China Miéville

by Embassytown

  Ez never said he’d help us, but we didn’t give him any choice, and his only resistance lay in sulking. He would obey us.

  “Will you do it?” I said to Bren that night. I spoke quietly. He looked away. It was at these times that I felt we could speak, when he was naked and I watched the night lights of the city now made carnival with biofires glaze him through his windows, his aging athlete’s body.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m too old, too stuck. I don’t even think I could. I know there aren’t many choices. I wouldn’t be any good at it: I’d say the wrong thing the wrong way. Whoever does this needs very very much to want to live, and I don’t, enough. Don’t be offended. I’ve no death wish but nor do I have the necessary … verve.

  “Yes, I know. Ez is Cut, it has to be a Turn-speaker. Well, we can always go to the Ambassadors and find someone desperate enough to cut themselves off from their doppel. That might not be so hard now. I’ll lay you money …” He laughed at that, at how silly money had become. “I’ll bet there are some new cleaved for us to pick from. And some’ll be Turn. But you know, anyway, who we’re going to choose.” He turned to me. “It has to be Cal.”

  Neither of us spoke. I didn’t even look at him.

  “What do we know about Ez and Ra? They weren’t doppels. But maybe what they did share was important. Hate. We’re not training a new Ambassador, we’re distilling a drug. We have to replicate every ingredient we know about. We need the Turn to hate the Cut. A voice tearing itself apart. Alright, Ez came and ruined the world. So, sure, why wouldn’t the Ambassadors hate him? Why wouldn’t I?” He smiled at me, beautifully. “But I’m tired of this place and I don’t hate Joel Rukowsi enough, Avice. We need someone who does. Cal hasn’t just lost his world, he lost his doppel. He hates Ez enough. Me, I’d be weak tea. My question is, do you think Cal knows he’ll do it, yet?”

  Probably, I thought. He must know what his duty would be: to become symbiont with the man who had destroyed his history, future and brother.

  Before he went into surgery the committee gathered for what we all knew was a valedictory-in-case. Cal was like some foul-tempered birthday boy. He sought me out.

  “Here,” he said. He was right up in my face, and I stepped back and tried to say something neutral, but he was shoving something at me. “You should … have this,” he said. Sometimes you could hear him pause like that, waiting for Vin to finish a clause. He gave me the letter Vin had left. “You’ve read it,” he said. “You know what you meant to him. This is yours, not mine.” Sort of to punish him for various things I didn’t shrink back but actually took it.

  “What the hell were you doing with Scile, all that time?” I said.

  “You’re asking about this now?”

  “Not back then,” I said, coldly. Folded my arms. “Not at the Festival of Lies. I know perfectly well what you did then, Cal.”

  “You … have no idea …” he said slowly, “why we did what we … had to—”

  “Oh Pharotekton spare me,” I interrupted in a rush. “Because I think I have in fact a pretty solid fucking idea why—if you don’t know what’s happening to Language how do you know what’ll happen to Ambassadors, huh?—but in point of fact even if that’s not your whole story I do not care. I don’t mean then, I mean now. Since all this started. Surl Tesh-echer’s long gone, but you were spending time with Scile since EzRa arrived. And everything went … What’ve you been doing? You and, and Vin?”

  “Scile’s always full of plans,” he said. “We did a lot of planning. He and I. Vin … got something else out of it, I think.” He regarded me. It was when he’d read Scile’s note that Vin had taken his own life. Irrespective of what Scile was in himself, what he wanted, Vin had found a community with him—of some grief or loss or something. A fraternity of those who’d once loved me, or still did? My stomach pitched.

  While Cal was under anaesthetic, Ez began to panic and insist that he wouldn’t do anything, that he wouldn’t help us, that he couldn’t, that it wouldn’t work. I heard from one of the guards how MagDa had arrived in the middle of his little meltdown. Mag had stood by the door while Da walked over to where Ez was sitting, and leaned over and punched him in the face. Her knuckles split.

  She’d said “Hold him,” to the guards, and brought her bust-up fist down on him again. He’d shouted and wriggled, his head cracking side to side. Joel had stared up at Mag and Da in the utterest astonishment, bloodily whooping with pain. Mag had said to him in a quite flat and calm voice, “In fact you will speak Language with Cal. You’ll learn how, and you’ll do it fast. And you won’t disobey me or any other Staff or committee members again.”

  I wasn’t there but that’s how I was told it happened.

  19

  The strategyless onslaughts on our barricades continued. Our new town edges smelled bad, of Ariekene death. Our bricks rubbled around Host corpses. Our biorigged weapons were hungry and dying. Our Terretech ones were failing. Within days we’d be fighting hand-to-giftwing.

  It was the usual siege-stuff that would finish us: the ending of resources. No food came through the dedicated loops of colon that linked Embassytown to our subcontracted farms, now, and our stores were hardly infinite. We had no power from the Ariekene plants, and our own backups would fail.

