China Mieville

by The City

  “We had an argument. Actually I only had an argument with her because she was giving some of the other comrades shit, you know? I’d walk into the library or downstairs or whatever and someone or other would be shouting at her. She was never shouting at them, but she’d be talking quietly and driving them mad, and in the end I had to tell her to go. She was … she was dangerous.” Another silence. Corwi and I looked at each other. “No I ain’t exaggerating,” he said. “She brought you here, didn’t she? I told you she was dangerous.”

  He picked up the photograph and studied it. Across his face went pity, anger, dislike, fear. Fear, certainly. He got up, walked in a circle around his desk—ridiculous, too small a room to pace, but he tried.

  “See the problem was …” He went to his small window and looked out, turned back to us. He was silhouetted against the skyline, of Besźel or Ul Qoma or both I could not tell.

  “She was asking all this stuff about some of the kookiest underground bollocks. Old wives’ tales, rumours, urban myths, craziness. I didn’t think much of it because we get a lot of that shit, and she was obviously smarter than the loons into it, so I figured she was just feeling her way around, getting to know stuff.”

  “Weren’t you curious?”

  “Sure. Young foreign girl, clever, mysterious? Intense?” He mocked himself with how he said that. He nodded. “Sure I was. I’m curious about all the people who come here. Some of them tell me shit, some of them don’t. But I wouldn’t be leader of this chapter if I went around pumping them. There’s a woman here, a lot older than me … I been meeting her on and off for fifteen years. Don’t know her real name, or anything about her. Okay, bad example because I’m pretty sure she’s one of your lot, an agent, but you get the point. I don’t ask.”

  “What was she into, then? Byela Mar. Why did you kick her out?”

  “Look, here’s the thing. You’re into this stuff…” I felt Corwi stiffen as if she would interrupt him, needle him to get on with it, and I touched her no, wait, to give him his head on this. He was not looking at us but at his provocative map of the cities. “You’re into this stuff you know you’re skirting with … well, you know you step out of line you’re going to get serious trouble. Like having you lot here, for a start. Or make the wrong phone call we can put our brothers in shit, in Ul Qoma, with the cops there. Or—or there’s worse.” He looked at us then. “She couldn’t stay, she was going to bring Breach down on us. Or something.

  “She was into … No, she wasn’t into anything, she was obsessed. With Orciny.”

  He was looking at me carefully, so I did nothing but narrow my eyes. I was surprised, though.

  By how she did not move it was clear that Corwi did not know what Orciny was. It might undermine her to go into it here, but as I hesitated he was explaining. It was a fairy tale. That was what he said.

  “Orciny’s the third city. It’s between the other two. It’s in the dissensi, disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma’s and Ul Qoma Besźel’s. When the old commune split, it didn’t split into two, it split into three. Orciny’s the secret city. It runs things.”

  If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown—records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then those black-box centuries of urban instigation—certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the censor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth—then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

  As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style town-houses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

  Some decades previously there would have been no need for explanations—Orciny stories had been children’s standards, alongside the tribulations of “King Shavil and the Sea-Monster That Came to Harbour.” Harry Potter and Power Rangers are more popular now, and fewer children know those older fables. That’s alright.

  “Are you saying—what?” I interrupted him. “You’re saying that Byela was a folklorist? She was into old stories?” He shrugged. He would not look at me. I tried again to make him out and say what he was implying. He would only shrug. “Why would she be talking to you about this?” I said. “Why was she even here?”

  “I don’t know. We have stuff on it. It comes up. You know? They have them in Ul Qoma, too, you know, Orciny stories. We don’t just keep documents on, you know, just just what we’re into. You know? We know our history, we keep all kinds of…” He trailed off. “I realised it wasn’t us she was interested in, you know?”

  Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say they didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research. Their library must have defensively complete holdings of anything that even implied a blurring of urban boundaries. She had come—you could see it—seeking information not on some ur-unity but on Orciny. What an annoyance when they realised her odd researches weren’t quirks of investigation but the very point. When they realised that she did not much care about their project.

  “So she was a time-waster?”

  “No, man, she was dangerous, like I said. For real. She’d cause trouble for us. She said she wasn’t sticking around anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders vaguely.

  “Why was she dangerous?” I leaned in. “Drodin, was she breaching?”

  “Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned point, watching us out there is … you know. Breach.”

