Embassytown

“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 backwards 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 cliffhanger, 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 hearthlair 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 eavesdropping 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 creches started running again. Though no one knew yet on quite what basis our economy worked any more, 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.

The news didn’t report the suicides of Ambassadors.

MagDa showed me footage of the bodies of Hen and Ry, lying entangled on their bed, intertwined by the spasms caused by poison.

“Where are ShelBy?” I said. ShelBy and HenRy had been together.

“Gone,” MagDa said.

“They’ll turn up,” Mag said. Da said: “Dead.” “HenRy won’t be the last.” “They won’t be able to hide this sort of thing much longer.” “In fact, given the population size...” “... the rate’s higher than average.” “We’re killing ourselves more than others.”

“Well,” I said. All business. “I suppose it’s no wonder.”

“No, it’s not, is it?” MagDa said. “It really isn’t.” “Is it any wonder?”

WE DRAGOONED some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.

Ehrsul would still not answer my buzzes, or, I learnt, anyone’s. I realised how many days it was since I’d seen her, was ashamed and abruptly fearful. I went to her apartment. Alone: I wasn’t the only one from the new Staff who knew her, but if any of the worst outcomes I suddenly pictured were true, I could only bear to find out, to find her, on my own.

But she opened her door to my knocking almost immediately. “Ehrsul?” I said. “Ehrsul?”

She greeted me with her usual sardonic humour, as if her name hadn’t been a question. I could not