The City & the City - China Mieville [66]
“Tell us about Mahalia. I get the sense she was well-known here, if not by your boss.”
“Not so much anymore,” Nancy said. “At one point maybe. Did Rochambeaux say he didn’t know her? That’s a bit… disingenuous. She’d ruffled some feathers.”
“At the conference,” I said. “Back in Besźel.”
“That’s right. Down south. He was there. Most of us were. I was, David, Marcus, Asina. Anyway she’d been raising eyebrows at more than one session, asking questions about dissensi, about Breach, that sort of thing. Nothing explicitly illegitimate, but a bit vulgar, you could say, the sort of thing you’d expect from Hollywood or something, not the nuts-and-bolts stuff of Ul Qoman or pre-Cleavage or even Besź research. You could see the bigwigs who’d come along to open proceedings and dedicate ceremonies and whatnot were getting a bit leery. Then finally she out and starts raving about Orciny. So David’s mortified, of course; the university’s embarrassed; she nearly gets chucked out—there were some Besź representatives there who made a big hoo-ha about it.”
“But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.
“I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”
Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”
“It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”
“She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.
“They were best friends.”
“Anyone who might know anything?”
“She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”
“Is that allowed?” I asked.
“These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.
Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.
Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?
At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.
“Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.
She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense