Embassytown (39 page)

It wasn’t as part of an official group, committee business, that I went back into the city, when I did. I went with Bren, to meet his friends again: YlSib, that secret rogue Ambassador.

O
UR AIR-SHAPING
was weak enough now that we had to wear aeoli within what had recently been Embassytown streets. So far as we could Bren and I were careful to avoid vespcams, though I knew if we were seen we’d only be a rumour among many. We stationed ourselves in the ruins. From a balcony in an apartment where children had lived (I trod over the debris of toys) we saw EzCal go again among crowds of Ariekei that listened and obeyed their instructions.

“Next time they’re going to head into the city,” said Sib. I hadn’t heard YlSib enter. “So . . .” Sib pointed out of the window at EzCal. “Language works differently with this one.”

“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”

YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town planning.

I looked down an avenue of marrowy-trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking.
I’m
, they said.
These are
— and then they said something yl that wasn’t our names.
They are coming with me. I’m going home
.
, YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I,
homegoer
, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.

“They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have . . .” “. . . reasons to not let us pass.”

In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.

They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”

“No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. They just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?

“Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we
talk
.”

“Do you know what they’re doing?”

“I don’t think there’s a ‘they’, Bren. It’s all . . . disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet . . . But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language . . .” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”

YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”

“What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me in, into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.

The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.

“Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”

It had been a close companion of Surl Tesh-echer,
, surl the best liar in Ariekei history. It was the Ariekes I’d once called Spanish Dancer. “Does it remember . . . ?”

“Of
course
it remembers, Avice,” Bren said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

B
REN AND
Y
L
S
IB
gave to the gathered Ariekei a clutch of datchips. They took them quickly, their limbs and digits betraying agitation. “Do EzCal know you’re recording them?” I said.

“I hope not,” Bren said. “You’ve seen? They’re trying to do what Ez did when he was part of EzRa—make sure we can’t build up a stock of recordings to make them redundant.”

“But you have.”

“These are just their public recitations,” he said. “They can’t stop people tapping those, and why would they? They think because it’s been
said
, because it’s out there, the Hosts’ve heard it, and it’s lost its thing.”

I looked one by one around the other Ariekei there. There were other patterns on other fanwings I thought I had seen before. “Some of these were in Surl Tesh-echer’s group as well,” I said. I looked at Bren. “They were its friends.”

“Yes,” Bren said.

“What they can do is lie,” Bren said. “Not that any of them’s anything like as virtuoso as Surl Tesh-echer was. It was . . .” He shrugged. “A harbinger. On the edge of something.”

“Your husband was right,” YlSib said. “To stop it. In his terms he was right. It was changing everything.” There was a silence. “This lot have had to carry on without it since. It’s slow.” “They do what they can.”

Every Ariekes took a datchip, each to a different part of the room. Each in similar elegant motion draped its fanwing over it. Their membranes spread. They withdrew, hunched into sculptures, made the room a drug-house. With the volume very low, they ran the sounds. Responded instantly as I watched, trembling, judders of bio-ecstasy. I could see lights of speakers through taut fanwing skin, hear the muffled chirruping of audio: the soul of EzCal, or its spurious fabricated semblance.

“How the hell can those recordings still work?” I whispered. “They’ve already been heard.”

“Not by them,” Bren said. “They wait. Bloody willpower. They fold up their wings when they know EzCal’s going to speak. They were already doing it with EzRa. They make themselves
hold out
. They’re trying to go longer and longer without.”

It was hard to imagine that the shuddering figures represented a resistance to the reign of god-drug. Still. “They can take these now because they didn’t take them before,” Yl said.

One by slow one the Ariekei rose. They looked at me. A strange reminiscence. We seemed to pick up where we’d left off. Spanish Dancer came up to me: its companions circled me. They said the succession of sounds in Language that were me. I had not heard myself spoken for a long time.

They said me first as a fact.
There was a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her
. Then they began to deploy me as a simile. We now, Spanish Dancer said,
when we take what is given in god-drug’s voice, we are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her
. The others responded.

“S
URL TESH-ECHER
was more than just the best liar, you know,” Bren said. “It was sort of a vanguard. It was never just about performing lies. Why would they be so interested in
you
, if that was all, Avice? How do lying and similes intersect?”

What other things in this world
, one of the Ariekei was saying,
are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her
?

“It’s been hard,” Bren said. “They were all scattered by the war.” The war of not-enough drug. The war of Ez killed Ra. The war of the walking dead. “Now they’ve tracked each other down, they’re going to keep going. They didn’t worship Surl Tesh-echer. But it was sort of a figurehead.”

“Prophet,” Yl or Sib said.

“Why can’t you tell MagDa, and even Cal . . .” I said, then trailed off because of course the group in this room was a conspiracy. Striving to limit the power of the god-drug. Cal would try to sabotage it. I wished I didn’t believe that. Bren nodded, watching me think.

“Yeah,” said Bren. “Now, MagDa are different. But there’s only so much they’ll risk. They want to get out, now, and they can only see one way to do it, and that’s hanging on. They won’t risk anything else. They might even scupper it.”

“Scupper what? What are you trying to do?”

“Not
me
,” Bren said.

“All of you. You, you,” I said to YlSib, “these Hosts. What are
you plural
trying to do?” “MagDa’s way won’t work,” Bren said. “Just to stave things off. That’s why they won’t take on Cal. It’s not enough to try to keep everything going until the ship gets here. We have to change things.” While he spoke, the Ariekei moved around me like flotsam in a current, and they said the phrase I was and tried to make it into new things, to think of new things they could insist that it, I, my past, was like.

“EzCal’s not the only one we have to be careful of,” Bren said. “You have to keep this quiet.” I remembered the parting of Ariekei when Hasser had come and killed
.