Kraken

by China Miéville

  “Collingswood!” he shouted.

  “What?” he heard. Billy glanced through the doorway and saw the kraken move.

  “You got him?” Collingswood shouted.

  “I did,” Billy gasped in delight. “I spilt him, he’s—”

  Byrne was whispering into the tank. She was dripping, squeezing the ink that drenched her top into the kraken’s ink.

  “Shit,” said Billy. He stared. “How much …”

  The world answered him.

  How much of Grisamentum does he need to merge with the kraken ink? To take it into him?

  The world showed him: not much.

  PLENTY OF GRISAMENTUM WAS RAGING IN WORDLESS LIQUIDITY AS the slosh of footprints dispersed him. But wrung out by his vizier was a small glassful of him, bloated with Krakenist knowledge from his hungry learning, squeezed into the tank. He swilled and bonded. He mixed with the kraken’s ink, ink also, the two inks one new ink, and changed.

  The liquid in the tank began to bubble. The zombie squid flopped and wriggled and butted up against the Perspex. Its ink effervesced.

  Billy fired at the tank, urgently. He punctured it right through, breaking off sections, and his bullets hit the dense body of the kraken. The liquid within did not flow from the holes. It held its tank-shape against gravity. A presence gathered into swirl-self out of the conjoined inks, burned man and kraken-writ. A voice made of bubbling laughed.

  The dark liquid rose. A pillar, a man-shape that laughed and pointed. That raised both arms.

  And started to rewrite rules.

  So the wall that hid Billy disappeared. It did not fall down, did not evaporate, did not crumble but instead simply had not been there, was un. The kitchen was all part of the living room now, sinkless and cutleryless, full of lounges and bookshelves, wet with remnant sea.

  The pistol in Billy’s hand was gone. Because Grisamentum wrote that there were no guns in that room. “Oh Jesus,” Billy managed to say, and the ink of Grisamentum wrote no across his consciousness. Not even God: he was the very rules God wrote. The gunfarmers stumbled. Byrne was laughing, was rising into the air, tugged by the boss she loved.

  Billy felt something very dangerous and forlorn settle, the closing of something open across everything, as history began to flex at someone else’s will. He felt something get ready to rewrite the sky.

  The ink gathered into a globe, hovering above the tank. Threads from it took word-shape and changed things. Writs in the air.

  The kraken looked at Billy with its missing eyes. It moved. Spasmed. Not afraid, he saw, not in pain. Bottling it up. Bottling it up. Where was his angel? Where his glass-container hero?

  This is a fiasco. He might almost have laughed at that strange formulation. It was the catastrophe, the disaster, the, the word was weirdly tenacious in his head, fiasco.

  He opened his eyes. That word meant bottle.

  It’s all metaphor, Billy remembered. It’s persuasion.

  “It’s not a kraken,” he said. The ink-god did not hear him until he said it again, and all the attention in the world was, amused, upon him. “It’s not a kraken and it’s not a squid,” Billy said. The eyeless thing in the tank held his gaze.

  “Kraken’s a kraken,” Billy said. “Nothing to do with us. That? That’s a specimen. I know. I made it. That’s ours.”

  A troubled look went across Byrne’s face as she spun on her axis. Bottle magic, Billy thought. The ink shuddered.

  “Thing is,” Billy said, in abrupt adrenalized bursts, “thing is the Krakenists thought I was a prophet of krakens because of what I’d done—but I never was. What I am—” Even if by mistake; even if a misunderstanding, a joke gone wrong; even if a will-this-do; how are any messiahs chosen? “What I am is a bottle prophet.” An accidental power of glass and memory. “So I know what that is.”

  There was a sink by Billy again, and the wall was coming back, a few inches of it. The bottled kraken wheezed from its siphon. The wall grew.

  “It’s not an animal or a god,” Billy said. “It didn’t exist until I curated it. That’s my specimen.”

  The new rules were being crossed out. Billy could feel the fight. He saw the wall shrink and grow, be there and un-be and have been and not have been; he felt able to stand and not; he felt the fucking sky reshape and rework as with instructions written and put under erasure in penmanship-duel the consciousness of Grisamentum—full of new krakeny power, ink-magic—battled with the tentacled thing that was not kraken at all.

