by Embassytown
“Wyatt,” I said. I didn’t know why he singled me out.
“Two strangers, two friends, just so bloody happened to get a score like that on the Stadt Empathy test? Christ Uploaded, are you stupid?” He shook his head and held up his hands in apology—he wasn’t trying to fight. “Listen. This didn’t just happen: this was done. Understand?” He pointed at Ez. “Scan that bastard’s head.”
His insinuation was that whatever he wanted to explain might change things, might give us a fingerhold of hope. If that was true, Ez must have known it too, but had done and said nothing. He’d pissed away even his own hope.
“Scan it,” Wyatt said. “You’ll see. He was made.” Made by Bremen. “My eyes only,” Wyatt said. “You might still be able to get the orders off my datspace, if you haven’t destroyed it. ‘Ez.’ Operative Joel Rukowsi. I’ll give you the passes.”
Rukowsi had had a certain facility, a predisposition for mental connection unachievable for most of us: but it was generalised, not directed. He wasn’t a twin: he had no close friends with whom he’d achieved any particular intuitive bond. They didn’t have language to give his talent an accurate name, so they misrepresented it calling it empathy. It wasn’t that he felt as others felt, though: his ability manifested in nasty parlour tricks.
He’d been an interrogator. Virtuoso—knowing when a subject would break, what to press for, what to promise, whether they were lying, how to make them stop lying. He was recruited young, and they’d honed his strange skills, with exercises, ways of focusing, and with more invasive methods, too. They’d left him different.
Some among our little group were murmuring, interrupting Wyatt. I clicked my fingers to shut them up. “What?” I said. I waved my hand at Wyatt, Go on. “They made him … what …? A mind reader?” Ez sat beyond our sound with his head down still. I wished the guards would hit him.
“Of course not,” Wyatt said. “Telepathy’s impossible. But with the right drugs, and implants and receivers, you can get brains into a certain phase. Enough. With a sensitive like him—” I sneered at that and Wyatt waited. “You know what I mean. There’s not many of them, but someone like him, when they’ve worked on him, and get him to train with someone else with the right hardware plugged in …” He tapped his head. “ ‘Ez’ there can make himself read like that person.” He waved his hand sine-wave style. “Same output. It’s related to linktech but it’s much stronger, works on heads bugger-all like each other, so long as one of them’s … Well, a quote sensitive unquote.
“At first they were thinking about totally other stuff, undercovers, for id-readers, get agents out of scans—mimic brainwaves and whatnot. Then something occurred to them. You know,” he continued slowly, “supposedly they once tried growing their own doppels? Back in Charo City? When the colony started.” He shook his head. “Didn’t go so well. Story goes they sink years into it, without any Ariekei to listen to to keep the skills up, with no sense of Embassytown on the ground—miabs being even less frequent then—and end up with … well, pairs of people who are dysfunctional in Bremen.” He indicated twoness with his hands. “And everywhere. Hardly reliable.
“But then here’s Rukowsi. The thinking was it might be a way to solve an old problem.”
The mystery of what it was the Hosts discerned in our Ambassadors’ voices remained unsolved: all that Charo City had ascertained was that after implants, augmens, chemicals and hundreds of hours of training, Joel Rukowsi and his fellow agent, linguist Coley Wren, codename Ra, had been able to score astonishingly on the Stadt scale.
No one had known whether it would sound like Language to the Ariekei—but Stadt was the only test anyone had for that, and the operatives looked, at least, to have passed. If in fact it hadn’t worked, if it had failed in the ways the paymasters had imagined it might possibly fail, if EzRa had spoken and elicited polite incomprehension, then nothing would have been lost. Two career agents would have a long and dull assignment, until the next Bremen-bound ship. But what if they succeeded?
“None of you lot are fools,” Wyatt said. “Why would you think we are? You think we didn’t get all your provocations, your fake meetings, your secret agendas, your disobedience, your tax-skimming, your doctoring of biorigging, keeping the best, or making it so no one but Embassytowners can make it work? You think that’s been invisible? For Christ’s sake, we’ve known for hundreds of thousands of hours that you’ve been building to independence.”
