Embassytown

by China Miéville

  “What in hell are you doing?” I went and said to Cal. At first he didn’t seem to notice me. Then his expression went from bewilderment to irritation to uninterest in less than a second. He walked away, and Ez followed him, and Ez’s guards followed them both.

  LIKE THE KING in a story, EzCal climbed up the barricades and down again into what had been our streets, and into a mass of hundreds of waiting Ariekei. They were motionless and silent. They moved out of EzCal’s way with little hoof-steps.

  EzCal’s retinue of nervous men and women scrambled down the plastone-set rubbish and rubble behind them. No path was cleared for us; we had to weave very tentatively between the Hosts. There were plenty of us, viziers insisting that they were indispensable, I, MagDa and others from the committee after them and trying to issue orders or just watching, collating. I had a sense I couldn’t quite articulate that of course Cal, EzCal, had known that their words wouldn’t only fulfil and fuel Ariekei cravings, but would communicate specifics.

  The effortlessness of it. EzRa’s audience had fugued as much at agricultural reports as at the narratives Ez had seemed or pretended to think caught them up. Now the stories Ez told had real audiences, but they weren’t his stories anymore. The Ariekei kept their fanwings flared, listening hard. Cal walked as if he and Ez would keep on to the edge of historic Embassytown and into the city. They had no aeoli, so this was pure theatre. Ez kept up with him.

  Listeners, EzCal said. They were amplified by tiny point-microphones on their clothes. Cal hadn’t been looking at Ez, I’d have put money on it, but they spoke together. EzCal waited so long I might have expected the hold of their voice on the assembled to ebb. It had only been a single word, not even a clause, with the grammar that seemed particularly succulent to the Ariekei. But they waited.

  Listeners, EzCal said. Do you understand me?

  The Ariekei told them yes.

  Raise your giftwings, EzCal said, and the Ariekei did. Shake them, they said, and again, immediately, the Ariekei did.

  I’d never seen anything like this. None of the watching Terre looked anything but stunned. If Ez was excited or surprised he showed no sign of it at all. He just looked out at all these addict-obedient. Raise your giftwings to listen, EzCal said. Listen.

  They said the city was ill, that it must be healed, that there was very much to do, that there were plenty of hearers in the city who were still dangerous or endangered, or both, but that things would be better now. To the Ariekei, these political platitudes, in this voice, might be revelations. They listened, and they were transported.

  I didn’t see any pleasure in Cal’s expression. The grim strain of his face, the muscles clenching—it looked to me as if he had no choice but to do and be this, now. Listen, EzCal said, and the Ariekei listened harder. The walls strained. The windows sighed.

  WHEN THEY REGREW the city the Ariekei changed it. In this rebooted version the houses segmented into smaller dwellings and were interspersed with pillars like sweating trees. Of course there were still towers, still factories and hangars for the nurturing of young and of biorigging, to process the new chemicals the Ariekei and their buildings emitted when they listened to EzCal. But the housescape we overlooked took on a more higgledy-piggledy aspect. The streets seemed steeper than they had been, and more various: the chitin gables, the conquistador-helmet curves newly intricate.

  The old halls were still there, and that architecture revived enough by EzCal’s voice to fail to die, but not quite to rise. The tracts of decayed city between new village-like neighbourhoods were dangerous. The prowling grounds of animals and of Ariekei so far gone they’d never fully woken. They would crowd isolated loudhailers during announcements and gain enough from EzCal’s voice to give them aggressive need, but not enough to give them mind.

  “We’ll clear them out, when we can,” Cal said. In the meantime the city was scattered fiefdoms, with each of which we tried to establish protocols. I found out something of their specifics—“that one’s run by a little coalition of the not-very dependent; that one’s too risky to go into right now; the Ariekes running that place there, around the minaret, it was a functionary before the fall”—from Bren. Bren learnt them from YlSib.

  “MagDa won’t push you on it,” Bren said to me. “But . . .” Bren saw the expression on my face. “You can see what’s going on,” he said finally. “They’re not running things now, they’re not in a position to close the infirmary . . .”

  “You think they would if they could?”

