by The City
“Corwi’s got word to them. They’re flying in. Major, I’m not sure you understand the position we’re in. Yes I am keen. Don’t you want to see the murderer of Mahalia Geary found?”
“Alright, enough.” Yavid Nyisemu. He galloped his fingers on the table. “Inspector, you might not take that tone. There’s a concern, both reasonable and growing, among representatives that we’re too quick to cede to Breach in situations where we might actually choose not to, and that doing so’s dangerous and potentially even a betrayal.” He waited until eventually his requirement was clear and I made a noise that could be thought apology. “However,” he continued. “Major, you might also consider being less argumentative and ridiculous. For goodness’ sake, the young woman’s in Ul Qoma, disappears, turns up dead in Besźel. I can hardly think of a more clear-cut case. Of course we’ll be endorsing the surrender of this to Breach.” He cut the air with his hands as Syedr began to complain.
Katrinya nodded. “A voice of sense,” Buric said. The Ul Qomans had obviously seen these internal fights before. The splendours of our democracy. Doubtless they conducted their own squabbles.
“I think that’ll be all, Inspector,” he said, over the major’s raised voice. “We’ve got your submission. Thank you. The usher’ll show you out. You’ll be hearing from us shortly.”
THE CORRIDORS OF COPULA HALL are in a determined style that must have evolved over the many centuries of the building’s existence and centrality to Besź and Ul Qoman life and politics: they are antique and haute, but somehow vague, definitionless. The oil paintings are well executed but as if without antecedent, bloodlessly general. The staff, Besź and Ul Qoman, come and go in those in-between corridors. The hall feels not collaborative but empty.
The few Precursor artefacts in alarmed and guarded bell jars that punctuate the passages are different. They are specific, but opaque. I glanced at some as I left: a sag-breasted Venus with a ridge where gears or a lever might sit; a crude metal wasp discoloured by centuries; a basalt die. Below each one a caption offered guesses.
Syedr’s intervention was unconvincing—he gave the impression that he had decided to make his stand on the next petition that crossed the desk, and had the misfortune for it to be mine, a case with which it was hard to argue—and his motivations questionable. If I were political I would not in any circumstances follow his lead. But there was a reason to his caution.
The powers of the Breach are almost limitless. Frightening. What does limit Breach is solely that those powers are highly circumstantially specific. The insistence that those circumstances be rigorously policed is a necessary precaution for the cities.
That is why these arcane checks and balances between Besźel, Ul Qoma, and the Breach. In circumstances other than the various acute and unarguable breaches—of crime, accident or disaster (chemical spill, gas explosion, a mentally ill attacker attacking across the municipal boundary)—the committee vetted all potential invocations—which were, after all, all circumstances in which Besźel and Ul Qoma would denude themselves of any powers.
Even after the acute events, with which no one sane could argue, the representatives of the two cities on the committee would carefully examine ex post facto justifications they commissioned for Breach’s interventions. They might, technically, question any of these: it would be absurd to do so, but the committee would not undermine their authority by not going through important motions.
The two cities need the Breach. And without the cities’ integrities, what is Breach?
Corwi was waiting for me. “So?” She handed me coffee. “What did they say?”
“Well, it’s going to be handed over. But they made me jump through hoops.” We walked towards the police car. All the streets around Copula Hall were crosshatched, and we made our way unseeing through a group of Ul Qoman friends to where Corwi had parked. “You know Syedr?”
“That fascist prick? Sure.”
“He was trying to make out as if he wouldn’t let the case go to Breach. It was weird.”
“They hate Breach, don’t they, the NatBloc?”
“Weird to hate it. Like hating air or something. And he’s a nat, and if there’s no Breach, there’s no Besźel. No homeland.”
“It’s complicated, isn’t it,” she said, “because even though we need them, it’s a sign of dependence that we do. Nats are divided, anyway, between balance-of-power people and triumphalists. Maybe he’s a triumphalist. They reckon Breach are protecting Ul Qoma, the only thing stopping Besźel taking over.”
