Embassytown

by China Miéville

  “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 CAL, 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.

  EZCAL 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.

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

  “It would depend.” He looked at the glass by his counter. “Talking about that one, I might say . . .”

  “No I don’t mean any specific one, but in general, that one.” Pointing. “Or that one.” Moving my hand. “Thatness.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Thought so. So how would I distinguish that glass and that one and that one?” I tallied them with my finger.

  “You’d say ‘the glass in front of the apple and the glass with a flaw in its base and the glass with a residue of wine left in it.’ You know this. What are you asking? They taught you these basics, didn’t they?”

  “They did,” I said. I was quiet a while. “Years ago.” I spoke in years again, not kilohours. “But if you were translating an Ariekes saying, ‘The glass with the apple and the one with the wine,’ to me, you’d probably just say, ‘That glass and that one.’ Sometimes translation stops you understanding. I’m not fluent. Maybe that’s helping me right now.”

  “Translation always stops you understanding,” he said. “What is it you’re thinking?”

  “How many days before they get here?” I said. “Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can?” He narrowed his eyes but nodded. “We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever
to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll—” I stopped. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know whether . . . Maybe I can tell Cal.”

  “Tell me,” Bren said. “I thought you’d despaired.”

  “I did too.”

  “What, then? Tell me.”

  I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.

  Bren nodded, and listened to what I can’t call a plan—it was hunch and hope—and when I was done he said, “No, we can’t tell Cal.” He touched me under the chin, and put his arms around me, and for a moment I let him take my weight and it was lovely. “Of course we can’t.”

  “But we’re trying to fix things,” I said. “You know EzCal aren’t stupid . . .”

  “It’s not about whether they’re stupid,” he said. “It’s about who they are, and what they represent. Maybe Cal would see reason. Maybe. But I don’t think so, do you? Want to risk it, really?”

  “If we go, he’ll find out.”

  “Yes. And see you as an enemy. And he’ll be right. Don’t think he—they—won’t find time to try to stop us.”

  “Alright then,” I said. “I’ll be an enemy.”

  He smiled at me. “What else are we going to do, Avice?”

  We turned arm-in-arm to look at the screen on which the captive Languageless tried to shuffle, alone in their room, watched by cams. It was a quiet moment for our banishing, as we got ready to exile ourselves. We saw the two Ariekei our rulers held moving not quite like two things unconnected, but according to something else; not a plan but a knowledge of each other; a community.

  24

  I WAS STILL OF some cultural interest. So was BrenDan, the free cleaved, troublemaker, licensed dissident. If we disappeared together people would notice. And we might already be watched. That was why the next time, the last time, I went into the city alone.

  While the committee fretted and Cal took what power we’d had, Embassytown streets got on with things. Walking through my shrunken town with my aeoli and supplies, I was surprised to pass more than one outdoor party. Some shiftparents of the playing children saw me watching and caught my eye, and even the poignancy of that, of knowing together that this was a last game to keep those children occupied, didn’t detract from a moment’s pleasure.

  There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us. They weren’t treated, even the most brimstone of them, as threats or pests, but as performers. People teased them, while they remained doggedly devout.

  I wanted to stop, to ask someone to join me at a cafe´ where they were giving away free drinks or accepting the little IOUs we proffered in polite charade. The usual lament: I may be some time. The wistfulness of we who are about to leave. I got out of Embassytown close to where Yohn and Simmon and the others and I had held our breath and where I’d touched a tether. I exited through the corridors of a border house, alone.

  On my chart were marked various colonies of city Ariekei, each annotated, the latest information Bren could gather. 1: Heartland. . Loyal. To my left. 2: Status uncertain. 3: Contributed to troop but dispute with . 4: Communalistic? 5, and on. I knew the displayed boundaries were all porous. As the Absurd approached, those little polities got more insular, their between-fix politics and cultures more divergent, the streets that separated them much worse. I wasn’t at all safe.

  The first few hundred metres altbrocks had ambled, I’d heard bird wings and been with insects. Now I was in the territories of local fauna, with at least two names: our vernacular; their markers in Language. I stood still for a dog-sized thing we called a browngun, which the Ariekei termed or depending on a taxonomic distinction we never understood. It crossed my path with an urchin frog-tongue gait. Overhead passed the scraps and biorigged machines, wild, or carrying Ariekei.

  I could navigate immer but this geography nearly defeated me. It was dangerous in no-person’s-lands, and it would be more so at the settlements, where I’d be threatened not by the random rages of the mindless but by the guarding of borders. With this new tribalism inhabitants of different areas sometimes fought. More than once I had had to hunker beyond a house-bone or a trash pile, watching such violence.

  My breath was short with fear. Around a convolute, half-hearing the diaphragmatic burr of this neighbourhood, I stopped abruptly. There were two men in front of me.

