by China Miéville

  All sorts of complicated maneuvers occurred. Windows that had just ingested others themselves climbed into yet others. A window opened and emitted three of its siblings, one of which then climbed into another, while the third spat out a fourth. Deeba saw one window emerge from another, then eat its own regurgitator. It was endless.

  The web was dim. Noises were hushed. There was a soft clicking from countless wooden limbs.

  Deeba saw glimpses through their glass. Through one window she saw a room full of tailors’ mannequins; through another a pit of darkness; through another, frighteningly close to her, what looked like dark water full of weeds.

  “What’s that?” Hemi whispered; then his voice gave out.

  A skeleton was floating among the kelp, beyond the glass.

  There were other dead, Deeba saw. Bodies lying in empty rooms and corridors beyond some of the windows, rope tied around their waists. So this was what happened to the lost arachnofenestranauts.

  If they managed to get out of the window they had entered, it might by then have entered another, which itself had entered another and exited a different one still. Even if they avoided the deadly realms that were beyond some of the panes, treasure hunters might roam helplessly through window after window, hunting for food and drink in a succession of alien rooms, never finding their way back to UnLondon.

  “You didn’t see what the one that took Rosa looked like, did you?” Jones whispered. Deeba and Hemi shook their heads. They had no way to tempt that particular window back. Rosa was lost.

  74

  Spider-Fishing

  “Make sure you don’t pull the wrong cord,” whispered Deeba. There were two: one took the weight, the other tightened the loops.

  Their trap dangled below them.

  “No two are alike,” the bishops had explained, and told them of the infinite rooms beyond the Black Windows’ panes. They had glimpsed monsters and gas and mustard-colored limbos, as well as the more tantalizing vaults and stairways and arsenals, the glints of coins that attracted those foolish adventurers.

  “We’ve got to get past them, and we’ve still got no idea where the UnGun is,” Fing had said.

  “Where do you think it would be?” Deeba had said. “It was put somewhere no one could get at.”

  Fing shook his head helplessly.

  “It’s in one of them,” said Hemi. He and Deeba nodded at each other.

  “Maybe…we can trick them,” said Deeba eventually. “No two are alike, you said?”

  “All different. We’ve seen a sword, a flame, a coal mine—”

  “—the canopy of a tree…But all different.”

  “Because we’re looking for one particular window, right?” Deeba said. “And we reckon we know what’s in it. So, if all the windows are different, how d’you think they’d react if they saw one exactly like them?”

  “They’d hate it,” said Jones.

  “They’d love it,” said Hemi. “Maybe they’d, y’know…I mean, there are no baby windows, are there? Maybe they’ve been waiting.”

  “I agree with you,” said Bon and Bastor simultaneously, Bon pointing at Hemi and Bastor at Jones. The bishops looked startled.

  “It don’t matter,” said Deeba. “If they’re territorial and they attack, or if they’re lonely and they want to, you know, whatever. Either way, if there’s one just like them, they’re going to come see.”

  With tools from the bus, Jones had pulled free a window from an empty building.

  Following Bon and Bastor’s description, they’d sawed and hammered, while the locals had ignored them as foolish treasure seekers. They made attachments to the frame, taking care not to crack the glass, and behind it nailed a flat piece of wood, on which Hemi drew exaggerated lines of perspective.

  “Now the main thing,” Deeba had said.

  From his tool kit, Jones had taken a soldering iron with a grip like a pistol, stuck a length of pipe on its end, like a barrel, and attached it to the wood behind the glass.

  The thing was inelegant. Its eight limbs swung stiffly on old hinges. It moved randomly when they jiggled it. Still, it was an eight-legged window with what looked like a gun behind it.

  “It’ll do,” Deeba had said. “They won’t have seen nothing like it before.”

  The bait swung below them, in the darkness of the web. A long time passed.

  Every time a spider-window approached, Deeba gazed into its glass. There was one that contained nothing, one with a room full of lamps. When a third came close, Deeba squinted, and felt Jones’s hand close around her mouth to stop her screaming.

