China Miéville - King Rat

The Piper smiled, and Saul smiled back.

He was vaguely aware of words being spoken, felt his feet propel him forward, across the big stage, towards the Piper, who waited for him, something long and glinting in his hand.

‘… to me…’ Saul heard between beats. ‘… dance for me… come…’

He stepped forward, shifting in time to the two tunes he could hear, eager to dance.

But something was wrong.

There was a disturbed moment. Saul hesitated.

The two flutelines were dissonant.

Saul put his foot on the stage and tried to dance, but a shadow had crossed his mind.

The flutes jarred with each other. .

He was suddenly aware of their raucous discord. His hunger and desire burned as strong as ever, but he could not see, he was blind, pulled in different directions, shaken by the aesthetic antiphase of the two flutes.

And as he listened, standing suddenly outside the music, looking in, desperate to get back, he sensed the great cavity between the flutes.

And pushing its way through the gap, vibrating in his gut, ever-present, the foundation of the music, the beginning and the end-point of Jungle, there came the bass.

Saul stood poised, immobile, centre stage.

The flute and the bass surged inside him.

The flutelines swirled around him, inveigling their way past his defences, seducing him, urging him to dance, teasing his rat-mind and his humanity in turn. But something inside him had hardened. Saul was straining for something else. He was listening for the bass.

The words of a hundred slogans raced through his mind, the endlessly sampled Hip Hop and Jungle paeans to the low end.

DJ! Where’s the bass?

Bass! How low can you go?

R-r-r-roll the bass…

Da bass too dark…

Here’s the bass.

Here’s how low the bass can go.

I… I’ll roll with the bass.

Because the bass too dark…

Because the bass is too dark for this, thought Saul suddenly, with shocking clarity, the bass is too dark to suffer this, the insubordinate treble, fuck the treble, fuck the ephemera, fuck the high end, fuck the flute, and as he thought this the flutelines faded in his mind, became nothing more than thin, clashing cacophonies, fuck the treble, he thought, because when you dance to Jungle what you follow is the bass…

Saul rediscovered himself. He knew who he was. He danced again.

This was different. He was fierce, swinging his arms and legs like weapons. He danced with the bassline, rolled over the beats… ignored the flutes.

It was the bass that set the agenda. It was the bass that made the song. It was the bass that united the Junglists, that cemented their community, that built a room full of dancers, something far stronger than this hive mind.

The Piper was still waiting for him. Saul saw a renewed smile spread across his face. He had seen Saul falter. You wanted me to dance, didn’t you? thought Saul. Had to have me dance my way over to you, waltz to my death… and now I’m dancing, you think your treble won, don’t you?

Saul danced closer and closer to the Piper. The Piper held his flute close, flush with his body like a Samurai sword. The Piper’s arms were tense.

Two flutes aren’t enough, thought Saul, giddy with power. He danced on, approaching his enemy. The Piper smiled and raised his right hand, the hand holding the flute, held it high, quivering, ready to strike.

Saul came close enough to touch.

‘Now dance on the spot, ratling,’ said the Piper softly.

He swung the flute.

The strike was cocky, cavalier and ill-timed, the Piper waiting for his prey to walk into the path of the wicked silver club.

Instead, Saul stepped inside the killing blow.

He moved in a blur of rat-speed, channelling all his frenetic panic and power, burning calories from old food. He turned as he stepped forward and reached up with his right hand, grabbing the flute and twisting, spinning round in a full circle, tugging at the cold metal, ripping it out of the Piper’s too-confident fingers and bringing his left arm up and around, looking over his left shoulder as he spun, and slamming his elbow into the Piper’s throat.

The Piper staggered backwards. His eyes bulged and stared at Saul in disbelief. He retched, clutched at his throat, sucked at the air. Saul stalked towards him, holding the flute. The Drum and Bass was pounding in his ears. It wasn’t the Piper’s song any more; it was the drums he heard, the drums and the bass.

‘One plus one equals one, motherfucker,’ he said, and brought the flute up hard under the Piper’s jaw. The Piper staggered back but did not fall. ‘I’m not rat plus man, get it? I’m bigger than either one and I’m bigger than the two. I’m a new thing. You can’t make me dance.’ He slammed the flute against the Piper’s temple, sending the tall figure spinning across the stage in a spray of blood, towards where King Rat still danced.

The Piper twirled an ugly pirouette but still did not fall.

Saul advanced on him, hitting him again and again with the flute, brutal and unforgiving. He punctuated his assault with proclamations.

`Should’ve just killed me. You’re too strong for me, but you had to get cocky. Well, I’m the new blood, motherfucker. I’m more than the sum of my parts.

You can’t play my fucking tune, and your flute means nothing to me.'

With the last strike, the Piper went down in the shadow of King Rat. His legs folded and he sat down hard on the floor, his back to the brick wall. He stared up at Saul, horrified and broken. His face was crushed and spoilt. Blood slid over the silver of the flute. The Piper’s eyes were glazed with agony and with affront, with outrage at this man who would not dance to his tune.

His breath rattled grotesquely in his throat. He fought to speak, failed.

Saul looked up. The dancing figures that filled the room were slowing down. The flute was mutating, folding in on itself. It could not sustain itself without the Piper’s will. People’s faces were confused, their heads lolling as if in uneasy sleep. The rats and spiders were twitching pathologically as the flutelines that held them imploded.

King Rat fell to the floor and twisted in agony, pulling himself out of the spell.

Always the strongest, thought Saul.

He looked back at the Piper, collapsed on the floor. With puffy lips and bloody teeth, the Piper smiled.

Saul held the flute like a dagger, raised it over his head.

There was a Stygian rumble deep in the walls. The stage shook. Saul staggered.

`What the fuck…?'he said.

The floor lurched, shook violently. Saul fell backwards.

Above the Piper’s head a split appeared in the wall, thin and unnaturally straight as if scored with a vast razor. The stage shook until all the dancers had fallen. It was only because it was on DAT, safe from the caprice of styluses and shocks, that Wind City did not falter.

The split widened and spread downwards, opening the bricks behind the Piper’s back. The rent in the wall opened onto a sheer darkness.

The Piper fixed Saul with his little smile.

The darkness widened and sucked at the air in the room. As if a window on an aeroplane had burst, papers and clothes and fragments of spider corpses whirled through the air into the black.

He opened a mountain once before, thought Saul urgently, he can open up a wall. He’s heading for home.

The Piper was quite still as the split pulled itself open behind him, the eye in a tornado of detritus that filled the room. Saul planted his feet wide and got to his knees, adamant that the Piper would not escape out of the world.

Then, as he steadied himself and gripped the flute once more, ready to strike, he heard a thin, desperate keening from the pit that was opening.