Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [81]
“Thank you,” she said. She smiled at him till he blushed.
“Well come on then,” he snapped. “Let’s get started.”
“Curdle? You coming?” The carton jumped up and down. “Alright then,” Deeba said. “You don’t have any choice, I’m afraid, Book. You have to tell me what to do. And…one more thing.” She swallowed.
“Look. No one’s really said, but there’s hints…if you stay too long in UnLondon, the phlegm effect gets stronger, doesn’t it? When I came back, before, I saw the way people looked when they saw me. Book, be straight with me. If you stay too long, people can forget you. Right?” There was a silence. “Right?”
“Well…” said the book uncomfortably. “Theoretically…”
“How long?” Deeba said.
“You have to understand,” the book said. “Most people who cross have no intention of going back, so it makes no odds. There are techniques to avoid it, they say, ways of making lists and mnemonics and so on, if you want to make sure to remember particular abnauts, but…”
“How long?” Deeba said. “’Cause my mum and dad don’t know any of those ways. So how long’ve I got?”
“Well…it’s speculative. But there is a theoretical danger of acute abnaut-related memory deficit disorder affecting Londoners after about…nine days.”
“Nine days?” said Deeba. “Is that all?”
“It might be possible to do the quest in that,” the book said doubtfully. “It’s not quite clear what happens after, but the Shwazzy must’ve been meant to go home afterwards. Surely…But then…she was…” She was the Shwazzy, Deeba thought as the book stopped itself. “Even so. It’s…a little tight.”
Deeba’s heart was speeding up.
“Well then,” she said. “We have to get started. What was the first one? Let’s go and get the featherkey.”
56
Incommunicado
“The featherkey’s in a forest,” the book said.
“A forest? In UnLondon?” said Deeba. “Where?”
“Where most things are in cities and abcities,” the book said. “It’s in a house.”
“If you say so,” Deeba said. “How do we get there?”
“I know where the house is,” the book said. “But we don’t even know where we are.”
“Actually…” said Hemi. He was standing by the alley entrance. “Listen.”
Deeba strained. She could make out a noise like a constant grinding, a sliding and slamming like very heavy machines.
“What is that?” she said.
“You know where we are?” Hemi said to the book. “It’s Puzzleborough.”
“Of course,” the book said. “That would make sense.”
“What?” Deeba said.
“It’s like one of those games,” Hemi said. “In crackers. A square with a picture in it chopped into nine or sixteen little squares, and one of them taken out, then they’re all slid and mixed up, moving them one at a time into the empty space. And you have to try to make the picture again? In Puzzleborough, the houses are like that.”
“A house was taken out, years ago,” the book said. “And the rest of the buildings got moved around, and now there’s a load of streets where none of the houses is in the place it should be.
“Every few minutes they all shift around. One of the ones next to the empty lot slides into it, and behind it another slots into the space it left, and it goes all through the borough. But there aren’t nine or sixteen or twenty-five houses, there are hundreds. That means thousands of possible arrangements. You never know where any house is going to be. Everything’s jumbled up.
“Maybe the only people in UnLondon as intrepid as the Wordhoard Pit librarians are the Puzzleborough postal workers. They’re still trying to deliver the mail from decades ago. But the house numbers keep moving. Some of those posties have been tracking a particular house for years, now. Everyone’s waiting for the day the houses land back in the right order.”
“Anyway the point is…” Hemi interrupted with ostentatious yawning motions. “Point is we know where we are.”
“So how do we get to this forest?” Deeba said.
“Well, if we were going direct,” the book