Kraken

by China Miéville

  “Perky,” she said. She shook a bottle of leftover spiritual scraps. “Hello again. Nummy treat. What’s going on?”

  num num, Perky said. num the num.

  “Yeah you can num it but first you got to tell me what’s happening.”

  scared, Perky grunted.

  “Yeah, it’s a bit scary tonight, isn’t it? What’s been happening?”

  scared. anglis out. sooss don tell.

  “Anglis?” She struggled with impatience. There was no point getting pissy with this amiable greedy thing. It was too thick to mind-fuck. The pig-presence flitted to her ceiling and gnawed the light cord. “I won’t tell. Anglis, Perky?”

  ess. ess anglis run fight come member not footer.

  Yes. Something had come in, or out, for a fight. Member? Members? Membership? Footer?

  Oh fuck right. Collingswood stood still in her sparking pentacle. Remember, and future. Remembrance versus some future. Anglis. The anglis, of course, were angels. The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They’d gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly. No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta.

  “Cheers, Perky,” she said. She unstoppered the container and flicked it so the invisible contents sprayed out of the protected circle. The pig went racing around, licking and champing and slobbering in dimensions where, happily, Collingswood did not have to clean up.

  Now she knew it was only Perky the cautions were overkill, and she stepped out of the angles of electrostatic protection and switched them off. “Have fun,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mess shit up too much, and don’t nick anything when you go.”

  kay kollywood byby thans for num.

  Collingswood ran her hands through her hair, put on a minimum of makeup, her roughed-up uniform, and went through the deeply threatening city. “Broomstick’s at the garage,” she said to herself more than once. The joke was so old, so flat as to be meaningless. Saying it as if everything was all normal was a very slight comfort.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” the taxi driver told her, and she stared at him, but couldn’t even muster enough to wither him. She put the cigarette out. She did not light up again until she was in the FSRC wings of the Neasden Police Station.

  You would have had to be a more adept adept than Collingswood to have even approximated some sight of what was going on, loomingly, totally, above everything. Various long-snoozing London gods had been woken up by the clamour, were stretching and trying to assert pomp and authority. They had not yet realised that no Londoners gave two shits about them anymore. The thunder that night was dramatic, but it was just the grump of past-it deities, a heavenly “What the bloody hell’s all this noise?”

  The real business was going on in the streets, on another scale. Few of the guards, earthly or unearthly, in any of London’s museums, could have said why they suddenly felt so extremely afraid. It was because their memory palaces were unprotected. Their angels walked. The guardians of all the living museums came together, bar one still rogue on its own mission. The angels hunted the incoming end, that closed-down future. If they tracked it down they intended to mash it up.

  VARDY WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICES. COLLINGSWOOD THOUGHT HE looked unruffled by the night, no blearier or more rushed than he ever did. She hung from the doorframe. She was slightly taken aback by the, if anything, even more unwelcome than usual look that he gave her.

  “Fucking hell, rudeboy,” she said. “What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”

  “I’m not sure what this is,” he said, scrolling through some website. “But it’s not apocalypse yet. Of that I’m fairly certain.”

  “Just a manner of speaking.”

  “Oh, I think it’s more than that. I think the word to keep in mind here is ‘yet.’ What brings you here?”

  “What do you fucking think? The not-yet apocalypse, squire. You know what’s going on? The memory guards are out looking to smack someone up. Those fuckers ain’t supposed to leave the museums. I want to see if I can work out what’s going on. Whatever just changed. What do you reckon?”

  “Why not?”

  “Fuck, you know, sometimes, seriously, sometimes you just wish you lived in a city where it wasn’t all this craziness and this and that. I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end. In London. It does, though. Every, single, time. And that, man, what are you going to say.” Collingswood shook her head. “Fucking mad weak shit. Arks and dinosaurs and virgins, fuck knows. Give me a robbery, man. Except they do, innit?”

  “‘Mad weak shit?’” Vardy swung back his chair and looked at her with some queasy combine of dislike, admiration and curiosity. “Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”

  Collingswood cocked her head. Are you talking to me like that, bro? She couldn’t read his head-texts, of course, not those of a specialist like Vardy.

  “Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See, that’s why you’ll never bloody be good enough at this job, Collingswood.” He waited as if he’d said too much, but she waved her hand, Oh do please carry the fuck on. “Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were. You want to get angry about that bloody admirable humanist doctrine, and why would you want to blame Clinton. But you’re not just too young, you’re too bloody ignorant to know about welfare reform.”