“They want to take it over? They’re living in a dreamworld if they think Besźel would win.” Corwi glanced at me. We both knew it was true. “Anyway, it’s moot. He was posturing, I think.”
“He’s a fucking idiot. I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever. When are we going to get the nod?”
“A day or two, I think. They’ll vote on all the motions put in front of them today. I think.” I did not know how it was organised, in fact.
“So in the meantime, what?” She was terse.
“Well, you’ve got plenty of other stuff to be getting on with, I take it? This isn’t your only case.” I looked at her as we drove.
We drove past Copula Hall, its huge entrance like a made, secular cave. The building is much larger than a cathedral, larger than a Roman circus. It’s open at its eastern and western sides. At ground level and for the first vaulted fifty feet or so above it is a semienclosed thoroughfare, punctuated with pillars, traffic streams separated by walls, stop-started with checkpoints.
Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission—or sometimes refused it—to leave Besźel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.
Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the crosshatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.
If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.
But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.
Copula Hall like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one.
There are places not crosshatched but where Besźel is interrupted by a thin part of Ul Qoma. As kids we would assiduously unsee Ul Qoma, as our parents and teachers had relentlessly trained us (the ostentation with which we and our Ul Qoman contemporaries used to unnotice each other when we were grosstopically close was impressive). We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way around in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong. Breach never manifested, of course. We did the same with the local lizards. They were always dead when we picked them up, and we said the little airborne trip through Ul Qoma had killed them, though it might just as well have been the landing.
“Won’t be our problem much longer,” I said, watching a few Ul Qoman tourists emerge into Besźel. “Mahalia, I mean. Byel
a. Fulana Detail.”
Chapter Seven
TO FLY TO BESŹEL from the east coast of the US involves changing planes at least once, and that’s the best option. It is a famously complicated trip. There are direct flights to Besźel from Budapest, from Skopje, and, probably an American’s best bet, from Athens. Technically Ul Qoma would have been harder for them to get to because of the blockade, but all they needed to do was nip into Canada and they could fly direct. There were many more inter national services to the New Wolf.
The Gearys were coming in to Besźel Halvic at ten in the morning. I had already made Corwi break the news of their daughter’s death to them over the phone. I told her I would escort them to see the body myself, though she could join me if she chose. She did.
We waited at Besźel Airport, in case the plane came in early. We drank bad coffee from the Starbucks analogue in the terminal. Corwi asked me again about the workings of the Oversight Committee. I asked her if she had ever left Besźel.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to Romania. I’ve been to Bulgaria.”
“Turkey?”
“No. You?”
“There. And London. Moscow. Paris, once, a long time ago, and Berlin. West Berlin as it was. It was before they joined.”
“Berlin?” she said. The airport was hardly crowded: mostly returning Besź, it seemed, plus a few tourists and Eastern European commercial travellers. It is hard to tourist in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma—how many holiday destinations set exams before they let you in?—but still, though I had not been I had seen film of the newish Ul Qoma Airport, sixteen or seventeen miles southeast, across Bulkya Sound from Lestov, and it got vastly more traffic than us, though their visitor conditions were not less strenuous than our own. When it had been rebuilt a few years previously, it had gone from somewhat smaller to much larger than our own terminal in a few months of frenetic construction. From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that.
A group of foreign orthodox Jews were met by their, judging by clothes, much less devout local relatives. A fat security officer let his gun dangle to scratch his chin. There were one or two intimidatingly dressed execs from those gold-dust recent arrivals, our new high-tech, even American, friends, finding the drivers with signs for board members of Sear and Core, Shadner, VerTech, those executives who did not arrive in their own planes, or copter in to their own helipads. Corwi saw me reading the cards.
“Why the fuck would anyone invest here?” she said. “Do you reckon they even remember agreeing to it? The government blatantly slips them Rohypnol at those junkets.”
