by Embassytown
Ra, the diffident half of our cataclysmic Ambassador, was allowed his solitude and whatever his little projects were; Ez was allowed his louche collapse. But they were on orders, and they were guarded. They had duties. They were what kept us alive.
“A city of brainwashed,” EdGar said to me. “Stronger than us, armed. We need them hospitable.”
There was no thinking or strategy from the Hosts in those first days. I who was so used to glossing all their strangeness with special pleading—it’s some Ariekene thing, we wouldn’t understand—was aghast to become convinced that they were not indulging any inhuman strategy, but mindless addict need. At first crowds of Ariekei were gathered permanently outside the Embassy. When they became agitated and their demands particularly insistent, every few hours, EzRa would be fetched, would appear at the entrance, and in flawless Language say something—anything at all—amplified to carry, to the crowd’s obvious stoned relief.
The second time EzRa said to them We are happy to see you and look forward to learning together, the oratees reacted without quite the degree of bliss they’d shown previously. The third time they were unhappy, until EzRa announced some new pointlessness about the colour of the buildings, the time of day or the weather. Then they were rapt again. “Fucking fantastic,” I said to someone. “They’re building up tolerance. Keep EzRa inventive.”
We watched trids and flats, news programs that after kilohours of trivialities now had to learn to report our own collapse. One channel sent an aeoli-wearing team with vespcams into the city. They were neither invited nor barred. Their reports were astonishing.
We were not used to seeing Ariekene streets, but there are new freedoms during a breakdown. The reporters edged into the city, past plaited ropes tethering gas-filled Host rooms, past buildings that shied away from them or rose on spindled limbs like witch-huts. Ariekei crossed our screens. They saw the reporters, stared and ran over sometimes like tottering horses. They asked questions in their double voices, but there were no Ambassadors to answer them. The reporters knew Language, translated for viewers.
“ ‘Where is EzRa?’ ” That was what the Hosts said.
The reporters weren’t the only Terre in the city. Their vespcams glimpsed men and women in Embassy suits moving among the skittish houses. They were routing cables and speakers—Terretech that looked jarring in that topography. They were extending a network of hailers and coms boxes. In return perhaps for our lives, the maintenance of our power, water, infrastructure, biorigging, they were getting ready to bring EzRa’s voice right into the city.
“We need EzRa now,” EdGar said. “They have to perform. That was our deal.”
“With them, or the Hosts?” I said.
“Yes. More EzRa, though. And that means we need Ez.”
He was drinking and drugging. More than once, he’d disappear at the times he was scheduled to speak Language to the Ariekei, leaving Ra speechless and waiting. I didn’t care if Ez killed himself, but that he’d take us with him if he did.
“They’re like normal Ambassadors in one way, right?” I said. “Recordings work? So build up a library of EzRa’s speeches, then let the fucker do what he wants. Let him drink himself dead.” They’d thought of that, but Ez would not comply. Even begged by Ra or threatened by Staff or guards, he would only speak with his Ambassador-colleague an hour or so at any one time. We could grab the odd snippet onto dat, but he was careful not to let them collect a store of EzRa’s Language.
“He knows he’d be redundant,” EdGar said. “This way we keep needing him.” Even in his decline and terror, Ez thought with ruthless strategy. I was impressed.
By vespcam, I saw the first times that EzRa’s voice was played into that strung-out city.
The buildings had been unhappy for days. They were rearing and breathing steam, purging themselves of the biorigged parasites they bred, that were Ariekene furniture. Look out from the Embassy, to where the city began, an organic vista like piled-up body parts, and the motion of the architecture was clear. The wrongness endemic.
The city twitched. It was infected. The Hosts had heard EzRa’s impossible voice, had taken energy from their zelles and let out waste, and in the exchange the chemistry of craving had been passed, and passed on again by the little beasts when they connected to buildings to power light and the business of life. Addiction had gone into the houses, which poor mindless things shook in endless withdrawal. The most afflicted sweated and bled. Their inhabitants rigged them crude ears, to hear EzRa speak, so the walls could get their fix.
