Embassytown (33 page)

“We’re in martial times, Officer,” MagDa said. “You don’t really think . . .” “. . . that the old laws apply.” “Let us in.”

Inside, uniformed staff met us and made us welcome. Their anxiety was palpable but muted compared to everyone else’s. There was a pretend normality in those secret halls: it was the only place I’d been for weeks where rhythms didn’t seem utterly sideswiped by the crisis.

Carers went with drugs and charts in and out of rooms. I got the sense that this crew would continue with these day-to-day activities until word-starved Ariekei broke through their doors and killed them. I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

The infirmary was infirmary and asylum and jail for failed Ambassadors. “As if it would work every time you tried to make two people into one,” Bren whispered to me, in scorn.

Ambassadors were bred in waves: we passed rooms of men and women all the same generation. First through the corridor of the middle-aged, incarcerated failures more than half a megahour old, staring at the cams and at the one-way glass that kept us invisible. I saw doppels in separated chambers, unlinked I suppose or linked loosely enough that the wall between them caused no discomfort. Looking into room after room I saw faces twice, twice, twice.

Some cells were empty and windowless and spare, some opulent with fabrics, looking out over Embassytown and the city. There were inmates secured or limited by electronic tags, even straps. Mostly the infirm, as one of the doctors who guided us called them, said nothing, but one of those buckled in constraints screamed inventive filth at us. How she knew we were passing beyond the opaque glass I don’t know. We saw her mouth move, and the doctor pressed a button that for a few seconds let us hear her. I disliked him for it a great deal.

Everything was clean. There were flowers. Wherever possible over double rooms was the printed name of those inside, with honorific:
Ambassador HerOt
,
Ambassador JusTin
,
Ambassador DagNey
.

Some had simply never had the empathy they’d needed, to pretend to share a mind, had only ever been two people who looked the same, despite training, drugs, the link and coercions. Many were insane to different degrees. Even if they had facility with Language, they’d been left unstable, resentful, melancholic. Dangerous. There were those who’d been made mad through cleavage. Who hadn’t, as Bren had, been able to survive the death of a doppel. They were broken half-people.

There was a huge variety of the failed. Many more than there were Ambassadors. I was horrified at these numbers.
I never knew
, I told myself. We were too civilised to end them: hence this polite prison where we waited for them to die. I knew enough Terre history to assume that some of these failed must be counted so because of political refusals. I was reading every nameplate we passed, and I realised it was for names I recognised, like DalTon—those of dissidents of whom only bad citizens like me spoke. No sign.

Past an extreme section, men and women older than my shiftparents baying like animals and those talking with careful civility on coms to their carers, or to no one. “Christ,” I said, “Christ Pharotekton.”

In its withdrawal,
unthinkingly defecated. It realised what it had done and said something in shame: the action was as taboo for the Hosts as for us.

I think the doctors deliberately took us a long way to our destination, a room where we could hold our auditions. So we were voyeurs on chamber after chamber. We passed walls painted in brighter colours, where screens were uploaded with playware, and God help me the aesthetics were so incongruous that it took me seconds to understand. This was where they brought Ambassador-young, some just 50 kilohours old. I didn’t look through the windows in those doors, and I’m glad I didn’t see the unfixable children.

I
N A LARGE ROOM
, we asked
to pay attention. One by one the doctors brought in what they thought the most likely candidates, all of them under guard.

Those who’d never mastered Language were no good to us, nor those too unstable. But some pairs held almost all their lives had been incarcerated for nothing but that there was something lacking when they spoke Language, a component we couldn’t detect. Many of them retained a startling degree of sanity. Those were the people we tried.

An aging duo stood before us, men without any easy Ambassador arrogance. Instead they seemed inadequate to the courtesy we gave them. They were named XerXes. The Ariekes entranced them: they’d seen no Hosts for years. “They could once speak Language,” a doctor told us, “then suddenly they stopped being able to. We don’t know why.”

XerXes had a polite and uninquisitive affect. “Do you remember Language, Ambassador XerXes?” Da said.

“What a question!” “What a question!” XerXes said. “We’re an Ambassador.” “We’re an Ambassador.”

“Would you greet our guest for us?”

They looked out of the window. Sectors of the city were listless and discoloured in withdrawal, overrun by wens.

“Greet them?” said XerXes. “Greet them?”

They muttered together. They prepared, lengthily, whispering, nodding. We got impatient. They spoke. Classic words, that even I knew well.

“
,” they said.
It’s pleasing to greet you and have you here.

The Ariekes snapped its eye-coral up. I thought, because I wanted to, that it was like the motion Ariekei made when they heard EzRa speak.
peered slowly around the room.

It was just looking because there had been a new noise. It might have reacted the same had I dropped a glass. It lost interest. XerXes spoke again, something like,
Would you speak now to me
? The Ariekes ignored them and XerXes spoke again and their voice fell apart, degraded, the Cut and Turn each saying half of a different entreaty. It wasn’t pleasant.

I don’t quite believe there was no Language in it. I think there was something, a remnant, in what the Ariekes heard. I’ve thought back to what I saw, to the way it moved, and I don’t believe in fact it was exactly as it would have been to random noise. It made no difference, wasn’t enough, but there was, I think, in XerXes and I don’t know how many others, the ghost of Language.

Ambassador XerXes were taken back to their rooms. They went tamely. One looked at us with I swear apology as he shuffled to his imprisonment.

Others: older first; younger; then, appallingly, two sets of adolescents desperate to please us. Some were equalised and dressed the same; some were not. A pair about my age, FeyRis, attempted cold defiance, but still tried desperately to speak Language when we asked them to.
stared at them and recognised something, but not enough. FeyRis were the first of our candidates to curse us as they were taken—dragged—away.

I stared at MagDa. I liked them, I admired them. They’d known about this.

W
E MET SEVENTEEN
Ambassadors. Twelve sounded to me as if they were speaking Language. Nine seemed to have some kind of an effect on the Ariekes. Three times I wondered if we had found what YlSib had hoped we might, what we were looking for, to take EzRa’s place and keep Embassytown alive. But whatever they had wasn’t enough.

If EzRa’s Language was a drug, I thought, perhaps some other Ambassador’s, one day, would be a poison. We played
one of the last datchips. It slumped and shuddered at EzRa’s meanderings about the biggest tree Ez had ever climbed. There was nothing in the infirmary that could help us.

“You can’t replicate that,” a doctor said. “These . . .” She indicated the imprisoned mistakes beyond our room. “They have
imperfections
. That’s not what there was in EzRa. Two random people should not be able to speak Language. You won’t find anything like that. It wasn’t just unlikely that we’d find EzRa the first time: it was impossible. How do you propose to find it again?”