This Census-Taker by China Miéville Page A

void to the other converged before me on the second hill, in the dimmer quarter that had once cradled my mother.
    “Moth boy,” Samma said. She sounded fond. “If you could fly you’d get right up there and touch the wire and die.”
    “You know what happens when you die?” Drobe said. “Do you know church?” he said.
    I ran forward again, hearing nothing of my own steps. Samma grabbed me, held me as tight as a harness, but I still felt as if I was running for those southern parts, or then as if the night itself had stopped to pause my investigation.
    Did my mother walk ahead of me? Even when she told stories of her earlier life she never seemed nostalgic, and I could think of no reason that death alone would change that. If she took that revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she
had
to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography.
    It wasn’t all collapse. Neither side of the town was ever only flyblown or air-bleached plastic or runoff and the slippage of industry but those were the castles she’d sought to live in, a cruder form, and it was by them that I considered her.
    Someone would come to find strangers and those born of strangers, Drobe said, repeating things he’d heard. People had been sent out to perform such tasks, he said, to take number, and now someone was coming. I didn’t understand him. It seemed I’d spoken of the trash head in my ruminations, and that mention had provoked him to interrupt me with his garbled information.
    “From the same place is what I’m saying,” he said. “I know that head. In the dump-house? That’s from when there was a time—where the counters come from—they were scared of all the engines and they smashed them all up. The ones that looked like that.”
    Before we were born, rumors of distant insurrection had meant the ordering of destruction, the gleeless dismembering of all such geared constructed figures. One of a sequence of imbricated catastrophes our town had imported from the little coast city, which had itself succumbed to the anxiety, as we all did with so many, as a contagion from a vast other country.
    Later I would come to understand that the doll’s head I’d given my dead mother must have been left as a sole remnant of the moving statue bodies, a disavowable memorial to molder on the tip while every other memento was broken and gone.
    “First that,” Drobe said. He tried to make me look at him while he told me these stories. “With the mechanicals. Then they had problems on the trains. And there was a war. Two wars! One inside, one out.” Samma looked at him, guarded. Who had been telling him this? “Years ago. And it all ends up with people sent to take stock, to count foreigners. Like your father,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
    I only just listened. I’m surprised now by how much of what he said I remember. I wouldn’t think of the murderer then; it was the murderee who had my attention. I was trying to hold her gone hand.
    “Your mum’s in heaven now,” Drobe said.
    I looked down at the cobbles. He said it to be kind.
    —
     
    For breakfast we scooped clean our pot with tough folded leaves. While I was eating the last of our cold stew the officials found me.
    The hunter came into the room. He walked slowly through the dust and the struts of light toward me in my corner. He picked a way heavily through upended furniture frames and children staring at him, mouths frozen open. The schoolteacher waited at the doorway, her face set.
    “So,” the man said. He held up his empty hands as if to show me something, as I’d done when I ran down the hill.