“Mahalia Geary. She was twenty-four. American. This is all my constable’s doing, Constable Corwi, all this information, ladies and gentlemen. All the information’s in the papers I sent.” They were not all reading them. Some did not have them open.
“American?” someone said.
I did not recognise all of the twenty-one Besź representatives. Some. A woman in her middle ages, severe skunk-stripe hair like a film-studies academic, Shura Katrinya, minister without portfolio, respected but past her moment. Mikhel Buric of the Social Democrats, official opposition, young, capable, ambitious enough to be on more than one committee (security, commerce, arts). Major Yorj Syedr, a leader of the National Bloc, the rightist grouping with whom Prime Minister Gayardicz controversially worked in coalition, despite Syedr’s reputation not only as a bully but a less than competent one. Yavid Nyisemu, Gayardicz’s under-minister for Culture and committee chair. Other faces were familiar, and with effort more names would come. I recognised none of the Ul Qoma counterparts. I did not pay close attention to foreign politics.
Most of the Ul Qomans flicked through the packets I had prepared. Three wore headphones, but most were fluent enough in Besź at least to understand me. It was strange not to unsee these people in formal Ul Qoma dress—men in collarless shirts and dark lapel-less jackets, the few women in spiral semiwraps in colours that would be contraband in Besźel. But then I was not in Besźel.
The Oversight Committee meets in the giant, baroque, concrete-patched coliseum in the centre of Besźel Old Town, and of Ul Qoma Old Town. It is one of very few places that has the same name in both cities—Copula Hall. That is because it is not a crosshatched building, precisely, nor one of staccato totality-alterity, one floor or room in Besźel and the next in Ul Qoma: externally it is in both cities; internally, much of it is in both or neither. All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.
To me it was as if another presence were there: the reason for the meeting. Perhaps several of us in the room felt watched.
As they fussed with their papers, those who did so, I thanked them again for seeing me. A little political gush. These meetings of the Oversight Committee were regular, but I had had to wait days to see them. I had despite Taskin’s warning tried to convene an extraordinary meeting to pass over responsibility for Mahalia Geary as quickly as possible (who wanted to think of her murderer free? There was one best chance of sorting that), but short of epochal crisis, civil war or catastrophe, this was impossible to arrange.
What about a diminished meeting? A few people missing surely wouldn’t … But no, I was quickly informed, that would be quite unacceptable. She had warned me and she had been right, and I had grown more impatient with each day. Taskin had given me her best contact, a confidential secretary to one of the ministers on the committee, who had explained that the Besźel Chamber of Commerce had one of its increasingly regular trade fairs with foreign businesses, and that counted out Buric, who had had some success overseeing such events, Nyisemu, and even Syedr. These of course were sacrosanct occurrences. That Katrinya had meetings with diplomats. That Hurian, commissioner of the Ul Qoma Exchange, an impossible-to-reschedule meeting with the Ul Qoman health minister, and very et cetera, and there would be no special meeting. The young dead woman would have to remain inadequately investigated a few more days, until the gathering, at which time, between the indispensable business of adjudication on any dissensus, of the management of shared resources—a few of the larger grid power lines, drains and sewage, the most intricately crosshatched buildings—I would be given my twenty-minute slot to make my case.
Perhaps some people knew the details of these strictures, but the specifics of the Oversight Committee’s machinations had never been of interest. I had presented to them twice before, long before. The committee’s makeup had been different then, of course. Both times, the Besź and Ul Qoman sides almost bristled at each other: relations had been worse. Even when we had been noncombatant supporters of opposing sides in conflicts, such as during the Second World War—not Ul Qoma’s finest hour—the Oversight Committee had had to convene. What uncomfortable occasions those must have been. It had not met, however, as I recalled from my lessons, during our two brief and disastrous open wars against each other. In any case, now our two nations were, in rather a stilted fashion, supposed to be effecting some sort of rapprochement.
Neither of these previous cases I had presented had been so urgent. The first time was a contraband breach, as most such referrals are. A gang in western Besźel had started selling drugs purified from Ul Qoman medicines. They were picking up boxes near the city’s outskirts, from near the end of the east-west axis of the crossroad railway lines that split Ul Qoma into four quadrants. An Ul Qoman contact was dumping the boxes from the trains. There is a short stretch in the north of Besźel where the tracks themselves crosshatch with and serve also as Ul Qoman tracks; and the miles of north-seeking railroads leading out of both city-states, joining us to our northern neighbours through the mountain gash, are also shared, to our borders, where they become a single line in existential legality as well as mere metal fact: up to those national edges, the track was two juridical railroads. In various of those places the boxes of medical supplies were dropped in Ul Qoma, and stayed there, abandoned trackside in Ul Qoman scrub: but they were picked up in Besźel, and that was breach.
We never observed our criminals taking them, but when we presented our evidence that that was the only possible source, the committee agreed and invoked Breach. That drug trade ended: the suppliers disappeared from the streets.
The second case was a man who had killed his wife and when we closed in on him, in stupid terror he breached—stepped into a shop in Besźel, changed his clothes, and emerged into Ul Qoma. He was by chance not apprehended in that instance, but we quickly realised what had happened. In his frantic liminality neither we nor our Ul Qoman colleagues would touch him, though we and they knew where he went, hiding in Ul Qoman lodgings. Breach took him and he was gone too.
This was the first time in a long time I had made this request. I put my evidence. I addressed myself as much, politely, to the Ul Qoman members as to the Besź. Also to the observing power that must, surely, invisibly have watched.
“She’s resident in Ul Qoma, not Besźel. Once we knew that we found her. Corwi did, I mean. She’d been there for more than two years. She’s a PhD student.”
“What’s she studying?” Buric said.
“She’s an archaeologist. Early history. She’s attached to one of the digs. It’s all in your folders.” A little ripple, differently iterated among the Besź and the Ul Qomans. “That’s how she got in, even with the blockade.” There were some loopholes and exceptions for educational and cultural links.
Digs are constant in Ul Qoma, research projects incessant, its soil so much richer than our own in the extraordinary artefacts of pre-Cleavage ages. Books and conferences bicker over whether that preponderance is coincidence of scattering or evidence of some Ul Qoman specific thing (the Ul Qoman nationalists of course insist the latter). Mahalia Geary was affiliated with a long-term dig at Bol Ye’an, in western Ul Qoma, a site as important as Tenochtitlan and Sutton Hoo, which had been active since its discovery almost a century ago.
It would have been nice for my compatriot historians had it crosshatched, but though the park on the edge of which it was located did, just a little, the crosshatch coming quite close to the carefully ploughed-up earth full of treasures, a thin strip of total Besźel even separating sections of Ul Qoma within the grounds, the dig itself did not. There are those Besź who will say that lopsidedness is a good thing, that had we had half as rich a seam of historic rubble as Ul Qoma—anything like as many mixed-up sheila-na-gigs, clockwork remnants, mosaic shards, axe heads, and cryptic parchment scraps hallowed with rumours of physical misbehaviour and unlikely effects—we would simply have sold it off. Ul
Qoma, at least, with its mawkish sanctimoniousness about history (obvious guilty compensation for the pace of change, for the vulgar vigour of much of its recent development), its state archivists and export restrictions, kept its past somewhat protected.
“Bol Ye’an’s run by a bunch of archaeologists from Prince of Wales University in Canada, which is where Geary was enrolled. Her supervisor’s lived on and off in Ul Qoma for years—Isabelle Nancy. There’s a bunch of them who live there. They organise conferences sometimes. Even have them in Besźel one year in every few.” Some consolation prize for our remnant-barren ground. “The last big one was a while ago, when they found that last cache of artefacts. I’m sure you all remember.” It had made the international press. The collection had quickly been given some name, but I could not remember it. It included an astrolabe and a geared thing, some intricate complexity as madly specific and untimed as the Antikythera mechanism, to which as many dreams and speculations had attached, and the purpose of which, similarly, no one had been able to reconstruct.
“So what is the story with this girl?” It was one of the Ul Qomans who spoke, a fat man in his fifties with a shirt in shades that would have made it questionably legal in Besźel.
“She’s been based there, Ul Qoma, for months, for her research,” I said. “She came to Besźel first, before she’d been to Ul Qoma, for a conference about three years ago. You might remember, there was the big exhibition of artefacts and stuff borrowed from Ul Qoma, and there was a whole week or two of meetings and so on. Loads of people came over from all over the place, academics from Europe, North America, from Ul Qoma and everything.”
“Certainly we remember,” Nyisemu said. “Plenty of us were involved.” Of course. Various state committees and quangos had had stands; government and opposition ministers had attended. The prime minister had started the proceedings, Nyisemu had formally opened the exhibition at the museum, and it had been required attendance for all serious politicians.
“Well she was there. You might even have noticed her—she caused a bit of a stink, apparently, was accused of Disrespect, made some terrible speech about Orciny at a presentation. Almost got chucked out.” A couple of faces—Buric and Katrinya certainly, Nyisemu perhaps—looked as if that sparked something. At least one person on the Ul Qoman side of things looked reminiscent too.
“So she calms down, it seems, finishes her MA, starts a PhD, gets entry into Ul Qoma, this time, to be part of this dig, do her studies—she’d never have got back in here, I don’t think, not after that intervention, and frankly I’m surprised she got in there—and she’d been there since except for holidays for a while. There’s student accommodation near the dig. She disappeared a couple of weeks ago and turned up in Besźel. In Pocost Village, in the estate, which is, you will recall, total in Besźel, so alter for Ul Qoma, and she was dead. It’s all in the folder, Congressman.”
“You haven’t shown breach, have you? Not really.” Yorj Syedr spoke more softly than I would expect from a military man. Opposite him several of the Ul Qoman congressmen and -women whispered in Illitan, his interjection spurring them to confer. I looked at him. Near him Buric rolled his eyes, saw me see him doing so.
“You have to forgive me, Councillor,” I said eventually. “I don’t know what to say to that. This young woman lived in Ul Qoma. Officially, I mean, we have the records. She disappears. She turns up dead in Besźel.” I frowned. “I’m not really sure … What else would you suggest was evidence?”
“Circumstantial, though. I mean, have you checked the Foreign Office? Have you found out, for example, whether perhaps Miss Geary left Ul Qoma for some event in Budapest or something? Maybe she did that, then came to Besźel? There’s almost two weeks unaccounted for, Inspector Borlú.”
I stared. “As I say, she wouldn’t have got back into Besźel after her little performance …”
He made an almost regretful face and interrupted me. “Breach is … an alien power.” Several of the Besź and some of the Ul Qoman members of the committee looked shocked. “We all know it’s the case,” Syedr said, “whether it is polite to acknowledge it or not.
“Breach is an I say it again alien power, and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a—apologies if I offend, but—a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.”
“Are you joking, Councillor?” someone said.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Buric began.
“We don’t all cosy up to enemies,” Syedr said.
“Chair,” Buric shouted. “Will you allow this slander? This is outrageous …” I watched the new nonpartisan spirit I had read about.
“Of course where its intervention’s necessary I fully support invocation,” Syedr said. “But my party’s been arguing for some time that we need to stop … rubber-stamping the ceding to the Breach of considerable authority. How much research have you actually done, Inspector? Have you spoken to her parents? Her friends? What do we actually know about this poor young woman?”
I should have been more prepared for this. I had not expected it.
I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn’t? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes. I was not used to seeking permissions, invoking, this arcane way. Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Besźel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.
When I was fourteen I saw the Breach for the first time. The cause was the most common of all such—a traffic accident. A boxy little Ul Qoman van—this was more than thirty years ago, the vehicles on Ul Qoma’s roads were much less impressive than they are now—had skidded. It had been travelling a crosshatched road, and a good third of the cars in that area were Besź.
Had the van righted, the Besź drivers would have responded traditionally to such an intrusive foreign obstacle, one of the inevitable difficulties of living in crosshatched cities. When an Ul Qoman stumbles into a Besź, each in their own city; if an Ul Qoman’s dog runs up and sniffs a Besź passerby; a window broken in Ul Qoma that leaves glass in the path of Besź pedestrians—in all cases the Besź (or Ul Qomans, in the converse circumstances) avoid the foreign difficulty as best they can without acknowledging it. Touch if they must, though not is better. Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it. (Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish from the other city, it’s just rubbish, and it drifts across borders, like fog, rain and smoke.)
The van driver I saw did not recover. He ground diagonally across the tarmac—I do not know what the street is in Ul Qoma, it was KünigStrász in Besźel—and thudded into the wall of a Besź boutique and the pedestrian window-shopping there. The Besź man died; the Ul Qoman driver was badly hurt. People in both cities were screaming. I did not see the impact, but my mother did, and grabbed my hand so hard I shouted in pain before I even registered the noise.
The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.
I was older than that when I looked up to see the bloody result of that breaching accident, and remember remembering those arcana, and that they were bullshit. In that moment when my mother and I and all
of us there could not but see the Ul Qoman wreck, all that careful unseeing I had recently learned was thrown.
In seconds, the Breach came. Shapes, figures, some of whom perhaps had been there but who nonetheless seemed to coalesce from spaces between smoke from the accident, moving too fast it seemed to be clearly seen, moving with authority and power so absolute that within seconds they had controlled, contained, the area of the intrusion. The powers were almost impossible, seemed almost impossible, to make out. At the edges of the crisis zone the Besź and, I could still not fail to see, Ul Qoman police were pushing away the curious in their own cities, taping off the area, closing out outsiders, sealing off a zone inside of which, their quick actions still visible though child-me so afraid to see them, Breach, organising, cauterising, restoring.
These kind of rare situations were when one might glimpse Breach, performing what they did. Accidents and border-perforating catastrophes. The 1926 Earthquake, a grand fire. (There had once been a fire grosstopically close to my apartment. It had been contained in one house, but a house not in Besźel, that I had unseen. So I had watched footage of it piped in from Ul Qoma, on my local TV, while my living room windows had been lit by the fluttering red glow of it.) The death of an Ul Qoman bystander from a stray Besź bullet in a stickup. It was hard to associate those crises with this bureaucracy.
I shifted and looked about the room at nothing. Breach has to account for its actions to those specialists who invoke it, but that does not feel like a limitation to many of us.
“Have you spoken to her colleagues?” Syedr said. “How far have you taken this?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to them. My constable has, of course, to verify our information.”
“Have you spoken to her parents? You seem very keen to divest yourself of this investigation.” I waited a few more seconds before speaking over the muttering on both sides of the table.