EzRa spoke. They said anything in Language. Their amplified voice sounded through all the byways. Everywhere in the city Ariekei staggered and stopped. Their buildings staggered with them.
It disgusted me. My mouth twisted. Everything beyond Embassytown shuddered with relief. It moved through pipework, wires and tethers, to every corner of the grid, into the power stations stamping in a sudden wrong bliss. Withdrawal would start again within hours. By the edge of our zone we could feel it in the paving: a shaking as houses moved. We could track their biorhythms through our windows, could gauge how badly the drug of speech was needed.
In the past, each few months at harvest- or weaning-time, we’d send aeolied Ambassadors and barter-crews out to where Ariekene shepherds of the biorig flocks would explain different ’wares, these machines half-designed, half-born to chance, what each did and how. Now, the Ariekei neglected their out-of-city lands. Biorigging still entered the city, and we could see by the convulsions of the enormous throats that stretched kilometres to the foodgrounds that pabulum was still coming in, too. And that, with reverse peristalsis, addiction was being passed out.
“This world’s dying,” I said. “How can they let it go like this?”
We saw no attempts at self-treatment, no struggles. No Ariekene heroes. Ambassadors could converse with them in the hours after they’d had a hit of EzRa’s voice, when they seemed to humans lucid, but only to make the shortest of plans, for scant hours ahead.
“What do you think they should be doing?” MagDa was one of the few Ambassadors working to usher in change. I’d joined them. I was trying to be part of this new team. I knew MagDa and Simmon, scientists like Southel. Mostly though it was people new to me. “There’s no equilibrium possible.” “This is chance. A cosmic balls-up.” MagDa hadn’t equalised. I saw broken veins beneath the eyes of one and one only, and new lines beside the mouth of the other. “This is just a glitch between two evolutions,” they said. “How would they accommodate it?” “This doesn’t mean anything.” “They’ll listen themselves to death before they’ll try to change.”
The Hosts had always been incomprehensible. In that one sense, nothing had altered.
The upper floors of the Embassy had become a moral ruin. A little farther down, I saw Mag and Da cajole the Ariekei who came, force them to focus just long enough that we could be sure they’d understood our requests for materials and expertise. And in return, what was it MagDa offered?
Have it say about colour, I thought I heard one Host say.
It will, MagDa said. You will bring us the tool-animals before tomorrow and we will make sure it describes every colour of the walls.
“We keep going through colours for them,” Mag said to me.
“They’re loving it,” Da said. “But eventually …” “… the piquancy of it’s going to wear off.”
After this exchange I made new sense of EzRa’s little speeches to the city. Someone would generally translate. Some nodded to logic. Others were random sentences, or statements of preference or condition. I’m tired, subject-verb-object like children’s grammars. What I’d previously thought whims of subject I realised might be gifts for particular Ariekene listeners, in return for this or that favour. Economies and politics.
In the Embassy corridors, Ra, that impossible not-doppel, joined MagDa and me. Mag and Da kissed him. His presence meant we were approached by people desperate for some kind of intercession. He was as kind to them as he
could be. I’d seen too many messiahs thrown up by Embassytown. “How long do we have to go on?” one distraught woman asked him.
“Until the relief,” he said. So many hundreds of thousands of hours, scratching out an interstitial living while the Hosts hankered for EzRa’s sounds.
“Then what?” the woman said. “Then what? Do we leave?”
No one answered. I saw MagDa’s faces. I thought of what life would be, for them, in the out.
Reliefs had arrived on catastrophised worlds before. No communications could warn; there’s no outracing an immer ship. No crew could know what they’d see when their doors opened. There were famous cases of trade vessels emerging from immer to find charnel grounds on once-established colonies. Or disease, or mass insanity. I wondered how it would be for our incoming captain to emerge in our orbit, as close as she or he dared to the Ariekene pharos. If we were lucky, that ship would find a populace desperate to become refugees.
