Kraken

by China Miéville

“Vardy, please don’t,” Billy said. “This won’t work, this’ll never work. It’s over, Vardy, and your old god lost.”

  “It may not,” Vardy said. There was the noise of combustion from his workstation. “Work. It may not. But it may. You’re right—he did lose, my god, and I cannot forgive the cowardly bastard for that. Nothing bloody ventured, say I.”

  “You really think they’re that powerful? That symbolic?” Billy crept on.

  “It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps by now you know. It’s all a matter of making an argument. That’s why I wasn’t too bothered by Griz. Is that where you’ve been, with him? With a category error like that in his plan …” He shook his head. Billy wondered how long ago Vardy had insighted what Grisamentum had in mind, and how. “Now, these things were the start of it. They’re where the argument started.”

  Billy crept close to the real targets of the time-fire, the real subject of the predatory prophecy. Not and never the squid, which had only ever been a bystander, caught up by proximity. Those other occupants of the room, in their nondescript cabinet, like any other specimen, exemplary and paradigmatic. The preserved little animals of Darwin’s Beagle voyage.

  THIS WAS A FIERY REBOOTING. UPLOADING NEW WORLDWARE.

  He had remembered Vardy’s melancholy, the rage in him, and what Collingswood had once said. She was right. Vardy’s tragedy was that his faith had been defeated by the evidence, and he could not stop missing that faith. He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years. And that was unbearable to him. He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right.

  Vardy did not want to eradicate the idea of evolution: he wanted to rewind the fact of it. And with evolution—that key, that wedge, that wellspring—would all those other things follow, the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth.

  And he was persuaded, and was trying to persuade the city and history, that it was in these contemplated specimens, these fading animals in their antique preserve, that evolution had come to be. What would evolution be if humans had not noticed it? Nothing. Not even a detail. In seeing it, Darwin had made it be, and always have been. These Beagle things were bloated.

  Vardy would burn them into un-having-been-ness, unwind the threads that Darwin had woven, eradicate the facts. This was Vardy’s strategy to help his own unborn god, the stern and loving literalist god he had read in texts. He could not make it win—the battle was lost—but he might make it have won. Burn evolution until it never was and the rebooted universe and the people in it might be, instead, created, as it and they should have been.

  It only happened that night because Billy and his comrades had made it that night, had provoked the end-war, and this chaos and crisis. So Vardy had known when he had to act.

  “It won’t work,” Billy said again, but he could feel the strain in time and the sky, and it seemed very much as if it would work. The bloody universe was plastic. Vardy held a Molotov cocktail.

  “Look,” said Vardy. “Bottle magic.” Filled with the phlogiston he had coerced Cole to make, with his daughter’s untutored help, at threat of his daughter’s life. A combusting tachyon flame. It roared with inrushing sound, illumined Vardy’s face.

  He brought it closer, and its glow lit the pickled frogs within a jar. They shifted. They shrank in the time-blistering warmth, tugged their limbs into their trunks. They became more paltry, ungainly long-tailed legless tadpoles. He held the flame so it licked the glass of their jar, and after a second of warming it burst into sand and sent the tadpoles spraying. They reversed and undid their having been and shrank as they fell, and never were, and nothing hit the floor.

  Vardy turned to the shelf of Darwin’s specimens and raised his arm.

  Billy struggled to his feet. He could think only, Not like this. He would try to spill the fire. Perhaps it would reverse the life cycle of the heavy-duty floor, rubbers separating, the chemicals racing back to elemental forms. But his hands were behind him and he was far too far away.

  “No!” Billy wheezed, bleeding.

  The shadows shed by fire danced over labels handwritten by Charles Darwin. Billy sprawled flat like a mudfish. With a bark of religious joy, Vardy threw the time-flaming missile.

  • • •

  IT FLEW AND TURNED AS IT FLEW. BILLY’S ARMS WERE TRAPPED. BUT there were other arms aplenty in that room.

  The undead specimen Architeuthis shot out its long hunting limbs all the way across the room, from far away. A last predation. It caught the bottle. Took it from the air.