The silence after he said that would have meant a declaration of war, shortly before. In these new times it was only a silence. What he said felt not like a revelation but like something impolite. Wyatt rubbed his eyes.
“It’s just history,” he said. “It’s adolescence. All colonies do it. We can set our fucking clocks by you. This is my fifth stationing. Before this, I was in Chao Polis, on Dracosi, on Berit Blue. Does that mean anything to you? Christ, do you people not read? Don’t you upload the dat that comes in the miabs? I’m a specialist. They send me in where outposts are spoiling for a fight.”
“You quash secession,” said Bren.
“God, no,” Wyatt said. “You may be the mysterious old man here, but I’m from the out, and you can’t hide your ignorance from me. Berit Blue did secede, with only the tiniest war.” He held thumb and forefinger minutely apart to show how small the war had been. “Dracosi’s independence was totally peaceful. Chao Polis is midway through thrashing out a plan with us for regional autonomy. How crude do you think we are, Bren? They are free … and they’re ours.” He let that sit.
“But there are exceptions. You’re too far from Bremen, too hard to reach, for easy management. And you’re not ready. You weren’t going to be getting independence soon. It’s the fault of Language: that’s what’s confused you. You think you’re aristocracy. You thought, I should say. And that this colony was your estate. And you had a kind of point: unlike every other aristocracy I’ve ever seen you really are indispensable. Were. So you’ve been choosing your successors since forever. Congratulations: you invented hereditary power.
“But every one of you, every Ambassador and every vizier, every member of Staff in Embassytown, is a Bremen employee. ‘Ambassadors’: get it? Who do you think you speak for? We can hire, and we can fire. And we can replace.”
EzRa had been a test. An operation to strip our Ambassadors of power and hobble self-government. Their success would have changed everything. In two, three ship-shifts, the social system of this outpost would have been overthrown. If those other than our Ambassadors could speak Language, apparatchiks, career diplomats and loyalists could be sent to Embassytown for a few local years, and soon we’d rely on Bremen for survival. Our Ambassadors would die slowly half by half, doppel by doppel, and be mourned but not replaced. The crèche would close. The infirmary would empty as death took the failed, and there would be no others.
It would have been a bloodless, elegant, slow assertion of Bremen control. How could we have asked for independence when our contact with the Hosts who sustained us relied on Bremen staff? All Embassytown had had was its monopoly on Language, and with EzRa, Bremen had tried to break that.
A world-destroying mistake. Not a stupid one: only the very worst luck. A quirk of psyche and phonetics. It made sense that they would try. It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counterrevolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.
“Biorigging’s … good,” MagDa said. “It’s invaluable.” “And, minerals and stuff from here’s useful, too. And a few other things.” “But still.” “Come on.” “Why all this?” We’re a backwater, they were saying. There was no false pride or denial. Most of us had wondered at some time why Embassytown wasn’t just allowed to die.
“I’d have thought it would make sense to some of you,” Wyatt said. “That you’d realise exactly what’s going on.” And he looked up, straight at me.
I stood and folded my arms. I looked down my face at him. Everyone turned their gaze to me. At last I said, “Immer.”
I’d been to towns in hollowed rocks and a planet threaded with linear cities like a filigree net, to dry places with unbreathable air, ports, and places about which I could say nothing. Some were independent. Many belonged, free or not, to Bremen. “They never let a colony collapse,” I said. We’d all heard it. “Never.” No matter if the cost of transportation outweighed the prices of trinkets and expertise shipped back, they wouldn’t let this town go, so long as we were theirs.
My companions were nodding slowly. Wyatt was not.
