The City & the City - China Mieville [34]
The immigration officer who escorted them saw us and nodded them gently over. They were recognisable from the photographs we had been sent by our American counterparts, but I would have known them anyway. They had the expression I have seen only on bereaved parents: their faces looked clayish, lumpy with exhaustion and grief. They shuffled into the concourse as if they were fifteen or twenty years older than they were.
“Mr. and Mrs. Geary?” I had been practicing my English.
“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”
“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”
The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.
“May I take you to your hotel?”
“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”
“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.
“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”
“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”
“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.
“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”
“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”
Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.
The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they were awake.
Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.
After a two-week or however-long-it-was course, no one thought visitors would have metabolised