The City & the City - China Mieville [117]
On the inside of the back cover among layers of irate theory I read in big letters written over earlier smaller ones BUT CF SHERMAN. A line from that to an argument on the facing page: ROSEN’S COUNTER. These names were familiar from my earlier investigations. I turned a couple of pages backwards. In the same pen and late hurried hand I read, abutting an older claim: NO—ROSEN, VIJNIC.
Assertion overlaid with critique, more and more exclamationmarked clauses in the book. NO, a pointer connecting the word not to the original printed text but to an annotation, to her own older, enthusiastic annotations. An argument with herself. WHY A TEST? WHO?
“Hey,” I shouted. I did not know where the camera was. “Hey, Ashil. Get Ashil.” I did not stop making noise until he arrived. “I need to get online.”
He took me to a computer room, to what looked like a 486 or something similarly antique, with an operating system I did not recognise, some jury-rigged imitation of Windows, but the processor and connection were very fast. We were two of several in the office. Ashil stood behind me as I typed. He watched my researches, as well, certainly, as ensuring I did not email anyone.
“Go wherever you need,” Ashil told me, and he was right. Pay sites guarded by password protection needed only an empty return to roll over.
“What kind of connection is this?” I did not expect or get any answer. I searched Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic. On the forums I had recently visited, the three writers were subjected to ferocious contumely. “Look.”
I got the names of their key works, checked listings on Amazon for a quick-and-dirty appreciation of their theses. It took minutes. I sat back.
“Look. Look. Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic are all absolute hate figures on these fractured-city boards,” I said. “Why? Because they wrote books claiming Bowden was full of shit. That the whole argument’s bollocks.”
“So does he.”
“That’s not the point, Ashil. Look.” Pages and pages in Between the City and the City. I pointed to Mahalia’s early remarks to herself, then her later ones. “The point is that she’s citing them. At the end. Her last notes.” Turning more pages, showing him.
“She changed her mind,” he said finally. We looked at each other a long time.
“All that stuff about parasites and being wrong and finding out she was a thief,” I said. “God damn. She wasn’t killed because she was, some, one of the bloody elect few who knew the awesome secret that the third city existed. She wasn’t killed because she realised Orciny was lying to her, was using her. That’s not the lies she was talking about. Mahalia was killed because she stopped believing in Orciny at all.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
THOUGH I BEGGED and grew angry, Ashil and his colleagues would not let me call Corwi or Dhatt.
“Why the hell not?” I said. “They could do this. Alright then, do whatever the hell it is you do, find out. Yorjavic’s still our best connection, him or some of his partners. We know he’s involved. Try to get the exact dates Mahalia locked up, and if possible we need to know where Yorjavic was every one of those evenings. We want to work out if he picked up. The policzai watch the TC; they might know. Maybe the leaders’ll even tell, if they’re that disgruntled. And check out where Syedr was too—someone with access to stuff from Copula Hall’s involved.”
“We’re not going to be able to get every day Mahalia did the keys. You heard Buidze: half of them weren’t planned.”
“Let me call Corwi and Dhatt; they’d know how to sift them.”
“You.” Ashil spoke hard. “Are in Breach here. Don’t forget. You don’t get to demand things. Everything we’re doing is an investigation into your breach.