Day 36
Invited Miss Diviou for a nice walk in Scylla Park today. I've found some areas of it that are safe from those portrait artists, where one can be unseen and unheard.
From a couple of glances that she gave me, I half-expect that she thought my intentions were untoward. But when I started talking she quickly understood that I meant something quite different.
I laid the whole thing out to her—my real reason for being here, my discoveries, my beliefs about what has been happening, my struggles with the authorities. She took it all in. I left out Biffy, naturally. If she is working with the authorities, best not to compromise him.
“So what you're saying,” she said, “is that these people have the power to reshape this city, they do it with language encoded into maps, and they're using it to keep people from actually mapping the city?”
“That's the best explanation I can come up with”, I answered. “That's why I need someone they would consider above suspicion to help me with the process.”
“But why?” she asked. “If they can reconfigure the city whenever they want, your map will be instantly inaccurate. It might as well say 'here be dragons.'”
“Because it's there, d—– it. Please pardon the expression. I'm like a bulldog. Once I sink my teeth into something, I have to see it through.”
We spoke a bit more about my theories and her possible role. Then she came out with something remarkable. “Do you suppose it has anything to do with those mysterious factories?”
That was a new thought to me. “Ah, yes, the factories. One of these days I must figure out what they actually make.”
She laughed—actually laughed at me. “You've said that to me several times before, nearly word for word. Do you not realize that?”
As I'm writing this entry, I looked back, and I realize that I've written those words several times as well. H—–, I even tried to investigate them once. Why didn't I remember any of it?
Anyway, Miss Diviou agreed on a combined approach to mapping the city, and that we would look for evidence in the broadsheets and other such documents that would tell us what the factories actually make. Perhaps there's a local equivalent of those overwrought novels where a factory worker falls in love with a young noblewoman, that all of the British women seem to be reading these days, that will provide some clue. Because of course we can't just break in.