China Mieville

by The City

  Dhatt met his eye. Fuck off, these truths don’t intimidate me, his expression said. Bowden smiled a little bashfully.

  “Wasn’t it a bit insulting?” I said. “Honoured visitors, sympaticos being watched like that?”

  “Might have been for some of them,” Bowden said. “The Philbys of Ul Qoma, the real fellow travellers, were probably rather put out. But then they’d also be the ones most likely to put up with anything. I never particularly objected to being watched. They were right not to trust me.” He sipped his drink. “How are you getting on with Between, Inspector?”

  His walls were painted beiges and browns in need of renovation, and busy with bookshelves and books and the folk art in Ul Qoman and Besź styles, antique maps of both cities. On surfaces were figurines and the remnants of pottery, tiny clockwork-looking things. The living room was not large, and so full of bits and pieces it was cramped.

  “You were here when Mahalia was killed,” Dhatt said.

  “I have no alibi, if that’s what you mean. My neighbour might have heard me puttering about, ask her, but I don’t know.”

  “How long have you lived here?” I said. Dhatt pursed his lips without looking at me.

  “God, years.”

  “And why here?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “So far as I can tell you have at least as much Besź stuff as local.” I pointed at one of the many old or reproduction Besź icons. “Is there a particular reason you ended up here rather than Besźel? Or anywhere else?”

  Bowden turned his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling.

  “I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know how much you know about this stuff. Most of the artefacts that are worth looking at, including the ones that look to us now like they were made by Besź craftsmen, are in Ul Qoman soil. That’s just how it’s always been. The situation was never helped by Besźel’s idiotic willingness to sell what little heritage it could dig up to whoever wanted it. Ul Qoma’s always been smarter about that.”

  “Even a dig like Bol Ye’an?”

  “You mean under foreign direction? Sure. The Canadians don’t technically own any of it; they just have some handling and cataloguing rights. Plus the kudos they get from writing up, and a warm glow. And dibs on museum tours, of course. The Canadians are happy as Larry about the US blockade, believe me. Want to see a very vivid green? Tell an American archaeologist you work in Ul Qoma. Have you seen Ul Qoma’s laws on antiquities export?” He closed his hands, fingers interlocking like a trap. “Everyone who wants to work on Ul Qoma, or Besźel, let alone if they’re into Precursor Age, ends up here if they can get here.”

  “Mahalia was an American archaeologist…” Dhatt said.

  “Student,” Bowden said. “When she finished her PhD she’d have had a harder time staying.”

  I was standing, glancing into his study. “Could I …?” I indicated in.

  “I … sure.” He was embarrassed at the tiny space. It was if anything even more cramped with the tat of antiquity than his living room. His desk was its own archaeology of papers, computer cables, a street-finder map of Ul Qoma, battered and several years old. Amid the mess of papers were some in a strange and very ancient script, neither Illitan nor Besź, pre-Cleaved. I could not read any of it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh …” He rolled his eyes. “It arrived yesterday morning. I still get crank mail. Since Between. Stuff that people put together and say is in the script of Orciny. I’m supposed to decode it for them. Maybe the poor sods really believe it’s something.”

  “Can you decode that one?”

  “Are you kidding? No. It doesn’t mean anything.” He closed the door. “No news of Yolanda?” he said. “This is seriously worrying.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Dhatt. “Missing Persons are on it. They’re very good. We’re working closely with them.”

  “We absolutely have to find her, Officers. I’m … This is crucial.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have any grievance against Yolanda?”

  “Yolanda? My God no, she’s sweet, I can’t think of anyone. Mahalia was a bit different. I mean … Mahalia was … what happened to her was utterly appalling. Appalling. She was smart, very smart, and opinionated, and brave, and it isn’t quite so … What I’m saying is I can imagine Mahalia getting people angry. She did that. It’s the kind of person she was, and I mean that as a compliment. But there was always that fear that Mahalia might one day piss off the wrong person.”

  “Who might she have pissed off?”

  “I’m not talking specifics, Senior Detective, I have no idea. We didn’t have very much contact, Mahalia and I. I hardly knew her.”

  “Small campus,” I said. “Surely you all knew everyone.”

  “True. But honestly I avoided her. We hadn’t spoken for a long time. We didn’t get off to a very auspicious start. Yolanda, though, I know. And she’s nothing like that. She’s not as clever, maybe, but I cannot think of a single person who doesn’t like her, nor why anyone would want to do anything to her. Everyone’s horrified. Including the locals who work there.”

  “Would they have been devastated about Mahalia, too?” I said.

  “I doubt any of them knew her, to be frank.”

  “One of the guards seemed to. Made a point of asking us about her. About Mahalia. I thought he might be her boyfriend or something.”

  “One of the guards? Absolutely not. Sorry, that sounded a bit peremptory. What I mean is that I’d be amazed. Knowing what I do of Mahalia, I mean.”

  “Which isn’t much, you said.”