  I’d never been able to convince myself that there was no harm to it, but I couldn’t stop nostalgia then. Just then, looking down streets with angles not as we’d have built them, which terminated or twisted in ways that still seemed almost playfully alien, toying with our teleologies, there was no way I couldn’t remember when I’d stared down them in my early life and systematically populated that out-of-sight city with every kind of child’s impossibility and story. From there followed a quick run-through of everything. Learning, sex, friends, work. I’d never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn’t see how that wasn’t cowardice, but not only did I not regret the out, but nor, suddenly, did I the return. Nor even Scile. When I unhitched my attention and let it wander down out-of-reach streets—which have been clocked before as yantras for reminiscence—it wasn’t that I thought well of my husband; it was that in those moments I remembered what of him I’d loved.

  I was spare with all that, rationed it. We tended our aeoli. The poor things had been relocated, their fleshly tethers cut and cauterised, with as little trauma as possible, but they were suffering. We had no Terretech that could replace them, and our air-gardeners frantically protected the biomes of them and their companion things, which shaped currents, sustained our rough air dome. They strived to keep them safe, unhearing, charged by unaddictable technologies, as protected as possible from cross-contamination, but despite all efforts we knew we might not be able to keep our breath-machines from addiction or sickness, and no Host savants would help us now.

  As the aeoli wheezed, so would we, and the Ariekei would breach our defences and walk in. When they’d finished with us we would lie with the dead’s traditional lassitude, and the Ariekei would prod us and ask us forlornly to speak like EzRa. Either they would all die, then, or new generations would be born and start their culture again. They would perhaps construct rituals around our and their parents’ bones.

  These were the bad dreams we were having. It was into this landscape that god-drug EzCal arrived.

  I’d left Bren and MagDa and others to the task of bullying and nurturing our last hope. I’d preferred to oversee other duties, the movement of supplies and weaponry. Despite knowing that Cal was waking, that he was being reintroduced to Ez, that they were making their first attempts, that they were sitting the Stadt test, that the results were being calculated, I didn’t ask what was happening. I even avoided Bren.

  Rumours spread that something was being made, that an autom had been perfected that could speak Language, that the Ambassadors and their friends were preparing a miab, would risk immer, to escape. We didn’t leak the truth because it seemed too tentative. When EzCal did emerge into our newly nightmared town,
I realised another reason we had said nothing: for the performance of it. A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

  I couldn’t avoid picking up information: when Cal was woken, when he was healed. Though I avoided what details I could, I knew before he and Ez emerged into the Embassy square that they would do so, and I was there ready. Everyone in Embassytown seemed to be there, in fact. There were even Kedis and Shur’asi. I saw Wyatt, flanked by security, to both guard and secure him. There were automa too, turingware struggling, so some of them expressed inappropriate bonhomie. I couldn’t see Ehrsul. It was only with my disappointment that I realised I’d been looking.

  We were close enough to the borders of our shrunken town to hear the gusting of Ariekene attacks on the barriers, and the missiles and energies of repulses. Officers kept Embassytowners back from the Embassy’s entrance. It struck me that I must have chosen to cut myself off from what had been happening in the hospital so that I could experience this as nearly as possible a member of the crowd. I looked up at the other committee members, who were parting, and stepping forward was Cal, with Ez behind him.

  “EzCal,” one of the official escort shouted, and Christ help me someone in the crowd took it up and it became, briefly, a chant.

  Cal looked like something horrific, made worse in the moving glare of lights. His head was shaved, his scalp the palest part of his pale skin, the link on his neck shining. I think he was kept alert by some concoction of drugs: he moved in little insect bursts. His skull was crossed with dark sutures: big physical stitches, a crude technique, supposedly dictated by dwindling supplies of nanzymatic healers, but one that so exaggerated the spectacle I wondered how medically necessary it had really been. He stared into the crowd. He stared right at me, though I’m certain he didn’t see me.

  Joel Rukowsi was Ez again. Physically he was unmarked, but of the two he seemed the less alive. Cal spoke to him harshly. I couldn’t hear the words. It was Ez who was the empathic, the receiver, who had to make this work.

  “So I lost everything,” Cal said into the crowd at last. Amplifiers carried his voice and everyone was quiet. “I lost it all and I went down, into that lost place, and then when I realised that Embassytown needed me, I came back. When I realised it needed us …” And he paused and I didn’t breathe, but Ez stepped forward and said in a voice that was, unlike his face, strong, “… we came back.”

  Applause. Ez looked down again. Cal licked his lips. Even the local birds all seemed to be in the plaza, watching.

  “We came,” Cal said, “and let me show you …” and after another heart-stopping pause Ez muttered, “… what we’ll do.”

  They looked at each other, and I could suddenly see an echo of what must have been hours of preparation. They watched each other’s eyes and something happened. I imagined the pulses of the implants, hot-synching them, pumping out into the universe the lie that they were the same.

  Ez the Cut-speaker and Cal the Turn counted each other in and opened their mouths and spoke Language.

  When we heard them, even we, humans, let out gasps.

  “.”

  I went away a time and now I’ve returned.

  The city woke. Even its dead parts shuddered. We all bloomed like flowers, too.

  Through the wires below our streets, past the barracks and barricades, at the speed of electricity under brick and tarmacked roads empty of Terre and picked through now by Ariekei suddenly still, into the kilometres of rotting architecture, the house-beasts waiting for death, up and through the speakers. From scores of loudhailers came the voice of the new god-drug, of , and the city came out of hermetic miserable withdrawal into a new high.

