Embassytown (31 page)

We showed our wares,
voilà
, like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it, in Language, EzRa said,
When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too
. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.

We offered other bits from his history, cliche´s of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free.
We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance
, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of
I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree
.

“They’re asking if we have the one about unacceptable levels of wastage in the refinement industry,” Ben or Tham said. “They heard about it from neighbours.”

Husbanding carefully, we gave them enough to buy the biorigging we needed, and some expertise, some explanations. Doing so we spread the addiction, too: we knew that. We brought out pure product, EzRa speech, and these as yet only half-affected outlanders would succumb.

I made a similar journey twice more after that first time. Soon afterwards, another of our buoyant dirigible beasts didn’t return.

When at last our cams found it they reeled back to us footage and trid of it dead and strewn in burnt-out flesh and a slick of guts across the countryside. There drowned in it and shattered, all dead, were our people. Ambassador; navigator; technician; Staff.

I’d known Ambassador LeNa slightly, one of the crewmembers well. I held my mouth closed with my hands as we watched. We were all affected. We fetched back the bodies and honoured them as well as we could with new ceremonies. Our crews searched the mouldering wreckage.

“The ship wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” our investigator told us in committee. “I don’t know what happened.”

I
N
E
MBASSYTOWN
we did our best to stand in the way of warlordism, but we small band of ersatz organisers could only slow a degeneration toward that kind of rule. More Ambassadors were joining us, terrified into organisation, inspired by MagDa. Others of course remained useless. Two more killed themselves. Some deactivated their links.

Ez seemed . . . not calmer perhaps, but more broken, I thought, when I chaperoned him again. Delivering him finally to Ra, though, they argued even more viciously than before. “I can make things bad for you,” Ez kept shouting. “There are things I could say.”

When we went into the city, we had to pass the corpses of houses and Hosts. The death breakdown of biorigging designed and bred to be immortal contaminated the air with unexpected fumes. We heard more Ariekei fighting around speakers. Some of their dead had died from the violence of the desperate; some, those without enough of the new sustenance they needed, just died; and in some places there were more organised brutalities, cadres exerting new kinds of control. The living grabbed what datchips we gave them: these were rewards for these new tough local organisers, in crude concert with which we were just managing to maintain a tenuous system.

One evening as we returned to Embassytown, I lagged behind my colleagues, shaking the mulch of rotting bridges from my boots. I looked back into the Ariekene city, and I saw two human women looking at me.

They were only there a second. They stood one to either side of an alley mouth, metres away, looking at me gravely, and then they were gone. I couldn’t have described them well, probably not even recognised them again, but I knew that they had had the same face.

I
T WAS ONLY LATER
, when things went wrong all over again and these new routines were made bullshit, that I realised I’d come to expect us to muddle through until the ship came and flew us all away.

One scheduled evening we could find neither Ez nor Ra at the time of their broadcast. Neither would answer our buzzes. That was like Ez, but it wasn’t like Ra.

Ez was in none of his preferred places. We searched the dangerous corridors of the Embassy: no one had seen him. We tried to buzz Mag or Da, who were often with Ra, but they wouldn’t answer either.

We found the four of them in MagDa’s new rooms, high in the Embassy. There were several of us, constables and new Staff like me. When we turned onto a last stretch of hallway we saw a figure huddled by the apartment door. We levelled our gun-things but she didn’t move.

It was Da. As I approached I thought she was dead. But then she looked up at us, with despair.

Into the rooms and to a dreadful scene. Still as a diorama. Mag on the bed, in the same precise pose as Da outside, the wall between them. She looked up at us too, and back at the dead man on the bed with her. It was Ra, quite ruined with blood. A handle emerged from his chest, like a lever.

Ez sat a way off, rubbing his head and face, smearing blood on himself, blubbing. “. . . I really didn’t, it wasn’t, oh, God, it was, look, I, I’m so, it . . .” he said, and so on. When he saw us, among other emotions I swear I saw shame broader than for one dead man: he knew what he’d done to all of us. My hand kept twitching as if I’d take the thing out of Ra.

Later we found out that at first the argument had been, ostensibly, about MagDa. That was the marshalling of unconvincing, rote things to express other deeper terrors and resentments. The surface specifics didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about whatever they shouted as they fumbled and implements turned deadly.

We weren’t very used to murder. It wasn’t me who closed Ra’s eyes but it was me who held Mag’s hand and led her away. There wasn’t much time to just grieve: the ramifications of the situation were obvious. I was already thinking of the tiny stock we had of EzRa prerecorded on datchip.

When I returned the others were hauling Ez away and taking Da to join her doppel. I secured the scene. I was alone for some minutes with Ra’s corpse.

“Did you have to?” I said. I think I whispered out loud. I was trying hard to keep myself together and I succeeded. “Couldn’t you have backed down?” I put my hand on Ra’s face. I looked at him and shook my head and knew that Embassytown and I and all the Embassytowners would die.

Part Five

NOTES

14

W
E HID THE DEATH
for days. We were miserable with secrecy. There’d be panic when Embassytown knew. I couldn’t convince myself panic in three days’ time would be much worse than panic now: still we hid it, like a reflex.