  “No. But, you know, you pick up on who’s doing what, which students do what. Some of them—Yolanda’s one—hang out with the Ul Qoman staff, but not Mahalia. You will tell me if you find anything out about Yolanda? You have to find her. Or even if you just have theories about where she is, please, this is terrible.”

  “You’re Yolanda’s supervisor?” I said. “What’s her PhD on?”

  “Oh.” He waved. “‘Representing Gender and the Other in Precursor Age Artefacts.’ I still prefer ‘pre-Cleavage’ but it makes an unfortunate pun in English, so Precursor Age is the newly preferred term.”

  “You said she’s not smart?”

  “I did not say that. She’s perfectly intelligent enough. It’s fine. She’s just … There aren’t that many people like Mahalia in any postgraduate program.”

  “So why weren’t you her supervisor?”

  He stared at me as if I was mocking him.

  “Because of her bullshit, Inspector,” he said at last. He stood and turned his back, seemed to want to walk around the room, but it was too small. “Yes, these were the tricky circumstances under which we met.” He turned back to us. “Senior Detective Dhatt, Inspector Borlú. Do you know how many PhD students I have? One. Because no one else wanted her. Poor thing. I have no office at Bol Ye’an. I have no tenure nor am I on tenure track. Do you know what my official title is, at Prince of Wales? I’m a Corresponding Lecturer. Don’t ask me what that means. Actually, I can tell you what it means—it means We are the world’s leading institution for Ul Qoma, Besźel and Precursor Age studies, and we need all the names we can get, and we may even entice a few rich kooks onto our program with your moniker, but we are not so stupid as to give you a real job.”

  “Because of the book?”

  “Because of Between the City and the City. Because I was a stoned young man with a neglectful supervisor and a taste for the arcane. No matter that you turn around a little later and say ‘Mea culpa, I messed up, no Orciny, my apologies.’ No matter that eighty-five percent of the research still holds up and is still used. Hear me? No matter what else you do, ever. You can never walk away from it no matter how hard you try.

  “So when, as happens regularly, someone comes to me and tells me that the work that fucked things up is so great, and that she’d love to work with me—and this is what Mahalia did at the conference over in Besźel where I first met her
—and that it’s such a travesty that the truth is still banned in both cities, and that she’s on my side … Did you know by the way that when she first arrived here she not only smuggled a copy of Between into Besźel but told me she was going to shelve it in the history section of the University Library, for Christ’s sake? For people to find? She told me that proudly. I told her to get rid of it immediately or I would set the policzai on her. Anyway, when she tells me all that, yes, I got shirty.

  “I meet these people pretty much every conference I go to. I tell them I was wrong and they think either that I’ve been bought off by the Man, or that I’m afraid for my life. Or that I’ve been replaced by a robot or something.”

  “Did Yolanda ever talk about Mahalia? Wasn’t it hard, you feeling like that about her best friend …”

  “Feeling like what? There was nothing, Inspector. I told her I wouldn’t supervise her; she accused me of cowardice or capitulation or something, I can’t remember; that was the last of it. I gathered that she’d more or less shut up about Orciny in the years since she’d been on the program. I thought good, she’s grown out of it. That was it. And I heard she was clever.”

  “I got the impression Professor Nancy was a bit disappointed with her.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. She wouldn’t be the first person to be a letdown in writing, but she still had a reputation.”

  “Yolanda wasn’t into Orciny stuff? That’s not why she was studying with you?”

  He sighed and sat down again. It was unimpressive, his lacklustre up-down.

  “I thought not. I wouldn’t have supervised her. And no, not at first… but she’d mentioned it recently. Brought up dissensi, what might live there, all that. She knew my feelings, so she was trying to act as if it was all hypotheticals. It sounds ridiculous, but it honestly hadn’t even occurred to me that it was because of Mahalia’s influence. Was she talking to her about it? Do you know?”

  “Tell us about the dissensi,” Dhatt said. “Do you know where they are?”

  He shrugged. “You know where some are, SD. There’s no secret about lots of them. A few paces of back yard here, a deserted building there. The central five metres or so of Nuistu Park? Dissensus. Ul Qoma claims it; Besźel claims it. They’re effectively crosshatched or out of bounds in both cities while the bickering goes on. There’s just not that much exciting about them.”

  “I’d like a list from you.”

  “If you want, but you’ll get it quicker via your own department, and mine is probably twenty years out of date. They do get resolved, time to time, and new ones emerge. And then you might hear of the secret ones.”

  “I’d like a list. Hang on, secret? If no one knows they’re disputed, how can they be?”

  “Quite. They’re secretly disputed, SD Dhatt. You have to get your head into the right mindset for this foolishness.”

  “Doctor Bowden …” I said. “Do you have any reason to think anyone might have anything against you?”

  “Why?” He was very abruptly alarmed. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing, only …” I said, and paused. “There’s some speculation that someone is targeting people who’ve been investigating Orciny.” Dhatt made no move to interrupt me. “Perhaps you should be careful.”

