The City & the City - China Mieville [23]
“I don’t know. We have stuff on it. It comes up. You know? They have them in Ul Qoma, too, you know, Orciny stories. We don’t just keep documents on, you know, just just what we’re into. You know? We know our history, we keep all kinds of…” He trailed off. “I realised it wasn’t us she was interested in, you know?”
Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say they didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research. Their library must have defensively complete holdings of anything that even implied a blurring of urban boundaries. She had come—you could see it—seeking information not on some ur-unity but on Orciny. What an annoyance when they realised her odd researches weren’t quirks of investigation but the very point. When they realised that she did not much care about their project.
“So she was a time-waster?”
“No, man, she was dangerous, like I said. For real. She’d cause trouble for us. She said she wasn’t sticking around anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders vaguely.
“Why was she dangerous?” I leaned in. “Drodin, was she breaching?”
“Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned point, watching us out there is … you know. Breach.”
We were all silent a moment then. We all felt watched.
“You’ve seen it?”
“Course not. What do I look like? Who sees it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse … we’re gone. Do you …” He shook his head, and when he looked back at me it was with anger and perhaps hate. “Do you know how many of my friends have been taken? That I’ve never seen again? We’re more careful than anyone.”
It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.
Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car. If Byela, Fulana, had been breaching, she would have brought that in. So it was likely not suspicion of that specifically that had made Drodin afraid.
“There was just something.” He looked up out of the window at the two cities. “Maybe she would, she would have brought Breach on us, eventually. Or something.”
“Hang on,” Corwi said. “You said she was leaving …”
“She said she was going over. To Ul Qoma. Officially.” I paused from scribbling notes. I looked at Corwi and she at me. “Didn’t see her again. Someone heard she’d gone and they wouldn’t let her back here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true, and if it is I don’t know why. It was just a matter of time … She was poking around in dangerous shit, it gave me a bad feeling.”
“That’s not all, though, is it?” I said. “What else?” He stared at me.
“I don’t know, man. She was trouble, she was scary, there was too much … there was just something. When she was going on and on about all the stuff she was into, it started to give you the creeps. Made you nervous.” He looked out of the window again. He shook his head.
“I’m sorry she died,” he said. “I’m sorry someone killed her. But I’m not that surprised.”
THAT STINK OF INSINUATION and