Un Lun Dun

by China Miéville

  After all, she knew now that there were real secret societies.

  On the computer in her living room, Deeba went searching on the internet for information, while her mother and father watched television.

  There were quite a few websites that said UnLondon, but she checked them all laboriously, and none of them were about the abcity. There can’t be nothing, she thought, but there was.

  All the references to Unstible were irrelevant spelling mistakes. All the listings for Armets were about the old helmets, from which the secret defenders had taken their name. Deeba tried countless different spellings of Klinneract and came up with nothing.

  She tried to think of new strategies to research the hidden histories. She looked up how to toughen fabric. She looked up weatherwitches, and got loads of pages, but mostly ridiculous foolishness, and nothing at all helpful.

  “Mum,” she said. “What’s it called when you study about the weather?”

  “Meteorology, sweetheart,” her mother said, and spelt it for her. “You doing homework?”

  Deeba didn’t answer. She typed meteorology into the search engine, and sighed as more than fourteen million hits came up. She combined meteorology with the words smog, society, and London. She still got lists of hundreds or thousands of websites.

  She was amazed by the numbers of people studying the British weather. The Met office, meteorology departments in universities, departments of London’s mayor’s office, the Royal Meteorological Society. She clicked on them randomly, and skimmed articles about the London Smog of 1952.

  And then suddenly, Deeba saw the web address of one of the sites she was reading: rmets.org.

  The Royal Meteorological Society, it said at the top of the page, next to a logo that read RMETS.

  Deeba stared, her eyes and mouth opening wide.

  She’d found the society of so-called weatherwitches with whom Unstible said he’d studied. She’d found the Armets, and they weren’t named after helmets at all.

  It’s got garbled over the years, she thought. The name. People here saying RMetS, and UnLondoners mishearing, and thinking Armets. It’s just a mistake.

  Deeba’s delight at having worked this out was tempered by growing unease.

  So…what was Unstible talking about, saying he’d studied magic with the Armets? There is no Armets. No weatherwitches. No magic. There’s no secret society. It’s all a misunderstanding.

  So…

  So Unstible must have been lying.

  35

  Conversation and Revelation

  Maybe it’s me getting it wrong, Deeba thought. Maybe he was saying he worked with RMetS and I got the wrong idea.

  She dialed RMetS’s number four times, always losing her nerve and disconnecting. The fifth time, she let it ring. When a man answered, Deeba was pleased to hear herself sound quite calm.

  “Can I speak to Professor Lipster please?” She had written down a list of names from the website.

  “What’s it regarding?”

  “I need some personal information about someone who worked…who I think worked at the society.”

  “I can’t possibly—” he said in a bored voice.

  “The name’s Unstible,” Deeba said, and to her surprise the man shut up.

  “Hold on,” he said, and there were a series of clicks.

  “Hello?” a woman said. “This is Rebecca Lipster. I understand you wanted to know about Benjamin Unstible?”

  “Yes,” said Deeba. “I want to know what he was working on, please. It’s quite important. I’m trying to find out as much as I can—”

  “Look,” Professor Lipster interrupted, very suspiciously. “I can’t discuss this sort of thing. Who am I talking to?”

  “I’m his daughter,” Deeba said.

  There was a silence. Deeba held her breath. She knew there was a big risk that Lipster would know she was lying. But Deeba had decided that if they’d even heard of Unstible, this was the best chance she had of persuading the meteorologists to hand over any notes he’d left. She got all her lies ready. My dad says he forgot some of his papers. Can I come and pick them up…?

  Then something completely unexpected happened.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Professor Lipster said. “Of course I can understand you wanting to know. I’ll tell you whatever I can…and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  Deeba’s eyes widened.

  “You should be proud of your father, young lady,” Lipster said. “He was working very hard. On the day he…of the accident…Ms. Rawley the Environment minister was coming on an official visit, and your father was very excited to be here. He was always saying what an excellent job she was doing, and he’d been wanting to meet her for weeks. He said he had some questions for her. And she said she was looking forward to meeting him, too.

  “Then…well the visit had to be canceled of course, when we found him.”

  “What happened?” Deeba said.

  Lipster hesitated.

  “I’m sure you’ve been told…It was a heart attack, we think. At first we thought there might have been a chemical accident, there was such a strong smell of fumes in the room. But he wasn’t doing anything like that. Just historical research.”

  “What sort of thing?” Deeba asked. Her mind was racing.

  “The Smog of 1952, he said. What was in it, how much damage it did, that sort of thing. And what was done about it. What was it he was particularly interested in? Wait: I remember.

  “It was the Klinneract.”

  “The what?” Deeba said.

  “From 1956,” Lipster said. “That was the law that really sorted out the problems of the smog.” She repeated herself slowly. “The Clean Air Act.”

  “Oh,” said Deeba slowly. “Oh.”

  “What else would you like to know?” Lipster said.

  “Actually,” Deeba said, “that’s more than I expected to find out.” Lipster was saying something else when Deeba disconnected.

  That night, to her father’s surprise, Deeba went outside in a light shower of rain. She wanted to think in the fresh cold air.

