The City & the City - China Mieville [29]
“You haven’t shown breach, have you? Not really.” Yorj Syedr spoke more softly than I would expect from a military man. Opposite him several of the Ul Qoman congressmen and -women whispered in Illitan, his interjection spurring them to confer. I looked at him. Near him Buric rolled his eyes, saw me see him doing so.
“You have to forgive me, Councillor,” I said eventually. “I don’t know what to say to that. This young woman lived in Ul Qoma. Officially, I mean, we have the records. She disappears. She turns up dead in Besźel.” I frowned. “I’m not really sure … What else would you suggest was evidence?”
“Circumstantial, though. I mean, have you checked the Foreign Office? Have you found out, for example, whether perhaps Miss Geary left Ul Qoma for some event in Budapest or something? Maybe she did that, then came to Besźel? There’s almost two weeks unaccounted for, Inspector Borlú.”
I stared. “As I say, she wouldn’t have got back into Besźel after her little performance …”
He made an almost regretful face and interrupted me. “Breach is … an alien power.” Several of the Besź and some of the Ul Qoman members of the committee looked shocked. “We all know it’s the case,” Syedr said, “whether it is polite to acknowledge it or not.
“Breach is an I say it again alien power, and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a—apologies if I offend, but—a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.”
“Are you joking, Councillor?” someone said.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Buric began.
“We don’t all cosy up to enemies,” Syedr said.
“Chair,” Buric shouted. “Will you allow this slander? This is outrageous …” I watched the new nonpartisan spirit I had read about.
“Of course where its intervention’s necessary I fully support invocation,” Syedr said. “But my party’s been arguing for some time that we need to stop … rubber-stamping the ceding to the Breach of considerable authority. How much research have you actually done, Inspector? Have you spoken to her parents? Her friends? What do we actually know about this poor young woman?”
I should have been more prepared for this. I had not expected it.
I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn’t? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes. I was not used to seeking permissions, invoking, this arcane way. Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Besźel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.
When I was fourteen I saw the Breach for the first time. The cause was the most common of all such—a traffic accident. A boxy little Ul Qoman van—this was more than thirty years ago, the vehicles on Ul Qoma’s roads were much less impressive than they are now—had skidded. It had been travelling a crosshatched road, and a good third of the cars in that area were Besź.
Had the van righted, the Besź drivers would have responded traditionally to such an intrusive foreign obstacle, one of the inevitable difficulties of living in crosshatched cities. When an Ul Qoman stumbles into a Besź, each in their own city; if an Ul Qoman’s dog runs up and sniffs a Besź passerby; a window broken in Ul Qoma that leaves glass in the path of Besź pedestrians—in all cases the Besź (or Ul Qomans, in the converse circumstances) avoid the foreign difficulty as best they can without acknowledging it. Touch if they must, though not is better. Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it. (Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough.