China Mieville by The City

Author:The City [City, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Detective and Mystery Stories, Mystery & Detective, Murder - Investigation, Fantasy Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Investigation, General, Mystery Fiction, Crime, Murder
ISBN: 034549752X
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2009-05-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

DHATT TOOK THE LIST Bowden gave him and sent an underling to supplement it, sent officers to the itemised lots, derelict buildings, patches of kerb and little promenade spaces on the river’s shore, to scuff stones and probe at the edges of disputed, functionally crosshatched patches. I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.

Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.

Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling. Young Bowden’s readings of some still-unsolved mysteries of Precursor or Pre-Cleavage age works were ingenious and even convincing. He had an elegantly argued claim that the incomprehensible mechanisms euphemistically slanged as “clocks” were not mechanisms at all, but intricately chambered boxes designed solely to hold the gears they contained. His leaps to the therefore were lunatic, as he now admitted.

Of course there would be paranoia, for a visitor to this city, where the locals would stare and stare furtively, where I would be watched by Breach, of which snatched glances would not feel like anything I had experienced.

My cell phone rang, later, while I was sleeping. It was my Besź phone, showing an international call. It would piss credit, but it was on the government.

“Borlú,” I said.

“Inspector…” Illitan accent.

“Who is this?”

“Borlú I don’t know why you … I can’t talk long. I … thank you.”

“Jaris.” I sat up, put my feet on the floor. The young unif. “It’s…”

“We’re not fucking comrades, you know.” He was not speaking in Old Illitan this time, but quickly in his own everyday language.

“Why would we be?”

“Right. I can’t stay on the line.”

“Okay.”

“You could tell it was me, couldn’t you? Who called you in Besźel.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Right. This call never fucking happened.” I said nothing. “Thanks for the other day,” he said. “For not saying. I met Marya when she came over here.” I had not given her that name for a while, but for the moment when Dhatt had questioned the unifs. “She told me she knew our brothers and sisters over the border; she’d worked with them. But she wasn’t one of us, you know.”

“I know. You set me on that track in Besźel …”

“Shut up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.