Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [83]
“What then?” Deeba whispered. “How’m I supposed to keep shtum there?”
“Well, talk fast. It was your stupid idea.”
It was eerie, walking in completely silent streets. Deeba found herself scuffing her feet just to make a sound.
“So where is the phone?” she whispered.
“No idea,” said the book. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Shut up,” Deeba hissed. “I’m making this call. So look in your index and find it.”
It took them until almost the setting of the UnSun, but by a combination of trial, error, and deduction, under the book’s complaining direction, they found their way into thickets of backstreets.
“He’s built a maze around the telephone,” the book said. “So people can’t find it.”
The streets emptied as they went on. They passed between terraces that loomed and leaned and became overhangs, until they walked in a tunnel between buildings.
The turns grew sharper, the streets shorter and more cramped. The alleys seemed to double back impossibly. Deeba and her companions passed dead ends, spirals, carefully confusing blind alleys.
“I think I’ve got a map,” the book said. “Check around page three-sixty.”
There was a plan of the maze, so extraordinarily complicated it looked like a human brain. Below it was printed: THE BLABYRINTH.
“I can’t follow this,” Deeba said, staring in the light of the streetlamps and the moving stars.
“’Course you can,” the book said. “You see the entrance? Put your finger on it. Now follow as I tell you. Don’t press too hard on the page, you’ll tickle. Are you ready?
“We’ve gone left, left, right, left, left, right, right, left, and right. Then left. Stop. Where your finger is is where we are.”
“How can you remember that?” Hemi said.
“I’m a book,” it said smugly. “We have good memories. Mark that place. Gently. Do you have a pencil? Now find a way from where we are to the center. When you’ve found one, move your finger along it.”
It took Deeba and Hemi several minutes of false starts and retracing their trails, but eventually they traced a twisting route to the center of the maze. Deeba moved her finger slowly along it, and the book translated her fingertip journey, murmuring directions she and Hemi cautiously followed.
At last they turned into the cul-desac at the center of the Talklands maze. In front of them was a red phone box.
58
Touching Base
“Dad?”
“Deeba?”
The phone had accepted the coins in various currencies that Deeba had fed it. It wasn’t a good line, and Deeba’s voice and her father’s were separated by long pauses, and heavily distorted, but they could hear each other.
Hemi, Curdle, and the book waited outside the phone box, looking into the rapidly encroaching night.
“Dad, can you hear me? I’m so glad to talk to you!”
“What are you up to, darling?” he said after another long pause. Even knowing about the phlegm effect, Deeba could not help being shocked by how calm he sounded. She had not been home for so long.
“I’m okay, Dad, I just wanted to say I’ll see you soon. And to tell you I love you and…and don’t forget about me.”
As she spoke, Deeba was astonished to see through the glass a dense clot of wasps emerge from the phone outside the box and tear off into the night. They flew close together, extraordinarily fast, disappearing in an instant.
After a moment, they, or another group, zoomed back down out of the sky and into the phone again. They buzzed together, and through the receiver, Deeba heard her father’s voice.
“Forget about you?” he laughed. “What are you talking about, mad girl?” She laughed back, a little hysterical with happiness.
“Get Mum, will you?” she said, and watched the insects zip off again to buzz her voice down the phone to her father. But only half of them came back, and when she heard her father’s response, it was broken up and faint.
“…can’t…not…gone out…” he said.
“Say that again, Dad, I can’t hear you.” Deeba sent the wasps skywards. “Tell her I said hello! Tell her I called!” Make her think about me, Deeba thought. Hemi knocked on the phone box. Deeba didn’t even look at him, just made