The City & The City: A Novel

“Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned po

It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be i

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.

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,

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

“I mean that if she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she’d be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in

“I fucking do not know,” he shouted. “Why the fuck are you asking me? Go get Borlú, because he seems to have a damn sight more of an idea what the fuck is going on than I do. Orciny? No I fucking don’t, because I’m not a child, but here’s the thing, even though it’s goddamn obvious Orciny’s a pile of shit, something is still going on, people are st

“It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But i

So the methods may not be so unfamiliar as I feared. There may be others who proceed the traditional Breach way, the levering of intimidation, that self-styling as a night-fear, while I—using the siphoned-off information we filch online, the bugged phone calls from both cities, the networks of informants, the powers beyond any law, the centuries of