Kraken

by China Miéville

“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”

“Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”

He’s pissed off with the world for being all godless and pointless, get me? He’d go back to his old faith tomorrow if he could. But he’s too smart now.” “That’s his cross to bear,” said Baron.

“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”

“Guv,” she said to Baron. “What do you know about how to …” She opened and clenched her hands. “How to make big shit go into something little?”

“What d’you know about making big shit little?”

The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT

What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

“Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon.

I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end.

“Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”

“Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See,

“Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists.

It’s not an intellectual mistake.”

The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were.

“Yeah but,” Collingswood said cautiously. “Only, it’s not totally admirable, is it, given that it’s total fucking bollocks.” They stared some more. “Well,” Vardy said. “That is true. I would have to concede that, unfortunately.” Neither of them laughed, but they could have done.

He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.

What you offering? You scratch my soul, you know, I’ll scratch yours. Tit for tat, darling. So what you been in? We all like a bit of theology here, love, no need to be shy.” He licked his lips. “Give us an afterlife, go on.”

Kraken did not steal fire from any demiurges, did not shape humans from clay, did not send baby kraken to die for our sins. “So Kraken was in the deep,” Dane had said. “Was in the deep, and it ate, and it took it, like, twenty thousand years to finish its mouthful.”

There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity.

Just once,” he said with abrupt savagery, “in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it’s supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.”