  Vardy stared. Vardy screamed in rage.

  The time-fire was touching the Architeuthis’s skin, and was burning. The zombie squid’s second hunting arm whipped Formalin-heavy up, around Vardy’s waist with a thwack. It coiled him in. It whipped the bottle toward its mouth. Vardy howled as its shorter arms spread to receive him.

  Vardy screamed. The time-fire was roaring, and spreading. The squid was shrinking. Vardy’s arms and legs were shortening.

  The squid looked at Billy. He could never put into precise words what it was in that gaze, those sudden eyes, what the bottled specimen communicated to him, but it was a fellowship. Not servility. It did not obey. But it did what it did deliberately, offered it up and looked at him in good-bye.

  The time-fire shrank it further, cleared the deadness from its skin, made it smooth. A selfless selfishness. Without evolution, what would it and its siblings be? The deep gods were not this thing’s siblings: it let itself be taken for the sake not of kraken but of the exemplae, all these specimens around them, of all shapes, these bottled science gods.

  The tank was roaring with fire. The flesh was burning younger. There was a last flurry of combat. Silhouetted in the glow, Billy saw a baby screaming adult fury at the little arm-length squid that encoiled it. Both were on fire. Then both, still wrestling, were hot embryos, that intertwined and stilled in grotesque protoplasmic détente, and were burning gone.

  The sides of the tank fell in, into smouldering crystals of ore and chemical and then atoms before they could even shatter.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  THE LAST OF THE BURNING EBBED AWAY. THE LIGHT OF FIRE WAS gone. Only the glow of fluorescent bulbs.

  Something a little rucked

  singed and melted

  and

  There was an inrush growth rejig. An imperfect healing but healing. A huge, epochal sealing. London reskinned. Fire scorched and then went out.

  And there was Billy in the new skin, there in time. There was a Billy. Billy breathing out from something, and he breathed in, shook with release. He was in a room.

  DARWIN’S SPECIMENS WERE SAFE. BILLY TOUCHED THEM, ONE BY one, stretching out his tethered hands behind him. He ran his fingers along the steel surface where no Architeuthis had ever been. The tiny mnemophylax watched from under its bell jar. Its bone head tracked his movements.

  Nothing had gone. Billy thought that very exactly.

  Billy knew with a strange precision that in all his recent adventures, the specificities of which were slightly vague, no giant cryptid animal had ever been here in this room. The angel of memory rolled on its tiny base and shook its skull head. Billy laughed and was not sure why. There was a pyromancer who was alive and waiting for his daughter, because there was no one nor had there ever been who could have blackmailed him with her. Time felt a little raw. The threat that Billy had defeated in this room, and it had been baleful, had neither involved anyone, nor existed. He laughed.

  The sky was different. Billy could feel it beyond the roof. Different from how it had not been. The strain was gone. The end of the world, a true finish, was only one very unlikely possibility among many.

  There were details missing. Billy was canny enough by now, after everything, to know what that might mean. There was a burn scar in history. There was still a smell of burning. Billy was definitely descended from simians and ultimately from fish in the sea.

&nbs
p; He met the gaze of the mnemophylax across the room, eye socket to eye. Though it had no face to crease he would have said it smiled back. It wriggled and wrote with its tiny fingers on the inside of its glass—he could not tell what. It opened and closed its mouth. It was memory. It shook its head. It put its hair’s-breadth fingerbone to its nonexistent lips. Its tiny bones fell, its skull settled into nothing, it became a test tube and some specimen rubbish.

  Billy sat on the steel where no great mollusc had been. He sat as if he were a specimen. He wondered what searing thing had not been overcome. He waited for whatever would happen, whoever would find him.

  It was Baron and Collingswood who came, at last, into the room. They were not missing any colleague, Billy thought, carefully. They’d never had a third in their crew, though they stood often a little close together, a little close to a wall, as if they would be framed with another presence. They recalled enough, and they knew that something had happened, had finished.

