Embassytown

by China Miéville

  Sometimes the Hosts left us energy, fuel, miraculously untainted biorigging. We gave them the food or medicines they were no longer able to make. We promised them EzRa’s voice, which was all they begged for. Whatever inklings they had about how lies worked, about the nature of our promise, they showed no suspicion. They waited hopelessly. Often they dispersed only when driven away by their less-controlled siblings.

  The most desperate oratees, incapable of planning, would come full tilt at the barricades, leap far and fast up them, grabbing with giftwings, shouting in Language. We repelled them. We killed them when we had to. I’ve seen Ariekei shot, blown apart by explosives, burnt by the caustic sputum of biorigging, cut with blades. When anyone killed their first Ariekes, a life of conditioned respect would break: gunners would weep. The second time not.

  ANIMALS INFILTRATED the lost streets. Altbrocks, foxes, monkeys moving curiously down wheel-ruts. Truncators climbed drainpipes and worried at loosening windows. Once in a while some depressive guard would shoot one and the beasts would scatter, but it quickly became bad luck to kill a Terre beast. It became instead a sport to take out the fluttering, tottering, strangely walking Ariekene animals that also came. No one was sure whether truncs, neither Terre nor indigene, were targets or not, and they were left alone.

  We avoided thinking about our inadequate stocks of food, of energy, of the stuff we needed. A narrative went up with our walls of torn-up rubbish, of last stands and resistance, the onslaught of hordes. It helped. In the evenings, people gathered in the little neighbourhoods left to us. I was surprised at what gave us comfort. Artists plumbed our archives, digital archaeology, back millions of hours, to the antediasporan age. They pulled up corroded ancient fictions to screen.

  “These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,” one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly sick figures. Colour came back, and protagonists were in an edifice full of products, and sicker enemies than before relentlessly came for them. We read the story as ours, of course.

  WE KNEW THE Ariekei would breach our defences. They entered the houses that edged our zone, found their ways to rear and side doors, large windows, to holes. Some came out of the front doors into our streets and tore apart what they found. Those with remnants of memory tried to get to the Embassy. They came at night. They were like monsters in the dark, like figures from children’s books.

  There were other dangers: there were human bandits. A rumour circulated that one group of criminals included Kedis and Shur’asi, as well as Terre. There was no evidence. Still, when, by what was certainly human action, a Shur’asi was found dead by our main barricade, the excuse was whispered that it had been part of that predatory gang. They only died by violence or mishap, and for that race the death — every Shur’asi death — was an abomination as epic as the Fall.

  Not all the Ariekene corpses we cleared were killed by us, nor by the random brutality of other afflicted Hosts. Some were destroyed with what seemed a more deliberate alien savagery.

  “That’s those we saw,” Bren told me. “Without their fan-wings. We’re worrying about the addicts, but we need to think about them, too.”

  “Where are YlSib?” I said.

  “They’re not lunatics, you know,” he said. “There are ways of being in the city. Yl, Sib . . . and others. You know ambassading doesn’t always take.”

  “That place has to close, Bren. Christ. Those people can’t be kept like that.”

  “I know.”

  I stayed the night with him, for the second time. We said even less than we had the first time, but that was really alright, as alright as it got that night. “Do you think there are languages made up of three voices?” I asked him at one point.

  “It’s a big out,” he said. “Sure. And four, and five.”

  I said, “And places where exots speak Anglo in ways that mess up human heads.”

  We stood naked by his window, his arm over my shoulder and mine around his waist, and listened to fires, shouts, shattering.

  BREN GOT A BUZZ early the next morning. He would not say from whom, to my anger. He raced us to the border. A tide of Ariekei were coming. They galloped at the barricades in a wave, an invasion organised with last gasps of sentience. I very much stress that I wish to hear the voice of EzRa please, the Ariekei shouted as they came to kill us. Is there a possibility that we could hear EzRa speak?

  The guards were calling for backup. MagDa, our comrades and Staff came. With animal-guns fast-bred without ears, with rapidly machinofactured bullets, with hurled clubs and polymer crossbows firing quarrels made of reclaimed stair-rods, we staved the Hosts off. Ariekei burst, screaming their polite requests, we most sincerely ask. Zelles scuttled up our barriers and we shot them too. Kedis were with us. There were Shur’asi playing out electrified wires. I saw Simmon firing expertly with what had once been his off arm.

  With only the tiniest organising the Ariekei would have taken us, but they were drugless and incompetent. They had to clamber over hillocks of their dead. Scavengers came: wild house antibodies. Our own birds tasted the air over the carnage and arced away again. My eyes were watering from acrid Ariekene innards. There was a commotion from side streets. Something was slamming into the Hosts. I shouted for Bren’s attention. It was a mass of those other, self-mutilated Ariekei. They’d come hidden among the others, a fifth column. Bren watched them without expression, while the rest of us gaped, as they dispersed our junkie attackers brutally.