“Typical Besź defeatist talk, Constable. That’s what’s doing our country down. Representatives Buric and Nyisemu and Syedr are doing precisely the job with which we entrust them.” Buric and Nyisemu made sense: it was extraordinary Syedr had got into organising the trade fairs. Some favour pulled in. The fact that, as these foreign visitors showed, there were even small successes was even more remarkable for that.
“Right,” she said. “Seriously, watch these guys when they come out—I swear that’s panic in their eyes. Have you seen those cars ferrying them around town, at tourist spots and crosshatchings and whatever? ‘Seeing the sights.’ Right. Those poor sods are trying to find ways out.” I pointed at a display: the plane had landed.
“So you spoke to Mahalia’s supervisor?” I said. “I tried to call her a couple of times but can’t get through and they won’t give me her mobile.”
“Not for very long,” Corwi said. “I got hold of her at the centre—there’s like a research centre that’s part of the dig in Ul Qoma. Professor Nancy, she’s one of the bigwigs, she has a whole bunch of students. Anyway I called her and verified that Mahalia was one of hers, that no one had seen her for a while, et cetera et cetera. I told her we had reason to believe dot dot dot. Sent over a picture. She was very shocked.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. She was … kept going on about what a great student Mahalia was, how she couldn’t believe it, what had happened, so on. So you were in Berlin. Do you speak German then?”
“I used to,” I said. “Kin bisschen.”
“Why were you there?”
“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”
“Fuck!”
“I know, I know. That’s what we said at the time. Totally missing the point.”
“Split cities? I’m surprised the acad let you go.”
“I know, I could almost feel my freebie evaporating in a gust of other people’s patriotism. My super said it wasn’t just a misunderstanding of our status it was an insult to Besźel. Not wrong, I suppose. But it was a subsidised trip abroad, was I going to say no? I had to persuade him. I did at least meet my first Ul Qomans, who’d obviously managed to overcome their own outrage, too. Met one in particular at the conference disco as I recall. We did our bit to ease international tensions over ‘99 Luftballons.’” Corwi snorted, but passengers began to come through and we composed our faces, so they would be respectfully set when the Gearys emerged.
The immigration officer who escorted them saw us and nodded them gently over. They were recognisable from the photographs we had been sent by our American counterparts, but I would have known them anyway. They had the expression I have seen only on bereaved parents: their faces looked clayish, lumpy with exhaustion and grief. They shuffled into the concourse as if they were fifteen or twenty years older than they were.
“Mr. and Mrs. Geary?” I had been practicing my English.
“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”
“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”
The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.
“May I take you to your hotel?”
“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”
“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.
“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”
“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”
“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.
“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”
“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”
Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.
The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they we
re awake.
Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.
After a two-week or however-long-it-was course, no one thought visitors would have metabolised the deep prediscursive instinct for our borders that Besź and Ul Qomans have, to have picked up real rudiments of unseeing. But we did insist that they acted as if they had. We, and the authorities of Ul Qoma, expected strict overt decorum, interacting with, and indeed obviously noticing, our crosshatched neighbouring city-state not at all.
While, or as, sanctions for breach are severe (the two cities depend on that), breach must be beyond reasonable doubt. We all suspect that, while we are long-expert in unseeing it, tourists to the Old Besźel ghetto are surreptitiously noticing Ul Qoma’s glass-fronted Yal Iran Bridge, which in literal topology abuts it. Look up at the ribbon-streaming balloons of Besźel’s Wind-Day parade, they doubtless can’t fail (as we can) to notice the raised teardrop towers of Ul Qoma’s palace district, next to them though a whole country away. So long as they do not point and coo (which is why except in rare exceptions no foreigners under eighteen are granted entry) everyone concerned can indulge the possibility that there is no breach. It is that restraint that the pre-visa training teaches, rather than a local’s rigorous unseeing, and most students have the nous to understand that. We all, Breach included, give the benefit of the doubt to visitors when possible.