Un Lun Dun

34. Curiosity and Its Fruits

For a while, Deeba tried not to think about UnLondon, because it made her miss it. She soon realized, however, that she couldn’t stop herself.

In the streets, she would eye passersby and wonder if they knew of the abcity’s existence. She was a member of an exclusive group.

Deeba wanted to know about the UnLondoners, and UnLondon, and the Smog, and the secret war. That war with the Smog, in particular, fascinated her. The idea that something like that had once gone on in her own city made all the impossibility she had seen feel closer to home.

There must be UnLondoners who’ve moved to London, as well as the other way round, she realized. Maybe there’s a secret group I can join, or something. Friends of UnLondon.

After all, she knew now that there were real secret societies.

On the computer in her living room, Deeba went searching on the internet for information, while her mother and father watched television.

There were quite a few websites that said UnLondon, but she checked them all laboriously, and none of them were about the abcity. There can’t be nothing, she thought, but there was.

All the references to Unstible were irrelevant spelling mistakes. All the listings for Armets were about the old helmets, from which the secret defenders had taken their name. Deeba tried countless different spellings of Klinneract and came up with nothing.

She tried to think of new strategies to research the hidden histories. She looked up how to toughen fabric. She looked up weatherwitches, and got loads of pages, but mostly ridiculous foolishness, and nothing at all helpful.

“Mum,” she said. “What’s it called when you study about the weather?”

“Meteorology, sweetheart,” her mother said, and spelt it for her. “You doing homework?”

Deeba didn’t answer. She typed meteorology into the search engine, and sighed as more than fourteen million hits came up. She combined meteorology with the words smog, society, and London. She still got lists of hundreds or thousands of websites.

She was amazed by the numbers of people studying the British weather. The Met office, meteorology departments in universities, departments of London’s mayor’s office, the Royal Meteorological Society. She clicked on them randomly, and skimmed articles about the London Smog of 1952.

And then suddenly, Deeba saw the web address of one of the sites she was reading: rmets.org.

The Royal Meteorological Society, it said at the top of the page, next to a logo that read RMETS.

Deeba stared, her eyes and mouth opening wide.

She’d found the society of so-called weatherwitches with whom Unstible said he’d studied. She’d found the Armets, and they weren’t named after helmets at all.

It’s got garbled over the years, she thought. The name. People here saying RMetS, and UnLondoners mishearing, and thinking Armets. It’s just a mistake.

Deeba’s delight at having worked this out was tempered by growing unease.

So…what was Unstible talking about, saying he’d studied magic with the Armets? There is no Armets. No weatherwitches. No magic. There’s no secret society. It’s all a misunderstanding.

So…

So Unstible must have been lying.