Embassytown (44 page)

I thought,
Have you and I even been together
?

“Waking without him. I don’t get used to it.” He spoke rapidly. “I’m not supposed to. Truth is there are times it’s not bad. The silence isn’t always unwelcome.” I looked away from his awful smile.

“Truth is, Avice, I can’t tell you if I miss him. That’s not true, I can tell you and I do, but it isn’t as
clean
a feeling as that. To have to say
everything
, like I do—or did . . . Well, it’s bad and it’s good and it’s bad. I’ve been to the retirement homes where cleaved are. Normal ones, not like Bren, making trouble. I don’t know, is that me now?”

He jerked his head at the door through which Ez had left. “That bastard, eh? It can be ugly how things go. I was going to say . . . I don’t know what I was going to say. I’m doing what I have to.”

“What is it you’re doing, Cal? Why d’you have to?” I said that though I’d not intended to respond, or involve myself in whatever this was. “We tried this once before, Cal; you made armies and it was a disaster . . .”

“Avice, please.” He shook his head, and hesitated, as if he was trying very hard to think how to communicate something. “It was joint patrols that didn’t work. You’ll see what we do now. This is different. Anyway, what would you rather? We can’t just leave them to come in . . . And haven’t you seen?” He gesticulated again after Ez. “I can make them do anything I want.”

“Well . . .”

“Well, anyway that’s not really the point. I do, we do want protections around the city, we need it, but that’s not the real point. The real point is the squads that go
out
. I’ve been thinking a lot.” He waved a hand at his throat, his voice. “About this. I’ve been thinking how to use it. I know why the first patrols went wrong: we just ordered them to
patrol
. That was much too vague. Tasks, though, that’s different. Specifics. With beginnings and endings.”

“What tasks are you going to set them, EzCal?” I said. The slip, calling Cal that, wasn’t deliberate.

“You’ll see. And you’ll be impressed, I think. I’m not operating like you think I am. I know what you think I am, Avice.”

I walked away. It was just unbearable.

I
DIDN'T
C
AL
, with Ez, inspect his Ariekene troops—what a pantomime. I heard he made MagDa his assistant, had them talk for him. EzCal couldn’t do it: it would have created a comedy of overwhelmed squaddies mindlessly attempting to obey every word, whether it was an order or not.

There were, in fact,
—some thousands. An unprecedented gathering. Through MagDa, Cal organised them into ranks, and squadrons, and units, each with its own commander. There wasn’t as much of the chaos as I’d expected when our new defenders went to their outposts.

They weren’t enough. The Absurd army outnumbered them by several times. I didn’t yet understand—had ignored him telling me—that this warcraft and panicked pomp was a minor part of Cal’s intentions. I didn’t even notice that MagDa were gone for two days, alongside others, part of a squad I imagine EzCal gave some carefully chosen name. While they were, without knowing they were, I went again with YlSib to Spanish Dancer, as the army of Absurd approached. I’d had enough of inevitability. In the city, outside Embassytown, it felt, even illusorily, as if more than one outcome was possible.

E
Z
C
AL
SUMMONED US
to a lecture hall. I went to that meeting, as I did to all of them, feeling like a spy. Not wholly misleading. The committee was depleted. In steeply banking rows of chairs we looked down at EzCal in the centre. I sat by Southel and Simmon. MagDa was with EzCal, their faces scuffed with injuries. By them was
, and there were other Hosts in corners.

“We’d like to start with a silence,” Cal said, “for officers Bayley and Kotus, who gave their lives on this mission, for the sake of Embassytown.” We waited. “Let’s make sure it wasn’t in vain. Bring them in.”

There was a commotion. We gasped and swore and drew back. What the guards entered and brought before us were enemies. Two deafened Absurd. They were held in cuffs. They eyed us, their eyes in polyp motion. Their legs and giftwings shook in constraints. They tested their tethers with cunning.

We watched them. Cal circled the captives, pointing out the injuries of the wilderness, the flanges of the ripped-out fanwing. He pointed at each thing he described with a long thin stick. He was like a picture of an ancient lecturer, in some pre-diaspora centre of learning. The attackers made noises as he rounded them. Calls that sounded like halloos, like calls to gods.
and the other Ariekei in the room watched them and kept up their own constant movement, twitches in a disgust-echo of the prisoners’ strainings.

Our people had tracked a group of Absurd broken off from the main oncoming army to raid an isolated settlement. There’d been a fight. There’d been deaths on both sides. At last, Cal said, after unprecedented cooperation between the Terre and our Ariekene allies we’d subdued and taken these Absurd alive.

“We need to understand them,” Cal said. “So we can defeat them.”

We were here to take notes, to learn Languageless behaviour. By experiments before cams in sealed rooms; by interactions gbetween the Absurd and our allies, that would not be interactions but actions from
and its coterie, and ignored by the Absurd; or if responded to in such ways that they were not discernible to us as reactions at all.

The solipsism of those that had torn out their own fanwings seemed impenetrable. Perhaps some on the committee believed Cal’s assertion that we were preparing to defeat them, but seeing him cajole
—speaking through MagDa again to avoid the tedium of repeatedly enthralling the Ariekes ally—to speak to the Absurd, which they pointlessly attempted, making MagDa try it too, I think there must have been many who knew, as I did then, that his hope was to negotiate.

But they were thousands who’d closed all windows in and out of themselves, cut off Language, become monads full of murder. No knowledge we had could make much difference. With the scrags of Wyatt’s arsenal and Cal’s Ariekene force we might kill some, but the city was still shrinking, inhabitants dying, self-mutilating, running to nearby settlements where speakers would broadcast the god-drug voice. There were more Absurd than Ariekei that would fight by us.

MagDa spoke in Language; then one or other would say, “They can’t even fucking hear us,” while the Absurd snarled.

“So show them,” Cal said. “
Make
them understand.” And this exchange would continue and mutate, upsetting and pointless. The whole Ariekes would repeat its words: MagDa and the other Ambassadors would make gestures with their hands. Our enemies came closer. The Languageless pulled against their bonds. They watched their interlocutors, ignoring overtures and focusing on actions. I saw sudden shared moments of attention, responding to idiosyncrasies of
’s motion invisible to me.

The Absurd glared at each other. They made noises without knowing it. They got each other’s attention with spread-out eye-tines, made motions to indicate things to notice. To the extent that they could, they moved, taking up positions while Cal and Ez flashed up images on screens, played vibrations to them through the floor. They walked, triangulated, parted.

I didn’t say anything fast enough, but when they suddenly tried to attack an Ariekes guard I realised I’d known it was about to happen. They were subdued before they could use their own strapped bodies as ungainly bludgeons, but the synchronicity of their movements astounded me. It sent me back to my husband’s books.

“H
OW DO YOU SAY
‘that’ in Language?” I asked Bren. “Like
that
one.” I pointed. “Which glass do you want?
That
one.”