“Inspector Tyador Borlú.” The guard looked at my papers.
“That’s right.”
He went carefully over everything written. Had I been a tourist or trader wanting a day-pass, passage might well have been quicker and questioning more cursory. As an official visitor, there was no such laxity. One of those everyday bureaucratic ironies.
“Both of you?”
“It’s right there, Sergeant. Just me. This is my driver. I’m being picked up, and the constable here’ll be coming straight back. In fact if you look, I think you can see my party over in Ul Qoma.”
There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour. Beyond, beyond the stateless space and the backwards-to-us-facing Ul Qoman checkpoint, a small group of militsya officers stood around an official car, its lights stuttering as pompously as our own, but in different colours and with a more modern mechanism (true on-off, not the twisting blinder that our own lamps contained). Ul Qoman police lights are red and darker blue than the cobalt in Besźel. Their cars are charcoal and streamlined Renaults. I remember when they drove ugly little local-made Yadajis, more boxy than our own vehicles.
The guard turned and glanced at them. “We’re due about now,” I told him.
The militsya were too far for any details to be clear. They were waiting for something though. The guard took his time of course—You may be policzai but you get no special treatment, we watch the borders —but without excuses to do otherwise eventually saluted somewhat sardonically and pointed us through as the gate rose. After the Besź road itself the hundred metres or so of no-place felt different under our tires, and then through the second set of gates and we were on the other side, with uniformed militsya coming towards us.
There was the gunning of gears. The car we had seen waiting sped in a sudden tight curve around and in front of the approaching officers, calling out one truncated and abrupt whoop from the siren. A man emerged, putting on his police cap. He was a bit younger than me, thickset and muscular and moving with fast authority. He wore official militsya grey with an insignia of rank. I tried to remember what it meant. The border guards had stopped in surprise as he held out his hand.
“That’ll do,” he shouted. He waved them away. “I got this. Inspector Borlú?” He was speaking Illitan. Dyegesztan and I climbed out of the car. He ignored the constable. “Inspector Tyador Borlú, Besźel Extreme Crime, right?” Shook my hand hard. Pointed to his car, in which his own driver waited. “Please. I’m Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. You got my message, Inspector? Welcome to Ul Qoma.”
COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated—corridors might start mostly total, Besźel or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall only , and of which the Oversight Committee and its bodies were the only government. Legended diagrams of the buildings inside were pretty but daunting meshes of colours.
At ground level, though, where the wide road jutted into the first set of gates and wire, where the Besź Border Patrol waved arrivals to a stop in their separated lines—pedestrians, handcarts, and animal-drawn trailers, squat Besź cars, vans, sub-lines for various kinds of passes, all moving at different speeds, the gates rising and lowering out of any phase—the situation was simpler. An unofficial but ancient market where Copula Hall vents into Besźel, within sight of the gates. Illegal but tolerated street hawkers walked the lines of waiting cars with roasted nuts and paper toys.
Beyond the Besźel gates, below the main mass of Copula Hall, a no-man’s-land. The tarmac was unpainted: this was neither a Besź nor an Ul Qoman thoroughfare, so what system of road markings would be used? Beyond towards the other end of the hall the second set of gates, which we on the Besźel side could not but notice were better kept than our own, with weapon-wielding Ul Qoman guards staring, most of them away from us at their own efficiently shepherded lines of visitors to Besźel. Ul Qoman border guards are not a separate wing of government, as they are in Besźeclass="underline" they are militsya , police, like the policzai .
It is bigger than a coliseum, but Copula Hall’s traffic chamber is not complicated—an emptiness walled by antiquity. From the Besźel threshold you can see over the crowds and crawling vehicles to daylight filtering in from Ul Qoma, beyond. You can see the bobbing heads of Ul Qoman visitors or returning fellow countrymen approaching, the ridges of Ul Qoman razorwire beyond the hall’s midpoint, beyond that empty stretch between checkpoints. You can just make out the architecture of Ul Qoma itself through the enormous gateway hundreds of metres off. People strain to see, across that junction.
On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Besźel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Besźel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma’s weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbour, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. We drove as if coincidentally by the Copula Hall exit into Ul Qoma.
I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the lines of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besź emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking around in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been breach to see before.
Near the Ul Qoma exit is the Temple of Inevitable Light. I had seen photos many times, and though I had unseen it dutifully when we passed I was aware of its sumptuous crenellations, and had almost said to Dyegesztan that I was looking forward to seeing it soon. Now light, foreign light, swallowed me as I emerged, at speed, from Copula Hall. I looked everywhere. From the rear of Dhatt’s car, I stared at the temple. I was, suddenly, rather astonishingly and at last, in the same city as it.
“First time in Ul Qoma?”
“No, but first time in a long time.”
IT WAS YEARS since I had first taken the tests: my passmark was long expired and in a defunct passport. This time I had undergone an accelerated orientation, two days. It had only been me and the various tutors, Ul Qomans from their Besź embassy. Illitan immersion, the reading of various documents of Ul Qoman history and civic geography, key issues of local law. Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actuallybeing in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.
“Acclimatisation pedagogy’s come a long way with computers,” said one of the teachers, a young woman who praised my Illitan constantly. “We’ve got so much more sophisticated ways of dealing with stuff now; we work with neuroscientists, all sorts of stuff.” I got spoiled because I was policzai . Everyday travellers would undergo more conventional training, and would take considerably longer to qualify.
They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimised with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.