Embassytown (25 page)

One of
’s eyebuds glimpsed something and the whole coral arced backward, to stare. I saw Spanish Dancer, heard it calling, its giftwing moving in alien distress. Hasser aimed a biorigged thing. A ceramic carapace, a pistolgrip that gripped him back. He fired. No one was there to stop him.

He fired and the gun-animal opened its throat and howled. He blasted
across the lying ground, spraying mud-coloured Host blood.

It broke apart as it flew. Hasser didn’t stop firing. The assault tore
’s giftwing from its body. Its legs dyingly scuttled, so insectile it was appalling. It gushed from everywhere.

Then Hasser was snatched out of my sight himself by a constable’s bullet. By the time screaming started again I was beside him. I trembled. I struggled for breath as if I were beyond the aeoli. Hasser stared without sight. I heard the rattle of scute from
’s posthumous fitting.

Spanish Dancer traced shapes with its wings. Its colours flushed. I’d never before seen Ariekene grief. I looked at Pear Tree, which looked down at me. I ignored the commotion and all the wails in the room, and watched Pear Tree, and CalVin, and Scile. I remember I moaned every time I exhaled. They were looking at Hasser’s body without expression. They must have seen me.

T
HAT IS HOW
the most virtuoso liar of the Ariekei was murdered.

The days after that were as you’d imagine. Chaos, fear, excitement. No Host had been harmed by an Embassytowner for hundreds of thousands of hours, for lifetimes. Suddenly we felt we existed on sufferance. Staff imposed a curfew, gave the constabulary and SecStaff extraordinary powers. In the out, I’d spent time in cities and colonies under dictatorships of various forms, and I knew that what we had was a quaint approximation of martial law; but for Embassytown it was unprecedented.

I
HAD SO MUCH
sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik who I still believe never knew he’d been a distraction, and whose loyalty to Scile was such that, after that night, he went to his execution denying that anyone else had had any hand in his plan.

So sorry for
. I never knew what emotion would have been appropriate for an Ariekene loss, so I settled for sadness.

For a day I turned off my buzz and did not answer when anyone came to my door. The second day I kept the buzz off, but I did answer the knocking. It was an autom I’d never seen before, a whirring anthropoid outline. I blinked and wondered who’d sent this thing and then I saw its face. Its screen was cruder than any I’d seen her rendered on before, but it was Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said. “Can I come in?”

“Ehrsul, why’d you load yourself into . . . ?” I shook my head and stepped back for her to enter.

“The usual one doesn’t have these.” She swung the thing’s arms like deadweight ropes.

“Why do you need them?” I said. And Pharotekton bless her she grabbed hold of me, just as if I’d lost someone. She did not ask me anything. I hugged her right back, for a long time.

I
WENT BACK
once more to The Cravat. Set my expression, walked a floaker walk. None of the similes were there, nor, I think, did any ever come back. I let my show drop. But the owner, a man whose name I had never bothered to learn, referring to him only by the vernacular slang handle we’d granted him that I now cannot remember, hurried up to me in agitation, as if I could help him. He told me that Ariekei were still coming: Spanish Dancer; one we’d known as Baptist; others of the Professors. They’d been staring at where the similes used to sit.

“Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”

The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for
’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that.
had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy,
had been sentenced to Death by Human.

Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.

Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate
, would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.

I remembered Cal or Vin’s anxiety, when they’d told me that some of Scile’s ideas about
made sense. The Ambassadors, as much as its Ariekene judges, had seen in it an approaching danger. I never thought CalVin saw whatever that coming badness was as my husband had, but where there’s commitment and dissent there might be change, and perhaps that was enough. There’d been a catastrophe on its way that, together, Ariekei and Terre had staved off. A problem they had solved.