China Mieville: This Census-Taker

I was so surprised I stopped at the edge of the rough and watched him. He turned to face me and walked backward to keep up with his mule. He beckoned as he went so I stepped after him among the stones, pulling my goat. It came, complaining.

“Careful,” the man said. “We’re going wherever there are people to count.” The mule sniffed but I thought it sounded happy.

The coming darkness and the picking of the plant life against my ragged trousers and the sway of our step-by-step descent narcotized me so I felt myself retreat behind my eyes, watching from a long way back, listening to my own body until after some hours at the start of deep night as we approached a spreading canopy, the foothills and the hill’s forested surrounds, the census-taker woke me for a startled moment by lifting me to put me in the saddle, nestled between bags. I fell asleep again, proper asleep, at once.

Much later I lurched half out of a bad dream with a cry, shaking, my hands clutching for something. Perhaps the animals had sounded. I don’t think so.

We were in the wooded lowland, I realized. We were off the hill.

I looked still sleepily at the flat land that somehow did not shock me alert, or all the way awake.

This Is My Catechism , it says in my second book, a book started, confiscated, pilfered, regained, and that I’ve inherited, that my boss taught me slowly to read, the few scraps left of which I go over many times, and ultimately in which now I write.

And there’d come to be a lot to write, a diaspora of which to make sense. An aftermath of war and commerce. Numbers to run, in as many kinds of places as there are places, cities you could call invisible or uneasy or beleaguered, cities about which I won’t even start to write here, in this part of my second book that can only be a prologue. There would be functions to apply according to instructions, which I can do without insubordination.

My line manager rarely speaks about my predecessor.

It wasn’t my catechism that fronts this, to which I’ve at last responded, with my five words on two lines, and with all of this; it was hers, the message she needed to give me, to give whoever came after her. It is mine now, though. Written with her unorthodox precision and inserted at the start of what would become my second book too, I’ve keyed it many times with the muffled typewriter, with its hacking bird sound: I write it again now, in full, by hand.

The Hope Is So:

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize

Interests. So

Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends.

“I dreamed of the hole,” I murmured. I rolled with the mule. I heard the man and his voice calmed me. He was close and I was unafraid.

I dreamed of the hole, I said. I remember saying it, but I don’t remember the dream exactly, though all my memories before that moment and after — forever after, you might say — had and have to them a must and coldness that can only have come from inside a hill. I’ve supposed that these recollections are what make me fretful at introspective times, so I believe what I said was true, but too, I think I dreamed of another city than that conical one of the discarded, that I’d visited that place I’d started to draw between the flowers on the wall, the uncertain charcoal city bustling with citizens of endless kinds and business, the limits of which spread out so every country I would ultimately come to, in which to count those I’d learn are my scattered compatriots and my business, would be in its outskirts, and I according to some purpose looking for the message left for me there, and counting there too.

There were rises in the distance, against the clouded sky behind us. I counted absences in my head. One of the rises must have been the hill, with its counter-hill, and its bridge, from where I’d come, from which my manager and I were just newly descended.

For all their help with this book, my deepest thanks to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Rupa DasGupta, Maria Dahvana Headley, Simon Kavanagh, Tessa McWatt, Susie Nicklin, Sue Powell, Max Schaefer, and Rosie Warren. I’m very grateful to all at Macmillan and Picador, especially Nick Blake, Robert Clark, Ansa KhanKhattack, Neil Lang, Ravi Mirchandani, and Lauren Welch; and all at Random House, in particular Keith Clayton, Penelope Haynes, David Moench, Tricia Narwani, Scott Shannon, David G. Stevenson, Annette Szlachta-McGinn, my editor, Mark Tavani, and Betsy Wilson.

Much of this book was written during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; and then as a residency fellow of the Lannan Foundation, in Marfa, TX. I am profoundly grateful to both organizations for their generous support.

Among the countless writers to whom I’m indebted, I want here to pay particular tribute to Mary Butts, Barbara Comyns, John Hawkes, Jane Gaskell, Denis Johnson, Anna Kavan, Edward St. Aubyn, and Roland Topor.

CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of numerous books, including Three Moments of an Explosion, The City & The City, Embassytown, Railsea , and Perdido Street Station . His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times). He lives and works in London.

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