  Hammering on the inside of the glass as the Black Window rose was a gaunt, exhausted woman. She was thin, her hair was wild and dry, her eyes staring. She stared straight at Deeba and Hemi as the window passed.

  The light was waning.

  “It’s evening,” Deeba whispered. “Maybe this isn’t working.”

  “Maybe it’ll help,” said Hemi. “It’ll stand out more.”

  He shone his flashlight on it, and Jones swung their clumsy window from side to side. Its limbs waggled. Deeba saw several of the Black Windows stop moving, then, to her simultaneous triumph and horror, pick their way towards them.

  “Here they come,” whispered Hemi.

  From the shadows in the rear of the hall, a window came fast.

  “We’ve got something’s attention,” whispered Jones.

  The Black Window ran with its unnerving many-legged motion, leaving the gloom. It leapt onto a thread between floor and ceiling, and raced towards them. It plunged on its silk right in front of their bait.

  The window hung, its legs wide. Through its glass, Deeba could see a weak electric bulb, the gray of a little room, and attached to a wall opposite, a huge, antique revolver.

  “That’s it!” She grabbed Jones’s hand. “It’s the one with the UnGun in it! It’s come to check out its double. Never seen another with a pistol in it.”

  The Black Window moved in agitation. Jones swung the bait gently, making its legs rattle. Other spider-windows watched and drummed their limbs.

  “Is it angry, or flirting?” whispered Hemi.

  “I dunno,” said Deeba. “But it’s interested. Get ready.”

  Deeba took hold of the rope that led out of the tunnel, and got ready to send Skool a message.

  The bait twitched and jiggled. Don’t look too close, Deeba thought. But the soldering-iron-and-pipe gun they’d rigged up seemed enough to fool the agitated Black Window. It drew back its limbs, paused, then pounced.

  It gripped the dangling fake window.

  “Now!” shouted Deeba, and Jones pulled hard on the second cord, as Obaday Fing had shown him. The loops Fing had woven around the bait all tightened together. It was beautifully precise. The thick silk bonds clamped firmly, and pinned the Black Window’s legs to the ridiculous marionette.

  Instantly, everything went mad.

  The captured window yanked its body, swinging at the end of the tether, trying to pull free. Jones staggered, was almost hauled off the little ledge.

  All the other Black Windows began to run towards them.

  “Quick!” yelled Deeba. “Help!”

  Hemi pulled frantically at the rope, several quick tugs. “Anything more than four,” they’d told Skool, “means pull.”

  There were agonizing seconds of delay. Then the rope was hauled back hard, and the captured Black Window began to rise.

  Deeba, Hemi, and Jones clambered as fast as they could up the slope of the tunnel. Their captive slid behind them, still shaking as it tried to escape, opening and slamming shut like a biting mouth.

  Black Windows followed them into the funnel. Deeba felt the vibrations of feet closing behind, and thought in terror that she couldn’t go any faster, until with one last heave, Skool yanked the tethered window the last few meters of the tunnel, sweeping Jones, Hemi, and Deeba with it.

  They came spilling out of Webminster Abbey, to where Skool hauled, and Obaday, the utterlings
, and the bishops waited anxiously. The Black Window they had snared skidded out, shaking furiously in its bonds, tied to the now distinctly unimpressive-looking fake. Curdle circled it, emitting aggressive puffs of air.

  “We’re okay!” said Deeba. “Don’t let go of it!”

  Giant wooden spiders’ legs poked aggressively out of the hole, looking for prey, but the windows wouldn’t come out of the abbey. None except the one that they had caught.

  75

  The Room Nowhere

  “It’s really not happy, is it?” said Obaday Fing.

  It was early night, and the stars moved above them. Deeba and her companions examined their captive in the almost-full loon, and the faint glow from windows at the edges of the square. The cobweb curves of the huge abbey moved gently in the wind.

