China Mieville

by The City

  “So what was it?”

  “Bol Ye’an’s an old dig, Inspector.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye’an’s uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we’re looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It’s root stuff.”

  “It must be extraordinary.”

  “Of course. Also pretty incomprehensible. You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?”

  “I think so. That’s why all the interest, yes?”

  “Well … yes. That and the kind of things you have here. What Mahalia was doing was trying to decode what the title of her project called ‘A Hermeneutics of Identity’ from the layouts of gears and so on.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Then she did a good job. The aim of a PhD’s to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you’re doing after the first couple of years. I’m joking, you understand. What she’s doing would have had ramifications for theories of the two cities. Where they came from, you know. She played her cards pretty close, so I was never sure month to month where she stood exactly on the issue, but she still had a couple of years to make up her mind. Or to just make something up.”

  “So she was helping with the actual dig.”

  “Absolutely. Most of our research students are. Some for primary research, some as part of their stipend deal, some a bit of both, some to suck up to us. Mahalia was paid a little bit, but mostly she needed to get her hands on the artefacts for her work.”

  “I see. I’m sorry, Professor, I’d been under the impression that she’d been working on Orciny …”

  “She used to be interested in that. She first went to Besźel for a conference, some years ago.”

  “Yes, I think I heard about that.”

  “Right. Well, it caused a little stink because at that time she was very into Orciny, totally—she was a little Bowdenite, and the paper she gave didn’t go down very well. Led to some remonstrations. I admired her guts, but she was on a hiding to nothing with all that stuff. When she applied to do her PhD—to be honest I was pretty surprised it was with me—I had to make sure she knew what would and wouldn’t be … acceptable. But… I mean, I don’t know what she was reading in her spare time, but what she was writing, when I got the updates on her PhD, they were, they were fine.”

  “Fine?” I said. “You don’t sound …”

  She hesitated.

  “Well … Honestly I was a little, a little bit disappointed. She was smart. I know she was smart, because, you know, in seminars and so on she was terrific. And she worked superhard. She was a ‘grind,’ we’d say”—the word in English—“always in the library. But her chapters …”

  “Not good?”

  “Fine. Really, they were okay. She’d pass her doctorate, no problem, but it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It was kind of lacklustre, you know? And given the number of hours she was working, it was a bit thin. References and so on. I’d spoken to her about it, though, and she promised that she was, you know. Working on it.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “Sure.” She was taken aback. “I mean, I suppose. I don’t know. I have to work out what the ethics of that are. I’ve got the chapters she gave me, but they’re very unfinished; she wanted to work on them more. If she’d finished it it would be public access, and no problem, but as it is … Can I get back to you? She probably should have been publishing some of them as papers in journals—that’s kind of the done thing—but she wasn’t. We’d talked about that too; she said she was going to do something about it.”

  “What’s a Bowdenite, Professor?”

  “Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry. It’s the source of this Orciny stuff. Poor David wouldn’t thank me for using the term. It’s someone inspired by the early work of David Bowden. Do you know his work?”

  “… No.”

  “He wrote a book, years ago. Between the City and the City. Ring any bells? It was a huge thing for the later flower children. The first time for a generation anyone had taken Orciny seriously. I guess it’s not a surprise you haven’t seen it; it’s still illegal. In Besźel and in Ul Qoma. You won’t find it even in the university libraries. In some ways it was a brilliant piece of work—he did some fantastic archival investigations, and saw some analogies and connections that are … well, still pretty remarkable. But it was pretty crackpot ramblings.”

  “How so?”

  “Because he believed in it! He collated all these references, found new ones, put them together into a kind of ur-myth, then reinterpreted it as a secret and a cover-up. He … Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really, thought he did believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said he believed it. He came to Ul Qoma, from where he went to Besźel, managed I do not know how to go between the two of them—legally I assure you—several times, and he claimed to have found traces of Orciny itself. And he went further-said that Orciny wasn’t just somewhere that had existed in the gaps between Qoma and Besźel since their foundings or coming together or splitting (I can’t remember where he stood on the Cleavage issue): he said it was still here.”

  “Orciny?”

  “Exactly. A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight.”

  “What? Doing what? How?”

  “Unseen, like Ul Qomans to Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites. David said he was going to go into it and disappear.”

  “Wow.”

  “Exactly, wow. Wow is right. It’s notorious. Google it, you’ll see. Anyway, when we first saw Mahalia she was pretty unreconstructed. I liked her because she was spunky and because Bowdenite she may have been but she had panache and smarts. But it was a joke, you understand? I even wondered if she knew it, if she was joking herself.”

  “But she wasn’t working on that anymore?”

  “No one reputable would supervise a Bowdenite PhD. I had this stern word with her about it when she enrolled, but she even laughed. Said she’d left all that behind. As I say, I was surprised she’d come to me. My work’s not as avant-garde as hers.”

  “The Foucaults and the $$i$$eks not your thing?”

  “I respect them of course, but—”

  “Aren’t there any of those, what should we say, theory types she could have gone with?”

