The City & the City - China Mieville [42]
I had scared off a pair once, as they foraged through rubbish in the yard of my building. I had thrown something at them. They had been unusually kempt, and more than one of my neighbours had been shocked, as if I had breached.
Most of the Ul Qomanists, as Nancy described herself, were bilocated like her—she explained it with audible guilt, mentioning again and again that it must be a historical quirk that located the more fecund archaeological sites in areas of Ul Qoman totality, or heftily Ul Qoma–weighted crosshatching. Prince of Wales had reciprocal arrangements with several Ul Qoman academies. David Bowden lived more of each year in Ul Qoma, and less back in Canada. He was in Ul Qoma now. He had, she told me, few students, and not much of a teaching load, but I still could not get hold of him on the number she gave me.
A little ferreting online. It was not hard to confirm most of what Isabelle Nancy had told me. I found a page that listed Mahalia’s PhD title (they had not yet taken her name offline, nor put up one of the online tributes I was sure would be coming). I found Nancy’s list of publications, and David Bowden’s. His included the book Nancy had mentioned, from 1975, two articles from around the same time, one more article from a decade later, then mostly journalism, some of it collected into a volume.
I found fracturedcity.org, the main discussion site for the kooks of dopplurbanology, Ul-Qoma-and-Besźel obsession (the site’s approach of conjoining the two as a single object of study would outrage polite opinion in both cities, but judging by comments on the forum it was commonly if mildly illegally accessed from both, too). From there a series of links (cheekily, confident in the indulgence or incompetence of our and the Ul Qoman censors, many were servers with .uq and .zb addresses) gave me a few paragraphs copied from Between the City and the City. It read as Nancy had suggested.
My phone startled me. I realised that it was dark, after seven.
“Borlú,” I said, sitting back.
“Inspector? Oh, shit, sir, we have a situation. This is Ceczoria.” Agim Ceczoria was one of the officers stationed at the hotel to look after Mahalia’s parents. I rubbed my eyes and scanned my email to see if I’d missed any messages coming in. There was a noise behind him, a commotion. “Sir, Mr. Geary … he went AWOL, sir. He fucking … he breached.”
“What?”
“He got out of the room, sir.” Behind him was a woman’s voice, and she was shouting.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know how the fuck he got past us, sir, I just don’t know. But he wasn’t gone long.”
“How do you know? How did you get him?”
He swore again.
“We didn’t. Breach did. I’m calling from the car, sir, we’re en route to the airport. Breach are … escorting us. Somewhere. They told us what to do. That’s Mrs. Geary you can hear. He has to go. Now.”
CORWI HAD GONE, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I took an unmarked squad car from the pool, but ran it with the sirens making their hysteric gulp gulp noises, so I could ignore traffic laws. (It was only the Besź rules which applied to me and which therefore I was with authority ignoring, but traffic law is one of the compromise areas where the Oversight Committee ensures close similarity between the rules of Besźel and Ul Qoma. Though the traffic cultures are not identical, for the sake of the pedestrians and cars who have, unseeing, to negotiate much foreign traffic, our vehicles and theirs run at comparable speeds in comparable ways. We all learn to tactfully avoid our neighbour’s emergency vehicles, as well as our own.)
There were no flights out for a couple of hours, but they would sequester the Gearys, and in some hidden