The City & the City - China Mieville [112]
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 There were anonymous bedrooms, kitchens, offices, outdated-looking computers, phones, locked cabinets.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 Breach.”
“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