China Mieville

by The City

  “So,” the older man said. He nodded at the wall. “You heard Bowden. What’s happening. What do you know about Orciny?”

  THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see. The Breach has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.

  This trail that led and led again to Orciny suggested systemic transgression, secret para-rules, a parasite city where there should be nothing but nothing, nothing but Breach. If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let that go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist?, put it like this, “So, are we at war?”

  I brought our collaboration to their attention. I, daring, bargained. “I’ll help you …” I kept saying, with a drawn-out pause, an ellipsis implying if. I wanted the killers of Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez and they could tell that, but I was not too noble to bargain. That there was room to barter, a way, a small chance that I might get out of Breach again, was intoxicating.

  “YOU ALMOST CAME for me once before,” I said. They had been watching, when I came grosstopically close to my house. “So are we partners?” I said.

  “You’re a breacher. But it’ll go better if you help us.” “You really think Orciny killed them?” the other man said. Would they finish with me when there was even a possibility that Orciny was here, emerging, and still unfound? Its population walking the streets, unseen by the populations of Besźel and Ul Qoma, each thinking they were in the other. Hiding like books in a library.

  “What is it?” the woman said, seeing my face.

  “I’ve told you what I know, and it’s not much. It’s Mahalia who really knew what was happening, and she’s dead. But she left something behind. She told a friend. She told Yolanda that she’d realised the truth when she was going through her notes. We never found anything like that. But I know how she worked. I know where they are.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  WE LEFT THE BUILDING—the station, call it—in the morning, me in the company of the older man, Breach, and I realised I did not know what city we were in.

  I had stayed up much of the night watching films of interrogations, from Ul Qoma and from Besźel. A Besź border guard and an Ul Qoman, passersby from both cities who knew nothing. “People started screaming …” Motorists over whom bullets had gone.

  “Corwi,” I said, when her face appeared on the wall.

  “So where is he?” A quirk of recording made her voice far away. She was angry and controlling herself. “What the fuck has boss-man got himself into? Yes, he wanted me to help him get someone through.” That was all they established, repeatedly, her Besź questioners. They threatened her job. She was as contemptuous of that as Dhatt, though more careful how she phrased it. She knew nothing.

  Breach showed me brief shots of someone questioning Biszaya and Sariska. Biszaya cried. “I’m not impressed with this,” I said. “This is just cruel.”

  The most interesting films were those of Yorjavic’s comrades among the extreme nationalists of Besźel. I recognised some who had been with Yorjavic. They stared sulky at their questioners, the policzai. A few refused to speak except in the company of their lawyers. There was hard questioning, an officer leaning across the table and punching a man in the face.

  “Fuck’s sake,” the bleeding man shouted. “We’re on the same fucking side, you fuck. You’re Besź, you’re not fucking Ul Qoman and you’re not fucking Breach …”

  With arrogance, neutrality, resentment or, often, compliance and collaboration, the nationalists denied any knowledge of Yorjavic’s action. “I’ve never fucking heard of this foreign woman; he never mentioned her. She’s a student?” one said. “We do what’s right for Besźel, you know? And you don’t have to know why. But …” The man we watched agonised with his hands, made shapes to try to explain himself without recrimination.

  “We’re fucking soldiers. Like you. For Besźel. So if you hear that something has to be done, if you get instructions, like someone has to be warned, reds or unifs or traitors or UQ or the fucking Breach-lickers are gathering or whatever, something has to be done, okay. But you know why. You don’t ask, but you can see it’s got to be done, most of the time. But I don’t know why this Rodriguez girl … I don’t believe he did and if he did I don’t…” He looked angry. “I don’t know why.”

  “Of course they have contacts in the deep state,” my Breach interlocutor said. “But with something as hard to parse as this, you can see the possibility, that Yorjavic maybe wasn’t a True Citizen. Or not only, but a representative of a more hidden organisation.”

  “A more hidden place maybe,” I said. “I thought you watched everything.”

  “No one breached.” He put papers in front of me. “Those are the findings of the Besźel policzai who searched Yorjavic’s apartment. Nothing linking him to anything like Orciny. Tomorrow we’re leaving early.”

  “How did you get all this?” I said as he and his companions stood. He looked at me with a motionless but withering face as he left.

  HE RETURNED AFTER A SHORT NIGHT, alone this time. I was ready for him.

  I waved the papers. “Presuming my colleagues did a good job, there’s nothing. A few payments come in time to time, but not that much—could be anything. He passed the exam a few years back, could cross—not so unusual, although with his politics …” I shrugged. “Subscriptions, bookshelves, associates, army record, criminal record, hangouts, and all that mark him out as a run-of-the-mill violent nat.”

  “Breach has watched him. Like all dissidents. There’s been no sign of unusual connections.”

  “Orciny, you mean.”

  “No sign.”