  Billy stood and waved with his handcuffed arms. The cops picked over the ruins of glass, spilt preservative, scattered specimen remains, scattered by no one.

  “Billy,” Baron said.

  “It’s okay now, I think,” Billy said. They stared at each other a while. “Where’s Simon?”

  “He went,” Collingswood said.

  Baron and Collingswood muttered together. “Fuck this,” Collingswood said. She undid Billy’s locks.

  “What’s the crime?” Baron said to Billy. “You nearly came to work for me. What animal?” he said. “There’s never been one here.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “Piss off,” he said, not unfriendly.

  Billy smiled slowly. “I wouldn’t have been—,” he started to say. Collingswood interrupted.

  “Please,” she said. “Please just sod off. You were offered a job a while back and you said no.”

  “Whatever the circumstances,” Baron said.

  “We may be a man down,” Collingswood said, “but we were always a man down.” She sniffed. Looked at him thoughtfully. “Burns don’t heal pretty,” she said. “Always a little melty-looking scar. You can’t fuss about that sort of shit, Billy.”

  Billy held out his hand. Baron raised an eyebrow and shook it. Billy turned and looked at Collingswood, standing at the edge of the room. She waved at him.

  “Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy,” she said. She smiled and winked at him. “You and me, eh? What didn’t we do?” She blew him a quick kiss. “See you around,” she said. “Till next apocalypse, eh. I know your bloody type, Billy. Be seeing you.” She nodded farewell. He did not disobey.

  BILLY WALKED THE CORRIDORS, ROUTES HE KNEW INTIMATELY, THAT he had not walked for weeks. He mooched. He left the Darwin Centre and reentered a night still frenetic with fights, thefts and heretic prophecies, but increasingly, epically sheepish, uncertain of its own anxieties, unsure as to why it felt like a final night, when clearly it was not and never had been.

  In the tank room, Baron was scribbling in his notebook.

  “Right,” he said. “Honest to bloody blimey I’ve got no idea how we’re going to write this up,” he said. “Shall we, Collingswood?” He spoke briskly and did not meet her eye.

  She paused before she answered him.

  “I’m putting in for a transfer,” she said. She met his shocked eyes. “Time there was another FSRC cell, ‘boss. Boss.’” She air-quoted. “I’m going for promotion.” Collingswood smiled.

  PART SEVEN

  HERO = BOTTLE

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  IN A QUIET PLACE, BY THE RAILWAY LINES IN A CUT IN THE CITY, discarded statues edged the stays. In a long-term moment of urban sentimentality, they were a line of retirement for no-longer revered nor desired mementos. In them Wati slept. Only his friends knew this.

  He had crept over from Marge’s crucifix after the end of the uncertain catastrophe that had not happened. He slept like one defeated. London was saved from whatever danger it was he had helped save it from, had there been such a thing, but his union had lost its fight, and the new contracts were punitive, feudal. Billy was glad for him that Wati could sleep through the worst of this, though he would excoriate himself for it when he woke, and would start the task of rebuilding the movement again.

  “Are you sad?” Saira said. She sat opposite him. They were together in his flat. After all that night, after all the everything, he had found her. He had needed to be with someone who had seen whatever it was he had seen.

  He had called Collingswood first. “Fuck off, Harrow,” she had said, friendly enough. He had heard a squeal of static like the enthusiastic voice of a pig, and she had broken the connection. When he had tried to redial, his phone had become a toaster.

  “Alright, alright,” he had said. He had bought a new telephone and not called her again, but had tracked down Saira instead. It had not been hard. She retained the expertise she had learned, but she was not a Londonmancer anymore. Mostly she used her hungover knack to roll bits of London between her fingers until they were cigarettes, which she would smoke.

  Neither of them were quite sure of details. They had seen the assault on the sea, though for what purpose they could not remember. “Are you?” she said. She spoke to Billy hesitantly. She was shy of this topic, despite all the time they had spent together recently.

  “Not really,” he said. “I never knew him.”

