Kraken

by China Miéville

  “There was something,” Wati said. “It was like …” He interpreted the bruises of the police-thing. “It was like it was, he’d been there for a long time. Since before you knew him. He was done before he was born.”

  “How does that …?” Billy said.

  “Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon. Al got turned into a memory, didn’t he?” He beat out a pattern on the dashboard. With his tension came little flexes of whatever small arcane muscles he had, and bioluminescence pulsed in his fingertips with each contact.

  “Alright,” Dane said finally. “He’s involved. We’ve got Simon, we’ve got a lead. We have to find out who hired him. I need to steal a phone and I need to get begging with Jason Smyle. The chameleon you asked about once. He’ll help us. Me.”

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “You know what we’re going to find out, though, right? It’s him. Grisamentum. He’s behind this. He’s got the kraken.” He turned back to face his companions. “And for whatever reason, he wants us too.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  EVERYONE WITH AN EAR TO THE CITY KNEW GOSS AND SUBBY were back. Goss, about whom they said he didn’t keep his heart in him, so he’s not afraid of anything; and Subby, about whom what can you say? Back for yet another last job. There was a lot of that going around. This time the Tattoo was their paymaster, and the job was something to do with the disappearance of the kraken—yes, the squidnapping—which the Tattoo either had or had not engineered, depending which rumour was preferred.

  Whether he had or not, he was on the hard hunt. It was not enough, it seemed, that he ordered his corps of strange self-loathing fist-headed thugs and controlled his altered and ruined punisheds, who stumbled trailing their mechanical flexes, their electric additions, from hole to hole, relaying orders and mindlessly gathering information. Now he had Goss and Subby and the rest of the worst of London’s mercs looking for Dane Parnell who—did you hear?—got chucked out of the Krakenists.

  According to the complex lay of the theopolitical land, allegiances and temporary affiliations were made for a war that everyone felt was about to start. It was all something to do with a curdling that everyone could feel.

  Tattoo sought his pariahs. He sent one of his bust machine-people to ask the worst of his bloodprice operators whether they had any news for him. He made sure it was well known that he had made this particular overture. A strategy of terror. That’s right. We’re that bad.

  JEAN MONTAGNE WAS THE SENIOR SECURITY GUARD ON DUTY AT THE entrance to London’s second-most-swish auction house. He was forty-six. He had moved to the city from France nearly two decades previously. Jean was a father of three, though to his great regret he had little contact with his oldest daughter, whom he had fathered when he was much too young. Jean was an accomplished Muay Thai fighter.

  He had been in charge of his shift-group for several years, and had proved his abilities when the occasional crazy had tried to enter, hunting some artefact or other being priced within, usually insisting it was theirs and had been illicitly taken. Jean was careful and polite. He recognised every employee in the place by face, he was pretty sure, and knew a good proportion of them by name.

  “Morning.” “Morning.” “Morning, Jean.” “Morning.”

  “What’s …?” The man for whom the entry gate stuck was smiling up at him in apology, holding up his card.

  “Hi there, morning,” Jean said. The man was early forties, thin, with neat receding hair cut short. “Wrong ID,” Jean said. The guy worked in acquisitions, he thought. Mike, he thought his name was. The man laughed at his mistake. He was holding a credit card.

  “Sorry, don’t know what I’m doing.” He patted the pockets of his suit in search.

  “Here,” said Jean, and buzzed Mike, or actually he thought Mick, in, to acquisitions. Or accounts. “Have a good one, bring that card next time.”

  “Got it,” said the man. “Cheers.” He walked toward the lifts, and Jean did not feel any qualms about the interaction at all.

  MADDY SINGH WAS THE OFFICE MANAGER OF THE SALES FLOOR. SHE was thirty-eight, well dressed, gay in a not-strictly-out-but-not-denying-it way. She liked watching ballet, particularly traditional.

  “Morning.”

  She looked at the man coming toward her.

  “Hi,” she said. She knew him, rooted in her mind for his name.

  “I need to check something,” he said. Maddy no longer spoke to her brother, because of a huge bust-up they’d had.

  The man smirked, raised his right hand, split his fingers between the middle and ring fingers.

  “Live long and be prosperous.”

  “Live long and prosper,” she corrected. He was called Joel, she was pretty sure, and he was in IT. “Come on, make Spock proud.” Maddy Singh hated cooking, and lived off high-end convenience food.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I need to check some details on our Trekkie sale, the names of some buyers.”

  “The geek bonanza?” she said. “Laura’s dealing with that stuff.” She waved to the rear of the room.

  “Cheers,” said Joel, if that was his name, made the sign again in good-bye, as everyone in the office had been doing for weeks, some struggling to get their fingers in the right position. “I never was a good Klingon,” he said.

  “Vulcan,” said Maddy over her shoulder. “God, you’re bloody hopeless.” She thought about the man not at all, ever again in her life.

  “LAURA.”

  “Oh, hi.” Laura looked up. The man by her desk worked in HR, if she remembered correctly.

  “Quick favour,” he said. “You’ve got the bumph from the Star Trek auction, right?” She nodded. “I need a list of buyers and sellers.”