We had only a few recordings of EzRa. Ez had been careful. Once we risked repeating a speech that the Ariekei had heard before, but the footage we saw of consternation, the fights we spurred among outraged listeners, frightened us. We didn’t try that again. We had perhaps twenty days of broadcasts. When we played them to the city we kept them as brief as we dared.

New hierarchies were asserting among the Hosts, from what we could tell. We didn’t understand them.

After the murder, MagDa equalised again, for the first time in days. They entered the committee room where we were meeting, smart and unsmiling and precisely identical. I couldn’t tell if it was a good or a bad reaction. In any case it didn’t last.

They accepted some condolences. They’d lost no authority, remained our de facto leader, listening, debating, and offering their thoughts and almost-orders. Obeying MagDa, and out of some prurience, I became Ez’s keeper.

He wanted to talk. He maundered through self-justification, self-disgust, anger, regret. I’d sit in the room where he was held and listen. At first I tried to glean the specifics of what had happened. “What was it?” I asked MagDa once. They looked weary. One of them shook her head and the other said, “That’s really not the point.” This outcome had been waiting for a long time.

Plenty among us advocated simply ending Ez. I and others argued against it. MagDa took our side, which was what settled it. They calculated that an excess of mercy, ultimately, would work for them better than vengefulness. Even at that time when none of us really believed we had a future, MagDa were planning for it.

I pitied Ez, though I despised him too, of course. I felt that as shocking an act as he’d committed should change someone; that he should emerge either better or fully a monster. That he could kill someone and remain the pathetic figure he was previously shocked me. He was idiotic with resentment. He responded to all my questions with a child’s churlishness. He wanted to continue telling me about his life, as he had the Hosts, with Ra, in Language. He picked up where they had left off.

He didn’t come clean about much. He didn’t tell us whatever his original task had been, that I was sure he’d had, his—and Ra’s—intended role to undermine Embassytown’s power. His motivations for this secrecy were obscure: all motivations are.

I don’t know how the news of Ra’s death—that he had, I suppose, technically, become
Ra
—got out, but word of his death, and therefore that of EzRa, did spread. A guard; a rogue vespcam; an Ambassador; a doppel saying it to a momentary partner, just because it was something that could be said. The knowledge just seemed to well up in Embassytown. On the fourth day after Ra’s death I woke to church bells. Sects were calling their faithful. Soon, I knew, the mere knowledge that there was nothing we Staff could do wouldn’t stop the crowds from marching on us to demand we did anything.

Embassytown would fall, perhaps even before the craving Ariekei came for us. In the time that was my own, for various reasons, foremost among them a sudden urgency, a sense that he might understand all this from his weird perspective, might help me or want help, I started hunting again for Scile.

After what CalVin had done with Scile’s collaboration, I’d tried to avoid finding out which other Ambassadors were complicit in
’s execution. I couldn’t face thinking about it. Cowardice or pragmatism, I don’t know. In these later days that ignorance was a relief: it was hard enough to live in Embassytown right then without relating to my new colleagues with that murder in mind. I did at last meet CalVin, at a gathering of Ambassadors, both those on MagDa’s committee and those too dissolute or afraid to be. I went straight to them. “Where is he?” I asked Vin. “Scile.” This time I didn’t mistake him for his doppel. Neither of them answered me.

B
REN BUZZED ME
. “People are being attacked. In Carib Alley.”

A corvid took constables, MagDa and me to the flashpoint in Embassytown’s outskirts. Bren was there already, on the ground, waving us down, torch in his hand: it was night. Down a small street Ariekei were clamouring outside a block. A small group of Terre were inside. They hadn’t joined the exodus from this area. “Idiots,” someone said.

The Ariekei were hurling things: rubbish, rock, glass. They each gripped the door in turn, frustrated by its mechanism. They were shouting in Language.
EzRa’s voice. Where is it
? “This lot are the weakest,” Bren said. “They’re too far gone to be satisfied with what we give them now.” We were increasingly parsimonious with the recorded god-drug. “They know there are Terre here, must think they’re holding EzRa’s voice, on datchip or something. Don’t look like that. This isn’t about logic. They’re desperate.”

Vespcams gathered. We watched their feeds. What do you feel, witnessing the end? In my case it wasn’t despair but disbelief and shock, endlessly. There, stepped into red mud by the hooves of the Ariekei, was a Terre body. A pulped man. I wasn’t the only one who cried out at that sight.

The cams darted closer. One was slapped from the air by an irate giftwing. Constables touched their weapons but what, would we attack the Ariekei? We couldn’t retaliate. We didn’t know what that would invoke.

Officers reached the rear of the buildings, made surreptitious entrances, got the terrified inhabitants away. We watched in split visuals: them with their charges; the Hosts clamouring as they attacked the house. There was more motion. Ariekei newcomers were approaching.

“There,” said Bren. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw.

There were four or five new arrivals. I thought they were coming to join the attack on the house, but to my great shock they shoved in a wedge into the crowd of Ariekei with their giftwings whipping. They reared and slammed hooves into their fellows, shattering carapaces. The fight was fast and brutal.

Ariekene blood sprayed, and there were the calls of Hosts in pain. “Look.” I pointed. The cameras flitted and gave me another moment’s view of some of the new attackers. “Do you see?” They were without fanwings. They had only stumps, flesh rags. Bren hissed.