“Jesus, Avice,” he said. “What do you sound like? ‘It is a foundation of our government …’ ” There was a strange glee in him, a functionary’s dissidence, giving the lie to lines he’d spoken many times. “You know how many colonies have been cut off? You’ve seen the charts, the gravestone symbols in the immer.” I knew the stories of planets studded with human and human/exot ruins, where high-rises sank into alien muck. Found landscapes deserted by design, failure, and in one or two instances, mystery. They were an immerser cliché. I felt reproached by all that empty architecture: that, knowing of it, I could still have repeated my government’s lines.
“If it were in Bremen’s interests,” Wyatt said, “we’d let you go, and send me to oversee it. We didn’t go to this effort because we ‘leave no colony behind.’” He looked at me expectantly again. Have another go.
I thought of the charts. I looked up, as if through the ceiling, at Wreck. I knew more about the immer than anyone else there, including him. I remembered conversations, the shy enthusiasms of a helmsman unaware he hinted at any secrets.
“We’re on the edge,” I said to my colleagues. “Of the immer. They’re exploring. Embassytown was going to be a way station.”
“All the biorigging and so on,” Wyatt said. “It’s nice.” He shrugged. “Nice to have. But Avice Benner Cho’s right. You’ve had more attention than a little place like this deserves.”
None of us looked at Mag or Da. We all knew now what several of us had suspected before, that their lover Ra had been an agent, had betrayed them, and us. It was no surprise he’d had an agenda, but that it was something so inimical to Embassytown shocked me. And that Ra, in the days of crisis when everything had changed, had not said. Though, I didn’t know what MagDa knew.
I missed the immer. The way the mess and mass of it gushed by ships on their way to impossibly far parts of the everyday universe, immersed in that infinitely older unplace. I imagined being an explorer on pioneering ships built for ruggedness, buffeted by currents through dangerous parts, through schools of immer-stuff sharks, repelling random or deliberate attack. I didn’t believe in the nobility of the explorer, but the thought, the project, compelled me.
“They’d have to build fuelling stations,” I said slowly. “And it’s a hard place to emerge: they’d have to put more markers in place.” Buoys that jutted half in immer, half in the quotidian void, with lights and immer-analogues of lights to guide incomers. The night over Embassytown was to have glimmered with more than just Wreck. It would have been strung with little colours. And while ships stored up on fuel, supplies, chemicals for life systems, and uploaded the newest dat and immerware, Embassytown would be where crews waited and played. “They want to make us a port town,” I said.
Wyatt said, “Last port before the dark.”
Embassytown might come to be a kilometres-wide sprawl of bordellos, drink, and all the other vices of travellers. I’d been to many such places in the out. Then we might have had our own street children, harvesting food and mutating the rubbish on town dumps. It wouldn’t be inevitable. There are ways of providing port services without the collapse of all the civic. I had been to more salubrious stopover cities. But it would have been a struggle.
To control a source of beautiful half-living technology, of curios, of precious metals in near-unique molecular configurations might have been desirable. To control the last outpost, a jumping-off to an expanding frontier, was nonnegotiable.
“What’s out there?” I said. Wyatt shook his head.
“I don’t know. You’d know better than me, immerser, and you don’t know at all. But something. There’s always something.” There was always something in the immer. “Why’s there a pharos here?” he said. “You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go. There are reasons to be careful in this quadrant, but there are reasons to come—to pass through, en route somewhere else.”
“They’ll come,” MagDa said. “Bremen.” “To see how they’re doing.” “Ez and Ra, I mean. To check on them.” They looked at each other. “We might not have so long to wait.” “As we’d thought.”
“More than five bloody days is too long, now,” someone said. “We’re at the end.”
“Yes but …”
“What if we—”
Wyatt was a clever man who had misplayed his hand, and was trying to salvage something: his life, at least. He’d told us everything, and not out of despair as it might seem, but as a gamble, a strategy. We looked at the glass that separated us from Ez. Ez raised his eyes to ours, to all of ours, as if he knew we stared.
