China Mieville - Kraken

“Fo,” she said. “Iff it? Iff it the work of Goff and Fubby?” Baron did, in fact, briefly, laugh. “Iff it their MO?”

And there was the problem. Goss and Subby had no such thing as an MO. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood peered at the preserved man. They referred to their notes, made more, circumnavigated the corpse, muttered to themselves and each other.

“All we can say for sure,” said Baron at last, peering, leaning in, “is that so far as we know, there’s no record of them having done anyone in like this before. I pulled the files. Vardy?”

Vardy shrugged. “We’re flying blind,” he said. “We all know that. But you want my opinion? Ultimately I think… my opinion’s no. What I know of their methods, it’s always been up-close, hands, bones. This is… something else. I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t that, I don’t think.”

“Alright,” said Baron. “So we’re after Goss and bloody Subby, and we’re also looking for someone else, who pickles their enemies.” He shook his head. “Lord, for a bloody Grievous Bodily Harm. Alright, ladies and gents, let’s get moving on this fellow. We need an ID on the poor sod ASAP. Among many other bloody things.”

INTO NEW LONDON? THE CITY’S VAST UNSYMPATHETIC ATTENTION’S on you, the Teuthex said. You’re hunted. Billy imagined himself emerging big-eyed as a fish, and London-where the Tattoo, Goss, Subby, the workshop waited-noticing. Oh there you are.

He walked almost as if free under the city. More than once Krakenists passed him and stared and he stared back at them, but they did not interrupt him. In places the grey bas-reliefs of cephalopods were crumbled and beneath were antique bricks. He found a door into a bright-lit room.

It made him gasp. It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church’s holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

Billy read titles on his way down. A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur’ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. A Pulitzer medal escutcheon stapled to a single page of one book, on which the line “Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness” was the only part left visible below paint. The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch, nailed upside down like something unholy.

Tennyson and a book of poems by Hugh Cook faced each other, open to competing pages. Billy read the counter to Alfred Lord.

THE KRAKEN WAKES

The little silver fish

Scatter like shrapnel

As I plunge upward

From the black underworld.

The green waves break from my sides

As I roll up, forced by my season,

And before the tenth second

I can feel my own heat-

The wind can never cool as oceans do.

By mid-morning,

My skin has sweated into agony.

The turmoil of my intestines

Bloats out against my skin.

I’m too sick to struggle-I hang

In the thermals of pain,

Screaming against the slow, slow, slow

Rise toward descent.

And the madness of my pain

Seems to have infected everything-

Cities hack each other into blood;

Ships sink in firestorm; armies

Flail with sticks and crutches;

Obesity staggers toward coronary

Down the streets of starvation.

“Jesus,” Billy whispered.

Samizdat, sumptuous hardbacks, handwritten texts, dubious-looking output from small presses. Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup.

We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.

This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.

He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.

Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.

AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room’s raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.

“Hi,” she said, shy. “It’s an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there’s looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said.” Billy blinked. “Teuthex said do you want to come, and they’d be glad if you was… if you want follow me because they’re waiting.”

He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex’s; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.

“Billy,” said Moore after a moment. “Please join us.”

“I protest,” someone said. There were murmurs.

“Billy, please join us,” Moore said.

“What is this?” Billy said.

“There’s never been a time like this,” Moore said. “Are you interested in the future?” Billy said nothing. “Do you ever read your horoscope?”

“No.”

“Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”

“Might be,” Dane said.

“They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.

“This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.

“What’s…?” Billy said.

“Well you may ask,” said Dane.

“Voices of the city,” Moore said.

“They wish.”

“Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”

“Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition…”

“Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.