“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar-face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.
“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.
“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.
When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.
Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned . . . and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my breath, certainly. Her avatar stuttered in and out of focus until I was done.
I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.
Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.
I DON’T THINK I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.
Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.
“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve . . .” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”.
Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.
“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.
“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.
I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.
Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.
“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.
Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside-out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.
Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That lanky shit,” he muttered as we followed him through semiautonomous zones policed by their own incompetent constables. “Coattailing me, then coming the big I-am.” Ra was the only person in Embassytown who shared Ez’s colloquialisms and accent. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Easy for him to play the nice boy when, with . . . he can . . .” Cheap lamps flickered above us, new stars. “I shouldn’t . . .” Ez said. “I’m tired, and I want to stop this . . . and I want Ra to leave me alone.”
I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid . . . It’s . . .”
I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish-specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.
Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.
“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.
We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.
“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.
“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.
“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.
“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.
Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.
13
CYNICALLY, WHO WERE WE? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.
We—MagDa above all
—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.
“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”
“Some of them,” said Da. “. . . there’s some kind of debate, some kind of . . .” “Some of them want to be cured.”
Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there, the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.
In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemical: there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.
When their shepherds reached the city there was no one to meet them. The country Ariekei saw their worst-afflicted compatriots lying by speakers and starving to death, waiting for the next sentence. Their bodies lay unhonoured. If the buildings around them were still healthy enough their dog-sized animalculae would break the corpses down: if not, the slower processes of internal rot would smear them gradually into the road.
Fights were common. Withdrawal and Ariekene need meant aggression. The afflicted would tear into things on sudden searches for EzRa’s Language. A less affected Ariekes, usually from the country, might frill its fanwing in formal pugnacity, but the more addicted had no time for traditional displays and would simply hurl themselves hooves and giftwings at their startled opponents. Once I saw footage of EzRa’s broadcast start in the middle of such a battle. The combatants slumped against each other immediately and coiled together as if in affection, still bleeding their blood.
“Things are getting worse again,” Da said. We were going to infect the entire planet.
“That’s not the only thing we have to contend with.” It was Bren.
He stood in the doorway. A suspiciously perfect pose, all framed. “Hello Avice Benner Cho,” he said.
I rose. I shook my head at him. “You prodigal bastard,” I said.
“Prodigal?” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“Prodigal extravagant?” he said. “Or penitent?” A little cautiously, he smiled at me. I didn’t quite smile at him for a minute, but then, fuck it, yes I did.
“HOW DID YOU get in here?” someone said, so newly promoted by circumstance that they added “Who are you?” to hisses of embarrassment. Ra shook Bren’s hand and tried to welcome him. Bren waved him away.
“It’s not just these Ariekene refugees we have to contend with,” Bren said. “Though they’ll certainly complicate matters.” He spoke with monotone authority. “There are other things.”
Of course he couldn’t speak Language since his doppel had died, but there were some Ariekei—you might sentimentally and misleadingly call them old friends—that came to his house and told him things.
“Do you think none of them want this to change?” Bren said.
“No, we know,” Mag said, but he continued.
“You think there are no Hosts who are horrified? They’re thinking through a fug, true, but some of them are still thinking. You know what they call EzRa? The god-drug.”
After a silence I said carefully, “That is a kenning.”
“No,” Bren said. He glanced around the room, gauging who knew that old term for the compound trope. “It’s not like a bone-house, Avice.” He thumped his chest, his bone-house. “It’s more straightforward. It’s just truth.”
“Huh,” someone said shakily, “that’s religion for you . . .”
“No it is not,” Bren said. “Gods are gods and drugs are drugs but here, here, there’s a city not only of the addicted but of . . . a sort of faithful.”
“They don’t have gods,” I said. “How . . . ?”