  “I don’t know and just now I don’t care. Cal certainly won’t. You saw what happened when EzCal spoke. If MagDa needs to know anything you know, please tell them. We need them clued in. They’re smart, they must know the sort of source you’re getting information from, but they won’t ask. They have plans, I’m sure. They’ve been spending time in Southel’s lab. Have you seen them talking to her?”

  It wasn’t as part of an official group, committee business, that I went back into the city, when I did. I went with Bren, to meet his friends again: YlSib, that secret rogue Ambassador.

  OUR AIR-SHAPING was weak enough now that we had to wear aeoli within what had recently been Embassytown streets. So far as we could Bren and I were careful to avoid vespcams, though I knew if we were seen we’d only be a rumour among many. We stationed ourselves in the ruins. From a balcony in an apartment where children had lived (I trod over the debris of toys) we saw EzCal go again among crowds of Ariekei that listened and obeyed their instructions.

  “Next time they’re going to head into the city,” said Sib. I hadn’t heard YlSib enter. “So . . .” Sib pointed out of the window at EzCal. “Language works differently with this one.”

  “We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”

  YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town planning.

  I looked down an avenue of marrowy-trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking. I’m , they said. These are— and then they said something yl that wasn’t our names. They are coming with me. I’m going home. , YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I, homegoer, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.

  “They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have . . .” “. . . reasons to not let us pass.”

  In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.

  They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.

  “Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”

  “No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. T
hey just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?

  “Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we talk.”

  “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  “I don’t think there’s a ‘they’, Bren. It’s all . . . disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet . . . But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language . . .” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”

  YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”

  “What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me in, into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.

  The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.

  “Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”

  It had been a close companion of Surl Tesh-echer, , surl the best liar in Ariekei history. It was the Ariekes I’d once called Spanish Dancer. “Does it remember . . . ?”

  “Of course it remembers, Avice,” Bren said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

  BREN AND YLSIB gave to the gathered Ariekei a clutch of datchips. They took them quickly, their limbs and digits betraying agitation. “Do EzCal know you’re recording them?” I said.

  “I hope not,” Bren said. “You’ve seen? They’re trying to do what Ez did when he was part of EzRa—make sure we can’t build up a stock of recordings to make them redundant.”

  “But you have.”

  “These are just their public recitations,” he said. “They can’t stop people tapping those, and why would they? They think because it’s been said, because it’s out there, the Hosts’ve heard it, and it’s lost its thing.”

  I looked one by one around the other Ariekei there. There were other patterns on other fanwings I thought I had seen before. “Some of these were in Surl Tesh-echer’s group as well,” I said. I looked at Bren. “They were its friends.”

  “Yes,” Bren said.

  “What they can do is lie,” Bren said. “Not that any of them’s anything like as virtuoso as Surl Tesh-echer was. It was . . .” He shrugged. “A harbinger. On the edge of something.”

  “Your husband was right,” YlSib said. “To stop it. In his terms he was right. It was changing everything.” There was a silence. “This lot have had to carry on without it since. It’s slow.” “They do what they can.”

  Every Ariekes took a datchip, each to a different part of the room. Each in similar elegant motion draped its fanwing over it. Their membranes spread. They withdrew, hunched into sculptures, made the room a drug-house. With the volume very low, they ran the sounds. Responded instantly as I watched, trembling, judders of bio-ecstasy. I could see lights of speakers through taut fanwing skin, hear the muffled chirruping of audio: the soul of EzCal, or its spurious fabricated semblance.

  “How the hell can those recordings still work?” I whispered. “They’ve already been heard.”

  “Not by them,” Bren said. “They wait. Bloody willpower. They fold up their wings when they know EzCal’s going to speak. They were already doing it with EzRa. They make themselves hold out. They’re trying to go longer and longer without.”

  It was hard to imagine that the shuddering figures represented a resistance to the reign of god-drug. Still. “They can take these now because they didn’t take them before,” Yl said.

  One by slow one the Ariekei rose. They looked at me. A strange reminiscence. We seemed to pick up where we’d left off. Spanish Dancer came up to me: its companions circled me. They said the succession of sounds in Language that were me. I had not heard myself spoken for a long time.

  They said me first as a fact. There was a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. Then they began to deploy me as a simile. We now, Spanish Dancer said, when we take what is given in god-drug’s voice, we are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. The others responded.