  “What? I don’t study Orciny, I haven’t for years …”

  “As you say yourself, once you’ve started this stuff, Doctor… I’m afraid you’re the doyen whether you like it or not. Have you received anything that could be construed as a threat?”

  “No …”

  “You were burgled.” That was Dhatt. “A few weeks ago.” We both looked at him. Dhatt was unembarrassed by my surprise. Bowden’s mouth worked.

  “But that was just a burglary,” he said. “Nothing was even taken …”

  “Yes, because they must’ve got startled—that was what we said at the time,” Dhatt said. “Could be it was never their intent to take anything.”

  Bowden, and more surreptitiously I, looked around the room, as if some malevolent gris-gris or electronic ear or painted threat might jump suddenly to light.

  “SD, Inspector, this is utterly absurd; there is no Orciny …”

  “But,” Dhatt said, “there are such things as nutters.”

  “Some of whom,” I said, “for whatever reason are interested in some of the ideas being explored by yourself and Miss Rodriguez, Miss Geary …”

  “I don’t think either of them were exploring ideas …”

  “Whatever,” Dhatt said. “The point is they got someone’s attention. No, we’re not sure why, or even if there is a why.”

  Bowden was staring absolutely aghast.

  Chapter Sixteen

  DHATT TOOK THE LIST Bowden gave him and sent an underling to supplement it, sent officers to the itemised lots, derelict buildings, patches of kerb and little promenade spaces on the river’s shore, to scuff stones and probe at the edges of disputed, functionally crosshatched patches. I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.

  Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.

  Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling. Young Bowden’s readings of some still-unsolved mysteries of Precursor or Pre-Cleavage age works were ingenious and even convincing. He had an elegantly argued claim that the incomprehensible mechanisms euphemistically slanged as “clocks” were not mechanisms at all, but intricately chambered boxes designed solely to hold the gears they contained. His leaps to the therefore were lunatic, as he now admitted.

  Of course there would be paranoia, for a visitor to this city, where the locals would stare and stare furtively, where I would be watched by Breach, of which snatched glances would not feel like anything I had experienced.

  My cell phone rang, later, while I was sleeping. It was my Besź phone, showing an international call. It would piss credit, but it was on the government.

  “Borlú,” I said.

  “Inspector…” Illitan accent.

  “Who is this?”

  “Borlú I don’t know why you … I can’t talk long. I … thank you.”

  “Jaris.” I sat up, put my feet on the floor. The young unif. “It’s…”

  “We’re not fucking comrades, you know.” He was not speaking in Old Illitan this time, but quickly in his own everyday language.

  “Why would we be?”

  “Right. I can’t stay on the line.”

  “Okay.”

  “You could tell it was me, couldn’t you? Who called you in Besźel.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Right. This call never fucking happened.” I said nothing. “Thanks for the other day,” he said. “For not saying. I met Marya when she came over here.” I had not given her that name for a while, but for the moment when Dhatt had questioned the unifs. “She told me she knew our brothers and sisters over the border; she’d worked with them. But she wasn’t one of us, you know.”

  “I know. You set me on that track in Besźel …”

  “Shut up. Please. I thought she was at first, but the stuff she was asking about, it was … She was into stuff you don’t even know about.” I would not preempt him. “Orciny.” He must have in
terpreted my silence as awe. “She didn’t give a shit about unification. She was putting everyone in danger so she could use our libraries and our contacts lists … I really liked her, but she was trouble. She only cared about Orciny.

  “Borlú, she fucking found it, Borlú.

  “Are you there? Do you understand? She found it…”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me. None of the others knew. When we realised how … dangerous she was she was banned from meetings. They thought she was, like, a spy or something. She wasn’t that.”

  “You stayed in touch with her.” He said nothing. “Why, if she was so …?

  “I … she was …”

  “Why’d you call me? In Besźel?”

  “… She deserved better than a potter’s field.”

  I was surprised he knew the term. “Were you together, Jaris?” I said.

  “I hardly knew anything about her. Never asked. Never met her friends. We’re careful. But she told me about Orciny. Showed me all her notes about it. She was … Listen, Borlú, you won’t believe me but she’d made contact. There are places—”

  “Dissensi?”

  “No, shut up. Not disputed: places that everyone in Ul Qoma thinks are in Besźel, and everyone in Besźel thinks are in Ul Qoma. They’re not in either one. They’re Orciny. She found them. She told me she was helping.”

  “Doing what?” I only spoke at last because the silence went on so long.

  “I don’t know much. She was saving them. They wanted something. She said. Something like that. But when I said to her once ‘How d’you know Orciny’s on our side?’ she just laughed and said ‘I don’t, they’re not.’ She wouldn’t tell me a lot. I didn’t want to know. She didn’t talk about it much at all. I thought she might be crossing, through some of these places, but…”