Embassytown (26 page)

Who could I tell? If I could prove anything, so what? Not everyone would think any of this the slightest crime. And what would I bring on myself? I’d no idea how many of the Ambassadors knew, or if they would disapprove if they did, or what they would do to me if I complained. I can’t have been the only one who worked out what had happened. There were enough snatches of information. But Staff asserted horror and shock and stressed to Embassytowners that they had apologised to our Hosts, and that Hasser and Valdik had both been brought to justice. They unleashed harsh policing against the remnants of the Druman cult.

Scile moved at last into the Embassy, became Staff. One day all his possessions were gone from my home. Among his flaws wasn’t cowardice. I think he was avoiding me; perhaps he wanted to spare me his rage.

I
NEVER STOPPED
being appalled by the sentencing I’d seen. But months passed—and our months are long—and we were out of the doldrums, and Valdik and Hasser were long dead. I still wouldn’t speak to CalVin or Scile, but though I didn’t know which Staff and Ambassadors were complicit in what had happened I couldn’t spurn them all forever. I couldn’t live in Embassytown like that. It felt not like compromise but survival.

Even CalVin and I came wordlessly to a way of being in the same room, if we so found ourselves. We might, I eventually came to accept, one day even exchange brief cool words.

I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I’d always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him. I didn’t know what fears the rest of the complicit Staff had had of
, but I thought they must have been political. I was never sure about Scile, though, for all that he was Staff too now, and had for a long time been of their party. For all his consummate manipulation of the credulous simile zealots. He worked as apparatchik, but I wondered if he really was a prophet.

Many months after those horrible events, the first crisis, as Embassytown geared into a different kind of time, as the arrival of the next ship grew closer, as the time I’ve called “formerly” ended, the Hosts apparently made Scile a simile. I heard that from Ehrsul.

She couldn’t find out exactly what he’d had to do. He was part of Language but I never heard him used and in various, I hoped untraceable, eavesdropping ways, I did try. By contrast the similes Hasser and Valdik, changed as they were by the events, were invigorated.
It’s like the boy who was opened and closed again and is dead. It’s like the man who swam weekly with the fishes and is dead.
The Ariekei found new uses for these new formulations.

Ehrsul was a good friend to me in what was a pretty bleak time, though I wouldn’t risk telling her everything that I knew had happened. I told myself that I was just waiting. I was immerser. When the relief came, I’d go into the out, away from this place. Then the miab arrived, with details of what would be arriving next, and news of our impossible Ambassador.

Wasn’t I going to stay to see what would happen? Everything

after this was latterday, and it’s the only story remaining. Wasn’t I eager for Embassytown to change?

Later, the scale of the crisis that unfolded made this, retrospectively, a guilty memory, but when first I realised that things were not going quite to plan, the first time I met EzRa at the Arrival Ball, when I sensed that they were spreading some unexpected chaos in Embassytown, it had made me happy.

Part Four

ADDICT

9

P
EOPLE WANDERED
through streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now. Adults were talking and children playing games. “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face. Minded, are you? I could have said. Minded how? What will you do? How will you be careful?

We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange. We’d lived among gods—little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their and our disposal—and ignored the fact. Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that, and all we could do was wait. Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.

Our news figures said things to me from screens and tridflats like: “The situation is being closely monitored.” We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after. I walked through the tiny Kedis district. The ruling troikas there had heard about the killing, knew enough Terre psychology that all our fears were rubbing off on them, and they were very anxious, too.

I couldn’t persuade Ehrsul to come to join me in the agitation and rush of Embassytown main, in the hilltop districts where people massed, following rumours that taught them nothing, staring, powerless spectators, into the city moving as opaquely as ever but differently opaquely now. We could all see it. I went to her apartment. Ehrsul was subdued, but then we all were.

She spiked me a coffee with one of the edgers many of us were taking. She moved backwards and forwards on her treads. Her mechanisms were smooth, but inevitably with that repetition tiny infelicitous noises in the machine of her became audible, then irritations.