  “Bren was the first here,” Da said quietly to me. She looked over to where Mag spoke to him. “With you. He knew this would happen, didn’t he? How?”

  I shook my head. “He knows people.”

  “Do you?”

  I wasn’t going to mention YlSib. Da was no fool: it wouldn’t have surprised me if she was aware of everything, including relevant names. “Come on,” I said.

  “What do you know, Avice?”

  I didn’t answer but I met her eye, to make sure I didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed; so if she could tell I was holding back, she knew it was because I was trying to show respect for something. I was buzzed right then, from an ID I didn’t recognise, sound only, no trid or flat. The voice was muffled beyond recognition.

  “Say that again,” I shouted. “Who is this? Say that again.”

  Whoever it was did and that time I heard. I held my breath and hoped I was wrong and put it to speaker, so Mag and Da and Bren could hear. But I was right. The words came one more time, much clearer.

  “CalVin’s dead.”

  ALL WE FOUND in their rooms was the detritus of drink and of sex. There was no answer on CalVin’s buzz. We went to clubs they’d been known to visit, where to my disgust a last fervent few were still trying to blot out the end of the world. They told us CalVin hadn’t been there for days. The last time, they’d been accompanied by some uninterested man.

  Down to other bars, and nothing and still nothing. I knew abruptly who had been with CalVin. We took a route to where I’d once lived, where Scile had once lived, and to which now that I’d gone, he’d returned. My key still worked. Scile’s stuff was everywhere, the flat was all his now, but he was absent. There was a note from him, to me, on the bed that had once been ours. It had been opened already. I unfolded it just enough to read the line This is to say goodbye, and stopped.

  CalVin were in another room. The message had been wrong: CalVin wasn’t dead. Vin was dead. He dangled. Cal was watching him move pendulum-precise. I saw another note, on another mattress.

  Cal looked at me. God knows what he saw in my face right then. “I didn’t feel it,” he said. “I didn’t know. I . . .” He touched his neck, his link. “It was . . . but we turned it on again. I should have known. I didn’t know. How could . . . I didn’t know.”

  He sounded bestial with loss. “How?” he shouted. “Who is this?” He threw out his hands at his dead doppel, his brother, impossibly alone dead.


  Part Six

  NEW KINGS

  17

  I HELD SCILE'S letter for hours, and I don’t think I even knew it. It was I who ended up alone with Cal, after we’d taken him to the Embassy and given him drugs to calm him.

  “Did you cut him down?” he said.

  “We took care of him,” I said.

  “Why are you here?” he said to me as others came and went.

  “MagDa’ll be here in a minute,” I said, “they’re just organising some —”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” He didn’t speak for seconds. “I wasn’t complaining, Avice. Vin’s gone . . . Why are you here with me?” Even now it was hard to acknowledge something we’d known for months, the fact of disparity. After a long time I just shrugged.

  “I just didn’t know.” He spoke with wonder. “I had to . . . we separate sometimes now, we have to, a little bit. And . . . I was just . . . He and Scile were working, I thought, and . . .”

  He put his own note, from his doppel, on the bed. He let me pick it up. People brought food and murmured in sympathy: CalVin had collapsed fast into selfishness, as others fought to fix the world, but Cal, and CalVin, had been central enough beforetimes to retain something. CalVin had been a leading Ambassador. Tipped to head the Embassy when JoaQuin retired. For many of the committee, their failure hadn’t been a failing but a sickness, and this was its dreadful result. I unfolded Vin’s message.

  I’m not like you. Forgive me.

  Tell her something from me.

  Please forgive me. I’m not so strong. I’ve had enough.

  Perhaps I’d expected or hoped for something like that second line.

  “You see my orders,” Cal said. “So what shall I tell you?” And though he tried to make it unpleasant, I couldn’t bear the break in his voice. I looked at the other paper, Scile’s letter. “I think it was . . . Vin found that just before . . .” Cal said. I hadn’t heard MagDa and Bren come in. I realised they were there when Cal said something like, “Avice Benner Cho and I are just comparing our valedictories.”

  Dearest Avice, I read.

  Dearest Avice,

  This is to say goodbye. I am walking. Out. I hope you can forgive me for this but I cannot stay, I will not do life here anymore —

  And then I stopped, refolded the thing. Even Cal looked at me with a bit of sympathy.

  “He was something, once,” I said. “I won’t indulge this.” This isn’t the man I married, I could have said, and I shocked them by laughing coldly. I pictured the visionary enthusiast I’d loved traipsing through Embassytown to find a place to end himself. I wondered when we would find him.

