China Mieville - Kraken

“Is that…?” one of the guards said. “Who is that?”

“You know who I am?” Dane said. “Yeah you fucking do. Go tell his holiness I’m here and let us in.” Brusque, but with a gentleness Billy could feel, Dane pushed Billy inside.

Beyond the gate the walls were not featureless. Billy’s mouth opened. Still concrete and windowless, the walls were intricately moulded. Stained by London dirt no scrubbing could remove, a nautilus entwined with an octopus, with a cuttlefish, its flattened frilled mantle like a skirt edge. It encoiled limbs with an argonaut bobbing below its extruded eggcase-house. And squid everywhere. Shaped when the walls were wet.

What a corridor, this council-office walkway. A tentacular border of Disney-malevolent vampire squid; ornery Humboldt; whiplash squid in tuning-fork posture. Their bodies were rendered similar sizes, specificities effaced by shared squidness, teuthic quiddity. Their-the word came to Billy and would not lie down-squiddity. Architeuthis in the shabby matter of the building.

The buried room where Dane took Billy was tiny as a ship’s cabin. There was a little bed, a steel toilet. On a table was a plate of curry, a cup of something hot. Billy almost wept at the smell.

“You’re in shock,” Dane said, “and you’re starving and knackered. You don’t understand what’s going on. Get that down you and we’ll talk.”

Dane took a forkful-to show it was safe, Billy thought. He ate. The drink was too-sweet chocolate.

“Where are we?”

“The Teuthex’ll explain.”

What’s a Teuthex? Billy felt like he was swimming. His exhaustion increased. He saw against a dark background. His thoughts faded in and out like a radio station. This was more, he realised, than tiredness.

“Oh,” he said. A welling of alarm.

“Now don’t worry,” said Dane.

“You, what’s, you…” Billy jiggled the cup and stared at it. Put the spiked thing heavily down before he dropped it, as if that mattered. Black came in at him like an ink cloud. “What did you do?”

“Don’t worry,” Dane said.

“You need this,” Dane said.

Dane said another thing but his voice was too far away now. Bastards, Billy tried to say. Part of him told another part of him that Dane would not rescue him just to kill him now, but most of him was too tired to be afraid. Billy was in the dark quiet, and just before it closed behind him and over him he swung his own legs onto the bed and lay down, proud that no one did it for him.

INTO SLEEP’S BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. He heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single minuscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still-still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way above though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

COLLINGSWOOD, WHOSE BRIEF THIS SORT OF THING WAS, HAD spent a couple of hours talking to a woman who referred to herself as an “asset” about some of the esoterica of material science. The woman had emailed a list of names, of researchers and grifters. “This sort of stuff changes all the time,” she had warned. “Can’t vouch for any of them in particular.”

“I called the first couple, guv,” Collingswood said, “but it was a bit tricky on the phone, you get me? Some of them gave me more names. I don’t think any of them knew what I was on about. I need to see them face-to-face. You sure you want to come? Ain’t you got shit to do?” She could rarely parse Baron’s brain, which was to be expected: it was only the inexperienced and unskilled who sent their thinkings all over the place, profligate and foolish.

“Indeed,” Baron said. “But that’s what mobile phones are for, aren’t they? This is the best lead we have.”

They traced a zigzag route through London, Baron in his plain clothes, Collingswood in her costume-like uniform, hoping to surprise their informers into helpful candour. There were not many names on the list-infolding and weightomancy were arcana among the arcane, a geeky byway. Baron and Collingswood went to offices, community colleges, the back rooms of high-street shops. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?” Baron would say, or Collingswood would open with, “What d’you know about making big shit little?”

One name on the list was a science teacher. “Come on, boss, let’s give the class a treat, eh?” Collingswood said, and marched in past pupils gaping from behind Bunsen burners. “George Carr?” Collingswood said. “What do you know about making big shit little?”

“ENJOY THAT?” CARR SAID. THEY WERE WALKING IN THE PLAYGROUND. “What was it, some science teacher tell you you’d never amount to anything?”

“Nah,” she said. “They all knew I’d amount to fucking loads.”

“What the hell does a cult squad want with me?”

“We’re just chasing a few leads, sir,” Baron said.

“Ever flog your skills?” Collingswood said. “Shrinkage for hire?”

“No. I’m not good enough and not interested enough. I get what I need out of it.”

“Which is what?”

“Come on holiday with me one day,” he said. “Three weeks of clothes in one carry-on bag.”

“Could I bring my dog?” Baron said.

“What? No way. Condensing something that complicated’s out of my league. I might just get it in, maybe, but Fido’s not going to be fetching sticks on the beach at the other end.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Sure. There’s a few people could do it.” He stroked his stubble. “Has anyone given you Anders’s name?”

Baron and Collingswood glanced at each other. “Anders?” Baron said.

“Anders Hooper. Runs a shop in Chelsea. Funny little specialist place. He’s very good.”

“So why haven’t we heard of him?” Baron said, waving his list.

“Because he’s only just started. Been doing it about a year, professionally. Now he’s good enough and keen enough to do it for lucre.”

“So how come you’ve heard of him?” Collingswood said.

Carr smiled. “I taught him how to do it. Tell him his Mr. Miyagi says hi.”

HOOPER’S SHOP SHARED SPACE ON A TERRACE WITH A DELICATESSEN, a travel bookshop, a florist. It was called Nippon This! Characters stared from the window with manga enthusiasm beside robot kits and nunchuck tat. Inside, a third of the small shelf space was taken up with books on the philosophy, mathematics, and design of origami. There were stacks of books of fold patterns. Incredible examples-dinosaurs, fish, klein bottles, geometric intricacies, all made from single uncut sheets.