“Have you found anything out?” I said.

“About what’s going on? Nothing. Nothing.”

“What about on the . . . ?”

“I said, nothing.” She made her face blink. “There’s all kinds of blather all over the nets, but if anyone out there understands what’s happened or knows what’s about to happen, they’re talking about it below what I can tap.”

“EzRa?”

“What about them? Do you think I’m just neglecting to tell you important bits? Christ.” I was embarrassed at her tone. “I don’t know where they are any more than you. I haven’t seen them since the party either.” I didn’t say that I’d seen Ra more recently. “Oh, there’s plenty of
rumours
: they’re in the out, they’re taking control, they’re preparing an invasion, they’re dead. Nothing I’d stake a rep on. If your channels to the Embassy haven’t netted anything, why would my pitiful little searchware?” We regarded each other.

“Alright,” I said slowly. “Come with me . . .”

“I’m not going anywhere, Avice,” she said, and her voice foreclosed argument. I was not, this one time, wholly disappointed at that.

I
WENT TO
the coin wall. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. But I knocked, and Bren answered.

I was looking down when he opened the door, to give myself a second. I raised my head to him. He looked much older to me, because his hair was grey. That was all, though: he was hardly collapsing. He recognised me. Before I met his eyes, I’m sure.

“Avice,” he said. “Benner. Cho.”

“Bren,” I said. We stared at each other, and eventually he made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, and I smiled if sadly and he stepped aside for me to enter the room I remembered so extraordinarily well, which hadn’t changed at all.

He brought me a drink and I joked about the cordial he’d given me the first time I was there. He remembered the chant we’d used when spinning coins, and recited it to me, imperfectly. He said something or other, something that meant
you went into the out, you’re an immerser
! A congratulations. I felt like thanking him. We sat looking at each other. He was still thin, wore what could have been the same smart clothes I remembered.

“So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.

“Is it?” I said.

“Oh I think so. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”

“Yohn.”

“Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”

“I think you can tell me things.”

“Oh believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.

“Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton.” He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but . . .” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?”

“Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”

“Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned towards me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.

“If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that
every single one
of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy crèche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”

Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.

“And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my . . . it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us . . . me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to
entice
me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.

“There are trainees who can
never
speak Language. I don’t know why. Just can’t speak in time no matter how they practise. That’s simple: you don’t let them go. But there are harder cases. They might look like any other pair. It’s happened before, to varying degrees. We had a colleague, when I was training. WilSon. Whatever joined-up mind it was behind their Language, for the Hosts to understand, it must have been a little out. A tiny bit. Nothing I could hear, but the Hosts . . . well.

“We were doing exams. We’d been tested by other Ambassadors and Staff, and in our last practical we had to speak to a Host. It was waiting. I don’t know what it thought it was doing, how they asked it to help.
Hello
, WilSon say, when it’s their turn.

“Straightaway we can see something’s wrong,” he said. “From how the Ariekes moves. Every time they talk to us, they taste our minds, and we’re
alien
. So it’s heady stuff. But if the two halves of an Ambassador aren’t . . . quite enmeshed enough? Not two random voices: close enough to speak Language and for them to get it. But wrong? Broken?” I said nothing.

“You know what Language is to them,” Bren said. “What they hear through the words. So, if they hear words they understand, they know are words, but it’s fractured? Ambassadors speak with empathic unity. That’s our job. What if that unity’s there and not-there?” He waited. “It’s impossible, is what. Right there in its form. And that is intoxicating. And they
mainline
it. It’s like a hallucination, a there-not-there. A contradiction that gets them high.

“Maybe not all of them. Every Host WilSon spoke to knew something was strange, and a few of them . . .” He shrugged. “Got drunk. On their words. Didn’t matter what WilSon said.
Isn’t it a nice day
;
Please pass the tea
; anything. The Hosts heard it and some of them got swoony and some of
them
wanted it again and again.