Kraken

by China Miéville

  “Are you going to start talking about organ-grinders and monkeys?” Byrne said.

  “However you want to put it,” Dane said. “What was it happened? He was really sick.”

  “Was he?”

  “Where is he then? Why disappear all that time?”

  “He’s not going to come here,” she said carefully. “There’s no way he’s going to …”

  “Well then we’re done,” said Dane.

  “Will you let me finish? That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to him.”

  “What, you got some secure line?” Dane said.

  “There are ways.” She took out a pen and paper. “Channels. Talk to him, then.”

  She put the fountain pen on the paper. Dane stepped closer. He kept the speargun aimed at her. Byrne wrote. She did not take her eyes from Dane’s.

  Hello, she wrote. The writing was the same as what had been on the paper plane, small and curled and dark grey. Long time.

  “Ask him what you want,” Byrne said.

  “Where is he?” Billy said.

  “It’s his writing,” Dane said.

  “That’s hardly proof,” Billy said.

  “Where are you?” Dane said. To the paper.

  Near, Byrne wrote, without looking.

  Billy blinked at this new thing, this remote-writing knack. “This proves nothing,” he whispered to Dane.

  “Heard you were dead,” Dane said. There was no writing. “When we was here last, you were asking me to come work for you. Remember?”

  Y.

  “When I said I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t, and I asked you a question. Do you remember? What I said? The last thing I said to you before I went?”

  Byrne’s hand hesitated over the paper. Then she wrote.

  Said you’d never leave church, she wrote. Said: “I know who made me. Do you know who made you?”

  “It’s him,” Dane said quietly to Billy. “No one else knew that.” The city broke the silence, with the coughing of a car, as if uncomfortable.

  What broke you from the church? Byrne wrote.

  “Different ideas,” Dane said.

  You want your kraken.

  “Dead, rotten and ruined?” Dane said. “Why d’you think I want it?”

  Because you’re not the Tattoo.

  “What exactly is your proposition?” Billy said. Dane stared at him.

  We can find it, Byrne wrote. She kept looking up. She stared into the litter of stars, strewn like discards. Whoever has it has plans. No one takes a thing like that without plans. Not good.

  Harrow you know more than you know, she wrote. She drew an arrow, pointing at him. Wherever he was, Grisamentum was pining for Billy’s opaque vatic insight.

  “We have to think about this, Billy,” Dane said.

  “Well he’s not the Tattoo,” Billy muttered to him. “I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does. I’m funny that way. But …”

  “But what?”

  “There’s too much we don’t know.” Dane hesitated. He nodded. “We’re meeting Wati tomorrow. Let’s talk to him about it. He might have news—you know he’s been tracking shit down.” Billy felt, suddenly and vividly, as if he were underwater.

  “Grisamentum,” Dane said. “We have to think.”

  “Really,” Byrne said. She looked away from the sky and at him as her hand wrote Join us now.

  “No disrespect. If it was you you’d do the same. We’re on the same side. We just have to think.”

  Byrne’s hand moved over the paper, but no ink came from the pen. She pursed her lips and tried again. Eventually she wrote something and read it. She took out a new pen and wrote, in a different script, a postal box, a pickup spot. She gave it to Dane.

  “Send us word,” she said. “But fast, Dane, or we have to assume no. Time’s running out. Look at the bloody moon.” Billy looked at the sliver of it. Its craters and contours made it look wormy. “Something’s coming.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.

  He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.

  “Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.

  Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.

  But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like that of the tinderbox dog. There was, instead, a bottle. Behind the enemy. Its glass was dark. Its stopper was old and corroded into place, but uncorking. And he knew suddenly and with a kind of relief that it was not his sidekick, but that he was its.

  When he woke Billy felt a different kind of guilt. At the kitsch of the dreams. He felt the universe, exasperated, was giving him an insultingly clear insight, that he was simply missing.

  “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?” BILLY SAID.

  “You mean what my granddad said?” Dane said. “If you was good, maybe you come back in a god’s skin.” A chromatophore, a gushing colour cell. So krakens show emotion by the flexing of their devout dead. It was never the stories of sinking islands upsetting Vikings that Dane told.

  Billy and Dane crossed the city with as much subterfuge as they could muster. By way of knacks, magic misdirection, an anti-trail of psychic un-bread crumbs. Billy relaxed a little when they entered the graveyard where they had their rendezvous. He walked between the rows of stone. His calm made little sense, he knew: whatever hunted them would do so among the dead as easily as among the living.

  “Dane. Billy.” Wati spoke to them from a stone angel. “Sure you weren’t followed?”

  “Fuck off, Wati,” Dane said mildly. “How’s the strike?”

  “Struggling.” Wati circled in a clearing among the unkempt graves, speaking from one then another then another stone face. “To be honest, we got big trouble. I got attacked.”

  “What?” said Dane. He took a solicitous step toward the moment’s contingent figure. “You okay? Who? How?”