  “Yes, but she told me she needed to get her hands on the actual objects. I’m an artefact scholar. My more philosophically oriented colleagues would … well, I wouldn’t trust many of them to brush the dirt off an amphora.” I laughed. “So I guess it made sense to her; she was really insistent on learning how to do that side of things. I was surprised but pleased. You understand these pieces are unique, Inspector?”

  “I think so. I’ve heard all the rumours, of course.”

  “You mean their magic powers? I wish, I wish. But even so these digs are incomparable. This material culture makes no sense at all. There is nowhere else in the world that you’ll dig up what looks like cutting-edge late antiquity, really beautiful complicated bronzework mixed right up with frankly neolithic stuff. Stratigraphy looks like it goes out of the window with this. It was used as evidence against the Harris Matrix—wrongly, but you can see why. That’s why these digs are popular with young archaeologists. And that’s not even counting all the stories, which is all they are but which hasn’t stopped unlikely researchers pining for a chance to have a look. Still, I’d have thought Mahalia would have tried to go to Dave, not that she’d have had much luck with him.”

  “Dave? Bowden? He’s alive? He teaches?”

  “Certainly he�
��s alive. But even back when she was into this, Mahalia wouldn’t have got him to supervise her. I’m willing to bet she must have spoken to him when she was first investigating. And I’m willing to bet she got pretty short shrift. He repudiated all this years ago. It’s the bane of his life. Ask him. A burst of adolescence he’s never been able to shake off. Never published anything else worth a damn—he’s the Orciny man for the rest of his career. He’ll tell you this himself if you ask him.”

  “I may. You know him?”

  “He’s a colleague. It’s not a big field, pre-Cleavage archaeology. He’s at Prince of Wales too, at least part-time. He lives here, in Ul Qoma.”

  She lived several months of the year in apartments in Ul Qoma, in its university district, where Prince of Wales and other Canadian institutions gleefully exploited the fact that the US state (for reasons now embarrassing even to most of its right-wingers) boycotted Ul Qoma. It was Canada, instead, that was enthusiastically forging links, academic and economic, with Ul Qoman institutions.

  Besźel, of course, was a friend of both Canada and the US, but the enthusiasm with which the two countries combined plugged into our faltering markets was dwarfed by that with which Canada cosied up to what they called the New Wolf economy. We were a street mongrel, maybe, or a scrawny milkrat. Most vermin are interstitial. It is very hard to prove that the shy cold-weather lizards in cracks in Besź walls can live in Besźel only, as frequently claimed: certainly they die if exported into Ul Qoma (even more gently than by children’s hands), but they tend to do so in Besź captivity as well. Pigeons, mice, wolves, bats live in both cities, are crosshatched animals. But by unspoken tradition, the majority of the local wolves—mean, bony things long-since adapted to urban scavenging—are generally if nebulously considered Besź: it is only those few of respectable size and none-too-vile pelt, the same notion held, that are Ul Qoman. Many citizens of Besźel avoid transgressing this—entirely unnecessary and invented—categorical boundary by never referring to wolves.

  I had scared off a pair once, as they foraged through rubbish in the yard of my building. I had thrown something at them. They had been unusually kempt, and more than one of my neighbours had been shocked, as if I had breached.

  Most of the Ul Qomanists, as Nancy described herself, were bilocated like her—she explained it with audible guilt, mentioning again and again that it must be a historical quirk that located the more fecund archaeological sites in areas of Ul Qoman totality, or heftily Ul Qoma–weighted crosshatching. Prince of Wales had reciprocal arrangements with several Ul Qoman academies. David Bowden lived more of each year in Ul Qoma, and less back in Canada. He was in Ul Qoma now. He had, she told me, few students, and not much of a teaching load, but I still could not get hold of him on the number she gave me.

  A little ferreting online. It was not hard to confirm most of what Isabelle Nancy had told me. I found a page that listed Mahalia’s PhD title (they had not yet taken her name offline, nor put up one of the online tributes I was sure would be coming). I found Nancy’s list of publications, and David Bowden’s. His included the book Nancy had mentioned, from 1975, two articles from around the same time, one more article from a decade later, then mostly journalism, some of it collected into a volume.

  I found fracturedcity.org, the main discussion site for the kooks of dopplurbanology, Ul-Qoma-and-Besźel obsession (the site’s approach of conjoining the two as a single object of study would outrage polite opinion in both cities, but judging by comments on the forum it was commonly if mildly illegally accessed from both, too). From there a series of links (cheekily, confident in the indulgence or incompetence of our and the Ul Qoman censors, many were servers with .uq and .zb addresses) gave me a few paragraphs copied from Between the City and the City. It read as Nancy had suggested.

  My phone startled me. I realised that it was dark, after seven.

  “Borlú,” I said, sitting back.

  “Inspector? Oh, shit, sir, we have a situation. This is Ceczoria.” Agim Ceczoria was one of the officers stationed at the hotel to look after Mahalia’s parents. I rubbed my eyes and scanned my email to see if I’d missed any messages coming in. There was a noise behind him, a commotion. “Sir, Mr. Geary … he went AWOL, sir. He fucking … he breached.”

