China Mieville

by The City

  I would say that she could never have seen the like of this place before, but that may not be true. Maybe she had once or twice watched a documentary named something like The Dark Side of the Ul Qoma Dream or The Sickness of the New Wolf or what have you. Films about our neighbour were not generally popular in Besźel, were rarely distributed, so I could not vouch, but it would not be surprising if some blockbuster had been made with the backdrop of gangs in the Ul Qoma slums—the redemption of some not-too-hardcore drug-runner, the impressive murder of several others. Perhaps Yolanda had seen footage of the failed estates of Ul Qoma, but she would not have meant to visit.

  “Do you know your neighbours?”

  She did not smile. “By voice.”

  “Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”

  “They got Mahalia, they got Doctor Bowden, now they’re going to get me.”

  “I know you’re afraid, but you have to help me. I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know what happened. If I don’t know, I can’t help you.”

  “Help me?” She looked around the room. “You want me to tell you what’s up? Sure, you ready to bunk down here? You’ll have to, you know. If you know what’s going on, they’ll come for you too.”

  “Alright.”

  She sighed and looked down. Aikam said to her, “Is it okay?” in Illitan, and she shrugged, Maybe.

  “HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know and I do not want to. There are access points, she said. She didn’t tell me any more and that was alright by me.”

  “Why didn’t she tell anyone but you?” She seemed to know nothing of Jaris.

  “She wasn’t crazy. You’ve seen what happened to Doctor Bowden? You don’t admit you want to know about Orciny. That was always what she was here for, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s how they want it. Orcinians. It’s perfect for them that no one thinks they’re real. That’s just what they want. That’s how they rule.”

  “Her PhD …”

  “She didn’t care about it. She was just doing enough to keep Prof Nance off her back. She was here for Orciny. Do you realise they contacted her.” She stared at me intently. “Seriously. She was a bit… the first time she was at a conference, in Besźel, she sort of said a load of stuff. There was a load of politicians and stuff there as well as academics and it caused a bit of—”

  “She made enemies. I heard about it.”

  “Oh, we all knew the nats had their eyes on her, nats on both sides, but that wasn’t the issue. It was Orciny who saw her then. They’re everywhere.”

  Certainly she had made herself visible. Shura Katrinya had seen her: I remembered her face at the Oversight Committee when I mentioned the incident. As had Mikhel Buric, I recalled, and a couple of others. Perhaps Syedr had seen her too. Perhaps there had been interested unknown others. “After she first started writing about them, after she was reading all that stuff in Between, and writing it up, and researching, making all her mad little notes”—she made tiny scribbling motions—“she got a letter.”

  “Did she show you?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t understand it when I saw it. It was in the root form. Precursor stuff, old script, before Besź and Illitan.”

  “What did it say?”

  “She told me. It was something like: We are watching you. You understand. Would you like to know more? There were others too.”

  “She showed you?”

  “Not straightaway.”

  “What were they saying to her? Why?”

  “Because she worked them out. They could tell she wanted to be part of it. So they recruited her. Had her do stuff for them, like, like initiation. Give them information, deliver things.” This was impossible stuff. With a look she challenged me to mock and I was silent. “They gave her addresses where she should leave letters and things. In dissensi. Messages back and forth. She was writing back. They were telling her things. About Orciny. She told me a little bit about it, and the history and that, and it was like … Places no one can see because they think they’re in the other city. Besź think it’s here; Ul Qomans think it’s in Besźel. The people in Orciny, they’re not like us. They can do things that aren’t…”

  “Did she meet them?”

