Embassytown (43 page)

The microphones were crappy but we heard the noise of the march, the percussion of hard feet walking not in time. The amputee Ariekei shouted. They must not even know, not even hear their own constant catcalls. Machines among them walked at the wordless correction of keepers. The Ariekei carried weapons. This was the only army on this world and it was marching on us.

The cam went close, and we saw thousands of stumps of thousands of fanwings. Every Ariekes there was a soldier, not obeying orders but trapped beyond society in soundless solipsism, unable to talk, hear, think, but still moving together in that mystery fashion, sharing purpose without speaking it. They couldn’t have a unified intent but we knew they did, and what it was, and that we were it.

23

A
S WELL AS THE
Languageless and the SM, for self-mutilated, at first we called the incoming army the Deaf. Embassytown’s human deaf objected hard to that; they were right and we were ashamed. Then someone named the attackers according to an antique language. It meant that same word,
deaf
, but rendered
the Surdae
any insult seemed diluted; particularly because, fast bastardised or misunderstood, the term became
the Surd
and then misprisioned into
the Absurd
. Hosts, coming to kill us for sins we’d committed, if at all, without intent.

Above all it was their discipline that was absurd, impossible, the way without words groups would peel off from the main slow body, coordinated into snatch squads that tore through strange country and took apart our rangers, or recruited new Ariekei troops by ripping their flesh. Eventually and abruptly transmissions to us ended, cams batted out of the air by breakdown, wind or the sudden irritation of the enemy. We sent more of course. Plans began.

As our spies gusted out to search, we were breaching old agreements and habits of isolation. The cams showed us the coast, the gently toxic sea. We had a country, on which the city sat, in which was Embassytown. We weren’t used to seeing that. I’d used cartographic ’ware in the immer, but not these charts. We had a continent. It would have been hard for me to trace the outlines of Embassytown, harder to draw the city, and I wouldn’t even have recognised the shape of the landmass on which we were such a tiny point. Now we needed them it wasn’t hard to break those taboos and pull up maps. They’d never been forbidden, as I’d seen in the out in some unsubtle theocracies: only inappropriate, and old politenesses were dead. Our cams uploaded directions so we could trace the Absurd.

Their few, their first, the pioneers had also learnt the specific violence to make unspeaking comrades of their victims. How had it been? They had spread out of the depleting city, claiming farmers, on past any urban gutwork into the wandergrounds of nomads, claiming the nomads, the gatherer-hunters of unneeded or escaped technology, building. Someone might one day write the history of that trek, the recruiting crusade.

There were more than all those stolen and violently cured rural addicts. I imagined these crazy figures emerging from wilderness like prophets; those distant Ariekei already alarmed or enraged at what they heard of their cousins in the city reduced to zombie-ecstatics or the craven desperate, might, even if far-off enough to have avoided the affliction, not have needed coercion to join the Absurd. Perhaps there’d been a while before the army went in with regular, remorseless violence, and instead there’d been debates about endeafening among the not-yet-recruited, in some settlements. Articulate, last-ever uses of speech to argue for its eradication.

I made Bren come with me into the city. It was easy to leave, though our borders were supposed to be controlled. Routes in and out weren’t hard to learn.

“They’ll be here within two weeks,” I said. He nodded.

“You see they’re all in prime instar?” Bren said. “They’re not protecting the old or looking after the young.”

The young, though, might soon enough be grateful to them. Even uncared for, a few in each Ariekene litter must survive, and when they emerged to their adult form, woke into Language, they would find a city purged of us. Without god-drug. The Absurd would martyr themselves to that future. They’d put themselves beyond the reach of any compromise or agreement.

We stuck to the safer sub-regions of the city. I found my way—my own, this time, leading Bren—to where Spanish Dancer and its friends practised lying, and I tried to help them find new ways to speak me.

“W
E'RE FORMING
an army,” Cal said. We were as disdainful as we could be at that.
Gather many of you in the square and be ready to fight
, EzCal broadcast to the Ariekei. They told them to put forward soldiers. They demanded
volunteers.
was the biggest aggregate of units with a name, and meant anything more than the largest exact number for which terminology existed,
, 3072.
translated usually as “countless”. EzCal were demanding as large a force as the Ariekei could give.

Cal waved his hand. Beside him, Ez was like a ventriloquist’s doll, existing only when he spoke, or was spoken through. Wyatt watched Ez like an anxious relative. I wondered how many Ariekene soldiers the god-drug would get, and whether the process of building that force would be violent. The natives in all the little villages left in the city, islands between zones of the deadly mindless, would try to obey, in various ways. They knew the Absurd were coming. The locals ruled or “ruled” or whatever by
, those over which EzCal had given
, aegis, would surely provide most of the soldiers.

“. . . one main force of Ariekei to guard the city, stationed at all the weak points we have, and there’ll be a couple of . . . well, of special squads prepared,” Cal said, at the committee meeting. I couldn’t listen to this, these desperations disguised as strategy. I couldn’t look at anyone else in the room. There was nothing we had that could hold off the oncoming army. When we were dismissed I got my stuff together slowly, and after a moment realised it was only I, Ez and Cal left in the room. I don’t know how that happened. I wouldn’t rush. I couldn’t look at them. I was their enemy, and I had secrets that were mutinous.

Cal slouched, looking tired. He looked shrunken, far off by the wall. A moment’s illusion and the chair seemed to dwarf him like a throne would a boy-king. Ez stood like a surly courtier. They must be waiting to practise their necessary proclamations.

“Do you miss my brother, Avice?” Cal said.

“Do I . . . ? Vin? I . . . Yes.” It was some way true. “Sometimes I do. Do you?”

Cal watched me from under his brow.

“Yes. I was angry with him. Before he died.” He paused. “I was angry with him before that, then worse after. Of course. But I miss him.”

I tried to work out if I could glean any advantage on any axis by keeping him talking, but I could think of nothing to say. “
Please
,” he said angrily, not to me. Ez looked up.

“I’ll . . .” Ez said, and walked out. It was the first word I’d heard him say for himself, for many days. Cal didn’t watch him go.

“Vin missed you,” he said.

“Did he?”

Whatever had happened to Cal, whatever he’d become, I was sure that he saw me as I saw him through a window of memories that included mornings, evenings together, nudity, of fucking, sometimes beautifully. What could I do but remember the last looks Vin had given me? I’d seen that need that could perhaps have been given another name, and that perhaps Cal resented. Because he thought his brother’s affections were a zero-sum, and that I’d stolen from him? Because he didn’t have it to give himself?

I, to my utmost shock, choked and had to close my eyes. A great big diffuse grief, not just for Vin, but some for him. I thought about the months I’d spent as CalVin’s lover. I tried to recall a time when both of them had moved with me at once. I could not. Had they both touched me at once, ever, or had it always been one, then some languid time later, as I’d imagined, assumed, the other? I looked at Cal. Had he merely tolerated his doppel’s desires, all that time?