The City & the City - China Mieville [76]
“You’re Yolanda’s supervisor?” I said. “What’s her PhD on?”
“Oh.” He waved. “‘Representing Gender and the Other in Precursor Age Artefacts.’ I still prefer ‘pre-Cleavage’ but it makes an unfortunate pun in English, so Precursor Age is the newly preferred term.”
“You said she’s not smart?”
“I did not say that. She’s perfectly intelligent enough. It’s fine. She’s just … There aren’t that many people like Mahalia in any postgraduate program.”
“So why weren’t you her supervisor?”
He stared at me as if I was mocking him.
“Because of her bullshit, Inspector,” he said at last. He stood and turned his back, seemed to want to walk around the room, but it was too small. “Yes, these were the tricky circumstances under which we met.” He turned back to us. “Senior Detective Dhatt, Inspector Borlú. Do you know how many PhD students I have? One. Because no one else wanted her. Poor thing. I have no office at Bol Ye’an. I have no tenure nor am I on tenure track. Do you know what my official title is, at Prince of Wales? I’m a Corresponding Lecturer. Don’t ask me what that means. Actually, I can tell you what it means—it means We are the world’s leading institution for Ul Qoma, Besźel and Precursor Age studies, and we need all the names we can get, and we may even entice a few rich kooks onto our program with your moniker, but we are not so stupid as to give you a real job.”
“Because of the book?”
“Because of Between the City and the City. Because I was a stoned young man with a neglectful supervisor and a taste for the arcane. No matter that you turn around a little later and say ‘Mea culpa, I messed up, no Orciny, my apologies.’ No matter that eighty-five percent of the research still holds up and is still used. Hear me? No matter what else you do, ever. You can never walk away from it no matter how hard you try.
“So when, as happens regularly, someone comes to me and tells me that the work that fucked things up is so great, and that she’d love to work with me—and this is what Mahalia did at the conference over in Besźel where I first met her—and that it’s such a travesty that the truth is still banned in both cities, and that she’s on my side … Did you know by the way that when she first arrived here she not only smuggled a copy of Between into Besźel but told me she was going to shelve it in the history section of the University Library, for Christ’s sake? For people to find? She told me that proudly. I told her to get rid of it immediately or I would set the policzai on her. Anyway, when she tells me all that, yes, I got shirty.
“I meet these people pretty much every conference I go to. I tell them I was wrong and they think either that I’ve been bought off by the Man, or that I’m afraid for my life. Or that I’ve been replaced by a robot or something.”
“Did Yolanda ever talk about Mahalia? Wasn’t it hard, you feeling like that about her best friend …”
“Feeling like what? There was nothing, Inspector. I told her I wouldn’t supervise her; she accused me of cowardice or capitulation or something, I can’t remember; that was the last of it. I gathered that she’d more or less shut up about Orciny in the years since she’d been on the program. I thought good, she’s grown out of it. That was it. And I heard she was clever.”
“I got the impression Professor Nancy was a bit disappointed with her.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. She wouldn’t be the first person to be a letdown in writing, but she still had a reputation.”
“Yolanda wasn’t into Orciny stuff? That’s not why she was studying with you?”
He sighed and sat down again. It was unimpressive, his lacklustre up-down.
“I thought not. I wouldn’t have supervised her. And no, not at first… but she’d mentioned it recently. Brought up dissensi, what might live there, all that. She knew my feelings, so she was trying to act as if it was all hypotheticals. It sounds ridiculous, but it honestly hadn’t even occurred to me that it was because of Mahalia’s influence. Was she talking to her about it? Do you know?”