Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  I wondered aloud if we should go on to another, maybe the tower of girders near the farthest rocks. Gam did not answer, was too busy staring into dim vistas of wreckage and gasping that we had done it, that we were here.

  Colonies of birds shuffled a bit and a few of them took off but mostly they were untroubled by our arrival, and I imagined that they were used to things hauling themselves up from the waters to sun or moon a while.

  Does the sentence make any more sense from here? I said. Gam did not answer but startled me by taking hold of me from behind and turning me around and trying to kiss me. I suppose I had known this might happen. I tutted and pushed and we wrestled for a while on the slope of the old metal. I shoved and Gam stumbled and trod on a decaying anemone abandoned by the sea and skidded violently and fell. Gam’s head cracked on the corner of the metal. I stepped forward but I was not quick enough and Gam pitched into the sea and was caught up by the gnarly undertows threading between the wrecks and yanked under as if by ropes much faster than you would think natural. Quickly I pointed the light but I could see only swirls and spray and the black water, and a bit of blood mottling the last of the ship’s paintwork, discoloring the remnants of a painted logo, of which we know from the books.

  I probed with my oar. Water tugged it and I wondered if it had sucked Gam down into the body of this word, to go up and down its stairwells for a long time. I put my hand into the cold but I had no way to know what shards and sharp edges were below.

  Gam did not reappear. I waited a long time. When I saw the lights of the town hall go out I pushed the raft back into the waves of the bay and rowed for the land.

  I was only one person, with one oar. On the other hand this was the way the currents wanted to take me. I think it was about the same amount of effort and time to reach the stones of the shore where I kicked and pulled the raft apart to set its pieces adrift, before sneaking, exhausted, back to my house where I knew my mother would be sleeping.

  People said Gam must have gone to sea, which I suppose was not untrue. Some wondered if, rather than by water, Gam had picked through the trees and down the sheer channels of the gorge, impossible and impassable as we all know they are, and had got to the mainland that way.

  That would be enough to have Gam spoken of in approving disapproving awe forever, but on top of that some people are saying that it’s Gam we have to thank for the return of the ships.

  In the late afternoon of the third day after we paddled out to the sentence and Gam didn’t come back, there was a sudden immense rumbling in the bay. I was not there but I heard about it from Tyruss, who was, who was looking sadly out to sea. There were a series of percussions and booms and the biggest wrecks of the sentence all lurched ponderously, suddenly, at once, in many directions. They came down shattering themselves and each other. Every word fell apart in water that was, Tyruss said, quivering.

  When the submerged upheaval was done almost all the ruins were under the waves. Only a few protruding feet of a very few of the biggest wrecks were still visible. The sentence was all but effaced.

  Some people thought it was an earthquake, some that it was a submarine, torpedoing the remains. There was a vessel there the whole time, they said. That explains it. Watching by periscope.

  In any case, a new ship arrived that evening.

  Most of the town were already gathered, as I was, gazing at where the sentence had been. There was a huge cheer and a gasp of astonished delight at the sight of the massive riveted ironclad that appeared, that looked almost crenellated with all its decks and radar dishes and such. It approached the hidden sandbanks and reefs closer to our shoreline than we were used to. We could make out more details of its topside. We could see no people.

  Despite this new proximity there was a quality to the ship that is hard to describe, whereby it seemed even less in focus, even more like an imperfect reproduction, even more as if it were copied from a photograph, than the ships to which we were used.

  Taking up a huge area on its flank was a symbol, stark and black and white and blue. It was the sign of a company. It looked like many letters superimposed, like several words, or a whole alphabet, printed on top of each other.

  People did not take long to simmer down. It was twilight and the vessel’s unfamiliar outlines picked out against a vivid red sky made us uneasy. Still, almost all of us stayed, many for hours, right into the night, watching the new ship, almost all of us almost always in silence.

  Once again ships are visiting our waters. It is rare again for more than three or four days to go by without a new vessel powering into view.

  They are still of countless different designs, but they are almost all now larger, newer, more studded with equipment we do not understand, than those ships we grew up watching. And every one is painted with that same big dense logo as was, and is, the first.

  The second ship appeared two days after that first and no one knew what to do. Once again we gathered. Of all the novelties of our recent situation this one we all found the most troubling: that the new ship was churning straight for our waters, as ships have done for as many years as we have records, but that its predecessor had not yet gone.

  Nor has it still, nor will it, is my opinion.

  No one had ever seen two ships afloat at once before. In pictures in the books in the library room, in pictures in the gallery room, yes, of course, there are images of several ships together, there are seascapes and harbors quite crowded with them, with ships jostling all the way to the edge of sight, seeming to shove each other aside to get a better view. In the waters of the real world, though, we had only ever been visited by one ship at a time, unless you count those sunk for us, those surrendered.

