The City & the City - China Mieville [119]
“ReddiTek’s software. Burnley—what do they do?”
“Consultancy.”
“CorIntech are electronics components. What’s this written next to them?” Ashil looked.
“The man heading their delegation was Gorse, from their parent company, Sear and Core. Came to meet up with the local head of CorIntech, guy runs the division in Besźel. They both went to the parties with Nyisemu and Buric and the rest of the chamber.”
“Shit,” I said. “We … Which time was he here?”
“All of them.”
“All? The CEO of the parent company? Sear and Core? Shit …”
“Tell me,” he said, eventually.
“The nats couldn’t pull this off. Wait.” I thought. “We know there’s an insider in Copula Hall but… what the hell could Syedr do for these guys? Corwi’s right—he’s a clown. And what would be his angle?” I shook my head. “Ashil, how does this work? You can just siphon this information, right, from either city. Can you … What’s your status internationally? Breach, I mean.
“We need to go for the company.”
I’M AN AVATAR OF BREACH, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.
No, they can’t sell it, I said, that’s not what this is about. We had all heard rumours about Precursor artefacts. Their questionable physics. Their properties. They want to see what’s true. They’ve got Mahalia to supply them. And to do it they’ve got her thinking she’s in touch with Orciny. But she realised.
Corwi had said something once about the visitors’ tours of Besźel those companies’ representatives endured. Their chauffeurs might take them anywhere total or crosshatched, any pretty park to stretch their legs.
Sear and Core had been doing R&D.
Ashil stared at me. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Who’d put money into superstitious nonsense …?”
“How sure are you? That there’s nothing to the stories? And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said. “Sear and Core pay, what, a few thousand dollars to set this up? They don’t have to believe a word of it: it’s worth that kind of money just on the off chance that any of the stories turn out to have anything at all to them. It’s worth that for curiosity.”
Ashil took out his cell and began to make calls. It was the early part of the night. “We need a conclave,” he said. “Big stake. Yes, make it.” “Conclave. At the set.” He said more or less the same many times.
“You can do anything,” I said.
“Yes. Yes… We need a show. Breach in strength.”
“So you believe me? Ashil, you do?”
“How would they do it? How would outsiders like that get word to her?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what we have to find out. Paid off a couple of locals—we know where that money came to Yorj from.” They had been small amounts.
“They could not possibly, not possibly create Orciny for her.”
“They wouldn’t have the CEO of their parent here for these piddling little glad-handers, let alone every time Mahalia locks up. Come on. Besźel’s a basket case, and they’ve already thrown us a bone by being here. There’s got to be a connection …”
“Oh, we’ll investigate. But these aren’t citizens nor citizens, Tye. They don’t have the …” A silence.
“The fear,” I said. That Breach freeze, that obedience reflex shared in Ul Qoma and Besźel.
“They don’t have a certain response to us, so if we do anything we need to show weight—we need many of us, a presence. And if there’s truth to this, it’s the shutdown of a major business in Besźel. It’ll be a crisis for the city. A catastrophe. And no one will like that.
“It isn’t unknown for a city or a city to argue with Breach, Tye. It’s happened. There’ve been wars with Breach.” He waited while that image hung. “That doesn’t help anyone. So we need to have presence.