  “SURL TESH-ECHER was more than just the best liar, you know,” Bren said. “It was sort of a vanguard. It was never just about performing lies. Why would they be so interested in you, if that was all, Avice? How do lying and similes intersect?”

  What other things in this world, one of the Ariekei was saying, are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her?

  “It’s been hard,” Bren said. “They were all scattered by the war.” The war of not-enough drug. The war of Ez killed Ra. The war of the walking dead. “Now they’ve tracked each other down, they’re going to keep going. They didn’t worship Surl Tesh-echer. But it was sort of a figurehead.”

  “Prophet,” Yl or Sib said.

  “Why can’t you tell MagDa, and even Cal . . .” I said, then trailed off because of course the group in this room was a conspiracy. Striving to limit the power of the god-drug. Cal would try to sabotage it. I wished I didn’t believe that. Bren nodded, watching me think.

  “Yeah,” said Bren. “Now, MagDa are different. But there’s only so much they’ll risk. They want to get out, now, and they can only see one way to do it, and that’s hanging on. They won’t risk anything else. They might even scupper it.”

  “Scupper what? What are you trying to do?”

  “Not me,” Bren said.

  “All of you. You, you,” I said to YlSib, “these Hosts. What are you plural trying to do?” “MagDa’s way won’t work,” Bren said. “Just to stave things off. That’s why they won’t take on Cal. It’s not enough to try to keep everything going until the ship gets here. We have to change things.” While he spoke, the Ariekei moved around me like flotsam in a current, and they said the phrase I was and tried to make it into new things, to think of new things they could insist that it, I, my past, was like.

  “EzCal’s not the only one we have to be careful of,” Bren said. “You have to keep this quiet.” I remembered the parting of Ariekei when Hasser had come and killed .

  “You’re worried about other Ariekei,” I said.

  “These speakers were dangerous before,” Bren said. “Scile was right about them, and so were their . . .” He shrugged and shook his head so I would know whatever phrase he used was inexact. “Ruling clique. And I don’t know where they are now, yet, but I bet EzCal have an idea. Or Cal does. They’ve done business before. Why do you think he’s so keen to get into the city?”

  I’d thought Cal’s eagerness was newly visionary fervour. But back then, there in the Festival of Lies, Cal, and Pear Tree, looking at me. “Jesus Pharos.” Scile had watched too. A conspirator then, Scile would approve of EzCal now. Their priorities, like CalVin’s before them, were power and survival; Scile’s were always the city and its stasis. Those had overlapped once, but history had left Scile behind. Hence his hopeless walk.

  “Cal might already have found his friends again,” Bren said. “This lot . . .” He indicated the room. “They were a threat once. You saw. Now . . .” He laughed. “Well, everything’s changed. But they might still be a threat. Different: but maybe even more. Cal might not know this group still exists. If he ever knew. But the Ariekei he worked with before do. So if he finds them, this lot here had be
tter keep very quiet. So we have to, as well.”

  “How are they a threat?” I said. “I never understood. Why are they doing this? Whatever it is they’re doing.”

  Bren struggled. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to say.”

  “You don’t know,” I said. He bobbed his head in a half-yes-half- no.

  “How’s your Language, Avice?” said one of YlSib. They spoke to Spanish Dancer and it answered. I could follow some, and when I shook my head Yl or Sib would translate a few clauses.

  It’s not good that we are this. We wish to be other than this. We’re like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal. There was a long silence. We want instead to be like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her in that we want to be . . . and then there was silence again, and Spanish Dancer shook its limbs.

  “It tried to use your simile twice, contradictorily,” Sib said. “But it couldn’t quite manage.”

  Now, Spanish Dancer went on, it’s worse. We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey. Yes, it said that with modulations that meant nothing to me, but no matter how alien the Ariekene mental map, sense of self, I thought that must be truly terrible. I’d seen the crowds respond instantly to EzCal’s instructions, choiceless about it. We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.

  They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey. This conclave could hardly be unique in that. But it dovetailed with what they had always wanted to achieve: their longtime striving for lies, to make Language mean what they wanted. That older desire seemed to make them execrate their new condition even more than other conscious Ariekei.