  He ushered me finally out of the room. The corridor had the same scabbing paint, a worn colourless carpet, a succession of doors. I heard the steps of others, and as we turned into a stairwell a woman passed us, with a moment’s acknowledgement to my companion. Then a man passed, and then we were in a hallway with several other people. What they wore would be legal in either Besźel or in Ul Qoma.

  I heard conversation in both languages and a third thing, a mongrel or antique that combined them. I heard typing. I never considered rushing or attacking my companion and trying to escape. I admit that. I was very observed.

  On the walls of an office we passed were corkboards thick with memos, shelves of folders. A woman tore paper from a printer. A telephone rang.

  “Come on,” the man said. “You said you know where the truth is.”

  There were double doors, doors to an outside. We stepped through, and that, when the light ate me up, was when I realised I did not know which city we were in.

  AFTER PANIC AT THE CROSSHATCH, I realised we must be in Ul Qoma: that was where our destination was. I followed my escort down the street.

  I was breathing deep. It was morning, noisy, overcast but without rain, boisterous. Cold: the air made me gasp. I was pleasantly disoriented by all the people, by the motion of coated Ul Qomans, the growl of cars moving slowly on this mostly pedestrian street, the shouts of hawkers, the sellers of clothes and books and food. I unsaw all else. There was the thrum of cables above us as one of the Ul Qoman inflates butted against the wind.

  “I don’t need to tell you not to run,” the man said. “I don’t need to tell you not to shout. You know I can stop you. And you know I’m not alone in watching you. You’re in Breach. Call me Ashil.”

  “You know my name.”

  “While you’re with me you’re Tye.”

  Tye, like Ashil, was not traditional Besź, nor Ul Qoman, could just plausibly be either. Ashil walked me across a courtyard, below facades of figures and bells, video screens with stock information. I did not know where we were.

  “You’re hungry,” Ashil said.

  “I can wait.” He steered me to a side street, another crosshatched side street where Ul Qoman stalls by a supermarket offered
software and knickknacks. He took my arm and guided me, and I hesitated because there was no food in sight except, and I pulled against him a moment, there were dumpling stations and bread stalls, but they were in Besźel.

  I tried to unsee them but there could be no uncertainty: that source of the smell I had been unsmelling was our destination. “Walk,” he said, and he walked me through the membrane between cities; I lifted my foot in Ul Qoma, put it down again in Besźel, where breakfast was.

  Behind us was an Ul Qoman woman with raspberry punk hair selling the unlocking of mobile phones. She glanced in surprise then consternation; then I saw her quickly unsee us as Ashil ordered food in Besźel.

  Ashil paid with Besźmarques. He put the paper plate in my hand, walked me back across the road into the supermarket. It was in Ul Qoma. He bought a carton of orange juice with dinar, gave it to me.

  I held the food and the drink. He walked me down the middle of the crosshatched road.

  My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up.

  Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besźel; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home.

  “Where are you?” Ashil said. He spoke so only I could hear.

  “Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?”

  “… Neither. I’m in Breach.”

  “You’re with me here.” We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. “In Breach. No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. Don’t creep. You’re not in neither: you’re in both.”

  He tapped my chest. “Breathe.”

  HE TOOK US BY METRO IN UL Qoma, where I sat still as if the remnants of Besźel clung to me like cobwebs and would frighten fellow passengers, out and onto a tram in Besźel, and it felt good, as if I were back home, misleadingly. We went by foot through either city. The feeling of Besźel familiarity was replaced by some larger strangeness. We stopped by the glass-and-steel frontage of UQ University Library.

  “What would you do if I ran?” I said. He said nothing.

  Ashil took out a nondescript leather holder and showed the guard the sigil of Breach. The man stared at it for seconds, then jumped to his feet.

  “My God,” he said. He was an immigrant, from Turkey judging from his Illitan, but he had been here long enough to understand what he saw. “I, you, what can I …?” Ashil pointed him back to his chair and walked on.

  The library was newer than its Besź counterpart. “It will have no classmark,” Ashil said.

  “That’s the point,” I said. We referred to the map and its legend. The histories of Besźel and Ul Qoma, carefully separately listed but shelved close to each other, were on the fourth floor. The students in their carrels looked at Ashil as he passed. There was in him an authority unlike that of parents or tutors.

  Many of the titles we stood before were not translated, were in their original English or French. The Secrets of the Precursor Age; The Literal and the Littoral: Besźel, Ul Qoma and Maritime Semiotics. We scanned for minutes—there were many shelves. What I was looking for, and there at last on the second-to-top shelf three rows back from the main walkway found, pushing past a confused young undergraduate as if I were the one with authority here, was a book marked by lack. It was unadorned at the bottom of its spine with a printed category mark.

  “Here.” The same edition I had had. That psychedelic doors-of-perception-style illustration, a long-haired man walking a street made patchwork from two different (and spurious) architectural styles, from the shadows of which watched eyes. I opened it in front of Ashil. Between the City and the City. Markedly worn.

  “If all this is true,” I said quietly, “then we’re being watched. You and me, now.” I pointed to one of the pairs of eyes on the cover.