He interrupted me. “They’ve known about them ever since we got here and told them what they are and what they do. They couldn’t talk about voidcraft or trousers either, before we arrived, but they find ways now. And there are some Hosts who’ll do anything to stop this. That might not be much yet, maybe, until they can get themselves free enough to try to free themselves more. But if they do, well. They’ll end it however they can. You should think of all the ways a few determined Ariekei might try to . . . liberate . . . afflicted compatriots.”
He joined me again, in private, that night, in my rooms. He asked me where was my friend Ehrsul and I told him that I didn’t know. That was almost all I said that night. Bren himself didn’t have much to say, but he had come, and we sat together while he said it.
I LEFT THE CITY. Three times.
Seeing those immigrant Ariekei from the outlands gave us ideas. There were some which hadn’t yet left their homesteads but had started to yearn for EzRa’s pronouncements. We went to them.
Our craft had ventricles through which I could put my head and look down as we flew. It exuded air in its belly-bridge, pressurised enough that the bad atmosphere couldn’t push in. I took breaths, then put my head out to watch the ground.
A kilometre below, the demesnes of the Host city. Plateaus and cultivation and simple massive rocks, fractured, their fractures filled with black weedstuff. Meadows crossed with tracks and punctuated by habitations. More grown architecture: rooms suspended by gas-sacs watched us as we flew, with simple eyes.
Leaving Embassytown and then the city felt as dramatic as entering immer. It might have been beautiful. Swaying through fields, even now during the breakdown, farms ambled hugely after their keepers if they still had them, or alone. Symbionts cleaned their pelts. The farms would birth components or biomachines in wet cauls.
Orchards of lichen were crisscrossed with the gut-pipework that spanned out from the city, still looked after in places by tenacious Host tenders. A long way off were steppes where herds of semiwild factories ran, which twice each long year Ariekene scientist-gauchos would corral. We hoped to find a few of these cowboy bioriggers left, to trade their creatures’ offspring.
There was I; Henrych, who had been a stallholder and now had joined the new committees; Sarah, with just enough knowledge of science to be useful; BenTham the Ambassador. The Ambassador were unkempt, bewildered and resentful. Unlike several of their fellows, though, they had still enough decorum to ensure that they were exactly equally dishevelled.
We landed and from the hillside came the distress call of grass, as our vehicles began to graze. In our aeoli masks we gathered equipment, made camp, called in to Embassytown, established a timetable. Checked once more over the orders and the wish list. “I don’t think this tribe exchanges many reactor pups,” I said, down the line to home. “Talk to KelSey. They’re with the wetland cultivators, aren’t they? That’s where they’ll get them, along with some incinerators.” So on. We divided hunting duties between the various crews beyond the city.
Our spancarts were skittish, their foreparts stretched in rippling caterpillar motion. We stacked them full of datchips, all sound-files. Some were stolen, some made with Ez’s grudging consent, when this system had been formulated a
nd mooted to them.
I was almost certainly not as calm as this telling would imply. I’d been looking down onto the surface of the country I was born in, grew up in, returned to, that was my home, and that, that view beyond Embassytown, had been impossible for me till then. So there was that, and there was what I was doing, and the stakes of it. I was looking into a season and a surface without cognates. I’d been into the out, but in homily fashion, my own planet was the most alien place I’d seen.
Things like crossbred anemones and moths froze as we passed, waved sensory limbs behind us. Our cart rutted toward settlements and animals like rags of paper flew in the hot sky. The farmstead at the end of knotted man-thick tributaries of the pipework was as restless as most architecture. A squirming tower laid young machinery in eggs. The paper-shred birds picked parasites from it. Its keepers started when they saw us, then galloped for our company. The farm lowed.
So far out, the addiction seemed weaker or different. BenTham could communicate our desires and understand theirs. They knew that we might have something they could hear, and they clamoured for that, unsatisfied by the degraded remnants of fix that backwashed down the arteries from the city whenever EzRa spoke, or what they half-heard from the nearest speakers, kilometres away, or what previous barterers had offered.
We showed our wares, voilà , like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it, in Language, EzRa said, When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.
We offered other bits from his history, cliche´s of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free. We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree.
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