  The first of the logo-ed ships was at anchor very close to the last visible vestiges of the sentence and it was toward it that the new ship sailed, coming so close and fast that many people started to scream that they would collide, that there would be another explosion, but there was not. The new arrival, a long lean cargo carrier, slowed and stopped, its bow half-blocking the first vessel from our view, settling into the waters still unsteady from the remains of the old sentence.

  Since then two more have come. A paddle steamer slapped slowly and inefficiently into place behind and at a right-angle to the previous two newcomers. A low stubby vessel followed it less than a day later, poking skew-whiff into the bay between two last sticking-up crane-tops from the earlier generation of arrivals.

  None of them leave. They just pile up where the wrecks are.

  I have a premonition that time will move quickly for these new ships. That they will not sink but that it will not take long before the first of them is a floating ruin, a skeleton, a series of shored-up iron ribs in a crumbling corpse buoyed up by its fellows. They are writing a new sentence, if the wrecks ever were, or are, a sentence, more quickly than before, in bigger, louder words, words all of the same brand, the brand of the new company, the company that has won control of this route in a hostile takeover.

  This new carrier cannot speak whatever it is saying truly into silence, of course: whatever it is building to with the bodies of its ships it does on older wreckage.

  I have tried to descend the ravine but I can find no way through the trees or down the rock face. I was not the first to decide to take a raft to sea and I will not be the only one who decides to go to sea again, now, in this new situation, to walk on the beginnings of a new sentence. I am, though, unless someone in the town is visiting at night and returning before the morning, which—looking at these new ships—seems to me unlikely, does not seem to me something these vessels would allow, the first to have decided to do so.

  You might not have thought it to watch me, but I paid close attention when Gam fixed up the first raft and I have made another all alone. It is too cold tonight, I do not want to row with cold deep in me, but as soon as the cloud covers us a little and insulates us from the freezing sky I will go back out to the sandbank, no matter how dark it is.

  Last n
ight Caffey and Misha and my mother said surely we all felt lighter now. Said no, we don’t know exactly what’s happening, but we know that there are ships at a distance again.

  I think Gam was right. This is a drop-off, not a pickup. Ships at a distance come not to collect, but carrying freight. They come carrying fear. And it is our fear but it is not our cargo. It has been ordered and is being delivered on behalf of someone else. They bring it to be rendered. It is on their behalf that it will be rendered here.

  THE 9TH TECHNIQUE

  The Precise Diner was on the outskirts of Rhode Island, near the interstate, at the end of a strip mall that had seen both worse and better days. The diner’s name and its better-than-necessary food, its posters for vampire films from Turkey and Vietnam, the worn toys that filled its wall nooks, combined to ensure that a good proportion of its customers were students. They would come in and haul chairs from un- or underoccupied tables and crowd them around their own in large boisterous groups.

  Alongside that young clientele, and the quieter locals who indulged them, were a few muscular men and women, all sitting alone. They were not many, but there were enough of them, and they were distinctive enough, to be noticeable. Each sat and ate and waited for something.

  There was one woman who was clearly no soldier, as it took little in their bearing for her to gather the other solitary diners were. Her name was Koning. She was not old, though she wore her hair in a way that one generally only saw on the old, and rarely even on them these days. She wore drab clothes, not quite convincingly. She was heavy and heavy-browed and well-made-up. She had been sitting alone for a long time, watching everyone who came in while slowly she ate first a bowl of oatmeal, then at last a lunch of salad and pasta as small and as late as she could get away with without infuriating the staff. She was unique in the room in being a buyer waiting for a seller, a civilian hanging on for a soldier.

  Every hour or so, a customer would come in and tentatively approach one or other of the soldiers’ tables. He or she might glance at a picture on a phone, or a scribbled description, to make sure this was the right contact. The newcomer would sit opposite the waiting diner and whisper. The students never let up speaking and laughing loudly, insufferably, a useful braying camouflage.

  At the quieter tables, the new arrivals would pass envelopes into which, with varying degrees of insouciance, the off-duty soldiers would peer. In exchange they might hand something over when they passed the salt (if their companions ordered food for appearance’s sake), or nod at gym bags stashed ready by their visitors’ chairs, or reach across the table and put objects gently in top pockets. The buyers would always exit quickly after such handovers.

  Some of the shouting young must have been paying a bit of attention, but most were genuinely oblivious, Koning thought, watching them and the exchanges they missed. The symbiosis between those students and the sellers of illicit wares they thought of, if at all, as local color, was, on the former’s part, mostly sincerely blind.

  The soldiers did not acknowledge each other. They would arrive, be ushered to a table at the room’s edge and wait and eat while those who had contacted them worked up the courage to come in. Few of their buyers were local, and caveat emptor, they would think, as they hedged and hemmed and hawed outside and made their dealers wait, as they fussed about the wards and protections they suspected surrounded the venue, the investigators watching. Which there were. The Precise was a locus for attention, but attention quite unconcerned by such as them.

  Koning watched many exchanges. Even caught one or two eyes, and dropped them again. At last, mid-afternoon, and the most patient of her servers growing curt with each offer of more coffee, each refill of iced water, a tall massive man in his early thirties came in, looked around, ran a hand over his stubbled scalp and nodded at her. He sat and ordered the special without asking what it was.