  We were all silent a moment then. We all felt watched.

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Course not. What do I look like? Who sees it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse … we’re gone. Do you …” He shook his head, and when he looked back at me it was with anger and perhaps hate. “Do you know how many of my friends have been taken? That I’ve never seen again? We’re more careful than anyone.”

  It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.

  Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car. If Byela, Fulana, had been breaching, she would have brought that in. So it was likely not suspicion of that specifically that had made Drodin afraid.

  “There was just something.” He looked up out of the window at the two cities. “Maybe she would, she would have brought Breach on us, eve
ntually. Or something.”

  “Hang on,” Corwi said. “You said she was leaving …”

  “She said she was going over. To Ul Qoma. Officially.” I paused from scribbling notes. I looked at Corwi and she at me. “Didn’t see her again. Someone heard she’d gone and they wouldn’t let her back here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true, and if it is I don’t know why. It was just a matter of time … She was poking around in dangerous shit, it gave me a bad feeling.”

  “That’s not all, though, is it?” I said. “What else?” He stared at me.

  “I don’t know, man. She was trouble, she was scary, there was too much … there was just something. When she was going on and on about all the stuff she was into, it started to give you the creeps. Made you nervous.” He looked out of the window again. He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry she died,” he said. “I’m sorry someone killed her. But I’m not that surprised.”

  THAT STINK OF INSINUATION and mystery—however cynical or uninterested you thought yourself it stuck to you. I saw Corwi look up and around at the shabby fronts of the warehouses when we left. Perhaps seeing a little long in the direction of a shop she must realise was in Ul Qoma. She felt watched. We both did, and we were right, and fidgety.

  When we drove out, I took Corwi—a provocation I admit though not aimed at her but at the universe in some way—for lunch in Besźel’s little Ul Qomatown. It was south of the park. With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the buildings’ designs, a squat self-parody. You can see the trimmings in the shade called Besźel Blue, one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma. These properties are local.

  These few streets—mongrel names, Illitan nouns and a Besź suffix, YulSainStrász, LiligiStrász, and so on—were the centre of the cultural world for the small community of Ul Qoman expatriates living in Besźel. They had come for various reasons—political persecution, economic self-betterment (and how the patriarchs who had gone through the considerable difficulties of emigrating for that reason must be rueing it now), whim, romance. Most of those aged forty and below are second and now third generation, speaking Illitan at home but Besź without an accent in the streets. There is maybe an Ul Qoman influence to their clothes. At various times local bullies and worse break their windows and beat them in the streets.

  This is where pining Ul Qoman exiles come for their pastries, their sugar-fried peas, their incense. The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons or wolves). But those smells are in Besźel.

  Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.

  “Boss,” Corwi said. We sat at a corner café, Con ul Cai, that I frequented. I had made a great show of greeting the proprietor by name, like doubtless many of his Besź clientele. Probably he despised me. “Why the fuck are we here?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Ul Qoman food. Come on. You know you want it.” I offered her cinnamon lentils, thick sweet tea. She declined. “We’re here,” I said, “because I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere. I’m trying to get into the spirit of Ul Qoma. Shit. You’re smart, Corwi, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. Help me with this.” I counted off on my fingers. “She was here, this girl. This Fulana, Byela.” I almost said Marya. “She was here—what?—three years ago. She was around dodgy local politicos, but she was looking for something else, which they couldn’t help her with. Something even they thought was dodgy. She leaves.” I waited. “She was going to Ul Qoma.” I swore, Corwi swore.

  “She’s been researching stuff,” I said. “She goes over.”

  “We think.”

  “We think. Then suddenly she’s back here.”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “Fuck.” Corwi leaned in, took and began thoughtfully to eat one of my pastries, stopped mouth full. For a long time neither of us said anything.

  “It is. It’s fucking breach, isn’t it?” Corwi said eventually.

  “… It looks like it might be breach, I think—yes I think it does.”

  “If not to get over, to come back. Where she gets done. Or postmortem. Gets dumped.”

  “Or something. Or something,” I said.

  “Unless she crossed legit, or she’s been here the whole time. Just because Drodin’s not seen her…”

  I recalled the phone call. I made a sceptical maybe face. “Could be. He seemed pretty sure. It’s sus, whatever.”

  “Well…”

  “Alright. So say it’s breach: that’s alright.”

  “Bullshit it is.”