MagDa in the out? CalVin? Or even Mag and Da and Cal and Vin? What would they do? And they were among the most collected of the Ambassadors. By then most others were falling, to various degrees, apart.
“They go into the city,” MagDa told me when we were alone. She was talking about Ambassadors. “Those of them who can still pull themselves together a bit.” “They go in, and find Hosts.” “Ones they’ve always worked with.” “Or they just … stand between buildings.” “And they just start to talk.” They shook their heads. “They go in groups of two or three or four Ambassadors and just …” “… they just … they try …” “… to make the Ariekei listen.” They looked at me. “We did it once, ourselves. Early on.”
But the Ariekei wouldn’t listen. They understood, and might even answer. But they would always go back to waiting for EzRa’s announcements. The vespcams got everywhere, wouldn’t let Ambassadors hide their breakdowns. I’d seen footage of JoaQuin howling, and speaking Language, and in their misery losing their rhythm with each other, so the Ariekes to which they desperately tried to talk didn’t understand them.
“Did you hear about MarSha?” MagDa said. I remember nothing about their voices that warned me that they were about to say anything shocking. “They killed themselves.”
I stopped in my work. I leaned on the table and looked at MagDa slowly. I couldn’t speak. I put my hand over my mouth. MagDa watched me. “There’ll be others,” they said quietly, at last. When the ship came, I thought, I could leave.
“Where’s Wyatt?” I asked Ra.
“Jail. Just up the corridor from Ez.”
“Still? Are they … debriefing him … or what?” Ra shrugged. “Where’s Scile?” I had not seen, nor heard from, nor heard of, my husband, since the start of this ruinous time.
“Don’t know,” Ra said. “You know I don’t really know him, right? There was always a crowd of Staff around us when we were talking … before. I don’t even know if I’d recognise him. I don’t even know who he is, let alone where he is.”
I descended, passed searchers looking through a room full of papers for useful things. We were doing a lot of scavenging. More floors down, and I heard someone call my name. I stopped. It was Cal, or Vin, in the entrance to a stairwell. He blocked my way and stared at me.
“I heard you were around here,” he said. He was alone. I frowned. His aloneness continued. He took my hands. It was months since we’d spoken. I kept looking around him and I kept frowning. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “Close, I’m sure. He’ll be here soon. I heard you were here.” This was the one I’d meant to wake. He stared with desperation that made me shudder. I looked down to avoid his eyes and saw something I could barely believe.
“You turned off your link,” I said. Its lights were off. I stared at it.
“I was looking for you, because …” He ran out of anything to say and his voice got to me. I touched his arm. He looked so suddenly needful at that that I couldn’t help pitying him.
“What’s been happening to you?” I said. Bad enough for me, but the Ambassadors had become abruptly nothing.
In the corridor behind him his doppel appeared. “You’re talking to her?” he said. He tried to grab his brother, who didn’t take his eyes from me but shook his doppel off. “Come on.”
They weren’t equalised. As with MagDa, I could see differences. They whispered an altercation and the newcomer backed away.
“Cal.” The first man, the half who had sought me out, said, looking at me. “Cal.” He pointed at his brother, at the other end of the corridor. He prodded his own chest with his thumb. “Vin.”
I knew his look of longing wasn’t, or wasn’t just, for me. I met it. Vin walked backward to join his brother, looking at me for several seconds before he turned.
12
I travelled into the city with MagDa and Staff, part of a group trying to keep a paralysed Embassytown alive. Aeolius on me exhaling air I could breathe, I walked at last into that geography. We couldn’t risk corvids: the systems in place to ensure safe landing were now too often not operated.
We couldn’t wait—our biorigged medical equipment, our food-tech, the living roots and pipes of our water system needed Ariekene attention. And I think there was also in us something that needed to keep checking, to try to test what was happening. Like mythical polar explorers, or the pioneers of homo diaspora, we trudged in formation, carrying trade goods.
