Embassytown (38 page)

There was to be nothing more about Joel Rukowsi’s life, it was clear. This was Cal’s script, not Ez’s. In several different ways, varying the shape of the sentences so the Language wouldn’t lose its efficacy, he and Ez repeated that EzCal had come to speak. Embassytowners were crying. We knew we might live.

We would have to re-establish ways of communicating our needs to the Ariekei, and working out what we offered. Somewhere in that city now trying to rouse itself there must be those Hosts with which we had established understandings, which might now be able to take some kind of control again, with which we could deal. It wouldn’t be a healthy polity. A few in control of their addiction would rule over those not, compradors at our behest: a narcocracy of language. We’d have to be careful pushers of our product.

Bren was on the stairs, and I waved, pushed through the crowd to him. We kissed, believing we wouldn’t die. EzCal were silent. Elsewhere, out of my sight, hundreds of thousands of Ariekei stared at each other, high but coming lucid for the first time in a long time.

“Hosts!” we heard from the barriers. There were only a few minutes before they began to gather, to clear away their dead.

For one moment, simultaneously in every quarter, every Ariekes listening and their revivifying rooms stiffened again, in an aftershock of feeling. I saw it on the cam, later. It happened when, without looking at each other, according to I don’t know what impulse, Cal and Ez leaned forward and with flawless timing, spoke the staccato Cut-and-Turn Language word that meant
yes
.

Part Seven

THE LANGUAGELESS

20

I
WAS A TRADER AGAIN
. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.

MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name:
.

In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.

We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.

We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s articulacy it wasn’t clear they understood what had changed, until with eager giftwing fingers, they played the files, and heard the voice of EzCal.

I want more of the other one
, a farmer said. It tried to remember the way we used to trade: the haggling Terre had taught the Ariekei when our predecessors first arrived. Clumsily it offered us more of the medical rigging it had grown if we would give it another of EzRa’s chips. We explained that we had none. Another, though, preferred the newcomer. It indicated several of its chewing beasts, which would defecate fuel and components: it would give us more than ever before, if we would give it more of this new EzCal.

Were those Ariekei who preferred EzCal more measured? Was there a calm, a focus to them, contrasting with a febrile air to those who still hankered for EzRa? Certainly, after ecstasy and before withdrawal, the composure between the Ariekei’s necessary fixes seemed easier for us than they had been before. This EzCal version of Language left the Ariekei clearer-headed, a little more like the Hosts we had grown up with.

We tried to intervene, to shape what structures were emerging. We tried to re-establish conduits for our necessaries. I imagined Scile dead in all the landscapes I passed—in the city, huddled where his aeoli had failed; in the first downs beyond.

We overflew desolate remnants of farms, vats dedicated by old agreements to the production of our foods: nutrient-rich pabulum; crops in Terre-air bubbles; food animals and sheets of meatcloth. Fallen and falling, there were parts though that were restorable. Our crews did what they could, coaxed airglands to fill chambers, restarted traumatised birth-pens. We found local Ariekene keepers, and with snips of EzCal’s speechifying we restored them to mindfulness and gave them delight, coaxed them back to the farmsteads to help us. They cured the buildings, fixed the cityward flow of what we needed. Cells of food jostled like corpuscles on their way to Embassytown.

With those peristalses of imports, we might have more or less ignored the city, now that its inhabitants weren’t attacking us anymore. We could have just broadcast the god-drug’s announcements to its convalescing boroughs to make its inhabitants pliant. We didn’t, of course. Most of us felt concern, even responsibility, for the biopolis. Nonetheless, we weren’t expecting what turned out to be the vigorous interventions of EzCal. Really, of Cal. Cal, and with him the other half of the god-drug, didn’t merely broadcast or make careful forays into the streets, to find a new Ariekei government: EzCal paraded.

The committee could have tried to stop them. Ez was our prisoner. When sometimes he tried—always obviously—to make his own plans, to turn a situation to an advantage, he was cackhanded. At first, mostly, he did as we told him; then he did what Cal told him. Cal disturbed me: his fever of importance. What we said was he was ours, that we decided what he did, and Ez with him, and it was true for a few days, until he’d remembered the minutiae of ruling.

“No, let’s not go slowly,” he said to us after that—to me, in fact, after I’d said that the city was still dangerous, and that with the systems we’d put in place we maybe didn’t need to deal too closely with it yet. “Oh yes we do,” he said.

EzCal’s recitations were quite different from EzRa’s. Cal put a transmitter in front of the Embassy, where he could be seen when he Languaged. He would turn up early for the broadcasts and wait, arms folded or on his hips, looking at the square, and to our surprise, it wasn’t only him who did so: Ez would be there, too. He barely spoke except during these performances, in Language, and if he did, his mumbles and monosyllables made you think he was barely with you. But he never made Cal wait.

Cal wouldn’t look at Ez except as he had to. It was easy to see he hated him. He found a way, though, to make himself into this new thing, using Ez as a tool.