  Thousands of eye-corals craned; fanwings that had been slack suddenly flapped rigid and strained to capture vibrations; mouths opened. Flights of collapsed chitin stairs raised in tentative display, suddenly stronger with the onrush of chemical fix that came with that new voice. I went away a time and now I’ve returned, and we heard the creak of reinflating skin, of flesh responding, metabolisms far faster than ours sucking on the junk energy it drew from the dissonance of EzCal’s Language. All the way to the horizon, the city, its zelles and its inhabitants, rose and found themselves wherever in their walking death they’d stumbled.

  Ariekene towers and gas-raised dwellings woke over the edges of Embassytown, looked down at us, opened their ears and listened. The addicted city came out of its coma of need. Our guards and gunners shouted. They didn’t know what they were seeing. Their quarries, the oratees, were suddenly still and listening.

  There was to be nothing more about Joel Rukowsi’s life, it was clear. This was Cal’s script, not Ez’s. In several different ways, varying the shape of the sentences so the Language wouldn’t lose its efficacy, he and Ez repeated that EzCal had come to speak. Embassytowners were crying. We knew we might live.

  We would have to reestablish ways of communicating our needs to the Ariekei, and working out what we offered. Somewhere in that city now trying to rouse itself there must be those Hosts with which we had established understandings, which might now be able to take some kind of control again, with which we could deal. It wouldn’t be a healthy polity. A few in control of their addiction would rule over those not, compradors at our behest: a narcocracy of language. We’d have to be careful pushers of our product.

  Bren was on the stairs, and I waved, pushed through the crowd to him. We kissed, believing we wouldn’t die. EzCal were silent. Elsewhere, out of my sight, hundreds of thousands of Ariekei stared at each other, high but coming lucid for the first time in a long time.

  “Hosts!” we heard from the barriers. There were only a few minutes before they began to gather, to clear away their dead.

  For one moment, simultaneously in every quarter, every Ariekes listening and their revivifying rooms stiffened again, in an aftershock of feeling. I saw it on the cam, later. It happened when, without looking at each other, according to I don’t know what impulse, Cal and Ez leaned forward and with flawless timing, spoke the staccato Cut-and-Turn Language word that meant yes.

  PART SEVEN

  THE LANGUAGELESS

  20

  I was a trader again. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.

  MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name: .

  In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.

  We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.

  We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s articulacy it wasn’t clear they understood what had changed, until with eager giftwing fingers, they played the files, and heard the voice of EzCal.

  I want more of the other one, a farmer said. It tried to remember the way we used to trade, the haggling Terre had taught the Ariekei when our predecessors first arrived. Clumsily it offered us more of the medical rigging it had grown if we would give it another of EzRa’s chips. We explained that we had none. Another, though, preferred the newcomer. It indicated several of its chewing beasts, which would defecate fuel and components: it would give us more than ever before, if we would give it more of this new EzCal.

  Were those Ariekei who preferred EzCal more measured? Was there a calm, a focus to them,
contrasting with a febrile air to those who still hankered for EzRa? Certainly, after ecstasy and before withdrawal, the composure between the Ariekei’s necessary fixes seemed easier for us than they had been before. This EzCal version of Language left the Ariekei clearer-headed, a little more like the Hosts we had grown up with.

  We tried to intervene, to shape what structures were emerging. We tried to reestablish conduits for our necessaries. I imagined Scile dead in all the landscapes I passed—in the city, huddled where his aeoli had failed; in the first downs beyond.

  We overflew desolate remnants of farms, vats dedicated by old agreements to the production of our foods: nutrient-rich pabulum; crops in Terre-air bubbles; food animals and sheets of meatcloth. Fallen and falling, there were parts though that were restorable. Our crews did what they could, coaxed airglands to fill chambers, restarted traumatised birth-pens. We found local Ariekene keepers, and with snips of EzCal’s speechifying we restored them to mindfulness and gave them delight, coaxed them back to the farmsteads to help us. They cured the buildings, fixed the cityward flow of what we needed. Cells of food jostled like corpuscles on their way to Embassytown.

  With those peristalses of imports, we might have more or less ignored the city, now that its inhabitants weren’t attacking us anymore. We could have just broadcast the god-drug’s announcements to its convalescing boroughs to make its inhabitants pliant. We didn’t, of course. Most of us felt concern, even responsibility, for the biopolis. Nonetheless, we weren’t expecting what turned out to be the vigorous interventions of EzCal. Really, of Cal. Cal, and with him the other half of the god-drug, didn’t merely broadcast or make careful forays into the streets, to find a new Ariekei government: EzCal paraded.

  The committee could have tried to stop them. Ez was our prisoner. When sometimes he tried—always obviously—to make his own plans, to turn a situation to an advantage, he was cack-handed. At first, mostly, he did as we told him; then he did what Cal told him. Cal disturbed me: his fever of importance. What we said was he was ours, that we decided what he did, and Ez with him, and it was true for a few days, until he’d remembered the minutiae of ruling.