  The specimen pressed its arms against its tank. Suckers pressed vacuum-flush against the plastic, pulling the great body into position. It was not trying to get out—that was where it belonged.

  Billy was standing.

  He had birthed it into consciousness. It was Architeuthis dux. Specimen, pining for preservative. Squid-shaped paradox but not the animal of the ocean. Architeuthis, Billy understood for the first time, was not that undefined thing in deep water, which was only ever itself. Architeuthis was a human term.

  “It’s ours,” he said.

  Its ink was vast magic: Grisamentum had been right about that. But the universe had heard Billy, and he had been persuasive.

  Maybe if Grisamentum had harvested ink direct from those trench dwellers, not from a jarred, cured, curated thing, the power would have been as protean as he had intended. But this was Architeuthis ink, and it was disinclined to be his whim. “It’s a specimen and it’s in the books,” Billy said. “We’ve written it up.”

  The comixed inks raged against each other. The universe flexed as they fought. But as Grisamentum mixed with the ink it mixed with him; as he took its power it took his. And much of Grisamentum had been spilt: there was more of it than of him. It was specimen ink, curated by a citizen of London, by Billy, and bit by bit it metabolised the ink-man. The wall was rising again, and Byrne was falling to the ground.

  Grisamentum sent out anguish that made the house quake. He slipped out of selfness like all the rest of him, in the tide, in the drains. He was overwritten. He was effaced by ink that, as it won, in an instant’s satisfaction returned to its unthinking form and fell out of the air like dark rain.

  THE WALL WAS BACK. THE KITCHEN WAS BACK. THE WET HOUSE WAS full again of dead fish.

  “What did you do?” Byrne screamed at Billy. “What did you do?”

  The sense, all sense, of Grisamentum, was gone. There was only the undead Architeuthis, still moving, stinking, chemical in its tank, poor skin flaking, poor tentacles palsied, drenched in ink that was nothing, now, but dark grey-brown liquid.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  THE GUNFARMERS RAN. WHY WOULD THEY STAY? BYRNE STAYED. Why, and where, would she go? She let Billy disarm her. She ran her fingers through the water on the floor.

  “Nice one, rudeboy,” Collingswood said to Billy.

  He sat with his back to the streaming walls. London was safe, Billy kept thinking, not subject to that cosmic scriptic totalitarianism. He heard Saira and Simon coming, having seen their enemies run. Collingswood turned as they entered.

  “Alright, nobody move,” she said. “This is the police.” They stared at her. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “What happened, Billy? Jesus, look at that thing. And it’s fucking moving.” Architeuthis wriggled sluggishly.

  Collingswood took half-hold of Byrne, who slumped and did not try to fight.

  “Where’s your ghost?” Billy said to Simon.

  “… I think it’s gone.” They heard sirens, the swish of wheels on the sea-wet street. Police came to the house, in not a very long time.

  “Hi Baron,” Billy said, as Baron came blinking in, pistol outstretched, blinking at the sea ruin. Baron and his officers stared at the twitching squid, the exhausted fighters.

  “Billy,” Baron said. “Billy bloody Harrow, as I live and breathe …”

  “Boss,” said Collingswood, and turned her back. “See you made it.” She lit a cigarette.

  “What the bloody hell have you lot been up to
?” Baron said.

  “Want me to fill you in?” Collingswood said.

  “No Vardy?” Billy said.

  Baron shrugged. “You’re coming with me, Billy.”

  “Ataboy boss,” said Collingswood. “That’s sorted them.”

  “Enough of your shit, Kath,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you.” Billy nodded. “As long as I can sleep.”

  “What are the plods going to make of this?” Baron said.

  “Collingswood’ll do you a report,” Billy said.

  “Doubt it,” she said. She was looking around the room, squinting, sniffing, knacking. “Hang on.”

  Billy approached the Architeuthis. Baron watched and let him go. He whispered to it as if it were a skittish dog. “Hello,” he said to the preserved eight-metre many-armed newborn thing, moving in the dregs of its preserver, slathering itself with its prehensile undead arms, pining for the ullage.

