The City & the City - China Mieville [92]
“Alright.”
She sighed and looked down. Aikam said to her, “Is it okay?” in Illitan, and she shrugged, Maybe.
“HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know and I do not want to. There are access points, she said. She didn’t tell me any more and that was alright by me.”
“Why didn’t she tell anyone but you?” She seemed to know nothing of Jaris.
“She wasn’t crazy. You’ve seen what happened to Doctor Bowden? You don’t admit you want to know about Orciny. That was always what she was here for, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s how they want it. Orcinians. It’s perfect for them that no one thinks they’re real. That’s just what they want. That’s how they rule.”
“Her PhD …”
“She didn’t care about it. She was just doing enough to keep Prof Nance off her back. She was here for Orciny. Do you realise they contacted her.” She stared at me intently. “Seriously. She was a bit… the first time she was at a conference, in Besźel, she sort of said a load of stuff. There was a load of politicians and stuff there as well as academics and it caused a bit of—”
“She made enemies. I heard about it.”
“Oh, we all knew the nats had their eyes on her, nats on both sides, but that wasn’t the issue. It was Orciny who saw her then. They’re everywhere.”
Certainly she had made herself visible. Shura Katrinya had seen her: I remembered her face at the Oversight Committee when I mentioned the incident. As had Mikhel Buric, I recalled, and a couple of others. Perhaps Syedr had seen her too. Perhaps there had been interested unknown others. “After she first started writing about them, after she was reading all that stuff in Between, and writing it up, and researching, making all her mad little notes”—she made tiny scribbling motions—“she got a letter.”
“Did she show you?”
She nodded. “I didn’t understand it when I saw it. It was in the root form. Precursor stuff, old script, before Besź and Illitan.”
“What did it say?”
“She told me. It was something like: We are watching you. You understand. Would you like to know more? There were others too.”
“She showed you?”
“Not straightaway.”
“What were they saying to her? Why?”
“Because she worked them out. They could tell she wanted to be part of it. So they recruited her. Had her do stuff for them, like, like initiation. Give them information, deliver things.” This was impossible stuff. With a look she challenged me to mock and I was silent. “They gave her addresses where she should leave letters and things. In dissensi. Messages back and forth. She was writing back. They were telling her things. About Orciny. She told me a little bit about it, and the history and that, and it was like … Places no one can see because they think they’re in the other city. Besź think it’s here; Ul Qomans think it’s in Besźel. The people in Orciny, they’re not like us. They can do things that aren’t…”
“Did she meet them?”
Yolanda stood beside the window pane, staring out and down at an angle that kept her from being framed by its whitewash-diffused light. She turned to look at me and said nothing. She had calmed into despondency. Aikam came closer to her. His eyes went between us like a spectator at a tennis match. Finally Yolanda shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“She wanted to. I don’t know. I know at first they said no.” Not yet, they had said. “They told her stuff, history, stuff about what we were doing. This stuff, the Precursor Age stuff… it’s theirs. When Ul Qoma digs it up, or even Besźel, there’s this whole thing about whose is it, where was it found, you know, all that? It’s not Ul Qoma’s or Besźel’s. It’s Orciny’s; it always was. They told her about stuff we’d found that no one who hadn’t put it there could know. This is their history. They were here before Ul Qoma and Besźel split, or joined, around them. They never went away.”
“But it was just lying there until a bunch of Canadian archaeologists—”
“That’s where they kept it. That stuff wasn’t lost. The earth under Ul Qoma and Besźel’s their storeroom. It’s all Orciny’s. It was all theirs,