  “No, listen,” I said. “That means it wouldn’t be our problem. Or at least… if we can persuade the Oversight Committee. Maybe I’ll get that started.”

  She glowered. “They’ll give you shit. I heard they were getting—”

  “We’ll have to present our evidence. It’s circumstantial so far but might be enough to get it passed over.”

  “Not from what I heard.” She looked away and back. “Are you sure you’d want to, boss?”

  “Shit yes. Shit yes. Listen. I get it. It’s a credit to you that you want to keep it, but listen. If there’s a chance we’re right… you can’t investigate breach. This Byela Fulana Foreigner Murdered Girl needs someone to look after her.” I made Corwi look at me by waiting. “We’re not the best people, Corwi. She deserves better than we can do. No one’s going to be able to look out for her like Breach. Christ, who gets Breach on their behalf? Sniffing out a murderer?”

  “Not many.”

  “Yeah. So if we can we need to hand it over. The committee knows that everyone would try to pass off everything; that’s why they make you jump through hoops.” She looked at me dubiously and I kept on. “We don’t have proof and we don’t know the details, so let’s take the next couple of days putting a cherry on top. Or proving ourselves wrong. Look at the profile we’ve got of her now. We’ve got enough at bloody last. She disappears from Besźel two, three years ago, turns up dead now. Maybe Drodin’s right she was in Ul Qoma. Aboveboard. I want you to hit the phone, make some contacts here and over there. You know what we’ve got: foreigner, researcher, et cetera. Find out who she is. Anyone fobs you off, hint this is a Breach issue.”

  On my return I went by Taskin’s desk.

  “Borlú. Got my call?”

  “Ms. Cerush, your laboured excuses for seeking my company are becoming unconvincing.”

  “I got your message and I’ve got it in motion. No, don’t commit to eloping with me yet, Borlú, you’re bound to be disappointed. You may have to wait a while to talk to the committee.”

  “How’s it going to work?”

  “When did you last do this? Years ago, right? Listen, I’m sure you think you’ve got a slam dunk—Don’t look at me like that, what’s your sport? Boxing? I know you think they’ll have to invoke”—her voice grew serious—“instantly I mean, but they won’t. You’ll have to wait your turn, and it could be a few days.”

  “I thought—”

  “Once, yes. They’d have dropped what they were doing. But it’s a tricky time, and it’s more us than them. Neither set of reps relish this, but honestly Ul Qoma’s not your issue at t
he moment. Since Syedr’s lot came into the coalition screaming about national weakness the government’s fretting about seeming too eager to invoke, so they’re not going to rush. They’ve got public enquiries about the refugee camps, and there’s no way they’re not going to milk those.”

  “Christ, you’re kidding. They’re still freaking out about those few poor sods?” Some must make it through and into one city or the other, but if they did it would be almost impossible for them not to breach, without immigration training. Our borders were tight. Where the desperate newcomers hit crosshatched patches of shore the unwritten agreement was that they were in the city of whichever border control met them, and thus incarcerated them in the coastal camps, first. How crestfallen were those who, hunting the hopes of Ul Qoma, landed in Besź.

  “Whatever,” Taskin said. “And other stuff. Glad-handing. They’re not going to shunt off business meetings and whatnot like they would’ve done once.”

  “Whoring it for the Yankee dollar.”

  “Don’t knock it. If they’re getting the Yankee dollar here that’ll do me. But they’re not going to rush for you, no matter who’s died. Did someone die?”

  IT DID NOT TAKE CORWI LONG to find what I had sent her to find. Late the next day she came into my office with a file.

  “I just got it faxed over from Ul Qoma,” she said. “I been trail-chasing. It wasn’t even so hard, when you knew where to start. We were right.”

  There she was, our victim—her file, her picture, our death mask, and suddenly and rather breathtakingly photographs of her in life, monochrome and fax-smudged but there, our dead woman smiling and smoking a cigarette and midword, her mouth open. Our scribbled notes, her details, estimated and now others in red, no question marks hesitating them, the facts of her; below her various invented names, there her real one.

  Chapter Six

  “MAHALIA GEARY.”

  There were forty-two people around the table (antique, would there ever be question?), and me. The forty-two were seated, with folders in front of them. I stood. Two minutes-takers transcribed at their stations in the room’s corners. I could see microphones on the table, and translators sat nearby.