The City & the City - China Mieville [145]
Dane’s acquaintance did not meet his eyes. “You feel it get cool?” Billy said, shaking his head. He sped them through time-release doors. “To stop evaporation. We have to be careful about fire. Because, you know, there’s a fair old bit of alcohol in here, so …” With his hands he made a soft explosion.
The visitors stopped still. They were in a specimen maze. Ranked intricacies. Kilometres of shelves and jars. In each was a motionless floating animal. Even sound sounded bottled suddenly, as if something had put a lid on it all.
The specimens mindlessly concentrated, some posing with their own colourless guts. Flatfish in browning tanks. Jars of huddled mice gone sepia, grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions. There were sports with excess limbs, foetuses in arcane shapes. They were as carefully shelved as books. “See?” Billy said.
One more door and they would be with what they were there to see. Billy knew from repeated experience how this would go.
When they entered the tank room, the chamber at the heart of the Darwin Centre, he would give the visitors a moment without prattle. The big room was walled with more shelves. There were hundreds more bottles, from those chest high down to those the size of a glass of water. All of them contained lugubrious animal faces. It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. There were steel bins, pulleys that hung like vines. No one would notice. Everyone would be staring at the great tank in the centre of the room.
This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.
It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis Dux. The giant squid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; and Un Lun Dun, his New York Times best-selling book for younger readers. He lives and works in London.
The City & The City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by China Miéville
Reading group guide copyright 2010 by Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Kraken copyright 2010 by China Mieville.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Kraken. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51566-7
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