  “It ain’t finished,” Collingswood said, in a dead voice.

  “Look,” Billy said to the Architeuthis. It wriggled its wrist-thick arms. “You sorted it. Made us safe.”

  A squelch answered him. Collingswood was breathing deep and looking at him with some kind of ragged expression. Saira was frowning. Billy heard the wet sound again.

  It was the fattest pile of fish-flesh he had noticed. He saw its glowering eyes. Something switched one side to the other. It was a ceratioid enormity, a huge anglerfish beached and collapsing under its own weight. It struggled to open the snaggled split of its mouth. It watched him come and swung again the organic spit before it—its lure, a still-glowing snare on a limb-long spur from its forehead. It wagged it side to side. Was it trying to fool him into its mouth, even now as it drowned in air?

  No. The motion of its bait-flesh had none of the fitful jerk of little swimming life that it would mimic to hunt. It tick-tocked the lure in what was not a fish motion at all, but a human one. Speaking his language. The motion of its lure was the wag of a correcting finger. He had said to the Architeuthis specimen, You made us safe, and the sea said no, no, no, no, no.

  “What the hell?” Billy whispered.

  “What does it mean?” Saira said. “What’s happening?”

  “It is not finished,” Collingswood said. “Oh shitting fuck.” She was bleeding. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. She spat the cigarette and blood away. “It just got a bloodyfuck sight closer.”

  Billy closed his eyes. He was trembling, a preemptive allergy to whatever was to happen.

  “It’s still …” he said. To his shock, he felt his hands yanked behind him. Baron had cuffed him. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s all about to burn.”

  “Shut your cakehole, you,” Baron said. He indicated one of his men to cuff Saira too.

  “Oh, something’s very fucking up,” Collingswood said. “Boss, don’t be a prick.” Sensitives all across the heresiopolis must be praying to be wrong, for something other than the burnt nothing they felt fast coming.

  “Let me go,” Billy said.

  “Baron, wait,” Collingswood said.

  “It never made any sense,” Saira said to Billy. They stared at each other. “No matter how powerful kraken ink is, there was no way it could have … let him end everything. In fire. Even if he wanted to, which why …?”

  “Boss,” said Collingswood. “Give them a second.”

  “What makes everything stop?” Saira said. “Fire, the squid, the …”

  Billy stared, and thought, and remembered. Things he had heard and seen, moments, from weeks and weeks before.

  “You end to start again,” he said. “From the beginning. So you burn backward. This isn’t an end … This is a rebooting.”

  “Get out,” Baron said. “Shift, Harrow.”

  “How?” said Saira to Billy.

  “Burn out whatever set us in the wrong direction. If you want to run a different program. Oh my God, this was never about the poor squid … it was a bystander. We started this. You did. Fitch kept saying it got closer, the harder you lot tried to protect it. You brought it to attention.” There was a straining sound. Everyone looked up. That was the sky stretching, ready to break into flames.

  “How far to the Darwin Centre?” Billy said. “How far to the museum?”

  “Four, five miles,” Collingswood said.

  “Get out,” Baron, uselessly, said.

  “It’s too far … Baron, can you send a message to … You need to get someone …”

  “Shut up or I will pepper-spray you,” Baron said. “I’m sick of this.”

  “Boss, shut up,” Collingswood said. She shook her head. Pointed, and Baron blinked in outrage, suddenly unable to speak. “What you saying, Harrow?”

  Something new had walked when the Londonmancers had learnt of Grisamentum’s plan, when Al Adler had indulged the traditions and respect his boss had taught him and gone for a supposedly useless reading. The new thing had grown stronger into itself when the kraken was taken and the alternatives narrowed. But it was after that that the memory angels had gone for it, that its sentience, its meta-selfhood, had become great enough.

  “Why’s the angel of memory not here?” Billy said. “It’s supposed to be my guardian angel, right? It wants to protect me, right, and to beat this bloody prophecy, right? So why isn’t it here? What’s it got to do that’s more important?”

