Embassytown (41 page)

It wasn’t the same. Before, with Embassytown and the world collapsing, they, and all the better Ambassadors, had kept us alive with their desultory trades. This time they followed orders. I had originally thought that Cal would do as little as he could when he became part of god-drug II. I was used to being wrong.

E
Z
C
AL DID FIND
Pear Tree, the erstwhile leader of that once-powerful Ariekene faction. Perhaps Cal had his own investigators. Not all the city-dwelling Embassytowner exiles would share Yl and Sib’s perspective: they might have enemies, of whom some were perhaps agents for EzCal.

What had happened was that during one of their speakings in the city plaza EzCal had been suddenly in the middle of a small group of Ariekei retracting and extruding their eyes and staring. EzCal hadn’t been afraid. One of the group had been Pear Tree.

It accompanied EzCal on their following performance, walking with them all the way from a meeting in Embassytown. There were other Ariekei with them, some closer to EzCal than any humans, Staff, committee or Ambassador. My memory was unreliable, but watching the trids—I played hookey from my accompanying duties—I suspected at least two others might have been among those that had stood aside to let Hasser murder
. I held my breath: I was on a side in a secret war.

That time, EzCal didn’t speak for a while. They rationed their words. When they did, they announced that
—Pear Tree—was chief of this township. That this area was chosen from all the scattered remnant parts of the city, to be EzCal’s node, and that its regent there was
. EzCal couldn’t speak except as the god-drug, and the words they said were always compulsions. This wasn’t like a momentary order to raise gift-wings: it was a ruling, and when EzCal finished speaking, the Ariekei who had heard them remained ruled by
. The Ariekei were very quiet, and then did not complain.

For all I knew
might already have been head of whatever clutch of streets it frequented. EzCal might have changed nothing—except that by saying it, they changed it. There was now a collaboration, an allegiance, between Embassytown and this new heart of the city. I had just seen the tasks of Bren, YlSib and their comrades, get harder.

I think I had been avoiding thinking about what Cal, EzCal, really was, and were. Whether it was design, buffoonery or luck that underlay our new politics, I was not safe.

A
RIEKI FROM
the new township EzCal had inaugurated left the city with PorSha, KelSey and the constables. These were now joint operations. KelSey came back, but PorSha did not.

We had receivers and cams around all the farm grounds. They flagged us when anything beyond their expectation-algorithms occurred, which is how it was that all of us in the committee were buzzed instantly, and the footage relayed direct to our rooms, at the next attack.

Corvids headed out. They wouldn’t arrive in time, but we had to act, even pointlessly. I was with Bren. We scrolled as fast as we could back and forth through chaotic images. Scenes of tending, of interaction with farmhands. PorSha, a pair of tall diffident women, communicating necessities to the Ariekei. Convulsions as the tube passed goods that would be shat out in Embassytown. Snatches of conversation in Anglo-Ubiq. The time-counter skipped. This datspace was fritzing. “We need Ehrsul,” Bren said. “Do you ever . . . ?” I shook my head. A constable was standing with mud across her. She stared anxiously not at us but over our shoulders, attempting to report.

“
Sergeant Tracer at . . .
,” she said. There were violent noises. She watched something off-screen. “
Under attack
,” she said. “
Groups of
. . .
hundreds, fucking hundreds
. . .”

Her transmission ended, the picture spasmed and was replaced by a view rapidly diminishing as the cam flew up. Tracer was lying on her back, among human dead. She tugged off her aeoli mask, an unthinking spasm of dying fingers. Images strobed. A great company of Ariekei, moving quite unlike the farmhands. They galloped, they swung giftwings, they trailed blood, liquid drizzled from weapons, a spray of dust. None of them spoke—they shouted wordlessly, voicing only attack-meanings, without Language.

They beheaded a minor Staff-man I’d once known a bit. I held my mouth closed. One kicked him down, gripped him with its giftwing, another swung a blade worked out of some coralline stuff. They had biorigged weapons they turned on the farm walls. One Ariekes shot our women and men with a carbine, wielding the Terre weapon with surprising precision. We saw them murder Terre without weapons at all, send jags of their own bone into human innards, or yank masks away, suffocating our people in alien wind.

Bren sped up the footage. He brought us up to live shots. Carnage was ongoing. The officers were vastly outnumbered. They were trying to reach the corvid, and were taken down. PorSha was shouting Language to the attackers.
Wait, wait, no more of these actions
, they said.
Please, we ask you not to do this
— We lost that cam, and when it came back PorSha were dead. Bren cursed.

All the speakers we had placed in the farmland started suddenly to shout, in EzCal’s voice. The god-drug had found each other, here in Embassytown, and were yelling down the line.
Stop!
they said, and things stilled. I leaned towards the crude picture. The carnage, all the motionless Ariekei.

“Jesus,” I said at the numbers. I held up my hands. Bren said, “What are they doing?”

Stand still
, the god-drug shouted across the kilometres.
Come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador
.

For seconds there was no motion. Then an Ariekes stepped out of the crowd, took careful hoof-steps into the cam’s view. The others watched it. Its back, its extended fanwing, stretched open, listening to the voice from the speaker, turning into and out of the light as it listened to EzCal’s voice.

There were no other fanwings in the crowd of killers.

“That’s a farmer,” it’s said. “It’s not one of them.”

A large Ariekes slapped two of its companions with its giftwing and pointed at the enthralled on-comer. It arced its back to display a wound. EzCal continued to speak.

“They saw the buildings hearing, and that one,” I said. “That’s why they stopped. Not because they had to.”

One by one at first, then countless at a time, the murder-squad of Ariekei arched their backs. I saw the quivering of scores of fanwing stubs. I heard Bren whisper, “God.” The Ariekei displayed their wounds. Some made wordless sounds I’m certain were of triumph.

“They know we can see them,” I said.

Following speechless giftwing-jabbed instructions from their larger comrade, self-mutilated Ariekei stood either side of the entranced farmhand, and held it. It didn’t even notice.
Stop what you are doing, release your grips
, we heard EzCal say. Their Language petered out. The farmer raised and opened its giftwing repeatedly, obeying the instruction not intended for it. Those it was intended for ignored it, did not hear it, kept hold of their quarry.

The big Ariekes tugged the biorigging-farmer’s fanwing. I winced. It twisted. Its victim screamed doubly and tried and failed to get away. Its tormentor’s giftwing moved like a human hand uprooting a plant. The fanwing wrenched free: roots of gristle and muscle parted and with a burst of blood came finally away, pulling fibres out of the quivering back, trailing them.

Fanwings are at least as sensitive as human eyes. The traumatised Ariekes opened its mouth and fell, stupefied with pain. It was dragged away. The deafener held up its grotesque dripping bouquet. It made a loud wordless noise. Triumph or rage.

EzCal were speaking again, I realised. They issued orders and were ignored.

22

T
HAT WAS THE START
of open war. We called it the First Farm Massacre though it was the only one we then knew of—a horrible perspicacity. It took us days to understand what was coming.

That final mutilation, by one Ariekes of another, was a recruitment. If the victim survived the shock and pain, it was made another soldier, on the enemy side. “How does it receive orders?” I said, but no one could answer me. Perhaps there were no orders, only rage stripped of language.
Can they think? If they can’t speak, can they think?
Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once.
Wasn’t it?

We didn’t know whether to roll back our presence from the outlying farms or bolster it, so we tried both. More visceral pipelines blew. The pictures were the same in different settings: in a copse of trees like organs; in a dustbowl; in scree; each time a burst of flesh and a litter of ruined cargo. Our stores depleted.