  “I simply can’t believe it,” said Bishop Bon.

  “I’m terribly impressed,” said Bastor.

  The window rattled and shook, still pinned to the bait. Skool kept the cord attached to its bonds taut.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Jones said. “This bloody thing’s strong.”

  They looked down through the glass.

  In the room behind the window, the bulb dangled horizontally, and the wall the pistol was attached to looked like a floor below them. Next to it was a closed wooden door. It was only about six feet away.

  “So that’s the UnGun,” said Hemi.

  It was a very big, heavy revolver, like the ones Deeba had seen in cowboy films. She leaned close to the glass, and the window opened and slammed like teeth. They all jumped back.

  “Right, so we get a rope with a hook, and we dangle it inside, and grab it,” said Obaday.

  Hemi wedged a hefty plank of wood in the window’s opening, to its obvious fury. Its snared legs were twitching. Skool struggled to hold it.

  “Come on!” said Jones.

  “Here we are, here we are,” said Obaday. But when he dangled a hook of bent piping on his spider-silk rope through the open window on the pavement, something strange happened. As soon as the rope passed through the window’s opening, it immediately changed direction, and fell sideways.

  Obaday stood with a rather stupid expression on his face. The rope dangled in an L-shape, down to the window, then inside at a right angle.

  “It’s ’cause down’s a different direction there,” Deeba said. “That’s not a floor below us, it’s a wall. We need something stiff.”

  They tried with the bishop’s staffs, but they couldn’t reach the UnGun.

  “Whatever you’re going to do,” said Jones, watching Skool struggle, “may I ask you to speed up?” Deeba heard creaking from the wood keeping the Black Window open.

  Everyone looked at each other.

  “I knew it,” Deeba said, and before she had time to reconsider, she sighed and stepped into the open window.

  Deeba heard her friends’ appalled shrieks as she slipped through.

  She experienced a very peculiar fall, changing direction beyond the glass. She twisted, and rolled on the floor of the little room.

  “Deeba!” she heard. “Get out of there!”

  She looked out the window at her friends. They were looking down at her, from her angle seeming to jut straight out of a wall beyond the glass. Hemi was reaching urgently through the window.

  “One second,” she said.

  Opposite her on the wall was the UnGun.

  Deeba walked across the concrete floor, her friends urging her to hurry. She felt unnaturally sensitive, noticing the cracks beneath her feet and on the walls around her. She heard the lightbulb buzzing.

  When she closed her hand around the wooden grip of the UnGun on the wall, she braced herself, expecting to be hardly able to pick it up. She lifted it.

  It was lighter than she had expected. She hefted it in her hand, examined it.

  It was battered and mottled with rust. She flicked the bullet compartment in the middle. It spun.

  Deeba could still hear buzzing, but she wasn’t sure it came from the lightbulb now. She stood very still, and listened. She closed her eyes. I could fall asleep, she thought.

  The noise was coming from behind the door. She put a hand on the wood. There were unclear sounds in the room, or corridor, or whatever was beyond it. I could open it and go exploring, she thought. If this place has the UnGun in it…what else might be here? Maybe there’s a garden. Or a bedroom. Or a phone…I could call home again!

  She put her hand slowly to the handle.

  Something was bothering her. She paused and wondered what it might be. She couldn’t think what was wrong.

  “Deeba,” she heard, for what she realized was the second time. “Turn around.”

  She did so, curiously, and there were her friends, staring down, sideways, through the window, beckoning.

  The view beyond the window was shaking violently, and Deeba realized that the window must have nearly pulled itself free. With a cold rush, she woke back into herself. She had been in some kind of dream.

  “Come on!” shouted Hemi. “Let go of the door!”

  Even as he spoke, Deeba saw one of the Black Window’s legs swing up into view, free of its bonds. It pulled the wedge of wood out from under its sash.

  The window slammed shut.

  Deeba saw the horror on her friends’ faces, but she could no longer hear them. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Deeba raised her arm, and hurled the UnGun as hard as she could.

