The City & The City

by China Miéville

Breach has powers the rest of us can hardly imagine, but its calling is utterly precise. It is not the passage itself from one city to the other, not even with contraband: it is the manner of the passage. Throw felid or cocaine or guns from your Besź rear window across a crosshatched yard into an Ul Qoman garden for your contact to pick up—that is breach, and Breach will get you, and it would still be Breach if you threw bread or feathers. Steal a nuclear weapon and carry it secretly with you through Copula Hall when you cross but cross that border itself? At that official checkpoint where the cities meet? Many crimes are committed in such an act, but breach is not one of them.

I saw the groups of Ul Qomans unsee me because of my clothes and the way I held myself, double-take and see my visitor’s mark, see me.

“Crap.” “Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe.

They knew I was in Ul Qoma: I could find them and could walk alongside them in the street and we would be inches apart but unable to acknowledge each other. Like the old story.

“Will you stop?” I said. “I am going to be so fucking glad when you’re gone,” he said.

“Because you may not see the justice of what we do doesn’t mean it’s unjust, Borlú. Think of this, if you want, as your trial.

And be my guest—disbelieve in Orciny all you want, I fucking do. But keep your head down in case that nonexistent fucking city shoots you in the face.

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.