  They saw me and raised rifles. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their aeoli. The incongruity of Terre figures right there stopped me for a dangerous moment but I moved, just before they fired, and bullets thumped into the ventricle or alley where I’d been. I ran. I heard them behind me. I shoved beneath underhangs, lost myself. I grit my teeth, my heart slamming.

  I wasn’t panicked. My thoughts were precise. I turned fast at another noise. Someone human was reaching for me from a doorway like gills. I staggered back but he put his finger to his mask, in a shhh face, and beckoned. I went to him and he pulled me into a chamber. We sat, listening. I stared at him, but he wasn’t memorable in any way. I scanned him like I might decode him.

  “Are you alright?” he whispered.

  “Yes.” I started to say Who are you? or Who were they? but he shook his head. He listened again.

  “Come with me,” he said at last. I tried to ask again who he was, but he still didn’t answer. He didn’t owe me any explanation, I supposed, after all. I let him lead me, creeping.

  At the end of a long detour, Yl and Sib were waiting. They greeted him tersely. The three of them confabulated too quietly for me to hear. The man turned and raised his hand to me briefly as he left.

  “His name’s Shonas,” Sib said. “He was a vizier once. He’s been in the city for about eight years.” We headed cautiously back toward my original intended route.

  “Why’s he here?” I said. “And who shot at me?” A lintel arced to let us in.

  “He came here after a breakdown between him and an Ambassador,” YlSib said. “It was a bit of a scandal. He disappeared. You were in immer probably. In the out.” “You wouldn’t remember.” As if. “The other two were DalTon.”

  I don’t remember being surprised. Those dashing dissidents I’d assumed dead, cleaved, or incarcerated in that terrible infirmary. “They went away.” “They went weird.” “Shonas came into the city to stop them, and . . .” “. . . Well. He’s on our side.” “Against Ambassador DalTon.” “We hadn’t heard from those bastards for a long time until all this started, don’t know what they’ve been working on.” “They’re pigs in shit, now.” “They must love all this.” “They got wind of your plan.”

  A parallel economy of narratives, counterfights and revenge. “How do they know what I’ve got planned?” I said.

  “Word gets out.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Come on. Stories get out.” “They might not know anything except you’re coming to the city. Which would mean you have a plan.” “Which whatever it is they’re against.”

  “Are they working with Cal? With EzCal?”

  “What? Because they tried to stop you?” YlSib glanced at me. “Just because Cal would try to stop you too?” “It’s hardly the same thing.” “DalTon have their own reasons for everything.”

  “Which are?” I said.

  “Oh there are so many reasons out there,” YlSib said, exhaustedly. “Who can keep track of them all?” “Pick one.” “They aren’t your friend.” “Won’t that do?”

  “No.”

  “They’re tired of all of it.” “And you’re not.” “And you’re trying.” “How’s that?”

  Dal and Ton, nihilist since the crisis and before. It was a vindication that they thought me worth attacking. Ask Cal if he’d rather Embassytown be destroyed or survive without him, he’d claim the latter and mean it: but he’d go to his grave, a
nd all our graves, to stop me, when he knew my plan, because it would undermine him. DalTon wanted to stop me because I wanted to save the world. I’m sure it made much more and coherent sense to them, with their long, furious self-exile. There were kilohours of story there I’d never know. DalTon were against me, Cal was against me, DalTon were against Cal, Shonas was against DalTon, Shonas was for me but not against Cal, and so on. I never, in Embassytown, the immer or the out, had the constitution for intrigue. Floaking, I’d hoped, was a way around it. But politics finds you.

  “How many are there?” I said. “Outcasts. In the city.”

  Yl and Sib said nothing. My plans to save Embassytown were briefly part of what happened to DalTon and Shonas, and the drama of the revenge of the ex-Ambassador and their onetime vizier had happened to me. I was grateful to Shonas for my life.

  “It’s on its way,” YlSib told me. “What do you call it? Spanish Dancer.”

  “I know, it’s rude of me,” I said. “I’ll stop using that name.”

  “Why?” “It doesn’t care and neither do we.”

  The room was small. Windowless of course, illuminated by fronds that glowed.

  “There’s power,” I said.

  “No.” “The light’s emitted by a necrophage in the walls.”

  “Come on,” I said. The building was dying and we were lit by that. I could only laugh.

  I asked again, but YlSib wouldn’t tell me what had sent them hundreds of thousands of hours ago out of Embassytown, to live behind aeoli masks in that exile microculture. We waited. “More city-Hosts are leaving,” YlSib said. “And plenty of them are going to join the Absurd.” “There won’t be many left to guard, even if they’re prepared to.”

  “They won’t have any choice. EzCal’ll order them to.”

  “What’s your plan?” “What is it you want to do?”

  “You know what,” I said. “Bren told you.” The truth was I didn’t know to explain it. When Spanish Dancer arrived, I said, “Look. I’ll show you.”