This Census-Taker Read online

It was fully night. I looked past him at the dark side of the hill and the foliage and stone in the sundown. I heard another whinnying honk.

  “Your mule,” I said quickly, so he’d know I was just startled, not afraid.

  He gestured down the hill and pursed his lips and before he spoke I said, “There’s no one in town for me,” and it was he who was startled this time. He looked at me with interest and care.

  “I had…” I said, and thought of Samma and of Drobe and didn’t know how to explain them. On the bridge, Samma might soon hook for bats, at least. “One can’t do any more for me and one’s gone,” I said. “Drobe’s his name.”

  That made the man look away from me, down the dark slopes. He seemed to hold his breath.

  At which, though I’d been about to tell him more, I stopped. Wherever he was now I had no more to say about poor Drobe.

  “There’s no one,” I said in the end.

  The man nodded and released his breath and walked out of the cave and waited where the hill began.

  “Do you have food in your house?” he said.

  “You can’t come in.”

  “I know. You’re good at rules. That’s good. I was thinking of you, for the food. Do you have something?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you could…” he said, and got lost in thought.

  “So,” he said eventually, hurriedly. “Like I said, sometimes there are tasks arising—any jobs that the numbers tell me need doing. It’s my job to do them. We had trouble where I come from. Fighting. What we realized is that the more you know about your people, the better. That’s why I go counting.

  “I had someone who worked for me.” He spoke carefully. “But she listened to tattle. About me. And in the end she took off with records and messages that weren’t hers to take. She’s gone now. Papers refiled.

  “I need a replacement.

  “They told me about your father and mother and they told me about you. Law goes through the blood a bit. I’ll mark you in my books whatever happens, which makes you my business, and makes the books your business too. You could learn them.”

  He stopped. I willed him to continue.

  “I need an intern,” he said. “Would you like to come with me?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  The man walked down the hill by a route I’d never have taken. I followed him to a crag. He showed me the lights of the town and the darkness of the other hill beyond them and the gorge yawning below, and the bridge. There was a glow of neon, somewhere with places open late. A district on the other side that I didn’t recognize from where we were, that was like somewhere I’d never seen, somewhere just opened.

  “I could teach you,” he said. “To do what I do.”

  “An apprentice,” I said.

  “No. A trainee. I’ll train you. We’ll be colleagues.” I’d come to understand that word. “If you come to work with me we’ll be in the same department. I’ll be your line manager.”

  “Where’s yours?”

  He frowned. “A long way away back home.”

  “What’ll happen?” I said.

  At first he didn’t answer. We walked back to my house. Then he said, “Hey,” when it came into view, so I quickly turned to listen.

  He said, “Will you give me your attention? If you work with me you might hear difficult things but I need you to stay focused. Think you can do that? And it might be scary sometimes. Can you be brave?

  “There’s—an agent—of something—who’s been trailing me a long time.” He shook his head. “Trying to catch me up, saying things. It can trick you. Issuing good forgeries, using the right language. I have to keep ahead of it. If someone told you stories about me, would you believe them?”

  I shook my head when I understood that was what he required.

  “I do have this authority. To make this count. So will you.”

  He smiled and stilled my new unease. I was eager to make this count, as he said.

  “Bring what you want,” he said, pointing me into the house. “What you can.”

  One more looking through the windows. Two shirts. What books I could find. Samma’s little knife, which I stared at, which I’d forgotten. I went through every room. Some oatcakes. Two pencils.

  In my father’s workroom I looked at the table all mucky with metal dust. The room felt saturated with his presence, felt like he was speaking in it.

  I didn’t take any of his keys.

  Tucked behind his worktable was the message in looped blue ink that was or was not my mother’s. I blinked to see it there. That I took.

  In the upstairs room I used the knife to score around the edges of the image I’d drawn on the wallpaper. I teased with the point and tried to lift my animals off the wall to carry them with me. But the glue was too strong and the paper came off in strips and they tore away.

  I took the house key from the hook in the kitchen. It should have been dark when I came out but it was as if there was gray light under the hill’s stones.

  The man fetched his mule. It met my eyes in challenge. “What do you have?” he said. I started to justify everything I carried but he just opened a pannier for me to put it in.

  “My goat!” I said. I ran to it and it hawed and hustled me.

  “You should bring it,” the man said, giving it a wave of welcome.

  “You took the other one,” I said.

  He frowned. He shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t steal,” he said.

  “Who took it, then?” I said.

  “There’s no shortage of thieves.”

  “I thought you took it. I thought I heard you shoot.”

  “You might have done. But,” he said then, “not your goat.”

  I closed the door of my house. I locked it. “You came here because I was here, didn’t you?” I said. I looked at the key I held.

  “Wait,” I said.

  I ran to where I’d buried the bottle. It was too heavy to bring. I couldn’t let those remains molder without me. I couldn’t bring myself to smash that thick glass even had I the strength. I pulled it out of the earth and shook it and the bones rattled.

