Embassytown

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 was 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 comes, 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 a desperation that made me shudder. I looked down to avoid his eyes and saw something I could barely believe.