  “What?”

  “He got out of the room, sir.” Behind him was a woman’s voice, and she was shouting.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know how the fuck he got past us, sir, I just don’t know. But he wasn’t gone long.”

  “How do you know? How did you get him?”

  He swore again.

  “We didn’t. Breach did. I’m calling from the car, sir, we’re en route to the airport. Breach are … escorting us. Somewhere. They told us what to do. That’s Mrs. Geary you can hear. He has to go. Now.”

  CORWI HAD GONE, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I took an unmarked squad car from the pool, but ran it with the sirens making their hysteric gulp gulp noises, so I could ignore traffic laws. (It was only the Besź rules which applied to me and which therefore I was with authority ignoring, but traffic law is one of the compromise areas where the Oversight Committee ensures close similarity between the rules of Besźel and Ul Qoma. Though the traffic cultures are not identical, for the sake of the pedestrians and cars who have, unseeing, to negotiate much foreign traffic, our vehicles and theirs run at comparable speeds in comparable ways. We all learn to tactfully avoid our neighbour’s emergency vehicles, as well as our own.)

  There were no flights out for a couple of hours, but they would sequester the Gearys, and in some hidden way Breach would watch them onto the plane, to make sure they were on it, and airborne. Our embassy in the US would already be informed, as well as the representatives in Ul Qoma, and a no visa flagged in their names on both our systems. Once they were out, they would not be back in. I ran through Besźel airport to the office of the policzai, showed my badge.

  “Where are the Gearys?”

  “In the cells, sir.”

  Depending on what I saw I was ready with, do you know what just happened to these people, whatever they’ve done they’ve just lost a daughter, and so on, but it was not necessary. They had given them food and drink and treated them gently. Ceczoria was with them in the little room. He was muttering to Mrs. Geary in his basic English.

  She looked at me tearfully. Her husband was, I thought for a second, asleep on the bunk. I saw how very motionless he was and revised my opinion.

  “Inspector,” Ceczoria said.

  “What’s happened to him?”

  “He’s … Breach did it, sir. He’ll probably be okay, wake up in a bit. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they did to him.”

  Mrs. Geary said, “You’ve poisoned my husband …”

  “Mrs. Geary, please.” Ceczoria rose and came closer to me, lowered his voice though he was talking now in Besź. “We didn’t know anything about it, sir. There was a little bit of a commotion outside and someone came into the lobby where we were.” Mrs. Geary was crying and talking to her unconscious husband. “Geary kind of lurches in and passes out. The hotel security go at them, and they just look at this shape, someone behind Geary in the hallway, and the guards stop and wait. I hear this voice: ‘You know what I represent. Mr. Geary breached. Remove him.’” Ceczoria shook his head, helpless. “Then, and I still can’t see anything properly, whoever’s speaking’s gone.”

  “How …?”

  “Inspector, I don’t fucking know. I … I take responsibility, sir. Geary must have got past us.”

  I stared at him. “Do you want a bloody biscuit? Of course it’s your responsibility. What did he do?”

  “Don’t know. Breach were gone before I could say a word.”

  “What about…” I nodded at Mrs. Geary.

  “She wasn’t deported: she didn’t do anything.” He was whispering. “But when I told her we had to take her husband, she said she’d go with him. She doesn’t want to stick around
on her own.”

  “Inspector Borlú.” Mrs. Geary was trying to sound controlled. “If you’re talking about me you should talk to me. Do you see what’s been done to my husband?”

  “Mrs. Geary, I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You should be …”

  “Mrs. Geary, I didn’t do this. Neither did Ceczoria. Neither did any of my officers. Do you understand?”

  “Oh Breach Breach Breach …”

  “Mrs. Geary, your husband just did something very serious. Very serious.” She was quiet but for heavy breaths. “Do you understand me? Has there been some mistake here? Were we less than clear in our explanations of the system of checks and balances between Besźel and Ul Qoma? Do you understand that this deportation is nothing to do with us, but that we have absolutely no power to do anything about it, and that he is, listen to me, he is incredibly lucky that’s all he’s got?” She said nothing. “In the car I got the impression that your husband wasn’t quite so clear on how it works here, so you tell me, Mrs. Geary, did something go wrong? Did he misunderstand our… advice? How did my men not see him leave? Where was he going?”

  She looked still as if she might cry; then she glanced at her supine husband and her stance changed. She stood straighter and whispered something to him that I did not catch. Mrs. Geary looked at me.

  “He was in the air force,” she said. “You think you’re looking at some fat old man?” She touched him. “You never asked us who might have done this, Inspector. I don’t know what to make of you, I really don’t. Like my husband said, you think we don’t know who did this?” She clutched and folded and unfolded a piece of paper, without looking at it, took it out of a side pocket of her bag, put it in again. “You think our daughter didn’t talk to us? First Qoma, True Citizens, Nat Bloc … Mahalia was afraid, Inspector.