  “You splashing around?” her father said. “Don’t go far. Stupid thing.” He pointed at her umbrella, with its canopy of red fabric printed with lizards. “I don’t think moisture in the air is reason enough—”

  “Yeah yeah, Dad, to overturn society’s taboo against spiked clubs, blah blah.” She kissed him and went out.

  She twirled her umbrella, watched it spin off the water in tiny droplets, remembered how Brokkenbroll’s broken umbrellas had protected her.

  Deeba went through what she’d found out.

  Unstible had been about to meet Rawley the Environment secretary—who might know better than most about dangerous climate and how to fight it—and he had been stopped. By something that stank. Of chemicals. His colleagues at RMetS thought he was dead.

  The Smog had found him. He hadn’t managed to hide from it, as he’d told her.

  Deeba thought about Elizabeth Rawley, the MP in charge of the environment. Maybe, Deeba thought, she could work out why the Smog had been so anxious to stop Unstible from meeting Rawley. Unstible had obviously thought she could help.

  Deeba thought back to when she had last heard anything from Rawley on the news. I can’t remember exactly when, she thought, but I’m sure it wasn’t long ago. Wasn’t Dad saying something about her last night? He likes her, says she’s the only one doing her job. Wasn’t she in the paper? Yes, I’m sure she was…Anyway it doesn’t matter. Why am I worrying about Rawley? I’ll hear something about her soon, surely…

  “Oh my gosh,” said Deeba suddenly. She froze her umbrella in midtwirl. She knew why it was hard for her to even think about when she’d last seen Elizabeth Rawley.

  “I’ve got the phlegm effect,” she said. “And that means…Rawley’s been in UnLondon.”

  There was no Klinneract. Long ago, a few UnLondoners must have mis-heard what had stopped the Smog in London, and spread the inadvertently invented w
ord, and eventually the whole abcity believed in a nonexistent magic weapon. That was how legends started. Then Deeba had been suckered into believing in it. By Unstible.

  But if the people at RMetS were right, and Unstible had been killed by the Smog, then it wasn’t Unstible in UnLondon.

  So who was it Deeba had met?

  And what was that imposter doing?

  Something was happening in UnLondon. Something was happening to UnLondon. And none of the UnLondoners knew it.

  36

  Concern in Code

  They’ll be fine, Deeba told herself. She told herself that again and again.

  UnLondon’ll get through. The Propheseers’ll work out what’s going on. Whatever it is. Maybe I’m the one with the wrong idea. Maybe everything’s fine. Anyway, the Propheseers’ll see to it, one way or the other.

  Whenever she thought that, though, Deeba could not help remembering all the confusion about the Shwazzy and the prophecies. She couldn’t forget quite how wrong the end of the stick was that the Propheseers had got hold of there.

  Still, she thought, they’ll have learnt their lesson. They’ll be keeping more of an eye out.

  UnLondon would have to look after itself. She wasn’t the Shwazzy. She was just someone. How could just someone be any help, whatever was going on?

  It’ll be fine, Deeba thought. You saw how Brokkenbroll and Jones and the binja got on.

  But she was never a hundred percent convinced.

  Besides…she found herself starting to think. She got ashamed of herself then. Because the thought that had been creeping out was Besides, even if something terrible does happen, you don’t need to know about it.

  “Zanna,” Deeba said. “I need to ask you something.

  “What if you knew something bad was going on somewhere, but the people there didn’t know, and they thought something good was happening, but you knew it wasn’t, and you didn’t know for a hundred percent certain but you did know really, and you didn’t know how to get a message to them, and you never hear from them so you wouldn’t know if they were able to do anything if you did get a message to them…”

  Deeba faltered and came to a stop. It had all seemed clearer in her head.

  “Deebs,” Zanna said. “I’ve got no idea what you’re on about.”

  She walked away, glancing back at Deeba with confusion. And, Deeba realized, fear.

  That was when she decided. Even though things were alright now for her and her friends, she couldn’t ignore the fact that something might be very not-alright in UnLondon. She had to try to get word to the abcity. She could only imagine how hard that might be.

  Deeba considered dropping messages in bottles down into the sewers. She wondered what she could write on an envelope that would ensure a letter’s passage across the Odd. But whatever she tried, she’d never know whether the message had got through, and she had to be sure.

  When she came to that conclusion, Deeba was surprised to realize that what she felt wasn’t foreboding so much as excitement. Despite the possibility that something was badly wrong in UnLondon, she was excited by what she’d found out, and by what it meant for her: she had to get back.

  So the question became how to return to UnLondon.

  Deeba told herself repeatedly that she didn’t want to go, even if she could. She didn’t convince herself.

  After several attempts, Deeba found her way back to the basement deep in the estate. But this time when she turned the big valve, London didn’t ebb away. So she went looking for other ways into the abcity.

  Deeba walked over several bridges, always trying to concentrate on somewhere else at the other end—somewhere in UnLondon. It didn’t work.

  She looked for hidden doors. She closed her eyes and wished hard. She clicked her heels together. She pushed at the back of her parents’ wardrobe. Nothing worked.

  What’s going on over there? she thought.

