Embassytown

understand. She asked me how I’d been, said something about her work. I let her blather a while, getting me a drink. When I asked her what she’d been doing, where she’d been, why she hadn’t responded to my messages, she ignored me.

“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar- face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.

“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.

“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.

When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.

Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned... and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my breath, certainly. Her avatar stuttered in and out of focus until I was done.

I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.

Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.

I DON’T THINK I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.

Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.

“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve...” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”.

Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.

“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.

“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.

I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.

Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.

“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.

Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside-out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.

Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That lanky shit,” he muttered as we followed him through semiautonomous zones policed by their own incompetent constables. “Coattailing me, then coming the big I-am.” Ra was the only person in Embassytown who shared Ez’s colloquialisms and accent. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Easy for him to play the nice boy when, with... he can...” Cheap lamps flickered above us, new stars. “I shouldn’t...” Ez said. “I’m tired, and I want to stop this... and I want Ra to leave me alone.”

I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid... It’s...”

I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish- specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.

Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.

“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.

We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.

“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.

“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.

“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.

“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.

Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.

13

CYNICALLY, WHO WERE WE? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of