  Laura was twenty-seven, red-haired, slim. She was severely in debt, had investigated bankruptcy proceedings on the Internet. She had a predilection for hip-hop that amused and slightly embarrassed her.

  “Right,” she said, frowned, poked around on her computer. “Um, what’s that about then?” He couldn’t be HR, she must have misremembered: a payment-chaser, obviously.

  “Oh, you know,” he said, shook his head and raised his eyebrows to show how long-suffering he was. Laura laughed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can imagine.” Laura was considering going back to do a master’s in literature. She pulled up files. “Were you at the sale?” she said. “Did you dress up?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Colour me all beamed up.”

  “Do you need all of them?” she said. “I have to have authorisation, you know.”

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully. “I should probably get them all, but …” He chewed his lip. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you call upstairs you can get confirmation from, you know, John, and maybe print me off the lot, but there’s no hurry. In the meantime, though, could you just give me the details of lot 601?”

  Laura click-clicked. “Alright,” she said. “Can I get back to you about the others in a couple of hours?”

  “No hurry.”

  “Ooh, anonymous buyer,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know, that’s why I need to find out who he was.”

  Laura glanced at the familiar face. “Alright then. What are you checking?” She wound backward through the spools of anonymity.

  “Oh lord,” he said. He rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask. Problems problems. We’re on it, though.” She printed. The man picked up the sheet, waved thanks and walked away.

  “HERE HE COMES,” DANE SAID.

  He loitered with Billy by a newspaper vendor. Jason Smyle, the proletarian chameleon, crossed the road. Here he came, folding and unfolding a piece of paper.

  Jason still plied his knack as he came, and the people he passed were momentarily vaguely sure they knew him, that he worked in the office a couple of desks along, or carried bricks in the building site, or ground coffee beans like them, though they couldn’t remember his name.

  “Dane,” he said. Hugged him hello. “Billy. Where
’s Wati? He here?”

  “Strike duty,” Dane said.

  Jason was a function of the economy. His knack deshaped him, he was not specific. He was abstract, not a worker but a man-shape of wage-labour itself. Who could look that gorgon in the face? So whoever saw him would concretise him into their local vernacular. Which made him impossible to notice.

  If Smyle had not existed London and its economy would have spat him out, budded him like a baby. He would find an unoccupied desk, play solitaire or shuffle paperwork, and at the end of the day ask Human Resources for a cash advance on his paycheque, which unorthodox request would cause consternation, but largely because though they were sure they knew him they couldn’t find his file, so they would loan the money from petty cash and make a note.

  Smyle could do commission work too, or favours for friends. The residue still clung to him, so Billy, knowing it was not the case, looked at him and had a sense that Jason worked in the Darwin Centre, was maybe a lab tech, maybe a biologist, something like that.

  “Here.” Jason handed over the printout. “That’s the buyer of your laser gun. I’m serious, what I said, Dane. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you’d been … you know, that you and the church … I’m glad I could help. Whatever you need.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Jason nodded. “You know how to get me,” he said. He got on a passing bus for free, because the driver knew they worked in the same garage.

  Dane unfolded the paper slowly as if for a drumroll. “You know what it’s going to say,” Billy said. “We just don’t know why yet.”

  It took several seconds for them to make sense of what they were reading. A collection of information—price paid, percentages, relevant addresses, dates, original owner, and there, marked to indicate that it was anonymised in other contexts, the name of the buyer.

  “It ain’t, though,” said Dane. “It ain’t Grisamentum.”

  “Saira Mukhopadhyay?” read Billy. He knew how to pronounce it. “Saira Mukhopadhyay? Who the hell is that?”

  “Fitch’s assistant,” Dane said quietly. “That posh one. She was there when he read the guts.” They looked at each other.

  Not Grisamentum, then. “The person who bought this gun, and knacked it, and used it to buy Simon’s services …” Billy said. “A Londonmancer.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  THERE WAS A HUBBUB IN BILLY’S HEAD ALL NIGHT. HE WOULD hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.

  He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton’s head got in the way, was kraken.

  His sinking was interrupted. He settled into something invisible. Glass walls, impossible to see in the black sea. A coffin shape in which he lay and felt not merely safe but powerful.

  Then a cartoon, that he recognised, that long-loved story of bottles dancing while a chemist slept, and not a cephalopod to be seen, then for a moment he was Tintin was what he was, in some Tintin dream, and Captain Haddock came at him corkscrew in hand because he was a bottle, but nothing could get at him and he was not afraid, then he was with a brown-haired woman he recognised as Virginia Woolf if you please ignoring the squid at her window, which looked quite forlorn, powerless and neglected, and she was telling Billy instead that he was an unorthodox hero, according to an unusual definition, and he was in some classical land and it was all a catastrophe, a fiasco, the word came, but if it was why did he feel strong? And where was the motherfucking kraken now? Too idle to get into his head, eh? And who was this peeping from behind the gently smiling Modernist, at two different heights? Bad as the intimations of war? One grin and one thoughtless empty face? And a little inslide closer, cocky shuffle skip of scarecrow legs, finger to nose and a one-nostril jet of tobacco exhaust? Hallo there old cock! Subby, Goss, Goss and Subby.