  Billy knew exactly where he had been when that last phase had begun, and what he had been showing to whom. He knew what was the concatenate development that had made the sea, that soup of life, what it was, and why it had sensed it was under threat. He knew what was happening, and why, and at whose hand, and he could not get anyone else where they needed to be, and he could not explain fast enough.

  He needed to be at the Darwin Centre, now. “Oh, God,” he breathed, and slumped, then stood up straight. The anglerfish had stopped moving. Billy silently said good-bye to everything.

  “Simon,” he said. “Simon,” he ordered. “You know the bearings of the Darwin Centre. The heart of it. Get me there, now. Now.”

  Simon hesitated. Baron strained and failed to speak. “But you know what that means. That’s how I …”

  “Put. Me. There.” Simon would not disobey that voice. Billy tried quickly to catch everyone’s eye. Saira half understanding, stricken. Simon, miserable at committing murder again. Baron actually shouting, quite unheard. Collingswood nodded at him, like a soldier saying good-bye.

  There was the shimmered static sound, a muffled cry as Billy made a noise, the last thing he would ever do, as light enveloped him from the inside, faded out and he was gone, and Baron was tugging at nothing.

  Chapter Eighty

  AND THE SMELL OF THE SEA (SEEMED TO) EBB, SUDDENLY replaced with chemical. Light shimmied in front of Billy’s eyes, different from how it had (not) been in his eyes a moment before. He knew he remembered nothing, that these were rather images he was born with. But he would not think about that now.

  He was inside of the tank room, in the Darwin Centre. Across from him, beyond two rows of steel tanks, was Vardy. Who turned.

  Billy had time to see that the work surface in front of Vardy was littered with vials, tubes and beakers, liquids bubbling, electric cells. He had time to see that Vardy was aiming a pistol at him, and he dropped. The bullet went above him, bursting a thigh-high bottle of long-preserved monkeys. They slumped as reeking preservative sprayed. Billy strained against the handcuffs that still (so to speak) constrained him. He stayed below the level of the steel and crawled. Another shot. Glass and Formalin littered the floor ahead of him, and an eviscerated dolphin baby flopped in his path.

  “Billy,” said Vardy, his voice grim, terse, as ever, just the same. It could be a statement, a greeting, a curse. When Billy tried to creep closer another bullet ruined another specimen. “I’ll kill you,” said Vardy. “The angel of memory couldn’t stop me, you’re certainly not going to.”

  There was a jabbering, a tiny high-pitched mouthing-off. Through cr
acks between furniture, Billy saw on the side a tiny raging figure. It was the mnemophylax—a bottle-of-Formalin body, bone arms and claws, a skull head, snapping like a guard dog. It was under a bell jar. Vardy had not even bothered to kill it. It had come and gone so many times, had emerged and been dissipated so often, it was tiny. A finger-sized glass tube that might have been used to contain one insect, and its limbs must have been, what, mouse legs? The skull that topped it was from some pygmy marmoset or something. It was a joke, a little animate failure like a cartoon.

  “What did you do with the pyro?” Billy called.

  Vardy said. “Cole’s right as rain. Did exactly as I asked—wouldn’t you, if you had it patiently explained that your daughter was in my protective custody?”

  “So you got what you needed. Time-fire.”

  “Between the two of them, I did.” Vardy fired again and ruined an eighty-year-old dwarf crocodile. “Been trying versions out and I think we’re good. Stay where you are, Billy, I can hear every move you make.”

  “Kata …”

  “Katachronophlogiston. Shut up, Billy. It’ll be finished soon.”

  Billy huddled. It was him who had given Vardy the idea. The prophecy had given rise to itself. It had snared him and Dane and his friends because they had paid it attention like it was a disease, a pathological machine. He cursed it without sound. That was what the angel of memory had been fighting, that certitude, struggling for the fact of itself. So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated. There was a clink as the phylax jumped up and down and banged its tiny skull head on the underside of the jar that jailed it.

  The noise of porting came again. The shadows and reflections shifted. The Architeuthis in its tank had returned to the place from where it had been stolen. Billy stared at it. Again, the eyeless thing seemed to try to look at him. It wriggled its coiling zombie arms. What the fuck? Billy thought.

  “You brought it to life?” Vardy said. “Whatever for?”