  I riffled the pages. Ink flickers, most pages annotated in tiny scrawl: red, black, and blue. Mahalia had written in an extra-fine nib, and her notes were like tangled hair, years of annotations of the occult thesis. I glanced behind me, and Ashil did the same. No one was there.

  NO, we read in her hand. NOT AT ALL, and REALLY? CF HARRIS ET AL, and LUNACY!! MAD!!! and so on. Ashil took it from me.

  “She understood Orciny better than anyone,” I said. “That’s where she kept the truth.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “THEY’VE BOTH BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT what’s happened to you,” Ashil said. “Corwi and Dhatt.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  A look: We don’t speak to them at all. That evening he brought me colour copies, bound, of every page, and inside and outside covers, of Mahalia’s Ul Qoma copy of Between. This was her notebook. With effort and attention, I could follow a particular line of reasoning from each tangled page, could track each of her readings in turn.

  That evening Ashil walked with me in that both-cities. The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel-continental and middle-history brickwork of Besźel, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Besźel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing. Being in both cities had gone from being in Besźel and Ul Qoma to being in a third place, that nowhere-both, that Breach.

  Everyone, in both cities, seemed tense. We had returned through the two crosshatched cities not to the offices where I had woken—they were in Rusai Bey in Ul Qoma or TushasProspekta in Besźel, I had back-figured-out—but to another, a middling-smart apartment with a concierge’s office, not too far from that larger HQ. On the top floor the rooms extended across what must be two or three buildings, and in the warrens of that, Breach came and went. There were anonymous bedrooms, kitchens, offices, outdated-looking computers, phones, locked cabinets. Terse men and women.

  As the two cities had grown together, places, spaces had opened between them, or failed to be claimed, or been those controversial dissensi. Breach lived there.

  “What if you get burgled? Doesn’t that happen?”

  “Time to time.”

  “Then …”

  “Then they’re in Breach, and they’re ours.”

  The women and men stayed busy, carrying out conversations that fluctuated through Besź, Illitan, and the third form. The featureless bedroom into which Ashil put me had bars on its windows, another camera somewhere, for sure. There was an en-suite toilet. He did not leave. Another two or three Breach joined us.

  “Look at this,” I said. “You’re evidence this could all be real.” The interstitiality which made Orciny so absurd to most citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma was not only possible but inevitable. Why would Breach disbelieve life could thrive in that little gap? The anxiety was now rather something like We have never seen them, a very different concern.

  “It can’t be,” Ashil said.

  “Ask your superiors. Ask the powers. I don’t know.” What other, higher or lower, powers were there in Breach? “You know we’re watched. Or they were—Mahalia, Yolanda, Bowden—by something somewhere.”

  “There’s nothing linking the shooter to anything.” That was one of the others, speaking Illitan.

  “Alright.” I shrugged. I spoke in Besź. “So he was just a random, very lucky right-winger. If you say so. Or maybe you think it’s insiles, doing this?” I said. None of them denied the existence of the fabled scavenging interstitial refugees. “They used Mahalia, and when they were done they killed her. They killed Yolanda, in a way exactly so you couldn’t chase them. As if of all the things in Besźel, Ul Qoma, or anywhere, what they’re most scared of is B
reach.”

  “But”—a woman pointed at me—“look what you did.”

  “Breached?” I had given them a way in to whatever this war was. “Yes. What did Mahalia know? She worked something out about what they had planned. They killed her.” The overlaid glimmer of nighttime Ul Qoma and Besźel lit me through the window. I made my ominous point to a growing audience of Breach, their faces like owls’.

  They locked me in overnight. I read Mahalia’s annotations. I could discern phases of annotation, though not in any pagewise chronology—all the notes were layered, a palimpsest of evolving interpretation. I did archaeology.

  Early on, in the lowest layers of marks, her handwriting was more careful, the notes longer and neater, with more references to other writers and to her own essays. Her idiolect and unorthodox abbreviations made it hard to be sure. I started page on page trying to read, transcribe, those early thoughts. Mostly what I discerned was her anger.

  I felt a something-stretched-out over the night streets. I wanted to talk to those I had known in Besźel or Ul Qoma, but I could only watch.

  Whatever unseen bosses, if any, waited in the Breach’s bowels, it was Ashil who came for me again the next morning, found me going over and over those notes. He led me the length of a corridor to an office. I imagined running—no one seemed to be watching me. They would stop me, though. And if they did not, where would I go, hunted in-betweener refugee?

  There were twelve or so Breach in the cramped room, sitting, standing, precarious on the edge of desks, low muttering in two or three languages. A discussion midway. Why was I shown this?

  “… Gosharian says it hasn’t, he just called …”

  “What about SusurStrász? Wasn’t there some talk …?”

  “Yes, but everyone’s accounted for.”

  This was a crisis meeting. Mutterings into phones, quick checks against lists. Ashil said to me, “Things are moving.” More people came and joined the talk.