  The big pistol spun in the air, crossing the room, straight into the very center of one of the panes. The glass exploded into hundreds of pieces, and the window spasmed.

  Deeba ran.

  She watched Hemi, then Obaday, then Jones and the utterlings try to grab the pistol as it passed into UnLondon. It was traveling straight up to them, and at the end of its trajectory, it would pause and come back at her.

  She was halfway to the broken window, and she saw another of its legs pull free.

  The UnGun had reversed direction. She and it were racing towards each other. As she reached the jagged edge of glass, she saw one of the bishops’ crooks reach out of nowhere, hook the pistol through the trigger guard, and yank it out of sight.

  Deeba put her hands in front of her face, screamed, and dived through the broken window.

  She felt her hair brush at fringes of glass still in the frame. She kept her eyes closed. As she passed through the window, gravity twitched around her again, and suddenly she was rising, not diving, and was grabbed by helpful hands.

  “Deeba! Deeba! You’re alright! You’re back!” Her friends crowded around her, and she opened her eyes.

  “What happened?” said Hemi. “You went all weird!”

  “I dunno,” she said. “I was sort of dreaming. It was something in that room, it…Where’s the window?” she shouted.

  “Gone,” said Jones.

  It was several feet away, where Skool had kicked it as she leapt free. The wounded spider-window was pulling itself away from the ruined bait. It limped back into the shadows around Webminster Abbey. Deeba let her heartbeat slow.

  “I almost,” Deeba said, “almost feel a bit sorry for it.” She hugged each of her friends in turn, including, to their obvious delight, the bishops. Dangling on the end of Bon’s staff was the pistol. He twirled it ostentatiously.

  “We got it,” Deeba said.

  They crowded around the UnGun.

  “It’s amazing,” said Hemi.

  “It looks ancient,” said Obaday.

  “Someone actually managed to bring something back,” said Bon.

  “A successful ’naut. I never thought I’d see it,” said Bastor.

  “It’s not loaded,” said Jones. “Where are the bullets?”

  Silence settled on them.

  “Pardon?” said Deeba.

  “I…it’s…” Jones said, hesitant under her stare. He pointed at it. “…unloaded…Bullets?”

  “Ammo,” said Deeba. “Right.” And fainted.

  76

 
Dwellers in the Smoke

  Deeba listlessly played with the remains of her food.

  After she had come to, her friends clucking frantically around her, they had agreed it was exhaustion and stress that had knocked her out. She seemed to have no ill effects.

  The bishops had fetched food, chairs, and a table from an emptish house nearby, and they had sat down to eat in front of the abbey. It was the first hot meal Deeba had had for a long time, and though it was a bizarre, mixed-up picnic—eggs, potatoes, salad, curry, chocolate, fruit, olives, and spaghetti—it made her feel better, at least physically.

  There was no improving her temper, however, nor that of her friends. The realization that after all they’d gone through to get the UnGun, they were missing a vital component, had put them all in terrible and argumentative moods.

  “We have to go back,” Jones repeated, glowering over the remains of supper.

  “Are you crazy?” said Obaday. “We don’t even know where the bullets are.”

  “They must be in same room as the UnGun,” Jones said. “Stands to reason.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” said Bishop Bon, just as Bishop Bastor said, “We can’t assume any such thing.” They stared at each other.

  “Deeba is not going back in there,” said Hemi.

  “No one’s asking her to,” said Jones. “I’ll go.”

  “It’s too risky,” said Obaday.

  “The bloody gun’s pointless without them!” said Jones.

  “How are we supposed to get the window back?” said Hemi.

  “It’s an insect, not a philosopher!” Jones shouted. “We’ll just trap it the same way again.”

  And on and on, around the argument went, repeating itself in loops. Deeba sat in surly silence, as she had since the beginning, playing aimlessly with the UnGun. Spiders aren’t insects, she thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t imagine the correction would go down well just then.