  They stared at each other. It was tense, and weirdly slightly funny.

  “Yeah but,” Collingswood said cautiously. “Only, it’s not totally admirable, is it, given that it’s total fucking bollocks.”

  They stared some more.

  “Well,” Vardy said. “That is true. I would have to concede that, unfortunately.” Neither of them laughed, but they could have done.

  “Right,” Collingswood said. “Why are you here? What are those files?” There were papers everywhere.

  “Well …” Vardy seemed hesitant. He glanced at her. “You recall our rather peculiar note from the sky? I have a thought about who it might be.” He closed one of the folders so she could see its title.

  “Grisamentum?” she said. “He died.” She sounded suitably uncertain.

  “Indeed.”

  “Baron was at the funeral.”

  “Sort of. Yes.”

  “So was it the Tattoo, right?” Collingswood said. “Who did him in?”

  “No. People thought so but no. He was just sick, is all, so he’d been talking to doctors, necromancers. We got hold of his medical records, and I can tell you he most certainly had cancer and it most certainly was killing him.”

  “So … why d’you think this was him?”

  “Something about the style. Something about finding Al Adler after all this time. Something about the word emerging that several monsterherds have been approached for some big commission. Remember his …?”

  “No, I don’t remember dick, I wasn’t around.”

  “Well, he was always a traditionalist.”

  “So who are all this lot?” Collings
wood said. She pointed at the details of some academic, some physicist called Cole, some doctor, Al Adler, Byrne.

  “Associates. Connected in one way or another to his ahem funeral ahem. I’m thinking I might revisit them. I have a few ideas I’d like to chase up. All this has got me thinking. I’ve been having various ideas tonight.” He smiled. It was alarming. “I do wonder if any of them might have a clue about all this. All this.” He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “ALRIGHT.” WITH EXPERT SPEED AND A MINIMUM OF FILTHSPILLAGE, Dane emerged from a skip. He had a bust cup, a radio full of mould, half a suitcase. Billy stared at them. “What it is, if we got this seen to—there are people who can clean this up right, you know—we might be able to use this to—”

  To what? The cup, it seemed, to carry some elixir that needed just this container—the radio to tune in to some opaque flow of decayed information or other—the suitcase to contain things that could otherwise not be carried. Dane struggled to articulate it. He kept reiterating that they needed equipment, if this was what they were facing.

  Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.

  “The Londonmancers don’t take sides,” Dane said. “That’s their whole thing.”

  “Maybe Saira’s gone rogue,” Billy said. “Doing this alone.”

  “I need a new gun,” Dane said repeatedly. The battle of Star Trek Tower had left him raging at his armaments. Whatever the specifics of this fight around them, seemingly between Grisamentum and the Londonmancers, he lacked firepower. With Wati’s help, anonymising the request, Dane sent a request to London’s arms dealers. Because someone out there had the psychic megatonnage of the fucking Architeuthis in their stockpile.

  At the stub-end of Wandsworth Common he took delivery of a weapon, left under a particular set of bushes like some fabled baby. There were passersby but none close enough to see, and in any case, like most Londoners now, they moved furtively and quickly most of the time, as if they were at the park against their will.

  Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.

  It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just …” “I’ve got really good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected pistonpunk might ask her elders, “but wouldn’t it be useful to …?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.

  With a little more propagandist verve, the Church of God Kraken might have issued its fighters FN P90s, say, or HK53s, and explained with sententious sermon-logic how the rate of fire made the fanning vectors of bullets reach out like tentacles, or that the bite of the weapon was like that of a squid beak, or some such. As an excommunicant, Dane was no longer restrained. What he dug out of the earth where it had been delivered was a heavy handgun.

  They did not know how many charges the phaser had, so Billy did not use it to practice. “I know what we can do,” Dane said. He took them to amusement arcades, pushing through crowds of teens. Billy spent hours going from machine to screaming machine, firing plastic pistols at incoming zombies and alien invaders. Dane whispered advice to him on stance and timing—marksman words, soldier-insight among these play deaths. The sneers of watching youths decreased as Billy’s skills grew.

  “Done well, man,” one boy said as Billy defeated an end-of-level boss. It was all disproportionately exhilarating. “Yes!” Billy whispered as he succeeded in missions.

  “Alright, soldier,” Dane said. “Nice one. Killer.” He dubbed Billy a member of various violent sects. “You’re a Thanicrucian. You’re a Serrimor. You’re a gunfarmer.”

