We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.
We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.
This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.
Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.
He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.
On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.
Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.
AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room’s raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.
“Hi,” she said, shy. “It’s an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there’s looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said.” Billy blinked. “Teuthex said do you want to come, and they’d be glad if you was… if you want follow me because they’re waiting.”
He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex’s; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.
“Billy,” said Moore after a moment. “Please join us.”
“I protest,” someone said. There were murmurs.
“Billy, please join us,” Moore said.
“What is this?” Billy said.
“There’s never been a time like this,” Moore said. “Are you interested in the future?” Billy said nothing. “Do you ever read your horoscope?”
“No.”
“Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”
“Might be,” Dane said.
“They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.
“This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.
“What’s…?” Billy said.
“Well you may ask,” said Dane.
“Voices of the city,” Moore said.
“They wish.”
“Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”
“Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition…”
“Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.
“You’re forgetting,” the Teuthex said. “It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true.”
“Sentiment,” Dane said.
“Maybe,” Moore said. “But this time it was him called it. He’s been begging people to pay attention.” He pressed Play.
“-best if you ask,” said a curt digital voice.
“That’s Saira,” Moore said.
“-what you’re here for.”
“Something’s coming up, underneath everything.” It was the Teuthex. “We’re looking for a path between possible-”
“Not this time.” An old man’s voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. “Have faith, but you have to do something, understand? You’re right, it’s coming, and you have to… It’s all ending.”
“Have faith in what?” the Teuthex said. “In London?”
The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. “Time was I’d have said that,” he abruptly said.
“I don’t understand…”
“No one does. I know what you think. What did they tell you? Did anyone tell you what’s coming? Did they? No. They all know something is. None of them saw any way past it, did they? Something,” Fitch said, and his voice sounded like the voice of dust, “is coming. London’s been telling you. Something happened and there’s no running the numbers. No argument this time. No getting away from it.”
“What is it?”
“The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong.”
“We need to be looking,” Dane said. “We need to be out there finding God. The Tattoo runs things. He won’t let anyone else have something that powerful.”
“What about the man you said was his enemy?” Billy said. “Might it be him who took it?”
“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “No. He weren’t a villain and he weren’t a man of gods. And he died.”
“Don’t people think you took it?” said Billy. Everyone stared at him.
“Everyone knows we wouldn’t,” the Teuthex said. “It’s not ours. It’s no one’s.” They were, Billy understood, the last people who would take it, that asymptote of their faith.
“What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.”
“Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God… needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you know your catechism? What’s the most powerful piece on the board?”
At last Dane muttered, “Kraken’s the most powerful piece on the board.”
“Why?”
“… The movement that looks like not moving.”
“Act like you understand what that means.”
Moore stood and walked out. Billy waited. Dane walked out. The congregation left, one by one.
Chapter Twenty
FSRC HEADQUARTERS, ONE MIDDLE-SIZED ROOM CONTAINING cheap armchairs and Ikea office furniture. Collingswood rarely used a desk and had never claimed one of the various of them for herself, working instead with a laptop in a deep chair.
“What’s up with grumpy twat?” Collingswood said.
“By which we mean whom, today?” Baron said.
“Vardy. He’s been even quieter and grumpier than usual since this squid business.”
“You think? Seems pretty standard surly to me.”
“Nah.” Collingswood leaned in toward her screen. “What’s he even doing, anyway?”
“Getting to grips with the squid cult.”
“Right. Having a kip, then.”
Collingswood had seen Vardy’s methods. He crossed London, interrogating informants. He did a great deal of online trawling. Sometimes he would pursue a frenetic and focused following of a trail from book to book, reading a paragraph in one, dropping it and grabbing another from the sliding scree of them on his desk, or jumping up and finding one on the shelves that faced him, reading it as he returned so that by the time he sat down again he was already done with it. It was as if he had found a single compelling story smuggled in bits into countless books. There was also his channelling. He would sit, his fingers arching in front of his mouth, his eyes closed. He might rock. He would slip into that reverie and stay in it for minutes, maybe an hour.