Kraken (40 page)

“Care to fill an old man in?” said Baron. “Sorry to intrude on this.” Vardy and Collingswood glanced at each other, until she smirked.

“Did you ever meet any?” she said to Vardy.

“Do you
mind?”
Baron said.

“They got sick, boss, back in the day,” she said. “But I could never work out what it was about the guns.”

An arcane disease had taken their ur-tribe and made their life infectious. What they touched would jostle, tables would tap, chairs would tap, books dance, the inanimate as boisterous and alarmed as any newborns. Midas couldn’t eat a sandwich made of gold, but no more could one of these vectors, Life-oid Marys, eat the bread and cheese slices all abruptly eager to run around.

“It was a
mutation,”
Vardy said. He said it carefully and with neutral distaste. “An adaptive mutation.”

“Is that bad?” Collingswood said, at the sight of his face.

“Bad for whom? Mutation saves, apparently.” Perhaps it was because of the careful grooming husbandry necessary for a flintlock, that fussy lead-barking animal; perhaps repressed resentment at life: whatever, it became only their firearms they made alive, in quieter, less motile ways—what weapons they wielded became selfish-gene machines. “The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched. “What I never got’s why all that makes them all badass.”

“Because they look after their flocks,” Vardy said. “And find them nests.” He looked at his watch.

“If you say so. So someone’s getting totally killed,” Collingswood said. “So who the fuck’s paying their way? I’m not getting much. And what that means bollock knows.” If her attempts at projection, remote viewing, sensory tickling, nightwalk sniffery, drift-jamming and a codewar flutter were not yielding any information, then a cowl was for certain draped over her quarries.

“Vardy,” said Baron, “where d’you think you’re going? Oy.”

“Leave it, boss,” Collingswood said. “Let Mystic Pizza do his thing. I want to sort out this gunfarmer stuff. We don’t need Doc Vision for a money-trail, surely?”

P
ETE
D
WIGHT WONDERED IF HE HAD CHOSEN THE RIGHT CAREER
. I
T
was not that he was a particularly bad police officer: there had been no complaints, no dressings-down. But he was never relaxed. He spent his uniformed days queasy with low-level anxiety, gnawed by the sense that he must be doing things wrong. It was going to give him an ulcer or something.

“Alright?” The man who greeted him was a plainclothes officer Pete recognised, though he could not remember his name.

“Alright, mate?”

“Seen Baron around?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Pete said. “But Kath’s in the back. What do you want with them nutters?” Pete laughed collegially and was suddenly terrified that the man was part of the very cult task force he was mocking. But, no, that was not where he knew him from, and anyway the bloke was laughing in turn, and heading for the rear of the station.

In the main room, among the clatter of keyboards, Simone Ball was leafing through her paperwork. She was in her midthirties, loved classic animated films, and was an enjoyer of, though not a frequent participator in, European travel. She had been a support worker for the police for seven years. She suspected her husband was cheating on her, and was bewildered that she did not mind very much.

“Where’s Kath?” a man asked her. She recognised him, and she waved him in the right direction and continued to think about her husband.

In the corridors, Detective Inspector Ben Samuels, considering his daughter’s piano exam, looked up and greeted the man with familiarity. The man asked directions from a uniformed WPC, Susan Greening, who grinned as she gave them, piqued by a sense that he and she had, she was sure, flirted recently. Outside the rooms used by the FSRC were three men comparing notes on a football game, though one of them had not watched it and was pretending. They parted as the newcomer arrived, nodded and greeted him, murmuring phonemes when they could not remember his name, and the one who was bullshitting in a surge of overcompensation even asked him what he had thought of the match. The man whistled and shook his head appreciatively, and the three men enthusiastically agreed and could still not quite remember his name but did recall that he was a supporter of one of the teams that had played or the other.

He entered the FSRC office. The only person in the room was Collingswood, prodding a keyboard as if at idle random. She glanced up at him and he nodded, crossed to the filing cabinets against the far wall. “Alright, Kath,” he said. “Just got to find some files.” He opened the drawers. He heard Kath stand. A silence went on. He turned. She held a pistol in her expert grip, aimed at his chest.

“And just who,” she said, “the motherfuck, are you?”

Chapter Fifty-One

“I
WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE ANGELS,”
Billy said, and the middleman made phone calls, sent emails, got on instant messenger and dropped queries in chatrooms. Eventually he told Billy where to go.

“Okay, it knows you’re coming. Otherwise it would be bad.”

“What am I looking for?” Billy said. “Who’s going to meet me?”

“Duh. An ex-angel.”

This was more than Billy had expected. Not a specialist or an angel-geek, but a semi-member of the jar’s tribe itself, to whom he might sort-of speak. The custodians of the museums could hardly be comprehended: their agenda was memory’s, which is not human. What they spoke was not like language. But redundant, they lingered, a few last years, and then they would become more like women and men out of a kind of loneliness.

The shell of the Commonwealth Institute was a conquistador helmet sweep of building at the southern edge of Holland Park. It had closed in the early 2000s. The ludicrous collection of exhibits honouring its member countries, that baffled and polite imperial aftermath, was long dispersed. But it was not all empty. When it grew dark Billy broke in—that was easy now with his new skills. He listened to his own reverberating steps.

The dust was only millimetres thick but thick enough. He felt as if he were wading in it, toward the last unmoved display cases. In many rooms the darkness should have been absolute, and Billy wondered what faint light it was that let him see. Once he heard a guard—some human guard—on halfhearted rounds. All he did was stand still in a cupboard and wait until the echo was gone from that section of hall.

A few exhibit pieces were left, forgotten, unworthy of rehousing, or hidden and, later in the solitude, they reemerged. Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random cross-hatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.

God, he thought as he approached.
God. I remember you
.

