Even after the acute events, with which no one sane could argue, the representatives of the two cities on the committee would carefully examine ex post facto justifications they commissioned for Breach’s interventions. They might, technically, question any of these: it would be absurd to do so, but the committee would not undermine their authority by not going through important motions.

The two cities need the Breach. And without the cities’ integrities, what is Breach?

Corwi was waiting for me. “So?” She handed me coffee. “What did they say?”

“Well, it’s going to be handed over. But they made me jump through hoops.” We walked towards the police car. All the streets around Copula Hall were crosshatched, and we made our way unseeing through a group of Ul Qoman friends to where Corwi had parked. “You know Syedr?”

“That fascist prick? Sure.”

“He was trying to make out as if he wouldn’t let the case go to Breach. It was weird.”

“They hate Breach, don’t they, the NatBloc?”

“Weird to hate it. Like hating air or something. And he’s a nat, and if there’s no Breach, there’s no Besźel. No homeland.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it,” she said, “because even though we need them, it’s a sign of dependence that we do. Nats are divided, anyway, between balance-of-power people and triumphalists. Maybe he’s a triumphalist. They reckon Breach are protecting Ul Qoma, the only thing stopping Besźel taking over.”

“They want to take it over? They’re living in a dreamworld if they think Besźel would win.” Corwi glanced at me. We both knew it was true. “Anyway, it’s moot. He was posturing, I think.”

“He’s a fucking idiot. I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever. When are we going to get the nod?”

“A day or two, I think. They’ll vote on all the motions put in front of them today. I think.” I did not know how it was organised, in fact.

“So in the meantime, what?” She was terse.

“Well, you’ve got plenty of other stuff to be getting on with, I take it? This isn’t your only case.” I looked at her as we drove.

We drove past Copula Hall, its huge entrance like a made, secular cave. The building is much larger than a cathedral, larger than a Roman circus. It’s open at its eastern and western sides. At ground level and for the first vaulted fifty feet or so above it is a semienclosed thoroughfare, punctuated with pillars, traffic streams separated by walls, stop-started with checkpoints.

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission—or sometimes refused it—to leave Besźel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the crosshatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.

Copula Hall like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one.

There are places not crosshatched but where Besźel is interrupted by a thin part of Ul Qoma. As kids we would assiduously unsee Ul Qoma, as our parents and teachers had relentlessly trained us (the ostentation with which we and our Ul Qoman contemporaries used to unnotice each other when we were grosstopically close was impressive). We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way around in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong. Breach never manifested, of course. We did the same with the local lizards. They were always dead when we picked them up, and we said the little airborne trip through Ul Qoma had killed them, though it might just as well have been the landing.

“Won’t be our problem much longer,” I said, watching a few Ul Qoman tourists emerge into Besźel. “Mahalia, I mean. Byela. Fulana Detail.”

Chapter Seven

TO FLY TO BESŹEL from the east coast of the US involves changing planes at least once, and that’s the best option. It is a famously complicated trip. There are direct flights to Besźel from Budapest, from Skopje, and, probably an American’s best bet, from Athens. Technically Ul Qoma would have been harder for them to get to because of the blockade, but all they needed to do was nip into Canada and they could fly direct. There were many more inter national services to the New Wolf.

The Gearys were coming in to Besźel Halvic at ten in the morning. I had already made Corwi break the news of their daughter’s death to them over the phone. I told her I would escort them to see the body myself, though she could join me if she chose. She did.

We waited at Besźel Airport, in case the plane came in early. We drank bad coffee from the Starbucks analogue in the terminal. Corwi asked me again about the workings of the Oversight Committee. I asked her if she had ever left Besźel.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to Romania. I’ve been to Bulgaria.”

“Turkey?”

“No. You?”

“There. And London. Moscow. Paris, once, a long time ago, and Berlin. West Berlin as it was. It was before they joined.”

“Berlin?” she said. The airport was hardly crowded: mostly returning Besź, it seemed, plus a few tourists and Eastern European commercial travellers. It is hard to tourist in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma—how many holiday destinations set exams before they let you in?—but still, though I had not been I had seen film of the newish Ul Qoma Airport, sixteen or seventeen miles southeast, across Bulkya Sound from Lestov, and it got vastly more traffic than us, though their visitor conditions were not less strenuous than our own. When it had been rebuilt a few years previously, it had gone from somewhat smaller to much larger than our own terminal in a few months of frenetic construction. From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that.

A group of foreign orthodox Jews were met by their, judging by clothes, much less devout local relatives. A fat security officer let his gun dangle to scratch his chin. There were one or two intimidatingly dressed execs from those gold-dust recent arrivals, our new high-tech, even American, friends, finding the drivers with signs for board members of Sear and Core, Shadner, VerTech, those executives who did not arrive in their own planes, or copter in to their own helipads. Corwi saw me reading the cards.

“Why the fuck would anyone invest here?” she said. “Do you reckon they even remember agreeing to it? The government blatantly slips them Rohypnol at those junkets.”

“Typical Besź defeatist talk, Constable. That’s what’s doing our country down. Representatives Buric and Nyisemu and Syedr are doing precisely the job with which we entrust them.” Buric and Nyisemu made sense: it was extraordinary Syedr had got into organising the trade fairs. Some favour pulled in. The fact that, as these foreign visitors showed, there were even small successes was even more remarkable for that.