This Census-Taker by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

stay and look at everything but I was afraid of her finding me there, and I wanted to know what it was that had passed.
    My mother finished patting earth down as I approached her with my hands behind my back and she straightened and put something back in her pocket and waited.
    “I saw something,” I said. “A tree was walking.”
    She didn’t speak for a while. She stood as tall as she could and looked past me toward where I had been. Not knowing why, I kept the flowers I had picked up in my closed hand.
    “Maybe you only thought you saw something,” she said, and paused. I was fascinated by her hesitation, the uncharacteristic way her mouth opened and closed more than once before she continued. “Maybe,” she said, it sounded as if to herself as much as to me, “it was someone from your father’s city.”
    She watched the horizon, her brows low.
    “Come to see him?” I said.
    She looked at me and though her attention brought with it an anxiety as it often did I could see she was not appraising me but a situation. She contemplated saying more, craned her neck again. At last she shook her head.
    “You only thought you saw something,” she said. Her calm had relief in it and disappointment, so I too was both sorry and glad that no one was coming, to provoke her into finishing whatever she had started to tell. My mother bent again and returned to her task and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.
    When she went in I planted the petals and their thorns where she’d been digging.

T wo other times as I played in the dustblown slopes I saw my father heading to the dump-hole with the body of something he’d beaten to death. Both times I stayed very still to watch him. Sometimes in my mind when I think back to that he has my mother’s face, or he wears a face that I can’t bring clear, that goes between his and hers. But I’m sure it was my father. Once he had a small rockrabbit; once an animal so ruined I couldn’t identify it.
    Months passed between those times. If he did for other things, he did it when I didn’t see him.
    I had never seen my father kill a person, which I’m sure is what I saw, before the time I ran, but I think that was at least the third he had.
    A young man came to our house. He was tall and fervent and young and well dressed, one of the richer of the downhillers, I supposed. He was in a terrible temper when I opened the door.
    “Where’s the key-maker?” he said, jabbing his fingers at me. “Come on, where’s the fucking key-maker?”
    My father came and banished me so I sat outside on the cold ground below his window and tried to listen to what passed between them. It was on its way to summer again and the earth around the house was garish with weeds, though the blooms I’d found and planted never grew.
    I could hear the client telling my father his needs. He spoke in such a low quick voice I couldn’t make much out. My father seemed to be trying to calm him. It didn’t work and his own voice began to grow louder.
    “Make the fucking key,” the young man said. That I heard.
    My father made a brief response.
    “You want a silver flower?” the young man said. “Want me to give you a flower, councilman? Oh, I need it all! I need it all!”
    There was nothing for some minutes then a grating sound and a regular methodical thudding began. I was still, hunched there, too afraid to rise, hearing the beat, feeling percussions through the house.
    I don’t know what name I’d give to the feeling I had—it was mostly fear, of course, but it had in it something of certainty too, the excitement of being not surprised, seeing myself there as if I was my own watcher, of discerning ineluctability.
    The rhythm went on. I was blinking and quaking and I looked up into a sky now warm and heavy with clouds, and I saw my mother knelt with her skirt rucked to her knees, her feet parted in runnels of earth between growing marrows. Scabs of dirt dropped from her hands.
    I looked at her and she