  Yolanda stood beside the window pane, staring out and down at an angle that kept her from being framed by its whitewash-diffused light. She turned to look at me and said nothing. She had calmed into despondency. Aikam came closer to her. His eyes went between us like a spectator at a tennis match. Finally Yolanda shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She wanted to. I don’t know. I know at first they said no.” Not yet, they had said. “They told her stuff, history, stuff about what we were doing. This stuff, the Precursor Age stuff… it’s theirs. When Ul Qoma digs it up, or even Besźel, there’s this whole thing about whose is it, where was it found, you know, all that? It’s not Ul Qoma’s or Besźel’s. It’s Orciny’s; it always was. They told her about stuff we’d found that no one who hadn’t put it there could know. This is their history. They were here before Ul Qoma and Besźel split, or joined, around them. They never went away.”

  “But it was just lying there until a bunch of Canadian archaeologists—”

  “That’s where they kept it. That stuff wasn’t lost. The earth under Ul Qoma and Besźel’s their storeroom. It’s all Orciny’s. It was all theirs, and we were just… I think she was telling them where we were digging, what we were finding.”

  “She was stealing for them.”

  “We were stealing from them … She never breached, you know.”

  “What? I thought all of you—”

  “You mean … like games? Not Mahalia. She couldn’t. Too much to lose. Too likely someone was watching, she said. She never breached, not even in one of those ways that you can’t tell, standing there, you know? She wouldn’t give Breach a chance to take her.” She shivered again. I squatted down and looked around. “Aikam,” she said in Illitan. “Can you get us something to drink?” He did not want to leave the room, but he could see she was not afraid of me anymore.

  “What she did do,” she said, “was go to these places where they’d leave her letters. The dissensi are entrances to Orciny. She was so close to being part of it. She thought. At first.” I waited, and at last she continued. “I kept asking her what was up. Something was really wrong, in the last couple of weeks. She stopped going to the dig, meetings, everything.”

  “I heard.”

  “‘What is it?’ I kept saying, and at first she was like, ‘Nothing,’ but in the end she told me she was scared. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. She’d been frustrated I think because Orciny wouldn’t let her in, and she’d been going mad with work. She was studying harder than I’d ever seen. I asked her what it was. She just kept saying she was scared. She said she’d been going over and over her notes, and that she was figuring stuff out. Bad stuff. She said we could be thieves without even knowing.”

  Aikam came back. He carried for me and for Yolanda warm cans of Qora-Oranja.

  “I think she’d done something to make Orciny angry. She knew she was in trouble, and Bowden too. She said so just before she—”

  “Why would they kill him?” I said. “He doesn’t even believe in Orciny any more.”

  “Oh, God, of course he knows they’re real. Of course he does. He’s denied it for years because he needs work, but have you read his book? They’re going after everyone who knows about them. Mahalia told me he was in trouble. Just before she disappeared. He knew too much, and I do too. And now you do too.”

  “What are you intending to do?”

  “Stay here. Hide. Get out.”

  “How’s that going?” I said. She looked at me in misery. “Your boy did his best. He was asking me how a criminal might get out of the city.” She even smiled. “Let me help you.”

  “You can’t. They’r
e everywhere.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “How can you keep me safe? They’re going to get you now too.”

  Every few seconds there came the sounds of someone ascending outside the apartment, shouts and the noise of a handheld MP3 player, rap or Ul Qoman techno played loud enough to be insolent. Such everyday noises could be camouflage. Corwi was a city away. Listening now it seemed that every few noises paused by the door to the apartment.

  “We don’t know what the truth is,” I said. I had intended to say more, but realising that I was not sure whom I was trying to convince of what, I hesitated, and she interrupted me.

  “Mahalia did. What are you doing?” I had taken out my phone. I held it up as if surrendering, both hands.

  “Don’t panic,” I said. “I was just thinking … we need to work out what we’re going to do. There are people who might be able to help us—”

  “Stop,” she said. Aikam looked as if he might come for me again. I got ready to sidestep but waved the phone so she could see it was not on.

  “There’s an option you never pursued,” I said. “You could go outside, cross the road a little bit down the way there, and walk into YahudStrász. It’s in Besźel.” She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Stand there, wave your hands. You could breach.” Her eyes got wider.

