The City & the City - China Mieville [135]
“When do I get to go home?” I said pointlessly. He even smiled at that.
“You did an excellent job. You’ve seen how we work. Nowhere else works like the cities,” he said. “It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it’s not your fault, for more than the shortest time … you can’t come back from that.”
“Accidents. Road accidents, fires, inadvertent breaches …”
“Yes. Of course. If you race to get out again. If that’s your response to the Breach, then maybe you’ve got a chance. But even then you’re in trouble. And if it’s any longer than a moment, you can’t get out again. You’ll never unsee again. Most people who breach, well, you’ll find out about our sanctions soon. But there is another possibility, very occasionally.
“What do you know about the British Navy?” Ashil said. “A few centuries ago?” I looked at him. “I was recruited the same as everyone else in Breach. None of us were born here. We were all once in one place or the other. All of us breached once.”
There were many minutes of silence between us. “There are people I’d like to call,” I said.
HE WAS RIGHT. I imagined myself in Besźel now, unseeing the Ul Qoma of the crosshatched terrain. Living in half of the space. Unseeing all the people and the architecture and vehicles and the everything in and among which I had lived. I could pretend, perhaps, at best, but something would happen, and Breach would know.
“It was a big case,” he said. “The biggest ever. You’ll never have so big a case again.”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “Jesus. Do I have any choice?”
“Of course,” he said. “You’re here. There’s Breach, and there’s those who breach, those to whom we happen.” He did not look at me but out over the overlapping cities.
“Are any volunteers?”
“Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.
We walked towards my old flat, my press-ganger and I.
“Can I say good-bye to anyone? There are people I want to—”
“No,” he said. We walked.
“I’m a detective,” I said again. “Not a, whatever. I don’t work like you do.”
“That’s what we want. That’s why we were so glad you breached. Times are changing.”
So the methods may not be so unfamiliar as I feared. There may be others who proceed the traditional Breach way, the levering of intimidation, that self-styling as a night-fear, while I—using the siphoned-off information we filch online, the bugged phone calls from both cities, the networks of informants, the powers beyond any law, the centuries of fear, yes, too, sometimes, the intimations of other powers beyond us, of unknown shapes, that we are only avatars—was to investigate, as I have investigated for years. A new broom. Every office needs one. There’s a humour to the situation.
“I want to see Sariska. You know who she is, I guess. And Biszaya. I want to talk to Corwi, and Dhatt. To say good-bye at least.”
He was quiet for a while. “You can’t talk to them. This is how we work. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. But you can see them. If you stay out of sight.”
We compromised. I wrote letters to my erstwhile lovers. Handwritten and delivered by hand, but not by my hand. I did not tell Sariska or Biszaya anything but that I would miss them. I was not just being kind.
My colleagues I came close to, and though I did not speak to them, both of them could see me. But Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and later Corwi in Besźel, could tell I was not, or not totally, or not only, in their city. They did not speak to me. They would not risk it.
Dhatt I saw as he emerged from his office. He stopped short at the sight of me. I stood by a hoarding outside an Ul Qoman office, with my head