  “You’re very late,” she said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he said. Both spoke mildly. He ate whatever it was that came enthusiastically. She did not look at it either. They eyed each other.

  Koning pushed a book across the table at him. He picked it up, raised an eyebrow and nodded. It was an old leather-bound edition. Gotto, the cover read. Lafcadio Hearne.

  “Classy,” he said.

  “Instead of an envelope,” she said.

  “Yes, I get it,” he said. He opened it and flicked through the first pages.

  “He went to Japan,” Koning said. “It’s about Japanese ghosts.”

  “I know who he is,” the man said, and added, “Not just ghosts.” He looked closely at the book. You might think him a dealer. He thumbed more pages, until halfway through the volume he reached the point where they were painstakingly glued together, solidified, hollowed and made into a box. In which, though he did not open it to look, was money.

  “It’s all there,” the woman said.

  “What if I want to read it?” he said. He sounded mournful. “What if I get halfway through this book and want to know what happens next?”

  There was more silence. “Then you can take the money out and buy yourself another copy,” Koning said. He grinned like a boy.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Philistine.” He closed the book without ever checking its hidden compartment or its contents. He put it in his bag, and brought out a small, stoppered bottle. The woman glanced around and back at him.

  “Should you be … ?” she said quietly, indicating the surrounds. He made a disdainful noise.

  “Come on,” he said. He waggled the bottle and something tiny rattled within. The woman winced and took it from him. She held it up to the light.

  In the glass was a clot like dark earth, finger-sized and studded, gnarled with tiny things impossible to identify, that did not look as if they belonged in the ground. She breathed out in reverence. Her heart was going fast and she wanted to keep staring, but she put the bottle away. The man continued to eat. Koning had expected him to leave.

  “So it was you who got it?” she said finally.

  “Me. I pulled it out. Right out of the box. I took it out.”

  “How long have you … ?” She spoke carefully. She stopped, struggled and went on. “How long were you stationed at Guantánamo?”

  The man looked at her with some kind of inscrutability. Chewed slowly. After a long time he shrugged and swallowed and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  “Long enough,” he said, “to go get that. It was a long time ago.”

  Koning had mined the bulletin boards, hacking secrets, sniffing sources. She’d spent years on her investigations. She knew how to track things down. In this particular economy to be a shopper took effort and arcana. She could have made an informed attempt at identifying several specific transactions occurring at the Precise while she was there: these commodities were not anonymous.

  Across the globe, in dark places of the earth, secret lairs were rarely caves of monsters or marvels but markets. Shops. The worst-kept secret in circulation was that certain activities invested items in their proximity with certain affects, effects, and powers, and made them hugely valuable. And that thus it was imperative that they be sold. That, certainly, had been the case for as long as there had been people and things, but there were always fluctuations. The occult economies of charged items were always jostling. War had flooded the market.

  Helmets that remembered the last sounds heard by those who died. Melted iPods pried from burnt-out tanks—if you could make them play again, they would infuriate djinn. What you wanted, the level and the type of item, would dictate where you went to buy. If you were doing business with a soldier in the eastern third of the U.S., the Precise was one of few possible venues. An illicit economy, of course, but equally of course one tacitly permitted. Like looting, like rape, so long as it was conducted within limits of plausible deniability, a degree of witchery, theft, and fencing was a perk of service, and it relied on the black market in artifacts.

  You have asked for this office’s views on whether cert
ain proposed conduct would violate the prohibition against torture found at section 2340A of title 18 of the United States code. Koning could recite the passages. She had recited them. Why would you not? That was what they were for.

  There were ten techniques to run. Attention grasp. Walling. Facial hold and slap. A brilliant document. Yoo and Bybee, prophets without honor, martyrs and Crowleys of the State Department. Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.

  Actions of unpersoning, and positions, deprivations, and the waterboard. Quite stuffed with fret, that last one. That was the locus of attention, in and beyond the mainstream. Abomination from one perspective, it was advertising copy from another. Koning could never have afforded that cloth, that first soaked cloth. It was, she understood, still wet all these years on from that first questioning. It could now do all manner of things towels wet or not had no business being able to.

  But hidden, like Bybee behind Yoo, was a less celebrated spell. Behind number 10, the crescendo, that water, was the 9th technique.

  9. Insects placed in a confinement box. You would like—Again these were the words of the lawyer-magi. Koning was never without the memo on her person. Quietly she read again the words she knew and emitted a bad guttural sound to speak the black redactions. She wrapped the bottle in the printout. You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us—those plurals and the consummate second person, talking across time, addressing all the later scandalized readers of those pieces declassified in a brilliant act of exonerative amplification, making everyone complicit. All purveyors of the demand post facto, all part of the collective. This you have informed us, they whispered. You have informed us that Zubaydah appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with Zubaydah. You would, however, place a harmless insect into the box.