  Another loud man ran upstairs outside, and we three waited. “Did you ever think it was worth a try? Who can touch Breach? If Orciny’s out to get you …” Yolanda was staring at the boxes of her books, her boxed-up self. “Maybe you’d be safer, even.”

  “Mahalia said they were enemies,” she said. She sounded far away. “She once said the whole history of Besźel and Ul Qoma was the history of the war between Orciny and Breach. Besźel and Ul Qoma were set up like chess moves, in that war. They might do anything to me.”

  “Come on,” I interrupted. “You know most foreigners who breach are just ejected—” But she interrupted back.

  “Even if I knew what they’d do, which neither of us do, think about it. A secret for like more than a thousand years, in between Ul Qoma and Besźel, watching us all the time, whether we know it or not. With its own agenda. You think I’d be safer if Breach had me? In the Breach? I’m not Mahalia. I’m not sure Orciny and the Breach are enemies at all.” She looked at me then and I did not disdain her. “Maybe they work together. Or maybe when you invoke you’ve been handing power to Orciny for centuries, while you all sit there telling each other it’s a fairy tale. I think Orciny is the name Breach calls itself.”

  Chapter Twenty

  FIRST SHE HAD NOT WANTED ME TO ENTER; then Yolanda did not want me to leave. “They’ll see you! They’ll find you. They’ll take you and then they’ll come for me.”

  “I can’t stay here.”

  “They’ll get you.”

  “I can’t stay here.”

  She watched me walk the width of the room, to the window and back to the door.

  “Don’t—you can’t make a phone call from here—”

  “You have to stop panicking.” But I stopped myself, because I was not sure that she was wrong to do so. “Aikam, are there other ways out of this building?”

  “Not the way we came in?” He looked intently and emptily a moment. “Some of the apartments downstairs are empty, and maybe you could go through them …”

  “Okay.” It had begun to rain, fingertipping against the obscured windows. Judging by the halfhearted darkening of the white windows, it was only just overcast. Washed out of colour, perhaps. Still it felt safer to escape than if it had been clear or coldly sunny, as it had that morning. I paced the room.

  “You’re alone in Ul Qoma,” Yolanda whispered. “What can you do?” I looked at her at last.

  “Do you trust me?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Too bad. You’ve no choice. I’m going to get you out. I’m not in my element here, but…”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m going to get you out of here, back to home ground, back to where I can make things happen. I’m going to get you to Besźel.”

  She protested. She had never been to Besźel. Both cities were controlled by Orciny, both were overlooked by Breach. I interrupted her.

  “What else are you going to do? Besźel’s my city. I can’t negotiate the system here. I have no contacts. I don’t know my way around. But I can get you out from Besźel, and you can help me.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Yolanda, shut up. Aikam, don’t move another step.” No time for this immobility. She was right, I could promise her nothing but an attempt. “I can get you out, but not from here. One more day. Wait here. Aikam, your job’s finished. You don’t work at Bol Ye’an any more. Your job’s to stay here and look after Yolanda.” He would provide little protection, but his continued interventions at Bol Ye’an would eventually attract other people’s attention than my own. “I will be back. You understand? And I’ll get you out.”

  She had food for some days, a diet of tins. This little living room/bedroom, another, smaller, filled with only damp, the kitchen with its electricity and gas supplies disconnected. The bathroom was not good but it would not kill them another day or two: from some standpipe Aikam had brought buckets that stood ready to flush. The many air fresheners he had bought made a stink different than it would otherwise have been.

  “Stay,” I said. “I’ll be back.” Aikam recognised the phrase, though it was in English. He smiled and so I said the words again for him in an Austrian accent. Yolanda did not get it. “I will get you out,” I said to her.

  On the ground floor a few shoves at doors yielded me an empty apartment, a long time since fire-damaged but still smelling of carbon. I stood in its glassless kitchen and watched the hardiest girls and boys outside refuse to get out of the rain. I watched for a long time, looking into all the shadows I could see. I saw only those children. My sleeves pulled over my fingertips in case of a fringe of glass, I vaulted out into the yard, where if any of the kids saw me emerge they did not remark.