  The him was the man who had died: the earlier Billy, the first Billy, the Billy Harrow who had teleported out of the sea-house, in which they had all been for reasons they could all remember, though were not perfectly impressed with. He had been blown into bits smaller than atoms.

  “He was brave,” Billy said. “He did what he had to do.” Saira nodded. He did not feel that he was praising himself, though he knew that he, this Billy, must be brave in exactly, precisely the same degree as his predecessor.

  “Why did you … he … do it?” she said.

  Billy shrugged. “I don’t know. He had to. Like Dane said—you remember Dane?” Dane had died. That he was sure of. “Before the, before Grisamentum did him in.” Grisamentum was gone too. “There are a lot of people who don’t think twice about travelling like that. It’s only a problem if you know.” It all depended on how you looked at it whether you were troubled by the fact that it was always fatal.

  “I keep trying to catch myself out,” he said. “I keep trying to suddenly see if I remember things that only he could know. The first one. Secrets.” He laughed. “I always do.” Billy did not feel proprietorial about the memories he had inherited, when he had been born out of the molecules of the air, in the tank room, days before, at the dying end of a catastrophe.

  I miss Dane, he thought. He was not sure of anything very concrete about Dane, not even in fact that he missed him, exactly; but whenever he thought of it, Billy was very sad that what had happened to Dane had. He deserved better.

  • • •

  WHEN MARGE AND PAUL RANG HIS BELL, BILLY INVITED THEM IN, but they waited instead on the pavement. He came down. This was a valedictory organised in advance. Everyone trod carefully with each other just then.

  Paul was in his old jacket. It was cleaned and patched. It would never look new, but it looked good. The scratches on his face were healing. Marge looked the same as she always had. They greeted each other with awkward heartfelt hugs.

  “Where you going?” Billy said.

  “Don’t know yet,” said Paul. “Maybe the country. Maybe another city.”

  “Really?” Billy said. “Really?”

  Paul shrugged. Marge smiled. Every time Billy had spoken to her since he had saved history from whatever, she had been buoyed up, more the more she found out about where she lived now.

  “It’s all bollocks,” said Paul. “You think this is the only place gods live?” He smiled. “There’s no getting away from that now. Wherever you go, that’ll be somewhere a god lives.”

  Once, Billy and Marge had sat down together, and over emotional hours he had told her what had happened to
Leon—his murder at the hands of Goss and Subby, as part of the huge plot, the details of which were still pretty lacunaed. The wrong, the damaged edges of the details frustrated them both.

  “You could ask Paul’s back what really happened,” Billy had said. “It was that bastard’s plan. I think.”

  “How would we do that?” she said. “You think he’d even know, anyway?”

  There were still those in the heresiopolitan wing of London who obeyed Paul as if he were the Tattoo, but not many. Most did not know details, but knew that he was not what he had been. Now Paul was a free operator, a roaming prison for a displaced kingpin. The Tattoo’s troops were routed and scattered after the recent, most confusingly vague near-apocalypse.

  “How would we do that?” Marge said again.

  They were not watched, the streets contained no one paying attention. Paul untucked his shirt, turned and showed Billy his skin.

  The Tattoo’s eyes widened and narrowed frantically as he tried to speak. As if Billy would respect or listen to him. Across the lower part of Paul’s back more ink had been added. He had had inked tattooed stitches, sewing up the erstwhile crime lord’s mouth. Billy could hear an mmm mmm mmm.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Paul said, “we had to find a savvy tattooist. And he kept trying to move, to purse his lips and that. Took a while.”

  “You weren’t tempted to get him removed?” Billy said.

  Paul put his shirt back on. He and Marge smiled. She raised her eyebrows. “If he gives me too much shit I might blind him,” Paul said. Sadism? Really? Billy would have said not. Justice? Power.

  “You’re never going to tell us what did happen, are you?” Marge said suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” Billy said. “Goss killed Leon. That’s what started this. For no reason at all.” They let that stand. “But then Paul killed Goss. You were there.”

  “I did,” Paul said.

  “I was,” Marge said. “Okay.” She even smiled. “Okay. And what else? What else happened?”