  He woke hard. It was early, and his heart continued with its performance and he sat up sweating in the sofa-bed. He waited to calm down but he did not. Dane sat by the window, the curtain pulled back so he could spy on the street. He was not looking down into it but at Billy.

  “It’s not you,” he said. “You’re not going to feel any better.”

  Billy joined him. The window was open a tiny bit, and he knelt and sucked up cold air. Dane was right, he did not much calm down. Billy gripped the windowsill and put his nose on it, like a kilroy graffito, and stared into the dim. There was absolutely nothing to see. Just fade-edge puddles of orange light and houses made of shadow. Just bricks and tarmac.

  “You know what I want to know,” Billy said. “The Tattoo’s men. Not just with the hands. The radio-man, too.” Dane said nothing. Billy let the cold air go over him. “What’s all that about?”

  “Say what you mean.”

  “Who are they?”

  “All sorts,” Dane said. “There are people out there who’d rather be tools than people. The Tattoo can give them what they want.”

  The Tattoo. You wouldn’t say “charming”—that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo’s brutal enticement. I’ll make use of you. Want to be a hammer? A telephone? A light to show up secret knack bullshit? A record player? Get into that workshop, mate.

  You have to be an outstanding psychologist to terrorise, blandish, to control like that, and the Tattoo could sniff the needy and post-needy surrendered. That was how he did it. He was never just a thug. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

  “So it wasn’t Grisamentum who took it,” Billy said. Dane shook his head and did not look at him. “… But we’re not going to go in with him.”

  “There’s too much …” Dane shook his head again after a long time. “I don’t know. Not without knowing more … Al’s got some dog in this fight, and he was Grisamentum’s man. I don’t know who to trust. Except me.”

  “Did you always work for the church?” Billy said abruptly. Dane did not look at him.

  “Ah, you know, we all have our, you know …” Dane said. “We all have our little rebellions.” Whether sanctioned rumspringas or disavowed crises of faith. Begging chastity and continence, but not yet. “I was a soldier. I mean—in the army.” Billy looked at him in mild surprise. “But I came back, didn’t I?”

  “Why did you?”

  Dane turned his gaze full on Billy. “Why’d you think?” he said. “Because krakens are gods.”

  BILLY ROSE. AND HE FROZE. LEGS CROOKED, BUT AFRAID TO MOVE, so that he would not lose this view, this angle through the window, that suddenly provoked something.

  “What is it?” Dane said.

  Good question. The street, yes, the lights, yes, the bricks, the shadows, the bushes turned into shaggy dark beasts, the personlessness of the late night, the unlitness of the windows. Why did it brim?

  “Something’s moving,” Billy said. Close to the edges of the city some storm was coming toward them. The clouds’ random rush was just random, but through the window they looked like self-organising ink, like he was watching a secret, that he had an insight into whatever metropolitopoiesis was happening. He had no such thing. How could he with those inadequate eyes? It was just the glass that gave him anything, any glimmer, a refracted glance of some conflict starting.

  • • •

  THOUSANDS OF LONDONERS WOKE AT THAT MOMENT. MEMORY versus the inevitable, going at it, that will play havoc with your sleep patterns. Marge woke, vividly aware that something new had happened. Baron woke, and said as he did, “Oh, here we bloody go.” Vardy had not been asleep in th
e first place.

  Closer to Billy than either of them would have imagined, Kath Collingswood was staring out of her window too. She had sat up at exactly the same second as Billy. The glass of her window helped her not at all, but she had her own ways to make sense of things.

  It was obvious, suddenly, that the fake ghosts she had put together had been beaten. She hauled out of bed. No one was with her: she was in her Snoopy nightshirt. Her skin was crawling every which way. Horripilations with interference patterns. London was grinding against itself like an unset broken bone.

  “So what are we going to fucking do?” she said, aloud. She did not like how small her voice was. “Who’m I going to call?”

  Something easy, something she could get info from without too much trouble. Didn’t have to be tough or clever. Best if it wasn’t. She flicked through a pad by her bed, where she made notes of various summonings. A spaceape, all writhing tentacles, to stimulate her audio nerve directly? Too much attitude.

  Alright, a real snout again, then, worthy of the name. She plugged in her electric pentacle. She sat in concentric neon circles, in various colours. This was a pretty, garish conjuration. Collingswood read bits and bobs from the relevant manuscript. The tricky bit with this technique was not getting the summons to work: it was to not summon too much. She was just reaching for one particular little spirit, not the head of its herd.

  It did not take long. Everything was raring to go, that night. She barely had to dangle a notional bucket of psychic swill, and with exploratory snorts and gleeful screams, buffeting the edges of her safe space, manifesting as a flitting porcine shade, in came the swinish entity she had enticed away from a herd of such in the outer monstrosity, introduced to London and taught to answer to Perky.

  kollywood, it grunted. kollywood food. Not much but a darkness in the air. It had no corkscrew tail, and as if in compensation it spiralled tightly itself, and rooted around the room, sending Collingswood’s tat gusting all over.