  I know how to watch to ensure I am not followed. I walked quickly through the byway meanders of the project, between its bins and cars, graffiti and children’s playgrounds, until I made it out of cul-de-sac land into the streetscape of Ul Qoma, and Besźel. With relief at being one of several pedestrians rather than the only purposeful figure in sight, I breathed out a little, I took on the same rain-avoidance gait as everyone else, and at last turned on my phone. It scolded me with how many messages I had missed. All from Dhatt. I was starving and uncertain of how to get back to the Old Town. I wandered, looking for a Metro but finding a phone box. I called him.

  “Dhatt.”

  “It’s Borlú.”

  “Where the fuck are you? Where’ve you been?” He was angry but conspiratorial, his voice quieter as he turned and muttered into his phone, not louder. A good sign. “I’ve been trying to call you for fucking hours. Is everything … Are you alright? What the fuck’s going on?”

  “I’m alright, but…”

  “Something happened?” Anger but not only anger in his voice.

  “Yeah, something happened. I can’t talk about it.”

  “The fuck you can’t.”

  “Listen. Listen. I need to talk to you but I don’t have time for this. You want to know what’s been going on, meet me, I don’t know”—flipping through my street map—“in Kaing Shé, in the square by the station, in two hours, and Dhatt, do not bring anyone else. This is serious shit. There’s more going on here than you know. I don’t know who to talk to. Now are you going to help me?”

  I made him wait an hour. I watched him from the corner as he must surely have known I would. Kaing Shé Station is the city’s major terminus, so the square outside it bustled with Ul Qomans in cafés, by street performers, buying DVDs and electronics from stalls. The topolganger square in Besźel was not quite empty, so unseen Besź citizens were grosstopically there too. I stayed in the shadows of one of the cigaret
te kiosks shaped in homage to an Ul Qoman temporary hut, once common on the wetlands where scavengers sifted through the crosshatched mud. I saw Dhatt look for me, but I stayed out of sight while it grew dark and watched to see if he made any calls (he did not) or hand signals (he did not). He only set his face more and more as he drank teas and glowered in the shadows. At last I stepped into his line of sight and moved my hand in a little regular motion that caught his eye and beckoned him over.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he said. “I’ve had your boss on the phone. And Corwi. Who the fuck is she anyway? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t blame you being angry, but you’re keeping your voice low, so you’re being careful and you want to know what’s going on. You’re right. Something’s up. I found Yolanda.”

  When I would not tell him where she was he was enraged enough to start threatening an international incident. “This is not your fucking city,” he said, “you come here and use our resources, you fucking hold up our investigations,” and so on, but still he kept his voice low and walked with me, so I let his anger ebb out a bit and began to tell him how Yolanda was afraid.

  “We both know we can’t reassure her,” I said. “Come on. Neither of us knows the truth about what the hell’s going on. About the unifs, the nats, the bomb, about Orciny. Shit, Dhatt, for all we know …” He stared at me, so I said, “Whatever this is”—I glanced around to indicate everything that was happening—“it goes somewhere bad.”

  We were both silent a while. “So why the fuck are you talking to me?”

  “Because I need someone. But yeah, you’re right, it might be a mistake. You’re the only person who might understand … the scale of what might be going on. I want to get her out. Listen to me: this is not about Ul Qoma. I don’t trust my own lot any more than you. I want to get that girl out, away from Ul Qoma and Besźel. And I can’t do it from here; this isn’t my patch. She’s watched here.”

  “Maybe I could.”

  “You volunteering?” He said nothing. “Right. I am. I have contacts back home. You don’t cop for this long without being able to score tickets and false papers. I can hide her; I can talk to her in Besźel before I get her out, get some more sense of all this. This isn’t about giving up: the opposite. If we get her out of harm’s way we’ve got a much better chance of not getting blindsided. We can maybe work out what’s going on.”