All you who listen to me
,
ez
/
cal
said. It was the third Utuday in ez the third monthling of October. I didn’t look at the feeds but I know what I’d have seen if I had: clutches of Ariekei throughout the city ringing the speakers and clinging to each other. I wasn’t aware I was listening to EzCal’s words until I reacted with shock to a promise I’d not known I was translating.

I will come and walk among you tomorrow
, EzCal said. I swear I heard noises from the city when they did. Faintly, over the membranous walls. That reaction was a revolution of a kind. I’d never seen any Ariekes understand or pay attention to the specifics of what EzRa had said—their voice had been nothing but intoxicant. Where listeners had liked one banal or idiotic phrase over another, it was as abstract and meaningless a preference as that for a favourite colour. This was not the same. Some in the city, even tripping on EzCal’s voice, had understood the content of those words. I wished Bren had been there with me when that happened.

“What in hell are you doing?” I went and said to Cal. At first he didn’t seem to notice me. Then his expression went from bewilderment to irritation to uninterest in less than a second. He walked away, and Ez followed him, and Ez’s guards followed them both.

L
IKE THE KING
in a story, EzCal climbed up the barricades and down again into what had been our streets, and into a mass of hundreds of waiting Ariekei. They were motionless and silent. They moved out of EzCal’s way with little hoof-steps.

EzCal’s retinue of nervous men and women scrambled down the plastone-set rubbish and rubble behind them. No path was cleared for us; we had to weave very tentatively between the Hosts. There were plenty of us, viziers insisting that they were indispensable, I, MagDa and others from the committee after them and trying to issue orders or just watching, collating. I had a sense I couldn’t quite articulate that of
course
Cal, EzCal, had known that their words wouldn’t only fulfil and fuel Ariekei cravings, but would communicate specifics.

The effortlessness of it. EzRa’s audience had fugued as much at agricultural reports as at the narratives Ez had seemed or pretended to think caught them up. Now the stories Ez told had real audiences, but they weren’t his stories anymore. The Ariekei kept their fanwings flared, listening hard. Cal walked as if he and Ez would keep on to the edge of historic Embassytown and into the city. They had no aeoli, so this was pure theatre. Ez kept up with him.

Listeners
, EzCal said. They were amplified by tiny point-microphones on their clothes. Cal hadn’t been looking at Ez, I’d have put money on it, but they spoke together. EzCal waited so long I might have expected the hold of their voice on the assembled to ebb. It had only been a single word, not even a clause, with the grammar that seemed particularly succulent to the Ariekei. But they waited.

Listeners
, EzCal said.
Do you understand me
?

The Ariekei told them
yes
.

Raise your giftwings
, EzCal said, and the Ariekei did.
Shake them
, they said, and again, immediately, the Ariekei did.

I’d never seen anything like this. None of the watching Terre looked anything but stunned. If Ez was excited or surprised he showed no sign of it at all. He just looked out at all these addict-obedient.
Raise your giftwings to listen
, EzCal said.
Listen
.

They said the city was ill, that it must be healed, that there was very much to do, that there were plenty of hearers in the city who were still dangerous or endangered, or both, but that things would be better now. To the Ariekei, these political platitudes, in this voice, might be revelations. They listened, and they were transported.

I didn’t see any pleasure in Cal’s expression. The grim strain of his face, the muscles clenching—it looked to me as if he had no choice but to do and be this, now.
Listen
, EzCal said, and the Ariekei listened harder. The walls strained. The windows sighed.

W
HEN THEY REGREW
the city the Ariekei changed it. In this rebooted version the houses segmented into smaller dwellings and were interspersed with pillars like sweating trees. Of course there were still towers, still factories and hangars for the nurturing of young and of biorigging, to process the new chemicals the Ariekei and their buildings emitted when they listened to EzCal. But the housescape we overlooked took on a more higgledy-piggledy aspect. The streets seemed steeper than they had been, and more various: the chitin gables, the conquistador-helmet curves newly intricate.

The old halls were still there, and that architecture revived enough by EzCal’s voice to fail to die, but not quite to rise. The tracts of decayed city between new village-like neighbourhoods were dangerous. The prowling grounds of animals and of Ariekei so far gone they’d never fully woken. They would crowd isolated loudhailers during announcements and gain enough from EzCal’s voice to give them aggressive need, but not enough to give them mind.

“We’ll clear them out, when we can,” Cal said. In the meantime the city was scattered fiefdoms, with each of which we tried to establish protocols. I found out something of their specifics—“that one’s run by a little coalition of the not-very dependent; that one’s too risky to go into right now; the Ariekes running that place there, around the minaret, it was a functionary before the fall”—from Bren. Bren learnt them from YlSib.

“MagDa won’t push you on it,” Bren said to me. “But . . .” Bren saw the expression on my face. “You can see what’s going on,” he said finally. “They’re not running things now, they’re not in a position to close the infirmary . . .”

“You think they would if they could?”

“I don’t know and just now I don’t care. Cal certainly won’t. You saw what happened when EzCal spoke. If MagDa needs to know anything you know, please tell them. We need them clued in. They’re smart, they must know the sort of source you’re getting information from, but they won’t ask. They have plans, I’m sure. They’ve been spending time in Southel’s lab. Have you seen them talking to her?”