“BOWDEN.”
He turned. His face was set. Tense. He held something the shape of which I could not make out.
“Inspector Borlú. Fancy meeting you … here?” He tried to grin but it did not go well.
“Where’s here?” I said. He shrugged. “It’s really impressive, what you’re doing,” I said. He shrugged again, with a mannerism neither Besź nor Ul Qoman. It would take him a day or more of walking, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are small countries. He could do it, walk out. How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours. He aimed with whatever it was he held.
“If you shoot me Breach’ll be on you.”
“If they’re watching,” he said. “I think probably you’re the only one here. There are centuries of borders to shore up, after tonight. And even if they are, it’s a moot question. What kind of crime would it be? Where are you?”
“You tried to cut her face off.” That ragged under-chin slit. “Did you … No, it was hers, it was her knife. You couldn’t though. So you slathered on her makeup instead.” He blinked, said nothing. “As if that would disguise her. What is that?” He showed the thing to me, a moment, before gripping and aiming it again. It was some verdigrised metal object, age-gnarled and ugly. It was clicking. It was patched with new metal bands.
“It broke. When I.” It did not sound as if he hesitated: his words simply stopped.
“… Jesus, that’s what you hit her with. When you realised she knew it was lies.” Grabbed and flailed, a moment’s rage. He could admit to anything now. So long as he remained in his superposition, whose law would take him? I saw that the thing’s handle, that he held, that pointed towards him, ended in an ugly sharp spike. “You grab it, smack her, she goes down.” I made stab motions. “Heat of the moment,” I said. “Right? Right?
“So did you not know how to fire it, then? Are they true, then?” I said. “All those ‘strange physics’ rumours? Is that one of the things Sear and Core were after? Sending one of their ranking visitors sightseeing, scuffing their heels in the park for? Just another tourist?”
“I wouldn’t call it a gun,” he said. “But… well, want to see what it can do?” He wagged it.
“Not tempted to sell it on yourself?” He looked offended. “How do you know what it does?”
“I’m an archaeologist and an historian,” he said. “And I’m incredibly good at it. And now I’m going.”
“Walking out of the city?” He inclined his head. “Which city?” He wagged his weapon no .
“I didn’t mean to, you know,” he said. “She was…” That time his words dried up. He swallowed.
“She must have been angry. To realise how you’d been lying to her.”
“I always told the truth. You heard me, Inspector. I told you many times. There’s no such place as Orciny.”
“Did you flatter her? Did you tell her she was the only one you could admit the truth to?”
“Borlú, I can kill you where you stand and, do you realise, no one will even know where we are. If you were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’renot . The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where you were either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever. People would have to step over you. Because no one breached. Neither Besźel nor Ul Qoma could risk clearing you up. You’d lie there stinking up both cities until you were just a stain. I am going, Borlú. You think Besźel will come for you if I shoot you? Ul Qoma?” Corwi and Dhatt must have heard him, even if they made to unhear. Bowden looked only at me and did not move.
“My, well, Breach, my partner, was right,” I said. “Even if Buric could have thought this up, he didn’t have the expertise or the patience to put it together so it would have fooled Mahalia. She was smart. That took someone who knew the archives and the secrets and the Orciny rumours not just a bit but totally. Completely. You told the truth, like you say: there’s no such place as Orciny. You said it again and again. That was the point, wasn’t it?
“It wasn’t Buric’s idea, was it? After that conference where she made such a nuisance of herself? It certainly wasn’t Sear and Core—they would have hired someone to smuggle more efficiently, a little nickel-and-dime operation like that, they just went along with an opportunity that was presented. Sure you needed Buric’s resources to make it work, and he wasn’t going to turn down a chance to steal from Ul Qoma, pimp Besźel out—how much investment was tied to this?—and make a mint for himself. But it was your idea, and it was never about the money.
“It was because you missed Orciny. A way to have it both ways. Yes, sure you were wrong about Orciny, but you could make it so you were right, too.”
Choice artefacts had been excavated, the details of which only the archaeologists could know—or those who had left them there, as poor Yolanda had thought. Supposed-Orciny sent their supposed-agent sudden instructions, not to be delayed, no time to think or rethink—only, quickly, liberate, hand over.
“You told Mahalia she was the only one you’d tell the truth. That when you turned your back on your book, that was just you playing politics? Or did you tell her it was cowardice? That would be pretty winning. I bet you did that.” I approached him. His expression shifted. “‘It’s my shame, Mahalia, the pressure was too much. You’re braver than me, keep on; you’re so close, you’ll find it…’ Your shit messed up your whole career, and you can’t have that time back. So the next best thing, make it have been true all along. I’m sure the money was nice—can’t tell me they didn’t pay—and Buric had his reasons and Sear and Core had theirs, and the nats’ll do for anyone with a way with words and a buck. But it was Orciny that was the point for you, right?
“But Mahalia figured out that it was nonsense, Doctor Bowden.”
How much more perfect that unhistory would be, second time around, when he could construct the evidence not only from fragments in archives, not from the cross-reference of misunderstood documents, but could add to those planted sources, suggest partisan texts, even create messages—to himself, too, for her benefit and later for ours, that all the while he could dismiss as the nothings they were—from the nonplace itself. But still she worked out the truth.
“That must have been unpleasant for you,” I said.
His eyes were unhitched from wherever we were. “It got… That’s why.” She told him her deliveries—so all secret payments—would end. That was not why his rage.
“Did she think you were fooled too? Or did she realise you were behind it?” It was amazing that such a detail should almost be epiphenomenal. “I think she didn’t know. It wasn’t her character to taunt you. I think she thought she was protecting you. I think she arranged to meet you, to protect you. To tell you that you’d both been duped by someone. That you were both in danger.”
The rage of that attack. The task, that post-facto vindication of a dead project, destroyed. No point scoring, no competition. Just the pure fact that Mahalia had, without even knowing it, outsmarted him, realised that his invention was invention, despite his attempts to seal up the creation, to watertight it. She crushed him without guile or bile. The evidence destroyed his conception again, the improved version, Orciny 2.0, as it had the last time, when he had actually believed it. Mahalia died because she proved to Bowden that he had been a fool to believe the folktale he created.