China Mieville: This Census-Taker

With as long a run-up as I could take I might be able to jump all the way across, but the floor was uneven and I might trip on my way and pitch forward, or reach the other side but tip back, and go down, into the dark to the other peak.

The cave wall had its handholds. Outside the sun was firing up the flanks of the hill and somewhere on them my father was coming back to the house, where by the front door the man in his dusty suit was waiting. I couldn’t climb into the pantry and there were no hollow trees nearby.

I took hold of the wall. It felt easier to hold myself there than it had before. I gripped. I sidled, trembling, and I kept going, and tried very hard not to think as I held tight on to the outcrops that I was now above the hole. I didn’t look behind me or down. I grabbed the extrusions and shuffled my poor feet like little animals into nooks and leaned on them to see if they’d take me, striving for the right pace, slow enough that I would not fall, quick enough that this would be over soon.

—

It was. I was there in the dark beyond the gap.

I pushed myself backward off the rock and landed in the rear part of the cave, the hollow beyond the pit, where I’d never been. I lay a long time gasping in the cold of the passage, trying to still my shaking limbs.

It was another country. I stared across at places I’d stood before. I was giddy and proud. I regarded the hole. I turned and went deeper into the hill, pausing to let my eyes adjust in shadows that were dense enough that I hallucinated, only a little, tiny points of light that weren’t there.

I thought of kingdoms and crystal caves and the tunnel continued a few meters and the walls narrowed and I was in a shaft, a wedge which then closed up altogether so I had stone against my chest and my back and I tried a moment to press on, luxuriating in the terror of it, the sense that the hill had paused and would at any moment flex and offhandedly crush me.

So I stopped and pulled out of that embrace and sat with my back to the curving cold wall behind the hole, where my father couldn’t touch me. I looked all the way out to where there was light. So deep in the hill even the waning light of the day glowed like a star. I waited.

—

He’s here to count . There’s a counting game, and I whispered its words as crows and magpies landed at the cave mouth, too effaced by light to be much as silhouettes, nothing more than ragged arrivals at the edge of darkness that I recognized by their calls. I sang a song you sing when you play a game of throwing stones. “ Up the wall and down the well and in the boy and out the girl.”

I heard my father.

He called me. I put my hands over my mouth.

He was shouting. My heartbeat was hard enough to make me quake because there he was, a shadow at the entrance, only a little clearer than the fleeing birds. His legs were apart, his hands were up, braced on the top of the stone.

“You know what I hear?” he shouted. “That there’s a man here! Why’s he not long gone with the other tallymen? Why’d you let him in? Know what I hear about this census-taker? This man you’ve let come? Know what I hear?”

He had not gone to the house, he had come straight to the hole, to me. How did he know where I would be, when even I hadn’t? I held my mouth shut with my fingers.

“In town they told me there’s a man who’s come asking questions and they say he came here to speak to you . Where are you? What’ve you said to him? What’s he doing here asking what isn’t his business?”

It was his business. The man had said. My father stepped into the tunnel. He seemed to fill it, to block the light. “Come on!” He shouted louder than I knew he could. “Where are you? They were recalled! Why’s this one still counting? This man thinks he knows what I’ve done? When? Always?”

I didn’t speak or move. I was before him, against the rock, motionless in the dark shadow beyond the hole, a new place. He came to the edge of the rubbish pit and still he didn’t see me there in front of him with my hands up.

“He’s waiting to talk to me?” he shouted. “Is that right? Is that what I hear?”

He turned at last. I watched his back. He was still calling when he walked away.

“I’ll talk, then,” he yelled to the hillside. “You better come find me. You better come talk too. To me.”

I stayed quiet until I was certain he was beyond hearing then slumped and my held breath came out in a long whine. It was a long time until my trembling started to ebb at last and I could whisper another game song.

Very slowly the light in the cave mouth waned and I was more able to see the entrance itself, now that glow no longer effaced it. It was like an open eye, I thought — then I thought, No, it’s like a closed eye. Abruptly and precisely it was like the oval shape I see when I shut my eyes tight, the ebbing red glow like an opening leading into or out of something. I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I’d seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn’t hard for me to call to mind.

If I could squeeze my lids so tight that it almost brought me a headache — for long enough, in a bright enough place — the image would open with hazy edges like something living and particular and it would leave within its center a smaller oval presence, floating.

I’d spent years making this appear in my inner eyes, and when I did so I would think myself in a cave looking out at a red sunset. Floating there in the cave mouth, I would imagine a boulder blocking all but the edge of my view.

I opened my eyes in a real cave, for a glimpse at the boulderless entrance beyond the split. It was filled with twilight. I closed my eyes again.

After a time I heard a scuffing, then laborious breaths.

—

“How did you get over there?”

It was the census-taker’s voice. It was strained and not without admiration.

“I see you,” he said.

He hissed as he breathed. I heard his burdened steps.

“Now,” he said. He spoke in little bursts. “Don’t,” he said, “open,” he said, “your eyes.”

He didn’t stagger. He trod slowly and deliberately and with care. “Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “What do you see?”

“The entrance to a tunnel,” I said without hesitation. “Like this one but red.”

“What else?”

“A rock floating in the middle.” This wasn’t true: I couldn’t see that now, only vague dark forms. If I’d been older and seen more things in the world they might have put me in mind of fleeting deep-sea things.

“Tell me about the rock,” he said. He hefted something. I heard a burden fall to the ground. “Now look carefully inside your eyes and tell me what you see there. Don’t look here. Do you promise me?”

“It’s like an egg.” I considered what I’d see floating in the cave mouth behind my eyes. “It’s the shape of an egg…”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

He grunted in satisfaction and exhaled and I heard the scrape of a mass pushed forward.

“Tell me,” he said, “what you want to see.”

That caught me up short. I had nothing to say. Which meant there was a silence during which I could hear him shoving.

“Anything,” he prompted.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe — anything?”

“Anything!” he said. “Wait now,” he said. “Eyes very closed. Quiet now one second.”

He hissed and I heard stones pattering and the sharp ricochets as they bounced below me and then a scraping roll and several hard diminishing thumps and a crack below as something heavy fell.