18
Groups of Ariekei were on their rooftops, between dead buildings, roaming in armed gangs: all strategies to protect themselves from the mutilated rampagers. Ariekei dead were everywhere, and here and there the remnants of Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Terre, dragged by Ariekene murderers for reasons beyond our reason. Packs of zelles wandered, hungry for food and EzRa’s speech, deserted by their erstwhile owners and gone incompetently feral.
It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition, so not war at all really but something more pathological. In each holdout, a few Ariekei tried to be the things they remembered. But they could concentrate only for hours at a time, before the equivalents of delirium tremens overtook them. Their companions would whisper words they’d heard EzRa say to whichever of their company was succumbing, trying to imitate the Ambassador’s timbre. They were just words, just clauses. Sometimes those convulsing would return to half-mindfulness: enough to remember that something needed rebuilding.
Between those remnant settlements were the truly mindless that didn’t even know that they shook when they did, and only hunted for food and for the voice of EzRa, and were hunted by each other. The self-mutilated, though, were suddenly rarer. I wondered if they were dying.
In places we had to haul our barriers back, abandon sections of Embassytown to the oratees. At the same time, there was an unexpected exodus of Hosts—we still called them that, sometimes, in unpleasant humour—from the city. Ariekei in small but growing numbers found the mouths and orifices where industrial guts linked the city to the meadows of biorigging and wild country. They followed them out.
“Do they think they’ll find EzRa out there?” We didn’t know where they were going, or why. I thought perhaps they simply couldn’t bear to live anymore in a slaughterhouse of architecture, amid what had been their compatriots. Perhaps their need for quiet deaths was stronger than their need for EzRa’s voice. I tried not to experience too much relief, or even hope, at that notion, at the possibility that more would leave; but, cautiously, I felt some.
We exhumed Ra. I didn’t see it.
We thanked Christ that he’d not been cremated or rendered biomass. It was MagDa who’d saved his body: he’d had no faith, but his family’s listed tradition was Unitarian Shalomic, which abjured those usual local methods, and in an effort at respect MagDa had had him interred in a small graveyard for those of such heresies.
We waited like parents-to-be while doctors worked with the schematics Wyatt provided. They removed from Ra’s dead head the implant, the hidden booster of his ordinary-seeming link. It was the size of my thumb, sheathed in organics, though it was all Terretech. It made me wonder if, had the Bremeni designers used Ariekene biorigging, the implants themselves would have become infected like the Hosts, and the thing that let Ez
and Ra be EzRa would have become hooked on their voice. What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.
The committee dragooned scientists from wherever they still worked: the stumps of hospitals; rogue-ministering in the streets; of course from the infirmary. We begged and forced others to start work again. Southel, our scientific overseer, organised the researches. They moved fast.
I believe Joel Rukowsi, Ez, thought himself a consummate gameplayer. He thought how broken he looked was a front, I think. We asked him why he’d said nothing about his hidden, embedded technology, why he’d have gone to his death with the rest of us rather than do something that might keep us all alive. He implied some hidden agenda but I don’t think he had an answer. He was just eaten by his own secrets.
He didn’t understand the mechanisms, could only truculently describe how it had worked for him. He looked at the insert we had dug out of Ra, warm in my hand.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “I just knew … how he was feeling, what to say. I don’t know if it was that thing made it easier, or what.”
The researchers had teased apart the filigrees that enmeshed it into Ra’s mind with disentangler techzymes. Its nanotendrils dangled from it like thin hair, twitched in my hand in vain search for neuro-matter. It mimicked the theta, beta, alpha, delta and other waves detected from its companion piece in Joel Rukowsi, coordinated the two feeds into impossible phase. Whatever the brain-states, the output would seem shared.
“It’s an amp, too,” Southel told us. “A stimulant. Pumps the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Emp centres.” She took the thing away and learnt it, tried to uncover what it was and did, to take it apart and build another. MagDa spent hours with her, focused her energies on the project.
“They’re up to something,” Bren said to me. “MagDa. You can see they’ve had an idea.”