The decommissioned angel of Commonwealth memory eyed him. “Hello again,” he said. He had seen it on its day job, when he was a child, and it, in the daylight, an exhibit.

Plastic in the shape of a little cow. It eyed him sideways, so it could display its flank made of glass. Inside were its four stomachs, which had lit up, one by one, he remembered, and there, they still did, repeatedly, one at a time. Paunch, king’s-hood, fardel and maw, digestion glimmering in each in turn toward its lactic telos, stalwart of some Commonwealth economy. From the New Zealand room, Billy thought.

He could feel its attention, its waning self. When the institute was open, this mnemophylax had after hours stamped the hallways with a gait modelled on Taurus myth. It had protected that mooncalf memory-palace from the forces of angry time or postcolonial rage-magic. Public uninterest had killed it finally and left it lonely and post-dead and full of stories.

Heard you were coming
. Its voice was distant. It tried to tell Billy about the fights it had had. The references were inhuman. It tried to tell stories that made no sense and faded into nothing, leaving Billy nodding politely at each absent anecdote. With a cough, as genteel as at a tea party, Billy brought it back to the matter in hand.

“I was told you could tell me what’s happening,” he said. “One of you’s been following me. Keeping an eye out for me. From the Natural History Museum. Can you tell me why?”

Can, it said. It was eager to answer.
You’re what it waited for
, it said.

“The jar? The angel of the Natural History Museum? How do you know?”

They telled. The others. We speaked
. Dead it might be, but it
kept in touch
with its still-active cousins.
It failed
, the thing said. Behind him was a gust of air, as swing doors opened and closed to help it speak. Its voice was building sounds.
The kraken went. It did bad. It’s full of guilt
.

“It’s left the museum,” Billy said.

All of them. All of us. There’s a fight on against the end thing. No point staying still. They fight the endingness. But it. Was the first to walk. Wants to make amends. Tries always to find you. Look after you
.

“Why?”

Billy backed away and bumped into the open-closing door. He stood away from it so the phylax could say in its hinge-squeak,
Remembers you. You’re chosen
.

“What? I don’t … How? Why’s it chosen me?”

Angels wait for their christs
.

Angels wait for their christs?

And you came, born not of woman but of glass
.

“I don’t understand.”

Gives you strength—you are christ of its memory
.

“This thing with time? It gave me that? Dane said it was because of the kraken … Oh. Wait, wait. Are you …?”

Billy began to laugh. Slowly at first, then more. He sat on the floor. He made himself laugh silently. He knew he was hysterical. It did not feel like release. The cow moved toward him. It was just one moment at the end of the room, one moment two or three feet closer and eyeing him with its sideways glass eye. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” Billy said to the decaying memory.

“You know why
Dane
thinks those things happen?” he said. He smiled like at a drinking buddy. “He thinks it’s because of the kraken. He thinks I’m some kind of John the Baptist, or something. But, so, that’s the wrong direction. It’s nothing to do with the squid.

“None of this is anything to do with the squid. It’s the sodding
tank
.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s funny. You know what’s even funnier? The best of it? I was joking.”

Billy had kept a straight face during all his claims to be the first person born of in vitro fertilization. That ridiculous, meaningless gag, made in
that
place, that for the sake of the rigour of humour he had stuck to, had been overheard by the genius loci, the spirit of the museum. Maybe it was attuned to any talk of bottles and their power. Maybe it did not understand the idea of a joke or a lie. “It’s not true,” he said. The bovine angel of memory said nothing.
Clack clack clack clack
went its four stomachs, lighting in time.

Billy leaned over. “I’m not a kraken prophet, I’m the bottle messiah.” He laughed again. “But I’m just
not
, I’m not.”

The bottle-angel was diminished, diminished and receding daily, by its wanderings beyond its demesne, by its failure, its efforts, the smashing of that iteration of glass, preserver and bone. It would look for him again, pulling itself another self out of bits and pieces from its palace, though, sniffing out that portion of its own self it had put inside him. That gave him these unearned powers. Until it was gone it would strive to find Billy again, and through him the
Architeuthis
it had lost.

“I
WISH IT WOULD COME BACK,” HE SAID.

Will
.

“Yeah, but now. My partner’s gone. I need all the help I can get.”

You are the memory christ
.

“Yeah, only I’m not.” Slowly, he looked up. Slowly he stood and smiled. “But you know what, I’ll take that. I’ll take whatever.” He reached and clenched, and thought maybe there was a tiny scutter of time. Maybe there was. “You going to come? Outside?” The cow said nothing. Dead as it was it did not have the strength to fight in the war that its living siblings were waging. “Alright,” Billy said. “Alright, it doesn’t matter. You stay here, look after this place. It needs you.” He felt kind.

From some other part of the building came a noise that was not part of the cow’s voice. Billy was at the door, his weapon out, listening, ready, without knowing how he had got there. The cow angel tried to speak, but Billy held the door closed, and it had nothing with which to make noise. “Hush,” he whispered. Ordering an angel around. It was gone, though, in a series of those being-elsewhere steps. Billy thought for a moment that it would bring a human guard running in consternation. (He did not know that they were all aware something old and melancholy walked in the building, that they tried never to disturb.)

“Godammit,” he said, and he went after the dead angel, holding his phaser out. He followed the screech of hinges and things falling from last shelves. He came suddenly into an unwindowed room where the plastic cow screamed with the voice of the building at a tall man.

Billy ducked and fired, but the man moved faster, and the phaser beam scored over the ineffectual cow and dissipated across the wall. “Billy Harrow!” the man was shouting. He held a weapon himself, but did not fire. “Billy!” The word came from behind him too, Billy thought, but realised that the second, tinier voice was in his pocket. It was Wati.