China Mieville - Kraken

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. Billy stared at Vardy. He had his glasses in his hand, so Vardy was a touch hazy. Billy had actually heard this story, or its outlines, he remembered: an anecdote in a lecture hall. Where they could, his lecturers, with vicarious panache, would spice the stories of their forebears’ theories. They told anecdotes of a polymath Faraday; read Feynman’s achingly sad letter to his dead wife; described Edison’s swagger; eulogised Curie and Bogdanov martyred to their utopian researches. Steenstrup had been part of that dashing company.

The way Vardy spoke was almost as if he could no-shit see Steenstrup’s performance. As if he were looking at the black weapon thing Steenstrup had lifted from the jar. That leviathan part, more like a tool of alien design than any mouth. Preserved, precious, manifest like the finger bone of a saint. Whatever he had claimed, Steenstrup’s bottle had been a reliquary.

“That article,” Vardy said. “It’s a fulcrum. With a certain way of looking at things, it would easily be worth breaking the law for. Because it’s sacred text. It’s gospel.”

BILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD. HE FELT AS IF HIS EARS WERE RINGING.

“And that,” Baron said, audibly amused, “is what the professor gets paid for.”

“What our thieves have been doing is building a library,” said Vardy. “I bet you good money that over the last few months stuff by Verrill and Ritchie and Murray and other, you know, classic teuthic literature has also been nicked.”

“Jesus,” said Billy. “How do you know so much about this?” Vardy swatted the question away-literally, with his hand-as if it were an insect.

“It’s what the man do,” Baron said. “Zero to guru in forty-eight hours.”

“Let’s move on,” said Vardy.

“So,” Billy said. “You think this cult nicked the book, took the squid, and killed that guy? And now they want me?”

“Did I say that?” Vardy said. “I can’t be sure these squiddists did anything. Something doesn’t add up, to be honest.”

Billy started up unhappy performed laughter at that. “D’you think?” he said.

But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”

“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”

The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”

“You going to say this is all a coincidence?” Baron said.

“Your squid just disappeared, right?” Vardy said.

“And no one’s watching you,” Baron said. “And no one did anything to that poor sod downstairs. It was suicide by bottle.”

“And you,” said Vardy, staring at Billy, “you don’t feel anything’s wrong with the world, right now. Ah, you do, though, don’t you? I can see. You want to hear this.”

A silence. “How did they do it?” said Billy.

“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? we can make headway with.”

Vardy walked to the window. He was against its light, a dark shape. Billy could not tell if Vardy was facing him or facing out.

“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might… abjure the world”-he rolled the pomp of the phrase around-“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.” He walked out of the window’s glare. “Or if they have, hello you poor buggers in Freezone, along comes a Council of Trent and the old order bites back. They really have to have their sacraments.” He shook his head.

Billy paced between posters, cheap artworks and pinboard message exchanges between colleagues he did not know. “If you worship that animal… I’ll put it simply,” Vardy said. “You, your Darwin Centre…” Billy did not understand the scorn there. “You and your colleagues, Billy-you put God on display. Now, who would a devotee be not to liberate it?

“It’s lying there pickled. Their touchy hunter god. You can imagine how that plays out in psalms. How God’s described.”

“Right,” Billy said. “Right, you know what? I really need to get out of here.”

Vardy seemed to quote: “‘It moves through darkness, emptying into that ink ink of its own.’ Something like that. Shall we say a black cloud in water already black? There’s a koan for you, Billy. It’s a tactile god with as many tentacles as we have fingers, and is that coincidence? Because that,” he added, in a more everyday voice, “is how this works, you see?”

Baron beckoned Billy to the door. “They’ll have verses about its mouth,” Vardy said behind them. “The hard maw of a sky-bird in the deep trenches of water.” He shrugged. “Something like that. You’re sceptical? Au contraire: it’s a perfect god, Billy. It’s the bloody choicest perfect simon-pure exact god for today, for right now. Because it’s bugger-all like us. Alien. That old beardy bully was never plausible, was he?”

“Plausible enough for you, you bloody hypocrite,” Baron said jovially. Billy followed him into the corridor.

“They venerate the thing,” Vardy said, following. “They have to save it from the insult of what I strongly suspect is your cheerful affection. I bet you have a nickname for it, don’t you?” He tilted his head. “I bet that nickname is ‘Archie.’ I see I’m right. Now, you tell me. What person of faith could possibly allow that?”

THEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND BILLY HAD no idea where they were going. He felt absolutely untethered. As if he were not there. The hallways were all deserted. The darks and woods of the museum closed up behind him.

“How do you…? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.

Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”

They reached an exit Billy had never used, and he gasped in the cool air of the outside. The day blustered: the trees wriggled in wind and clouds raced as if on missions. Billy sat on the stone steps.

“So the guy in the basement…” he said.

“Don’t know yet,” Vardy said. “He got in the way. Dissident, guard, sacrifice, something. At the moment I’m talking about the shape of something.”

“None of this should be your business,” Baron said. With his hands in his pockets he addressed his remarks to one of the building’s stonework animals. The air shoved Billy’s hair and clothes around. “You shouldn’t have to fuss with any of this. But here’s the thing. What with Parnell on the bus, what with that sort of attention, it just seems like for whatever reasons… they’ve noticed you, Mr. Harrow.”

He caught Billy’s eye. Billy twitched in the attention. He glanced around the grounds, beyond the gate to the street, into the shifting plant life. Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom-feeders.

“You’re part of some conspiracy that trapped their god,” Vardy said. “But more than that. You’re the go-to squid guy, Mr. Harrow. You seem to have got someone interested. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a person of interest.”

He stood between Billy and the wind. “You found the squid gone,” he said. “You put it there in the first place. It’s always been you who’s had magic mollusc fingers.” He twiddled his own. “Now you found this dead bloke. Is it any wonder they’re interested?”