“Yes. The Oversight Committee … excuse me, Professor I don’t know how much you know about how these matters go. But yes, responsibility for this will be passed over. You understand how that will work, then?”

“I think so.”

“Alright. I’m just doing some last work. I’m curious, is all. We hear interesting things about Mahalia. I want to know some things about her work. Can you help me? You were her advisor, yes? Do you have time to speak to me about that for a few minutes?”

“Of course, Inspector, you’ve waited long enough. I don’t know quite what—”

“I want to know what she was working on. And about her history with you and with the program. And tell me about Bol Ye’an, too. She was studying Orciny, I understand.”

“What?” Isabelle Nancy was shocked. “Orciny? Absolutely not. This is an archaeology department.”

“Forgive me, I’d been under the impression … What do you mean, this is archaeology?”

“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 trowels.” She did not sound angry but sad and amused. “But we wouldn’t have accepted her unless her PhD was real archaeology.”

“So what was it?”

“Bol Ye’an’s an old dig, Inspector.”

“Please tell me.”

“I’m sure you’re aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye’an’s uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we’re looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It’s root  stuff.”

“It must be extraordinary.”

“Of course. Also pretty incomprehensible. You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?”

“I think so. That’s why all the interest, yes?”

“Well … yes. That and the kind  of things you have here. What Mahalia was doing was trying to decode what the title of her project called ‘A Hermeneutics of Identity’ from the layouts of gears and so on.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Then she did a good job. The aim of a PhD’s to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you’re doing after the first couple of years. I’m joking, you understand. What she’s doing would have had ramifications for theories of the two cities. Where they came from, you know. She played her cards pretty close, so I was never sure month to month where she stood exactly on the issue, but she still had a couple of years to make up her mind. Or to just make something up.”

“So she was helping with the actual dig.”

“Absolutely. Most of our research students are. Some for primary research, some as part of their stipend deal, some a bit of both, some to suck up to us. Mahalia was paid a little bit, but mostly she needed to get her hands on the artefacts for her work.”

“I see. I’m sorry, Professor, I’d been under the impression that she’d been working on Orciny …”

“She used to be interested in that. She first went to Besźel for a conference, some years ago.”

“Yes, I think I heard about that.”

“Right. Well, it caused a little stink because at that time she was  very into Orciny, totally—she was a little Bowdenite, and the paper she gave didn’t go down very well. Led to some remonstrations. I admired her guts, but she was on a hiding to nothing with all that stuff. When she applied to do her PhD—to be honest I was pretty surprised it was with me—I had to make sure she knew what would and wouldn’t be … acceptable. But… I mean, I don’t know what she was reading in her spare time, but what she was writing, when I got the updates on her PhD, they were, they were fine.”

“Fine?” I said. “You don’t sound …”

She hesitated.

“Well … Honestly I was a little, a little bit disappointed. She was smart. I know she was smart, because, you know, in seminars and so on she was terrific. And she worked superhard. She was a ‘grind,’ we’d say”—the word in English—“always in the library. But her chapters …”

“Not good?”

“Fine. Really, they were okay. She’d pass her doctorate, no problem, but it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It was kind of lacklustre, you know? And given the number of hours she was working, it was a bit thin . References and so on. I’d spoken to her about it, though, and she promised that she was, you know. Working on it.”

“Could I see it?”

“Sure.” She was taken aback. “I mean, I suppose. I don’t know. I have to work out what the ethics of that are. I’ve got the chapters she gave me, but they’re very unfinished; she wanted to work on them more. If she’d finished it it would be public access, and no problem, but as it is … Can I get back to you? She probably should have been publishing some of them as papers in journals—that’s kind of the done thing—but she wasn’t. We’d talked about that too; she said she was going to do something about it.”

“What’s a Bowdenite, Professor?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry. It’s the source of this Orciny stuff. Poor David wouldn’t thank me for using the term. It’s someone inspired by the early work of David Bowden. Do you know his work?”

“… No.”

“He wrote a book, years ago. Between the City and the City . Ring any bells? It was a huge thing for the later flower children. The first time for a generation anyone had taken Orciny seriously. I guess it’s not a surprise you haven’t seen it; it’s still illegal. In Besźel and in Ul Qoma. You won’t find it even in the university libraries. In some ways it was a brilliant piece of work—he did some fantastic archival investigations, and saw some analogies and connections that are … well, still pretty remarkable. But it was pretty crackpot ramblings.”

“How so?”

“Because he believed in it! He collated all these references, found new ones, put them together into a kind of ur-myth, then reinterpreted it as a secret and a cover-up. He … Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really , thought he did  believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said  he believed it. He came to Ul Qoma, from where he went to Besźel, managed I do not know how to go between the two of them—legally I assure you—several times, and he claimed to have found traces of Orciny itself. And he went further-said that Orciny wasn’t just somewhere that had existed in the gaps between Qoma and Besźel since their foundings or coming together or splitting (I can’t remember where he stood on the Cleavage issue): he said it was still here.”

“Orciny?”

“Exactly. A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight.”

“What? Doing what? How?”

“Unseen, like Ul Qomans to Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites. David said he was going to go into it and disappear.”

“Wow.”

“Exactly, wow. Wow is right. It’s notorious. Google it, you’ll see. Anyway, when we first saw Mahalia she was pretty unreconstructed. I liked her because she was spunky and because Bowdenite she may have been but she had panache and smarts. But it was a joke, you understand? I even wondered if she knew it, if she was joking herself.”

“But she wasn’t working on that anymore?”

“No one reputable would supervise a Bowdenite PhD. I had this stern word with her about it when she enrolled, but she even laughed. Said she’d left all that behind. As I say, I was surprised she’d come to me. My work’s not as avant-garde as hers.”