  “I’m alright,” Wati said. “I nearly wasn’t, but I’m alright now. It was police. It nearly got me. I got it though. The only good thing is I learnt a few things. It sort of oozed out of itself, is what.”

  Billy turned slowly and looked at each of the angels. “We all had visitors,” Dane said. “You remember Byrne, Wati?”

  “Grisamentum’s vizier? What about her?”

  “We saw her, Wati.” The leaves of the ivy and the overlooking trees muttered. “Grisamentum’s still alive.”

  Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent. Billy heard some little animal rustling under the grass.

  “You saw him?” Wati said.

  “We spoke to him. It was him, Wati. He wants to work with us. To find it.” There were more graveside rustles.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “We said we’d think.”

  “So what do you think?” After seconds of silence Wati said, from a new, saccharine child angel, “Billy, what do you think?”

  “Me?” Billy cleared his throat. “I don’t kn
ow.”

  “We need all the help we can get,” Dane said carefully.

  “Yeah, but,” Billy said. The toughness of his own voice surprised him. “You think I’ve got knowledge I don’t even know about, right? Well, I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. Alright?”

  “That’s not nothing, Dane,” said Wati at last.

  “Listen,” he continued. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. You remember that list of the porters we reckon could’ve took the kraken? I been looking into it.” Wati’s voice that day was thin and marble. “Simon, Aykan, couple of others, remember?

  “There’s skinny on all of them, you hear what they like, who they’re working for, what they’re good at and not good at, all that. If we thought of this you can bet your arse everyone else who knows about the kraken did, and they’re looking too: we heard from Aykan’s old flatmate that the cops tried to get hold of him. But they’re not thinking right. Simon’s the dark horse.”

  “Simon Shaw retired,” Dane said.

  “He did—that’s the point,” Wati said. “I was thinking about methods. Rebecca uses wormholes, but she needs a power source, and it leaves pissed-off particles. You said the police couldn’t find anything?”

  “I don’t know what they were looking for,” Billy said. “But I heard them say there was no sign of anything.”

  “Right,” said Wati from a Madonna. “Aykan uses Tay al-Ard, great method …”

  “It’s the only kind of porting I’ll do,” said Dane.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Wati. “But even if he could shift something as big as the kraken, some of the irfans would have felt it. Like you say, Simon hasn’t been on the scene. But here’s the thing: he does have a familiar.”

  “I didn’t know,” Dane said.

  “Honest truth is neither did I until one of the organisers reminded me. It ain’t like most assistants. Simon made sure it paid dues—it never had the mind for much, but it pushed a bit of energy our way to cover subs. He wasn’t bad to it. He loved the bloody thing. But we should still have had a connection, and no one could feel the link. I had to go hunting.

  “I don’t know how long it’s been faddling around. Found the poor little fucker eventually, in a landfill. It’s only here because it trusts me.” What familiar didn’t?

  “Here?” said Billy. “Here here?”

  The statue whistled. From below a scraggy bush next to them there was a rustling, again.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Billy. “What the hell’s that?”

  Snuffling amid the cigarette butts and the ruins of food, a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair whimpered and whispered. There were no features, only a matting of dirt and sickly flesh.

  “Oh what?” said Dane.

  “He had it made from scratch,” Wati said. “It’s clotted out of him. His parings. He had a lifesmith clay it together. The fur’s from a vet: it’s dog, cat, all sorts.” The thing had no eyes, no visible mouth.

  “What use is this hairball?” said Dane.

  “None,” Wati said. “It’s not smart, it’s a rubbish guard, it doesn’t have the focus for knacks. He made it anyway. Out of him, so the poor little bastard has a link. A bit buggered, but you can still feel it. I don’t know what, but something scared Simon off working a couple of years ago. And judging from the mood of my little brother here, something’s happened more recently, too.

  “You know what we found it doing?” The thing shivered, and Wati made the reassuring noise again. “It was gathering food—sort of folding itself over it to drag it. I think it’s for Simon. I think it’s been trekking for days to get stuff, trekking back with it. I think it’s on its own initiative.”

  “Why would Simon want something like that?” Dane said, staring at the pitiable threadbare oddity.

  “Well,” said the Wati-statue. “You know how Simon used to dress. Don’t you ever watch telly, Dane?”

  “How did he dress?” said Billy.

  “Pretend uniform,” Wati said. “Little sign on the chest.” His voice was arch.

  “Why does this matter?” Dane said.

  “No,” said Billy suddenly, staring at the bizarre familiar. “Oh you’re shitting me.”

  “Yeah,” Wati said. “You got it.”

  “What?” said Dane. He stared at the statue and at Billy. “What?”

  YOU HEAR ALL THE TIME, BILLY TOLD DANE—AND HOW GOOD IT was for him to be telling Dane something—about the influence of pulp science fiction on real science. It is an admission both shamefaced and proud that some large proportion of scientists claim inspiration from variously crude visionary blatherings they loved when young. Satellite specialists cite Arthur Clarke, biologists are drawn to the field by the neuro- and nanotech visions of entertainers. Above all, Roddenberry’s leaden space-pioneering meant a demographic bulge of young physicists attempting to replicate replicators, tri-corders, phasers and transporter rooms.

