The City & the City - China Mieville [41]
“Wow.”
“Exactly, wow. Wow is right. It’s notorious. Google it, you’ll see. Anyway, when we first saw Mahalia she was pretty unreconstructed. I liked her because she was spunky and because Bowdenite she may have been but she had panache and smarts. But it was a joke, you understand? I even wondered if she knew it, if she was joking herself.”
“But she wasn’t working on that anymore?”
“No one reputable would supervise a Bowdenite PhD. I had this stern word with her about it when she enrolled, but she even laughed. Said she’d left all that behind. As I say, I was surprised she’d come to me. My work’s not as avant-garde as hers.”
“The Foucaults and the $$i$$eks not your thing?”
“I respect them of course, but—”
“Aren’t there any of those, what should we say, theory types she could have gone with?”
“Yes, but she told me she needed to get her hands on the actual objects. I’m an artefact scholar. My more philosophically oriented colleagues would … well, I wouldn’t trust many of them to brush the dirt off an amphora.” I laughed. “So I guess it made sense to her; she was really insistent on learning how to do that side of things. I was surprised but pleased. You understand these pieces are unique, Inspector?”
“I think so. I’ve heard all the rumours, of course.”
“You mean their magic powers? I wish, I wish. But even so these digs are incomparable. This material culture makes no sense at all. There is nowhere else in the world that you’ll dig up what looks like cutting-edge late antiquity, really beautiful complicated bronzework mixed right up with frankly neolithic stuff. Stratigraphy looks like it goes out of the window with this. It was used as evidence against the Harris Matrix—wrongly, but you can see why. That’s why these digs are popular with young archaeologists. And that’s not even counting all the stories, which is all they are but which hasn’t stopped unlikely researchers pining for a chance to have a look. Still, I’d have thought Mahalia would have tried to go to Dave, not that she’d have had much luck with him.”
“Dave? Bowden? He’s alive? He teaches?”
“Certainly he’s alive. But even back when she was into this, Mahalia wouldn’t have got him to supervise her. I’m willing to bet she must have spoken to him when she was first investigating. And I’m willing to bet she got pretty short shrift. He repudiated all this years ago. It’s the bane of his life. Ask him. A burst of adolescence he’s never been able to shake off. Never published anything else worth a damn—he’s the Orciny man for the rest of his career. He’ll tell you this himself if you ask him.”
“I may. You know him?”
“He’s a colleague. It’s not a big field, pre-Cleavage archaeology. He’s at Prince of Wales too, at least part-time. He lives here, in Ul Qoma.”
She lived several months of the year in apartments in Ul Qoma, in its university district, where Prince of Wales and other Canadian institutions gleefully exploited the fact that the US state (for reasons now embarrassing even to most of its right-wingers) boycotted Ul Qoma. It was Canada, instead, that was enthusiastically forging links, academic and economic, with Ul Qoman institutions.
Besźel, of course, was a friend of both Canada and the US, but the enthusiasm with which the two countries combined plugged into our faltering markets was dwarfed by that with which Canada cosied up to what they called the New Wolf economy. We were a street mongrel, maybe, or a scrawny milkrat. Most vermin are interstitial. It is very hard to prove that the shy cold-weather lizards in cracks in Besź walls can live in Besźel only, as frequently claimed: certainly they die if exported into Ul Qoma (even more gently than by children’s hands), but they tend to do so in Besź captivity as well. Pigeons, mice, wolves, bats live in both cities, are crosshatched animals. But by