“I want to see Sariska. You know who she is, I guess. And Biszaya. I want to talk to Corwi, and Dhatt. To say good-bye at least.”
He was quiet for a while. “You can’t talk to them. This is how we work. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. But you can see them. If you stay out of sight.”
We compromised. I wrote letters to my erstwhile lovers. Handwritten and delivered by hand, but not by my hand. I did not tell Sariska or Biszaya anything but that I would miss them. I was not just being kind.
My colleagues I came close to, and though I did not speak to them, both of them could see me. But Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and later Corwi in Besźel, could tell I was not, or not totally, or not only, in their city. They did not speak to me. They would not risk it.
Dhatt I saw as he emerged from his office. He stopped short at the sight of me. I stood by a hoarding outside an Ul Qoman office, with my head down so he could tell it was me but not my expression. I raised my hand to him. He hesitated a long time then spread his fingers, a waveless wave. I backed into the shadows. He walked away first.
Corwi was at a café. She was in Besźel’s Ul Qomatown. She made me smile. I watched her drinking her creamy Ul Qoman tea in the establishment I had shown her. I watched her from the shade of an alley for several seconds before I realised that she was looking right at me, that she knew I was there. It was she who said good-bye to me, with a raised cup, tipped in salute. I mouthed at her, though even she could not have seen it, thanks, and good-bye.
I have a great deal to learn, and no choice but to learn it, or to go rogue, and there is no one hunted like a Breach renegade. So, not ready for that or the revenge of my new community of bare, extracity lives, I make my choice of those two nonchoices. My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.
That is the end of the case of Orciny and the archaeologists, the last case of Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad. Inspector Tyador Borlú is gone. I sign off Tye, avatar of Breach, following my mentor on my probation out of Besźel and out of Ul Qoma. We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.