The City & the City - China Mieville [28]
Digs are constant in Ul Qoma, research projects incessant, its soil so much richer than our own in the extraordinary artefacts of pre-Cleavage ages. Books and conferences bicker over whether that preponderance is coincidence of scattering or evidence of some Ul Qoman specific thing (the Ul Qoman nationalists of course insist the latter). Mahalia Geary was affiliated with a long-term dig at Bol Ye’an, in western Ul Qoma, a site as important as Tenochtitlan and Sutton Hoo, which had been active since its discovery almost a century ago.
It would have been nice for my compatriot historians had it crosshatched, but though the park on the edge of which it was located did, just a little, the crosshatch coming quite close to the carefully ploughed-up earth full of treasures, a thin strip of total Besźel even separating sections of Ul Qoma within the grounds, the dig itself did not. There are those Besź who will say that lopsidedness is a good thing, that had we had half as rich a seam of historic rubble as Ul Qoma—anything like as many mixed-up sheila-na-gigs, clockwork remnants, mosaic shards, axe heads, and cryptic parchment scraps hallowed with rumours of physical misbehaviour and unlikely effects—we would simply have sold it off. Ul Qoma, at least, with its mawkish sanctimoniousness about history (obvious guilty compensation for the pace of change, for the vulgar vigour of much of its recent development), its state archivists and export restrictions, kept its past somewhat protected.
“Bol Ye’an’s run by a bunch of archaeologists from Prince of Wales University in Canada, which is where Geary was enrolled. Her supervisor’s lived on and off in Ul Qoma for years—Isabelle Nancy. There’s a bunch of them who live there. They organise conferences sometimes. Even have them in Besźel one year in every few.” Some consolation prize for our remnant-barren ground. “The last big one was a while ago, when they found that last cache of artefacts. I’m sure you all remember.” It had made the international press. The collection had quickly been given some name, but I could not remember it. It included an astrolabe and a geared thing, some intricate complexity as madly specific and untimed as the Antikythera mechanism, to which as many dreams and speculations had attached, and the purpose of which, similarly, no one had been able to reconstruct.
“So what is the story with this girl?” It was one of the Ul Qomans who spoke, a fat man in his fifties with a shirt in shades that would have made it questionably legal in Besźel.
“She’s been based there, Ul Qoma, for months, for her research,” I said. “She came to Besźel first, before she’d been to Ul Qoma, for a conference about three years ago. You might remember, there was the big exhibition of artefacts and stuff borrowed from Ul Qoma, and there was a whole week or two of meetings and so on. Loads of people came over from all over the place, academics from Europe, North America, from Ul Qoma and everything.”
“Certainly we remember,” Nyisemu said. “Plenty of us were involved.” Of course. Various state committees and quangos had had stands; government and opposition ministers had attended. The prime minister had started the proceedings, Nyisemu had formally opened the exhibition at the museum, and it had been required attendance for all serious politicians.
“Well she was there. You might even have noticed her—she caused a bit of a stink, apparently, was accused of Disrespect, made some terrible speech about Orciny at a presentation. Almost got chucked out.” A couple of faces—Buric and Katrinya certainly, Nyisemu perhaps—looked as if that sparked something. At least one person on the Ul Qoman side of things looked reminiscent too.
“So she calms down, it seems, finishes her MA, starts a PhD, gets entry into Ul Qoma, this time, to be part of this dig, do her studies—she’d never have got back in here, I don’t think, not after that intervention, and frankly I’m surprised she got in there—and she’d been there since except for holidays for a while. There’s student