  You could put a bird’s egg in there and let it grow in the glass. Drobe hadn’t said if anyone had ever put a baby in a bottle and let it continue. You could. Push food in, teach it through the glass, clean it out. If you were strong enough. You could grow a man in there, a woman, in the glass.

  I didn’t smash the bottle but I did at last upend it and scatter the bones.

  I put my house key into the bottle and stopped it up again and nestled it carefully in a hollow of dried weeds and stone, where the bones it had contained could watch it.

  He said, “Let’s put this place out of our sight.”

  Halfway between what had been my house and the bridgetown the man clicked within his throat and veered off the path.

  I was so surprised I stopped at the edge of the rough and watched him. He turned to face me and walked backward to keep up with his mule. He beckoned as he went so I stepped after him among the stones, pulling my goat. It came, complaining.

  “Careful,” the man said. “We’re going wherever there are people to count.” The mule sniffed but I thought it sounded happy.

  The coming darkness and the picking of the plant life against my ragged trousers and the sway of our step-by-step descent narcotized me so I felt myself retreat behind my eyes, watching from a long way back, listening to my own body until after some hours at the start of deep night as we approached a spreading canopy, the foothills and the hill’s forested surrounds, the census-taker woke me for a startled moment by lifting me to put me in the saddle, nestled between bags. I fell asleep again, proper asleep, at once.

  Much later I lurched half out of a bad dream with a cry, shaking, my hands clutching for something. Perhaps the animals had sounded. I don’t think so.

  We were in the wooded lowland, I realized. We were off the hill.

  I looked still sleepily at the flat land that somehow did
not shock me alert, or all the way awake.

  This Is My Catechism, it says in my second book, a book started, confiscated, pilfered, regained, and that I’ve inherited, that my boss taught me slowly to read, the few scraps left of which I go over many times, and ultimately in which now I write.

  And there’d come to be a lot to write, a diaspora of which to make sense. An aftermath of war and commerce. Numbers to run, in as many kinds of places as there are places, cities you could call invisible or uneasy or beleaguered, cities about which I won’t even start to write here, in this part of my second book that can only be a prologue. There would be functions to apply according to instructions, which I can do without insubordination.

  My line manager rarely speaks about my predecessor.

  It wasn’t my catechism that fronts this, to which I’ve at last responded, with my five words on two lines, and with all of this; it was hers, the message she needed to give me, to give whoever came after her. It is mine now, though. Written with her unorthodox precision and inserted at the start of what would become my second book too, I’ve keyed it many times with the muffled typewriter, with its hacking bird sound: I write it again now, in full, by hand.

  The Hope Is So:

  Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

  Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize

  Interests. So

  Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends.

  “I dreamed of the hole,” I murmured. I rolled with the mule. I heard the man and his voice calmed me. He was close and I was unafraid.

  I dreamed of the hole, I said. I remember saying it, but I don’t remember the dream exactly, though all my memories before that moment and after—forever after, you might say—had and have to them a must and coldness that can only have come from inside a hill. I’ve supposed that these recollections are what make me fretful at introspective times, so I believe what I said was true, but too, I think I dreamed of another city than that conical one of the discarded, that I’d visited that place I’d started to draw between the flowers on the wall, the uncertain charcoal city bustling with citizens of endless kinds and business, the limits of which spread out so every country I would ultimately come to, in which to count those I’d learn are my scattered compatriots and my business, would be in its outskirts, and I according to some purpose looking for the message left for me there, and counting there too.

  There were rises in the distance, against the clouded sky behind us. I counted absences in my head. One of the rises must have been the hill, with its counter-hill, and its bridge, from where I’d come, from which my manager and I were just newly descended.

  To Mic

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For all their help with this book, my deepest thanks to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Rupa DasGupta, Maria Dahvana Headley, Simon Kavanagh, Tessa McWatt, Susie Nicklin, Sue Powell, Max Schaefer, and Rosie Warren. I’m very grateful to all at Macmillan and Picador, especially Nick Blake, Robert Clark, Ansa KhanKhattack, Neil Lang, Ravi Mirchandani, and Lauren Welch; and all at Random House, in particular Keith Clayton, Penelope Haynes, David Moench, Tricia Narwani, Scott Shannon, David G. Stevenson, Annette Szlachta-McGinn, my editor, Mark Tavani, and Betsy Wilson.

  Much of this book was written during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; and then as a residency fellow of the Lannan Foundation, in Marfa, TX. I am profoundly grateful to both organizations for their generous support.

  Among the countless writers to whom I’m indebted, I want here to pay particular tribute to Mary Butts, Barbara Comyns, John Hawkes, Jane Gaskell, Denis Johnson, Anna Kavan, Edward St. Aubyn, and Roland Topor.

  BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

  King Rat

  Perdido Street Station

  The Scar

  Iron Council

  Looking for Jake: Stories

  Un Lun Dun

  The City & The City

  Kraken

  Embassytown

  Railsea

  Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

  This Census-Taker

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of numerous books, including Three Moments of an Explosion, The City & The City, Embassytown, Railsea, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times). He lives and works in London.

  chinamieville.net

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