  “A what?”

  “Watch the screen. Bad bastards, once upon a time. Raised guns like fighting dogs. Let’s get you shooting like them. Pay attention.”

  From Time Cops to the latest House of the Dead to Extreme Invaders, so Billy wouldn’t learn the looped attack patterns. Marines and soldiers learned with such machines, Dane told him. Juba the Baghdad sniper went from zero to his deadly skill set using these. And these pretend guns had no recoil, no weight, no reloading—just like the phaser. Their limited realism made them paradoxically perfect practice for the real, ridiculous weapon Billy had come into.

  Billy kept asking about the knuckleheads he might face. How do they eat? How do they see? How do they think?

  “That’s not the issue,” Dane said. “The world can always finesse details. And who’d choose it? Always people ready to do that kind of thing.”

  SO THEY KNEW WHAT BAIT HAD GOT SIMON PORTING. THEY NEEDED to talk to Saira.

  What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground. You don’t know who to trust. Grisamentum’s postal box was not a Royal Mail address, nor the service of any other carrier they knew. The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?

  “It must get to him,” Billy said.

  “Yeah but not by the usual bloody routes.” There would be no staking out the mail drop.

  “How’s Simon?” Billy said.

  “Alright. I was there earlier,” said Wati, from a Victorian statue. “I mean, not really. Mo’s good with him though.”

  “What about the Londonmancer?” Dane said.

  “I got as close as I could. She don’t look like she even has a home. She sleeps in that building. Near the stone.”

  “Alright,” said Dane. “We’ll have to get her there, then. Wati, help me out. I’m trying to teach our boy some stuff about things.” Billy heard the grinding sound of glass at the fringe of his consciousness. It had been a while. He waited, trying to understand it as a message.

  “Alright, so …” he said eventually, when they passed a locksmith and he noticed something on display in the window. He remembered Dane’s lesson at the bins, and stared at the miniature door to which various different on-sale handles had been attached, for show. “Alright so if you got hold of that,” he said, “and did whatever to it, put it into a wall. Then you could, I bet you could …”

  “There you go,” Wati said from inside next to it, from a gargoyle door knocker. “You could use each different one of them handles to open it into somewhere else. Too small though. All you could do’s stick your arm through.”

  These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.

  “There.” There was a key embedded in the tarmac. It had been dropped when the surface was still soft and then had been run over or toughly trodden in. Anxious clubbers and nightwalkers passed them.

  “So,” Billy said, “if we could get it to work, with a bit of knacking, we could use that to, like, travel from place to place?”

  Dane looked at him. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty hairy,” he said. “Let’s get somewhere we can put our heads down.” They were nearly out of safe houses. He looked at Billy suspiciously. “How come you figured you could make the key work that way?”

  Because, Billy thought, it’ll, oh, unlock the way.

  Chapter Forty-Four

 
; MARGE’S PROBLEM, WHEN SHE ASKED ON HER BULLETIN BOARDS where she should go, “as a noob in all this,” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. She had winnowed with a few questions, and had raised the issue of the cults. The issue, tentatively, of the church of the squid. A few false leads, and she came back again and again to the message that said: “cult collectors old queen almagan yard east london.”

  Down this way London felt like a city to which Marge had never been. She had thought the docklands all cleared out, bleached with money. Not this alley in gobbing distance of the Isle of Dogs, though. These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.

  Where the fuck am I? She looked again at her map. To either side were warehouses scrubbed and made flats for professionals. A channel of such buildings was parted as if grudgingly, an embarrassed entrance onto a cul-de-sac of much grubbier brick and potholed pavement. A few doors, a pub sign swinging. THE OLD QUEEN, it said in Gothicky letters, and below it a pinch-faced Victoria in her middle years.

  It was the middle of the day. She’d have thought twice about walking into that streetlet at night. Her shoes got instantly filthy on its puddly surface.

  The small pub bottle-glass window made the light inside seem dingy. A jukebox was playing something from the eighties, which as always with tracks from that decade registered in her head as a test. She hesitated: “Calling All the Heroes,” It Bites. Grizzled drinkers muttered at each other, in clothes the same colours as everything else. People glanced up at her, back down again. A fruit machine made a tired electronic whoop.

  “Gin and tonic.” When the man brought it she said, “Friend of mine told me some collectors meet here.”

  “Tourist?” he said.