Un Lun Dun by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

something else instead.
    There was a fat, low tree, with open-fronted bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens perched in its branches. People were clearly visible in each chamber, brushing their teeth or kicking back their covers. Obaday took them past a house-sized fist, carved out of stone, with windows in its knuckles; and then the shell of a huge turtle, with a door in the neck hole, and a chimney poking out of its mottled top.
    Zanna and Deeba stopped to stare at a building with oddly bulging walls, in a patchwork of black, white, and gray bricks of varying sizes.
    “Oh gosh,” said Deeba. “It’s
junk.
”
    The entire three-floor building was mortared-together rubbish. There were fridges, a dishwasher or two, and hundreds of record players, old-fashioned cameras, telephones, and typewriters, with thick cement between them.

    There were four round windows like a ship’s portholes. Someone inside threw one open: they were the fronts of washing machines, embedded in the facade.
    “Shwazzy!” Obaday called. “Shwazzy…I mean, Zanna. You’ll have time to stare at moil houses later.” The girls followed him, and the milk carton followed them.
    “How long will it take to get there?” Zanna said. “Is it dangerous?”
    “Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define ‘dangerous.’ Is a knife ‘dangerous’? Is Russian roulette ‘dangerous’? Is arsenic ‘dangerous’?” He did the little finger-thing to show quotation marks, tickling the air. “It depends on your perspective.”
    The girls looked at each other in alarm.
    “Uh…” said Zanna.
    “I don’t think it does depend on perspective,” said Deeba. “I think that’s all definitely
dangerous.
I don’t think you need none of this…” She did the quote motion.
    “If we planned ahead, sent a few messages,” Obaday went on, “maybe got a gnostechnician to check the travel reports on the undernet, stayed each night with friends in safe places in whatever borough we reached…then it would be perfectly safe. Well…reasonably safe. Safe-esque. But, yes, it would be ‘dangerous’ if we didn’t think ahead, and we took a wrong turning into Wraithtown, or met some scratchmonkeys or a building with house-rabies, or, lord help us, if we ran into the
giraffes…
”
    He shivered, reached up absently, and touched his fingertips on the ends of his pins and needles. “But we’re not walking. We’re going to get there today. This is…well, a ‘special occasion’ doesn’t cover it, really, does it? We have to get you to the Propheseers
one,
as quickly as possible, and
two,
as safely as possible.”
    They turned into a cul-de-sac of brick homes, houses on stilts, and a windmill made of a helicopter on its side. Skool pointed. He, or she, beckoned them to a shelter with a very familiar logo.
    “Now,” said Obaday, “we have only to wait.”
    Zanna and Deeba stopped. The milk carton bumped into Deeba’s foot and squeaked.
    Zanna said, “We’re getting a bus?”

11
    Public Transport
    “I know!” said Obaday. “Hard to believe. But yes. I think we need to.”
    Zanna and Deeba looked at each other. They didn’t speak, but messages went between them in a series of looks and raised eyebrows:
What’s the big deal with a bus? Don’t know…
    “I’ve got the fare,” Obaday said. “They never turn anyone away, but it’s traditional to pay what you can.”
    They were joined at the stop by an elderly woman in a coastguard’s uniform, and a hulking figure in a dress at whom Zanna and Deeba had to force themselves not to stare. It was a lobster, waddling on two stubby legs, clacking her pincers.
    Obaday looked at his watch, leaned against the pole, and began to read his sleeve. The girls watched the sky. A sliver of the hoop-sun was visible over the roofs. Troupes of starlings, pigeons, and crows crisscrossed in front of the clouds, in rather more organized fashion than they ever seemed to manage in London.
    “Look,” said Zanna, pointing. There were other