The City & the City - China Mieville [71]
“Fuck, we’ve got something. I cannot fucking believe you didn’t mention this before.”
“Hold on, Dhatt.”
“Okay, I can really—I can see that this puts you in a bit of a position.”
“I don’t know anything about who this was.”
“We’re still in time; we can maybe hand it over and explain that you were just a bit late …”
“Hand what over? We don’t have anything.”
“We have a unif bastard who knows something is what we have. Let’s go.” He stood and jiggled his car keys.
“Go where?”
“Go fucking detecting!”
“OF BLOODY COURSE,” Dhatt said. He was tearing up Ul Qoma streets, the car’s siren gasping. He turned, shouting abuse at scuttling Ul Qoman civilians, swerved wordlessly to avoid Besź pedestrians and cars, accelerating with the expressionless anxiety foreign emergencies occasion. If we hit one of them it would be a bureaucratic disaster. A breach now would not be helpful.
“Yari, it’s Dhatt.” He shouted into his cell phone. “Any clue if the cc of the unifs are in at the moment? Excellent, thanks.” He slapped it shut.
“Looks like at least some of them are. I knew you’d spoken to Besź unifs, of course. Read your report. But what kind of fool am I”—slap slap of his forehead with the heel of his hand—“didn’t occur to me to go talk to our own little homegrowns. Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers—and we have our share of fuckers, Tyad—are all talking to each other. I know where they hang out.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“I hate those little sods. I hope … Goes without saying, I mean, that I’ve met some great Besź in my time.” He glanced at me. “Nothing against the place and I hope I get to visit, and it’s great that we’re all getting on so well these days, you know, better than it used to be—what was the fucking point of all that shit? But I’m Ul Qoman and I’m fucked if I want to be anything else. You imagine unification?” He laughed. “Fucking catastrophe! Unity is strength my Ul Qoman arse. I know they say crossbreeding makes animals stronger, but what if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Besź optimism?”
He made me laugh. We passed between ancient age-mottled roadside stone pillars. I recognised them from photographs, remembered too late that the one on the eastern side of the road was the only one I should see—it was in Ul Qoma, the other in Besźel. So most people said, anyway: they were one of the cities’ controversial disputed loci. The Besź buildings I couldn’t help fail to completely unsee were, I glimpsed, sedate and tidy, but in Ul Qoma wherever we were was an area of decay. We passed canals, and for several seconds I did not know which city they were in, or if it was both. By a weed-flecked yard, where nettles poked out from below a long-immobile Citroën like a hovercraft’s skirt of air, Dhatt braked hard and got out before I had even undone my seatbelt.
“Time was,” Dhatt said, “we’d have locked every one of these fuckers away.” He strode towards a tumbledown door. There are no legal unificationists in Ul Qoma. There are no legal socialist parties, fascist parties, religious parties in Ul Qoma. Since the Silver Renewal almost a century before under the tutelage of General Ilsa, Ul Qoma had had only the People’s National Party. Many older establishments and offices still displayed portraits of Ya Ilsa, often above “Ilsa’s Brothers” Atatürk and Tito. The cliché was that in older offices there was always a faded patch between those two, where erstwhile brother Mao had once beamed.
But this is the twenty-first century, and President Ul Mak (whose portrait you can also see where managers are most obsequious), like President Umbir before him, had announced certainly not a repudiation but a development of the National Road, an end to restrictive thinking, a glasnostroika, as Ul Qoman intellectuals hideously neologised. With the CD-and-DVD shops, the software startups and galleries, the bullish Ul Qoman financial markets, the revalued dinar, came, they said, New Politics, a very vaunted openness to hitherto dangerous dissidence. Not to say that radical