  But it was not only the hard sciences. Other professionals grew up with the same stuff. Sociologists of the network went rummaging in old imaginings. Philosophers stole many-worlds, grateful to alternative-reality merchants. And, unknown to the mainstream, such invented futures were the seminal viewing for a generation of London’s mages, and they were no less keen to imitate their favourites than were physicists. Alongside technopaganism and chaos magic, Crowleyism and druidical pomp, there were the reality-smiths of the TV generation.

  Ornerily, it was not the fantasies that inspired most knackers, not Buffy, Angel, American Gothic or Supernatural. It was the science fiction. Time travel was out, the universe not having fixed lines, but sorcerer fans of Dr. Who made untraditional wands, disdaining willow for carefully lathed metal and calling them sonic screwdrivers. Soothsayer admirers of Blake’s 7 called themselves Children of Orac. London’s fourth-best shapeshifter changed her name by deed-poll to Maya, and her surname to Space1999.

  There were those magicians who expressed allegiance to more recherché series—empatechs who would not be quiet about Star Cops, culture-surfing necromancers hooked on Lexx—and a younger generation naming themselves for Farscape and Galactica (the remake, of course).

  But it was the classics that were most popular, and just as for NASA technicians, Star Trek was the most classic of these.

  “Simon’s familiar’s name,” Wati said, “is Tribble.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “’COURSE I’VE SEEN STAR TREK,” DANE SAID. “BUT I DON’T KNOW what a fucking tribble is.”

  They were by London Bridge. Simon’s last-known address had been empty for months. They hunted.

  “Well, it’s one of those things, basically,” Billy said. He was back in silly student getup too young for him. He peered into the plastic bag he carried. Within shivered Tribble. Billy stroked its dirty fur. They passed slate-top figurines and plaster statuettes on buildings. Ill-clothed mannequins. From each of them came Wati’s whispered voice, soothing Tribble, keeping the un-animal calm.

  “We sure we’re going the right way?” Billy said.

  “No,” said Wati. “I’ve been trying to track the link backward. I reckon it leads round here. If we get close enough I’ll feel it.”

  “What is the fucking deal with this tribble thing?” Dane said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Wati said. He spoke in little gusts from all the statues. “Simon was totally into that stupid show. He went to conventions. Had the collections, the figures, all that stuff. Half the time he dressed in that stupid uniform.”

  “So?” Dane said. “So he’s talented, made money and pissed it away on tat. He’s a beamer who made himself Mr. fucking Spock.”

  “Scotty,” Billy said. He looked at Dane over the top of his glasses, schoolmarmish. “Spock didn’t beam anything.”

  “What? What? Whatever. Listen, there’s different ways of porting, Billy. There’s folding up space.” Dean scrunched his hands. “So places far apart touch each other for a moment. But that ain’t what Simon does. He’s a b
eamer. Disintegrate whatever it is you want, zap its bits somewhere else, stick them back together.”

  “Wasn’t there an auction of Star Trek stuff?” Billy said. “A couple of months ago? At Christie’s or somewhere? I think I remember … All the auctioneers wore the uniforms. They sold the starship model for like a million quid or something.”

  Dane half closed his eyes. “Rings a bell.”

  “It’s going weird in-between,” said Wati from a scuffed stone dog. “I think it wants us to turn left.”

  “We’re circling,” said Billy.

  They slowed. They had done three turns of a towerblock, orbiting it as if the ill-kept concrete pillar were the sun. They were not alone on the street, but none of the pedestrians paid them any particular mind. “It wants to take us there,” said Billy, “but it’s scared.”

  “Alright, hold on,” said Wati from a plastic owl, a bird-scarer on a chemist roof. “I’ll have a look.”

  WATI WENT TO A TINY COSY PLASTIC DASHBOARD VIRGIN; TO A cemetery and a headstone angel, seeing through birdlimed eyes. Staccato manifested moments to the base of the tower, eyeing the building from a bouncing horsey in the children’s playground.

  He could feel familiars in a few of the flats. All union members. Two on strike; the other, a—what was that?—a parrot, still working but with dispensation for some reason. The unioned three felt their organiser’s presence with surprise. He stretched out, found a child’s doll in the ground floor. It took him scant moments to see through speck-sized Barbie, to go again, finding a terra-cotta lady in the next-door flat, seeing again, nothing of interest, moving to a China shepherdess on next-door’s mantelpiece.

  He slid through figures. His moments of statued awareness proliferated in a cloud. He strobed through floors in doll figure carved-soapdish rabbitsextoy antique relic, seeing, fucking, eating, reading, sleeping, laughing, fighting, human minutiae that did not interest him.

  Three storeys from the top, he opened his consciousness in a plastic figure of Captain Kirk. Feeling the seam of his moulding, the hinge of his little arms and legs, the crude Starfleet uniform painted on him, he looked into a ruinous apartment.