  MagDa took the note from me. Da read it, handed it to Mag.

  “You should read this,” Da said.

  “I’m not going to read it,” I said.

  “It explains things. His . . . theories . . .”

  “Jesus fucking Christ Pharotekton, MagDa, I’m not going to read it.” I stared them down. “He took the Oates Road. He’s gone. I don’t care about his fucking theologies. I can tell you what it says. Language is the language of God. The Ariekei are angels. Scile’s their messenger, maybe. And now it’s the fall. Our lies corrupt them?”

  Bren’s expression was fixed. MagDa shifted and couldn’t deny the accuracy of what I said.

  “You think you’re the only one suffering?” they said. “Get over yourself and do it now, Avice.” “It was when he read this” — Mag or Da shook Scile’s letter — “that Vin did himself in, do you realise that?”

  “What were they doing?” I said. “What was Vin thinking? So does Scile say what . . . ?” I regretted asking.

  “Just that he can’t bear it here anymore,” Bren said. “So he’s gone. And the reasons why. The ones you said.”

  THE FANWINGLESS, self-mutilated Ariekei were murdering more of their neighbours. Bren sent vespcams searching. He followed vague directions I was sure came from YlSib and other contacts. We saw the deafened Ariekei’s raids, had camswarms enter the corpses of houses and the holes where dwellings had uprooted or sublimed. I didn’t know what we were searching for. He’d given us no idea of which direction he’d walked away to die, and I repeatedly imagined the lenses finding Scile’s body. They did not.

  Where there was the new breed without their fanwings, they were bunkered down in ruins, touching each other’s skins, and pointing. If they caught our cams they destroyed them. They hunted the oratees.

  There were Ariekei not so far-gone as the addict-living-dead, nor so enraged as the marauders: in biorigging nurseries or their skeletons, they talked frantically in Language so fast Bren found it hard to follow. “I’ve not heard talk like that,” he said. “Things are changing.”

  They were trying to live. They shouted for EzRa’s voice, and built encampments around the speakers that had been silent for days now. They cleaned them like totems. They tended what few young survived, and protected the post-sentient oldsters, also addicted, though they didn’t know it. We saw a stand-off between a tiny group of these at least residually civilised, and the walking ruins, who looked at the mindless elders and made mouth-moves of hunger.

  On my own I watched other things. Grubbing through border-cam footage from the night we found Vin — no one knew I was doing it — I found at last a few seconds of my husband, on his walk, out of Embassytown. One more change of shot after abrupt change, and I was watching him descending one of our lower barricades.

  He glanced up, at what must have been another cam, the stream from which I couldn’t find, so I never saw his expression full-on. I could tell it was Scile, though. He went, not walking slowly nor with obvious depression. He walked into the dangerous street like someone exploring, in those seconds I saw, before the signal stuttered, and there was just the street and he was gone.

  DURING THE WEEKS of his incarceration, Wyatt, Bremen’s redundant man, had repeatedly demanded to talk to us. At first, in a nebulous sense of due process, the committee had agreed. All he’d done was shout in panicked bullying, denounced us. We stopped coming.

  Some people speculated that he had managed to send an emergency flare to Bremen: even if he had, and even if it was well programmed, it would be months before it reached them, and months again until they sent any response through the immer. Too late for us to be saved, even as mutineers.

  I didn’t think much about it when MagDa first told me Wyatt was demanding to see us again. We’d been keeping him in solitary, in case of those imagined other Bremen agents in Embassytown to whom he might give orders. “He’s finally heard about Ra,” Mag said. “He knows he’s dead.” Incommunicado or not, I was surprised it had taken so long for word to get to him. “You should hear this, actually.” We watched the feed from Wyatt’s cell.

  “Listen to me!” He addressed the cameras carefully. “I can stop this. Listen! How long has Ra been dead, you idiots? How can I help if you won’t tell me what’s happening? Bring me to Ez. You want to rule, you can rule, be a republic, I don’t care, I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, but if you want there to be an Embassytown at all then for God’s sake let me out of here. I can stop this. You have to take me to Ez.”

  We’d seen him wheedling, and blustering, but this was new.

  At our perimeter, oratees and their Ariekei enemies came at us incessantly. At the start of what looked like our last defence campaign, MagDa, Bren, the best of the committee and I went to see Wyatt.

  EMBASSYTOWN JAIL was still staffed by a few guards who, out of helplessness as much as duty, didn’t disappear. Wyatt had refused to explain anything to us until we took him with us — under guard — to see Ez. We watched the half-Ambassador in his cell, in a dirty prison uniform. “What did you think?” Wyatt muttered. He was speaking to us while he stared at Ez. “How did you think that worked?” he said. He nodded and added, “Hello, Avice.”

  “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.