The architecture quivered as we came and related to us as germs in a body. Ariekei saw us. They murmured, and MagDa spoke to them, and often they would respond in ways that suggested they hardly knew we were there. We were not relevant. We went past the speakers Staff had helped to place, and around each of them, though they were currently silent, were gatherings of Ariekei. These were the furthest gone: we were learning to distinguish degrees of addiction. They would wait there for more sound, whispering to each other and to the speakers, repeating whatever they had last heard EzRa speak.
Ra had to cajole and threaten Ez into their performances, now. One concession—because Ez was treated like a capricious child, with castor oil and sugar—was, within the limits of barter necessity, to let Ez decide what they would say. What we would hear translated into Language, then, were rambling discussions of Ez’s past. If EzRa spoke during one of our trips into the city we couldn’t escape listening to them. Christ knows what Ra thought as he spoke these platitudes that Ez wanted his audience to get drunk on.
… I always felt different from the others around me, the Ariekei listeners would repeat. We would walk past a patchwork of Ez’s ego in scores of voices. She never understood me …, … so it was my turn …, … things would never be the same again.… It was almost unbearable to hear the Ariekei say these things. Ez, I realised, built up an arc over many days. These weren’t disparate anecdotes: it was an autobiography. And that, I heard in an Ariekene voice, was where the trouble really started, and what happened next you’ll have to wait to hear. Ez was ending each session on a cliff-hanger, as if that was what kept his listeners avid. They would have listened no less hard had he expounded details of import duties or bylaws on construction specifications or dreams or shopping lists.
We would make our way to some nursery for the processing of bioriggage, a cremator full of memory, a residence or leviathan hearth-lair or wherever, and when we found through the efforts of MagDa or another Ambassador the Host for which we were looking, there would follow careful discussion. It was a tortured business, negotiation with an exot addict. But we would generally achieve something. And in the company of a Host or with a cage full of the tool-parasites our maintenance needed, or with plans or the maps we were learning to use and draw, we would retrace our way. It was always a full day’s expedition. The city would react vividly to us, walls sweating, window-ventricles opening. The ears that each house had grown would flex with expectation.
That was another reason we preferred not to be outside when EzRa broadcast. I wasn’t alone in finding the gluttony of the architecture and its inhabitants, the frantic e
avesdropping of the walls, horrible.
Order was tenuous and dangerous but there: this wasn’t the collapse it so might have been. The ship would come. Until then we lived on the brink. When we left, we would leave a world of desperate Ariekei crawling in withdrawal. I couldn’t think about that, or what would happen after that. It would be a long time until we had the luxury of guilt.
I met the same Ariekei more than once on our expeditions. Their nicknames were Scissors; RedRag; Skully. If EzRa’s broadcast sounded they would snap to as utterly as any other Ariekei. But other times they did their best with us: a cadre was emerging among the Hosts who were, perhaps, our counterparts; trying, from their side, to keep things going. Harder for them, given that they were afflicted.
In Embassytown we had countertendencies, now, to the drive toward collapse. Schools and crèches started running again. Though no one knew yet on quite what basis our economy worked anymore, shiftparents mostly kept care of their charges, and our hospitals and other institutions continued. Out of necessity our town didn’t fuss about the lines of profit or accounting that had previously driven its production and its distribution.
I mustn’t give the impression that it was healthy. Embassytown was violently dying. When we citynauts returned it was to streets that weren’t safe. Constables escorted us. We couldn’t punish those determined to party their way to the end of the world. Besides, all of us sometimes went to their convivials. (I wondered if I’d meet Scile at any: I never did.) The curfew was unforgiving, though. Constables even left some dead, their bodies censored by pixellation on our news channels. There were fights in Embassytown, and assaults, and murders. There were suicides.
There are fashions in suicide, and some of ours were dramatic and melancholy. More than one person took what was known as the Oates Road, strapping on a mask to breathe and simply walking out of Embassytown, and on, out of sight and into the city; even, some stories had it, out beyond it; to let what would, happen. But the most common choice for those oppressed to death by the new times was hanging. According to what protocols I’ve no idea, news editors decided that those mostly bloodless bodies could be shown without digital disguise. We grew used to shots of dangling dead.