  In despair, Deeba wrote to the only other person she could think of in contact with UnLondon: Minister Elizabeth Rawley at the House of Commons.

  She realized the letter would have to go through many secretaries and assistants, so she camouflaged her message.

  Dear Minister Rawley,

  You do not need to know my name. I know that you have gone somewhere quite like London but in other ways quite UNlike it. I think you know what I mean and you can see I know what I am talking about. I am writing to you because it is maybe more easy for you to go to that place than me, and I think that maybe that place is in trouble. You might know there is a plan for a fight against someone who SMOKES a lot—you know who I am talking about—and I think the man who is supposed to help is maybe not who he says he is and is actually an enemy working for that enemy. You know the man I mean, the one who is UNSTABLE. [Deeba was particularly proud of this pun.]

  If you can go to that place or send other people I think maybe you should have a look at him and make sure he is doing what he says he is, or our friends are in trouble.

  Thank you.

  A Friend.

  At least I’m doing something, Deeba thought, but she knew the minister would probably never get the letter. So she kept trying to think of other ways back to UnLondon.

  At night she would sit up in bed, wearing and reading the glove that Obaday Fing had made from the book. “Brick wizardry,” she read. “Pigeons. Difficult to get in. Enter by booksteps, on storyladders…”

  And one night, reading those words as she had many times before, Deeba suddenly stopped, and slowly clenched her word-gloved fist. Because out of the blue, finally, she had had an idea. And though she immediately, carefully—almost dutifully—went through all the reasons she shouldn’t act on her thought, Deeba could not stop worrying about her friends in UnLondon, and she knew she’d try whatever she could.

  37

  An Intrepid Start

  When she came to school the next day, Deeba’s bag was packed. It contained sandwiches and chocolate and crisps and drink, a penknife, a notepad and pens, a stopwatch, a blanket, plasters and bandages, a sewing kit, a wad of out-of-date foreign money she’d gathered from the backs of drawers all over her house, and other bits and pieces that she thought might just be useful. On top of them all, Deeba had put her umbrella.

  That morning, she’d hugged each of her family members for a long time, to their amused surprise. “I’ll see you later,” she’d said to her brother Hass. “I might be away for a while. But there’s something I have to do.”

  She reminded herself several times that her plan might not work. That all her preparations might come to nothing. Still, her heart was going very fast most of the day. She thought it was excitement; then she thought it was fear. Then she realized it was both.

  That morning she didn’t talk to anyone. Becks was watching her suspiciously, and Zanna looked confused. Deeba ignored them.

  At lunchtime she went to the school library.

  There were a few other pupils in the room, doing homework, reading, working at the computers. Mr. Purdey the librarian glanced up at her, then went back to his paperwork. Apart from a few whispers, the room was quiet.

  Deeba walked past the desks and the other children, and in among the bookshelves. She went to the farthest end of the room and stared at the shelves in front of her. She pulled on the glove made of paper and words.

  The multicolored spines of hardback novels stared back. They were slightly battered, and coated in clear plastic. Deeba looked up. The shelves rose a meter or so above her, to the ceiling.

  “Right,” whispered Deeba. She checked the contents of her bag one more time. “Enter by booksteps,” she said, reading her hand. “And storyladders.”

  No one was watching. She stepped up carefully and put a foot onto the edge of a shelf. Deeba reached up and took hold of another. Slowly, carefully, she began to climb the bookshelves like a ladder. One foot above the other, one hand above the other.

  The books didn’t leave much space for her fingers or toes. She felt the bookshelves
wobble, but they didn’t collapse. Deeba concentrated on reading the titles just in front of her fingertips.

  She knew she must be close to the ceiling. She didn’t slow, and she didn’t look up. She stared straight ahead at the books, and climbed.

  A little way up the spines looked less battered. Their colors more vivid. Their titles less familiar. Deeba tried to remember if she had ever heard of The Wasp in the Wig, or A Courageous Egg.

  It took a moment for her to realize that she was still climbing. The library floor…

  …looked farther down than it should be.

  In front of her was a book called A London Guide for the Blazing World-ers. Deeba kept climbing. She was definitely beyond where the ceiling had been. Still she didn’t look anywhere but straight in front of her.

  She clung to the edges of the shelves and climbed for a long time. A wind began to buffet her. Deeba tore her gaze from a book called A Bowl for Shadows and at last looked down. She gave a little scream of shock.

  Far, far below her she saw the library. Children walked between the shelves like specks. The bookshelf she was ascending rose like a cliff edge, all the way down, and as far to either side as she could see.

  Vertigo made Deeba nauseous. She had to force herself to keep going up.

  She stopped to rest when her arms and legs were shaking. By this time, all she could see was an endless stretch of bookshelf. Behind her back was nothing but darkness.

  Deeba tried to take a book off the shelf to take a look inside. She almost lost her grip. She heard herself shriek, and she clung to the storyladder while her heart slowed. She wondered if her friends below would hear a tiny tinny sound, and if she fell, whether she would keep tumbling until she landed back into the library.

  Eventually she fished her umbrella out of her bag and climbed like a mountaineer, hooking a shelf high above with its curved handle, and hauling herself up.